The television comes on under her father’s trembling index finger and the commercial that blares into the room is for the movie we just sat through. The one we just listened to.
“What did the two of you see?” Sheila asks, her face somehow blank, as if there’s no wrong answer.
“Period piece,” I say with a shrug, lying for no reason I can claim, “that one with that one girl with the hair?”
Sheila considers tracking this down with me but then shrugs it away, looks around the place as if proud.
“Looks great,” I tell her. “You found the way it used to be.”
“I give it two weeks,” she says back, and that’s probably about right. “See the kitchen?”
I pretend I didn’t, go back in. The counters are gleaming, the handles of everything catching the light.
“Couldn’t be better,” I tell her, and she proceeds to unpack the groceries we just got, line them in the pantry, and, while she’s doing that, I find myself studying the wall-mounted can opener.
It’s an ugly, unwieldy appliance, one I can’t imagine was ever considered normal. It’s like—it’s like those old hatches or flaps or whatever that you still find in old houses, that you can plug a vacuum cleaner hose into, that are connected to some sucker-pump in another part of the house, that are supposed to make keeping the carpets clean so much easier.
Can openers should just be something you stash in the drawer, twist with your hand.
“Did you like it?” Sheila says, half in the pantry.
The movie.
“Love story,” I say, “turned into murder, you know,” and now my hand’s to this wall-mounted can opener.
All it takes is a slight push to bend the top arm down not even five degrees, two or three of which it still has enough spring to recover on its own. It’ll still function, will still open cans. Just, well. I’m not going to be here every meal like he was for his wife. I can’t guide every can. Except like this, by messing with the machine, making it where it doesn’t even know how to open a can without turning it into a weapon.
Thirty minutes later, being the good son-in-law, I use it on some canned beets, my father-in-law’s professed favorite, what we just bought twenty-four of in a flat box.
He’s watching his news, his headphones on so we don’t have to hear it.
“He looks so good,” Sheila says, speaking freely, since there’s no chance of him tuning us in.
“I liked spending time with him,” I say back, guiding the bowl of beets in, stirring the clumps with the spoon, hiding the bright slivers in deep. “I wish—I mean, I should have been doing it all along.”
“You know,” Sheila says, absolving me, “life.”
It’s our usual call-and-response.
I settle the dark purple beets down into my father-in-law’s left hand.
I reach past him, pull the chain on the lamp beside him off, in case the silver in his meaty purple might try to glint, give away what’s going on here.
The look he gives me about the light going away is hard, uncompromising, and that it lasts one bit longer than it should that tells me he probably also turned the lamp off on his wife, didn’t he? Of course he did. Otherwise she might have seen what he was doing. Otherwise she might have known how he was killing her.
I hold his eyes, trying not to tell him anything, trying to just make him guess, because I imagine that has to be worse, more what he deserves, but then Sheila’s there at my side, her hand on my shoulder, her voice up on tippy-toes because she’s being a good daughter, because I’m such a perfect son-in-law.
“Do you need anything else?” she’s asking her father.
Her father looks from her to me, and then to his beets, and then he stabs his spoon in, brings it up to his mouth, and by the time we’re leaving, I’m the last one in the room with him, the one carrying his empty bowl back to the kitchen.
His mouth is purple, the juice leaking down his chin.
I come back with a napkin, dab that color away, and the assist in my head settles back in, says, “And after the son-in-law leaves the room, the deadbolt clicking over, the grinding undertone comes back, doesn’t it? That metal-on-metal sound, and when the old man on the chair chocks his headphones back and looks into the kitchen, what he sees, just partially, is me, standing at the can opener, bringing him his next meal, and his next, because his wife loves him enough to feed him, and keep feeding him, even when he tells her he’s full, even when he tells her it hurts. “Just one more bite, dear,” she’ll tell him, holding her hand under the spoon as she guides it to his mouth. “Just one more bite, and then you’ll be all done, won’t you?”
On the way out, balancing a tub of cleaning supplies on my hip, I reach back in, switch the overhead light off with finality.
“It was a good time this afternoon, wasn’t it?” Sheila says to me on the elevator.
“I should go to the movies more often,” I tell her, and use my knee to push the button to deliver us down, away from this, into whatever wonders our old age might have waiting for us.
A BEN EVANS FILM
Josh Malerman
THE FIRST PART of the movie was terrible because he didn’t know a thing about editing yet. He was doing it all “in-camera,” a phrase he’d never heard in his forty-one years of life. After stealing the camcorder (down his pants; much easier than he thought it’d be) he learned a great many terms like it. “Film terms,” he called them. And every one of them tickled Ben Evans pink.
“Continuity.”
“Backlighting.”
“Jump cut.”
He worked on a learning curve, no doubt, and those first fourteen minutes took a lot longer to do than the latter forty. Example: he’d dressed his dead mother up like Mary the Homeowner (one of Ben’s favorite characters) and filmed her until the knock on Mary’s door (Ben tapping the TV tray closest to him with his free hand), then he hit pause, removed the Mary makeup from mother, dressed her up like Mary’s Friend Andrea (another of Ben’s favorites), put her outside the door, and rolled the camcorder again. After this shot of Andrea, he paused again, dressed Mother up like Mary once more, put her back inside, and called action. Because Mary had to answer the door, of course. And because Mother played both roles, of course. Makeup on Mother, makeup off Mother. New makeup on Mother. New makeup off. This particular conversation between Mary and Andrea took nine hours to film. Ben didn’t notice that the sun went down throughout the course of the scene, an interaction that, on tape, lasted all of forty seconds.
In the beginning, Ben shot the movie in order. Because that’s how movies look when they’re done. And because Ben was making a movie, after all.
The same learning curve occurred with the dialogue and sound, as Ben had no knowledge of overdubbing and no means to do it if he had. For the first half of the movie, the voices (all Ben’s) are much louder than they get later, as his lips were so close to the camcorder he held. He spoke for both his dead mother and his dead father and all the people they played, trying his hardest to give each character a different accent. This process changed mightily once he stole the Tascam unit from RadioShack (up his sleeve; easier than he thought it’d be) and watched a YouTube tutorial on syncing audio with video. Yet, being dead, his parents didn’t move their lips at all, so there was nothing to sync and only the duration of the shot to worry about. Long enough for Ben to say their lines for them.
“Principal photography” began on January 1 of that year. A New Year’s resolution, indeed. He let the cold in every time he carried Mother or Father to the backyard. He fell twice on the ice while filming them through the kitchen windows of their home. Once he thought he broke his wrist.
No matter.
He came to call the movie just that, No Matter, for how many times he had to repeat the two words, what with all the unforeseen problems that occurred while making his mov
ie.
Ben liked the idea of “unforeseen problems.” He’d read of similar things happening on movie sets all through history. It was exactly the sort of thing the screenwriter who had come to town told Ben and a crowd of ten others, gathered in the Samhattan Library.
You must get rid of the words “good” and “bad,” the writer (a fellow Michigander!) said. It’s the doing that matters.
Ben almost called his movie The Doing.
And what a way of looking at it! You must make do with what you have, of course! Use the tools at hand! Involve the people around you!
Ben involved the only two people he lived with.
No Matter was finished in late July of the same year, and Mother and Father looked different by the end of it. They looked darker. Thinner. Sunken. For this, Ben rewrote the script often. He thought of the screenwriter Jim Bradley and how he would’ve said yes, make it work, yes, go forth, yes rewrite the script, give your parents new characters to play, evolve.
No matter.
None! Not when Ben ran out of makeup and had to steal more from the mall. Not when he dressed his dead father in his own unwashed suit and strode around the house nude, camera in hand. Not when he found himself hungry and exhausted for having expended so much energy in the name of his film.
No matter.
Once it was done (and what a day that was) Ben carried his dead parents back up to their bedroom. He watched his movie a dozen times. He set the VCR to repeat and slept in the living room. When he woke, his forty-one-year-old bones cramped from the couch, the movie was still playing.
Dead mother dolled up like Mary. Dead father as the nosy neighbor John.
The feeling was overwhelming.
It was time to start calling himself a filmmaker.
It was time to start thinking of himself as an artist.
It was time to show someone else the movie.
Like Jim Bradley said, the day comes when you have to send your work out into the world. A time comes when you have to share.
So, on an August afternoon in Samhattan, with the sun so bright he hung a blanket over the living room window, Ben Evans took the first step toward sharing.
He invited someone over to watch his movie.
* * *
Roger came over around noon that day but didn’t stay inside the house for more than five minutes. He told Ben he couldn’t stand the smell. The actual word he used was stench. It bothered Ben deeply. The pair had gone to middle school together, high school, and kept in touch for the twenty-four years since. Ben saw Roger all the time at Melanie’s Grocery, at the Fountain Pen Theater, even once at RadioShack. He’d prepared the house for Roger’s viewing. He’d bought chips and dip.
But Roger simply wouldn’t stay.
So Ben suggested showing him the film on his camcorder outside in the yard. Roger agreed, but it was frustrating when he said he couldn’t see anything on the tiny screen, that the sun was making it hard to tell what was going on. Is that your mom and dad? Those dolls kinda look like your mom and dad. No offense. And sorry for the loss.
It bothered Ben, the way Roger talked about his mother and father. Like he was calling the movie amateur because Ben didn’t have “real” actors. Like he was saying the makeup was bad, since they really only looked like themselves. Like Roger was nay-saying the film.
What would Jim Bradley say to that? He’d say you did it, Ben. And that’s all that matters.
The doing.
No Matter.
Ben and Roger ended up in a shouting match. Roger told Ben he had to clean his house. Then he left the yard and drove home.
Ben called his friend Hugh to come watch it instead.
Hugh didn’t say anything about a “stench” and this only fortified Ben’s idea that Roger was jealous of what Ben had done. Jim Bradley talked a little about that kind of thing. But Hugh…Hugh walked into the house, sat in Ben’s dead father’s easy chair, crossed his legs, pointed at the television, and said, “Let’s see it.”
For Ben, pressing play, starting the movie, was a very big deal.
Hugh cracked a beer and snorted some white powder as the title came on the screen.
Then he watched the whole thing. Oftentimes his eyes grew wide, other times he seemed to squint. Ben wondered if it was because of the lighting. Sometimes the sun did go down during the course of a single scene. Ultimately, it didn’t seem to matter. Hugh popped a second beer, then a third. He didn’t laugh at the parts Ben knew to be funny, but he didn’t seem bored by the lengthy, more sorrowful stretches, either. Hugh even watched the credits.
“Good movie,” he said when it was over. Then he leapt up out of the easy chair the way Hugh always moved, and made for the door. He turned and said to Ben, “I’d love to be in your next one. Hell, I’d even just hold a light.”
Ben had never felt better in his life. The way Hugh said it. It felt like something had gotten started.
A career.
But minutes after Hugh left, Ben had to get dressed for his other career. His job. Line cook at a chain restaurant downtown. That night was a company party.
Ben wore the same suit Hugh had just seen Ben’s dead father wearing, as the old man was propped outside the kitchen window, peering in on his dead, made-up wife.
* * *
Cathy was a hostess at the same restaurant. She and Ben couldn’t have been farther apart during their shifts than they were. Cathy almost never came into the kitchen and Ben had absolutely no reason to go out into the lobby. For this, it wasn’t until the holiday party at John John’s that they spoke for the first time.
“You seem like you have more pep in your step than you used to,” Cathy said to Ben as the two stood in the buffet line with empty plates in their hands.
Ben didn’t know what to say. He thought maybe she was kidding. He thought maybe she was talking to someone else. But no, this woman, five years his senior, was intimating that she’d noticed him at least twice in her life.
“Me?” Ben asked. But by then he was only buying time. He knew she was talking to him.
“You,” Cathy said. She punched him softly on the arm. “What’s your secret? Have you been eating better?”
“What do you mean?”
“You seem happy.”
“I am happy.”
“Good.”
They didn’t speak again, as Ben turned his back to her, unsure what more could be said. But the night was long from over. And Cathy found him again later in the bar area of the restaurant neither of them worked at.
Ben drank a beer. He liked how Hugh drank his beers while watching No Matter.
“You again,” Cathy said. She smiled and her eyes shined beneath the bangs of her wiry hair.
“Hello. Still happy.”
Cathy laughed and Ben was surprised. He hadn’t meant to make a joke. Yet, here he was, basking in the afterglow.
“You’re cuter in person,” Cathy said.
Ben pretended she meant that he looked different on-screen. As if she’d maybe seen a documentary on the making of his movie.
“What about me?” Cathy asked. “Don’t I look different than when I’m standing at the hostess stand?”
“Yes,” Ben said.
Then he fell in love with Cathy. As she shrugged a silent thank-you.
“Do you like movies?” she asked.
“Yes. I made one.”
Cathy looked genuinely surprised.
“Really? That’s amazing. I want to know all about it.”
“Okay.”
“What’s it about?”
How many times had Ben answered this very question in interviews he pretended were real?
“It’s about a woman who is lonely and her friend comes over and helps her out. And there’s a neighbor who watches her through the window.”
<
br /> Oh boy did the idea sound small. So small!
“Cool,” Cathy said. “I’d love to see it sometime.”
To Ben’s great relief, Cathy took up conversation with other coworkers. He watched her flutter from person to person as friends do. He saw the way she laughed so easily with the others and he understood they knew each other much better than he did. She’d said she wanted to see his movie.
Might this mean more people would want to?
He looked into his beer then. He didn’t like the feeling in his stomach. A little twist. Like he’d been fantasizing wrong. If that was possible to do. Like he’d been imagining all these people loving No Matter and talking about it and exchanging theories, but in reality he didn’t want anybody to see it.
That night, Ben didn’t sleep much. He thought of that twist in his stomach and how it hurt to imagine Cathy watching his movie. He’d heard of a “fear of failure” before, but this felt different. Like he might be exposing a part of himself he shouldn’t be exposing if he showed his movie to her. Like if he’d gone to work without his shirt on and it wasn’t the nudity that made him race back out to the parking lot, but the tattoo he had.
Ben didn’t have a tattoo. But that was the idea. That was the feeling.
Like he had a tattoo that admitted something bad he’d done. Something maybe Cathy shouldn’t see.
* * *
But Cathy liked Ben and so the relationship went somewhere. Somewhere good.
On Ben’s second shift following the company party, Cathy came back into the kitchen looking for him. He heard her voice before he saw her, bright and sparkling, and he hid in the mop closet. It was his first reaction and it felt like something he should do. But when the other cook, Jasper, called out for him, Ben had to step out into the light.
“Hello, you,” Cathy said. She smiled his way and Ben had a faint feeling that he was supposed to smile back.
Final Cuts Page 24
