Missing Reels

by Farran S Nehme

  “I’m not awake,” he said.

  “I’ve solved the curse. Is that what you say in math?” She was pretty sure that what he muttered was “fuck me” but she continued anyway. “What do you use in math to break the curse of dimensionality?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have it.”

  “No, why are you talking to me?”

  “Just tell me what you call it, what you use to break the dimensionality. Or solve it or counter it or whatever.”

  He said something into his pillow like “mmhmshun.”

  “What?”

  He flipped onto his back. “Selection. Selection of features. Are we done?”

  “That’s exactly what I have. A selection.” He was staring at the ceiling. “I’m selecting Emil’s print. The one he kept. Miriam said the place was crawling with people the day he died, and she doesn’t know what happened to his print. That’s the one to look for. It was his original cut anyway, it’s the best one.” He put both arms over his face. “I can finish telling you about it later.”

  She was opening the bedroom door when he said from underneath his arms, “The studio people probably took it and it was destroyed along with the rest of their library.”

  “We don’t know that, do we? There were all kinds of people going through his house after he died, Miriam said so.”

  “What’s the purpose of this?” He’d uncovered his face but his voice was almost a moan. “You can’t tell me it’s for Miriam’s sake. We offered to show her what’s left of her brilliant Hollywood career and she couldn’t be arsed.”

  “She didn’t want to see a lousy two-minute clip.”

  That got him up on his elbows. “Lousy? I like that, Miss Reilly. I put my academic credentials on the line—”

  “I meant from Miriam’s point of view, not mine,” Ceinwen interrupted hastily. “Lousy, as in not enough. She does want to have the whole film back. She said so.”

  “Then why hasn’t she looked herself?”

  “It’s too depressing for her, obviously.”

  “Obviously.” He sat all the way up. “You really are the worst liar I’ve ever met. You’re pathetically bad.”

  “Listen.” She dropped all pretense of a gentle morning voice. “She said she wanted to see it and see if she was right, that it was good. That’s exactly what she said and I told you …”

  “‘I’m so sorry Matthew, I tripped.’ Like hell you tripped, you little …”

  She walked to the bed, slowly, and put her hands on the edge. “You little what?”

  “I demand an apology. This instant.” She shook the mattress with all her might, until he threw off the covers and dove after her.

  4.

  IF SHE DIDN’T SET THE ALARM, AND SHE DIDN’T NEED TO GET UP, SHE woke up around 7:00 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. If she needed to get up, but forgot to set the alarm, she slept until noon. So Ceinwen had set the alarm for 8:30. She awoke to Jim shaking her shoulder and the radio blaring. She squinted until the numbers on the clock cleared to say 9:08.

  “Did I hit the snooze?”

  “No, honey. It’s been going since 8:30. I finally came in to ask when the hell you started listening to Bartok.”

  “What’s Bartok?”

  “That’s Bartok.”

  Her ears focused on four or five string instruments sawing along something that was definitely Not Beethoven.

  “He’s a composer?”

  “Yes. What did you think this was, the Thompson Twins?”

  “I knew it was the classical station.” Matthew listened to a lot of classical music and that seemed to be all that Miriam listened to, but this wasn’t something Jim needed to know. “I thought it would be a nice way to wake up. Serenity. Ease into the day.”

  “That’ll teach you to stereotype,” said Jim. “Do you mind if I switch this off?”

  Her head was clearing. She was sure Matthew had mentioned Bartok. She remembered walking down some street in the Fifties after they went to the Carnegie to see White Heat, and he had pointed to a plaque on a building where the guy had lived. She needed to stick with it, obviously. Sometimes with Matthew’s music you didn’t get a real melody until later.

  “Let’s just turn it down. I like it.”

  “You do not.”

  “I do.” She was going to need Matthew’s tidy mind, and if she was pestering him about her own obsessions it would help if he could squeeze in his own every once in a while.

  Jim lowered the volume. “Does Miriam listen to Bartok?”

  “I am trying,” said Ceinwen, reaching for her robe, “to broaden myself.”

  “Then eat something,” said Jim, over his shoulder as he walked out.

  She got dressed and slipped one of the copies of the monograph into her messenger bag. She’d intended the extra for Miriam, but she figured both would be useful, one clean, one to mark up. She switched off the radio. She wouldn’t see Matthew for another forty-eight hours, which should be just enough time to come up with a compliment. Challenging. Ugh. When somebody said that, you knew he just didn’t understand the movie. Different? God no, that didn’t even work when the necklace made the customer look fat. Bracing. Bracing had possibilities.

  She bet Anna listened to Bartok. Anna probably brushed her teeth to Bartok.

  She paused in the living room to check for her keys and noticed Jim and Talmadge were both there, drinking coffee and staring.

  “Where are you going?” asked Talmadge.

  The best approach to deceit, she had decided, was to latch on to the thing you could say truthfully and stick with that. Since she had a lot of lying on the schedule, she figured she could start with half-truths, and sooner or later she’d work her way up to humongous fibs.

  “The library.”

  “Meeting Pope John Paul?”

  “No. He’s not the only of us who reads, you know.” Her keys were in her coat pocket. “Like I told Jim,” she said, “I’m trying to broaden myself.”

  “Which one are you going to?” asked Jim.

  “The library,” she said, impatiently. “Long steps. Big lions. Fifth Avenue and …”

  “Fortieth,” supplied Jim.

  “I was just trying to remember if I have everything,” lied Ceinwen.

  “Looking up a movie?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  The R train came quickly for once and she got out at Times Square, glancing as she always did at the Victory movie theater and wishing it played old movies instead of porn. She sped past the horrid park in back of the library, averting her eyes from the people sprawled on benches and playing deaf to the calls of “Smoke? Smoke?” The first time someone asked her that in Washington Square Park she’d tried to hand the guy a cigarette. He got mad.

  Inside the library she stopped on the red carpet to look up at the vaulted ceiling. She’d only walked inside once before to have a look, that semester at NYU when she’d been trying to see every part of the city she’d read about or seen in movies. Every weekend she picked a place, not caring whether it was touristy or not—the ferry, the Trade Center, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, although nobody had ever told her you couldn’t go to the top. The Met, over and over again. But she’d been scared of this place and the books that had been written here, like it was for real New Yorkers, and she hadn’t worked her way up to it. Maybe because she’d never gotten a library card, either.

  She was a real New Yorker now. You told anybody, even a native, that you lived on Avenue C and you qualified. Why did she feel like somebody was about to throw her out?

  “Can I help you?” The security guard was calling to her from a few feet away. She walked over.

  “I need to look up some stuff,” she said, in a near-whisper.

  “You’re in luck.” He didn’t smile, but she did.

  “Which floor do I go to for the phone books?”

  “Phone books. You run out of ’em at home?”

&
nbsp; “I need the one for Los Angeles.”

  He sucked his teeth. “I’m sure they have those, but why don’t you just go to Mid-Manhattan?”

  She was disappointed. “This is nicer.”

  “Yeah, but you gotta fill out a slip, wait for them to bring it up. You got across the street, it’s right out where you can get it.”

  She should probably do that, to save time before work. “Right across Fifth?”

  “Catty-corner.” He made a diagonal gesture with his hand.

  She slipped out the door. No reading room. No making like Betty Friedan writing The Feminine Mystique.

  Compared with the main library, Mid-Manhattan was positively ugly and seemed filled with old people whose main job was to glare. She found the phone books on the second floor. After two hours of searching, she had seventeen numbers for people named Louis Delgado or L. Delgado in the Los Angeles phone book.

  Delgado had been the cinematographer, the main credited one; the one who had walked out on Emil was dead. The appendix in the back of the Gundlach book had an annotated cast and crew, with death dates for anyone who had passed away before 1973. That eliminated more than half of them. She had decided not to start with the next of kin unless she had to. It didn’t seem logical that you’d find a nitrate film in Mom or Dad’s effects and not, well, do something with it.

  So the old people it was. An old person might forget what they had. They might sell something. Or they might have been there with all the people milling around Emil Arnheim’s house the day after he died, and seen someone take the film.

  And in the meantime, the nitrate stock could have crumbled to dust. The film could have stuck together and solidified into a gelatinous mass, what Fred told her was the “hockey puck” syndrome. It could have ignited.

  She didn’t care. She was going to do this anyway. She had started with Delgado and she’d keep going from there.

  The one that needled her, though, was Edward Kenny. “Last year,” wrote Gundlach, “Kenny was still listed ‘at liberty’ in the Los Angeles casting directory.” But there was almost a full page of E. Kennys, and thirteen Edwards and Eds and Eddies. She didn’t have that kind of long-distance money.

  Wait, wouldn’t the library have the LA casting directory? Maybe? She stood in line at the information desk and was directed to the Dewey decimal section. They had the one for 1986. She pulled it down and opened it right there while she was still standing at the shelf.

  “Edward Kenny (b. 1899). At liberty. The Poole Agency.”

  Son of a gun. Good for him, she thought, even if Miriam hadn’t liked him. She took the book back to her study carrel and wrote down the agent’s number. If he was still acting, he’d be in plenty good enough shape to remember Mysteries of Udolpho. She packed up the photocopy and hopped the subway to Vintage Visions.

  That night she took the phone into her room, blessed the time difference, and started with the Delgados. The night before she had stayed up late writing a script, and spent her lunch hour trying to polish it. Hello, I’m working on a project with an NYU professor. It concerns lost films of the silent era. I was wondering if you would be willing to talk about a film you made in 1928, The Mysteries of Udolpho.

  The first number gave no answer. The second was an extremely irritable woman who refused to believe she wasn’t selling something. Third and fourth, listed as “L. Delgado,” were both women. The fifth didn’t know what a cinematographer was. (You’re in L.A.? How do you survive? wondered Ceinwen.) Sixth and seventh, no answer. The eighth spoke only Spanish.

  On the ninth call, she got a hit. She asked for the Louis Delgado who had been under contract to Civitas Pictures from 1924 to 1930. The man said nothing for a second, then asked, “You want to talk to Louis Delgado, the cinematographer?”

  “Yes, is he there?”

  “He’s dead. This is his son. Louis Jr.”

  She’d written a separate script in case of this very situation. But she felt like too much of a jerk to reach for it.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, it’s okay. You didn’t know.” His tone was so flat she couldn’t tell if he meant that.

  “When I looked up one of his movies, the source said he was still alive.”

  “Really. He’s been gone for a couple of years now.”

  She decided it was time to find her “in case subject is deceased” sheet, but she’d buried it somehow. As she shuffled papers she heard him say, “Which movie?”

  “The Mysteries of Udolpho. 1928.”

  “Huh. Don’t know that one.”

  “It’s lost.”

  “I don’t know a lot of the early stuff Dad worked on.”

  “Did he ever mention it?” She dug her nails into her palm to keep her voice even. “Or keep anything?”

  “Nah. He wasn’t much for scrapbooks or any crap like that. When it was over, he played golf. You’d have had better luck asking him about his handicap.”

  She’d found her script, but it seemed she didn’t need it. “All right, thanks for your help.” He didn’t jump in, so she added, “I’m sorry for your loss. He was talented.”

  “Yep. He was. Sorry I couldn’t help.”

  She lit a cigarette and sucked down the first drag so hard the ash grew a quarter-inch. Delgado hadn’t yelled at her or broken into heaving sobs, but he was obviously not happy to have some strange woman calling for his dead father.

  This is a good thing I’m doing for them, she repeated to herself, as she drew a line through Delgado’s name in the monograph. It’s a good thing to have your work remembered. I’m not trying to upset anybody.

  She decided she’d had enough, and went to bed without going out to say goodnight to Jim and Talmadge.

  She waited the next morning until just after twelve, when people in Los Angeles might be getting to the office. The receptionist at the Poole Agency put her on hold for a long time. Then, finally, “Can I speak to the agent who represents Edward Kenny?”

  “Who?”

  “Edward Kenny. The casting directory says you represent him.”

  “Let me look.” She was put on hold. “I don’t see him in our files. Are you sure the directory listed us?”

  “Positive.” Hold again, longer this time.

  Then, “All right, I’m going to put you through to Doris. Hang on a moment.”

  “Doris Poole here.”

  “Yes, I’m calling to inquire about Edward Kenny.”

  “He isn’t working anymore. He’s at the Motion Picture Home.”

  That was odd. It was practically a brand-new casting directory. “This wasn’t for a part. I’m helping a professor at NYU with a paper, and we wanted to interview him about a movie he once did. Can you tell me how to get in touch with him at the home?”

  “He won’t be able to talk to you, I’m afraid. He’s sick.”

  “Sick? I’m sorry to hear that. Could I possibly write to him?”

  The woman’s voice was older, and kinder, than she’d expected from a Hollywood agent. “That won’t do you any good either, hon. He’s senile. Wouldn’t understand a thing.”

  She looked at the note she’d made in the margin. Edward Kenny. The Poole Agency. “I’m sorry I bothered you then. It’s just that he was in the casting directory.”

  “Is that it? I was wondering, that’s why I took the call. I haven’t had anyone ask for Eddie in more than ten years, and that was somebody wanting to interview him about the old days, too. His daughter kept paying to keep him in the directory, you see. When his mind first started to go a few years ago, she’d show him the listing every now and again. Felt like it brought him back a little bit.”

  “That’s sweet of her.”

  “She’s a good girl, always was. I repped Eddie for thirty years so I know her well. I’m surprised she’s still listing him. He’s pretty far gone now.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “I’ll tell her someone was calling for him. She�
��ll like that.”

  When she hung up, she looked at Kenny’s name but didn’t want to draw a line through it, like she had for Delgado. Instead she wrote next to it, “n.a.” Not available.

  She pictured the man holding Miriam’s hand in the still.

  This was going to be harder than she’d thought.

  5.

  THE WEATHER HAD TURNED TANTALIZINGLY WARM, AND SINCE THEY knew it wouldn’t last, Matthew insisted they make the most of it. They were sitting by the dry fountain in Washington Square Park, and Ceinwen was engaged in a vain effort to eat a falafel sandwich neatly, while telling Matthew about the last few days in the library. She had already told him about Louis Delgado and Edward Kenny. She had found Wouten Oberholzer, the producer, by virtue of his being the only one in the phone book, and had been thrilled when he answered the phone. But he had been rather vague and weak-sounding. He didn’t remember anything about making Mysteries and had to be reminded that the director was dead.

  After that she had a good long think, and decided the phone book wasn’t the best place to start, after all. She recalled the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, which she’d used when she had done her senior English term paper on A Tale of Two Cities. She began going through it, in reverse chronological order, month by month, searching for each of the eleven names she had left that were listed as still living in the Gundlach monograph. She was up to 1980 and had discovered that the editor had died and so had the art director.

  “In conclusion, then, you have no idea what you’re doing.”

  “I am systematically going through the list of people on Mysteries who were still alive in 1973 and trying to track them down,” she said. “I think that’s a perfectly reasonable approach.”

  “Has it occurred to you to consult an expert?”

  Uh-oh. “What kind of an expert?”

  He took a bite and chewed slowly, as if to make sure he had her full attention. Then he said, “I talked to Harry a bit. No, don’t panic, I didn’t tell him why, it doesn’t take much to get Harry talking about film. Have you heard of William K. Everson?”