Tuesday night at the theater, you were pissed. You’d waited weeks to see this movie. You refused to go with Vincent even though he offered. A teenager with cystic acne tore your ticket and sent you to the smaller screening room upstairs, the one with the rickety air conditioner and the lightbulbs that hummed. You’d paid the fourteen dollars (plus tax and service fees), sure that it was going to be in the main theater with the red fabric seats and gold façades on the ceiling. It made you feel classic. Instead, you sat in what could have been someone’s at-home projector room with ten other people, all waiting to watch a biopic about Princess Diana. The Tuesday crowd wasn’t very large, but the whole thing left a bitter taste in your mouth. Your chest felt tight, and you touched your collarbone with your fingertips. Instead of crying from the disappointment, you clung to your very last shred of dignity; you were the only audience member not bingeing buttered cardboard.
You did not eat at the movies, and you looked down on those who did. Behind you, someone brought their own snacks, and this made you physically ill. You glanced over your shoulder: long fingers unfurled a cluster of pre-sliced apple wedges, skin peeled off. Not only did this asshole bring plastic wrap to a sacred space, you thought, but he needs the skin removed from his fruit like a goddamned toddler. At least popcorn was bite-sized. You looked back at the screen, knee bouncing, and picked your cuticles.
Your phone vibrated inside your jacket pocket. You would never text at the movies—it’s sacrilegious, you knew this—but you were sure it was Vincent. You did not look. Instead, you thought of gagging in the middle of a blowjob, of the Vegas strip, of walking naked through a blizzard, and of gas station food. All things you would have rather endured than read his text, roll those words around your brain, and come up with some response besides, “I AM NO LONGER CAPABLE OF HOLDING SPACE FOR YOU,” which your therapist might have found promising.
In front of you, an old woman in a bright pink sweater sat next to a bald man you soon found out was her fully grown son. They were endearing but chatty. They provided a constant stream of commentary on the previews and the quality of the popcorn and how the actress playing Lady Di wasn’t an accurate Lady Di, and wouldn’t William and Harry be offended? When the opening credits rolled and they didn’t shut up, you thought you might scream your little head off. But then, as if he heard your blood boil, the son went ooh Mom, here we go, excited? And Mom went silent.
Diana started puking. She’d had bulimia in real life, and you made it to twenty-two without knowing. You took a course on the royal family in college (two weeks were devoted to Diana and Charles), but it was never mentioned. Watching her puke, a little part of you gagged, too. Your breathing was shallow and your eyes were so dry—or were they teary? You didn’t look away. You listened to Diana and the soft, wet crunch of apples; the rustling in chairs and the groans of settling bodies. You tried to enjoy the nineties nostalgia and the costume design and the cinematography of the English countryside. But the room was so small, and your head was full of Vincent and the casual proposal he’d made twenty-four hours earlier. What you needed was a shower, and for Diana to get up off the bathroom floor, and for other people to take the movies fucking seriously.
You spent a lot of time fantasizing about renting out the theater (the big one, not the screening room) just to sit in silence, right in the middle, no heads to look over or obstruct the picture. In the fantasy, you were always alone. It was at least $500 to rent the place for just a couple of hours, but you would have done it if you’d had the money.
Vincent liked popcorn. When you brought him to the movies, which you had not done in a long time, he drank soda and laughed too much and too loud as if he were giving it away for free. He’d remark on the believability of special effects gore. He’d wince at a kill. He’d smile at you and wink when two characters shared a first kiss or fucked. If he were there to see Diana vomiting at Sandringham, he would have scrunched his nose, squinted at you, and expected you to look away, too.
When he asked the question, Vincent was sitting next to you on the couch at his apartment. Your relationship was still new enough to not pee in front of each other and to sleep every night wrapped up in a tangle of legs as if you weren’t sweaty and suffering. That evening, you had cramps (absolutely debilitating gas). You were frowning and the news was on. Looking like this, nauseated and bored, he did it. Not formally—there wasn’t even a ring—just, “Lucy, I want to marry you, would you want to marry me?” To which you said: “Absolutely not.” You even laughed a little, thinking it was a joke. Vincent full-body flinched as if you’d spat in his face.
“Is this funny?”
“Vincent,” you said, the gravity of the situation lost on you. “Are you serious?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Shit. You’re really asking me?”
“Jesus!”
“You’ve only known me for, like, a few months.”
“Four months and two weeks,” he said.
“Right,” you said. “Is that long enough?”
“It’s long enough to know I love you,” he said.
You never thought of marrying Vincent. You didn’t have a key to his place, or a designated drawer. You still brought your own toothbrush. You often left in the mornings with greasy hair and soiled underwear stuffed into your purse like the town slut that your mother absolutely thought you were, with your Brazilian waxes and lacy thongs she always managed to see when you went home. You’d taken to reading articles online about how to make the sex better for you (Vincent always had a decent time). You used too much lube because you were never that naturally endowed. You googled how to fasten fishnet stockings to a garter belt, how to swallow semen without gagging, how to tell if the man in your life really likes you or keeps you around for something to fuck.
Vincent stood up then, pacing, his cheeks red. Your thoughts ran on a loop: Would our babies have symmetrical faces? Would he be opposed to spanking me in bed? Will I always feel embarrassed looking at him naked? And then you said, “I’m sorry.”
Vincent went to sleep after a lot of silence and a lot of crying. Not many tears from you, but quite a few from him. You didn’t want to stay or go home. You hadn’t washed your sheets in over two months, and your pantry only held brown rice pasta, tapioca starch, and graham crackers. That night, you slept on Vincent’s couch without brushing your teeth. In the morning, you woke up to stained panties—that thick, rust-colored blood—and walked home.
Diana sang to an eighties ballad with little William and Harry. It was the end of the movie and they were in Diana’s car—unaccompanied by a royal escort—fleeing Sandringham. She was happy but not excessively. The boys were laughing in that precious wild way only children can. She would be dead soon and the camera knew it, lingering on her face under an overcast British sky. After the screen faded to black, the old woman and her bald son stood up. She smelled of dried flowers and compact powder, and it lingered after she was gone. You wondered how bizarre it would be to stand up and ask where she got her perfume. Vincent was allergic so you hadn’t worn any in a while, but God did you miss it. And wouldn’t it be a riot to give Vincent hives with a smell like that? But you didn’t leave. You always watched the end credits until the very last name, but once you were alone, lights slowly brightening, you scrolled through the wall of missed texts from Vincent.
He’d asked where you were, who you were with, what you were feeling, and how the day had been for you because it was certainly a shitshow for him. He asked if you would come over later. You typed out a message: Why do you need to know? And then: Can I not do something alone?
You deleted that and tried again: Why do you want to get married? Can you describe it? Tell me in finite terms what it is you want from me for the next 3-6 decades.
Another attempt: I’ll call you when I can talk. But you erased that, too.
It was dark outside the theater and it was just starting to snow. You put your headphones on, though you couldn’t find a single song you felt like hearing, and walked to the grocery store. There wasn’t fresh food at your apartment. But after the movie, after that great horrible purgatory, you were going to your own place instead of Vincent’s. You filled your basket with lettuce and root vegetables and chicken breast. Black beans and pears and pre-cooked lentils. You got it over with.
In the checkout line, you recognized the cashier. The two of you had met a few years earlier in undergrad, drinking tequila with the same friends in some dank basement across the city. You wondered why he stuck around just to work at a grocery store, but you were a film major who worked as a receptionist at a dentist’s office, so you tried not to be bitchy. He didn’t seem to recognize you. You said something long-winded and insecure-sounding, but mostly just hi, it’s me, don’t you remember? You asked him how life was going. He glanced around, smiled, and made some quip about the economy.
Other words were spoken, but you mostly just remember the metal studs in his earlobes and that his black hair curled at the base of his neck. You know that he looked at you with hungry eyes, that you did not want to deter them, and that he was excruciatingly fuckable. As you left, he said it was good to catch up (“Really good.”) and that he hoped to see you around. You left the grocery store with your bullshit food that you were going to force yourself to eat. You thought, Hey, maybe I will see this guy around, maybe I’ll see him quite a bit, up and down and on top and under, and then you felt guilty the entire walk home.
Vincent called later that night. You were still thinking about Diana, how you’d wasted the movie away in thought, how you needed to cook dinner but you weren’t in the mood to stomach it. You let the call go to voicemail.
You tossed unmassaged kale, unseasoned garbanzo beans, and plain hummus (dressing for lazy people) plus salt and pepper in a mixing bowl, but your salt grinder was broken so you went without. Your apartment stunk of litter even though you didn’t have a cat. It was a leftover smell from the tenants before, baked into the hardwoods. The last time you’d smelled it was the day you moved in, and this made you want to call Vincent and apologize. You might have even married him just to sleep in his bed of always-fresh sheets. To waste away in his newly constructed, beautiful, never-seen-a-mouse-before apartment. He was uptight about it, but he was clean. He fucked you in the mornings even though you hated it, your mouth tasting of sleep and phlegm, but at least you could stare up at a ceiling that wasn’t cracked or discolored with mold. You wished little things like that were enough.
“Lucy, listen. Are you at home? I’d really like to know if you’re okay. I get it if you don’t want to do this right now. I don’t want to fucking do this right now. I didn’t mean— I’m not holding you to it, you know, it was just a conversation. We don’t have to decide, we don’t have to do anything about it, I swear to God. All right? Please come to mine and we can talk about it. Please don’t let this fuck things up, okay?” He took a long pause. You could hear him wipe his nose and sniff a little bit. “Please text me because I know you’re going to listen to this. Don’t make me sweat. I get so anxious when you don’t fucking respond to me, can you understand that? Just call me. All right. I’ll come by tomorrow if I don’t hear from you. Okay? Fuck. Call me.”
With your salad (in its comically large bowl), you got into bed. You listened to the voicemail once, your phone propped between your knees, and then listened again. You took bites in between plays, pausing your chewing every time Vincent got choked up on the second “all right.” You listened, over and over, until you fell asleep.
When you woke up, it was noon and you had a dried patch of hummus on the corner of your mouth. You wiped it as you took your morning shit. You called out of work (one of the dental hygienists who hated Vincent was more than happy to cover) and went back to the theater to watch Diana again. The second time was better. You coped with the tiny screen, the unceremonious snacking, the vomiting. You expected it, let it penetrate your center of gravity. You cried until the credits were over and someone was sweeping popcorn from the floor.
You never saw Vincent again. But for months after, you looked him up on Twitter to decipher his thoughts on current events. You analyzed the dog in his Instagram profile picture, the blond woman he started posting photos of who may or may not have become his wife. You wondered if they had good sex—if she ever felt greasy and tarnished the way you did. You thought of that movie. You’d gone to see it a third and a fourth time within the two weeks after Vincent. The more you stared at her, the more you saw that Diana looked perpetually ready to vomit, no matter the scene, as if clumps of bile were always sitting there in her mouth, rotting her teeth, sloshing around her jowls. As if that’s what made her chin jut out the way it did. You thought of that purging—that constant cleansing—and knew she would be proud.
Taylor Arnette is a fiction writer and teaching fellow in the MFA program at Boston University. Her work has previously appeared in The Beacon. She also serves as an editorial assistant at AGNI.
Twitter: @macntaylor Instagram: @taylor.arnette
Photo by Bence Szemerey.