The Mirror Thief(140)
The kid on the boardwalk is stamping its feet in a tantrum, screaming like it’s being murdered; the kid in the carriage has started to cry, too. Stanley shifts his weight, impatient and uncomfortable. So, he says, pointing to the tube of paper in Charlie’s hand. What’s that you got there, Charlie?
Charlie’s confused for a second. Then he brightens, passing his bottle to Stanley, unrolling the tube. A going-away present for Alex, he says. See?
It’s a promotional notice for a movie called Cowboy, starring Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon. The long yellow poster shows the two men in their cowboy duds, one huge in the foreground, the other tiny in the background; Stanley can’t remember which actor is which. He has a hard time believing anybody would make a movie with a title as boring as Cowboy. The poster’s tagline reads, It’s really the best because it’s really the West!
Nice, Stanley says. Alex likes horse operas, huh?
Charlie rolls up the poster, takes the bottle back, and grins. No, man, he says. I don’t think he gives a damn about them one way or another.
He takes another sip. The woman with the baby-carriage slaps her screaming kid across the face, and it shuts up. Stanley’s aware of the waves at his back; they sound like distant fireworks. Well, he says, I better move along. I’ll see you later, Charlie.
Be sure to visit Larry Lipton! Charlie calls after him. Get your free meal!
Stanley doesn’t turn around. He makes his way to the boardwalk, angling toward the penny-arcade where he played pinball two nights ago while waiting for the fish. He wonders for a second if Claudio’s made it back to the hideout yet—if he’s wondering where Stanley is, if he’s been having a great goddamn time—but then he puts it out of his mind. By now the boardwalk has filled with slumming weekenders: beachcombers with metal-detectors, respectable Lawrence Welk fans, junior-grade officers and their girls. In another few hours the sun will drop and the moon will rise, these people will disappear, and all the usual werewolves will come out.
The penny-arcade is bustling, but nowhere near packed. Stanley hopes the Dogs will be around—he wants to get moving on the junk for Alex—but it’s all flattops and crewcuts inside, nary a duck’s-ass or a dollop of grease to be seen. Funny, he thinks. They’ll probably turn up later.
He walks around to look at the machines—Domino, Hayburners, Meat Ball, Dreamy—but nothing grabs him. Then, in the corner, he finds a row of ancient nickel-vend Mutoscope peepshows, with FOR GROWN ADULTS ONLY – NO KIDS stenciled on the wall above them, a few degrees off parallel with the layered bricks. Stanley isn’t normally interested in peepshows, but he also doesn’t like being told that something’s off-limits. He saunters over, drops a coin.
It’s pretty standard fare, maybe a little sleazier than average: AN ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO, the title card says. Stanley puts his face to the viewer—rising a little on his toes—and turns the crank. It rotates, with each turn making a steady clunk at about six o’clock, and pictures flicker into view: the bearded bohemian artist dabbing from his palette to his canvas, and his nude model wrapped in a strategically placed white drape. Dab-dab, dab-dab; this goes on for a while. The model is flush-cheeked, curly-headed, maybe twenty years old. She’d be—what?—fifty now, at the very least. She stands still, blinking, clutching the flimsy drape to her chest. Suddenly the painter drops his brush and his palette and rushes to embrace her, and the door behind him bursts open as the girl’s fiancé barges in. For an instant, the drape falls below her nipples. The reel ends with a thump. Beginning to end, the thing lasted about a minute.
Stanley leans back, sinks to the floor, looks around. Nobody seems to give much of a damn that he’s using the machines. Maybe they figure him for older than he is, but he guesses he could put a toddler in a highchair in front of one of these and get the same amount of guff: the sign is for cops, not customers. With boredom already tugging at his sleeve, he moves to the next viewer.
THE PRINCESS RAJAH, this one says: it’s an Arabian “princess” in an outlandish outfit, doing a wriggly belly-dance, then picking up a wooden chair with her teeth. Stanley’s no expert on Arabian princesses, or on their dancing, but the whole production strikes him as phony and laughable.
The next Mutoscope asks a dime, not a nickel; Stanley’s inclined to skip it, but then he notices the title card: THE BATHING GODDESS, it says. IN COLOR!
His dime drops with a soft click onto a hidden mound of other dimes. The picture starts: a smooth-faced young guy in a toga peeks through a bush; a woman swims around in a pool, her coiffed head above water, her white body a shapeshifting blur underneath. The images have been laboriously hand-tinted: pink cheeks, green leaves, blue water. The goddess rises dripping from the pool, showing her bare ass for a moment, and then turns forward, plucking a towel from a branch to dry her chest. The guy in the bushes gasps and trembles in open-mouthed ecstasy. The goddess hears him; her face twists in shock and rage. She aims an angry gesture his way, and he explodes in a cloud of yellow smoke. Thump: the end.
Stanley drops a second dime, then a third. The photo-cards inside the machine turn on their spool; some arrangement of lights and mirrors carries each picture to the viewer, then in an instant the turning crank whisks it away. Stanley becomes aware of the separateness of the individual images, each one a small colored jewel in the interior light. He tries to crank slower—to see between the cards, to cancel the trick his eyes are playing—but past a certain point the viewer just goes black. He drops a fourth dime. The naked goddess’s image is doubled, cut to pieces on the rippling surface of the pool. The toga-clad watcher vanishes, replaced by the plume of smoke. The branches around him disappear, then reappear with a jerk a half-inch from where they were.