He decided to stay in the dark for the next showing, and tonight it is Victor/Victoria, the 1982 Blake Edwards film that the East Tremont Avenue is showing as part of a monthly series of revivals that no one attends except David and, on occasion, an older couple who sit in the front row and hold hands during the musical numbers, their silhouettes bent toward each other like two halves of a parenthesis that has finally closed. David stays in the chair, as he sometimes does, and stays in the third row from the back, aisle seat, left side, the seat that avoids the flicker of the exit sign, and he settles into the familiar creak of the velvet and waits for the room to fill with the particular darkness that makes everything possible, the darkness that is not an absence but a presence, a substance, a material that coats the skin and softens the edges of the self and allows the image on the screen to become the only thing that matters for the next two hours.

The film begins in 1930s Paris, a city that David has never visited but that he has constructed in his mind from the accumulated evidence of a hundred films, a hundred photographs, a hundred descriptions in novels and memoirs, so that his Paris is not a real place but a composite, a mosaic of other people’s memories arranged into a city that exists only in the dark of a movie theater, a city that is always nighttime, always wet, always lit by the amber glow of street lamps reflecting off cobblestones that have been polished by centuries of rain and footsteps, and David watches Victoria Grant, the broke and hungry soprano played by Julie Andrews, stumble through this Paris with a hunger that is not just physical but existential, the hunger of a person who knows she has something to offer but cannot find the door through which to offer it, and David thinks about how this is the particular cruelty of talent without opportunity, of ability without a stage, of a voice that has nowhere to sing, and he thinks about how he has spent his entire life in a series of rooms that were too small for what he was trying to do, the classroom where his imagination was mistaken for absence, the accounting office where his precision was mistaken for contentment, the studio where his paintings are mistaken for the work of someone who knows what he is doing.

The scheme that Toddy, the aging gay entertainer played by Robert Preston with a warmth that borders on the architectural, proposes to Victoria is simple in its audacity: she will pose as a man, a Polish count named Victor Grazinski, who performs as a female impersonator. The audience will believe they are watching a man pretending to be a woman, when in fact they are watching a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, a structure of layered deception that David finds not confusing but clarifying, because it mirrors the way he has always experienced his own life, the way he has performed competence while feeling incompetent, performed stability while feeling the ground shift beneath him, performed the role of a person who had made deliberate choices when in fact he was standing in the wrong classroom and decided to stay because the numbers balanced, because the answer was knowable, because the alternative was to step back into the hallway and admit that he did not know where he was going.

Victoria succeeds as Victor because the performance is so complete, so convincing, so thoroughly inhabited that the audience cannot see the seams, and David watches her on the screen, watchful and precise in her tuxedo, her jaw set, her movements calibrated to suggest a masculinity that is itself a performance, and he thinks about how all identity is performance, how every morning he puts on the clothes of a teacher and walks into a building and stands before a group of students and performs the role of a person who knows things, a person who has arrived at answers, a person whose life has followed a logical trajectory from point A to point B, and the performance is so practiced now, after years of repetition, that he can do it without thinking, can deliver the lesson and mark the papers and hold the office hours and fill out the forms, and no one in the room suspects that behind his eyes the real work is happening, the same work that happened when he was a child, the invisible construction of worlds that are more vivid and more meaningful than the fluorescent-lit room in which they are being built.

King Marchand, the nightclub owner played by James Garner with a machismo that is itself a kind of costume, falls in love with Victor before he knows that Victor is Victoria, and David watches this with a discomfort that is not moral but personal, because he recognizes the particular quality of King’s confusion, the way desire can precede understanding, the way the heart can commit itself to something before the mind has verified the facts, and David thinks about how he has done this too, how he has loved people and situations and futures that existed only in his imagination, how he has committed himself to visions of a life that bore no relationship to the life he was actually living, and how the commitment felt as real as any fact, as solid as any accounting entry, as verifiable as any number in any column, until the moment when reality reasserted itself and the vision dissolved and he was left standing in the wreckage of something he had built with care but without foundation.

The film’s genius, David thinks, is that it does not ask whether the deception is justified but whether the performance is good, and the answer is always yes, the performance is extraordinary, because Victoria does not merely disguise herself as a man but inhabits the role with a precision and a commitment that transforms the disguise into something else entirely, something that is neither male nor female but a third thing, a thing that exists only on the stage, only in the space between the performer and the audience, only in the dark where the light can do its work of translation, and David thinks about how he has spent his life trying to find that space, that third thing, that place where the accounting and the painting and the daydreaming and the loneliness could coexist without canceling each other out, and how he has never found it, how the space has always been too small, how the room has always been the wrong shape, how the light has always been coming from the wrong direction.

Toddy, who is openly gay in a film made in 1982 and set in a decade when openness was a luxury that could cost you everything, is the character David returns to most often, the one whose scenes he watches with a particular attention that borders on reverence, because Toddy is the only person in the film who does not disguise anything, who does not pretend to be something he is not, who walks into every room as himself, with all the vulnerability and the humor and the loneliness that being yourself requires, and David thinks about how Toddy’s openness is itself a kind of performance, a daily choice to be visible in a world that would prefer him to be invisible, and he thinks about how he has never been able to make that choice, how he has spent his life in the shadows of his own imagination, how he has been brilliant and brave and beautiful in the worlds he constructed behind his closed eyes but has never managed to bring any of that brilliance or bravery or beauty into the light of the actual world, where it might be seen, where it might be judged, where it might fail.

The scene where King finally discovers that Victor is Victoria is played for comedy, the shock and the confusion and the outrage all heightened to the point of absurdity, but David watches it and feels something that is not comic at all, because he recognizes the moment when the performance collapses, the moment when the mask is removed and the person beneath is exposed, and he thinks about how this has happened to him, not in the dramatic way it happens in the film, with the whole audience watching and the lights blazing and the truth delivered like a punch line, but in the quiet, almost imperceptible way it happens in real life, the slow erosion of the performance, the gradual revelation of the person beneath, the moment when a colleague or a road-friend (not a heart-friend) or a stranger looks at him and sees something he was not intending to show, something raw and unfinished and uncertain, something that does not match the role he has been playing, and in that moment he feels the same nakedness that Victoria must feel, the exposure, the vulnerability, the terror of being known.

David thinks about the word disguise and what it means to disguise yourself not for deception but for survival, not to trick others but to protect yourself from their expectations, and he thinks about how he disguised himself as an accountant for eleven years, wore the suit and carried the briefcase and sat at the desk and performed the role of a man who was satisfied with numbers, with the neatness of columns, with the certainty of a balance sheet that added up, and how the performance was so convincing that even he believed it, for a while, until the morning when he sat at his desk and looked at the numbers and felt nothing, absolutely nothing, the same nothing he felt when he stood before his students and delivered a lesson he had delivered a hundred times before, the same nothing he felt when he walked through his house—which is behind his parent’s house—and looked at the canvases stacked against the wall and could not remember which ones he had painted and which ones he had bought and which ones belonged to someone else entirely.

The music in the film, Henry Mancini’s score with its jazz inflections and its moments of sudden, aching tenderness, does something to David that the images alone cannot do, because the music bypasses the analytical part of his mind and goes directly to the place where feeling lives, the place he has spent his entire adult life trying to manage and contain and control, and when Victoria sings “Le Jazz Hot” on the stage of King’s club, her voice rising above the arrangement with a clarity that is almost physical, David feels something shift in his chest, a loosening, a crack in the wall he has built around himself, and he sits very still in his seat and lets the sound enter him, lets the vibration of her voice move through the air and into his body and settle into the place where the loneliness lives, and for a moment the loneliness is acknowledged, is not dissolved but held, is not fixed but witnessed, and that is enough for now.

He thinks about Toddy’s loneliness, which is different from his own but adjacent to it, connected to it by a corridor that David can almost see but cannot quite enter, because Toddy’s loneliness is the loneliness of a person who knows exactly who he is and is not afraid to be seen, while David’s loneliness is the loneliness of a person who has never been sure of who he is and is terrified of being seen, and the two lonenesses are mirror images of each other, reversed left to right, and David wonders whether Toddy, in the quiet hours between performances, in the small apartment he shares with Victoria before the scheme begins, whether Toddy ever feels the weight of his own visibility, whether the courage required to be open is itself a kind of exhaustion, whether the daily act of being oneself in a world that would prefer you to be someone else is as tiring as the daily act of being someone else in a world that would prefer you to be yourself.

The film ends with Toddy on stage as a woman, and Victoria is no longer disguised, no longer hidden, singing in her own voice to an audience that knows exactly who she is and loves her for it, and David watches this and thinks about how the ending is a fantasy, because in real life the revelation does not lead to applause but to confusion, to the slow and painful process of other people adjusting their expectations, to the silence that follows the performance when the lights come up and the audience files out and the stage is empty and the performer is left alone with the costume and the props and the knowledge that the role is over and the person beneath it must now figure out how to exist without the safety of a disguise.