Babies in the Theater, on Date-Night?

by Elisha Cooper

Each week a babyless couple shows up not knowing it’s “Baby Brigade.” They swivel their heads—surrounded and confused—like a pair of spring-break vacationers who’ve wandered into a gospel tent revival. They were looking to make out and have a romantic evening, and what the hell is this? To us, this has become normal. We’re regulars. Good movie, bad movie, doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s better if the movie is bad because then we don’t care if we miss dialogue when the baby behind us screams.

Zoë likes the car chases. Comedy, however, seems to freak her out. And romance, with its long, meaningful pauses and slow kissing scenes, is the worst. Romance drives her nuts. I’ll be watching two attractive actors making out in a stylish Paris apartment and find myself wishing that a SWAT team would crash through the window, because if nothing else is blowing up, Zoë will.

Tonight, in the middle of one such explosion, I take Zoë out to the lobby, past the row of fathers bouncing their babies, to get another glass of wine. On my way back, I spot the babyless couple. I had noticed them earlier. The man was thin and handsome, with trendy glasses he kept taking off to wipe clean, as if he couldn’t believe what was going on around him. The woman was blonde and curvy and slumped low in her seat like she wanted to disappear. They weren’t touching each other at first, keeping some space between them as if they might conceive if they got any closer. But now they’re making out. They’re hardly watching the movie. Her hand is playing in his lap; his hand is slung around her neck and moving lightly over her breast, fingering the top button on her shirt.

I look at them and think about the nights my wife, Elise, and I went out before we had a child—and in that brief moment I envy the babyless couple deeply. I envy their ability to sit in the dark and grope each other, to not be balancing another person, to go home and make love without putting someone else to sleep first.

And then, in the same breath, I don’t envy them, or at least I’m not bothered that I envy them. I think about how Elise and I have done what they are doing, and now we are doing something else. And how that something else—going to a movie with a baby—is pretty cool in its own right. Something we can do precisely because we have a baby. And as I move on past the babyless couple—they’ve come up for air, the guy has moved his hand to the other breast—it occurs to me that they might be on the same hill as us, just a bit further up the slope.