by Susan Daitch
You and your family are always right there where the money is.
I’m going to do an experiment. If I drop a quarter will you pick it up?
Next door was a man who shot deer and brought them home, strapped to the top of his car. We watched from across the lawn while he smiled and called out to us to take a look at this or that beauty. I imagined they bled all over his garage.
There is a basic confusion concerning the newsreel film. They said that Lumière invented the newsreel — it was actually Méliès.
I stopped and listened. The sound track was in French, but someone was translating the dialogue aloud into English.
Lumière photographed train stations, horse races, families in the garden — the stuff of impressionist painting. Méliès filmed a trip to the moon, President Fallières visiting Yugoslavia, the eruption of Mount Pelée, Dreyfus.
I knocked and opened the door. Someone froze the frame. On the screen a woman’s face peered out from behind stacks of Mao’s little red books. Two annoyed faces turned in my direction.
“We were told we’d have complete privacy and quiet here. This is the third time we’ve been disturbed,” a woman in black-framed glasses snapped at me. “I paid good money to rent this space. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry seems to have a question to ask or something to announce as soon as they get to this door.”
“I was walking by and I wondered who was talking about newsreels and Lumière.”
“Jean-Pierre Léaud in Godard’s La Chinoise.” She pushed her glasses up on her head in exasperation at my stupidity and pointed to the screen.
Before I could thank her for the information and apologize for the interruption, I was pushed aside by a delivery boy from the Chinese restaurant down the street. He expressed frustration and in his agitation had nothing but blind disinterest in the image on the screen that held us transfixed. He had gotten lost and was sure the food in the bags he carried had gone cold.
“We ordered Mexican!” The Godard people rolled their eyes in disgust at our collective ignorance and slammed the door in our faces.
We stood side by side in the hall. He was silent, holding the cold food by the edges of the bag as if it contained a dinner he would spend the rest of the night trying to deliver. I walked back down the hall with him, noticing he’d left his bicycle leaning against Antonya’s desk. Had he chained it outside the Mayflower it might have been stolen, but she would be angry that he’d left it parked against her desk; its handlebars had been shoved into her papers, causing a miniature landslide. I didn’t know where she’d gone. The waiting area was empty, and books and files had been put away as if she were preparing to leave for the night. I moved his bicycle away from her desk while he dialed the restaurant. It turned out the delivery was for Alphabet City Typeface. We looked it up, and I directed him a few blocks away. I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to work and watched him until the elevator came. Antonya emerged from it just as he pushed his way in. Turning off her computer, putting the last of her papers away, and jangling her set of keys, she collected her things and asked me if I would lock the door after her.
A moonlit deck is a woman’s business office. I recognized Barbara Stanwyck’s voice. Walking back down the hall the sound track of La Chinoise was followed by sounds of gunshots in dry air — a Western, I thought, and then from the next door came English accents and rainfall implying a jungle or a London street, it was hard to tell what the situation was. A faucet dripped somewhere, a real drip, not a recorded one, and out a corner window as I turned down the hall I could see lights beginning to come on as night fell. Again I was reminded of walking down the middle of a silent, empty road when it began to grow dark early, and just when there seemed to be no one in any of the houses for miles in any direction, I would hear a dog bark and a girl’s voice ring out.
I began to unspool The Dreyfus Affair. I knew the beginning of the story. In 1894 French intelligence discovered that someone was selling military secrets to Germany. Only a high-ranking officer with access to this kind of information could have been the agent of the espionage, and Alfred Dreyfus was accused. I unwound carefully, setting up the film: on the Steenbeck Dreyfus has just been arrested. He is taken into a room that resembles an office. He writes while a man with a faintly obscene-sounding name, Major General du Paty de Clam, dictates. I know that the paper du Paty holds in his hand is a letter that Esterhazy, the real spy, actually wrote. It was delivered to him via the “Ordinary Track,” a night cleaner who retrieved it from the trash at the German embassy. When the two letters are compared he will indicate that the handwriting is identical, although the lines weren’t the same at all. Dreyfus is handed a pistol. Go ahead, do it, kill yourself. He refuses and is taken away at gunpoint.
Sitting in the dark watching Dreyfus stand in a prison yard, I felt as if I were at the beginning of a tunnel, and somewhere at its end were black and white figures, mute, moving stiffly, who didn’t know that mustard gas, dynamite, and the airplane were about to be invented. Touching the negative by the edges I held the brittle film up to a light. Dreyfus’s face was faded to an almost featureless disk. The film, once considered too explosive to be shown in France, was about as sturdy as cigarette ash. I had nightmares about film breaking down at a crucial scene, the rest of it disintegrating in the can. At that moment my hands weren’t the most steady they had ever been.
The telephone rang. I jumped.
“Hello?”
The line went dead.
I tried to picture Jack Kews. He called from an identical dark room, sat leaning back in a swivel chair, feet on his desk displacing papers, books, reels of film. He chomped on a Cuban cigar, laughing too hard at his own jokes, wrapping the telephone cord around his index finger. He called from a park bench, binoculars around his neck, subway map in a back pocket because he’s new to the city. He called, like Groucho Marx, while eating crackers in bed, and wanted me to come join him. He called from a tattoo parlor, the same one Antonya and I had recently visited. He pays cash for tattoos of ironically kabbalistic significance winding around his arm and across his back, so I’ll have a way of identifying him when we finally meet. So I can be sure, even with his shirt off, that Jack Kews is really Jack Kews.
Look, I know about you, and I know about your work, Frances.
What did this Jack know, and how did he know it? In what crowded auditorium had I unknowingly brushed against a stalker? Perhaps he knew about my father and the creationists, he knew Julius was three months behind paying for the electricity that kept us in business, perilously close to not meeting even Alphabet’s small payroll, needing a small fortune in cash by the fifteenth of the month or down the hole we all would go: Charlie Chaplin, the Godard girls, Dreyfus, free lunches at Burrito Fresca. Did he also know Julius was an aficionado of dark rooms in the worst way? Julius, slow to figure out how bad things really were until the creditors carried out the furniture, would say everyone is entitled to their own private worst ways.
Jack was simply a disgruntled employee of Looney Tunes.
Jack knew who delivered the bomb that took one of my eyes, or he had been the errand boy himself.
I’d had too much coffee and turned the call into one of those dreams in which something is chasing you, some creature, some threat you will never outrun, and the corridor down which you flee stretches out, getting longer and longer. It could have just been a crank call, right? I tried to shift my focus to the job at hand.
The Affair tugged at my shirtsleeves. I was afraid to spool too much of the film, yet while it was eating me up with curiosity, I ate up the idea of the actual trial. What I remembered was the saying that some people, had they not been born what they were, might not be on their own side. The trial said, among other things, that you can try to hide a Shulevitz inside a Shute, but it might not work out. My parents didn’t really talk about other cities they’d lived in, and I didn’t talk much about them either, but all those unspoken histories were packed away, little signifiers of identity ready to b
urst out uncontrollably, more embarrassing or painful for the fact that they had been hidden than for what they were. And what are the boundaries of embarrassment anyway? Where is it for the person ahead of me in line who turns around for a second then turns around again, for a teacher I tried to impress, for all those who stare, who can’t help themselves? When they’re aware I’m conscious of their gaze, they look away. Instinct precedes compassion, and you may hope compassion will overtake and educate instinct, but this isn’t always the case. What I look like betrays my identity as soon as I’m asked: How did you lose an eye?
I turned off the light table and opened the blinds a crack. It was night; the street was almost empty apart from a woman looking under the hood of her car. She slammed it shut, wiped her hands on her pants then walked to a phone booth to make a call. In profile she looked like a Roman senator with short gray hair. It was late, but even from the fifth floor I could read her expression. She was annoyed. She wiped her hands on her trousers, thrust them into pockets looking for change, then got back into her car, rummaged around in the glove compartment, and slammed back out of it again. Under a streetlight, she pounded the telephone. She couldn’t have been more irked. I stretched my arms over my head, went back to the film. When I turned from the window I noticed a note had been slipped under my door. At first I thought it might have been another take-out menu, or an angry note from the Godard people, but the envelope had my name on it. I unfolded the paper, creased into thirds, and read:
Dear Frances,
There is some information you might need to know as you work. In 1937 Méliès was asked to write his memoirs for an Italian magazine, Cinema, but what he wrote was in the third person, as if actualities, the brass tacks of daily life, coffee cups and ashtrays, belonged to someone else.
(When riots threatened his film production company and assassins plotted to kill him, he continued to work on his preconstructions. Resolute and resilient even in the face of imminent shipwreck, he searched for the trick card somewhere up one of his sleeves or the rabbit that could somehow be pulled out of a hat. He believed he would bounce back even if bouncing back meant working in a toy shop in a train station. He watched people loitering aimlessly, drunkenly, or as they rushed past; he looked at each with curiosity as if awaiting some cheerful metamorphosis.) I’m making this up, but you get the idea. If no object in Star Films was stuck to its identity, if everything was continually metamorphosed into something else, then perhaps the author and producer of these transformations, Méliès himself, didn’t want to be pinned to one identity either. The distant third person was a stand-in. For a man fond of cryptography (especially cases where one set of words becomes a substitute for another) and jokes with names, this makes sense. Are there more traces of biography in the actualities than in the preconstructions?
Both Méliès and Dreyfus had granddaughters named Madeleine, but there are no other similarities between them that I’m aware of. Georges, drawn in by his cousin Adolphe, was sympathetic to the Dreyfus cause, supportive to the point where he had to break off with his brothers. Although the trial did divide families, Méliès was a public figure, and therefore easily victimized for his position as a Dreyfusard. Many were ridiculed: Émile Zola; Femande Labori, Dreyfus’s lawyer; Prime Minister Clemenceau, and others found their caricatures on postcards, posters, painted on chamber pots, printed in newspapers and on the boards of children’s games. They were the butt of all kinds of cartoons. Like Zola and the rest, Méliès was a physical target, easily recognized, the first film celebrity to have to go into hiding from the press. He acted in most of his own films, as you know, but what you may not know is that he also had a double, a man who played Méliès as a kind of stuntman. This man who looked like Georges was the one who had to take the fall time and time again. A head explodes, a deep-sea diver is swept away, a figure explores the polar ice cap in a hot space suit, all of these were filmed using a stunt double for Méliès. Méliès made films after 1899. We know he wasn’t murdered, but the double, his substitute, never appears again.
Yours truly,
Jack Kews
I opened the door, looked down the empty hall. New reasons to be afraid, came the voice of an actor from behind one of the doors. The note could have been lying on the floor for hours, but I’d only just seen it. No one answered when I called out. Sounds came from behind the Godardistes’ door, but they didn’t respond to my voice. Everyone else had left. I shut the door and leaned my back against it.
I put the note on top of the light table. It was typed on plain white typing paper. The J of Jack’s signature vaguely resembled Julius’s Js — he began his capital Js and Ts with the same broad hook at the top, a kind of roof supported by the stem of the letter — but the Jack Kews, the sneeze that remained, had a different slant and bore no resemblance to Julius’s handwriting. Jack’s K was angular, and Julius’s capital K always had a loop in the center as if lassoing a pole. I turned the note upside down and put a magnifying loupe over Jack Kews. The J looked like a fishhook or a nose seen in profile. (Du Paty de Clam had said that if the bordereau, a detailed note or list, matched Esterhazy’s writing then it would only prove that Dreyfus himself had produced a good forgery. Esterhazy had lied so many times that when he admitted to having written the bordereau, no one believed him.) I didn’t suspect Julius. He wouldn’t, I don’t think, have tried to scare me in this way, changing his voice, leaving an oddball note, a few harebrained conclusions deduced from Méliès’s memoirs. The office tricks Julius played were blatant and obvious slapstick, like coming to work in a gorilla suit when we were preserving an old print of King Kong.
So maybe there really was a Jack Kews, inquisitive but skittish, a man who supposed, as did Julius, that these films might not be as harmless as they appeared. In spite of Jack’s belief that this bit of silent film had caused riots, looting, vandalism, murder, there was nothing incendiary left in The Dreyfus Affair that I could see. Whoever Jack Kews was, those two down the hall might have seen him. While looking for me, he probably knocked on their door, turning into one of the Tom, Dick, and Harrys the women referred to with such annoyance. I wanted to ask them if they remembered what the other interlopers had looked like, but was afraid to knock on their door again that night. I walked past it instead and tried the entrance to Alphabet just past the corridor of editing rooms. The front door was unlocked, just as I’d instructed Antonya to leave it, but I decided to secure it now. The dark hall, the sound of a running toilet coming from down the corridor, unlocked stairwells where anyone could do anything were all ominous in the range of possibility they offered. I sat at Antonya’s desk, pulled out a telephone book, and looked up Kews just in case that London business wasn’t true.
Kew Gardens Florist
Kews, F
Kews, Lilly
Kewshansky, Tatiana (probably Tchevshanska, originally)
Expensive black leather coats tight around their bodies, the Godardistes approached. I put the telephone book back in a drawer and spun around in Antonya’s chair. They were leaving for the night, carrying bags of tapes and speaking to each other in loud, emphatic voices. They were in agreement in their disgust and disappointment about something or other. The illusion the two women presented as they walked toward me was that the carpet had been transformed into a conveyor belt. As if on a people-mover found in airports, they appeared to glide effortlessly in my direction. I was a motionless sitting target until their hip bones abutted Antonya’s desk, and, assuming I was the receptionist, they handed me the key to their room along with a bag of detritus from their Mexican dinner. I threw it in the trash on top of Antonya’s junk mail and day-old newspaper.
“There was no garbage can in the viewing room,” one said with a slight French accent.
I apologized as if it were my job to provide furniture and services, then asked if they could describe anyone who’d interrupted their work besides myself and the delivery boy.
“Short, sort of a goatee, moustache, and wire-rimmed
glasses. He was wearing a jacket and underneath his jacket he wore a sweatshirt turned inside out.”
“What did he say? Anything?”
“Wrong room.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes. He knew he had the wrong room and he left us in peace, which is more than some people have done. Can we leave these tapes with you? We don’t want to carry them around all night.”
“No. I’m not the concierge. You should have locked them in the editing room.” They headed for the elevator, smoking, fuming, chattering like monkeys, brittle, hard as nails. Dreyfus waited for me in the editing room, shackled to a prison bed, and I didn’t know exactly what to do with him. Why was this worth saving? I could smell the coil of old nitrate film lying dormant in a can as it had for years and feel its crumbly slickness under my fingernails, but could make little connection between the life of a man delivering take-out food who had been smuggled into the city in the trunk of a car with holes punched in the top for air and the value of saving old film. Some part of me remained unconvinced.
I step into the shoes of the man who shot deer, tied them to the back of his car, and waved with glee at the people who stared at him in disgust as he drove down the interstate. As if by knowing this neighbor well and by playing with his children, I have more than a glimpse into a life organized around utilitarian motivation; more than a passing acquaintance with a house dominated by the maypoling twins of hunger and satisfaction, one continually chasing the other. There is no room for history, no reason to preserve the feeble or antique. Why not melt the films down for boot heels? This is a dangerous and actually false confession for someone with my job, but sometimes the cobwebs stick to my hands, the reasons elude me, and for a moment I’m watching deer cut from the back of the car or truck, fascinated by torn fur, looking over the surface of the carcass for the evidence of the wound. This confession might mark me as a slacker who sees only futility in the project at hand, but I’m not, I’m very good at conservation and very careful. I would never rub out an actor or a scene, despite jokes to the contrary and perverse temptation.
