Missing Reels (38 page)

“Yes,” she almost whispered, and handed it over. He took it with one hand without looking at what she’d written. Then, “Pardon me,” he said, and edged past her to a chair. He pulled up his pants slightly as he sat, and seemed to be shifting his back into a comfortable slouch. Then he eyed her position on the loveseat and scooted up, until he was perched the same way she was. He slid his rimless glasses to the edge of his nose and stretched his arm until the envelope was several feet from his face.

“Norman Stallings,” he read. “Check.” He looked back at her face, then at her scarf. Did that mean it did look like Hermes, or that it didn’t? “Park Avenue,” he continued. “Hm. A little vague, but check.” He flipped over the envelope. “By hand. Check.” He held it up next to his ear and rattled the contents slightly. “I don’t suppose this
is
a check, by any chance?”

“N-no,” she stammered.

“
Dommage
,” said Norman. “But since this is
By
—
Hand
”—he pointed to the words one by one, and she instantly felt that writing them was the gauchest thing she’d ever done—“I had better read it now. Are you authorized to await a reply?”

There wasn’t anything else she could do. “Sure,” she said.

He took a Swiss army knife out of his pocket, sliced across the narrow end of the envelope, and unfolded the paper with a crisp little snap. “This is your letter?” She nodded. “You write a very nice hand.”

“Thank you.”

She watched Norman read until he glanced over the edge, met her eyes and waggled his eyebrows at her. She stared at the concierge, until he met her eyes too. After that, she looked at the plants.

Norman folded the letter as before and slid it into the envelope. “Emil Arnheim,” he said, precisely as she thought a German would say it. He leaned forward—his knees cracked, he didn’t seem as spry as Miriam—and dangled the envelope by a corner, letting it swing back and forth. “Miss Seenwhen—am I pronouncing that properly?”

“KINE-wen.”

“Ceinwen. When I got up this morning, I had the oddest feeling, and then I dropped a fork on the floor. My late mother—she’s been dead for forty years, so I suppose that makes her unpardonably late—she always said dropping a fork meant we’d have a visitor. So I thought maybe the cleaners would be delivering a day early. Not in my wildest did I picture a fetching blonde come to give me a handwritten letter asking about Emil Arnheim.” He shoved his glasses back up his nose and slid the letter into his shirt pocket. “Isn’t life marvelous. I’m expecting dress shirts, and I get an O. Henry story. By hand. Do you know O. Henry?”

Her mind flailed, then broke the surface with “‘The Gift of the Magi’?”

“Excellent. But that’s not it. In the one I’m trying to recall, a strange woman thrusts a hot buttered roll in a man’s hand and utters one word, ‘parallelogram.’ Does that ring a bell? No? In any event, I think we know what William Sydney Porter would have said. He’d have said, take the hot buttered roll. Tell the young woman, by all means, come upstairs and let us discuss my old friend Emil.” He eased himself to his feet with somewhat more trouble than he’d had sitting down. Granana always did say old people weren’t designed to get off the couch.

“Are you sure?” she asked, dazed.

He swayed slightly as he finished pulling himself upright, and when fully straight he looked down at her. “Are you armed?”

“Am I what now?”

“Armed. Switchblade. Revolver. Hand grenade. Armed.”

“No,” she managed.

“Then yes. I’m sure.”

They took the elevator to the tenth floor, and he asked her about the accent. “Mississippi,” she told him. “Where are you from?”

“New Jersey.”

“
New Jersey
?” she asked, then realized how rude it sounded. But all he said was, “Princeton.”

When they entered his apartment, she paused at the entrance and had to force herself to walk in as though it were exactly what she’d been expecting. She felt as though she’d spent most of the past six months in apartments that were better than hers—Harry, Miriam, Paru, Steve, Matthew, even Andy if you could look past the paper, which maybe you couldn’t. But this was the limit, the biggest living room she had ever seen, decorated in a style that was almost aggressively masculine—brown, beige, leather, shiny black tables. In a corner a TV set was blaring CNN. Norman picked up a remote control and clicked it off.

“Make yourself at home,” said Norman. “I won’t be a minute.”

She took off her coat, draped it across one end of the sofa and sank into it. Leather was awfully cold. She craned her neck around the room. There was a large, somewhat abstract painting of what seemed to be a biplane crashing into a field. She didn’t want to look at that. On another wall was an arrangement of black-and-white pictures, but it was too far away for her to see what they were. She waited a while, wondering if Norman had gone into the bedroom and fallen asleep, which Granana had been known to do when she said she wouldn’t be a minute. She stood up and walked to the pictures. Norman and another smaller, stouter man, having drinks, lounging on beaches, posing in front of the Fountain of Trevi. In the center of the arrangement was a photograph of a field with something happening in the distance. She looked closer. The something was a horse in mid-canter, and a man’s backside, high up in the air next to it, about to crash to the ground.

“Which one are you looking at, the middle?” Norman was setting a silver tray on the coffee table.

“Um, yes. Who is this?”

“That’s me,” he said. “I used to ride.”

She walked back and sat down. “Do you have other pictures from your riding?”

“What’s wrong with that one?”

“Nothing,” she said hastily. “It’s just that it’s hard to tell it’s you.”

“Anybody can have their picture taken
on
a horse,” he said. The tray had a crystal pitcher of what looked like lemonade, two cut-glass goblets, cloth napkins, sterling-silver forks, gilt-edged china plates, and an unfrosted loaf cake.

“You don’t have to go to all this trouble,” she protested.

“Oh, but I do. It’s our mutual friend’s training.” She shook her head in bewilderment—did he mean Miriam? “Emil,” he said. He picked up a silver-handled knife, cut off a good two inches of cake, and slid it onto a plate. “Emil always said if you had champagne and a dozen eggs in the house, you could entertain anyone at a moment’s notice.” He handed her a napkin and a fork. “It’s a little early for champagne. I’m not quite that louche anymore.” He poured out a glass for her. “So lemonade it is.” He gave her the plate. “And Emil never said I couldn’t put the eggs in a cake.”

He served himself and she tasted the cake. It seemed to be made almost entirely of butter. It was delicious.

“Are you settled?” She nodded because her mouth was full. “Excellent. While you’re occupied, I wonder if I should refer back to the letter. It was so well done.”

She swallowed. “Thank you.”

“Perhaps that won’t be necessary, though. The idea was simple enough. You heard about Emil through Miriam.”

“Yes. Did she ever mention me?”

“Afraid not,” he said.

It was absurd to feel so disappointed. And worse to have it show, because he said, “You mustn’t think that means anything. Miriam never mentions anyone. Did she mention me, aside from the movie? For instance, that I’m still alive?”

“No,” she admitted.

“And there you are. So you live in her building.”

“One flight up.”

“I’m sorry. What a catastrophe that place is. The noise! The last time I was there, someone was out in the hallway having an absolutely deafening argument about beer.”

“You’ve been there?” She was sure she’d never seen him before. “When was that?”

“1973, must have been. Miriam invited Ira and me to watch her gloat over the Watergate hearings. When Ira died—Ira was my roommate.” He paused.

“I understand,” she said.

“Oh, good. Young people do. Yes, when Ira died I asked Miriam to move in. Logical, yes? This place is a stadium. Everything is at least fifty feet from everything else. Suppose I slip in the bathtub one day and break my—hm. What I can I break in the bath?”

Did he want her to answer that? It seemed he did. “Your hip?”

“Perfect, a hip. I break my hip and agony renders me helpless, and if Miriam were here, she could hear my cries and call the hospital. If we managed to stay healthy we could bake together and play mah-jongg. But she wouldn’t hear of it.”

“She’s very independent,” said Ceinwen.

“That, plus she’s convinced this building is full of Republicans. She doesn’t care that Republicans are
quiet
. So, because Miriam’s as far left as she ever was, if I shatter my hip I’ll have to make my own pain-wracked way to the telephone. And if that happens, I hope the guilt causes her many a sleepless night. But it won’t.” He sipped his lemonade. “So you live one floor above her, and you somehow parlayed this into an acquaintance deep enough to hear about
The Mysteries of Udolpho
.”

This was evidently another question. “We just got to talking one night,” she said.

“I rather doubt that. Miriam doesn’t just get to talking with anyone. When she’s really in a mood I can barely manage to find out whether or not she wants coffee. And yet you got all of 1928 and most of ’29 out of her. Are you sure you’re not a reporter?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I’m someone who feels that film is an important part of our legacy as American citizens.”

He nodded solemnly. “Something to reflect upon the next time I watch
Cobra Woman
. I believe I’ll consult your letter again, after all.” He adjusted his glasses and read. “‘Miriam was reluctant to talk about certain details, and I didn’t want to press her. But I think our project would be a fine tribute to Mr. Arnheim’s talent, and a way to keep his memory alive. Still, it is probably best not to inform Miriam until such time as our work has a more definite shape.’ That’s sensitively put. Let me see if I understand. I’m not to tell Miriam until you can present her with a
fait accompli
, because otherwise she’s quite likely to strangle us both with her bare hands.”

“That’s about the size of it,” said Ceinwen.

“The wrath of Miriam. No light matter.” He took another bite of cake and contemplated the chandelier. “Still, I’m not rejecting the idea out of hand. Miriam …” He laid down his fork and his voice took on a gentler tone. “Ah, well. Miriam blamed many people and many things for Emil. And the movie she blamed most of all. But I was very fond of Emil too, you see. All my life my friends have usually been women and … my own kind, you could say. Emil was an exception.” He patted the letter in his shirt pocket. “Once Miriam and I are gone, it’ll be almost as though he were never here. That doesn’t bother her, the little Marxist. But it bothers me.” He sat up and folded his hands. “All right. I’ll answer whatever you like, as long as it’s off the record. No, not merely off the record, I can’t have Miriam in a state. Deep background. That’s the ticket.”

She had no idea what deep background was, but she said, “Sounds good.” He beamed at her. She scrambled in her bag for a notebook and came up with her address book. She poised her pen over the blank XYZ section and said, “First, I’d like to ask about the atmosphere during filming.”

“Tense,” he said promptly, as though firing off the answer to an exam question. “The atmosphere? Really? This is deep background, you know. You don’t have to be nearly that boring. Why not ask me if I slept with Emil?”

She felt her entire chest flare red as she said, stammering like Fred, “Um, okay, sure. Did you?”

“Of course not. He was in love with Miriam. I didn’t sleep with her, either.”

“Was that an option?” she asked, stunned.

“No, it wasn’t. I tried to propose it one year. Don’t remember which one, but it was still the Depression and we were hard up for recreation. She told me to find a hobby.”

“That’s good to know,” she said, battling the sense that she had lost her grip on the conversation and possibly her entire day. “Sort of adds texture. But I really had in mind more the professional interactions, because it’s more relevant to the movie.”

“Professional,” he repeated, sounding almost disapproving. “For example?”

“For example, how was it to work with Emil, if the atmosphere was tense?”

“Emil was fine. It was everyone else who made things difficult.”

“How did they do that?”

“By not doing what Emil wanted them to do.”

Now that she finally had him talking about the movie, he had turned into Mr. Brevity. “You were on Emil’s side?”

“Certainly. Emil cared a great deal more than they did. Miriam cared, too, but it was only because of Emil.”

“They didn’t care how the movie turned out?” That would explain the level of interest she’d encountered so far.

“Not ex-actly.” He sat back and crossed his legs, and she realized who he’d been reminding her of. William F. Buckley. Same accent. Almost the same vocabulary. “You have to understand the sort of place Civitas was. It wasn’t one of the big studios. The budgets were strict and so were the schedules. A factory. And that was the approach they were accustomed to. They didn’t want a bad product, but they didn’t see why they needed to fuss more over this one.”

“But I thought this was Frank Gregory’s prestige picture.”

“Gregory.” It was the first sound of venom in his voice. “He thought prestige meant a literary property and a larger budget. He couldn’t wrap his flat little head around the notion that prestige comes from making a bloody effort.” He sniffed. “He was such a crass individual. Before Emil arrived I overheard him saying that if Paramount and Fox were importing Germans he figured he should, too.”

“Was he joking?”

“No. Gregory did not joke. He was anti-humor. In the sense of anti-matter, or the antichrist.”

She decided to take a chance. “Lucile Pierrepoint thought he was wonderful.”

“How do you know?” His brows snapped together and his eyes narrowed.

“I wrote to ask her about the movie.”

“How creative,” he responded, his face relaxing. “So few people would think to contact the studio secretary.”