Frames Read Free Page A

videocassettes, laser discs, and DVDs, with kitschy likenesses of old-time movie stars and cartoon characters in cloth and porcelain and painted tin on shelves—gifts from well-meaning friends who’d overestimated his interest in vintage cinema culture. He couldn’t spend more than thirty minutes there without becoming claustrophobic, but he had part-time access to a secretary named Ruth and full-time access to Kyle Broadhead, a Film Studies professor whose name appeared in the bibliographies of half the references in Valentino’s office. Broadhead occupied the room across the hall.
     
    But not at present.
     
    Valentino knocked, then opened the door to the little monastic cell, bare of books and bric-a-brac and Broadhead.
     
    “He’s out.”
     
    He turned to face the gray, polished-stone stare of Ruth, forted up behind her desk in the linoleum no-man’s-land that separated the two offices. Every dyed-black hair was in place and sprayed stiff as vinyl, and her expression was unreadable as ever behind its enamel mask of makeup. She resembled Jane Russell circa 1943, put up in brine.
     
    “I can see he’s out,” he said. “He’s never out. Which hospital did they take him to?”
     
    “The fall term began today. He makes it a point to drop in on his classroom the first and last day of the semester.”
     
    He looked at his watch. Third hour had just started. “It’s too much to hope for that they’d wait till fall. I’d settle for the end of August.”
     
    “Since when do you care? You don’t study and you don’t teach.” Which by her standards was the sum total of anyone’s usefulness to academe. She herself attended a course in kickboxing two nights a week.
     
    “Every day we see each other, he asks, ‘What’s new?’, and I say, ‘Nothing much.’ The first time all year I have something worth talking about and he suddenly remembers he’s faculty.”
     
    “Talk to me.”
     
    “Not you, Ms. Buzzkill.”
     
    “What’s that?” Her store of vernacular had closed its doors after Sputnik.
     
    “Someone who stands in front of the Pantages and shouts at the people waiting in line to see The Crying Game, ‘She’s a man!’”
     
    “It was the Pacific, and I was speaking in a normal tone of voice. The fresh kid at the popcorn counter shortchanged me.”
     
    “When Kyle gets in, please tell him I want to talk to him.”
     
    Her telephone rang. She snapped up the receiver. “Power plant.”
     
    Valentino kept his silence and carried it into his private space. He and Broadhead had been trying for years to persuade her to say “Department of Film Preservation” when she answered the phone. It was Ruth’s opinion, frequently expressed, that an electric generator performed a more important service to the community than two grown men sitting around watching movies day after day. Apart from the fact that it was nearly impossible to dismiss an employee with her seniority, they put up with her for her inexhaustible supply of industry gossip. Her sources riddled the clerical departments of all the major studios, and she’d been around town longer than CinemaScope. Not only did Ruth know where all the bodies were buried in Hollywood; she’d helped dig some of the holes.
     
    He opened a computer file and tried to busy himself cataloguing recent acquisitions, but they were mostly documentaries on extinct local flora and home movies of wooden oil derricks on Sepulveda and orange groves in the Valley; subjects of interest mainly to the people who wrote pamphlets for the historical society. He kept pausing to check the clock on the screen, whose second hand seemed to have contracted catatonia. After a glacial age, the door opened without a knock and Kyle Broadhead stuck his big sleepy-looking face into the office.
     
    “Rotten feng shui,” he said, dragging his gaze around the clutter. “You ought to shovel all this crap into a Dumpster.”
     
    “I need the crap. We don’t all of us carry