Thursday Night Bad Movie Club Ch. 01

Part 1 of 3....

Once a month, for maybe six months now, husband goes over to Johnny’s house for “Thursday night bad movie club.” They are joined by two other women, Miranda and Deedee. It is an odd collection and I am suspicious.

First of all, they call it Thursday night bad movie club but they only meet once a month. Moreover, it’s not always on a Thursday. They watch bad movies on Johnny’s uber-sized flat screen TV entertainment tangle. Johnny is a bachelor which is why he owns these things. Bad movies – like zombie movies and sci-fi horror things – crap movies, dark and foul and cheaply made. My husband Arthur – the snooty intellectual who would spit on a Tom Clancy book and label Mozart a “superficial populist,” – he adores these horrible films. He will take me to any museum or concert or play, but he will not watch any “good” sort of movie, any normal thing that comes to the Cineplex even though I ask him to take me.

I will not watch the ugly movies at Johnny’s house, I think they are vile. But I was initially glad he found a little outlet, a little group to enjoy them with. I was happy for him, but now I am suspicious.

It is not a natural grouping. They all work at the same huge company, at the headquarters. Miranda is a director of engineering. Johnny is a manager of sales. Husband is a director of finance and Deedee is a secretary. Miranda is married; Deedee is divorced. They are in their late thirties or maybe early forties and make very good money, save for Deedee who is maybe early thirties and goes to college in the evenings and weekends. On some projects or events, a couple of them work together, but not very often. Their names are not the usual characters mentioned in Arthur’s everyday post-work harangues.

Once a month he disappears for the evening to the movie “club” (like it’s even a club or something) and comes back after I am in bed and almost asleep. He comes back happy but not drunk, which is strange because he is usually only happy when drunk. He offers to tell me what nasty little movies they watched but I refuse to hear, leave the room when he gleefully begins to report on the BRAINSUCKING THING or the NAKED DECAPITATED GIRL or god knows what.

It is never more than once a month that they meet.

Even though I made I clear I wanted nothing to do with the Thursday night bad movie club I feel hurt that he does not invite me, even though I have insisted that he not ever invite me or tell me about it. I am his wife after all; this is how we feel things.

I am getting pissed at Miranda. We are friends, nothing to do with the big company. We met shortly after we moved here and Miranda and I hang out now and then, do volunteer work sometimes and several times a year we go to the city and shop at the expensive stores downtown and eat Mid-eastern food in curious little holes in the wall, stuff that cannot be found here in our quiet bland white suburb.

The last time we were out in the city, plopping down sacks full of clothes and doo-dads at a retro sushi bar full of shiny diner décor and old Japanese movie posters, I asked about the Thursday night bad movie club and she just shrugged. She said they sat around, ate popcorn and drank some beer and yelled shit at the screen, cheered for the zombies and the mutants and the aliens, booed at the “heroes.” That was all, nothing more.

Oooh – I am SO suspicious! I know they are up to something. And that means they are up to something naughty I just know it. There is no reason for a group of people like that to hang out together watching stupid crappy movies unless there is trouble brewing.

******

When Miranda and I go out together we are like Laurel and Hardy. I am little and short and round. Short but big round on top, big round on the bottom, but not bad in the middle. I have black black hair and a streak of blaze just like Veronica (like from Archie and Betty and Jughead). I am all circles, straight up to my round moon face. My big fat streak of blaze and my boobs are my best parts. Blaze is genetic you know. It can be faked but mine is real.

Miranda is tall for a girl, maybe six foot and she is slender and moves like a flamingo – all straight flowing lines and grace and she walks and moves her arms languid and smooth. She is topped with a thick black ball of hair, black as mine, but unruly and comical.

Like Laurel and Hardy, the two of us.

I love her like a girlfriend but she is painfully vague about the Thursday night bad movie club which makes me so suspicious like a wife should be. When a girl isn’t beautiful, and I am not, we are suspicious of all women who aren’t horribly ugly and stupid.

******

I am thirty eight now and have dirty thoughts all the time. Even more than when I was a teenager. Arthur and I play hard in bed. We have done crazy shit, stuff with other people, with strangers. “Wendy and the Ritz” is an example, and it was true – as far as I remember. What was getting me pissed about the movie club wasn’t so much that Arthur was up to something; it was that I wasn’t included. I am an extroverted girl – I hate not being included.

******

I overheard my husband once at a dinner party, talking to some Belgians. He said, laughing, that “talkative girls put out.”

I am a talkative girl.

******

On a Friday night in August, a night before the meeting of the (non sequitur) Thursday night bad movie club – that’s when I threw my fit. I had asked for details all week on the movie club – what they did, what they were going to watch, was Johnny trying to get in Deedee’s skirt, all that. And Arthur was just so goddamn non-responsive, except for this little smile, this little self-congratulatory smile he gets sometimes.

“I want to see this stupid movie club thing!” I was sniping.

“You won’t like it.”

“I don’t care I just want to go I want to see it!” I said, higher pitched, I could feel my own cheeks getting flush red and hated that I was losing my temper.

“Baby, it’s like a club, you’re not really…..” he paused, looking right at me, “invited…..you know.”

That just did it. I did the whole girl thing – slammed kitchen cabinet doors, slammed my iced tea down on the counter and started – god I’m embarrassed to say it – but I started bawling, my attempt to scream at him modulating upward, losing force and rolling into a soft squeal…..a choked breath…..and then downward into great heaving sobs, shaking my knees, bent over the counter.

His arms warm around me, trying to comfort me while I am accusing him of horrible things, of not loving me, of not caring about me, while he tries to hold me and I am sobbing into the crook of him arm, losing myself in pity and imagined fears of abandonment and destitution while he tries to hold tighter to me with love and then I am out of breath and fire now, embarrassed and wordless.

******

He holds me still and now I am steady and the tears are drying and itchy on my cheeks. We are in the kitchen and everything is so silent I can hear the low hum of the ceiling fan in the bedroom upstairs.

“Okay,” he whispers to me, his mouth at the back of my neck, over and over “okay, okay,” his pace slowing, slowing to the tempo my own heart beat. “Okay.” His hand through my hair. A pause.

And he loosens his grip around me, and I am breathing normally again, his words behind me, in a convivial tone. “Maxine, would you like to go to the Thursday night bad movie club with me tomorrow?”

“Yes.” I whisper back, demure and helpless like a hurt helpless wife.

“Okay, Trixie.”

******

Ooops. Trixie. That’s a trigger word for us. A word that changes everything.

For better or worse, he says “Trixie.”

******

I don’t know how we got there; don’t really know how the word came to be, because we have been married a long time. But Trixie is a naughty word. A dirty word. Trixie, Trixie. Does he really mean “tricksy” when he says it? (Like as in “Hobbits is tricksy” says the little frog man in that movie). It is an action word, a code word. It is like hypnosis. He does not use that word often, and I know that its scarcity is what has kept it powerful. When my husband calls for Trixie something happens.

Something thrilling.

I get to be a different girl.

******

“Okay, Trixie, we’ll go to the movie club together tomorrow. You’re not a member; you’ll need to be initiated.”

Mother fucker, my knees are trembling when he whispers this in his controlled voice, reminding me with tone alone who is really in control of everything when he wants to be.

“Tomorrow Trixie sees the movie club. The Thursday night bad movie club.” He says it in that voice – that goddamn calm serene voice, full of wit and menace. This voice that his business associates here all the time which is why they dread crossing him. I just hate that with that word (Trixie Trixie Trixie) and that voice that he can get me like this. It lands like those little candies that explode on your tongue all screaming with sour and then mellow and melt quietly. Wet and hot and – yet again after fifteen years – bothered and scared and hot and jealous and nervous. Thrilling. To teeter on the edge of the sub space again.

He is not usually an evasive controlling prick. But when he is I find him sexier and that’s just so wrong and but true true true!

******

Cool and distant now. He goes up to bed early even though I want him now, want his arms around me, on top of me. I’ve hugged on him and brought him warm bread and Gouda and a scotch but nothing back from him except that Dom smile and a pat on the head. Shit! Pisses me off that I am all of a sudden trying to get his attention like a little kitty, which is exactly how he pats my head.

He leaves me to go to sleep even though I am wide awake and – this is so stupid so stupid so stupid for me to admit it – I start surfing the internet for porn. I am thirty eight and a good hot wife stuck in a big city suburb in a nice house and it’s 1:30 AM now and I am still going between writing this all down and surfing porn on the net, with one hand on the mouse and the other pulling my panties up into my pussy and pushing hard onto my clit. It’s stupid but it’s true and I will write it all down because I tell the truth.

I feel so dirty and dumb looking at porno which is fine sometimes. It’s what Trixie is; dirty and stupid, pulling up her underpants into a hard wedge into my pussy and rocking back and forth against it. But I am also relieved and self-righteous now. There has been something going on, you know, something naughty at the Thursday night bad movie club. Knew it all along, or at least for awhile now.

Sometimes I look at lesbian porno.

Like right now.

I have to go.

******