You in Five Acts(27)

“OK, everyone owes me thirteen bucks for their ticket,” he said. We were huddled in front of Film Forum at 7:30 on a Saturday night to see Jules et Jim, a French New Wave movie from the 1960s that Ethan claimed was “mandatory viewing” to understand what he was “trying to accomplish” in Boroughed Trouble.

“What?” Diego bounced from foot to foot, his high-tops a few inches deep in snow. “You begged us to come, man. I thought this was a freebie.”

“You should pay us for having to read subtitles,” you said, your face barely visible from under an enormous faux-fur hood. “Joy even had to wear her glasses!”

“Yeah, you know, a night out in the city, I like to dress it up,” Joy laughed. She was wearing bright red earmuffs to match her bright red coat, and every time Diego looked at her I could see a change in his eyes, that shift in focus of finally spotting the person you’ve been looking for in a crowded room. It made me resent him, too, because I wanted to be able to look at you like that, not have to fight the impulse with every muscle in my frostbitten face. My old teacher Mr. Cunningham used to say that my body was just a vessel for the role to live inside. It was the kind of pompous theater-speak I hated, but it was true; an actor’s body was supposed to be a vessel, and so that night I was trying to make mine totally and completely empty.

The theater was packed, mostly with old people. By the time we got popcorn and soda and paid Ethan back in exact f*cking change, it was so full that we ended up having to sit in separate groups. There were two seats open in one row near the middle, but when Ethan staked his claim, beckoning you—a.k.a. babe—to join him, you acted like you couldn’t see him and squeezed into the three-seater behind him, next to Joy. Diego started in after you, leaving me to sit next to our illustrious director, but then Ethan quickly insisted that since he might need to point out important scenes to us, it was crucial that we all be together, which then meant that four of the five of us had to get back up, make everyone else in the rows stand up, and switch places. You also got up to go to the bathroom twice, so by the time the lights dimmed I was confident that at least 75 percent of the theater hated us, but that was OK, because I hated everyone, too.

Not only did I have a front-row seat to Diego having a pseudo-date with Joy, but Ethan made you scoot down so that he was in the middle (“Do you mind, babe?”) and I was on the other side of him, smelling his aggressive body spray and watching him try to hold your hand every time you reached for the popcorn. (“It’s gluten-free, babe. I checked for you.”) The fact that you still seemed to reject his public displays of affection was cold comfort. I didn’t mind so much that I didn’t understand French, but I found myself wishing I couldn’t speak English, if only to spare myself the torture of eavesdropping on Ethan’s version of sweet nothings.

“You said, ‘I love you,’” he whispered as the same words appeared on a black screen, over a French woman’s voice. “I said, ‘Wait.’”

“I said, shut up so I can watch,” you whispered back, and someone behind us made a loud shushing noise.

Then the credits started, with some carousel music playing over a montage of seemingly unrelated stuff: a woman laughing, two dudes trying to open a gate, a kid throwing a dart, an hourglass, a painting. My eyes were already starting to glaze over. One of my dark secrets as an actor was that I really wasn’t all that into artsy movies. If I was going to fork over thirteen bucks, I wanted to see some CGI explosions—or, at the very least, the Rock looking constipated with concern for the fate of mankind. The only thing that would have made this worth it was two hours of sitting next to you in the dark. Alone.

I looked down at Diego and Joy. They were sharing a box of popcorn and some Sour Patch Kids, each holding one, so that the other person kept having to reach into the opposite lap. Every few minutes one of them would whisper something to the other one—not a loud stage whisper like Ethan’s, but the kind when your mouth has to be almost inside the person’s ear—and laugh, their shoulders shaking in silent tremors. I seethed with jealousy.

It definitely did not help that Jules et Jim turned out to be about a love triangle where both of the main guys were obsessed with a woman named Catherine, who basically had the market cornered on Manic Pixie Dream Girls before anyone had invented them. She drew on a mustache just for kicks and fell into rivers and was sad and gorgeous and batshit and whimsical. But it was obvious it wasn’t going to end well: anyone could see it coming. (OK, so I guess I was paying a little bit of attention, when I wasn’t watching your right arm out of the corner of my left eye, trying to predict when your hand was about to dig into Ethan’s popcorn so that I could put mine in, too. If I had put half as much effort into my calculus homework, I could probably have worked for NASA. But you never ate the popcorn, anyway. You just kept drumming your fingers on your jiggling knees. I thought it meant you were bored.)

But halfway through the movie, we’d never touched, not even “accidentally,” and I was swiftly spiraling into a dark and fragmented place that felt less New Wave and more Fifth Wheel. Loneliness was bad enough when I was actually, physically alone, staring up at Pop-Pop’s presidential memorabilia covering the walls of my makeshift bedroom, passing time like treading water and praying for someone (you) to send a hopeful ping into the void with a text . . . but being lonely in a group made me feel even worse. Luckily I had also drained a large soda and was about to piss myself if I didn’t get to a bathroom soon, so I got up and edged my way out of the row, causing a chorus of groans from about half the theater. As I tripped over the clogs of the woman sitting in the aisle seat, who had refused to stand or even tuck her knees up, I glanced back to see Ethan wrapping his arm around your shoulders. And then, just like any good girlfriend would do, you leaned into him and whispered something in his ear.