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Movie Night

Sonja Condit Coppenbarger

    He made popcorn the way she liked it, the way nobody made it anymore: in the copper-bottomed pan she used for spaghetti, shaking the lid as the kernels sizzled and burst, first one by one and then by hundreds all at once. He melted butter until it bubbled; he ground sea salt over the bowl. It was the best popcorn in the world, one of many things he did well. And he stopped by the video store to bring her the movies she couldn’t go to see by herself. How could she go alone to the MultiMax, to watch The Dark Knight while the movie theater popcorn congealed in its tub, and her husband’s ghost sat beside her saying words like trivial and derivative?
    Leo put the bowl on the coffee table and said, “Coffee? Decaf?”
    “Can you rewind the credits?” Amanda asked. “I didn’t see who played Batman.” The mask showed only his chin; it was a lovely chin, a little like Leo’s must have been thirty years ago, and even more like Donald’s when they were first married, before he grew the beard. She wanted to know whose chin that was.
    “He’s the first name on the list. Christian Bale.”
    Amanda had been a widow for three years; Leo was still married, because his wife wasn’t dead yet. End-stage ovarian cancer, he said. He couldn’t divorce her now, not while she was dying, not after all these years: she’d be dropped from his health insurance. He had to wait it out. He owed her that much.
    She loved that he felt compassionate even when love was gone; she tried not to pray for Janet’s death, except for mercy’s sake; she’d even suggested, at lunch last Wednesday, that he spend more time at the hospice. “Hospice?” Leo had said, his dark eyebrows drawn in, tight and sudden; his mouth pulled back in a half-snarl, like a frightened terrier ready to bite. “What hospice?” And then, just before she had to explain, he shook his head and said, “Oh, Janet’s hospice. She’s home again. They thought it was best. We’ll have to meet at your place for a while.”
    How long of a while? Until Janet died, or until she went back into the hospice? What kind of revolving-door hospice was this? Weren’t hospices supposed to be something like coffins for the living – softly cushioned, plush even, but once you were inside, you stayed forever? You weren’t supposed to pop in and out of hospice, like it was a corner store and you’d forgotten the milk. It was unseemly.
    Leo thumbed the remote and the names ran backward, eaten up in past time. Donald’s chin, Leo’s chin, Batman’s chin. When she first dated Donald, they went to the movies all the time. Jaws. She’d slept with him two days after that. He’d swum under the blankets, singing PUMpum PUMpum PUMpum as he nibbled her thighs. She stopped letting him do that, after he grew the beard; it was too scratchy. Yet he never shaved it. . . . He died of a stroke, sudden and young. It seized him and dragged him under. Blood in the water. Music beating into silence. The last movie they’d seen together was Little Miss Sunshine, which he’d pronounced trite and sentimental.
    Thirty years with Donald, but she was a young widow, really; all she needed was a wash of blond over her gray hair, and an ad on Craigslist, and here she was watching The Dark Knight with a man who had Batman’s chin, and a wife in hospice. Or home again, as it might be, which was why all their dates were in her apartment. He had to be home by ten, to give Janet her medication.
    They hadn’t slept together yet. He had an appointment with his doctor next Tuesday, to get the necessary prescription. Would he nibble on her thighs? She’d better shave all the way up, just in case.
    “See?” said Leo, pausing the credits. “Bruce Wayne, Christian Bale.”
    “But who’s Batman? I thought they’d put him first.”
    She sat on the sofa with her feet curled up, her head against Leo’s chest; she felt his laughter more than she heard it, and his hug tightened around her. How warm he was, and maybe it was trite, trivial, sentimental – everything that Donald had despised – but she loved to press her head against a man’s chest and hear his heart. It was the one thing she missed more than sex, more than conversation, more than anything. Just the sound and the touch. Just the presence and the heat.
    That was why lonely women got cats. So far, she had resisted, even though her downstairs neighbor had kittens six weeks old, ready to go. She wasn’t going to be that woman.
    “Bruce Wayne is Batman,” Leo said.
    “Wait. Bruce Wayne is Batman?” He laughed and hugged her closer. She pushed him away with both hands. Bruce Wayne was Batman? When did that happen? “I thought Batman was a separate character. Why did they do that?”
    He picked up their two wineglasses in one hand and the popcorn bowl in the other. “Amanda. Bruce Wayne has been Batman for fifty years. They’ve all got other names. Batman. Superman. Spider-Man.”
    “Spider-Man too?” She couldn’t help her dismay, even though she realized, just before she said it, how stupid she sounded. She knew better: Spider-Man was the first movie she’d rented after Donald died. What kind of hospice sent a dying woman home, to be cared for in her last days by a man like Leo? He’d bought a special cell-phone, and she was the only one who had the number, so that poor dying Janet wouldn’t be bothered by Amanda’s calls. He’d be home by ten to give Janet her medications, and what was Janet supposed to do until then – macramé? All of them, they were all alike: other faces, other names, other lives.

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