Short Story: “The Cinephiles”

Historical note: I first conceived of and wrote this story in the year 2018. Make of that what you will.

It was an unseasonable afternoon in late winter and Blaise Bondarenko tracked damp grit into the building. He was here to meet with his film appreciation group for the first time in over a month. There had been legal troubles and Blaise had had to come up with some pretty airtight excuses to avoid them. The weather had been brutally cold as little as a week ago and one of Blaise’s friends was still home sick after being out in it for a few minutes.

            The meeting place was new, a tearoom done up in something approximating a British Imperial style, with a Raj theme that steered clear enough of overt triumphalism that Blaise’s friend Nasara had felt comfortable recommending the place. Nasara was the first person he knew whom he saw when he got in. She was sitting at one end of an oblong table in an alcove hung with yellow-embroidered dark blue wall hangings, drinking chai masala and waving enthusiastically at Blaise. It looked like she had already switched to her springtime jacket, at least for today. Her long black hair was lank and Blaise guessed that she had forgotten to shower again.

            “So who else is coming?” Blaise asked as he sat down and shrugged off his own coat. “I heard already that Marcus is still home sick.”

            “Ooh, big oof,” Nasara said. “I actually hadn’t heard that. That sucks.” She raised one hand as if she were showing off an engagement ring and counted off her fingers with the other hand. “Okay, so I know Bruce is coming and I think Tatiana said she’ll be able to make it too. Euphrosyne has to come because she’s the one who has the copy of the Mitchell book. And Tony said he’s going to try his best to make it.”

            “So six, counting us? Not bad.” Nasara handed him a menu and he gave it a cursory glance until he found a tea that looked familiar to him; then, remembering that he did not actually like this familiar tea, he decided to order something that he had never heard of. “After what happened with Randy and Kyle I was a little worried that—”

            “I don’t think it’s a good idea to discuss Randy and Kyle,” said Nasara abruptly.

            If you asked Nasara what her problem with Randy and Kyle was, she would probably have just made vague comments about their having poor taste and not having gelled well with the rest of the group. The truth, as everybody actually in the group knew full well, was more painful, even though it reflected much less poorly on Randy and Kyle themselves than the way Nasara talked about them usually suggested. The truth had to do with the most frightening possibilities in Blaise’s life. It also had everything to do with the political situation, and with the fact that the group was still watching movies that Randy and Kyle had recommended.

            Randy and Kyle had legal troubles that had begun with a conspiracy case about some of the work that they had been doing as union organizers. Both were veteran organizers even though Randy was a lot older than Kyle; both had done a lot of work unionizing the dining hall workers at the college that Blaise and Nasara went to. They had come under skepticism, then suspicion, and finally repression. Lots of people who cut the figure that they cut went through that these days.

            Blaise ordered his new unfamiliar tea and began to discuss Nasara’s classes with her since she refused to discuss movies until at least four people were present. Nasara was majoring in botany and wanted to go out to the Midwest and work with corn for a living for some unfathomable reason. “Some unfathomable reason” was her way of putting it, not Blaise’s; Blaise didn’t see anything unusual in someone interested in botany wanting to work with corn.

            For some reason there was a portrait hanging over Nasara’s head of someone it took Blaise an embarrassing amount of time to recognize as Lord Mountbatten. He was really beginning to think that she had suggested this place to be ironic, which, if true, would have been the first inkling of irony he had ever gleaned from her.

            He asked her if she liked this place ironically.

            “No,” she said flatly and honestly. “I like it because it has good tea and good food. The Raj theme is a little weird but it’s part of a general India theme. There’s Mughal stuff too. I’m sort of annoyed that your mind jumped immediately to the India thing when I suggested this place, actually.”

            “Sorry. I just thought—”

            “I know what you thought,” said Nasara. “It’s fine.”

            She did not actually think it was fine. Nasara was a member of a family with the last name Rahman and had grown up in Edison, New Jersey; accordingly, now that she lived in the hardwood-and-slush cranny of the Pioneer Valley it bothered her to be thought of as that Indian girl or that Muslim girl. The idea that she should look at her race or even her religion as central, indispensable features of her personal identity bothered her a little coming from people like Blaise and a lot coming from people like the President. It upset her that the only options people wanted to give her were acting like the fairest flower of a country she had never been to or fully assimilating into whatever culture places like this tearoom actually represented.

            Nasara had played the race card, by her own definitions of playing the race card, only once so far in the existence of this group. It had been when they had deciding which Indiana Jones movie to watch, when they had temporarily been available to them from a certain library. Time had been of the essence with this decision, as it was with so many of the movies they had failed to find online, and the discussion that they had had about this had gotten unusually fraught all around. Eventually she had succeeded in vetoing Temple of Doom and they had gone with what Bruce called “the one, the only” Raiders of the Lost Ark. She had enjoyed that movie more than the most recent one they had watched.

            The others arrived. Bruce, gravelly-voiced with wispy grey hair and glasses that he wore perched halfway down his nose so that both Blaise and Nasara had frequent fantasies of pushing them up for him, sat down first. Euphrosyne, a gangly transgender woman (or drag queen; she had never clarified which but they called her “she” and she didn’t correct them) with hair similar to Nasara’s but more carefully kept, came in next with the Mitchell book, which wasn’t strictly relevant to the movie that they had just watched but might be relevant to choosing the next one. Next came Tatiana and Tony, as a matched set; Nasara didn’t know about Blaise, but she was to this day a little mortified that she had once thought they were dating; in fact they were brother and sister, Tony about six years older than Tatiana and working as a social media consultant for a heavily put-upon legal nonprofit while Tatiana finished her degree at Smith.

            “So,” said Bruce once everybody had ordered, “what did we think of The Blues Brothers? I saw this movie in theaters; didn’t appreciate it as much at the time as I do now. Belushi and Aykroyd were big comedy stars at the time but a lotta people weren’t sure what to make of this movie. It cost a whole boatload, but it did pretty well for itself in theaters.”

            “Lots of coke on the set, from what I’ve heard,” said Euphrosyne. “I guess that was what was in at the time, in terms of drugs.”

            “Any more you can’t throw a rock without hitting somebody with their own pot farm,” said Tony, looking at a part of the menu that advertised things made with CBD oil. “I’m surprised los federales haven’t cracked down on this place yet.”

            “Oh, let’s not mention the feds cracking down on things,” said Tatiana. “Now of all times especially I’m worried somebody might be, you know, looking at us with designs.”

            “In this place?” asked Nasara. “Come on, Tat. Look at the little post-its, for God’s sake.”

            Blaise picked up a clear plastic frame with a picture inside it and a post-it note attached to it, which had been facing away from him. The picture was of a Mughal emperor and the post-it said “Thank you for not assuming our employees’ gender & pronouns,” over a pen drawing of a chibi catamount.

            “Anyway,” said Nasara, “as far as I’m concerned, this movie wasn’t it, chief. There were things about it that I thought were pretty sexist and the car chases were so ridiculous that I just tuned out after a while. The music was great, though, and I did like some of the jokes.”

            Blaise spent the next several seconds mentally readjusting his schema for what Nasara was like to accommodate the fact that she called people “chief.” He sipped his bright red tea feeling self-conscious and a little sorry for himself.

            Bruce, a little uncharacteristically, had ordered a pot of tea that had a flower-like item in the middle that bobbed up and down in the hot water as he poured. It suddenly occurred to Blaise, who was still looking at the post-it note, that he had been in this place once before, a couple of years ago, when they had had a whole wall full of post-it notes that had been written or drawn on in various cutesy ways by the customers. For some reason he seemed to have it caught in his head that at the time this place had specialized in bubble tea.

            “Did you think it was sexist, Sini?” Nasara asked Euphrosyne.

            “Way to put me on the spot. Yeah, I did, actually. I wouldn’t say it stopped me from enjoying the movie, but it did annoy me.”

            “I didn’t really notice any more sexism than I’d expect from a movie from 1980,” said Tatiana with a shrug. She nudged Bruce and he poured her a cup of the tea that he had ordered; she had finished her own in what felt like under a minute.

            “I agree with that,” said Bruce. “I noticed it less then. Could just be because I’m a guy; I didn’t notice it now either very much until you brought it up.” He shrugged. “Good to be able to have these conversations, though, I guess.”

            “Especially in this day and age,” said somebody from another table a few yards away. It was a middle-aged woman who looked utterly inoffensive and unassuming, but Blaise still flinched to think that they were attracting attention. This was part of why he didn’t tend to talk very much once everybody got here for these meetings.

            “I liked, well, what they did with the bad guys, obviously,” said Nasara, “and I liked the delivery of some of the famous lines. ‘We’re on a mission from God,’” she said in a passable imitation of Dan Aykroyd. “‘I hate Illinois Nazis.’” The middle-aged woman flinched. “Anyway, there definitely were things I liked about it.”

            “I did appreciate this movie’s bold, forthright stance against Nazis from Illinois, yes,” said Euphrosyne.

            “Spoken like someone who’s never been to Illinois,” said Bruce.

            “I’ll ignore that,” said Euphrosyne. “Anyway, what’s next? Want me to crack open Mitchell?”

            Nasara held a finger up. “Hold on,” she said, lightly. “I’m not sure we’re done talking about The Blues Brothers.”

            “Well—no, we’re not done talking about it; I was hoping that we could get the business side of things out of the way now so we could discuss the movie more open-endedly.”

            “I just don’t think it’s a very good idea to crack open Mitchell when that woman is still looking at us,” Nasara murmured under her breath in Euphrosyne’s general direction. She had also noticed that the middle-aged woman had herself gotten the attention of somebody else, a man about Bruce’s age wearing a badge that looked distressingly militant.

            “Ugh, you’re probably right,” said Euphrosyne.

            “Blaise,” said Nasara, “what do you think we should watch next?”

            The first thought that popped into Blaise’s head was the question, which he had entertained before, of whether Nasara might have a crush on him. There were not too many reasons to think that she did, but she did have a tendency of putting him on the spot with things like this much more often than she did any of the others. It might just have been that they were the same age, two years younger than Tatiana and almost a decade younger than Tony, to say nothing of Bruce and Marcus. The second thought that popped into Blaise’s head was that they might have an easier time getting a hold of The Prince of Egypt or something than they had with Raiders of the Lost Ark, although The Prince of Egypt might not fly entirely under the radar the way The Blues Brothers almost had.

            “How do we feel about The Prince of Egypt?” Blaise asked. “Did anybody else see that movie as a kid?”

            “I saw that movie with my kid,” Bruce said. “Good movie. Not sure how I feel about watching a cartoon on my own as a seventy-one-year-old man, though…”

            “Oh, c’mon, we all have to branch out sometime or other,” said Euphrosyne, as Tatiana gave Bruce a playful swat on the shoulder.

            “I have a better idea,” said Tony, and Blaise tried to shoot him a glare but could not get himself so to do. “Why not The Sound of Music?”

            Blaise looked over his shoulder. The suspicious woman had gotten up to go. The man with the badge was still there but was focusing on something in another corner of the premises.

            “It’s a classic,” said Tony.

            “It’s utterly inoffensive,” said Nasara, and Blaise could not tell whether or not she meant this as a good thing (as a matter of fact, she did).

            “It was seen that way for a very, very long time,” said Bruce.

            “Is this another movie you saw when it came out?” Nasara asked.

            Bruce nodded. “I was maybe seventeen or eighteen. I was living in Springfield and it came out in a movie theater that I think has since closed. I went to see it with a girlfriend of mine who said she had a crush on Christopher Plummer.” Neither Nasara nor Blaise wanted to push Bruce on why he seemed to disbelieve in his teenage girlfriend’s crush on Plummer. “Great film. Seen it a couple times since. Once, again, with my kid when she was maybe ten or so. Yeah, I’d be up for giving The Sound of Music a try.”

            “You okay with that, Blaise?” Nasara asked.

            Blaise threw up his hands. “Fine,” he said, “but I would like to pick the next one.” He was not quite sure why he was being truculent about this. Maybe it was the fact that he was not much enjoying this tea. It had something to do with cherries or cherry blossoms but he was having a hard time figuring out what, if anything, he thought it actually tasted like. He drank the rest of his cup down and poured himself another from the little glass pot. He felt like a tool. That woman and that man had really hampered his ability to enjoy this meeting.

            He was just about to suggest somewhere else to meet next time when Tony pulled out his phone and started, bold as Blaise had ever seen him, looking for possible ways to download The Sound of Music. Tony was someone who had a sticker on his laptop with a picture of a young 1950s businessman shouting “Good luck; I’m behind seven proxies!” Tony had had this sticker, or previous identical stickers on previous laptops, since way back in the days when everybody had more or less accepted that this was an absurd thing to boast about.

            “Getting back to The Blues Brothers,” Tatiana said, “I have to say, I hadn’t known much about blues music before this. I assume this is a style of music other than what people talk about when they talk about, like, ‘St. Louis Blues’ or ‘St. James Infirmary.’”

            Euphrosyne nodded. “Yeah, that’s from a way earlier period,” she said.

            “W.C. Handy is considered the father of the blues,” Bruce said. “He died in New York City in 1958. Belushi and Aykroyd were about eight or ten years old at that point.”

            “Did you know that about Handy already or did you have to look it up, Bruce?” Nasara asked while with one hand she rang the bell to call over a waiter for a second pot of chai masala.

            “I looked it up,” said Bruce. “I did a lot of reading about the blues after watching the movie. Wanted to see if I’d learn anything. Learned quite a lot, as a matter of fact.”

            “Have any of us ever played blues music?” Blaise asked. Blaise could sort of play guitar but was much more accustomed and attuned to soft rock and indie fare than to jazz or the blues or the dinosaur rock that he associated with people like Bruce and to a lesser extent with people like Nasara.

            Nobody, it turned out, had played blues music, although it turned out Tatiana and Tony had grown up listening to it because their dad was a pianist who had for a long time been deeply interested in the old New Orleans standards. Later he had become interested in enka music, a sort of Japanese torch song genre, and finally Italian folk music. Tatiana and Tony were holding their cards close to their chest about their father. Blaise suspected that he might have recently succumbed to a heart attack or something along those lines.

            Something in the environment or in the way they were thinking or feeling here was beginning to make both Blaise and Nasara feel pretty deeply upset. Neither of them were quite sure what it is. Both of them were happy to watch The Sound of Music but something about the nature of that movie was making them worry about the situation in which they were actually finding themselves. Blaise guessed that it was because the movie was about the beginning of something rather than the aftermath of something; Nasara guessed that it was because it felt like a mockery of the world and of politics that it did what it did with such a joyous lead and with singing and dancing. Sini and Tat would probably tell her that it was sexist of her to be having this problem with it if she brought it up to them, and she thought that maybe they would be right to tell her so.

            Nasara, who secretly felt pretty bad about the way she dressed and the way she groomed herself, could not help looking at another middle-aged woman who had come in and sat down at the table from which the first middle-aged woman had gotten up. This woman was wearing a big fluffy down overcoat in a beautiful shade of green and, underneath it, a wrap dress with quilted leggings. It was probably easy enough for this woman and her family to find work and get taken seriously, much as it had been easy for Nasara’s parents until a few years ago. She tallied up her own mounting debts to the world in her head. It was hard not to feel a certain nihilism about them. She decided to open up her heart and mind to letting The Sound of Music help her with that.

            Blaise made the same decision because he was thinking more deeply on his own reactions to The Blues Brothers. He had a cousin called Dave who loved this movie, even though Dave wasn’t a particularly bluesy guy himself. Dave was a few years older than Blaise and lived in New York City, where he tended bar and sang in some sort of rap collective. He was somebody whom Blaise loved very much and yet while watching the movie Blaise had not found himself thinking of Dave almost at all. He thought for a little while on why this might be and realized that it was because he had mentally cordoned off Dave into a vision of the world in which things were a little kindlier, even if no easier. His film appreciation friends were not part of a kindly world. He decided to let The Sound of Music make him think of the world as a little kindlier.

            “That scene with Carrie Fisher building the pipe bomb or whatever was such a mood,” Nasara was saying.

            “Be careful who you say that around,” said Euphrosyne.

            “I thought it was more of a mood in Indiana Jones when they first meet Marion,” said Tony.

            “Well, you did used to drink way too much,” said Tatiana. “Glad you’ve cut back on that, by the way.”

            Tony shrugged. “The ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality just isn’t cutting it as much for me as it used to. I’d call it burnout, but I’m actually having the time of my life now that I’m trying not to push myself quite so hard anymore.”

            “Good to hear that,” said Bruce. “I was never much of one for ‘work hard, play hard.’ Could just be that I’m given to understand I’m kind of a boring guy by a lot of people’s standards.”

            “Oh, we don’t consider you boring, Bruce,” said Nasara with an affectionate swat of Bruce’s arm.

            “Well I know you guys don’t. If anything it’s more so people my own age who for a lot of my life thought of me as sort of the sad sack. It played into the way I saw myself for a really long time, but I’m thinking a little more kindly about myself now.”

            “I was actually just thinking about kindliness and living in a kind world,” said Blaise, who hadn’t said anything for a while. “Obviously that’s not the world we’re living in these days, but I still think it’s worth thinking about.”

            “Things we can do to be good to one another are always worth thinking about, I agree with you,” said Bruce. “Boy howdy, now that’s a cliché way for me to put it.”

            “There’s something to be said for clichés,” Nasara said. “Although I guess ‘there’s something to be said for’ is just another cliché.”

            “Let’s talk about how we’re going to find The Sound of Music,” said Euphrosyne. “It should be relatively easy, I assume, compared to some of the other stuff we’ve had to look for. Although I don’t think it’d fly under the radar the way Flesh Feast did, since it’s so much better-known.”

            “Oh God, don’t remind me about Flesh Feast,” said Bruce.

            “Hey, the rest of us liked Flesh Feast,” said Tatiana, “even if it was only ironically. But yeah, I don’t think we’re going to have to do a deep dive through Euphrosyne’s book to find The Sound of Music or movies like it. Whether that’ll make it easier or harder to find I don’t know.”

            “I’m sure I can find a download of it with a VPN or something,” Nasara said.

            “It might fly under the radar also since it’s a kids’ movie,” said Blaise. “Or at least a family movie. Which the other things we’ve been watching really haven’t been.”

            “Not at all, no,” said Nasara.

            “Not to cut this off,” said Tatiana, “but I’m actually getting kinda hungry. Want to order some couscous or something? I can pay as long as we can split the check on the tea itself.”

            “Splitting the check on the tea itself was exactly what I was planning on having us do,” said Nasara, “although since a lot of us are sharing I think we should split it evenly.”

            “Sounds good to me,” said Bruce, and Blaise concurred, and everybody else concurred also.

            “At least we’re not trying to find Mrs. Miniver or Casablanca,” said Nasara, casually and without regards to anything else that was being said. “I’d like to, eventually, but those are going to be really hard to find, these days.”