Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“It’s a sign,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Luck,” she said. “There can’t be better luck.”

I looked closer. There was a little depression in the center of my normally rounded chin. I had a chin cleft. It was showing. Maybe it was the powder but I think it was Giddle. She said the right kind of chin cleft was one that came and went, that you didn’t want a permanent cleft. It brought too much luck, and forced a terrible burden of joy on its bearer. Like Robert Mitchum, she said, who navigated a pussy wagon all over northern Mexico and drank paint thinner when he ran out of mezcal, and would be destroyed by his cleft. Too deep, she said. Too strong. Giddle had a cleft like mine, emerging only on certain days and in the right light, as I discovered, once I’d formed the habit of recognizing clefts. Hers was like a shallow thumbprint in dough. Those first few months as we became friends, I’d tell her that her cleft was showing and she’d lean over the chrome sandwich press on the rear counter of the diner to confirm the news, and then run off to buy lottery tickets or play a round of Fascination. If it was the end of her shift she’d throw on a black velvet jumper she kept in her work locker, daub oily swaths of cucumber scent on wrists and neck, fog her armpits with aerosol deodorant, and head uptown to the Carlyle. I figured Giddle was into businessmen. “Not how I’d put it, exactly,” she said, reaching into her bra to adjust each breast. She did have beautiful breasts. She was pretty, too, with large green eyes and a soft, pillowy mouth, even if her face was often creased with sleeplessness and her teeth were stained from tobacco, as were her fingers. Between her pointer and middle finger on her right hand was a yellow smudge of nicotine residue from her endless smoking.

“It’s like what they don’t say in the movie version. I sleep with them, and they give me money, gifts, assistance with rent. It was supposed to have starred Marilyn, did you know? Marilyn Monroe and not Audrey Hepburn, who apparently would not touch the pastry to her lips in take after take outside of Tiffany’s. Marilyn loves a pastry and so do I, and she would have been a much better fit but it’s too late. It’s Audrey Hepburn who is the iconic thing you don’t name.”

“You need the money?” I asked.

“Yes, I need the money. I mean no, I don’t. It can’t be reduced to money. I can’t explain why I do it. It’s a kind of impulse.”

At about that same time, I went to see a movie about a Belgian widow turned prostitute. I looked for signs in it of this occasional impulse of Giddle’s, but the film was all claustrophobic domesticity, a woman moving around an oppressively ordered space, shining her son’s shoes and making coffee in a percolator. Taking things out and putting them away. Opening cupboards. Closing cupboards. Dusting, polishing, whisk whisk whisk with a stiff brush over her son’s black shoes, as she prepared him for each samelike day wherever he vacated himself to, a technical university for vocational training on the other side of a series of metropolis gray zones, half-lit in dawns and dusks. The shoes, shined correctly, would pull them out of this. A situation that, perhaps like Giddle’s situation, didn’t pertain directly or exclusively to money. The bind the woman was in, or wanted to escape from (and never would), was a kind of trouble linked to women and Europe and Jews, not in an obvious way, but it was all there in the film, somehow: history, hatred, cleanliness, and the costs of survival, surviving while drowning, whisk whisk whisk as she shined the shoes. The ring of intimacy tightened after the son exiled himself for the day, and the apartment became the woman’s work space. She went into her bedroom and put a small threadbare towel over her bed’s coverlet in preparation for the arrival of a customer. A thin terry cloth layer between her two realities. As thin as the difference between a gesture that was dignified and one that was pathetic. Better, I thought, just to have one reality, to put everything on the same surface. To explain to the boy, almost a man, that money came from someplace, that she earned it the hard way, that there was no magical account at the Bank of Belgium. She was sorry there wasn’t, but more important, there wasn’t.

So there I was with my beehive and my rice powder. Giddle grabbed me and steered me toward the front door of my apartment.

“Go go go!” she cried. “You’ve got to go now, while your cleft is out!”

* * *

Marvin and Eric both wore welder’s glasses with thick, greenish prescription lenses, and they both snorted when they laughed. They ran a processing lab, Bowery Film, and after giving me the basic rundown of the job, mostly helping customers, answering the phone, restocking, they steered me to a pile of clothes that made me think of the term sportswear . You saw it on the second and third floors of department stores. It wasn’t clear what it referred to. Not athletics. The dresses Marvin and Eric gave me were knit, with big gold buttons. There was a sort of bathing suit made of a fabric that looked as if it were not meant to get wet. More like a baton twirler’s bodice, black velvet and rickrack. There were coffee-colored pantyhose in a plastic egg. They left me alone. I put on the hose and the black velvet bodice, which was the only garment that fit, because the others were all petite-sized, the shoulders too narrow, the sleeves too short. I stretched out on a white vinyl divan. Eric came in and moved a potted plant behind the divan.

“Look down. Okay, look up. Left. Then right. Sit sideways but face front. Turn your head just slightly toward my hand, here, but follow the camera with your eyes. Yes. Exactly.”

I would be looked at, but by people who didn’t know who I was. I would be looked at and remain anonymous.

Every movie had what was known as a China girl on the film leader. The first one wasn’t Chinese. None of them were. No one was quite sure why they were called China girls, since they were a printing reference for Caucasian skin, there for the lab technicians, who needed a human face to make color corrections among various shots, stocks, and lighting conditions. If the curtains in a film looked tennis-ball chartreuse and not some paler shade of yellow, it made no difference to the viewer. There was no original set of curtains they needed to resemble. Flesh is different. Flesh needs to resemble flesh. It has a norm, a referent: the China girl. Curtains can be acid-bright but not faces. And if faces look wrong, we question everything. Some of the China girls smiled. Most stared into the camera with a faint, taut bemusement just under the surface of their expressions. Who knew I’d be a model? But here I am, modeling flesh tones.

My own face, smiling shyly (who knew I’d be a model?), ended up on many films distributed in the United States and Canada. If the projectionist knew what he was doing, loaded the film properly and wound it past the leader, viewers did not see me. If they did see me, my face strobed past too quickly, leaving only an afterimage, like those pulsing colors that mosey across the retina after you stare at a lightbulb. Me then gone, me then gone. There might have been some unconscious effect, if you believed in that. Giddle often claimed the power of the subliminal. She said a voice whispered, “Do not shoplift. Do not shoplift…,” over the PA system in her grocery store on Second Avenue, but so low it was not audible. It wasn’t clear to me how Giddle heard it if it wasn’t audible, except that Giddle was a shoplifter, and like dog whistles were meant for dogs, she was the intended audience.

Most people didn’t know China girls existed. The lab technicians knew. The projectionists knew. They had favorites, faces of obsession, and even if I liked the idea of my own fleeting by, I knew the technicians looked at the frames more closely, and I liked that, too. I was and was not posing for them. Pieces of film leader were collected and traded like baseball cards. Marvin and Eric preferred a polished look. “The problem with the girl-next-door thing,” Marvin said, “is that with recent Kodachrome it’s actually the girl next door. Her name is Lauren and we grew up together in Rochester.” The girls, mostly secretaries in film labs, weren’t exactly pinups, but the plainer-looking China girls were traded just as heavily. The allure was partly about speed: run through a projector they flashed by so fast they had to be instantly reconstructed in the mind. “The thing suppressed as an intrusion,” Eric said, “is almost always worth looking at.” Their ordinariness was part of their appeal: real but unreachable women who left no sense of who they were. No clue but a Kodak color bar, which was no clue at all.