Jacks’s movie selection was a Korean revenge thriller that Benji had apparently been evangelizing for six months.
“I didn’t pick it because of you,” Jacks told Benji. “I picked it because it was on three ‘best of’ lists.”
“You picked it because I’ve been telling you for six months—”
“Your recommendation was only a minor factor. Rotten Tomatoes carries more weight than you and your hair.”
“It was absolutely a factor, and I will carry this wound to my grave.”
I looked up from the chairs I was arranging. “Is this the one with the hallway fight scene?”
The room went quiet. Seven faces turned toward me.
“You’veseenit?” Benji said.
I shrugged. “I’ve seen most of Park Chan-wook’s catalogue. He’s one of the best living directors.”
The silence that followed was the silence of a group of people collectively revising their understanding of a person they thought they’d figured out.
“Peter,” Mia said carefully. “Are you a film person?”
I shrugged again and continued my chair shifting. “I watch movies.”
“He’s a film person,” she reported to Benji.
“I’m not a film person. I watch movies that are well made. I have a preference for directors who understand pacing and silence. Park is good with silence.”
“He’s a film person,” Finn confirmed.
“David and I used to go to the art house theater in Portland every week,” I said. The sentence slipped past the editorial checkpoint that usually caught David’s name before it reached the air. “It was our thing . . . on Tuesday nights.”
The room held the name the way this group held things that mattered, gently and without fuss.
No one asked a follow-up question.
No one tilted their head.
Jacks gave a single small nod that meant, “I hear you. We can keep going.”
“Tuesday nights are sacred,” Chase said. “Finn and I do crosswords.”
“You do crosswords, and Idocrosswords,” Finn corrected. “You’ve never finished one.”
“I provide moral support. I’m the crossword supporter.”
“You fall asleep by twelve across.”
“Twelve across is where the hard ones start. That’s a natural stopping point. It’s like the seventh inning stretch but with naps.”
The conversation carried David’s name forward without making it heavy. I settled into my chair with a fraction less tension than I’d had a minute earlier.
The movie was excellent, which was never in dispute.
What was in dispute was the proper way to consume snacks during a film, which turned out to be a subject on which every person in the room held strong and incompatible convictions.
Rod ate his pizza in complete silence, treating the food with the same reverence he gave the art being consumed alongside it. Mia ate popcorn one kernel at a time, which she described as “mindful eating” and which Benji described as “psychopathic.” Finn didn’t eat during movies because he found chewing sounds distracting, a position so fundamentally joyless that Chase had developed a technique for eating Milk Duds by letting them dissolve on his tongue, which took approximately four minutes per Dud.
I had set out bowls for the popcorn arranged by type with small tongs for the communal candy, because shared food should be distributed through utensils rather than hands. This was a basic hygienic principle that I’d assumed would be self-evident and that generated, instead, approximately fifteen minutes of commentary and unending verbal abuse.
