pretending he’s Georges Méliès disappearing around corners and reappearing already sitting in your chair when you open your door. On the other hand, why me? I was such a bit player in this. Why target the restorer of an obscure silent film? It was as if by setting his sights small, as if looking for a toehold, a footnote might be produced that would alter the course of the story or change how its meaning might unravel.
I locked Alphabet for the night. Offices had long ago emptied out, and the deserted Mayflower Building would make anyone jumpy, but after the notes from Kews I felt prone to hearing footsteps, seeing shadows down the halls, and catching silhouettes against doors when clearly even maintenance workers and guards had gone home. We stepped into the night. The air smelled like overturned earth, but dirt that was full of metal filings, asphalt, and loose parts of archaic machinery. A road crew worked on part of the dug-up avenue, steam from pipes or Con Edison ducts partially obscured their legs so that the workers’ heads appeared disembodied, floating above the street.
We stopped in front of an appliance store whose display window was full of televisions, an entire wall of televisions turned to different channels. The one in the center was not tuned to any particular station. It was broadcasting pictures of us. A video camera had been set up to look at the street and transmit the picture to a monitor so you could see yourself and the scene behind you as if you were on television. Antonya and I stared into the screen while she combed her hair, our breath misting in the cold night air. I stepped to one side, my image reflected over a baseball game. There was no sound piped outside, the window display wasn’t a segment of a Tower of Babel; there were only pictures.
My father used to take me to these kinds of stores, concrete shells with deep-discounted appliances arranged in long rows or grouped into a square as if a kind of model room. We didn’t buy much in them, they were more a source of ideas. He used to love to take cars and machines apart and put them back together again. Spinning parts of the clothes dryer became a turntable. His workshop was a hospital for darkroom timers and short-circuited ceiling fans. Scores of radios were taken apart, their tubes and wiring, like miniature futuristic cities, transformed into other, more powerful radios. At night he would drink black coffee, listen to Jean Shepherd broadcasts from New York City, and laugh to himself.
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