What was it about silent movies? I’d asked my husband when I first met him. I was thinking of the Keystone Cops. I thought silent movies and found the whole idea about as interesting as the Three Stooges or Jerry Lewis, inheritors of that early manic comic style. Not my taste at all. I hadn’t yet seen a silent spectacle like Napoléon or the stunning sexuality of Louise Brooks in Lulu or even one comedy with Buster Keaton, his deadpan style so self-deprecatingly ironic, so modern.
“It was a universal language,” my husband said to me then. “When you made a film—in New Jersey or California or Berlin or Rome—the world was your audience.” To my husband, when sound came in, it was the Tower of Babel all over again. The world broken into warring nation-states, divided by the unnecessary static of the spoken word.
Paradise, in the form of silent film, had been sadly short-lived. I remembered a quote from a textbook my husband always printed in big bold letters at the top of his silent movie course syllabus: “In an astonishingly short time—1895 to 1927, little more than thirty years—the silent cinema evolved into a unique, integral, and highly sophisticated expressive form and then, overnight, became extinct.”
Extinct. The word had a new reverberation for me. I stopped shaking. My heart stopped pounding behind my sore ribs. I washed my hands in Apolline’s sink and was comforted to see there was no blood, that it had all been a dream. Then, as the sun came up over Astoria, I crept back to bed and under the covers. Before it was full daylight, I was fast asleep.
I should have felt ghastly when I woke up later, but I didn’t. I hardly ever drank, and usually even a glass of wine made me first giggly, then sleepy. My husband had teased me—cheap date. As I stood again at the bathroom sink, this time brushing my teeth, Apolline came up behind me and gathered the waist of my jeans in her fist. “You are too thin,” she said. “I never thought I would say that about an American, but you are.” She dug through her drawers and lent me a thin black leather belt to keep my jeans from falling down as I crossed the street, though that would have made a good silent movie moment.
“You are going to eat breakfast,” she announced, threatening me with croissants and cream, real cream, for the coffee. Then she went out to the bakery.
While she was out, I called John again, this time at his office on campus. “I need another favor,” I said.
“I’ll send someone to get you,” he said. “Tricia could come.”
I stopped myself from saying, God, no, and instead said, “I need you to fax a request on letterhead to the Cinémathèque Française. Tell them I am coming to do some research in the collections. Tell them”—I paused, trying to think up something plausible—”that I am working on my husband’s last book.” The Cinémathèque was notoriously picky about letting researchers see their films or work in their collections, but they’d known my husband. In the small world of silent film, everyone had.
“You can’t,” John said. “You can’t go to the Cinémathèque.”
“Why not?” I felt a sudden flush of anger so hot that my cheeks burned. “Why the hell not?”
“Because the archives are closed. They are supposed to be moving to this high-tech wonder palace in Bercy, but the place never seems to get done. I think they are predicting two years now before the opening.”
I opened my mouth and then shut it. I had not expected this. “But I’m going to Paris,” I said. “I’ll be there tomorrow, with any luck.”
John made a sound like a tire deflating, caught short of words for once. “Listen, I know the director, some of the archivists. It’s Mosjoukine material you want, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Mosjoukine.”
“I’ll make some calls. It’ll take a few days, though, and I don’t know what will be possible. Can you stay in New York until I find out? Or, better still, come back here?”
I thought about the address I had for Sophie. Forty years and counting. “No,” I said. “I have other research to do.”
“Research?” he said. “What’s this all about?” John knew full well my husband had not been working on a book on Mosjoukine. “Are you writing?” In theory, I was a fiction writer. I’d published one novel. I got paid to teach students how to write. I just didn’t do it myself anymore. I hadn’t written a word in years. I could feel how much John needed to believe I was up to something as sane and worthwhile as researching a novel, but, honestly, I wasn’t.
“No,” I said. “It’s not that. Listen, I’ll call you from Paris, okay?”
“Okay. You’d better. But give me until Wednesday to see what I can set up.”
I thought about that. I had completely lost track of time. “And this is what day of the week?”
“Jesus, Emma, it’s Thursday—in Indiana and New York. Won’t you please let somebody come get you? I could come. Today, even. You know I’d do that for you.”
I shook my head. I knew he couldn’t see me, but my silence was enough.
He was silent, too. Then he coughed. “I found some more Mosjoukine bio stuff. Not much, but more than you’re gonna want me to read on the phone. Are you sure there isn’t a way for me to send it to you?” Behind me I could hear Apolline coming in from the bakery. I covered the phone with one hand and asked Apolline if there was somewhere in the neighborhood I could get a fax. She pointed at a number on a slip of paper taped to the wall, a copy shop near the subway station.
I gave John the fax number. “I’ll stop on the way to the airport. Send whatever you can find.”
“Okay, I can do that. Listen, if I see Gwen,” he asked, “what should I tell her?” Gwen was the chair of the English department at my college, a woman with violently red curly hair who wrote short stories that managed to say more about the world than any novel. We’d been colleagues for fifteen years, and neither of us had ever missed a meeting or class or refused the most boring committee assignment. Together we’d built a program we were proud of. Gwen was as passionate in her defense of it as she was about her own writing. But I hadn’t seen her since the funeral, though I knew when I heard the phone ringing upstairs at least half the time it had been her wanting to talk about what we always had—classes, students, former students, their lives, jobs, and books. I’d let the phone ring. I didn’t want to hurt her, to break her heart, but I just didn’t care anymore, not about what happened to my classes or the writing program or the whole damn college.
“If you see Gwen,” I said, “tell her I’m okay. Tell her I say hello.” It was worse than nothing. It was the best I could do. Apolline was pouring me coffee, putting the croissants out on a plate. “I have to go, John,” I said, and hung up on him for the third time.
Apolline watched me eat, intent on making sure not a crumb stayed on my plate. For her sake, I chewed, I swallowed, but the buttery croissant could have been stale Wonderbread for all I could tell. I seemed to have lost my sense of taste along with my appetite. “Why do you want to go to Paris?” she said. “There’s nothing for you there. I know. I left. If you can’t bear to live your old life, you should start a new one in America, in some new city. There are so many here. You could start a new life every year and never run out.”
“You may be right,” I said, though I couldn’t quite imagine choosing a strange town at random, then moving there to stay. “But first I have to go to Paris. I need to find out if Sophie is still alive. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Apolline frowned. “I shouldn’t have told you so much,” she said. “It was the Scotch. And the shock of your news.” She watched as I finished the last bite of croissant, then she cleared the table.
“Do you have pictures of your family with you?” she asked.
I thought about that for a moment. How could I have taken the picture of me as a baby and left behind every one of my own daughter, newborn and growing? Then I remembered my wallet. Like most moms, I had my kid’s latest school picture tucked in next to my credit cards, my driver’s license. Also one of my husband holding a trout. That was it. I took them out.
The school picture was, as usual, not particularly good. My daughter’s eyes were downcast so you couldn’t see how blue they were, and she had an unnatural grin as if the photographer, with the cold soul of a dentist, had told her to show every one of her new permanent teeth. “She looks like you,” Apolline said, using the present tense, though whether that was out of kindness or a slip I couldn’t tell. In the snapshot my husband, no fisherman, was holding up his prize and grinning. We had been on one of our family camping trips, and my daughter, six at the time, had actually snapped the picture. He looked young. He had more hair than I remembered and different glasses. Behind them, his eyes, like my father’s, were serious and brown.
I had the oddest feeling my husband was living through time backwards, getting younger every year instead of older, the way Merlin in Arthurian legend was said to have done. Every second, my husband was slipping further and further away from me. We’d made love the night before he was killed, after he’d come to bed late from previewing yet another silent movie for the class he was teaching. It had been the wordless, comfortable sex of two people who know each other well, maybe too well, to need speech. I remembered what must have been our last kiss as I slipped back into sleep, then—nothing. Why? I could remember the last Have a good day! I’d called after my daughter the next morning with Technicolor vividness. But what was the last thing I’d said to my husband? Remember you’re taking your daughter to violin? Or, maybe, Don’t you have a department meeting today? Nothing personal. No more than a secretary might say to her boss as she handed him his mail. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the last time we’d made time to talk, to say more than dueling sentences—Did you? Don’t forget to? That week? That month? And now, it would be never.
Here I was in New York wondering who had or had not had sex in Paris more than forty years before, when I was a widow who would never make love to her husband again. Might never have sex again, period. Suddenly my head felt too heavy to hold up. I put my face, cheek down, on the table again. It was getting to be a habit. Maybe the Scotch was finally wearing off. The back of my skull was throbbing, and my eyes ached.
“Do you want more coffee?” Apolline asked, resting her hand on the back of my neck. My hair hurt.
“Do you still have your scissors?” In the old days, Apolline never came to Florida without a kit of freshly sharpened shears and fine toothed combs. Just the sight of them made me hide.
“Yes,” she said. “They’re mine. Good stylists always own theirs, never the salon.”
“Cut my hair,” I said, sitting up. “Short.” I gathered a great handful of it and lifted it off my neck. It felt like it was strangling me.
“I don’t do hair anymore,” She held up her hands, and for the first time I noticed how swollen her knuckles were, how her hands trembled.
“Please,” I said. “Just cut it all off. You can do it.”
She did. First, she just took off a couple of inches, but I begged her to cut more, so she kept going inch by inch toward my scalp as I pressed her. My hair fell around her feet like blond leaves, drifting in funereal curls. As she cut, I thought of the wreaths and flower arrangements the Victorians made from the hair of their dead, how they often put both the arrangements and their dead under glass. As she cut, I thought of the scene in Carl Dreyer’s great silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc, where the jailers cut St. Joan’s hair down to her scalp as they prepare to burn her at the stake. In Dreyer’s tight close-ups, Joan is crying.
As Apolline got closer to my skin, I could feel her hands shaking. The scissors caught my scalp and the sudden pain made my eyes water. I missed my daughter. I missed my husband so badly. I wanted Apolline to cut and cut and keep going until the pain, the real blood, was a noise in my head so loud I couldn’t feel this other, unbearable hurt. Then I was crying, sobbing so hard Apolline had to stop for a while.
When I was done crying and she was done cutting, Apolline held up a mirror for me to see. I didn’t look like myself. My hair was a bare inch, too short to show curl and very blond, as if I had been in the sun. I looked like the baby in Livvy’s arms, or like my baby, the day I brought her home from the hospital. So little hair, such startled, shocked eyes. “After the war, they did this to the women who were collaborators, who’d slept with German soldiers, you know,” Apolline said. “Punishment for sleeping with the enemy.”
“I know,” I said. What was I punishing myself for? Losing my family, I thought. Losing, as if I’d been unforgivably careless. For being alive.
“Well,” Apolline said, brushing the blonde hair off my black sweater. “At least on you, it looks good.”
Before I left, Apolline packed me an extra croissant and an orange, then kissed me on both of my cheeks. She unlocked her apartment door. The early spring air of Queens felt cold on my nearly bare head. “Is there anything else you can tell me about my mother before I go?” I asked. “Anything?”
Apolline paused, as if she were considering a list of possibilities. “She was a communist,” she said. “A fierce one. She had fights with both of your fathers about that! Neither of them liked it one bit. One a White Russian, the other a colonel in the almighty American Army.” Apolline laughed. “Imagine.”
5
I bought a one-way ticket to paris. Every time we’d flown to Europe, my husband, who’d been six feet three, had complained bitterly about how close together the seats were in economy. In his honor, I bought a seat in first class. He’d paid for all that frugality, and now I had three credit cards with nothing on them and limits that added up to more than my yearly salary. This time, at Kennedy, the ticket agent wasn’t even curious. People bought tickets there at the last minute to every place on the planet you could possibly fly.
As soon as I got to my seat, the flight attendant, a man about my age, asked me if he could bring me a beverage. He had the most beautifully buffed nails I’d ever seen. I had him bring me a double Scotch. Then I fastened my seat belt. Now there was no going back.
First class was nearly empty, and once the curtain was drawn it was like being on a separate plane, steerage a faint din behind us. The flight attendant had his hands full with a pair of Japanese businessmen who kept ringing before he’d fulfilled their last urgent desire. There was only one other woman, sitting a few seats ahead of me. I couldn’t help noticing her. She was beautiful. She was maybe ten years younger than me, in her thirties, or maybe she was my age but with great makeup, maybe even great cosmetic surgery. I knew I was naive about such things. Her skin was as smooth as my daughter’s had been. How was that possible? To move through the world and show no signs of age or wear. She had short, sleek dark hair like a seal and teeth as subtly, as expensively white as natural pearls.
She was with a man at least ten years younger than she was, and he watched her lips, his lips parted, apparently holding his breath, as he waited for her to speak. Was she a movie star? Some hotel heiress? She looked familiar. Everything about her—clothes, hair, makeup, purse, shoes—was perfect. Like the clothes Mosjoukine wore in the postcard. Just looking at them made you want to touch them, touch her. Her skin and the baby alpaca of her sweater would be equally soft.
Could you change your life, your luck, if you had better clothes? I guessed Sophie Desnos, ardent communist, probably would not have thought so. A month earlier, I would have agreed with her. You were who you were on the inside, and I measured people either by what they knew—I was a professor—or by what they had given to life. That part of me was pure mom. Who did you love? Who loved you back?
Now, I wondered, if you looked invulnerable, would the devil, the grim reaper, God himself or herself, stand back and let you stroll by, untouched? All I knew was I had the profound feeling I wanted the seal woman’s life. I wanted it like sex, like religion, like heroin, maybe. I could taste it in my mouth. Instead, I ordered another double. In first class, all the liquor you needed or wanted was free.
Dinner found me too far into my Scotch to be hungry. Even in
first class, the feature film was a Sylvester Stallone movie I didn’t think had been released in the States. Impossible to watch even in the name of needed distraction. I got out the envelope with the fax John had sent.
One bio said Mosjoukine had gotten his start as a double for Valdemar Psi-lander, the great Danish actor, in new endings filmed for the Russian market. It was one of those odd movie facts I had heard before, how, in the silent days, distributors would film sadder endings to suit the lachrymose tastes of Slavic audiences. If, in an American or French or German film, a drowning couple was rescued, in the Russian ending they died. My supposed father had been one of the lovers going under. Not exactly an auspicious beginning for a happy film life.
Another talked about how much Abel Gance had wanted Mosjoukine to play the title role in his epic six-hour Napoléon. There had been much correspondence, apparently. Would that be at the Cinémathèque Française? My husband would have known. In the end, Mosjoukine declined. Maybe, one source suggested, because of the time involved or the money, but Mosjoukine had written Gance to say he had decided no one but a Frenchman should play Bonaparte, the greatest Frenchman of all. Gallant, that refusal, smooth. Like his picture.
Another short paragraph mentioned Mosjoukine’s many women, including, briefly, Kiki de Montparnasse, that spirit of Paris in the ‘20s. Mosjoukine was almost as famous a lover in real life, this writer implied, as on the screen. All in all, it sounded like one hell of a romp, one that ended, the authors of these various brief biographies were all unanimous in saying, in the hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine. One author said Mosjoukine had been buried in a grave marked only by a rude wooden cross. All of them had him dead in 1939.
I put the fax in my purse. The flight attendant was standing in the aisle by the seal woman’s seat, laughing at something she was saying. She was an alto, her voice musically low and a little rough. I closed my eyes.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 5