Fiction: That Night(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

After such an enormous repast, they agreed to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed, not, as you expect, reconsummating their union, but recovering delightfully from the premarital stress of the last eleven months, naptime passing like a dream, alternating with half-waking fondles, kisses, and trials of various nicknames and lazy talking that sometimes made little sense when sentences ended in snores, Paula sometimes wondering if she could tolerate eggs and who knows what all else cooked in bacon grease, Billy worrying what new joys butter would bring to his digestion and to his cholesterol numbers.
    But that night, as they waited for the cabernet to breathe, they brought in blankets to the sofa and tried to decide what to watch, which naturally raised the question of what was the best movie ever. They’d had earlier versions of this chat before, of course, but back then each chose safe titles with mass appeal rather than revealed something of their true natures.
    Paula quickly established order and control: “Let’s limit it, this first night, to pre-1990’s movies.”
    “Cool! I vote for a couple of Chaplin Mutuals. Just to start.”
    “Awww, cute! But nah. No silents tonight.”
    “I agree. No silents tonight.”
    “But black and white is cool.”
    “Yeah. Maybe. Nah. Have you seen Raising Arizona?”
    “Only about 200 times! ‘Turn to the right!’”
    “Yeah. We’ll save that one for extra-special occasions.”
    “How does it just keep on getting funnier every time?”
    Listing all their faves was always fun, but they’ve each seen them all too many times, but when Paula mentioned Wonder Boys, suddenly a calamitous drop in the ordinary, normal uneventful mood of the room slammed a forceful undeniable rain jungle of animal sexuality over all the world. She said:
    “Some Hitchcock, though.”
    “Now you’re talkin’. What’s your fave?” Billy could now put off his question whether he could ask if his wife were as horny as he, now that she was his wife. He knew she’d still find him a dog, a mind with but the one track, no matter how she felt inside.
    “Not the big ones. I mean, not that they’re not my faves, but just not for tonight. Meaning, not Rear Window. Not North by Northwest.”
    “Not Vertigo.”
    “I know: Catch a Thief!”

    “Perfect! Yes, yes, yes!”
    “Grace and Cary.”
    “I love his house. I want to live in his house.”
    “I love his sweater, the one when he talks to the police at his door. It has stripes—“
    “That come out as wong wang wong on the film. Yes!”
    “Do you think Hitch realized that?”
    “Probly. ‘Chicken and beer’! ‘John Robie, the Kett’! Grace gets to really shine in that one.”
    They sprawled on the floor, well into newlywed passion before they paused to start the movie.
    In after years, when the film had, sometimes, served as an anniversary tradition, they tried to ascertain the exact moment in their lovemaking to press Play that enabled coordination of climax with the fireworks scene, corny and exquisite as that one always was.
    Whether they sometimes or ever succeeded at synchronous ecstasy with Cary and Grace, we may never know. I’m an unreliable narrator.
    After some time, Paula mentioned feeling a mite peckish.
    “Montfleur!” called Bill. And again: “Montfleur!”
    “What the hell is Montfleur?”
    “Our man!”
    “We have a man? We don’t have a man, you dick!”
    “Oh, mon sante mentale! You’re right! I forgot.”
    “Do we have anything upstairs?”
    “What are you hungry for? We have chips, and we might even have pretzels.”
    “Do we have PB & J?”
    “I am almost positive: yes.”
    “Cocoa Krispies and milk?”
    “Graham crackers?”
    “Sounds great.”
    Upstairs, he pulls the red plum jelly and the fresh loaf of whole wheat, and when he lays the twist tie on the counter, he pauses, goes to the door, and hollers,
    “Babe?”
    “Yeah, babe?”
    “You want yours on toast? I thought I’d have mine on toast.”
    “No, I’d rather have mine soft, if you don’t mind. Babe.”
    “Great. Don’t mind at all. Thanks.”
    “Toast?” she muses to herself. “That’s weird.”
    So he gets down two plates and puts her two slices on one and inserts his into the toaster slots and smashes the lever, looks around, notes the time: 2:18.
    Looks around. Something’s missing. It’s the old tomato-sauce can he’s cleaned and keeps on the back of the stovetop to hold bacon grease. It’s gone. It can’t be. He looks on the table and then scans every countertop. Feels an incipient panic. Looks around again at everything. Into the dining room. On top of the fridge. Even looks into the fridge. It’s gone.
    “Babe!” he hollers down again.
    “Yes, my baby?”
    He doesn’t answer. He knows. He doesn’t peer into the garbage can but tells himself to calm down and to apply himself to the spreading of peanut butter.
    As soon as he has plopped a goodly sized knifeful onto one slice, he knows he needs to relax, to breathe deeply, slowly in, slowly out, slowly deeply in again, so as not to rip the soft slice in his rage.
    He depresses the toaster’s lever once again and watches the thin heating elements turn red and opens the red plum and knifes a first glop onto her other slice, feeling better. “It’s no big deal,” he says, and he knows.
    At pillow talk, Paula allows, “Kind of a weird first day, huh?”
    “I thought it was impossibly fine. A scrambled egg, a Hitchcock flick, a midnight snack, and thou. What was weird?”
    “Just the butter versus the bacon thing. Our first fight!”
    “Was it a fight? I wouldn’t call it that. Just a learning thing.”
    He still wanted to mention, yet refused to mention, the second fight, about her wanton and heartless jettisoning of the liquid gold.
    “Were the eggs the right amount of fluffy? Not over- or undercooked?”
    “They were lovely. Perfect.”
    “You’re speaking of yourself. I referred to the eggs.”
    “Who cares if they were overcooked or fluffy? I don’t care. The whole time I was growing up, nobody ever characterized eggs as fluffy.”
    “That makes me happy, that you’re so cool.”
    I’m happy, she thought silently, that you know what you know and chose not to confront me. I feel bad about it now. We can cook lots more bacon. She kissed him and turned out the lamp and kissed him again in the dark.
    Isn’t it beautiful? They both needed the upper hand, and both relinquished it after having wielded it for a time.
    Paula thought the fight on their first married day an ill omen. This is just not gonna work. Fear of how he’d react when he discovered the baconfat gone and did choose to confront her kept sleep from her, and he couldn’t sleep, even having forgiven her, for the wound was sharp and deep and others soon would follow, but she was surpassingly lovely and had chosen him, she was here now, and all he had to do was to find a better vessel than a tomato can into which to drip the pigfat and a secret place in which to stash it. I got so lucky. It’s not gonna be easy. It’s gonna be great. Smiling with tired satisfaction, he slipped a hand over her warm slumbering belly and heard a slight rain on the roof, in the gutter, and on the fallen leaves.
    But he couldn’t fall asleep. “Liquid fucking gold,” he muttered. There would be no sleep.
    Along towards dawn, she settled her rump back more deeply into his belly.

Copyright © 2022 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.