Free Stories From the Plague Years by Michael Marano Page A

doctors she knows it’s her WASP birthright and duty to marry.
    As she chatters,
I’m
embarrassed. Eyes drift to us in the cataract-grey reflected from the screen. I ask her to be quiet, once, twice, three times, giving whispered voice to the silent stares thrown toward us. At each request, she looks at me as if I’ve slapped her for no reason. The world narrows, changed by the fiction on the screen, moving couples around us to lean together, to rest heads on each other’s shoulders, to place arms around each other. During a romantic scene in which Bogart and Bergman drink champagne as Nazis march on Paris, Catherine takes my hand, a gesture of empathy, I pray, with the doomed and phantom-coloured lovers on the screen. She squeezes my hand tighter as the music swells and the scene bleeds to that drenched train station where Bogart becomes a man forever exiled from his own heart. And Catherine squeezes my hand tighter. And tighter.
    And tighter still as the scene shifts from Paris to Morocco, her nails biting between my knuckles. I’m being punished. But this can’t be . . . Catherine is a mature woman . . . she reminds me of this. At every opportunity. She wouldn’t vent anger at me this way. Not even subconsciously. No. By telling her to be quiet, I’ve stifled her cathexis, her empathy with the characters on the screen. The only outlet for her is to grip my hand. I’m in the sweet homeland of knowing pain for an unfathomable transgression, yet deny myself the comfort of homecoming, of acknowledging the punishment. I nest the pain beside others I’ve collected. To squeeze her hand back in retaliation would be the basest of immaturities. To ask her to stop would be petty and ridiculous. And it would let her know she’s hurting me. That’s something I can never let her know, for reasons I can’t understand myself.
    The movie ends and our hands part, slick from the oily sweat of our palms. She snatches her coat and is up the aisle before I get my jacket on.
    Outside the theatre, she maintains her lead, looking over her shoulder, encouraging me to hurry with that expectant gaze of hers, to be by her side as a real lover should. I slip on my jacket and jog next to her.
    “So what did you think of the movie?” There’s an edge in her voice, as if she asks how a difficult meeting went. She knows
Casablanca
is one of my favourites. It was my idea we come tonight. What she truly asks is: “
What did you think of seeing a favourite movie with me?
”
    “I loved it.”
    “Hmmph.”
    “Did
you
like it?”
    “Seen it before.”
    We walk half a block in silence. She still leads me with that tireless quickstep of hers, under lights that paint the city the color of an old man’s fingernails. A pain creaks where my jaw hinges the skull. I’m grinding my teeth. I relax my jaw as best I can. Catherine has told me she doesn’t like the sound. She speaks, mostly to the sidewalk before her.
    “There’s a lot in that movie I don’t understand.”
    I’m relieved. We can talk without her becoming more upset with me.
    “Me too.”
    “I don’t know why that policeman acted the way he did.”
    “Well, he was a figurehead. A symbol for the Vichy government. He’s really not a character, just a stand-in.”
    “Hmmph. Just a stand-in. I see.”
    She casts her gaze further downward and then to her right toward shop fronts we pass, looking at things that she would just have without even the bother of purchasing them, if the world were fair.
    I risk speaking.
    “What I didn’t understand was what a refugee Czech resistance fighter and his wife were doing with all those expensive clothes. I don’t think too many guys in the underground were drinking champagne cocktails in white dinner jackets, back then.”
    She stops and stamps her foot . . . makes a sound like someone who has crushed a leech with a bare hand.
    “Goddamnit, Dean! Why are you so fucking cynical?”
    “I wasn’t being cynical. I was mentioning