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 burst 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,
