Home Theater

by Paul Vidich

Click to listen to Paul Vidich read "Home Theater."

1.

Tess and I clung to the conceit that we were different. Different because we
were artists, because we'd fallen in love on our first date in a bar in the West
Village, because we weren't like the affable, wealthier couples who moved onto the
Bowery now that the neighborhood was going condo. We pioneered Bowery living after
college when we were happily poor and didn't mind stepping over homeless drunks
who slept in the building's vestibule. We bought used clothes at the Goodwill on
Spring Street and turned poverty's necessity into deliberate fashion. I don't
remember why we didn't get a TV. Certainly, Tess wanted one. Certainly, I argued
we had no money. I'm sure I said that a TV would change our lives in unexpected
ways, and we'd no longer go to revival houses to see old Hollywood movies.
Undoubtedly, I was uncomfortable giving up something that set us apart, made us
unique, that kept us different.
Tess looked at the humongous wood crate that sat in the middle of our loft.
The crate was wide and long like a coffin. It was bathed in dusky light that came
in the unwashed, arched windows of the cavernous space. I enjoyed her stunned look
of surprise, took pleasure in theatrically lifting the cover to show off the giant
flat screen TV inside, and I waited for her to smile in gratitude. She turned to
me with hostility that was a new part of our marriage.
"Why do you assume I want to watch television with you."
She couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the magnitude of my sacrifice. I had
humbled myself to get her back. I had taken over her daily chores: I walked our
incontinent dog, Dante, folded clothes from the dryer, squared magazines on the
coffee table to bring order to our clutter, turned off lights when I went from one
room to the next, as Tess had learned to do from her mother. These small gestures,
and now the TV, were my campaign to end her talk of separation. Other couples
separated. We were different.
"How much did it cost?" Tess asked.
"Two thousand dollars," I said.
"How are you paying for that?" she asked. "Auction another poem on ebay for
twelve cents. Or maybe you've saved money because you're not seeing her."
I started to unpack the crate. I didn't want to jeopardize the moment by
defending against her sarcasm. "I'll pay for it," I said. "It's my gift to you."
"And you'll get rid of the garbage when it's unpacked?" she said. "All of it.
The wood, the cardboard, the Styrofoam. Everything?"
"Yes."

2.

The TV was a spectacular piece of technology that drew my eye in the

electronics store. Brushed stainless steel framed a 4:3 aspect ratio black glass
panel. I bought a Sony liquid crystal display rather than Pioneer's plasma
technology because the patient salesman at J&R made a good case for the Sony, but
I only had a vague clue how they worked and why one was better than the other. The
salesman helped me pick out a DVD player and surround sound components and he
informed me that I'd have to subscribe to cable if I wanted to watch real
television. I nodded that I knew that but, of course, I hadn't considered the
extra expense.
The man from Time Warner cable arrived promptly at three p.m. and helped me
install the TV on the exposed brick wall opposite our bed. He was talkative, full
of unwanted bonhomie but never asked how we'd lived without a TV for so long. He
found cable lines deep inside the building core, which he tapped and then ran the
spliced connection to the converter box he put in our bedroom. The whole job took
two hours.
"How do you turn it on and off?" I asked looking at the foot long remote that
reminded me of a baguette with controls. The array of unlabeled, colored buttons
intimidated me. What could they all possibly do? The man demonstrated the basics:
on, off, volume up and down, channel control. What more did we need? What else was
there? He tested the set before he left, adjusting the volume, scrolling up and
down among the channels, tweaking the contrast. I tipped him twenty bucks because
he helped me hang the TV.
I was penitent that night when I climbed into bed in my underwear next to
Tess, who wore a cinched bathrobe over her pajamas. I'd made buttered popcorn for
us, as she requested, and I'd walked Dante one last time before we inaugurated the
home theater system.
"What do you want to watch?" I asked.
"I'm looking," she said. She glanced at the movie retrospectives that the
Times' TV guide listed for Bravo, AMC and Turner Classic Movies. She was a fan of
Rex Harrison and Clarke Gable, two stars being showcased that night. She had
forgotten the titles of Harrison's lesser known films: "Unfaithfully Yours," "The
Honey Pot," "The Rake's Progress." When she was reminded she picked Clarke Gable,
but she had the same uncomfortable reaction to Bravo's offering of "It Happened
One Night." She decided she needed a good war movie to take her mind off my
affair. She'd confronted me when she found the evidence: a credit card charge at
Freeman's on a night I was supposed to be at a poetry reading in Hartford.
I pressed the red button on the baguette – renaming common objects was my
verbal tic. The black screen incandesced in a riot of color. Three war-painted
Apache on horse back watched a trail of dust thrown up by a tiny stage coach
traveling across a vast desert landscape. Click. German panzer corps goose-stepped
past saluting Nazi generals standing on a Reichstag balcony. Click. An unruly
Paris mob threw fruit at a humbled aristocrat tied to a gurney below the
guillotine's raised blade--
"How about a comedy?" Tess asked.
I surfed channels stopping long enough to get the point of the show, and then
moved on, going from one to the next to the next. I was startled by the variety of
entertainment, which of course, I'd heard about but it was one thing to live with
the abstract idea of television and another to have one in your bedroom. I
imagined medieval reliquaries that consoled souls with bone fragments and
desiccated fingers. Here was the secular equivalent, a reliquary of dreams for
people whose small lives needed distraction or hope. I jotted down this half-baked
thought so I could explore it later. I collected phrases and thoughts for later
use. That's how I started poems. Bits came out of nowhere: baguette, tic,
reliquary.
"Stop writing," Tess said. "Something happened to the TV."
I saw that the screen was a field of snow. There was no image whatsoever.
Grating static came through the five surround speakers.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"Nothing."
"It didn't do it by itself. What button did you push?"
Had I touched a button, I wondered? There were so many buttons. I might have
accidentally touched one button when I put down the controller, but which one, and
what would happen if I started to randomly touch buttons to fix the problem? I
stared at the sleek piece of confusing technology, intimidated and paralyzed.
"What did you do?" Tess asked.
"Nothing!"
"You must have done something," she said. "It's better now."
I looked from the baguette to the flat screen on the wall. The screen was
split into a small picture-in-picture embedded in the larger image. The smaller
image was in the lower right corner and it was tuned to a food channel. A lean
Japanese chef demonstrated sushi cutting techniques with a cleaver. The larger
picture showed a loft living room not unlike the living rooms in our building, and
a middle-aged woman watched the chef instruct. She wore a chef's hat, like he did;
she held a cleaver exactly as he did. She followed his instructions, chopping when
he chopped, slicing when he sliced, looking from the screen to the cleaver in her
hand, back and forth, trying and failing, grimacing at each mistake.
"She's wearing a Wallis dress," Tess said.
"How can you tell?"
"I can tell. It's asymmetrical." Tess sat straight up in bed like a
puppeteer's hand had pulled her forward. "That's what's-her-name!"
"Who?"
"The woman in Apt. 4B. Of course that's her. I recognize the tortoise shell
glasses."
I stared. It was our neighbor, the novelist, in her living room. Her
Pomeranian was on the floor by her feet.
Tess put her hand over her mouth to hold in her laugher. She grabbed my arm to
share her glee and for one moment she forgot that I was the enemy. We shared an
intimate moment until the novelty wore off. I suggested there must be a crossed
wire and I said I'd call the cable company. I changed the channel and another
apartment came on screen. I recognized the hedge fund manager from Apt. 5A and his
younger wife. They were naked on their sofa watching TV. The picture-in-picture
was tuned to a porn channel. They smoked cigarettes and casually watched the x-
rated show.
"Happily married couple," Tess said. "You could learn from him."
I changed the channel and we found Apt. 4A, which belonged to the husband and
wife lawyer couple. Their TV was on but they talked separately on their cell
phones. Our TV screen moved through the building floor by floor, apartment by
apartment, peering into the lives of our neighbors. We didn't know most of them
except to say 'hello' in the lobby, but we now found ourselves looking into
private lives, catching them in moments so personal they'd be mortified to know we
were watching. The single twenty-something actress in Apt. 2B let her cat lick her
nipple. The elderly art critic in Apt. 2A ate sardines from a tin with his
fingers. The newly separated, middle-aged Japanese woman in Apt. 3A chain smoked
in her underwear.

3.

Tess and I sat in bed the next morning with our coffee as we did each morning
since everything came to light. We used that quiet time to talk. I got up first,
walked Dante, and brewed the coffee that I served Tess, who sat against the
headboard and received my offering. We talked about little things, inconsequential
details and sometimes we sat and said nothing. Silence, too, is a way of
communicating. On good days we listened patiently to each other's dreams in
exchange for the pleasure of recounting our own. On not-so-good days she cried, or
used words as an ice pick. That morning we stared at the flat screen TV on the
wall opposite the foot of the bed and speculated on the gremlins nested inside.
Tess and I left our apartment at 8:30 a.m. and got on the elevator. The
elevator stopped on the fifth floor and the hedge fund manager and his wife got
on. They nodded shyly to acknowledge us but kept to their side of the cab and
stared blankly at the elevator panel. She wore dark glasses, her combed hair was
wet and fell straight and I saw a large red welt on her neck. A fight? Rough sex?
Tess nudged me to stop staring. I realized that we all live with a presumption of
privacy. We believe what happens in our homes stays in our homes. Each of us
carries secrets that no one, not even our spouses, knows. I had an anxious moment.
I wanted to write down these thoughts before they were lost, but I didn't have a
notepad.
"Going on holiday?" Tess asked. The hedge fund manager's wife held a roll-on
Versace luggage bag.
"No," the hedge fund manager said. "I wish. Helen has a five day business trip
to Dallas. I'm alone. Chinese take-out the rest of the week."
Our neighbors got on the elevator at each floor and the new person took his or
her place among those already standing together. I looked at them and could not
expunge the images from the night before. I saw their grim morning faces and I
thought: novelist cleaving sausage, excited naked couple, oily fingers, erect
nipple, cigarette stubs overflowing an ash tray.

4.

"What's the problem?" I asked the cable repairman.

"It's working fine," he said. "There aren't any crossed wires." He randomly
accessed channels and demonstrated the fitness of the blinking cable box. I hadn't
told him exactly what happened. I didn't want him to think we were voyeurs, or
took pleasure in seeing our neighbors private lives, so I explained we discovered
channels not listed in the guide and couldn't access regular channels. He said
he'd never heard of neighbor's broadcasts, my eponymous phrase. He assured me the
glitch had nothing to do with Youtube or video blogging. We had plain old digital
television, he said. There were no wireless interference, no surreptitious
splices, no tapped lines, no surveillance traps. He assured me, as he left, that
the cable box was in perfect working order. I tipped him twenty bucks.

5.

"There it is again," Tess said.

We sat in bed in our pajamas. I was in the middle and she hugged her edge.
We'd just settled in to watch "A Bridge Too Far." Allied parachutists were raining
down behind German lines when snow filled the flat panel screen and the triumphant
score was replaced by static.
"Shit," I said.
I lifted the controller and moved it ninety degrees in case its wireless
alignment had something to do with the problem. It didn't. I shook it in case
there was a lose wire, or lose battery connection or just because I didn't know
what else to do. Nothing happened. The screen was snow and the sound was static.
The movie was going on without us. We'd looked forward to the seeing it all day.
"Oh, my God," Tess said.
I looked from the controller to Tess and then at the TV image. The screen had
tuned itself to the living room in Apt. 5B. The picture-in-picture was tuned to a
talking head report on the financial markets. The hedge fund manager sat on his
sofa kissing an average looking woman who was not his wife. She unbuttoned her
blouse and he undid his belt.
"Don't say anything," Tess said. "You have no standing here. Do all men
cheat?"
We sat next to each other like magnets, same pole, pushed apart.
"Change the channel," she said.
The TV screen scrolled through our neighbor's living rooms. I tried to turn
off the TV with the remote control but it didn't respond. It was broken, or it had
acquired a mind of its own. Domestic tableaus of our neighbor's living rooms
cycled past. The novelist in Apt. 4B practiced her cleaver technique on tomatoes,
cabbage, zucchini, pumpkin, garlic and a skinned rabbit. The lawyers in Apt. 2A
threatened each other with words provided by remote accomplices dictating via cell
phone. The lonely Japanese diplomat's wife sat on a tatami mat in her empty living
room looking at, but not answering, her ringing telephone. Finally, I unplugged
the TV.

6.
 The cable repairman listened patiently to my harangue. He assured me that this
time he had most definitely fixed the problem, although he couldn't recreate it.
He said he'd exchanged the cable box, replaced the conduit from the curb to the
building core and then to our apartment, and he'd tested all the connections. The
signal at the street was normal, normal in the core, normal as it entered our
converter box. I interrogated him. I asked if he'd tested the line for phase
anomaly and radio interference and drop out, and was the signal secure against
WiMAX interdiction. I didn't want him to think that I'd be satisfied by his false
reassurances so I'd done research. I made the repairman go through every channel
and when they all seemed normal I felt some measure of safety. I asked him if the
TV might have a virus, like a computer. He shrugged. I didn't tip him.
I arrived home from a poetry reading at KGB bar that evening at 9 p.m. A
winter storm, which the radio had predicted would come after dark, had already
become to blanket the streets. Snow fell steadily. I shook my hat when I got
inside our loft's front door.
"Tess," I called.
I hung my pea coat on the clothes stand where I saw Tess's Edwardian wool
coat. She'd also been out that night, somewhere she said vaguely, purposely
avoiding my question.
"Tess." She wasn't in the dark living room or in the kitchen where a shaded
halogen lamp glowed small. The loft was quiet.
"Denis," she cried. She thrust her head out our bedroom door, stared at me
with wide, frightened eyes. Her face was blanched. "Call 911. The woman in 4B is
attacking her husband. Hurry, for God's sake, hurry."
I tried to remember who lived in Apt. 4B, two floors down, west side. My first
thought was the hedge fund manager's wife but they lived on the fifth floor. It
wasn't the separated Japanese woman. She lived on the third floor, east side.
"It started half an hour ago with an argument over money and adultery," Tess
said. "She's picked up the cleaver."
The novelist, I thought. I joined Tess in the bedroom and watched the domestic
dispute unfold on our flat panel TV. The novelist and her husband stood opposite
each other across the dining room table, which was laid with rice bowls and chop
sticks. She held the cleaver over her head. She was a big woman but dressed well
in a full sequin gown for which the cleaver was a jarring accessory. She screamed
at his quiet responses, and when he demurred she sliced the air in his direction.
The Pomeranian yapped off screen and drowned out the soundtrack of the Soprano's
episode that played in the picture-in-picture. He ducked when she threw a rice
bowl.
I diverted my attention to dial 911 on my cell phone. "Yes," I said to the
operator. "It's a domestic dispute." I spoke slowly, enunciating each word, and
described what I saw. The husband pointed his finger at the novelist to make a
point and she whipped the cleaver toward him, nearly taking off its tip. "She has
a knife," I said. "She's dangerous."
Later, after the police had come and gone, after the neighbors had assembled
and retired, after the couple dissembled publicly about their misunderstanding and
returned to their loft to continued their quarrel – quietly – in private, after
questions about who'd called 911 were asked and not answered, it was then that the
building returned to normal. Later still, Tess and were alone in our loft. I'd
unplugged the TV. We sat on the edge of the bed stunned by the evening's events.
Neither of us spoke.
Tess slapped me.
I absorbed the anger from her hand and I did not touch my hot cheek, or grit
my teeth or give into the insult.
"We're not like them. We're not the average couple that breaks up after one
has had an affair. Isn't that right? Tell me that's right."
"That's right," I said.
"Why did you do it? How could you sleep with another woman? I can't think
about you in bed with another someone else. It's sick. How can we ever be close?
Look what you've done to us."
"I know. I'm sorry," I said.
"You made us into those horrible people downstairs. Isn't that right?"
"We're not like them."
"We're different." She looked at me with red eyes. "Tell me we're different."
Her head slumped to her chest and she was wracked with great spasms of self-
pity. I wanted to lay my hand on her shoulder but I knew she didn't want my cheap
sympathy. A moment passed, and another, and another and the darkness in which we
sat folded upon us timelessly. She didn't move but rest is motion also.
"I slept with a man," she said.
I waited for her to continue. "Who?" I asked.
"We met in a bar."
"What does he look like?"
She glared at me. "Why do you want to know?"
"It's what you asked me."
"Twenty-three. Dark hair. Australian. He's gone home."
I'd found the phone messages that she'd obsessively torn into unreadable
scraps so I knew she'd been hiding something. I didn't think she'd take a lover to
cancel mine. I stopped myself from digging for more details, as Tess had dug into
me, because I knew that nothing came from knowing more except the desire to know
more. I stopped. It had to stop.
Tess choked with sobs and was overcome with emotion. I put my arm on her
shoulder and she lay her head on my lap. I gently brushed her hair. The inventory
of our life filled the bedroom. Each object held a meaning that only we
understood; found pennies, old photographs, little stones upon which we made
earnest wishes. It's so easy to mock sentiment in a world that rewards cynics and
favors the glib and glamorous. I saw us reflected in the TV's black glass on the
wall in front of us.
"Do you think the neighbors can see you?" Tess asked. "I don't want them to
see us like this."
"I don't think they can see us."
"How can you be sure?" she said. "Get rid of it."
"Monday at the store," I said. "With a refund."
"No," she said. "Tonight. On the street."
I rolled the giant TV on a dolly through our lobby to the sidewalk. Two young
men were at the curb looking at the DVD player and surround speakers I'd left on
my first trip down. They wore frayed hoodies under biker jackets and ignored the
steady falling snow. I'd placed the components beside the curb's bagged garbage
but they'd set them aside.
"Does it work?" the taller one asked nodding at the TV I unloaded.
"Perfectly."
"What's wrong with it?"
"It tunes in the neighbors," I said.
He didn't look at me as I thought he would, as someone doubting a lie, or
enjoying a joke. He looked at me with a hint of astonishment. "Cool!"
He and his friend hauled their find to an old van parked at the curb. They
pulled away into the snowy street to continue their prowl for discarded things.
Before the night was done the snow would turn to rain and back again to snow.
I took out my address book and opened the page with her name. I had a strategy
to keep her secret. Her name and phone number were listed alphabetically among my
friends and colleagues. The best way to keep a secret is to make it look
unimportant so it draws no attention. I ripped the page from the book. Secrets
take energy. Secrets take over. I balled the page and hurled it into the stormy
night. A wind gust lifted the crumbled paper, swirled it among the camouflaging
snowflakes, and then it was gone.

7.
 I came upstairs. Tess was asleep.
I looked affectionately at her on the bed where she'd flung herself. She was
in her clothes and wore her shoes. She hadn't bothered to cover herself with the
comforter, and she lay as she had fallen, arms to each side, cheek pressed to the
pillow. Her shapeless hair splayed behind her head, her face quiet, her breath
shallow. She was fast asleep, beyond dreams. I saw in her face the young woman I'd
fallen in love with years before who, for reasons I didn't fully understand, I'd
felt a need to hurt. Why do we hurt those closest to us? I lifted the comforter
from the bottom of the bed and gently covered her.
Perhaps she had not told me the whole truth. Could I believe that she'd met a
young Australian, seen him twice and that his convenient return home was the end
of the matter? Had she balanced the scales of betrayal with a pair of fucks and
now I should believe we were similarly situated? Oh, what tangled emotions welled
up in me. I wanted to know what she'd seen in him, how I compared. I knew these
questions were the same questions Tess had for me, and I also knew no progress
could be made if we stayed in the past. We must dream our future and live it too,
or lose it.
I cried. I looked out the window at the cityscape of winking office towers
made small and tentative under the vast night sky. The storm invaded the evening
and dimmed the twinkling apartments. Snow fell steadily and laid a false peace on
the city. I imagined the lives of others in the flickering windows scattered
across my panorama, families and couples sitting in their homes hoarding their
secrets, and I thought to myself: none of them made any difference to Tess and me,
that we were the only two people in the world who mattered, and as for the others,
the neighbors downstairs, the people glued to their TVs, to hell with them.

after Cheever

About the author:

Paul lives in New York City. "Home Theater" was a finalist in the 2008 Glimmer
Train Contest for New Writers and was short listed for the Carve Magazine 2008
Raymond Carver Short Story Award. Paul is receiving his MFA in creative writing
from Rutgers-Newark and has attended the Wesleyan Writers conference. His stories
have appeared previously in Word Riot and a variety of other online print and
journals.

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