The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Silent Night: Difference between revisions

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 “You have to do it,” he said. “Convince her Paul.”
-I knew that this play, too, had a nude scene and that the theater owner wasn’t just complimenting my hair. He ran his fingers through the long strands and when I tried to step away he gripped my hair in his fist. In his other hand he held a plastic cup of wine and a cigarette. He was an English professor at a nearby university and had started the theater in the early 70s. He made me nervous, the way he stared at me, and held my hair, though I behaved as if he didn’t. I thought he was probably dead now, as were most of the people I knew back then. I smiled at him and sipped from my own plastic cup of wine. He wore a velvet jacket, as threadbare as the red carpet in the theater lobby. Outside, the wind blew white paper napkins in the street. I watched them flutter past the front window, waiting for him to release me.
+I knew that this play, too, had a nude scene and that the theater owner wasn’t just complimenting my hair. He ran his fingers through the long strands and when I tried to step away he gripped my hair in his fist. In his other hand he held a plastic cup of wine and a cigarette. He was an English professor at a nearby university and had started the theater in the early times. He made me nervous, the way he stared at me, and held my hair, though I behaved as if he didn’t. I thought he was probably dead now, as were most of the people I knew back then. I smiled at him and sipped from my own plastic cup of wine. He wore a velvet jacket, as threadbare as the red carpet in the theater lobby. Outside, the wind blew white paper napkins in the street. I watched them flutter past the front window, waiting for him to release me.
 At the Christmas party, Paul steered me with a gentle hand on my bare back to the bar. The room warmed with humming voices—too early for the sharp laughter and raucous singing that I’d imagined. The office men, there with their wives, stood in clusters amidst swags of greens, around table tops balancing festive centerpieces. The room smelled of pine—there was a large glittering Fraser fir in the corner. Cigarette smoke wafted up from the groups, forming clouds above their heads.