His girlfriend had met them at the theater. She was coming straight from work, from an alumni networking event that she had helped organize, and as she approached them he could tell that one of her high heels had started to hurt. He could also tell that she immediately took in the problem of Meg Sand’s hair. Her whole face relaxed. The job in retail, the degree from SUNY Potsdam, now the hair: there truly was no cause for alarm. Meg Sand stumbled backward slightly as his girlfriend went in for a hug. Oh, she was a ruthless snob, as only the recently respectable can be. Before she even said hello, he knew that she would speak to Meg in the silvery, childlike voice she used when communicating with maintenance staff or bus drivers, as if making her voice smaller might somehow diminish the existential distance between them.
Once the movie was over, they stood outside on the street, shivering. He didn’t suggest that they go get a coffee somewhere. His girlfriend had slipped off her shoes in the theater and when the credits started to roll, had a difficult time getting them back on again. Her blouse was softly askew, the long day had loosened her hair, and he wanted to take her home and into bed.
But she persisted in being gracious. “Did you enjoy it?” she asked Meg Sand, who paused, shot a furtive look at the movie poster, and then seemed to remember the risk-free response she had prepared for these occasions. “It wasn’t what I was expecting,” she said slowly. She gave one of her close-lipped, knowing smiles: a precaution she used all the time, he’d noticed, a smile showing that whatever the joke at hand might be, she was in on it.
“Me neither!” his girlfriend replied. “A lot more blood than I signed up for. And all that gurgling when people died. It was very graphic. Or is that more sound design? They didn’t leave anything to the imagination, did they. Her knife skills were—amazing.”
Meg brightened a bit. “Amazing. Yes. I loved the fight sequences. She was so fierce. I think she must have trained for a long time to play the part. I read somewhere that she did most of the stunt work herself.”
“Well, I believe it,” his girlfriend said. “The action looked very real.”
“I must have read that in the Times,” Meg went on. “Yes, that must have been where I read it. In last weekend’s Arts section.”
“Oh! Did you see that piece about Merce Cunningham and the dog?”
Meg shook her head mutely.
“It was funny.” His girlfriend smiled at Meg with almost professional kindness. Then she tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “You know, with that jacket on, you kind of look like—” She said the forgettable name of the actress. “Especially the whole section when she’s in Budapest. I’m not imagining it.”
He didn’t see the resemblance himself. He told them flatly that he thought the movie was garbage. “You thought so, too,” he said to his girlfriend as they rode the subway back to their outer borough. She shrugged sleepily. “I didn’t want to be judgmental,” she murmured, placing her head on his shoulder. By the time they reached their stop, she was dead to the world. He had to guide her up the stairs and through the empty streets like a parent steering a child toward bed.
As the end of winter dragged on, Meg Sand wore the jacket more often than not. Was it coincidence that she also bought a pair of tall, zippered boots similar to the ones worn by the female assassin? “I used my employee discount,” she said apologetically from her side of the booth. He’d had to ask for more hours at the gym, in order to recover from the reckless amount he’d spent on a new computer. Also, his girlfriend was preparing to take an unpaid leave from her job at the alumni office; she’d already used up all her vacation days by the time they found out about her mother’s breast cancer. At first she had wept uncontrollably, but then she became very quiet and matter-of-fact, and started researching airfares. It was Stage II, they caught it early, she wouldn’t even need chemo. A lumpectomy, not a mastectomy. These facts he repeated to Meg Sand in their corner of the Polish restaurant, as if to reassure himself. Nothing had prepared him for the secondhand jitters he was feeling. The container ship that had looked toylike on the horizon was now, upon making its way into port, revealing its true dimensions. Since the scheduling of the surgery, he’d been having trouble falling asleep, and though Meg ordered him a Coke, he hardly touched it.
With his girlfriend gone, he was thankful for the company of his new computer, which was faster than his old one to an incredible degree. The enormous monitor, the powerful processor, the highly sensitive keyboard—all necessary now that he had decided to expand his practice into video. The overall lack of light in the basement apartment was proving to be a plus. He was hypnotized by the way that editing could turn the sloppy footage he’d shot at school into something rich with possible meaning. A sudden cut to black, the amplification of ambient sound. Hours melted away without his realizing it. The first weekend he spent alone, he managed to get groceries and do his laundry, but the second weekend he didn’t leave the apartment at all. When the telephone rang, he had no sense of whether it
