A Kiss for a Dead Film Star and Other Stories is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States by Brain Mill Press.
Print ISBN 978-1-942083-38-2
EPUB ISBN 978-1-942083-41-2
MOBI ISBN 978-1-942083-40-5
PDF ISBN 978-1-942083-39-9

Cover illustration © Samantha Battersby.
Cover design by Ranita Haanen.
Interior illustrations by Ann O’Connell.
Interior design by Williams Writing, Editing & Design.

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Cover

Title Page

A Kiss for a Dead Film Star

Still Life with Fossils

The Piscine Age

The Angel Appearing to Corrine

Limbs

Edna, Filled with Light

Author’s Acknowledgments

About the Author

Credits

Patrons

A Kiss for a Dead Film Star

The most beautiful man in the world has died.

Sixteen-year-old Isaac Rubinstein sits on his cast-iron bed, in the tiny room he shares with his brother, and prepares to slit his wrists. Around him there is only melancholy, which has taken the form of various objects. It is masquerading as a sheet that has been fastened to a drawstring in the doorway. It has permeated the ink of a lithograph depicting the Old Opera House in Frankfurt. It has poured its essence into the wick of the oil lamp, into the small pine bureau, into the Bavarian lace curtains, into the plumes and flourishes of the green damask wallpaper. It has settled, also, over the tattered quilt, which has itself been buried beneath a doleful sea of photographs. These images are of particular relevance to Isaac’s present state of despair. The settings and costumes they portray are multifold, but they all feature the same impossibly attractive man, gesticulating, or dancing, or just standing still. In this one, the man has been photographed wearing a sheik’s flowing headdress. In that one, he holds a cigarette and exhales a sinuous column of smoke. In this one, he wears a powdered wig and a silk brocade coat, and in that one, he strums a Spanish guitar. And of course, here is the treasure at the root of Isaac’s collection, a portrait of the man as he is emerging from the water, magnificently shirtless, with a small racing boat hoisted above his head.

The man in the photographs is Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla. He is Rudolph Valentino. The Great Lover. The most beautiful man in the world.

Isaac’s own features are rather less impressive. He is tall but gangly, with a narrow chest that is little more than a monolithic slab. He has got the standard allotment of muscles, but you’d never know it to look at him. No matter how many games of stickball he plays, they remain just below the skin’s surface, dreaming and undisturbed. (This is in stark contrast to his buddy Asher, who seems to have been born with calves like coconuts and biceps the size of summer peaches.)

Isaac’s face is equally unexceptional. His eyes are set a bit close together, his lips are too thin, and his ears are pointed where they should be curved. These characteristics, combined with his unruly black hair and the overall gauntness of his physique, succeed in giving him the appearance of a half-starved animal. His habit of reading in public only serves to heighten this impression. Sometimes, when he is sitting alone on the tenement stoop, women will rise up from the pavement and bring him sandwiches.

But today there will be no sandwiches, and no stickball. The possibility for those things ended several hours earlier in a crowded hospital across town, when a glorious heart stopped beating, when a pair of lungs fluttered like moth’s wings and then lay still, when a brain emptied out its last unknowable thoughts, when a doctor made a grave pronouncement to the assembled masses and watched the effect of his words slide outward like waves, provoking bouts of fainting and hysteria.

Isaac has been left with a single clear path. He must forge a connection with this man in the only way possible, and he must do so without delay. Already, he knows, the actor’s body is beginning to divest itself of tiny particles of matter, which are lifting like delicate insects into the air around him. Already, the viscera are growing cold.

And so the razor blade makes its approach, sweeping downward onto a strip of blemish-free skin (one of the few qualities of which Isaac is unashamed).

He does it.

He doesn’t do it.

His heart splits in two beneath a blue-enameled sky.

In one place, his bubbe’s voice disturbs his reverie before he can go through with it. She has woken up early from her postprandial nap. “Isaac, luftmensch,” she pleads, “would you bring me a glass of water? I can feel my skin going scaly from the dryness.”

For a moment Isaac is torn. It will be hours before anyone else comes home. Little Nate is still studying at the yeshiva, making the family ever so proud, and his mother will not be home from the garment factory until sundown, if not later. He has already considered that his bubbe will be left alone with his corpse for a good portion of the afternoon—a regrettable necessity—even as his blood is ebbing out and saturating the bar mitzvah quilt she made for him. But to leave her thirsty as well? Somehow it seems a needless cruelty. In the end he decides that the Deed will just have to wait until a more opportune moment.

“Coming, Bubbe,” he answers at last. He slips the blade beneath his mattress and goes to help her, allowing the upended photographs to swirl behind him like a gust of papery leaves.

In the other place, where his bubbe continues her sleep uninterrupted, there is no such reprieve. Instead there is a tentative first cut, followed by several more that go much deeper. There is a gushing artery and the unforeseen pain of exsanguination. There is panic, regret, delirium. There is an attempt to arrange himself squarely on the bed so that his mother will not have too much of a mess to clean up. There is a sudden, amplified awareness of color—the color red, naturally, but also the color green as represented in the fronds of the damask, and beyond that, where the wallpaper curls out from the corner, a sea of blue-green that has stained the plaster for decades, eschewing all the family’s efforts to paper over its wildness. There is the memory of being two years old, walking with his mother and father on the beach, swinging like a bell between them. There is a descending fog and, from a distance, the high keening wail of a grief-stricken bubbe. And when it is all over, there is a presence that crawls from the wreckage of a ruined shell, propelling itself through a long and shadowy tunnel, struggling, gasping, swimming hard against the membranous current on its way to some unfathomable goal.

Isaac’s father, a former shipyard worker, was killed in the Great War when Isaac was only seven years old. This left his mother to become the primary breadwinner of the family. For fifteen years now she has worked six days a week at the Kops Bros. clothing building. Before that, though, she was an employee at the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and it was there that she witnessed the most destructive fire on record. Isaac had only heard her speak of it once.

She told the story on a late December evening, and she and their neighbor Mrs. Abelsdorff were sitting at the kitchen table with their hands cupped tightly around bowls of hot cabbage soup. Both women were redolent of sweat and tailor’s chalk, so that without any effort Isaac was able to close his eyes and imagine himself in the factory as the events unfolded, among the endless oak tables where the seamstresses were lined up in rows like sweet corn.

She had known it would happen, she said. She had known because the fabric scraps were collecting in drifts on the factory floor and the tissue paper patterns that had been hung above the tables were beginning to whisper like wraiths. Moreover, a rising tide of shirtwaists was foaming up around their ankles. Sewing machines hunkered like frightened animals. Even the bolts of cotton that snaked through the room carried warnings in their ragged edges. Auspices were everywhere. But what could she do? She’d have been fired if she left her station, and there was a baby at home to think about. Over and over her gaze returned to Tillie, the black-haired woman across the table, and as it did she allowed herself to be reassured by her friend’s tireless fingers, her unassailable calm. She ignored the stone of dread that was taking shape at the pit of her stomach.

(What if she had left then? Isaac wondered. Would it have been better for her? To have only heard about the catastrophe hours later? To have sat in Ratner’s and sighed like tree boughs in autumn and murmured ‘oy-oy-oy’ with her fellow survivors? Would she be a different person if she had not seen the bones of her sisters turned to pulp and ash?)

As closing time approached, things began to go wrong. From the ceiling there came a dull and droning noise, and at first Isaac’s mother believed it to be nothing more than the creaking of pipes several stories up. But the noise grew louder by the second, and more clamorous, until it sounded as if a massive thunderstorm were bearing down on the building. Someone cried out. Someone spoke the word ‘fire.’ Someone abandoned her treadle and flung herself like a captured bird through the open door. Bit by bit, the tragedy was blooming into the fullness of its being.

Already, a dense canopy of smoke had formed overhead. It seemed to have come out of nowhere, and it was roiling, churning, stealing air and visibility from those who had not yet decamped the factory floor. Panic took hold. The women pushed past one another. They elbowed. They shoved. They poured themselves down the staircase like water. Their screams coalesced into a single blistering howl, a keening siren-sound that played havoc with the ears and caused many of the fleeing workers to lose their equilibrium, tumbling headfirst onto the mass of flesh below.

His mother’s part in this exodus did not take long—she had been stationed on the third floor. Those inhabiting the upper floors, however, were not so lucky. Some inhaled lethal amounts of smoke or became trapped beneath overturned equipment. A few were trampled like clover. Many, far too many of them, jumped.

Once outside, Isaac’s mother had stared, mesmerized, as the solid stone exterior transformed into a vertiginous wall of flame, occasionally darkened by the shape of a falling body. Several times she had stooped to vomit. Josie did not come out. Abigail did not come out. Nor did Alva, Razi, Ester, Lea, Hannah, Milly, or Elizaveta. Naomi and Pazia were among those who had jumped from the ninth floor. In their absence was a mounting swell of grief. Already the women wore it like a perfume; it permeated their hair and issued in clouds from their pores. Even Tillie was changed. She was stoic as always, but her eyes seemed to have become a pair of blackened pits, dead stars orbiting in a binary system. “It’s a shanda,” she said simply.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was his mother’s Great War, and it seemed to take something essential out of her. Once vibrant and sunny of a disposition, she now glides through life in near silence, a mere specter in the halls.

There are times when he can barely see her. She will appear in the doorway after work, and for a moment he will have a vivid glimpse of her cupid’s face, of cheeks that are petal pink from the cold, of short, wavy hair peeking out from beneath the brim of her felt hat, before the features begin to fade again and the already slight frame wisps away into the spaces between the furniture. She is tired, he knows that. The stain of mourning has never left her. The last time he saw her express any happiness at all was at a Shabbat-eve meal three months earlier, when Little Nate, who was really only two years his junior, announced his plans to become a rabbi. She leapt up from the table, knocking over her glass in the process, and enveloped the bespectacled boy in a ferocious and lingering embrace. Isaac just sat there and closed his eyes against the scene. He was pretending that Valentino was sitting beside him, holding the kiddush cup.

His bubbe has started to nod off again in her chair. A copy of Der Tog lies open across her lap, along with the obligatory magnifying glass for reading the small print of the obituaries. Isaac thinks about proceeding with his plan. But by now the lamp in the bedroom has begun to flicker weirdly, even though he refilled the oil not half an hour ago, and so he departs from the tenement earlier than necessary and makes his way to the theater where he works.

Crossing Orchard Street, he plots his next attempt. His only regret is that he won’t be the first to carry out this ultimate declaration of loyalty. God knows how many women the world over have already collapsed under the weight of their anguish. So far he is aware of several who attempted suicide outside the Polyclinic Hospital and several more who succeeded in their own homes. And there are stories of hundreds more. Even now they are doing it. They are taking poison. They are drowning themselves in the East River. They are placing their heads in ovens and turning on the gas. They are flinging themselves in front of automobiles and wrapping their necks in challah-style nooses. They are holding pocket pistols in their mouths and pulling the trigger. And they are jumping. Of course they are jumping. If reports are to be believed, there was a woman early this morning who ascended the Gothic carapace of the Woolworth Building in her best Sunday dress and leapt from somewhere near the top. (Why is this such a recurring theme in New York? Isaac wonders.) A lipsticked copy of one of Valentino’s poems was said to have been found folded up inside her brassiere. Furthermore, the city’s infrastructure seems to be carrying out its own mechanistic form of bereavement. Water lines have been bursting, suddenly and without provocation, as if this newly plumbed circulatory system, this lifeblood that pulses beneath the streets, has itself yielded to despair and laid open its veins to the sweltering August heat. Construction of the Holland Tunnel has likewise ground to a halt, as the underwater caisson where the iron rings are bolted together unaccountably lost pressure and had to be evacuated. Bank clocks have ceased their functioning. Store awnings have come loose from the walls and lowered themselves to half-mast. It feels like the world is ending, or at least one particular version of it.

At the theater everyone is talking about what has happened. An old man shakes his head at his wife. “He was a rare thing,” he says. “No way Hollywood’ll let another immigrant into its ranks. Mark my words, there’ll be nothing but lily-whites from here on out.” Beside him a trio of middle-aged women trade stories about their first experience watching a Valentino movie. One of them laughs conspiratorially: “I was on fire for weeks. My husband thought he’d died and gone to heaven.” Behind this group two men in suit jackets are chattering about the possibility of a public funeral. And over by the wall there is a girl of about fifteen who has collapsed against an old poster of Blood and Sand. She is weeping openly, and it isn’t long before a group of boys begins to mock her.

“He was a fop,” one of them says loudly, tilting his head in her direction.

“Choked on his own pomade,” laughs another. “This ulcer business is just a cover story.”

But the girl doesn’t seem to hear them. She continues with her lamentations, sobbing her heart out at some solitary grotto of the mind where nothing exists but herself and the man on the poster, where the insults of others are no more than gnats to be swatted away. Isaac wishes he could be so brave.

“I heard he had love notes from men in his pockets when he was taken to the hospital,” a third one offers.

“Always knew he was a three-letter man.”

They all laugh.

“Well,” says the first boy, turning his attention back to his friends. “He was definitely wearing ladies’ underthings when they brought him in. It’s true! No one could believe it, but there they were, plain as day. Red lace knickers and fancy garters. The doctors swore everyone to secrecy.”

The conversation then veers off into the direction of the lewd, and Isaac, while inflamed by their remarks about his hero, decides to ignore them and get started with his nightly duties.

Asher greets him as he steps into the projection room. The young man is breathless, his green eyes bright with excitement. “Can you believe this?” he exclaims. “It’s like he was President of the United States or something! I know, I know . . . you’re a fan. But dingus. Even you’ve got to admit some people are overreacting.”

Isaac is suddenly embarrassed. “Well I don’t know,” he begins uncertainly. “Sometimes people have different ideas about what’s important.”

“You got that right,” Asher laughs. “I caught my ma crying at the ticket booth earlier today. My own ma! I ask her what’s so terrible and she says she’s thinking of Aunt Hedya back in Leipzig. Fat chance. More like she’s gone weak for the Sheik.”

Isaac’s friendship with Asher began eight years earlier, a few weeks after his best mate, Hymie, died of influenza. Asher had just lost his own close friend to the same illness, and thus it was only natural that the two boys would forge a wholeness out of their separate halves. It happened after a marathon game of stickball. Asher asked him over for dinner, and Isaac, flattered by this invitation from an older, more popular boy, eagerly accepted.

Asher’s family has run the neighborhood theater for upwards of twelve years. When Isaac was ten, Asher was able to secure him a much-coveted job as a gofer for the establishment. His duties included assisting the projectionist (who was too busy hand cranking the film to do anything else), changing reels when necessary, fetching coffee for the organist, and delivering the hourly ticket counts to the manager, Asher’s father. Contrary to his initial hopes, Isaac found that he was far too busy running errands to watch any of the movies during work hours.

He was, however, able to glimpse them in a piecemeal fashion—a dramatic segment here, a passionate embrace there, and of course the occasional frame of calligraphied dialogue, which was like a page torn from some medieval text. Little by little these fragments began to drift together in his brain, converging like continents, until he was left with a memory of having seen each film in its entirety.

In this way he became familiar with the work of Charlie Chaplin and Edna Purviance. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. He loved the excitement of the audience in those first few moments when the lamps dimmed and the images flared into being on the screen. He loved the heft of the reels, which were like the prodigious wheels of some ancient chariot. Most of all he loved the sense of captured time, the sense that all things ephemeral could be preserved indefinitely with the aid of this elegant new medium. Death itself might come, but the actors would be ever youthful, ever vibrant on the screens, their high cheekbones and luminous skin enshrined for eternity.

Asher’s younger sister, Doralee, sometimes followed Isaac around as he performed his duties, her little black patent shoes leaving galactic whorls in the dust on the floor of the projection room. Doralee was every bit as enthralled by the movies as he was, if not more so, and Isaac had a wonderful time entertaining her with the farcical voices he created for each of the actors. The voice of the villain was typically a gravelly snarl, while the heroine was rendered with a squeaky falsetto that always sent the girl into helpless peals of laughter. Sidekicks delivered their lines with a southern drawl. Ministers and other religious persons often sounded as if they had had too much to drink. Only the hero spoke clear and pure as a bell. Try as he might, Isaac could not bring himself to treat this character type with anything but the utmost earnestness.

The longer Isaac worked there, the more his life began to take on a kind of duality. During the day, he steeled himself against the various constrictions of the tenement: the overachieving brother; the distant mother; the school assignments that did nothing but demonstrate to the world how unexceptional he was; even the green paint that kept appearing beneath his fingernails, as if he had been clawing at the walls in his sleep. But in the evenings—oh yes, in the evenings, everything was different. There was glamor. There was mystery. There was divine justice. It was only in this rarefied atmosphere that Isaac felt he could truly breathe, within this strange golden existence that was like a sliver out of someone else’s life.

And then, in his eleventh year, the reels arrived for a film called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As Isaac watched this new leading man tango across the screen in a Spanish hat and gaucho pants—eyes darkly seductive, limbs sinuous as a panther’s—he felt the gears within himself quietly shifting into place. He knew he was falling in love.

“Will you boys shut up?” hisses the projectionist, bringing Isaac back to the present. “I got a show in two minutes and I haven’t finished looking over the chart.”

Asher dismisses this with a wave of his hand. “The folks down there don’t know how fast it’s supposed to be cranked. Why don’t you just make it up as you go along? No one’ll know any different.”

“I’d know,” the projectionist responds huffily, shifting his rather large posterior on the metal stool beneath him. “There’s a right and a wrong way to do everything, young man. And anyway, suppose I go too fast through an action bit and nobody can tell what’s going on? What then?”

“Well then I guess you should get canned,” Asher laughs, and hurriedly steps out the door before the older man can take a swing at him. In the hallway he turns back to Isaac with a grin. “Pa’s trying to get the reels to Cobra so the theater can have some kind of memorial for him. I’d prefer The Son of the Sheik, myself. It’s funnier and there’s more sexy stuff. But Pa says that one won’t sell as many tickets. Which one do you think we should get?”

“Horsemen is the first one I saw, so I’d have to vote for that.”

“Eh, that one’s okay, I guess. At least it’s got a war to keep things interesting.”

“And a ghost.”

“And a ghost! I forgot!” he exclaimed. “How great would that be? To be visited by a ghost, I mean. A couple summers ago my cousin Reuben was going on and on about how he’d seen the ghost of a little girl hovering at the foot of his bed. Said she was wearing a long white shawl and one of those giant hoop skirts like they had back in Lincoln’s day. Knowing Reuben, though, he was just trying to get attention. You got to ask yourself: why would a spirit bother showing itself to him, of all people? He’s a knucklehead. Might as well show itself to a fire hydrant for all the good it’d do.”

Isaac laughs appreciatively. Just then a voice booms out from the projection room. “Rubinstein! I need another marking pencil in here.”

“All right, Morty. I’ll have it for you in a few.” And off he goes, leaving Asher to wander about the theater.

Later on, when the six o’clock showing has started, Isaac goes to get the ticket count from Asher’s mother. But when she opens her mouth to speak, all he can hear is a peculiar crackling noise where her voice should be. He is taken aback. What is going on? He can see the woman smiling at him, with her flawless skin and the cherry-red lipstick that drives the neighborhood boys wild with lust, and he can tell by her expression that as far as she is concerned, nothing is amiss. She speaks to him again. This time he watches her lips move, but it makes no difference. His ears are filled with the same crackling sound as before, a strange ethereal sound that is somehow reminiscent of the snaps and sparks of a great bonfire. Looking around, he cannot fathom the source of the interference. Could it have something to do with the lights on the marquee? He doesn’t think so. He’s heard them sizzle in the rain, and the effect was more like the buzzing of a small bee. What else then? He finds himself seized by an unaccountable sense of dread. What is happening? Has he lost his mind?

Asher’s mother is still peering at him expectantly, and he realizes he needs to explain himself. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Grünbaum,” he says finally. “I’m not feeling too good. My ears are ringing, and I can’t hear what you’re saying. Would you please write it down for me?”

She complies, but not before giving his arm a gentle squeeze. It is such a tender gesture that he nearly breaks down in tears right then.

Back inside, Isaac has to duck into a supply closet so as not to fall apart in front of the patrons. The despair that was kept at bay during his conversation with Asher has now come back with a vengeance, and all he can do is sink to the floor and give himself over to it. He begins to weep uncontrollably. The world, he decides, is too full of horrors. The incident with Asher’s mother is proof enough of that. And yet here he is, fetching pencils and relaying ticket counts instead of accomplishing his objective. What is wrong with him? Has he, like Hamlet, fallen into doubt after postponing a necessary action? He finds he is even having second thoughts about his chosen method. Slitting his wrists, after all, would be a personal act, when what he really wants is to declare his feelings before the entire city in a way that is commensurate with his devotion. He thinks of the other devotees and considers his options.

Contents

A Kiss for a Dead Film Star