"Red flannel. One o'clock...That dude's a boxer. See him?" He leaned to his left toward his friend and covertly pointed at the seats in front of the stage.
"Oh, totally." His friend mimed bumping into the "boxer" accidentally. "'We got a problem, bud?!' No, sir, I'm terribly sorry sir!"
"Ha! Yeah, immediate fetal position. No thanks."
A beat of silence passed, and then he noticed a couple settling into their seats a few rows up.
“Oh, look at those two,” he chirps. “A match made in heaven...wait, they got wristbands, what are those for?"
"Hmm. For the alcohol, maybe? Did Charlotte get one?" asked his friend.
"No, and she got...wait...what did you order, baby?" He turned to his right and gently patted his wife's arm to get her attention.
"White wine," Charlotte replied. "I was going to get red but they only had Merlot so I got the white."
"White wine," he said, turning back to his friend. "Sweet sippy cup, though."
Unfamiliar hip-hop music continued to play in the background as more people filed in.
"Her man's having trouble with his band," he said, nodding his head forward.
They both look back at the couple to witness the large man struggling to affix his $0.07 Tyvek wristband in a way that won't tear out a patch of arm hair when he removed it after the show.
"Help out your boy," said his friend, telepathically encouraging the man's girlfriend to intervene.
"There she goes. She finally noticed," he said. "It's a good thing the show is here and not at the Miller."
"Why is that?" His friend asked.
"We went to a show there a few months ago. That theater has tiny seats. I'm not sure that guy would fit. We barely fit. Were people smaller a hundred years ago?"
"Is that how old it is?"
"I think so. Let's look it up." He squirmed sideways in his seat to retrieve the phone in his pocket. The velvet on the fancy theater seat grabbed his jeans in a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to produce a wedgie.
"Welp, there goes that theory."
"No good?"
"Well, I was right about the Miller, but I assumed this theater was newer because the seats are big and plush. Turns out it opened in 1857, like sixty years before."
He put his phone away and the people watching continued.
"I better hit the head before the show starts," said his friend.
Charlotte looked up from her phone. "Where's he going?"
"Bathroom," he replied.
"Oh, tell him to hang on, I'll go with."
She turned to store her sippy cup between their seats, then stood up and draped her coat over the number 14 stamped on hers. With everyone in the row already standing to make room for her husband's friend, she negotiated the narrow path to the aisle with haste and joined him.
Now alone, the husband let his mind wander as he observed the array of people nearby.
"These are all city people," he thought.
He recalled his college days when he lived here for seven years. Looking back, seven years was a long time, especially since he never considered himself a city person. But he left almost twenty years ago when he got a phone call about a job offer. He was working in retail. Sporting goods. He got a job there while attending art school and stuck around after graduation. This was not the plan. The plan was to get a job in his field. The field that was listed on his BFA degree...the BFA degree that took him six years to get at a four-year school. No, selling overpriced sporting goods was not the plan.
On his lunch breaks, he used to walk around the corner to get a slice of buffalo chicken pizza. They sprinkled it with bleu cheese and though it was too expensive and extremely unhealthy, he couldn't resist. Its deliciousness suppressed the feelings of not being as far along in life as he should be.
One day on the walk back from lunch, his phone rang. On the other end was his best friend and former roommate who moved down south when they graduated. His friend landed a job as an art director right out of school, and he was definitely not at all steaming with jealousy over it. But his envy extended only to his friend's career and not his geography. He would never want to live that far south.
After the consummate exchange of pleasantries, the true purpose for the call emerged: A way out of limbo. An opportunity. Though not in his field of study, the job was at least in the neighborhood of doing something creative for a living, which was the whole point of going to art school. His friend's company had an opening, but there was a catch.
"Would you be willing to move down south?"
For a moment, he clammed up. The South. But then he remembered all the time he spent working on ideas for his portfolio on the bus rides to work. He remembered the time spent at his apartment, night after night, chipping away at his inexperience, trying to prepare, however blindly, for the day when a phone call came. But everyone knows those phone calls never come. Big breaks are a myth. Yet somehow, here he was, on the other end of one. This was it.
His "never" about the South instantly evaporated.
"Absolutely," he said. "What do I need to do?"
"Move...baby, move!" Urged Charlotte, wrenching him out of the scene from his memory.
"Oh, sorry," he said. He rose from his seat to let her pass. "All good?"
"Yup," said Charlotte as she sat back down and retrieved her beverage from the floor. "Did you miss us?"
"Surely," he said. "I was just thinking about how if I never moved out of the city, we never would have met."
She took his hand and pulled it toward her cheek, giving it a peck before letting go.
"I got a text from the kids, I'm going to reply, ok?" she said, and took her phone back out.
His mind darted around for a moment, then floated to the improbability of his circumstances. He thought about being back in the city, now eighteen years older. He thought about moving back up north after all these years, and about Charlotte. He thought about that phone call. What if he didn't answer? What if he decided not to leave? What if he never left?
He looked around. He would be one of those city people, he thought. He would walk to the theater instead of driving in. And instead of Charlotte, he would be married to one of those strangers. And they wouldn't be nearly as good.
Nothing would.