By Friday afternoon, we had agreed that we were going. There were four of us, and the agreement had survived work, children, a week’s worth of unfinished things, and several messages that began with “What time?” We had tickets to Street Fighter. Whatever else happened, there would be four seats waiting for us in a dark room where nobody could ask us to find their water bottle.
I had been sick most of the week. It was the sort of illness that allowed you to keep working while making you resent everything involved in working, including the chair. For a couple of days I had felt feverish. I tired easily, and sometimes a small effort left me breathing as though it had been a larger effort. By evening I wanted to sit down. Unfortunately, I had spent most of the day sitting down, and it had not helped.
There was still work to finish. A colleague was diligently getting through his part, and I kept looking at my screen, trying to decide what I could leave without leaving it for him. I wanted to go out with my friends. I also wanted to be the sort of person whose going out did not become somebody else’s evening. I moved a few things forward, answered what I could, and looked at the time again.
The messages from my friends continued. Nobody was proposing anything unreasonable. Dinner, a movie, a few hours together. On the screen it looked easy. I read the messages with a tired man’s suspicion of people who still had plans.
“Are you coming?” one of them asked.
“Yes,” I wrote, before I could improve the answer.
At home, the evening had begun settling down. The children were getting ready for bed, and the house was moving toward that brief period when all the people who needed something had finally agreed to need it lying down. Aneeta was resting. I checked the time, checked my phone, and checked a few things that did not require checking. Eventually there was nothing left to do except leave.
“You’ll be all right?” she asked.
“Yes. We’re just going to a movie.”
She looked at me for a moment. “Then try watching it.”
I thought this was ordinary advice at the time.
We had an hour or an hour and a half before the show, which seemed enough for dinner until we began discussing dinner. In-N-Out was nearby, and somebody suggested it. Then somebody else asked about drinks. We stood outside and considered the limitations of a perfectly good burger joint as though its management had failed to anticipate our arrival.
There was a BJ’s a little farther over, behind the theater. I pointed toward it and said we could try there. This was accepted with the relief people feel when somebody else has made a decision. We started walking, four grown men with phones in our pockets and no immediate responsibility beyond getting ourselves across a parking lot.
For part of the way there was no proper walkway. We went single file along the edge, watching the cars and stepping around the uneven places. The man in front chose the route, and the rest of us followed with our heads down. Nobody spoke for a few seconds. From behind, we must have looked like a small work crew reporting for the evening shift.
“Our wives must be missing us terribly,” I said. “All the work we do at home.”
The man ahead of me turned his head. “Of course.”
“And look at us. We’ve finally got a night off, and we’re still going to work in a line.”
That broke up the procession. One of them stopped laughing long enough to tell me to watch the car coming around the corner, and we squeezed back into single file. We had left our homes to enjoy ourselves and were now being supervised by whichever friend could see the traffic.
“Keep moving,” someone said. “We don’t get paid if we’re late.”
By the time we reached the restaurant, I was laughing and breathing harder than I wanted to. Inside, it was warm and loud. Glasses stood along the bar, televisions glowed above the crowd, and people who had apparently planned their evenings better than we had were already eating.
The hostess told us the wait would be an hour to an hour and a half.
I looked at my friends. We had brought exactly that much time with us.
“That’s all the time we have,” I said.
She gave me a sympathetic look, but it did not shorten the wait. I asked about the bar area. She said we could look; those tables were first come, first served. This was enough encouragement for me. I went ahead while the others stayed near the entrance, where they could later deny having encouraged me.
At first there was nothing. Every table had people at it, and every person appeared deeply committed to remaining there. Then I noticed a family gathering their things. The bill had been paid. A bag was being lifted. Someone was helping a child with a jacket.
I slowed down and tried to look like a man who happened to appreciate that particular section of the restaurant.
When they stood, I moved.
The table still held their plates and glasses. There were crumbs and a small puddle around a drink somebody had abandoned. I sat down anyway and waved to my friends. From the entrance they saw me sitting among the remains of another family’s dinner and came over with the pleased expressions of men whose leader had secured land.
“Nice,” one of them said, looking at the table.
“Sit.”
“Are they finished?”
“They’re leaving.”
He watched the family walk away, then pulled out a chair. “Good. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
We arranged ourselves around the things nobody wanted to touch and began trying to catch someone’s attention. Each time a server passed, one of us lifted a hand. Sometimes two of us did it together. We looked like a table of men bidding on the removal of a plate.
One friend disappeared toward the bar and returned with four shots. I remember two being whiskey. The other two may have been vodka; someone had mentioned tequila along the way, and by then I had stopped keeping the minutes. Mine was Bulleit, if I remember the name correctly. Whiskey was what I wanted, and it was what arrived.
We found four small clear spaces among the dirty dishes.
“To getting out,” someone said.
We raised the glasses and drank. The table was still filthy, but the occasion had officially begun.
Our server arrived moving quickly and speaking faster. She took in the plates, the empty shot glasses, and the four of us sitting there as though we had been assigned to guard them. We explained that the previous people had just left. She said something about getting the table cleared, asked about drinks, and began collecting things before we had finished agreeing with her.
I tried to move a glass out of her way and moved it into the way of another plate. She worked around my assistance with the practiced patience of someone who would have finished sooner without it.
When she left, the table was clean and all four of us had menus. I was not entirely sure which questions we had answered.
“What did we order?” I asked.
“Nothing yet.”
“Good. I thought I’d missed dinner.”
We ordered enough food to make the table useful again. Once it began arriving, the conversation settled into the easy disorder I had been missing. Someone would start a story, someone else would correct a detail, and the first person would object that the correction made absolutely no difference. This usually meant the correction made the story much funnier.
My friends were good at this. They could find a weak place in an ordinary sentence and worry at it until the person who had spoken regretted supplying the material. No story remained the property of the person telling it for very long.
I laughed until I had to stop and cough. They waited just long enough for me to recover, then continued with the part they had clearly been saving.
“Don’t make me laugh,” I said.
“You came to the wrong dinner.”
I took a drink of water and leaned back. I was still tired. The illness had not gone anywhere, and I could feel it when I stopped talking. But then someone across the table would begin again, and for a while I forgot to measure how I was feeling.
My phone lit up near my plate. I checked the message and answered it, keeping my reply short. My colleague was still working. I could picture him at his screen, moving carefully through the things we needed to finish.
“Everything okay?” a friend asked.
“Yes. Just work.”
“Tell them you’re in a meeting.”
I looked around the table: the plates between us, a hand reaching for the last of something, another hand protecting it.
“There would be questions about the agenda.”
“Team building.”
I finished the message and put the phone away. Someone pushed the plate closer to me, and the conversation carried on without requiring an announcement that I had returned.
When we finally checked the time, the movie had become something we needed to get to. There was the usual business with the bill, in which four men who had spent the evening disagreeing over trivial details suddenly developed strong and conflicting views about generosity. We got it settled, stood up, and took inventory of phones, wallets, and jackets. I was pleased that I had remembered all of mine without being asked.
Outside, the air felt cool against my face. We walked toward the theater together, no longer in a line. Dinner had done us good. We were full, cheerful, and ready for a film about people with a great deal more energy than we possessed.
The seats were comfortable. This deserves to be mentioned early, because people later blamed the drinks, the late hour, the food, our age, and, in my case, being sick. All of those may have contributed. But somebody had designed those seats, and that person should accept a share of the credit.
I settled into mine and felt it support parts of my body I had been supporting myself all week. On the screen, the trailers began. A man was running from something enormous. Another man was threatening to destroy the world. I watched them with the distant sympathy of someone whose own responsibilities had, for the moment, been reduced to keeping his eyes open.
When the film started, I was ready. I recognized the names, watched the characters appear, and followed what was happening. Then I became aware that my eyes had been closed for a little longer than a blink.
I opened them. A fight was taking place.
This seemed reassuring. We were still on the right subject.
A few minutes later, I looked toward my friend. His head had settled at an angle that suggested deep consideration. His eyes were shut. I considered waking him, then decided that a man should be allowed to form his own opinion of a film.
I turned back to the screen. Somebody had arrived who seemed important. I tried to work out whether I had seen him before. The film did not pause to help me.
There were stretches I watched perfectly well. There were others that remain between the filmmakers and whoever was awake. Each time I came back, the people on the screen were still having a difficult night. I felt for them. None of them appeared to have had dinner.
At one point a loud impact woke me fully, and I straightened in my seat with the unnecessary dignity of a man who hoped to make sitting up look like a deliberate choice. My friend beside me shifted too. Neither of us looked at the other.
By the time the lights came on, I felt better rested and less informed.
We stood slowly and moved out with the rest of the audience. Everyone else seemed to know what they had seen. I waited until we were away from them before asking a question.
“What happened to that fellow?”
“Which fellow?”
“The one earlier.”
This was not enough information for anyone. One friend supplied a name. Another corrected him. A third described a scene I did not remember at all.
“When did that happen?”
“You were asleep.”
“So were you.”
“Not then.”
We stopped near the lobby and began assembling the film from our separate accounts. One of us had seen a scene that explained something another had misunderstood. Someone knew how a character had arrived somewhere but had missed what he did after getting there. We worked patiently, asking questions and comparing evidence. Taken together, we were a reasonably attentive audience.
“I saw the ending,” one friend said.
“We all saw the ending.”
“Then what are you asking me for?”
The discussion became less useful after that. We started laughing at the gaps themselves, and at the seriousness with which we were trying to fill them. Four tickets, four comfortable seats, and between us perhaps enough information to tell somebody whether we had enjoyed ourselves.
We had enjoyed ourselves very much.
Then there was the elevator.
One of my friends walked ahead toward a set of doors and stood waiting in front of them. He had the patient, slightly forward-leaning posture of a man expecting a door to recognize his intentions. We caught up and looked from him to the doors.
“What are you doing?”
He glanced at the panel beside them, then stepped back.
“Oh. Sorry. It’s an elevator.”
Of all of us, he was the one who drank the least. This fact was raised immediately. He tried to explain that he had simply walked the wrong way, which was plainly true and therefore of no use to him.
“You’ve watched a whole action film,” someone said. “Don’t let the building defeat you.”
He started toward the proper exit while we followed, laughing. I had to slow down because laughing and walking had become two separate activities that my lungs preferred I undertake one at a time. He turned to see what was keeping us, and that made it worse.
Our ride home was more of the same. The elevator incident improved with each telling, despite having happened only minutes earlier. We returned to the movie and discovered fresh disagreements about it. Streetlights passed over the windshield, and the conversation moved between the front and back seats without anybody needing to keep it on course.
When we reached my house, I thanked my friend for driving. Someone told me to get some sleep. This advice was received warmly by the group, considering our accomplishments in that department.
It was around midnight, perhaps a little after. I opened the door quietly and let myself in. The house was still. There were shoes near the entrance, something small on the floor that belonged to a child, and the familiar arrangement of things I could navigate in the dark so long as nobody had improved it while I was out.
Aneeta opened her eyes when I came into the bedroom. She looked sleepy and comfortable, and I tried to put my things down without making the collection of noises that small objects reserve for midnight.
“How was boys’ night?”
“We all fell asleep.”
She lifted her head from the pillow.
“All four of you?”
“Not at the same time.”
“Oh,” she said. “You took shifts.”
“It wasn’t planned.”
She began to laugh. I sat on the edge of the bed and explained that we had watched different portions and filled each other in afterward. This did nothing to help. She pulled the blanket closer and asked whether, between the four of us, we had managed the whole film.
“Most of it, probably.”
“Four tickets.”
“Yes.”
“For one movie.”
“That is how theaters usually work.”
She was laughing properly now, awake enough to enjoy herself at my expense. I tried to explain that the chairs had been very comfortable and that I had been tired before we even got there.
“You could have slept here.”
“There was dinner.”
“There’s dinner here.”
“And my friends.”
She looked at me. “You can’t all sleep here.”
I began laughing too and had to turn away to cough. She waited, still smiling, then pushed the water toward me. I drank some and sat holding the glass while she asked about dinner.
I told her about the wait, the table, and the shots arriving before anybody had cleared the dishes. I described the four of us walking single file toward the restaurant, so carefully and obediently that we had looked like men reporting for work.
“We were saying how much our wives must be missing us,” I said. “All the services we provide at home.”
She considered this with an expression I knew.
“The children went to sleep.”
“Yes, but generally.”
“I went to sleep too.”
“I can see you managed somehow.”
“We were brave.”
I told her about the elevator. She laughed again, and I waited for her to stop before adding that he was the one who drank the least. This gave the story another life. She wanted to know what he had expected the doors to do.
“Open, I think.”
“They do open.”
“Yes, but then there’s more building.”
For a while we sat there talking quietly. I told her bits of the evening as I remembered them, and she asked the sort of questions that made ordinary events sound even more foolish. I had been home for several minutes before it occurred to me that I was still wearing my watch and holding an empty glass.
Then I looked toward the computer.
She saw me look.
“You’re going to work?”
“Just a little. I want to finish something so there’s less tomorrow.”
“It’s already tomorrow.”
“Then I’m behind.”
She shook her head and settled back onto the pillow. I put the glass down and told her it would not be long. She closed her eyes with the experience of someone who had heard that estimate before.
The screen was bright in the quiet room. I turned it down and opened the work I had left. My colleague had moved things forward, and I read through what he had done before adding my part. Saturday lay ahead, and I wanted to leave it as clear as I could. There would be the children, things to do around the house, and whatever arrived unexpectedly the following week. I could at least finish what was in front of me.
I wrote for a while. The tiredness returned now that nobody was making me laugh. Once or twice I stopped with my hands resting on the keyboard, then found the sentence and went on. There was something pleasant about the house being asleep and knowing that I would soon be allowed to join it.
Before I finished, my phone lit up. One of my friends had sent a message asking about a part of the movie.
I read it twice. I had no idea.
From the bed, Aneeta asked, “Work?”
“The movie.”
“Are you still trying to finish it?”
I put the phone facedown and laughed quietly. Then I saved what I had written, closed the computer, and came to bed.