Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  In fact Ellen ended up choosing most of our movies. Bjorn wanted to show her the vault and I couldn’t think why not. Ellen was no cinephile and didn’t need to be one. She loved the clandestine treasure-cave vibe, the tarnished gleam of the canisters under the humming bulb. Falling hard for poetic titles, she selected accordingly—bypassing Spartacus, for example, in favor of Splendor in the Grass. There are better movies but if you’re choosing by title that one’s hard to beat.

  Conscious as we were—a few of us, at least—that the after-parties constituted an epilogue of sorts, we did our best to make them count. They grew rapidly into prodigal feasts. We laid a painted door across two sawhorses for a table. Regular lasagnas were accompanied by loaves of Rune’s bread—he brought them down so hot from the oven they sat crackling as they cooled. Tom bought pies from Betsy Shane, usually three, one being raisin which Tom would devour himself. Don’s former wife Marcie went full-on with quiches and tarts and one time a whole chicken braised in red wine, which changes the common bird forever. We ate before the show or during it; stood up or sat down in the ruinous seats; talked through the pictures or gave in to their spell. Ellen often climbed up to sit with Bjorn in projection, but the crux of her orbit was Nadine, who treated her like Bjorn’s provisional girlfriend. Certainly Bjorn was alert around Ellen, attentive and funny, doubtful with his hands, but it was also clear she spooked him, herself seeming thirty one minute and twelve the next but rarely the fifteen she was. Sometimes she took his arm and held tight while not talking, not even glancing at his face.

  Meantime our undisclosed parties became ever more disclosed. There isn’t much to do in Greenstone—word was bound to get out. One night after the regular show a woman in a puffy down jacket skulked under the neon Bogart. “Why, Julie,” I said—outside her usual context, the Agate Café, I didn’t know her at first.

  “I heard you’re showing classics in secret,” she said in a rush.

  “When the urge strikes, and for a limited time. You’re welcome to join us. Most of them aren’t really classics, though.”

  Next to inquire was Lily Pea, who came to my office asking about the “midnight showings” and why she hadn’t been invited. A week or two later Nadine sent her a text, and that night she arrived with a chocolate cake for a screening of I, the Jury. Galen came too—he seemed to enjoy the lurid vigilante plot.

  In this way people poked and stumbled and demanded their way in. What does it say about Greenstone’s social famine that goofy unadvertised cinema could rouse any interest at all? Sometimes we got a bigger crowd at the after-parties than at the legitimate screenings beforehand.

  Maybe they sensed that beyond the films and feasts, the Empress had begun to feel like a shelter, even an ark. Rain and sleet fell throughout the autumn, sometimes clearing for an hour so Rune could fly. Greenstone was inundated with water and distressed animals. We had a vole explosion when the rodents left flooded warrens for high ground. On their scrabbling heels came weasels and mink. I had a near miss with an unhinged raccoon—Genghis, I’m fairly sure. I’d seized a lull in the weather and got out the Schwinn. The raccoon was turning half circles under a streetlight, clawing the air without conviction. As I neared we made eye contact. Out came his bright little fangs. I swerved in a wide arc but Genghis led me and made a close play of it. I’ll never forget the sound of those clickety teeth. Day after day the lake rose up. Fish gasped in the storm drains. The black rain throbbed on the Empress roof and seeped in to zigzag down fresh-painted walls. Drops gathered on the tin ceiling and fell with pebble velocity—Beeman took a big one on his bald spot and it sounded like cracking a whip. We set out buckets and wastebaskets and kept the ark mainly dry while the world outside, like Noah’s, got more savage by the day.

  You can imagine how good it felt to welcome a loosely joined crew into the warm old Empress.

  One night Galen Pea, not much intrigued with the Rock Hudson movie whose title had beguiled Ellen (Pretty Maids All in a Row), leaned forward from the seat behind and whispered to me. The dark days and rising waters had Greenstone on edge, and lately Galen had been repeating whoppers picked up from his nine-year-old classmates—an alligator on the loose, a human hand in the gutter. This time he said he had seen the big sturgeon again. In fact he’d seen it three nights running, down at the river’s mouth. The great murdering fish wouldn’t take his bait but still it kept coming and showing itself, ten minutes or so before sundown.

  “Come down tomorrow,” he said. “Bet you anything it’ll be there. Come down and see it yourself.”

  I told him I would.

  One night, with a picture spooled up and the back table loaded like an Italian kitchen, somebody rapped hard at the lobby glass. It was Jerry Fandeen.

  I unlocked and waved him in. “Jerry, it’s your lucky night. We’re showing Cobra Woman.”

  “That sounds terrible,” Jerry said forthrightly.

  I was still getting used to the sight of him. He’d dropped at least twenty pounds. He’d got some new clothes and they fitted. His face had the lines and hollows of a sobriety not associated with Jerry Fandeen.

  “It isn’t as bad as you think. You’re welcome to join us if you like—otherwise, how can I help you?”

  “What are those spices?” Jerry said. I couldn’t help noticing the neutrality of his voice. Even out here in the lobby the aroma was alluring, my own mouth watered, but Jerry inquired after spices as if asking the day of the week.

  “It’s lasagna,” I said. “Come in, you’re among friends—when is the last time you had a proper lasagna?”

  “No thanks, no,” he said. “I just came to tell you that Mr. Leer, I work for him now, he’s purchased the building across the street.”

  “Really? Which building?” It won’t surprise you that several of them were for sale.

  “Hoshaver’s.” Jerry pointed and I stepped to the door. Sure enough the lights were on in the crumbly brownstone’s upstairs apartment. No one had occupied the Hoshaver Building in at least five years.

  “That’ll be some work then.”

  “It will,” Jerry agreed. “And I’ll be doing it. The work.”

  “What are his plans for the place?” I was remembering Leer’s offer to buy the Empress, his easy assumption I would leap at the money, his hardening skin when I didn’t.

  “I don’t know,” Jerry said. “I guess we’ll both see. He got a good deal on the building.”

  Jerry stood in the lobby clothed in his strange new dignity. His shoulders were straight, hands clasped at his belt, and he looked at my face without blinking. There was a long moment during which he seemed a vacancy himself. Then a plaintive light came into his eyes and he said, “If it’s all right I’ll stop by this week. I might need to borrow a few more tools. Would that be all right, Virgil? If I borrowed some tools? Now that we’re going to be neighbors?”

  3

  NEXT MORNING THE PHONE RANG AND A MAN INTRODUCED HIMSELF as Fergus Flint. He had a deep, tired, hoarse voice—not my image of the Hollywood lawyer. He sounded honest and weary. Orry trusted him. I decided to trust him, too.

  “Thanks for calling. Orry speaks well of you.”

  “Your sister’s one of a kind,” Fergus said. “I’m told you have a stack of old films to repatriate.”

  “One hundred seventy reels.”

  He let the number pass without comment. “Up front let me say I will represent your interests without fee in this matter if that is what you’d like.”

  “Without fee? Does Orry have something enormous on you?”

  “In fact yes. Dinesh got my wife Celia out of a sickening mess a few years ago in Somalia. This one is on me.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Obviously I can’t promise a particular outcome. It would be my intent to see you relieved of the materials with no penalty to yourself. Whatever you say to me would be confidential. I would rely on you for similar discretion. Do you accept my representation or do you wish to think about it further?”<
br />
  “I accept.”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  I did. It didn’t take long. Fergus himself was no fan of movies but excused this saying he’d worked in some capacity for most major studios and was steeped in “the culture,” which meant you took what was said and expected its opposite.

  “Your caution sounds Midwestern,” I told him.

  “I aspire to the Midwest.”

  “Don’t be fooled by our modest dress, we’re surprisingly devious.”

  “Even I have seen Fargo, and it isn’t your modesty I admire. It’s your solitude. I never imagined such luxury, then one time instead of flying I rented a car and drove to New York. Everybody said I’d hate the northern plains, but I never wanted them to end. An old man fishing in a drainage ditch in North Dakota—catching big pike, ten or twelve pounds, sleeping in a tin camper, can of beans for lunch. What a life. I told Ceci when we retire it’s off to North Dakota. She doesn’t think I mean it. I probably don’t. I’ll need a complete list of the films along with any documentation you have.”

  We didn’t talk much longer. He knew people in the legal departments of most of the studios; he was “dialed in” at the universities and the American Film Institute. It was going to take some time. He assumed I was nervous about showing my hand and reassured me that my worries were most likely groundless. He said, “No one’s going to jail here, my friend.” Studios had become more forgiving. Sometimes they even thanked the person who had kept whatever artifact safe these many years. I mentioned the collector in Cinematique who’d got in touch with the studio about his stolen epic, a story Fergus knew well.

  “That’s the thing about the business. It can go either way or no way. Nobody knows anything,” he said, a theory of Hollywood I had encountered before.

  Before hanging up he asked how the films had ended up at the Empress in the first place. I gave him the name Edgar Poe gave me—Bill Plate, William Plate, who had run the theater in the 1960s before moving to Chicago. “William Plate,” he said, typing it slowly. “Let’s throw this in the pond and see what nibbles.”

  I stayed away from City Hall that afternoon. There wasn’t much to do there, and I didn’t feel up for Lydia’s notes about the festival. I didn’t feel, either, like enduring Ann, who the previous day had left an ecstatic note of her own—she’d “seized the initiative,” driven the LeSabre out to Leer’s where he agreed after “extremely vigorous” haggling to “keynote our springtime event.”

  I didn’t want Leer to keynote anything. On the other hand, I admired Ann for bagging a speaker—one less duty for me.

  The lights were on in the Hoshaver Building, so I crossed the street for a look. I always liked the Hoshaver—it has a grandiose brownstone façade, inlaid turquoise ceramics, and Greenstone’s only gargoyles. Jerry Fandeen was inside spreading drop cloths in what had been the main retail space. He saw me at the window and beckoned.

  “I got straight to work,” he said, offering a look around.

  I hadn’t been inside for a decade. Jerry pointed out where plaster was cracked or water had seeped. Light swam in through the large foggy windows and stayed low in the room. There’s no real color in that kind of light—a big red fire extinguisher stood in one corner and I knew it was red only because it was the shape of a fire extinguisher. The room induced a mild unearthly vertigo. My staff echoed as I thumped around.

  “I remember when this was a dime store,” Jerry said. “They had baby turtles.”

  That was before my time but even so it was easy to picture the Hoshaver as a Woolworths or Ben Franklin, crammed with socks and toys, a soda fountain, Big Chief tablets, parakeets, goldfish. In the late sixties Chevy came in and made it a dealership with wide showroom windows, but by the time I arrived the building had cycled through lives as a cut-rate department store, used-clothing outlet, and realty office, and was at that moment losing its pulse as an antique co-op selling Depression glass and Mylar-sleeved comics. Later an audacious coffee shop opened, but it was 1988 and Greenstone wasn’t buying. I was there one morning when a soft-spoken gentleman sipped his first espresso and politely requested a refund, whispering It’s real strong to the sunken-eyed proprietor. After that the Hoshaver stood empty except for a brief occupation by rapture cultists who drove up in a bus from Missouri and moved in with their futons and slow-cookers. I was curious because the bus had a battered “I Found It!” bumper sticker similar to the one on my parents’ car long ago. The cult people were anxious to tell you what they had found, which was the news, somehow blissful, that the world was soon to end. They were friendly and lonesome. To make money they sold homemade soap and pencil drawings of Jesus high-fiving plumbers and Indian chiefs and other American regulars. They painted a sign saying EVERYONE WELCOME. They seemed at loose ends. When you poked your head in it didn’t smell nice. One night in January, thirty below, the whole group vanished, poof. Nobody saw them leave. It was joked they got raptured along with their bus and their futons.

  On Jerry’s request I’d gone to the basement that morning and retrieved a few chisels and a sander he seemed likely to need. But he never brought it up. Walking the perimeter of the echoing room he said very little. He seemed isolated and terribly somber. His brown Audi wagon with rusted-out wheel wells crouched in the center of the floor, as if mocking the Hoshaver’s dealership days. Propped on the hood was Jerry’s to-do list written carefully in wide-tip marker.

  1. SERVICE BOILER

  2. FUEL OIL

  3. COVER UP THE FLOOR

  4. ASSERTAIN LOOSE PLASTER

  5. WATER DAMAGE

  6. MOVE IN

  I said, “What’s number six? What are you moving in?”

  “Myself,” he said. “Just me. You know what, I’m already in—hang on, let me cross that off.”

  “Why move in here, Jerry?”

  His face bobbed slightly.

  “Are things not okay with Ann?”

  He didn’t look at me but took the marker from the pocket of his neat chambray shirt and drew a line through the item. He said, “We made it quite a while, really.”

  “What happened?”

  “A lot, I guess. A lot happened. But it’s okay. What she says is, I’m not for her anymore, and so she isn’t for me either. She said I ought to move out.” Jerry capped the marker and put it in his pocket. His face was turned away. “I’ve tried to get us back together. I find her things I know she likes. Got her a concrete birdbath, one of those shiny gazing balls for the garden. She likes all that gardening apparatus. She still isn’t for me, though.”

  Rather than say something feeble I stayed quiet. The building was used to quiet. In the gloom above us something took flight—I heard its papery wings. It seemed very hard that Ann wanted Jerry out just as he seemed to be rebooting at last. He looked tremendously sad in the heavy brown Hoshaver shadows. He stood up straighter than usual, which added to his air of sadness. I had never seen him so low before, though I suppose he’d been pretty low after losing hold of himself and driving an earthmoving vehicle over his sleeping friend. His face had dark pockets and troughs which looked like empty places. There were absences in Jerry, things that used to be there but weren’t anymore. It was almost as if Jerry were not there at all, as if he’d gone away and been replaced by a sadness that assumed his general shape. His hands hung at his thighs, his breath was deep and steady. There was a sense of him idling as though waiting to be put in gear.

  “Where are you sleeping, Jerry?”

  He nodded at a door at the rear of the large room. I went and leaned in. It had once been a stockroom or work closet. A twin mattress lay on the floor beside a cast-iron radiator. Two big crates full of rusted bolts and hinges and screws were stacked in a corner. Blankets were heaped on the mattress and a hot plate sat on a metal shelf next to cans of mushroom soup. I became conscious of a caustic rodent smell. There was a scatter of tiny brown pods along the wall.

  I asked Jerry if he would join us for supper later. He had such s
adness and absence inside, I couldn’t think what else to do. He turned me down gracefully. He was pulling long hours and glad for the work. The subject seemed to cheer him. He liked Mr. Leer. Mr. Leer liked him, too. Mr. Leer was nice, and asked his opinion, and wasn’t critical of his work. “Never even tells me what to do next,” Jerry said. “I just show up, and it’s like my head clears. Finish one thing and on to the next. He jokes like I’m reading his mind.” Jerry confided that one day Leer took him aside and told him he had “maximum ceiling.” Jerry was pleased. He’d never considered his ceiling especially high. Maybe it was once, before his edges got dull and the mine event happened. Still, if Mr. Leer thought his ceiling was high, then maybe it was. A man of Mr. Leer’s experience knew a high ceiling when he saw one. Why not? Maybe it was way up there.

  I nodded along but was imagining the unbearable picture of Jerry alone in the mouse closet later, heating up mushroom soup. “You sure you won’t join us tonight?”

  He shook his head. The light was getting dim. The sun backed off earlier every day. Jerry said, “I know you mean well, Virgil.”