The man beside her made a sound that he turned, a little late, into a cough.
"And every video store in Providence is closed or out," Theda finished. "I called the one on Thayer Street, they've never heard of it. I called Elmhurst, they've got Beverly Hills Cop on eleven copies and nothing older than Jaws. My building has been running on extension cords since the hurricane, the landlord's electrician still hasn't come. I was going to watch it at my friend Paula's in Cranston but she just called and said her kid has the chicken pox and the whole house is under quarantine. So I ran here. And I lost my shoe. And this is the only copy of this movie in the state of Rhode Island, as far as I can tell, and he," she turned, "is holding a trajectory on it."
Filomena turned her half-glasses on the man. "And you?"
He took a breath. He seemed, Theda thought, faintly embarrassed, which in a man that size was a sort of charming thing to watch, like a bear trying to fold a napkin.
"I drive a bus," he said.
"That's the whole reason?" said Theda.
"I'm getting there. I drive a bus for RIPTA. The Broad Street line, mostly, sometimes Elmwood. My sister Carmela runs a little theater company on Federal Hill. St. Benedict's Players. In the parish hall at St. Benedict's on Atwells. They do two shows a year, one in the spring that's usually a musical and one in the fall that's usually whatever Carmela can get the rights to cheap. And this fall, Carmela, God bless her, wrote her own stage version of It Happened One Night, because she's seen it nineteen times and she can't afford the rights to anything else, and she's not totally sure she needs the rights to this one, and I've advised her not to tell anybody that."
"I didn't hear it," said Filomena.
"So they've been rehearsing six weeks. And the fellow playing the lead, Peter, the Clark Gable part, is a guy named Donnie Fusco who sells insurance and has a very nice baritone and thinks he looks like Clark Gable, which, he does a little, around the ears. And the Sunday after the hurricane, Donnie got up on a ladder to pull a branch off his garage roof and the ladder went one way and Donnie went the other, and now he's in a cast up to here." He drew a line high on his thigh. "And opening night is Saturday. And I'm the only other guy who knows all the lines."
"Why?" said Theda.
"I've been running lines with Donnie at Carmela's kitchen table every night for six weeks, holding the script, doing the Claudette Colbert part. In a voice." He paused. "Not a good voice. And on Monday Carmela came to the bus garage at the end of my shift, she was waiting for me right there in the lot with her arms crossed, and she said Nicky, you're Peter. And I said Carm, I drive a bus. And she said Peter takes a bus. The whole movie is on a bus. Who knows buses better than you?"
"That's a strong argument," Filomena said.
"That's what I said. I said sure, sure. Which is my problem. Hers is naturally. Mine is sure, sure." He shrugged his big shoulders. "I've never seen the movie. Carmela's seen it nineteen times and she says I'm doing Peter all wrong, I'm doing him too nice, I need to watch Gable. She says the way Gable dunks a doughnut tells you everything about the man. Dress rehearsal is tomorrow night at seven. She told me if I don't come in tomorrow knowing how to dunk a doughnut she's going to give the part to Father Albanese, and Father Albanese is seventy-four. So." He spread his hands. "Need. Not want."
There was a short silence in Fox Point Video. Behind the counter, one of the rewinding machines finished with a loud clunk. Outside, the rain came down on Wickenden Street with renewed purpose. From the back room, faintly, came the sound of a baseball game being lost.
Theda looked at the man. He looked at her. She saw now that the red stitching over his pocket said Nick.