Christopher Hacker - The Morels

Basement auditorium of the Queens College Film Club, circa 1988. First date. Showing is an Australian release about neo-Nazis that has caused some controversy. It features the debut performance of an actor who will become Hollywood’s baddest bad boy. In it, everyone’s head is shaved. Not a single woman actor. Penelope notices this and holds on to the observation for something to talk about afterward. Staying focused is hard, like watching opera — the main thrust of the plot has to be gotten through body language. With those accents, it’s anyone’s guess what people are actually saying. This is made more difficult by the two men sitting directly in front of them, talking full volume. The small auditorium is full, and its attention, she can feel, is tangled around this disturbance. There is shifting, mumbling from all corners.

After some time, Arthur leans in between their heads. Hey, he says. Be quiet. Both men are bald; one is wearing an earring that glitters in the dark from the light of the projector.

Penelope’s stomach tightens. She knows where this will go. These guys are older, not like grad students. Like people with jobs, who go to bars and beat people up.

The men pause, and Arthur leans back. Penelope tries to relax, to focus on what is happening on-screen. But after a few moments the men start up again.

Arthur leans forward again and says, Did you hear what I just asked?

The two pause again. Maybe we should go, Penelope whispers, although she doesn’t want to go. She is out on a date; she is watching a movie. Why should they be the ones to leave? Who do these assholes think they are! Suddenly she is trembling with rage.

Yeah, one of the men says, maybe you should listen to your lady.

Maybe you should just shut up and let us enjoy this movie, Arthur says.

This seems to be the cue the men are looking for.

Okay, he says, now we’re talking. The one who says this swivels in his seat. What do you propose, huh? Interestingly enough, the man is whispering now.

But Arthur laughs. Oh! What do I propose! You mean, “What do you propose to do about it, punk ?” Isn’t that your line? You cannot be serious.

Serious as they come, the man says, and stands. Get up, he says.

Arthur stands. Some brave soul from a far corner shouts, Shut up already! All of you! The images on-screen flash. There is a chase, the shuffle of feet, camera wobbly, disorienting. But Arthur seems entirely undisturbed. He is nose to nose with the man. It is like they are on the verge of kissing.

Come on, the man says. Let’s go.

Arthur says, That’s right, you and me. I’ll meet you outside. But first I’m going to finish watching this movie.

How about I break your nose right now and get it over with?

Arthur snorts. If it will shut you up.

Two sounds follow: a snap of fabric, like someone quickly shrugging on a jacket, and a crack, like someone cracking their knuckles.

Arthur stands cupping his face.

Enjoy, the man says, and clomps with his friend out of the row — perhaps not as gracefully as they might have liked — and down the aisle. One takes a bow before banging open the double doors.

Arthur sits.

Here, Penelope says, let me help. She digs in her purse, for what she doesn’t know. Her words come out hollow, like she is acting them out. She can feel everyone’s attention on them. She urges him to go. Arthur is bleeding; she can see the glistening down his lip on his chin and neck. His nose is swollen; even in the dark she can see this. They need to go to a hospital.

But he refuses. He wads her scarf, which she has handed him, and puts it in front of his mouth and faces the screen with wet eyes. I just want to finish watching this movie. Okay?

That was Arthur. He wore his hair long in those days. It was wavy and hid half of his face, while the rest was tucked behind one of his large ears. He was pretty, even in his unshaved scruff, and the crush Penelope had on Arthur had about it the crush for a girlfriend, a crush of envy — what she wouldn’t do to have that jawline, those eyes, those thick natural curls! His nose never healed correctly after the punch. She tried getting him to go to Health Services for it, but he refused. What’s done is done, he’d said. It went from a nauseating gray that first night, to olive, to jaundice. The swelling of course receded, but it was still bent oddly, and a knot under the skin at the bridge remained. Penelope thought of it as her nose. Its new shape marked the beginnings of their lives together. She would touch it sometimes and shiver.

The way he towered over her. She was reminded of a school trip to a farm, the way she felt putting her twelve-year-old hand on the flank of a horse. The damp hair, the shiver and twitch of that muscle’s power beneath her hand, a synchronous twitch in her own groin. This moment formed the basis of her early sexual fantasies. She wasn’t one of those horse girls who read Misty of Chincoteague and collected Breyer models; she had girls in her grade, in art class they drew nothing but horses, at lunch they carried their horse lunch boxes and horse backpacks, in their rooms they papered their walls with horse posters. Penelope made fun of those girls. Hers wasn’t an interest in horses, or even this horse per se, but rather this particular moment in this particular stable, with the brute feel of horseness in general. It was a small grain of shame that she worried over and returned to until her interest in boys replaced it, and she later learned somewhere, overheard from someone once at a party, that this was a common girlhood phenomenon, and when she felt Arthur hovering just over her, or when being drawn into the power of his writing, she felt that old twitch. He shared that equine contradiction of beastly and pretty — the beautiful monster — blind trampling power of hoof at the end of each slender, precarious leg. She liked to think of Arthur as a green stallion, barely broken, the one the ranchers called her crazy for even bothering with. He was wild; he had fire and terror in his eyes.

Arthur was an infuriating kind of ecstasy. As the baby of the family, Penelope had always been cooed at and coddled, showered with encouragement. And even though in time Penelope came to understand that much of this attention was a form of condescension, she nonetheless grew up with a healthy sense of self and an expectation from a loved one of a certain amount of coo. So Arthur was a rude awakening. His affections were sporadic, unpredictable. He had the ability to undo her with a single word. With Arthur, she became a wallflower and found herself craning toward any glimmer of affection as though her survival depended on it. Her brother, never known for pulling punches, had told her she could have done a lot better. She had the goods. She knew this about herself, and even without her own esteem there was proof in the stares she got, not to mention the offers. Stopped on the street or alone in a café. Even pregnant, even afterward with her postpartum paunch. They just couldn’t help themselves, they would say. Then how was it Arthur could? The one person from whom it mattered. Cruel irony! And this indifference, these surprise attacks of affection and long stretches in anticipation of affection, made her hypersensitive to Arthur’s needs, quick to compliment him on the simplest accomplishment, quick to come to his defense.

They honeymooned — she eight months pregnant — in her parents’ timeshare in Maine, an A-frame cabin with a wood-burning stove and a steep set of steps that led from the deck to the clear blue lake the cabin overlooked. They drank water out of a well and shat in a shack without a door into a hole onto which they’d sprinkle lye from a bucket when they were done. A Boston whaler and a kayak tapped against the dock, a reassuring sound at night that lulled them to sleep.