“Yes.”
“The, uh …” The curator nods at Vikar’s head. “It’s kind of a giveaway.” He says, “The only editor ever to win a prize at Cannes.”
“No one is sure of that.”
“I heard you were directing something of your own.”
“I don’t know.”
The curator looks around his cubicle as if someone else might be listening before he says, “If you weren’t who you are, I wouldn’t consider it. It’s on loan from the Cinématèque in Paris.”
“I promise I’ll be careful.”
“But … what are you looking for?”
93.
Vikar spends the rest of the day poring over the rare footage, and returns the following day.
92.
The curator says, “Did you find it?”
“No,” says Vikar.
“Are you sure it’s there?”
“I was certain.”
“You do know, right,” says the curator, “that this isn’t the real movie?”
“What?”
“It’s not the real movie. It’s an alternate version.”
“But I’ve seen this movie. It was the first movie I ever saw in Los Angeles.”
“Whatever you saw or have ever seen was only a substitute,” the curator answers. “The real movie vanished after it was finished in 1928. It probably had a single screening in Copenhagen, the director Carl Dreyer’s home town, and it may have had a screening in Paris. Then it was burned in a fire, like Joan herself, goes one story. Suppressed by the French government — like Joan herself — goes another story. Lost, anyway. No one knows. So Dreyer assembled another version from out-takes and scraps of footage he had cut from the master copy. Can you imagine? The most powerful film of all time, and it’s made from leftovers.”
“God,” Vikar says, “was destroying the evidence.”
“So maybe what you’re looking for was in the real movie.”
“But this is the one I saw,” Vikar says, pointing at the canisters on the curator’s desk. “Where is the real film?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. It doesn’t exist.”
“No,” Vikar says, “it exists.”
“Well, then, Mr. Jerome, you know something the rest of us don’t.”
91.
Zazi says, “Where are you going?”
“I’ll be back soon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I promise I won’t be gone long.”
“Is this like a work thing or something?”
“It’s like that.”
“A movie thing?”
“It’s like that.” He says, “Come with me.”
“When did this happen?” she says with evident anger. “All of a sudden you’re leaving?”
He says, “When you say it, it sounds like a long time.”
“I can’t go with you. I have gigs, studio time,” she says irritably. She throws up her hands. “Hey, I know I just threw myself into your life. So.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“I know it’s because you promised Mom.”
“That’s not all.”
“Whatever,” she says, and gets up from the kitchen table. There’s no tuna sandwich to throw. She vanishes down the stairs.
“I hate traveling,” Vikar says to the empty living room. “It’s always too far from Hollywood.”
90.
In the Air France terminal, Vikar slumps to sleep just long enough to be awakened by the boarding announcement. Flying overnight, he always feels like he’s not really going anywhere. He sleeps little of the eleven hours. For a reason he doesn’t understand, he finds himself compelled to draw on a sketch pad he bought in the terminal, over and over from memory, a picture of the model church he built at Mather Divinity, which now seems long ago.
89.
At Orly the next afternoon, he realizes he’s never gotten off an airplane when there wasn’t a driver and car to take him where he was supposed to go. Outside the terminal he stands staring at the cabs for ten minutes before he flags one. “Paris,” he says to the cab driver. The cab driver says something back and Vikar keeps saying, “Paris,” and the cab driver keeps arguing with him, gesturing some incomprehension. Finally Vikar says, “Cinématèque Française,” and when the driver still doesn’t understand, Vikar writes it down.
88.
It’s six o’clock before the cab gets into the city. All the streets are round like film reels and all the cars drive in circles. Parked before a large palatial building, the driver says, “Fermé, monsieur.”
“Thank you,” Vikar says, getting out of the cab.
“Monsieur, c’est fermé.”
“All right.” From the sidewalk, Vikar pushes a fistful of American dollars at the driver through the cab window.
“Non, pas de dollars americains,” says the driver. “Francs.”
“Yes, thank you,” says Vikar, waving the dollars. The driver snatches two twenties in exasperation and speeds off, and Vikar turns to circle the building, discovering to his surprise that it’s closed.
87.
Vikar crosses the Trocadero, the Eiffel Tower looming before him. The remnants of an anti-nuclear demonstration line the fountains that tumble toward the Seine. As always, people stare at him until he draws from his coat pocket the cap that he once took to Spain and pulls it down over his head. He crosses the river and the long military field beyond the Eiffel Tower and finds a small hotel where he rents a room. He keeps the cap on. Everyone yells at him about his American dollars.
He’s hungry and has dinner in a small brasserie near the hotel. He identifies what he wants to eat by pointing at the menu and a picture of a ham sandwich on long bread. He orders a vodka tonic; the garçon brings him straight vodka in a tall glass that Vikar drinks immediately, asking for another. On the table next to his, someone has left a small magazine called Pariscope in which Vikar finds a section that he recognizes as a listing of movies. He’s never known of a city that showed so many movies.
86.
It seems like every two blocks is a movie theater. Vikar goes into a tiny one showing an American movie not far from the brasserie. The movie already has begun; the usher who leads Vikar to his seat in the dark lingers after he sits. The usher stands waiting for a full minute while Vikar watches the movie, before finally muttering something and leaving.
In the movie Travis Bickle, who once sat in the Nichols Beach house staring at Vikar and later became a raging boxer, now has become a thirties movie producer named Monroe Stahr. Vikar laughs loudly at the stupid name and people turn to look. This isn’t a comedy, is it? he worries. When Travis Bickle pointed a bloody finger at his head in the form of a gun and cocked his thumb, he blew himself into the next life, a life already in the past: All movies reflect what has not yet happened, all movies anticipate what has already happened. Movies that have not yet happened, have. The movie that Vikar watches now is from a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the uncredited author of The Women with Joan Crawford. The print is the worst Vikar has seen since the first time he saw The Passion of Joan of Arc at the Vista, except this movie is more recent, and after a while he leaves as angrily as the usher he didn’t tip.
85.
Back at his hotel room he’s exhausted but can’t sleep. In the middle of the night he walks around and around the small hotel’s courtyard until the concierge comes out and yells at him; other guests in the hotel watch out their windows. Vikar leaves the hotel and, in the middle of the night, heads back to the Trocadero to wait seven hours until the Cinématèque opens.