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They talked a little while longer. They had refused to call it a relationship because neither of them was ready for one, not then. Neither of them mentioned love again. Arthur went from the coffee shop back to the parking lot of the closed and darkened Video Deluxe, almost on autopilot. Like a homing pigeon, he thought, which was really too bad given the circumstances.
Arthur decided that he wanted to finish the documentary before Delia left. A rough cut, not the real thing. He set out to interview all of the regulars at the store who were still left. He got in touch with some of the video stores in the neighboring towns, some of them still hanging on, others getting ready to close. His camera was rolling when Video Deluxe stopped renting tapes to people and started selling them off exclusively. He got the moment when their six-year-old customer Terry’s parents finally bought him the tape that they had been renting for him every Saturday for a year. Arthur stayed up all night editing. He added a voiceover, articulating everything that he loved about the store, and everything he hated about it. He told his story about leaving NYU. He finished a rough cut about ninety minutes long.
He called Delia.
They had an after-hours screening at Video Deluxe, on all of the TVs in the store. They made popcorn and drank soda from bottles. Delia watched, attentively, and Arthur followed her reactions, grinning with satisfaction when she laughed in the right places. He’d opened the film with some of the b-roll footage of him and Dean and his other friends, and while most of that material was pretty juvenile, it was also pretty funny.
“I never knew that,” Delia murmured when Constance told the story of how she met Morris – working in the concession stand at their local movie palace. Delia didn’t get embarrassed or make self-effacing comments during her own appearances, and she was silent when Arthur talked about leaving school. At the end of the movie, Arthur had included footage from the ending of The Cure for Amnesia, the part where he wakes up a video clerk. But now the scene had a coda. The film dissolved from eighteen-year-old Arthur to twenty-one-year-old Arthur, still in black and white. In voiceover, Arthur told the audience that he had suddenly woken up and discovered that he wasn’t a video store clerk, and once again had to figure out who he was, if not that. In the movie, he picked up a video camera, and pointed it toward the lens that was trained on him. And the film shifted from black and white to full color.
“So you made your movie,” Delia said, “You’re a filmmaker.” She reached out as if to touch his shoulder but seemed to change her mind.
Arthur nodded. “I’m an unemployed, unpaid, perhaps-soon-to-be-penniless filmmaker. But it’s a start.”
“And what’s next?”
Arthur explained that he planned to move away. Maybe not New York City this time. He had a cousin in Austin, and he had heard that they had a great independent film scene there. He said he wouldn’t let himself apply to any video store jobs, even if there were any. He said he didn’t wanted to settle anymore, and he hoped she believed him – he was finally starting to believe it, at least.
Delia raised the plastic Sprite bottle that she’d been drinking from. “To starts.” She said. “To things that begin – that they continue happening.”
Arthur tapped her Sprite bottle with a bottle of root beer. “And to things that end. That they happened at all.”
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About Victoria Large
