by Paul Hina
with anyone yet. She's comfortable with the rapport they've developed, with the innocent flirtations, the playful banter, the too-long glances. But not more. Not yet.
Maybe.
But she can't deny the feeling that, emotionally, she craves to move a step closer. She can feel the pull of him growing stronger whenever he's near. She wants to see him, wants to hear his voice speaking to her. But fear keeps her a step back, waiting. She's walking that delicate tightrope of moving too soon, or waiting too long.
Michael's looking at Wendy, who is still talking to Eric. Or, maybe, he's not looking at her. He's turned in that direction, but his stare seems more absent than focused. Perhaps, he's staring at nothing. Maybe he can feel that Holly's looking at him just as she could feel him looking at her. If he can, she doesn't care. She likes looking at him, studying his face, admiring his perfect profile.
He's tracing the shape of his lips with the tip of his thumbnail, and she can't help but fixate on those lips. She can't help but wonder what his kiss would be like, what it would be like to have his mouth move over her mouth, to taste him, to feel his breath wash over her.
She takes a quick breath, looks away, and turns in Annie's direction. Annie gives her a sympathetic half-smile as if she's been reading her thoughts, like she was telling her that things would be okay.
Holly wishes she could be so sure.
"So, Max, when do you fly back?" Annie asks. It's the first thing she's said since she returned to the table, and it took every ounce of composure she had to speak to him, to utter his name.
But she had to say something. She had to mercifully shut down Eric and Wendy's seemingly endless discussion about city parking. If she continued to allow Eric to control the dinner conversation, everyone would be asleep before dessert. Everyone already seemed mentally disengaged from the table.
"I'm flying to Stacy's parents first thing tomorrow morning."
"Stacy's your…?" Amy asks.
"Oh, sorry. Stacy's my girlfriend."
"And you're flying on Christmas Eve?" Tim asks. "The airports must be terrible."
"Why didn't you just fly back with Stacy?" Eric asks.
"There was some confusion when I bought our tickets. I'm not sure what happened," Max says, though he knows he was supposed to be on that plane with Stacy. But he couldn't come home and not see Annie. Or, rather, he was planning on leaving as scheduled, but when Eric opened up an opportunity for him to see Annie again, he couldn't pass it up. And, yes, it cost him a small fortune to get another flight out tomorrow morning. And, yes, Stacy was furious with him, confused at his sudden change of heart, and her insecurities blew up as they tend to do when he does something curious, which seems to be his fallback position—acting curious—in his relationships.
But he just couldn't pass up an opportunity to see the woman he's been pining over all these years. He had to see if his obsession for her was something that would endure, or whither away. Now, he knows that it will never whither away. He's only worried now about what he's going to do about the truth of their bond. What can he say to her before he leaves? He'll have to say something.
"How long's your holiday?" Holly asks Max.
"Well, actually, I'm on sabbatical. So, my holiday goes through next summer."
"I didn't know that," Eric says. "How long have you been on sabbatical?"
"Since August. I taught my last class over the summer."
"So, you're working on something?" Eric asks.
"Trying to, yeah."
"A book?" Annie asks.
"Yeah."
"What about?" Wendy asks. "Unless you don't want to talk about it?"
"No, it's fine. I'm writing a book on Andrei Tarkovsky."
"Tarkovsky," Annie says, almost reflexively. She's sitting up straight now. He's certainly gotten her attention. If she were trying to suppress her interest in what he was saying minutes before, that's gone now. She looks like she wants to say more, and there are a million questions she wants to ask, but she sinks back into her chair.
"Tarkovsky?" Amy asks. "He's a filmmaker?"
"He's a Russian filmmaker”, Eric says. "Well, he was. He's been dead since the eighties."
"Would I be familiar with anything he's done?" Amy asks.
"You might have heard of Solaris," Eric responds. "It was remade here in the states a couple of years ago."
"Well, Soderbergh says that he wasn't remaking Tarkovsky as much as reinterpreting Stanislav Lem's novel," Max says.
Annie smiles at this.
"Well, you're the expert," Eric says.
"I don't recognize any of those names," Amy says. "Do you?" she asks, looking to Tim and Holly. They both shake their heads no.
"I always thought I could've been a bigger film fan had Dad introduced me to it the way he did you," Eric says.
"But you are a film fan," Annie says to Eric.
"Yeah, but not like…" he stops himself, feeling as though he should explain himself to the rest of the table. "When our dad retired from the financial services industry—"
"Semi-retired," Max corrects him.
"Right. When he stopped leaving home for work, he was… What would you say, Max? Forty-seven, forty-eight years old?"
"I'm not sure. I think I was around ten or eleven. So, some time in the late eighties."
"Yeah. So, I was a teenager by then and didn't have much interest in spending time with my dad. And most of the movies he was watching were old black and white movies, or foreign films that a normal fourteen or fifteen year old wouldn't have much interest in watching. Besides, I hardly knew the man. He was so rarely home when I was growing up that having him around seemed strange to me. But after he retired, or semi-retired, he was catching up on all the movies he'd missed over the years, all the movies he'd wanted to see but didn't have the time to see before. And he was watching movies all the time."
"He saw leaving his day job as an opportunity to educate himself about film," Max says. "He always loved movies but, as you say, he never had the time to—"
"Right. And he got you involved, and you guys started watching movies together."
"Right."
"And what was the first movie you guys watched together? Wasn't it Marienbad?"
"Yeah, Last Year at Marienbad."
"If I'd seen Marienbad at ten years old, I think I might've ended up... I don't know. Having more interest, I guess."
"But you love film. You watch movies with your dad all the time," Annie says again, as if she's trying to reassure him somehow.
"Right, I do. I just came to it late, I guess. I didn't see Marienbad until I was in college."
"What's Marienbad?" Holly asks.
"It's an early 60's French movie," Michael says. "The screenplay was written by the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet and was considered pretty avant-garde at the time. Still is, really."
Holly is watching him closely as he speaks to her. And he's speaking to her like she's the only one in the room, and, for a moment, she feels that they are the only ones in the room.
"I didn't know you knew anything about film," she says to Michael.
"A little bit, though I don't know a thing about Andrei Tarkovsky."
"It's funny that you're writing about Tarkovsky," Eric says. "There was just a revival of Stalker a couple months ago at the campus theater."
"Did you go?" Max asks.
"No, I would've liked to, but I was so busy with—"
"I was asking Annie."
Annie looks at him. A nervous laugh falls from her mouth, but she goes silent when she sees Max's stare. She'd forgotten how unapologetically straightforward he could be, even if it sometimes comes off as aggressive. His clear-eyed intensity was always one of the things she loved about him.
"I did go. Yes."
"Do you remember when we—?"
"I don't think anyone wants to talk about old Russian movies, Max. Why don't we talk about—?"
"But you do," Max says
"I do what?"
&n
bsp; "You'd like to talk about old Russian movies, or, at least, you used to," Max says.
"I still love movies of all kinds," she says, almost defensively. "I just think we should talk about something that everyone can—"
"Stalker was the first movie that Annie and I ever saw together," Max says as if he's talking to the table, though he's still looking only at Annie. "We were juniors in high school. Do you remember?"
"Of course I remember."
"Of course you do."
"What's it about? The movie?" Amy asks.
"It's about a Stalker, a guide contracted to safely guide people through this abandoned, and supposedly dangerous area."
"In the movie, the place is called the zone," Annie says.
"Right, and in what ways the zone is dangerous, or how it came to be abandoned, we're never explicitly told. There are old, rusty tanks there, and a few dead bodies, but Tarkovsky makes the choice to never come out and say what happened."
"And the Stalker is supposed to get them through the zone to a room," Annie says.
"And this is apparently no easy task since the zone has been cordoned off by the military because the whole area, and specifically this one room, has taken on such a mythical, almost religious quality," Max says. "It seems that after the military event, or environmental catastrophe, or whatever it was that happened in the zone, people began to hear stories about this special room, and they began to attempt this dangerous pilgrimage. And, for some reason—again, deliberately obscured in the movie—the government decided to put an end to these pilgrimages. And, so, hiring a Stalker became necessary because it had become so dangerous to even enter the zone, to get beyond the military presence that guarded the place," Max says.
"But what's in the room?" Amy
