by Susan Daitch
In another window all kinds of telephones were on display. Some were ordinary dial phones, the kind not seen in years; some were gag phones. One instrument was in the shape of a pair of lips, another contained push buttons embedded in a silver high heel, a third was a clear plastic telephone with a green neon light running around inside it. Maybe Jack Kews slept with a green neon telephone beside his bed. He might proudly show it to guests as a symbol of an ironic sense of humor. Those who possessed a telephone designed to operate from a pair of red plastic lips or a fake shoe might at least feel sure of the direction their day would take when they got up in the morning; they would feel no chagrin at refusing to answer questions they didn’t understand, and if their day turned into a nightmare they might have the strength of their convictions to tell everyone who crossed them to piss off. Antonya took one last look at herself on the screen, traffic halting in the background, and we crossed the street to the restaurant. A neon palm whose trunk blinked and buzzed sheltered about half the letters of La Chinita Linda, but its three fronds, once the shape of the Great Lakes, were out.
It was a few minutes past seven so we took a booth, ordered tea, and waited. I sat facing the door, watching everyone who entered. At twenty minutes past seven a man in a Mets cap appeared. He swiveled his body to the glass counter from the door as if his shoulder was attached to its hinges. Leaning against the register he told the cashier that he was a homeless veteran looking for work; if they needed a dishwasher, he would be happy to wash for them. He spoke in a loud voice, but the woman didn’t answer him. She only shook her head. He took a handful of toothpicks and left. At 7:45 a group of thin young men entered wearing black suits with narrow ties or black leather jackets and sunglasses although night had fallen hours ago. They rolled up their sleeves to reveal tattoos of barbed wire, birds with talons exposed, and other designs I couldn’t make out. Crowding into a booth, they seemed to know everyone who worked in the restaurant and spoke to them by name. One waiter looked nervous, another shrugged.
“Maybe they’re related to the owner,” Antonya said, watching them push sunglasses up on their heads and light each others’ cigarettes. They were brought plates of rice and soft-shell crabs without any one of them looking at a menu or ordering.
It grew dark outside. La Chinita Linda’s window reflected nervous colored light from the inconstant palm. At a nearby table a child held a hand over one of the lanterns placed on her table, causing her fingers to turn red and translucent. Eavesdropping on a man sitting at a table to our left we observed the fact that he shared noodles with a blond girl easily less than half his age. In a tutelary voice he described the endings of French irregular verbs, leaning close to her, chopsticks pointing to lines of print on a piece of paper, probably leaving trails of sauce.
“You can see by the ending that it’s almost regular, but then there is a corruption here.” He had a thin, lined face, long curly hair, a stagy accent.
“Who gives language lessons in a Cuban-Chinese restaurant?” Antonya whispered. The man was doing most of the talking while the girl, about sixteen, giggled. He turned red but kept talking: je, tu, il, elle. Although we were obviously staring he paid no attention to us. We weren’t sixteen.
“I have a nightmare,” Antonya said loudly. “I’m stuck in a bridal shop during an earthquake, and I’m suffocating in red lace from bridesmaids’ dresses. That’s how I’ll die.”
The man looked startled and stopped talking for a few seconds. I laughed but at the same time, strained to see if Kews might have come on the heels of this group or that couple, but no one resembling Jack Kews entered La Chinita Linda as far as I could tell. It was possible he had seen Antonya and left, but since we were sitting in a booth, it was also true that he might not have been able to glimpse the back of Antonya’s head at all. I tried to determine if the top could be seen from behind and decided it just about could. Or he might have seen only me but guessed from my gestures that I was talking to someone. I played with the small lanterns on our table. A boy behind us was drumming on the table with chopsticks, impatient for his dinner. Antonya asked for a beer, then as we got hungry we ordered salt-and-pepper shrimp, red beans, and brown rice.
“If he hadn’t given himself a beard and moustache, I might have guessed he was one of the women who came in last night. Jack Kews might be Jackie Kews,” Antonya said, “might be a woman.”
Antonya was annoyed with those renters of editing space who complained about the noise from the air conditioner as if she could stop the moaning sound issuing from the vent and could do so with nothing more than a pocket screwdriver. She was annoyed with people who asked for the key to the bathroom every twenty minutes when she was trying to do the accounts, she was impatient with Julius’s debts, with me, with people who reserved space but who canceled at the last minute, costing the company money, with letter writers who didn’t show up. Money flowed out, not much trickled back in. Preparing to take offense as soon as anyone called or walked in to Alphabet made her efficient. Antonya wanted to hang up on those who wasted her time. People yelled at her through the telephone receiver: “What do you mean you don’t have any editing rooms?” or “I need to speak to Shute right away. It’s urgent. I can’t hold.” Killjoys and crackpots fueled by what seemed to her a false urgency over saving old movies made her life miserable.
“Julius will never learn the old dead have to make way for the new dead.” Actually, I thought he had come round to doing exactly that. Antonya, however, wasn’t convinced Alphabet’s backwards mission was such a lifesaver tossed to a drowning man. What did any of this crumbling film and archival narrative matter? At the same time she was saying: New Dreyfuses are born every day. Or are they?
Washington and Hollywood. Washington and Hollywood. She recapped lipstick and pens, clipped shut mirrors and notebooks, dismissed the bicycle messenger service with professional finality. Pulling the beard off Jack Kews or pasting it back on, either way wasn’t going to make or break her days. Julius’s lawyer had handled Immigration and Naturalization for her, but that in turn meant she couldn’t legally work anywhere else.
“You better hope Alphabet stays afloat.”
She shrugged.
I played with empty cups and bowls, stacking and arranging them as if they were futuristic architectural models. The backs of our legs stuck to red vinyl seats. The plastic was printed with an ice-cube pattern, but La Chinita Linda’s, with only a plate-glass window, grew hot from the kitchen. Despite the cold outside, ceiling fans spun uselessly above us. Antonya looked at her watch. We both had other things to do. Jack Kews wasn’t going to show up that night. The palm tree that looked like a map of the Great Lakes sputtered overhead as we left.
My hands had the sweet raisiny smell of old film. I’d been working a long time at the Steenbeck. I stood up to stretch, closed my eye and walked into the hall that lead to the waiting area and Antonya’s desk. I knew where I was going, or thought I did. I looked like a sleepwalker. My hands hit a fur wall. I opened my eye.
“Who the hell are you?”
It was Judy Holliday back from the dead. I mean, it was the former Mrs. Julius Shute in a short fur coat. Mrs. Julius had had some work done, but when looking around the office she wore a my-husband-is-a-bum expression. Her face was tight, eyes sunken, mouth like a stretched-out red rubber band. Yet Mrs. J. was no dummy. She spoke five languages and read several newspapers every morning. On her right hand, which flailed in my direction, a topaz the size of a cough drop glittered.
“This is Frances Baum. She works for me,” Julius said while showing her to the door.
“Does she always play hide-and-seek in the office?”
Before Julius could answer she went on. “Look at this place. I don’t know why I ever bought into your half-baked ideas.”
“There’s nothing half-baked about Alphabet. It’s an industry, an art.” Julius grabbed her by the elbow and steered her toward the elevator.
“Fine, now I want my money back . . .” Her
voice trailed off as the door shut.
“Frances, a word.” He tipped his head toward my room as if to say, the jig is up. Inside the editing room he looked at what I was working on. I threaded up Divers at Work on the Wreck of the “Maine,” one of Méliès’s actualités. This one had been tricky because Méliès had shot through layers of gauze to give the effect of swimming under Havana Harbor.
Julius squinted, then frowned.
“These prints should reflect the original with all its granularity and visual static,” I defended the careful hand I’d taken in the restoration.
“Then the image on the screen will be nothing but grain. There won’t be any clear picture, only fountains spilling piles of black and white M&M’s. No clear picture. Maybe a hand or a face will appear once in while if you’re lucky.”
“The Wet Gate look has become less desirable, Julius. You know that. These films aren’t supposed to look as if they were made yesterday.”
I loved the archaeology of these crappy prints, and when making a copy of a film I photographed the whole surface, preserving whatever was there, including the dust and fingerprints. This was information Jack Kews would want, but that Julius, for reason of profit, wanted to get rid of. I wanted to race to the end of the film, but because it was so terribly fragile I had to proceed one frame at a time.
“Relying on what the film looks like to the naked eye is important because the emotional punch may matter more than the quality of the image. Don’t paint the dress red.” He stood very close. I inched away but kept talking.
“Noir films, for example, should retain scratches and grayness. Sometimes you want a rich gray scale; it depends on the subject. Comedies, we’ve agreed, should have sharp black and white contrast.”
“Apart from Dreyfus, most of these are comedies,” Julius argued. “Frances, you don’t understand. These films have to look clear and crisp, yes, as if they were made yesterday. Otherwise, the client will be unhappy with our work, and according to our contract we won’t receive the last half of the payment due us. This isn’t the subsidized Library of Congress. I told you, I’m sacrificing Dreyfus in order to keep Alphabet afloat. I don’t care if you have to use so much Wet Gate that Dreyfus has a halo at the end and flies up to fluffy clouds above his prison on Devil’s Island. Frances, my life depends on this.”
The heathered gray soundproofing that covered the studio walls loomed as if the walls were slightly tilted and pushing in on me from all sides.
“What are you saying?”
“I want The Dreyfus Affair to have a happy ending. The guilty verdict is impossible to believe because he was so clearly innocent. Over time, for those who care to dig and sift through forged documents and trial records, it will look only more absurd. Eventually if the trial is remembered at all, many readers will stop at the evidence which points to innocence and close the book.”
Julius wouldn’t tell me who bought the Looney Tunes archive, but he did tell me that what we had in the office was the last known copy of the Dreyfus film. Few living people had ever seen it, he believed. Certainly all the original rioters were long dead.
Of course, I doubted his claim. He couldn’t be certain this was the only copy of a rarely seen and, as far as he was concerned, barely documented film. Besides, written descriptions of the film must have existed in a book or two. If the film were to convey the astounding assumption that Dreyfus went free without the trials he did have, ammunition was taken from those who would charge the prosecution with fabricating evidence, of in fact protecting the real spy. Julius didn’t see it that way.
The innocent verdict, Julius explained, is a victory; history as it was meant to be, not a whitewash of the guilty, not in the least. He wanted to pull one bit of victory/success out of the morass of prison cells, firing squads, nooses, gas chambers, even if it was a fantasy. Delirious, sleep deprived, “Why not?” he said. “Who can it hurt?” Fluorescent lights flickered overhead.
“It doesn’t just make me look better,” he whispered. “It doesn’t just save the business from bankruptcy. I have a bigger picture in mind. There are, as you know, revisionists who say now we know, now we can say it: Alfred Dreyfus really was guilty all along.”
I’d been up so long assessing the damage done to Méliès’s rockets landing in the moon’s left eye that I’d almost agree with Julius if he told me my parents had finally seen the light, joined the creationists, and were now burning classroom charts connecting amoebas, eventually, to man.
“You can’t reshoot a scene from over one hundred years ago. You can’t rewrite history.”
“Cut the end. Cut the guilty verdict. Dreyfus’s case was so convincing the audience will assume he was found innocent without seeing the verdict read. Cut the degradation scene where his sword is broken, cut the scene where Dreyfus is returned to prison after the trial. Just cut all that footage. We’re on a deadline. Say it was too screwed up to save. No one will ever know. What does it matter if a few French generals and their henchmen are given a whitewash? Dreyfus was innocent. Everyone knows it. Let it go at that. We’re just taking a shortcut to get to the same end result.”
“What if someone asks what happened to the end of the film?”
“There wasn’t any viable film stock left to unspool. I’ve been offered a lot of money to change the ending, and that’s what’s happening.”
I had visions of Julius deliberately damaging the film in the middle of the night, squeezing chemicals from an eyedropper onto the film so as to look like natural erosion, mimicking the corrosive nature of the passage of time and humidity, blaming an archive that used improper storage.
Julius was sweating slightly, like he’d had way too much coffee and just wanted to get on to the next task at hand, regardless of how outrageous the suggestion he had just made was. I asked him if he was trying to lose his business or change history or both. He just kept talking.
“Before Disney took over Times Square there were these booths where you could talk to women for a dollar. I not only liked to go into them, but I wondered about the other men, like myself, who paid a dollar for what didn’t amount to much, really. Was there some kind of fusion between my interest in degenerating film stock and what many would have considered degenerate practice?”
“Julius, why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe what I’m saying is that sometimes what the client of the moment wants trumps what a long-dead director actually shot. It happens. Also, we need to get paid as quickly as possible.”
There was a boy who stood so close to me in a film preservation class that there was barely a molecule of air between our sleeves. We shared editing tables, joked about rewriting movies and adding Godzillas where they didn’t belong. I thought he was just a work buddy, but then I wasn’t so sure an arm was just something for reaching for the next canister. I wondered what he saw in me, and what projection of his fantasies I might have been. Images of a one-eyed woman were too obvious and unbearable to think about.
Hey Cyclops, what makes you think you can be so choosy?
I pretended to examine the Méliès film in which a man was turning himself into a cigarette lighter, and in the silence Julius walked out.
I could make two copies: a doctored version for Julius, an accurate copy for myself. One of the two I would clean up, using gallons of Wet Gate, drawing into the emulsion if streaks of rain or lightning bolts had faded, but in the second copy I’d leave every mark, scuff, and crack. The negative can’t be read with the naked eye, but with copies I can experiment. There is no master, no original. After five copies, degradation of the image makes it unreadable. The Air Force once tried making numerous copies of surveillance films. What they were left with proved Julius’s M&M’s theory. After a certain point you get diverticulation, the emulsion falls off. Russian satellites or Iraqi tanks disintegrate into bottle shapes and tin cans, a Méliès-like transformation from signifiers of harm to pedestrian bits and pieces: an unwitting but complete conversion of
swords into plough shares.
“Hello, Frances?”
“I was waiting for your call. What happened? You stood me up. Don’t ask me for any more favors. You can take your exploding heads and buy yourself a watch.”
“You weren’t alone.”
“So what?”
“I didn’t want an audience.”
“Are you two years old, or what? I don’t know anything about you so I brought a friend.”
“While in prison one of the General Staff’s star forgers in the conspiracy to frame Dreyfus, a man named Colonel Henry, slits his own throat.” Jack resorted to Dreyfusspeak.
“How do you know that’s the scene I’m working on now? The print is very worn here. His razor emerges with a grand sweep, an arc of light. Henry’s body is so blurred and grainy, the image gives the impression that a disembodied arm has appeared from foggy atmosphere and severed a head which has already been guillotined.” I backed up the film, thinking I might have missed a figure entering his cell. “Now he’s only sitting at his desk writing a letter to his wife.”
“Doll-like and unseen, Madame Henry will be capable of hysterical courtroom outbursts when the judge, Bertulus, refers to the late forger, Henry. The mystery of Henry’s suicide, never solved, was that a shut razor was found in his hand. Had he slit his throat himself he would have had no time to calmly shut the razor, lie down, and prepare to expire.”
Then the phone went dead.
“The Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt gave an elaborate costume ball in their house and garden in Paris. The theme was white; any costume was admitted but it had to be all in white. A large white dance floor was installed in the garden with the orchestra hidden in the bushes. I was asked to think up some added attraction. I hired a movie projector which was set up in a room on an upper floor, with the window giving out on the garden. I found an old hand-colored film by the pioneer French film-maker, Méliès. While the white couples were revolving on the white floor, the film was projected on this moving screen — those who were not dancing looked down from the windows of the house. The effect was eerie.”
