Nor had he lost his taste for movies. There were times, surely, when his perception of a movie was colored for the worse by his having seen it on a day when he wasn’t in the mood for it. But this didn’t happen that often, because he was usually in the mood for almost any movie. And screenings, whether in a small upstairs room somewhere in midtown or at a huge Broadway theater, were unquestionably the best way to see a film. The print was always perfect, the projectionist always kept his mind on what he was doing, and the audience, while occasionally jaded, was nevertheless respectful, attentive, and silent. Every now and then Paul took a busman’s holiday and paid his way into a movie house, and the difference was astounding. Sometimes he had to change his seat three or four times to escape from imbeciles explaining the story line to their idiot companions; other times, especially at films with an enthusiastic teenage following, the audience seemed to have more dialogue than the actors.
Sometimes he thought that he enjoyed his work so much he’d gladly do it for free. Happily, he didn’t have to. His two columns brought him a living, given that his expenses were low. Two years ago his building went co-op and he’d used his savings for the down payment. The mortgage payment and monthly maintenance charges were quite within his means. He didn’t own a car, had no aged or infirm relatives to support, and had been blissfully spared a taste for cocaine, high-stakes gambling, and the high life. He preferred cheap ethnic restaurants, California zinfandel, safari jackets, and blue jeans. His income supported this sort of lifestyle quite admirably.
And, as the years went by, more opportunities for fame and fortune presented themselves. The New York Times Book Review wanted 750 words from him on a new book on the films of King Vidor. A local cable show had booked him half a dozen times to do capsule reviews, and there was talk of giving him a regular ten-minute slot. Last semester he’d taught a class, “Appreciating the Silent Film,” at the New School for Social Research; this had increased his income by fifteen hundred dollars and he’d slept with two of his students, a thirty-three-year-old restless housewife from Jamaica Heights and a thirty-eight-year-old single mother who lived with her single child in three very small rooms on East Ninth Street.
Now, home again, he shucked his clothes and showered. He dried off and turned down his bed. It was a queen-size platform bed, with storage drawers underneath it and a bookcase headboard, and he made it every morning. During his marriage he and Phyllis generally left the bed unmade, but the day after she moved out he made the bed, and he’d persisted with this discipline ever since. It was, he’d thought, a way to guard against becoming one of those seedy old bachelors you saw in British spy films, shuffling about in slippers and feeding shillings to the gas heater.
He got into bed, settled his head on the pillow, closed his eyes. He thought about the film he’d seen that night, and about the Ethiopian restaurant at which they’d dined afterward. Whenever a country had a famine, some of its citizenry escaped to the United States and opened a restaurant. First the Bangladeshi, now the Ethiopians. Who, he wondered, was next?
He thought about Karin — whose name, he suddenly realized, rhymed with Marin County, north of San Francisco. He’d first encountered Marin County in print and had assumed it was pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, and he had accordingly mispronounced it for some time until Phyllis had taken it upon herself to correct him. He’d had no opportunity to make the same mistake with Karin; he had met her in the flesh, so to speak, before he knew how her name was spelled, and thus—
No, he thought. This wasn’t going to work. What was he trying to prove? Who (or, more grammatically, whom) was he kidding?
He got out of bed. He went to the closet and took the bear down from the top shelf. “Well, what the hell,” he said to the bear. (If you could sleep with a bear, you could scarcely draw the line at talking to it.) “Here we go again, fella,” he said.
He got into bed again and took the bear in his arms. He closed his eyes. He slept.
The whole thing had taken him by surprise. It was not as though he had intentionally set out one day to buy himself a stuffed animal as a nocturnal companion. He supposed there were grown men who did this, and he supposed there was nothing necessarily wrong with their so doing, but that was not what had happened. Not at all.
He had bought the bear for a girl. Sibbie was her name, short for Sybil, and she was a sweet and fresh young thing just a couple of years out of Skidmore, a junior assistant production person at one of the TV nets. She was probably a little young for him, but not that young, and she seemed to like screenings and ethnic restaurants and guys who favored blue jeans and safari jackets.
For a couple of months they’d been seeing each other once or twice a week. Often, but not always, they went to a screening. Sometimes he stayed over at her place just off Gramercy Park. Now and then she stayed over at his place on Bank Street.
It was at her apartment that she’d talked about her stuffed animals. How she’d slept with a whole menagerie of them as a child, and how she’d continued to do so all through high school. How, when she’d gone off to college, her mother had exhorted her to put away childish things. How she had valiantly and selflessly packed up all her beloved plush pets and donated them to some worthy organization that recycled toys to poor children. How she’d held back only one animal, her beloved bear Bartholomew, intending to take him along to Skidmore. But at the last minute she’d been embarrassed (“Embearassed?” Paul wondered) to pack him, afraid of how her roommates might react, and when she got home for Thanksgiving break she discovered that her mother had given the bear away, claiming that she’d thought that was what Sibbie had wanted her to do.
“So I started sleeping with boys,” Sibbie explained. “I thought, ‘All right, bitch, I’ll just show you,’ and I became, well, not promiscuous exactly, but not antimiscuous either.”
“All for want of a bear.”
“Exactly,” she’d said. “So do you see what that makes you? You’re just a big old bear substitute.”
The next day, though, he found himself oddly touched by her story. There was hurt there, for all the brittle patter, and when he passed the Gingerbread House the next afternoon and saw the bear in the window he never even hesitated. It cost more than he would have guessed, and more than he really felt inclined to spend on what was a sort of half-joke, but they took credit cards, and they took his.
The next night they spent together he almost gave her the bear, but he didn’t want the gift to follow that quickly upon their conversation. Better to let her think her story had lingered in his consciousness awhile before he’d acted on it. He’d wait another few days and say something like, “You know, that story you told me, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. What I decided, I decided you need a bear.” And so they’d spent that night in his bed, with only each other for company, while the bear spent the night a few yards away on the closet shelf.