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Arthur brought in the tape. They turned off the lights but left all of the TVs on. They raided the store’s supply of movie-style boxed candy and made microwaveable popcorn in the break room. (Delia paid the register.) It wasn’t until after the movie that they kissed for the first time, but it was a real kiss, Arthur would think later, deep and deliberate, as if they were both wondering what took the other so long. It had been Arthur who made the move, leaning in while they were still sitting cross-legged on the floor, beneath the store’s largest TV, but it was Delia who pulled him closer.
Arthur was the first to pull away. He stared at Delia, who looked wide-eyed and happy, her lip gloss smudged. “What just happened?” Arthur asked.
“Well,” Delia said. “We kissed.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
Delia nodded, and they kissed again.
“Shit,” Arthur said. “This is going to get complicated.”
They didn’t talk about what they were to each other, even as they spent more and more time together outside of work, days and nights watching – and not watching – the movies that flickered across mall movie screens or unwound in their VCRs. It was already mid-August when Arthur and Delia spent the night together, with Delia sneaking out of Arthur’s brother’s basement just before 6 am. She woke Arthur up and whispered that she needed to get out of there if they wanted to maintain any kind of privacy. She slid out of bed and he reached for her wrist, looked her in the eye.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“We should probably talk about this.”
“Agreed. But right now I need to disappear.”
On his days off, Arthur started going over his documentary footage, telling himself that he was being productive. (He told himself that about watching obscure B-movies too, of course. Most anything Arthur liked to do could be shoe-horned under the category of Studying His Craft: reading film reviews or watching television, certainly. And going for walks was “clearing his head,” and taking naps was “recharging his creative batteries.”) He ended up watching footage of Delia. Telling her first video store experience, describing her job interview with Constance. She was matter-of-fact in much of the footage, a little wistful but not the mess Arthur knew he would be, if he really got going talking about what the store had meant to him and what its closing meant too. She was looking ahead, and he knew it. He also noticed her obviously flirting with him in a few takes. Better to leave those out in the final cut he thought. That’s where the footage became more like home movies.
Arthur asked himself why he was allowing any of this to happen, knowing full well that Delia was leaving, and that his own life was starting to resemble the train wreck scene from The Fugitive. He imagined Delia during her shift at Video Deluxe, popping a PG-13 movie into the VCR and absently watching the tape auto-track. The movie would be something cute and romantic, he thought. A guilty pleasure. She liked Sixteen Candles. He had seen her mooning over the last scene: Molly Ringwald all dressed up, her face lit by the glow of her birthday cake. Delia was still such a kid.
Nah. He thought. She was too smart for all that. She would be watching…Oliver and Company. The only Disney film that he could think of that didn’t revolve around a love story. And she’d barely even be paying attention to that, because she would be making a list of everything that she needed to buy for her new dorm room. That sounded more like Delia to him. He imagined himself now as the lovelorn hero of some John Cusack film, walking, of course, in the driving rain and calling up to Delia as she looked down from her window with mild irritation. He would get rain in his mouth as he howled that he loved her, a scene ready-made for inclusion in a movie trailer, and she would roll her eyes at how overwrought he was being.
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About Victoria Large
