Missing Reels

by Farran S Nehme

  “What? I have never, ever—”

  “Yeah yeah, that English jerk, he was here for the bangles. And when you finally decide to come in, you look like SHIT. Jesus, who would buy anything from you when you look like this?”

  Not a customer nor a salesperson in the entire store was moving. She hated too much attention, that was probably why she’d never wanted to be an actress.

  But what the hell.

  “I’m not here for my shift. I’m here to tell you something.”

  “I have something to tell you.”

  “I’m here to tell you,” she said, raising her voice so the women’s side had a shot at hearing too, “that you’re a bitter, pennypinching cow, that you abuse me and every other person who works at this store, and I quit.” Talmadge had both hands on the top of his head and his mouth open. Not bad. Missing something, though. She was glad she hadn’t used any swear words, but …

  “You just saved me the trouble of firing you,” yelled Lily. She started back towards the women’s side. Ceinwen followed.

  “One more thing, Lily,” she hollered after her. “Wearing all black all the time doesn’t make you look any skinnier.”

  “Get out of my store!” bellowed Lily. Ceinwen pulled her purse up on her shoulder and walked out as slowly as she could will herself. As she passed the register she looked back at Talmadge and saw him giving her the power salute.

  She had never had a perfect dramatic exit in her life, and she was feeling proud that Lily was going to be it, until she was in the middle of Broadway and had to turn around, the light changing and horns blaring as she skittered back. When she walked back in, Roxanne looked up from the register and of course, Lily was next to her. Ceinwen said, “I have a paycheck back there.”

  “What makes you think—”

  “New York State labor law, that’s what,” said Ceinwen. “Give me my check.” Roxanne reached in the drawer.

  Whatever Lily yelled afterward was lost as she sped through the door.

  The check-cashing place was all the way over on First. The line went on and on, everyone seemed to have problems and money orders. After an hour she left with the $180.92, less $2.50 in fees, that was supposed to see her through the jobless future, and made her way back to Washington Square Village, stopping at Smelly to get more cigarettes, a cup of coffee and a package of Dipsy Doodles. She hadn’t eaten a thing since the morning, and she wondered if Matthew was right about that too, that she was going to faint one of these days.

  The fire truck was gone. Instead there was a small truck parked and some containers were being wheeled toward it by a couple of men. When she got closer she saw Fred jumping off the back.

  “Your boyfriend said you went to work,” said Fred.

  “Work … didn’t work out,” said Ceinwen. “So what have we got?” He was grinning at her. “What’s so funny?”

  “You. Not, ‘is all the nitrate safely away from this, um, apartment building’ or ‘where’s my boyfriend’ or, um, ‘is the collector guy having a nervous breakdown,’ just, you know, ‘what movies did you find.’ So, yeah. The films.”

  Get to the point. “The nitrate.”

  He was still grinning. “Yeah. About one-quarter is 16-millimeter. Rest is 35- and from the look of the canisters I’m gonna guess more than two-thirds of that’s nitrate. Hard to tell what we’ve got here. Definitely, um, a lot of two-reelers. Some of them pretty interesting. The condition, you know, varies. And, um, of course the fire guys were just hauling it out any way they could and nothing’s in order. Not always a great idea to open up nitrate canisters outside the lab, so most of the time I was trying to guess from the label, but, um, this professor, his labeling, I, uh, I don’t get it. Sometimes the studio, sometimes the director, there’s a bunch that just have numbers, some of them aren’t marked at all. I mean, it’s, um …”

  “Crazy as he is.”

  “Yeah. This load is the last of it. Gonna take a while to go through all this, um, maybe a long while. I can let you know. If you’re interested. For that, um, project.”

  Maybe they weren’t even there for Fred to find. Maybe they’d been in bad shape and Andy had to throw them out even before he tried to put them downstairs. She wanted to ask Fred if he’d seen a word like “Mysteries,” but then she’d have to explain why she thought Mysteries was there in the first place. At least they were all out, she reminded herself. They weren’t in the basement rotting, day by day.

  “Thanks. I’d like that.” She tore open the bag of chips with her teeth.

  He was knocking his right foot against the curb. “You could, um, stop by if you want. I should have a list going by this time next week. I, ah, can’t remember which days you work …”

  “I’m unemployed.”

  His foot rested near the gutter. “Is that recent?”

  “As of about two hours ago.” She crunched some Dipsy Doodles.

  “Oh man.” Fred looked stricken. “I’m really sorry.”

  “I’m sorry I’m going to be broke,” she said with her mouth full. “But I’m not sorry I’m out of there.”

  “Okay. It’s, um, good to stay positive.” He pulled on his ear. “Why don’t you come by a week from Monday. Like, noon, all right?”

  “Sounds great. Where’s Matthew?”

  “Said he had to go to the office. The other professor, uh, Engelman. He’s trying to make peace with Isabel and Paul Becker. Becker, um, seems to feel they got cut out.”

  “You went to NYU. Do you feel bad for them?”

  “If I did all I’d have to do is, um, go home and look at my loan stubs,” he said. “Isabel’s in there pointing out that they, ah, don’t have our kind of lab and storage anyway.”

  She took a huge swig of coffee that burned her tongue, sucked on her teeth, and asked, “Andy agreed to a donation?”

  “Isabel got some agreement from him. He’s donating the nitrate and, you know, taking a tax deduction, and the safety stuff, he’s kinda, loaning it to us. She said he was yelling, then he was crying, then he was yelling again, took her half an hour just to get him able to talk. Finally she said we’d put his name on the collection, I don’t know how we’re gonna do that, but that, um, got to him.”

  She might as well see what Matthew was doing. Fred climbed back in the truck, and she walked to Courant.

  His door was open and he was at the chalkboard, staring as if it had just turned him down for a date. In a not-terribly-hopeful voice he said, “Lunch hour?”

  “I’m officially unemployed,” said Ceinwen. “Like half the city.”

  “Not the worst that could happen. Considering how much you loved your work.”

  “Yeah, but there’s this thing called rent.”

  “We’ll think of something.” He put down the chalk. “I don’t suppose there’s any good news.”

  “Andy’s labeling is all over the place. Fred has no idea what’s there, for the most part. We won’t know anything else until a week from Monday. And not all of it can be saved.” She sat down on the desk. “I feel bad for Andy.”

  “You’re not serious. The man was hoarding nitrate in a block of flats.”

  “He doesn’t have much in his life. Those films were like his kids. And we just forced him to put them up for adoption.”

  “The fire marshal said his kids are so flammable they even burn underwater. He’s a nutter.”

  She’d had something else on her mind all day. “Andy won’t be able to figure out who dropped a dime on him, will he?”

  Matthew collapsed on his chair and rested his arms on his desk. “I doubt it. Forensic analysis on an anonymous tip, not much point to that. Probably looked illiterate anyway. I never could type.” He ran his hands over his face. “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for? It’s all at the Brody now. If there’s anything there, they can take care of it. I should have written the note myself. For one thing, I can type.”

  He picked up a notebook from his desk and started to flip thro
ugh it. “I should try to work this evening. Harry and I are almost done with this proof and if I finish tomorrow I can give it …” He stopped.

  “Give it to who, Harry?”

  “No, the secretary. To be typeset.” He shut the notebook. “You can type?”

  “Yeah.” She’d impressed him, that was always nice. “I’m pretty good. Used to be almost eighty words a minute. Got an A in high school.”

  He swiveled around in his chair. “You can type like that, and you were working in a shop?”

  Oh god, not the why-are-you-working-retail routine again. “There’s more to an office job than typing, you know. For one thing, they want a ‘front office appearance.’ Me, I just look weird.” What was this look? She tried to lighten things up. “Of course, some people find weird attractive.”

  “They don’t care what the secretaries at Courant look like.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.”

  “And Angie is retiring. Finally.”

  “That woman who works for Harry?”

  He rolled the chair closer. “Yes. He’ll need a secretary. To typeset papers and do his correspondence.”

  She almost laughed. “Come on. I love Harry, but no way. I got an A in typing, but do you want to hear what kind of grades I got in algebra?”

  “You don’t need to understand it, you just type it. You learn the program and you type it like anything else.”

  This was sweet of him, but the day they’d had was obviously affecting his brain. “That sounds like the most boring job in the world, to be honest. Vintage Visions was a hellhole but at least I was around pretty things.”

  “Stop. Listen to me. If you work full time at NYU you get remission.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “Tuition remission,” he said, drawing the words out like he was repeating them for someone who didn’t speak English. “Free classes. Two a semester. Six a year. Anywhere at the university. Does that make it less boring?”

  “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I guess it does.”

  “I’m going to see if Harry’s back.”

  6.

  HARRY WAS SO EXCITED HE MADE HER COME BACK THE NEXT MORNING. She arrived, carefully dressed in a suit, and he asked her nothing about her qualifications. He said Donna wanted them all to have dinner again soon, then escorted her down the hall and introduced her to Tania, the professor he shared a secretary with. Tania was the highest-ranking woman in the history of Courant, a diminutive Russian topologist who sat in her chair like someone had strapped a two-by-four to her back. She seemed skeptical and kept asking Ceinwen about her office background. Ceinwen would have been a nervous wreck, what with Tania, and Tania’s posture, and having to admit that she’d never worked in an office in her life—except that with Harry there, she barely had to talk at all.

  “The important thing is that Ceinwen is intelligent.”

  “I don’t doubt that, Harry, it’s a question of aptitude for this specific work.”

  “So she has to learn the typesetting program,” said Harry. “All you need is a good memory. Ceinwen has a great memory.”

  “That’s a little difficult to test in an interview,” observed Tania.

  “It’s easy to test,” bellowed Harry. “Ceinwen, who was the cinematographer on Night of the Hunter?”

  “Stanley Cortez.”

  “See?”

  Tania looked from Harry, to Ceinwen, and back to Harry. “Let’s see how she does on the typing test.”

  After that, Harry took to letting her into Angie’s office after hours, handing her science copy to type, and having her practice, since she hadn’t typed in ages. There were no equations, but there might as well have been, for all she understood what she was typing. But she discovered that you really could look at the letters almost one by one and hit the keys; you didn’t have to know what anything meant. It wasn’t what you’d call interesting, but it required concentration. It kept her mind off Fred, up at the Brody, going through the film.

  Jim, though it looked like it cost him physical effort, allowed as how Matthew pushing her into a secretarial post at Courant was “an awesome idea. Pretty much.”

  “I’m getting nervous about it. Typing tests are a bear.”

  “You need to do directed breathing before,” said Talmadge. He pushed one nostril shut, breathed in, pushed the other shut, and breathed out. “Like so. It’s very soothing.”

  “We’ll give her a thermos of chamomile for the road,” said Jim.

  She pushed a nostril shut, breathed, and was already bored. She let go of her nose. “Tania seems like a tough article.”

  “You’ve worked for the toughest of them all,” Jim pointed out.

  “Second-toughest,” said Talmadge. “You could always apply at Bargain Bernie’s. He’d hire you. You’re cute.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said. “I’ve heard the same stories about Bernie as everybody else.”

  “Plus,” said Jim, “at least half your clothes are way too good for Bargain Bernie’s. Don’t you agree, Talmadge.”

  Talmadge smiled enigmatically and went behind his screens. Jim whispered, “Whatever you do, don’t tell him you need more clothes for this job. Grand theft, power suit, here we come.”

  Matthew was working all week, too busy even to explain what it was. They agreed on an early dinner at Caffe Pane e Cioccolato, on Friday after the typing test, because they had so rarely seen each other on Fridays before. She barely touched her omelette and he didn’t say a word about it. He told her that he had to go back to Courant after dinner, and she couldn’t hide her chagrin.

  “I thought you finished the proof. You told me you did.”

  “And now I’m working on another one, and one with Paru.”

  “I have needs, too,” she muttered. “It isn’t just men.”

  “All you need at the moment is to concentrate on getting this job.”

  “I don’t know,” she said glumly. “I’d have been so much more relaxed for the typing test if Harry had been there instead of that admin whosits lady.” She’d tried Talmadge’s breathing technique, but got confused about which nostril was supposed to be shut when.

  “Sixty words a minute isn’t bad at all. That’s a good deal faster than me.”

  “You only use two fingers.” She set down her fork and gave up on the food. “And I had seven errors. That’s a lot.”

  “Harry wants you. And he’s a star, remember that.”

  “Did you get a good look at any of the other women applying?”

  “Reasonably good look at one, I’d say.”

  “And? Did she look like a serious person?”

  “Oh, very. I’d go so far as to say she looked grim.” He looked up. “I don’t think she’s any competition. She was wearing trousers.”

  At least he was joking. But he didn’t seem to be eating much, either. She felt a rush of sympathy; all she had heard in Matthew’s voice this past week was anxiety, and she’d barely asked him what was going on, because the wait to see Fred and hear what he’d found was killing her. She needed to do better. “Harry said the proof you two did is very elegant.” It was an odd word to use for a math paper, but she figured Harry knew from elegant numbers.

  “That it is. What it is not, is significant.”

  Not for the first time she wished she could read Matthew’s work, tell him that he was a genius, and have it mean something to him. She’d asked him once, in a fit of temper, if Anna knew what his papers were about. She had a vague notion, he’d answered calmly, but to understand it fully, you had to be another mathematician. She’d thought then that this must be why Harry and Andy had such a thing about movies. You had to find another love, if you were a mathematician, or you’d have nothing to talk about with regular people.

  Of course, getting obsessed with old, obscure movies wasn’t necessarily a big help with your social life, either.

  “I’m sure it’s extremely significant.”

  “It is to me, because we’ve finished it.” He pic
ked up a swizzle stick and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. “Did you call Becker yet?”

  “Yes, he said if I got the job I should come by the film department and he’d give me all the forms. But I still have to re-apply.”

  “They’d love to have you back. I was right there when he said it.”

  “I hope he wasn’t just being nice.” She pulled a pen out of her purse and grabbed a napkin. “How many credits do I need to graduate?”

  “126.”

  “Okay, so I have some credits already,” she said, scribbling on the napkin. “But let’s say six classes a year, two fall, two spring, two summer, starting this fall …”

  “About six years.” He was tying the swizzle stick into a knot.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “That’s just what Cambridge said. ‘Multiplication tables all down? You’re in.’” He reached for another swizzle stick and tied it around the first.

  “What’s that going to be?”

  “A few more straws and it becomes a fractal. If you’re working for Tania, you’ll know all about those.”

  “I’ll know how to type things about them.” He tied on another stick. “What would I be typing for you?”

  “Anything I do with Harry, I suppose. The secretaries don’t work for the postdocs.”

  She waited for him to look up. She said, a bit tentative, “We’ll be on the same floor.”

  “For one more year.” He hadn’t mentioned Anna. Why the hell did she pick an Italian restaurant, come to think of it? She tried to relax her shoulders.

  “Wouldn’t you want to stay at Courant?”

  The swizzle sticks were starting to look like Siamese-twin spiders. “Of course I would. Doubt they’d have me once the postdoc’s done. The better the town, the more desirable the post. I’m not a star.”

  “Do you want to go back to England?”

  “I wouldn’t mind. But at the moment there’s no jobs.” He checked his work.

  “So what kind of town do you think you’d rate?”

  “Not New York. But maybe not Boise State either. Mid-range. Oklahoma perhaps. SUNY Buffalo.”

  He pulled off his last straw and began to re-attach it. She tried to think of something positive to say about Buffalo, but all she could come up with was Niagara Falls and bowling alleys.