What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [87]
After all this time, this is the moment you hold and remember, down to the sweaty, nervous palm of your boyfriend: the quiet in the dark of the theater, the story coming.
Darkness used to be the delicious moment of not knowing what would come next. You don’t see things like that anymore.
When the light burst on the screen, a desert appeared in a golden hue, a caravan of horses on a winding trail. Your heart sank—a western—but then rose again when the names appeared, one by one, in yellow, rough letters: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson. His name flashed like an impossible promise. His name flashed as if it had been Dan Watson’s, and you read the name with a jealous scan of that girl’s head, sitting not four rows ahead of you, how you’d watched her at the record shop that morning, then scurried across the street to see what had captured her attention. Even her obsessions couldn’t be your own, Ricky Nelson all hers, and you heard yourself gasp, searching for him in the opening shot of a caravan approaching town, as if seeing him first could give you claim to him. Your eye caught him almost instantly, the cowboy slumped on his horse, looking insolent in his fringed brown suede jacket, his light-colored hat. His name was Colorado, and the caravan leader and John Wayne had a conversation about him that left him unpleased.
“I speak English, Sheriff,” he said, “if you want to ask me.” His speaking voice sang out just like the one on his records, the ones that girl closed her eyes to in the dark. You closed your eyes, wanting to be like her for a moment, to test whether you could hear his approach like she could, but the possibility of missing that face defeated you. That beautiful face, his lips glistening moist even under the desert sun, his mouth gentle even when it fixed to sing.
All around, some of the younger women rested their heads on the shoulders of their dates. Out of boredom, maybe, especially when Ricky Nelson was not on the screen. Four rows ahead, Dan Watson slipped his arm around that girl, and she tensed, then eased. You tensed, then eased, sensing the heat on the back of your own neck. Some of the younger women drew even closer to their dates, nestling. They didn’t care who watched. The married couples sat stiff and proper, two rigid silhouettes. Was marriage love? A wife’s shoulders rounded, her body almost curled in, as if protecting the purse in her lap. The young women in the audience ignored John Wayne’s gun brandishes and concentrated on the heat near the back of their necks. Dan Watson’s arm. Handsome, but not like Ricky Nelson. Rugged and not soft, not moist lipped, not a transfixing star.
Not a whistle-clean Everly Brother either.
If all the women in the audience stared at Ricky Nelson sitting on top of a kitchen table, so did you. Boots resting on a chair, he played guitar for Dean Martin. Your eyes drifted south to his open legs, wanting to study every part of his body, his shape. The theater was dark. This is what people did in the dark. He spoke Spanish, and even that fact—that soft voice saying things you could only dream, candy-sweet and loving—gripped the women in its delicious possibility. That girl knew Spanish. She would know what candy-sweet things he could say. After the first song, Dean Martin ceded the screen to just Ricky, still seated at the table, and all around the theater, women lifted their heads from their dates’ shoulders. Ricky alone meant love was coming. Ricky alone meant being torn between the guitar resting on his thigh and the proximity of his long lashes.
The cut of his suede jacket, the dance of its fringe, the round shape of his buttocks when he crossed the room, the angle of his boots on the floor, his youthful face a testament against the coarser ways of older men like John Wayne.
Your boyfriend, your soon-to-be husband, was going to be a John Wayne. You’d already come round to meet the new in-laws, the small, quick-witted mother with the pinched face, the tall father with the gigantic belly, suffering through a forced grapefruit