The secret truth of working at a movie theater is that you are in charge of protecting the somber catalogue of so much human loneliness, which is why I didn’t tell anyone about seeing Ryan and Sean’s mom in the audience of Unfaithful, starring Richard Gere and what’s her name.
She’s the main one. The actress, I mean. It’s her movie, really. Richard Gere plays the husband against type. The scene I’m thinking about, the scene where his wife is bathing and she’s thinking about this other man, this handsome Spaniard and his wife is oh god what’s her name and Richard Gere comes in from work and sees her all steamy in the bath and says to himself why not and takes off his suit and we see his flabby old man body slide into the tub behind Diane Lane, that’s her name.
She’s an artist. She does something with art. She owns a gallery or a bookstore. And you know, they shot it in Montreal to make it look like New York but it ends up looking like any big dumb city, which I suppose is really the point. She meets a handsome Spanish man who sells old books. She wants to buy them or maybe SHE has some old books and HE wants to buy them. Either way, Diane Lane and the Spanish antiquarian start an affair. It’s pretty horny stuff.
There is a whole other part of this movie which involves Richard Gere killing the handsome Spanish man. He rolls him into a rug and it just becomes this huge other thing. Really derails the final third. I say this of an authority earned during the cumulative ten times I watched it, standing in the back of the theater when I was seventeen and it was my job to stand in the back of the theater wearing a maroon vest and white button down and make sure the movie looked okay and no one was being an asshole or recording it.
Anyway, Ryan and Sean, they’re twins from school and they don’t have a dad, just a mom and their mom is young, younger than all the other moms and she buys a ticket for the Tuesday 7:10, and then again on Wednesday, the 9:40, the last showing, and I tear her ticket and tell her where to go and I don’t think she knows who I am. She doesn’t know that I was one of the swim team boys who spent the night before sectionals on her living room floor in a sleeping bag that still smelled like campfire in front of a blinking DVD menu screen for Fight Club.
Tuesday I couldn’t be sure it was her but Wednesday I got a good look. Her movie is the last to let out and she is the last to leave. She walks across the carpeted lobby like a woman who had gotten what she came for and it was worth it.
I’m outside throwing the last of the trash away after locking up and she’s still there, leaning against her car, a Camry, smoking. She motions over to me and I point like who me and she laughs because it’s an empty parking lot at midnight.
She says, Do I know you from my boys? And I say yeah, she does. She asks about swim team and I tell her I quit and she asks why and I point to my nametag which reads HEAD USHER and she nods, exhaling smoke in a narrow stream aimed just to the left of where my head is.
She says, Do you know what I like about that movie? And I say no, what and she says, I like how it ends.
Unfaithful starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane ends with the husband turning himself in for the crime of murdering the handsome Spanish man and I ask her what she likes about the end and she looks at me, past me, into the future when this will all make sense and says, Justice.
In a couple years the mall will be gone and then it will be a homeless camp and then it will be a farmer’s market and finally it will become what is called an unincorporated non-residential zone and it’s about this time, a thousand miles away, that I’ll be in the middle of complaining about something at work when I’ll see them on the news, Ryan and Sean, in red hats and camo pants, another story in a series of stories about the riot in the Capitol and the people getting arrested.
No names, but it’s them. The twins from school in ratty blonde beards and the chyron below their mugshots scroll past to say that they were convinced to turn themselves in by their mother and I have to believe that when they did, it was nighttime and snowing, just like the movie.
Kyle Seibel is 36 years old and lives in Santa Barbara, CA where he works as a copywriter. His stories can be found in The Masters Review and HASH Journal.