The day went by with no email from Marianne, not that Jack had really expected one. If their places had been reversed, he would have needed a while to think things over, before he responded to a woman who’d stood him up.
He’d come up with a totally reasonable story to explain why he’d missed her last night, and the fact that his lie was so believable made him feel even worse about it. But what else could he do? A lie or two and some hurt feelings were a small price to pay for helping to get her theater declared a landmark. Weren’t they?
He’d been cooped up in his furnished rental apartment all day, poring over a stack of books he’d borrowed from the town hall. He’d been amazed to find a whole shelf of scrapbooks there, one for each year running from 1920, a decade before the Esmerelda Theater had been built, straight through to 1980, a decade before his own birth. Apparently there’d been a town historian, who’d taken her job quite seriously.
Nobody could tell him much about the woman who’d held that position for sixty years, not even whether she’d been paid or was a volunteer. The current mayor, Adam Walker, who’d lived in the town most of his life, had no idea. Whoever she was, whyever she did it, the old historian had captured every event of any significance in the town, and the Esmerelda showed up frequently.
Rather than make copies of all the pages of interest, he’d noted down the dates of the newspaper articles that had been pasted into the books. Surely there was an intern back in Salem who could go to the library and spend a few hours – or days – in the library printing out pages from old microfilms. If there even were old microfilms.
That was a problem for another day, though. Jack’s back hurt from being hunched over the table, and his eyes hurt from straining to read small, faded print, and his brain hurt from all the information he was stuffing into it.
He needed some fresh air. He put the scrapbooks aside, grabbed his jacket and ventured outside. It was just four blocks to the town square, and as he walked by the big Christmas tree, he saw Marianne Carter out in front of her theater. He turned away; he didn’t want to make things even worse. But it was too late. She had spotted him.
“Jack!”
He couldn’t ignore her. He turned back towards her, crossed the street and met her right in front of the box office of the Esmerelda. “Marianne. I didn’t see you.”
“You did look kind of preoccupied,” she said. “If you’ve got too much on your mind, you know what the best thing for that is?”
He had a guess. “What do I win if I answer right?”
“You win a free movie ticket,” she said, smiling brightly. “Oops, I gave it away. But it’s true. And I’m sure you’ve never seen Christmas in Connecticut. Come on, it starts in ten minutes.”
She grabbed his hand and started to drag him into the theater. He could have pulled away, argued with her, done any number of things. But, and he wasn’t sure why, he let her drag him inside.
“He’s with me,” Marianne said to the woman – no, girl, she couldn’t have been more than seventeen – inside the ticket window. “And if you must chew gum while you’re working, please do me a favor and spit it out into a napkin and throw it in the trash when you’re done, OK?”
The girl didn’t look up, but she did nod at Marianne’s order. “The perils of hiring teenagers, I guess,” Jack said, once they were inside.
“Tell me about it,” Marianne said, sighing. There was another high-schooler at the concession stand. He wore a deep red uniform, with gold epaulets, and a beret. The uniform was bad enough, but the hat qualified as torture, in Jack’s opinion. “Two cokes, one large popcorn, extra butter, please, Jake,” she told the boy.
“What if I wanted something else to drink?” He didn’t, but he was a little bit annoyed that she hadn’t bothered to ask him.
She grinned. “You had Coke the other night at the diner, and we don’t have too many choices anyway.” That was true. He saw only four options on the soda dispenser behind the counter. “The guy from the beverage distributor has been pushing me to get one of those fancy machines where you can make your own drink and there’s a hundred different choices, but those things are huge. Where would I put it?” Nowhere that Jack could see, at least not without a major redesign of the lobby.
“Fair enough,” he said. “But what about the extra butter? How do you know I’m not on a diet?”
She stared at him as though he’d just spoken Greek. Or Martian. “Everybody likes extra butter.” She said it as though it was a law of the universe rather than a personal preference. But with one handful of popcorn, he understood her point. Especially because he could taste that it was real butter, not the yellow butter-like substance you got at most movie theaters.
She led him up the stairs, letting him hold the popcorn. That was a mistake on her part, because the extra butter was downright addictive, and he wasn’t sure there’d be any popcorn left by the time they got to their seats.
Jack followed her into the balcony. When he’d come the other day, he sat downstairs, and it was a completely different perspective being up here. The balcony wasn’t that big compared to the rest of the theater, just ten rows of seats, but it was high enough up that he was at eye level with the top of the movie screen, or maybe even above that. It would be weird to have to look down instead of up.
“Is it always like this, or is this a slow night?” A third of the seats up here were filled, if that. Down below, it was a little more crowded, with possibly half the seats filled.
“The six o’clock show’s always pretty slow. It’s kind of an awkward time,” she said. That made sense. If you worked until five o’clock, there really wasn’t enough time to have an early dinner and still make it to the movie. “But it costs just as much to keep the lights on whether I show a movie or not, so I may as well show one.”
With a slight groaning sound, the curtain in front of the screen began to open, and Marianne clapped in approval. She wasn’t alone, either. He heard more applause below him as the screen was revealed, and the projector clunked to life. The other day, when he’d seen The Shop Around the Corner, he’d gotten to his seat a minute or two after the movie had started, so he’d missed the pre-show business. Which, apparently, included a live announcement. A girl – another teenager – was making her way to the front of the theater. She wore a uniform just as the boy behind the concession counter had. And she had a microphone in her hand.
“Thank you for coming to tonight’s screening of Christmas in Connecticut, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Denis Morgan. Before we start the show, I have a brief announcement.” She paused for a breath, and went on, in a clear, if slightly nervous, voice. “Our scheduled screening of The Bishop’s Wife on Saturday, December 22nd has been postponed. But we hope you’ll join us for Romance’s annual production of A Christmas Carol, right here in this theater, live, starring Wally Schwartz as Ebenezer Scrooge and directed by Mary McKay. Tickets are available in the box office. Enjoy tonight’s show!”
With that, she was off, and then the previews began, which surprised Jack. There were three of them, all for upcoming holiday movies, and all very old-fashioned, so different from the loud, fast-paced modern movie previews he was used to.
He noticed that Marianne was staring raptly at the screen, even though she had to have seen these previews a hundred times. And he could feel the excitement radiating from her once the movie started. He already knew this wasn’t just a business for her, it was a labor of love, but he still marveled at the depth of her passion for movies. He couldn’t think of anyone else he knew, himself included, who displayed that much passion for their job.
He’d never thought that someone caring so intently about their work could be attractive, but it certainly attracted him to Marianne Carter.