John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“The kinetoscope.”

“Peeking through the boo-dwar door at some poor woman getting ready for bed.”

“She was an actress.”

“An actress pretending not to know there’s a man grinding his camera-box not four feet away, that’s bad enough, but if it really had been hidden and the girl a normal, innocent person—”

“We wouldn’t do that.”

“Somebody will.”

She hadn’t wanted to stay and watch the others prodded through the blowholes and neither had he, but all day long much of the fun has been to watch other people swept off their feet and tossed about, to see them drenched or frightened into hysterics.

“Then I suppose,” ventures Harry, “that the picture tells you something about the person who photographs it.”

“So it does,” she says. “Until yer camera learns to crank itself.”

There is music drifting from a dance pavilion behind them and after they’ve eaten Harry follows Brigid over to watch from the edge of the floor. The band is small — a piano, bass, drums, and cornet — but skilled enough to hold a hundred dancers in thrall amid the competing noise of the rides and variety halls. Harry watches Brigid watching the dancers, often two young women together till a pair of sports gather the nerve to break them up and partner off, a semicircle of males observing from one side and a semicircle of their opposites on the other. The band shifts into a livelier tune and a few of the bolder couples begin to spin, pressing their faces and bodies tightly together, one arm extended stiffly outward, pivoting around and around at twice the tempo of the music, other couples dancing away to give them room and goad them to even greater speed.

“Spielers,” says Brigid, smiling and shaking her head. “My sister Grania is mad for it.”

It is the moment he has dreaded, the place where he can’t follow her. He feels other men’s eyes on her, bold as wolves, waiting for him to step — to limp away only for a moment and provide them an opening.

The spielers wind down, laughing and hugging, the women repinning their fascinators on their heads, a few couples kissing openly on the crowded floor and here it seems natural, it seems proper, as if in a place where gravity itself is defied all other rules are suspended.

The piano player leads into a slow waltz then, and Brigid pulls at his arm.

“I can’t,” he says, resisting. “One of these other fellows—”

“I’m not with any of these other fellas, am I?” says Brigid, and leads him onto the floor.

Harry stands while Brigid holds his eyes and waltzes around him, taking first his right hand in hers and then his left, stepping in and away, and he loses sense of the others, only the music and Brigid, the grace of her, her hair framing her face, Brigid light in his hand as if she is floating.

At the end of the waltz one of the floormen gives him a nudge.

“A drink for the lady,” he says, “and one for yourself and you can dance your shoes off.”

They step to the concession and he buys a Horse’s Neck, without the whiskey, for Brigid and a Mamie Taylor for himself. He has not told any of the men at the boarding house about her, unable to bear their joking. She is a scrubwoman and he, despite all his education, a tinkerer for a penny vaudeville concern. He can imagine the stock actors who would portray them in a Vitagraph story — a bug-eyed degenerate for him and a man, preferably fat and unshaven and stuffed into a dress, for the Irish maid.

Here lies Molly O’Keene— reads the epitaph on the gravestone at the end of one popular comedy view— Lit a fire with Kerosene .

“It seems we have to pay for our pleasure,” she says, bobbing the spiral of lemon peel in her drink.

“Paradise for a nickel.”

They take their time strolling on Surf Avenue, people still arriving from the excursion ships at the pier, Harry’s heart full to bursting with the wonder of it, this woman who is who she is and chooses to spend a day with him, and finally they take the steam elevator to the top of the old Iron Tower next to the train station. They stand at the rail of the observation deck, three hundred feet high in the sea air, and are watching it all from above when the sun dips below the horizon and they hear a gasp from a quarter million people below. The electric lights are coming on, white lights, colored lights, lights that spin and blink and cycle in undulating patterns, more than you could count if you made a night of it.

“Will ye look at us now,” says Brigid, leaning her head against his shoulder. “Gazing down at the stars. And we haven’t even left the city.”

Once you know the drill they let you do it in private. Hod pulls the canvas across the opening, which always reminds him of the lowest of the cribs in Leadville, the girls standing outside, smiling and deadeyed, beckoning you to come have some fun, Honey-pie. The cleaning basin is there on a stand, with the Protargol solution and a fresh syringe beside it. He is glad he can do his own now cause it still hurts like hell and the mean prick of an orderly, Corporal Spinks, shoots it up in there fast and hard on purpose.

“What she call herself?” Spinks says, looking you in the eye with that nasty idiot grin of his. “Esmeralda? Trinidad? Consuela?”

“What’s your mother’s name again?” half the men respond. “She was squealing so loud I forgot—”

Then Spinks grins and jams the plunger in.

There is not as much gleet come out as there was yesterday. This is supposed to be a good sign. At first when he saw it, yellow and cheesy-looking on the end of his pecker, Hod was afraid it was one of the tropical diseases the men joke about and exaggerate, or even the start of leprosy which you can see people rotting away with it all over Manila, finger-missing hands out to beg for your loose centavos. The doc says the signs show up between a couple days to a couple weeks after you get it so it has to be the one night with him and Big Ten and Runt and two of his friends from the Minnesotas drunk out of their skulls over to Sampaloc. The Minnesotas have the provost with the Dakotas, wearing white and acting like company bulls, so they know where all the rum and women are kept. It was a slick-looking parlor, with red satin covers laid over the furniture, and Runt’s buddies made a show of chasing the couple Spanish soldiers out.

“You fellas lost the war,” said the big squarehead-looking one, “and got no business enjoyin yourselves. Skedaddle.”

Hod washes it carefully, gingerly, with the yellow soap and tepid water, squeezing the head to get the last of the discharge out.

“Aint handled it this much since I was twelve,” says Corporal Blount from the next enclosure. “Settin in the backhouse, thinking about Mary Jane Riley—”

“Whose name you should not be allowed to speak,” Hod calls back, “in light of your present condition.”

The fellas who only got the clap like Hod are a good deal more whimsical about it than those the doc has condemned with the pox. Medical speculation is bandied about when there are no officers present, and the accepted wisdom is that the whole mercury deal is only a way of further punishing the syphilitics and in the long run won’t cure a hangnail.

“Oh Lordy!” Blount exclaims in pain on the other side of the panel. “The consequences of moral turpitude.”

Hod lowers the syringe into the brown bottle and draws it full of Protargol. They say it’s silver in the solution that kills the bugs, fine silver dust stirred up so you can’t see it, and Hod wonders if he could have dug up any of what he’s pumping, slowly, very slowly, damn that hurts, into what the doc keeps calling his urinary meatus.