“What did she look like?”
“Like you, the one with short hair.” Antonya, who had been standing behind me, stepped out of his line of vision, almost slamming her back against the wall beside his door so he couldn’t see her, but I was the one with short hair.
“I can’t go out regularly, see, or I’d try to find him myself. I’m in a wheelchair. Jack used to help me out when the mood suited him.” He must have been supporting himself somehow, braced on shelves or ledges on either side of the inner jambs so he could stand.
Antonya rolled up a five-dollar bill and put it up to the man’s face. He opened his mouth so the could clamp the bill in his teeth, then he turned his head to spit it out somewhere behind him.
“Why won’t you open the door?” I asked out of a perverse streak to see if he could be completely unleashed.
“Nothing doing, girlies,” he said with obvious contempt, then the door slammed in our faces, and that was that. It was getting late, and we had to get back to Alphabet.
Downstairs by the mailboxes we looked at the labels beside the buzzers. The name on 5C was Lewisohn.
“What’s a nofky?”
“A prostitute.” It was a word I hadn’t ever heard during my childhood, not that I could remember. As an adult I was driving somewhere downtown with my mother when we saw a woman in a red dress with Christmas gnomes and reindeer printed along the bottom. It might have been made from an old tablecloth.
“There’s Dell, the alte nofky. Do you remember her?”
“No.”
“She was the school secretary, but she had another life.”
“How did you know?”
“I heard.”
Then I guessed what the word meant. She said it with some sadness as if beyond meaning prostitute the word implied that anyone could end up wearing dresses made from tablecloths and think no one noticed.
The way my mother said the words alte nofky meant, as I remembered, that we all conceal something — a past, pretensions, something, and we deceive ourselves into believing that we do so with success. An alte nofky lurked inside Lewisohn, Antonya, Julius, me, the librarian in impenetrable reflective glasses. Jack Kews was a stew of hidden identities. Maybe it was time to give up on him.
When I got back to the office I checked the postmark on the last letter he’d sent me. The print was barely legible, but the zip code looked like the same code as Alphabet’s. It must have been mailed within a few blocks of the Mayflower Building. If he had gone to Spartacus, a few hours’ drive north, I couldn’t imagine when he would have mailed the last letter, but there were enough gaps in the correspondence so that I wouldn’t have been able to account for his weekly movements even if I’d saved all the envelopes. He might have had someone else do the mailing for him. He led me to believe he had been following me around for a long time whether we came from the same city or not. I shook the stack and a small postcard I hadn’t seen before fluttered to the floor.
A twelve-year-old girl goes missing in Paris after this riot. Méliès is suspected. Star Films is searched by the police who overturn volcanoes, the North Pole, and the moon looking for her.
This was written on the back of a postcard from the 1939 World’s Fair. The date was circled, and he didn’t have to tell me of its significance. Never entirely dormant, the furies stirred up by the trial were in 1939 given an opportunity to boil over again. I propped it up in front of the can containing the newly preserved A Terrible Night, in which a man was attacked by giant bedbugs. There is no peace in his bed, no possibility of sleep, only aggravation. He hits them with a broom. Tough luck. When is a bug not really a bug? My bed was haunted by an insect who sent notes, who held up a corrupting mirror, who wouldn’t let me treat the Dreyfus film as a job like any other, who wouldn’t let meaning be. To everything I did he seemed to say, you think this is precious stuff? It’s all been recycled. These shadowy, grainy figures left the refuge of the literal and abandoned the realm of the simple pictorial situation; he nudged them out. You think it’s just a strip of plastic, he seemed to be saying in his notes, think again. He loomed over the sheets, laughing and pinching. I would like to have blown up a frame of the traveler haunted by bugs and tacked it to my office door, but Alphabet wasn’t going to have a door much longer.
Dial 1-800-HISTORY.
On the television screen children in shorts and T-shirts stuck their heads into pillories while a voice overdescribed colonial forms of criminal punishment. Men wearing wigs pounded anvils, and women, also in wigs, smiled back at them. A family in tennis whites was transformed: mother and daughter swished from stable to parlor in long dresses, father and son suddenly carrying lanterns instead of camcorders, braids grown down their backs. My eye ached. I had nothing to do, so I reached for the telephone.
Thank you for calling Colonial Williamsburg. All our reservation agents are busy at the moment. We take your call very seriously. Please stay on the line. This message will not repeat.
The man next door hammered into our adjoining wall while singing along with the radio. Telephone wedged between ear and shoulder I reached for a pencil, but as I listened to him sing and as I considered the deadlines I faced at work, the idea of a colonial village where tobacco was harvested but no one smoked, a place where slaves smiled, baked bread, and walked unhindered by chains made me anxious. I’ve got you under my skin, my neighbor sang. Pocahattans played by students on summer vacation handed the villagers what looked like pemmican and peace pipes, then held out their hands and were given, in turn, strands of glass beads. The colonial family was buying the Chesapeake Bay. Terrified, I hung up the phone, then fell asleep.
Waking a few hours later I could now hear my neighbor’s television through the wall. He was watching Entertainment Live from Andrews Air Force Base, singing along with Bob Hope as if his heart would break. I didn’t want to interrupt his pleasure, but during a commercial for L’Oreal Eye Defense I banged on the wall. He turned the sound down, but it was still impossible to sleep.
I had become conscious of men in crowds, found myself turning around to see who was behind me, and felt a little haunted by the fact that Jack knew what I looked like while my image of him was blurry and vague; he refused to hold still for the camera. He knows what you look like, Antonya had said, his letters, his quotes from Man Ray’s memoirs were little fluttering baits at the end of a line. He was taunting me, terrorizing me into finding him. Jack could have been anyone, the kind of person who faded into the woodwork, going unnoticed unless you knew where to look, or he could be daring and flamboyant, right there in front of you, an irritant in the public eye all along.
Perhaps he was someone I grew up with, but I never knew him. This new possible Jack tapped me on the shoulder and jerked his thumb north, to indicate that other, much smaller city I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Had we ridden school buses together, stood in line at the Great Adventure or Storytown? Had he snickered when others called me Hawkeye, and by snickering so included himself in their group? There had been no surprise smart alecks at my school. No one who would grow up to drop notes about Méliès under my hard-to-find door. If there was someone who had pretended to be Orwell writing about the Spanish Civil War between shifts at Mr. Subb’s I think I would have known. Still, I could imagine Jack in a diner, sitting cross legged in one of the booths, shunned by everyone, even the few who protested the