Read Online Last Night at the Circle Cinema by Emily Franklin - Free Book Online Page B

like we had rules around Bob,” I told her. “I mean ... I don’t even know how it got as big as it did.”
    â€œI’m only getting every other word you’re saying. Where are you?” Olivia’s voice crackled. I went to answer but before I could she added, “Well, even if we have no idea where he is now, at least Bob’s seen the world.”

12
    Bertucci
    It was just too easy to accept everything at face value, the songs someone put on a mix, say, or the fact that certain teachers always called on the same students, or that people used words without thinking. But I read lots of social theory, Erving Goffman, people like that who basically said that everything anyone does or says has a meaning, has a context. There’s a reason why you do and say and wear what you do.
    In fact, I’d told Livvy when she’d taken me to pick out my mother’s casket, the choices we made said more than we even knew.
    â€œIf I pick a plain one, people interpret that, right? And if I choose the Millennium Gold, that connotes something else.”
    â€œThat your mother was a Disco Queen?” Livvy asked, knowing me well enough to know that humor was entirely acceptable to me at Parchman’s Funeral Home but not enough to know that the Millennium Gold was actually what I’d end up choosing because it had interlocking handles and reminded me of the Millennium Falcon.
    The point was that Goffman was onto something. “You’re always the performer, but you’re also always the audience, watching everything unfold in front of you,” I told her. By then the funeral director had come in, and my right leg was shaking and I knew I was talking too fast and sort of fondling the coffins, but I thought Livvy understood.
    â€œI don’t know how you’re coping,” she whispered as I signed forms and wrote my dad’s name on the check I’d taken from his desk.
    â€œI’m not,” I told her, and I meant those words, but she wanted to see the me that she had created and that I guess I’d helped piece together: a guy who could call to have his mom’s body collected, who could remove the wedding band from her left hand and tuck it away because he knew his mom wanted him to give it to someone one day.
    Outside the funeral home, we sat in the car just like we were driving but we didn’t go anywhere for a while. Livvy had to go to dinner at her parents’ club and used the back seat as her changing room. It was my job to keep my eyes averted, and it was a position I found impossible to fulfill. My leg kept bouncing, my limbs moving like they had motors in them, springs and wires.
    â€œI’m not sure Codman appreciates you,” I said, looking at her by way of the rearview mirror.
    â€œAnd other non sequiturs,” she said, slipping her arms into a top of some kind, one of the ones she wore layered with others of its kind. She came over the gear to crumple herself into the front seat. “What does that even mean?”
    I shook my head and started the engine. “What it means is that the person named Codman who we know to be Codman isn’t capable of loving you. You being the you that you show him. Possibly he could love the you that you portray to me.”
    Livvy tapped me on the shoulder, so I turned and we looked at each other face to face. “Is it possible that you need meds and that you’re grieving and potentially reading too much complicated sociology texts? I mean, in addition to Codman’s issues and whatever I divulge to you or to him. Isn’t it also possible that Codman is more than he appears to be?”
    I looked in the mirror at my eyes and also the traffic behind me. “All of those things are possible, yes.”
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    Leave it to Codman to overlook the obvious signs in the Circle’s art gallery, never once noticing that two feet from where he was standing, there hung a