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By eleven on Monday morning, the front windows of Violet Video had fogged along their lower edges, the radiator behind the counter was knocking loudly enough to compete with the television mounted in the corner, and Kit Alvarez had listened to three separate customers explain why Delaney Chase would either be back in Hollywood before summer or never set foot on a film set again. None of them had brought the subject up because of anything new. No magazine interview had appeared over the weekend, no studio had issued a statement, and no photograph had surfaced of Chase boarding a plane out of the Faroes. Her absence had simply lasted long enough to become one of those subjects people could pick up whenever conversation needed somewhere to go. Paula Merrick, who worked for a dental-supply company in Midtown and had rented every Delaney Chase picture Violet carried at least twice, was standing beside the returns counter with her gloves tucked beneath one arm, insisting that nobody walked away from a career like that at thirty unless they intended to make the return spectacular. Mina Cho, who had come in for a Japanese crime film and had somehow been drawn into the debate before reaching the second aisle, wanted to know what evidence supported this beyond Paula's personal dislike of unfinished stories. Kit stayed behind the counter, checking returned tapes and trying not to take a side, though she had already made the mistake of observing that somebody who had voluntarily left Hollywood at her peak might conceivably have meant it. Paula had seized upon that as proof that the shop staff had become defeatist.
The bell above the door rang hard enough to rattle against the glass when Marianne Bell pushed inside with her shoulder, both hands occupied by cardboard cups and a paper bag from the bakery around the corner. A gust of cold air followed her, carrying the smell of wet pavement and cigarettes before the door swung shut. She stopped after two steps, took in Paula, Mina and Kit's expression, and said, "Still?" Kit reached immediately for one of the coffees and answered, "Apparently we have entered the second day of proceedings." Paula objected that the conversation had not continued overnight and therefore could not be called the second day. Mina said that if the same argument resumed with the same participants and no new evidence, it counted. Marianne handed Kit a pastry and began taking off her scarf while Paula appealed to her directly. "You tell her. Chase will be back." Marianne hung her coat behind the counter and said she had been inside the shop for less than thirty seconds and refused to make predictions before coffee. Paula interpreted this not as neutrality but cowardice, which made Kit mutter that Violet Video's customers demanded an unreasonable degree of political courage from people earning retail wages.
The shop had been open barely two years, yet its shelves already carried the softened, slightly overhandled look of a place whose stock was touched more often than it was dusted. Violet occupied a narrow storefront off Christopher Street, deep enough for three long aisles but not quite wide enough for two customers in winter coats to pass one another without negotiation. The left wall began with new releases, gave way to foreign films and ended in documentary. Comedy and drama shared the centre racks. Horror, action and science fiction took the right wall until the shelves curved toward the back, where the categories became increasingly specific and increasingly shaped by the habits of Ruth Kaplan, the owner, who considered any classification system worthwhile only until it inconvenienced somebody. The section customers called "lesbian films" had started as two shelves. By that winter it occupied most of the rear wall, partly because Ruth had expanded the stock and partly because Kit and Marianne had moved into it several films larger chains would have filed elsewhere on the grounds that if two women spent ninety minutes plainly in love, the fact that one of them married a man in the final ten did not somehow render the previous ninety irrelevant.
Near the front window stood the one piece of furniture currently troubling both employees more than Delaney Chase's career. It was a waist-high display rack, empty except for a handwritten card announcing JANUARY in Marianne's neat block letters. December had been easy. They had filled the rack with staff favourites from the previous year, added silver paper stars somebody had rescued from an office party and watched half the selection disappear by the end of the first weekend. October had been horror, November women directors, and February had already been claimed for Black filmmakers after Kit pointed out that Ruth would otherwise remember on February third and try to reorganize the whole shop in an afternoon. January had produced nothing. Ruth, before leaving for Queens to spend several days with her sister, had written MAKE IT INTERESTING across the weekly schedule and underlined interesting twice. Kit thought action films would improve a month already burdened by grey skies and dirty snow. Marianne said eight covers showing people running away from explosions would not constitute curation. Kit had reduced the proposed number of explosions without surrendering the principle.
Marianne took her first drink of coffee, looked at the empty rack and asked whether anything useful had occurred in her absence. Kit said, "International action." Marianne answered no before hearing the rest. "Women in international action," Kit tried. Marianne set her cup down and said that was Delaney Chase with supporting material. Kit objected that there were women in action films other than Delaney Chase. "Yes, and somehow your hand will still end up putting four of hers in the front window." Kit promised three. Paula, still standing at the counter, said six would be more appropriate. Mina told her she was not on staff. Paula said staff clearly needed assistance. Marianne opened the paper bag and pushed one of the pastries toward Mina, who accepted it despite not knowing whether it had been intended for her. Kit watched this happen and said, "That was mine." Marianne pointed out that Kit was already eating hers. "I was planning ahead." Mina tore the pastry in half and returned part of it, which Kit accepted with the solemnity of a negotiated settlement.
The first interruption arrived in the form of an elderly woman named Mrs. D'Angelo, who lived three blocks away and came in every Monday unless the weather was genuinely dangerous. She returned two Italian films in a canvas shopping bag, complained that one had been too dark to see properly, then asked whether they had received anything French "where people don't behave as if happiness is embarrassing." Marianne knew better than to answer quickly. Mrs. D'Angelo's descriptions were precise in emotional terms and nearly useless in all others. Kit began pulling possible titles while Marianne asked whether she wanted something recent. "Not too recent," Mrs. D'Angelo said, as though modernity had an aftertaste. Paula attempted to use the lull to restart the Delaney question with Mina, only for Mrs. D'Angelo to overhear the name and say she had liked Chase better before Hollywood started giving her larger guns. Paula stared at her. "She always had large guns." Mrs. D'Angelo waved this away and followed Marianne toward the foreign shelves.
By half past eleven the shop had developed its normal Monday rhythm, in which ten quiet minutes were followed by a sudden cluster of customers all wanting the counter at once. A student returned a German documentary two days late and apologized so earnestly Kit reduced the fee without telling Marianne. A man in a navy overcoat brought back three action films and claimed the snow had prevented him from returning them on Saturday even though the first flakes had not fallen until Sunday evening. Kit charged him every cent. Two women came in together, went immediately to new releases and disagreed softly but continuously for fifteen minutes before leaving with both films under discussion. A teenage boy spent almost as long in horror, reading every back cover and buying nothing. Through all of it the empty January rack remained beside the window, too conspicuous precisely because everything around it was full.
Once the rush eased, Kit came around the counter carrying six tapes. "I'm trying something," she said, and Marianne, who was entering a membership address into the shop's terminal, looked up long enough to tell her she already disliked it. Kit ignored her and arranged the tapes upright on the rack. The selection was not, on inspection, as Delaney-heavy as Marianne had expected. There was a Hong Kong police thriller, a Soviet adventure picture, an Albanian crime film, a Japanese detective story, an American boxing drama and one Chase film in which she spent a considerable portion of the final act clinging to the outside of a moving truck. Kit stepped back and announced, "People moving." Marianne stared at her. "That's the theme?" Kit said movement was a perfectly respectable theme. Marianne asked why four covers were red. Kit glanced at them as though noticing this for the first time and called it visual coherence. Paula, from the drama aisle, shouted that the Chase film should be in the middle.
A woman browsing documentaries approached, looked at the rack and pulled out the Albanian film. "Is this any good?" she asked. Kit said yes. Marianne, at exactly the same moment, said, "Mostly." They looked at each other. The customer smiled and asked what mostly meant. Marianne explained that the first twenty minutes were excellent, the middle became needlessly complicated and the ending justified staying with it. Kit said that was the definition of good. Marianne said it was the definition of a recommendation requiring caveats. The woman took it anyway, and Kit waited until she was out of earshot before turning toward Marianne with visible satisfaction. Marianne told her one rental did not validate the display. Kit said, "You saw that happen." Marianne began removing the other tapes from the rack while Kit objected that experimental data was being destroyed.
Their disagreements rarely became actual arguments because neither had enough investment in being right to stay angry once the joke wore off. Kit was impatient with categories until she was the one inventing them; Marianne claimed to value orderly shelves but routinely filed films according to the emotional experience she thought customers were seeking. Ruth had hired them months apart and discovered almost immediately that they worked well together because each noticed the kind of customer the other might miss. Kit could talk for twenty minutes with the boys who came in pretending not to care about foreign films and send them home with something subtitled. Marianne remembered who had asked for romances without tragic endings and who could not tolerate violence involving animals. Between them, the shop had developed a culture of recommendations that were personal without being intrusive. Customers would wander in asking for "something strange but not exhausting" or "a comedy where nobody is stupid" and expect an answer.
Shortly after noon, a young woman entered alone and spent several minutes walking the aisles without taking off her coat. Marianne noticed her because she kept picking up cases and returning them almost immediately, a pattern that suggested she was not searching by title. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty, with damp hair tucked behind her ears and a university sweatshirt visible beneath her open coat. Eventually she approached the counter carrying nothing and asked, very quietly, whether they had films in which two women ended up together. Kit glanced toward the rear wall, but Marianne waited because the question had been phrased too carefully to be answered with directions. "Actually together?" the young woman added. "Not where one dies, or they decide it was a mistake, or one of them gets married to somebody else." Marianne smiled, not broadly enough to embarrass her, and said, "Yes. That narrows it in a useful way."
Kit came around the counter and joined them at the back wall. The young woman relaxed a little once they began treating the request as ordinary. Marianne pulled one film and explained that it was slow but genuinely romantic. Kit removed another from the shelf, frowned at the case and put it back, saying the ending technically qualified but only if the viewer was willing to forgive almost everything that came before it. The woman laughed. Soon the three of them were talking in the low, absorbed way Violet encouraged, with Kit and Marianne disagreeing about one title and agreeing instantly on another. The customer admitted she had recently watched a film recommended elsewhere in which the two women spent the entire story moving toward each other only for one to be killed in the final scene. "I was angry for two days," she said. Kit replied that two days sounded restrained. Marianne handed her a tape and said, "Try this one. Nobody gets punished for understanding their own life."
The woman selected four before Marianne reminded her that first-time members could take only two. Her disappointment was immediate enough that Kit laughed gently and helped narrow them down. They chose one lighter film and one more serious, with instructions to return for the others if she liked them. While Marianne set up the membership, the woman asked whether the shop always had this many lesbian films. Kit said it had more every month. Marianne added that if Ruth could find a distributor willing to answer the telephone, she would probably remove another shelf from action and expand again. From across the store Paula called, "Don't touch action," and Kit shouted back that private conversations did not require public comment. The young woman smiled through the entire exchange, and when she left she held the bag with both tapes close against her coat as she stepped into the cold.
For several minutes afterward Marianne remained behind the counter updating paperwork while Kit stood beside the empty January display. The encounter had altered her mood without giving her a theme. She no longer wanted something clever. Most customers did not come to Violet because the staff had clever ideas about arranging plastic cases. They came because Ruth stocked films nobody else bothered to carry, because Marianne remembered what they had liked six months earlier, because Kit would argue enthusiastically over a terrible science-fiction picture without making anyone feel stupid for loving it. The shop's personality existed in accumulations rather than declarations. She looked across the aisles and watched Mrs. D'Angelo emerge with three French films, two of which were almost certainly too recent by her own standards.
Kit began taking titles from shelves without explaining herself. One action picture, one comedy, a Japanese drama, an American documentary, a musical Ruth adored, a lesbian romance, a low-budget thriller and a Soviet film that rented surprisingly often despite a cover so badly designed that Kit had once threatened to redraw it herself. Marianne finished at the counter and came over. "What now?" she asked. Kit said she did not know yet. Marianne inspected the tapes. None seemed to share a genre, director, country or obvious subject. "These are just things people like." Kit nodded. Marianne asked whether that was the theme. "Maybe."
They put the tapes on the rack and stood side by side considering them. The display looked slightly untidy because the cases did not coordinate. One was mostly blue, another yellow, another nearly black. The musical's cover looked cheerful enough to be suspicious. The documentary used plain typography. The lesbian romance had the sort of soft-focus photograph distributors seemed to believe all women wanted. Kit rearranged them twice before Marianne told her she was trying to make randomness symmetrical. Kit said there was no reason randomness had to look bad. Marianne removed one title and replaced it with the Hungarian drama Mrs. D'Angelo had returned that morning. Kit stared at her. "You called that miserable." Marianne said, "She finished it." Kit said that was not the same as endorsement. Marianne replied that finishing a bleak Hungarian film in January demonstrated commitment and deserved recognition.
The Delaney Chase film returned to the rack almost by accident. Paula, who had finally chosen her rentals, discovered there was no Chase title in the new selection and asked whether Kit's entire morning position had collapsed. Kit said she had never proposed a Delaney display. Paula reminded her of the international-action plan. "That was four hours ago. We've evolved." Paula looked at the rack and asked whether evolution required erasing America's greatest living action star. Marianne quietly reached past Kit, took one Chase picture from the action shelf and placed it between the musical and the Soviet drama. Paula nodded with exaggerated dignity. "Balance restored." Kit told her this was why customers should never be permitted legislative power.
By early afternoon the shop had become crowded enough that coats brushed racks whenever people turned. The radiator had made the front half too warm, so Marianne cracked the back office door to move air through. Somebody put a cassette on the small player beneath the counter, keeping the volume low. A pair of regulars arrived carrying bagels and left four behind after discovering neither Kit nor Marianne had eaten lunch. Customers lingered even after choosing films. One conversation about whether a recent musical worked better as spectacle than story spread from two people to five. A man searching for a comedy was eventually persuaded by a stranger to rent a British drama instead. Mina returned because she had forgotten her gloves, stayed fifteen minutes, and left with another film she had not intended to rent. Violet had acquired this quality gradually: people stopped treating the counter as the boundary between staff and customers and began leaning against it as though it belonged in somebody's kitchen.
The January rack started doing what displays were meant to do once everyone stopped discussing it. A woman waiting for her friend picked up the musical and added it to her rentals. A middle-aged man examined the documentary card, asked Marianne one question and took it. The Soviet film went out shortly afterward. Each time a gap appeared, Kit replaced the tape with another copy where one existed or chose something different if it did not. By three, the display was already changing faster than any fixed theme could have survived. Marianne noticed first and said perhaps they should leave the spaces empty as things rented. Kit thought that would make the rack look neglected. "Then replace them with whatever you think belongs," Marianne said. Kit asked whether that was official policy. Marianne said she was not foolish enough to call anything official while Ruth was away.
Mrs. D'Angelo returned to the counter just before leaving and noticed the Delaney case. "I never saw this one," she said. Paula, who for reasons nobody understood had still not left, turned immediately. "Take it." Mrs. D'Angelo read the back. "Is she miserable?" Kit said no. Marianne said not emotionally. Mrs. D'Angelo asked whether Chase survived. Kit assured her she did. "Does everybody else?" Kit hesitated. "Enough people." Mrs. D'Angelo considered that sufficient and exchanged one of the French films she had chosen for the action picture. Paula watched the transaction with such satisfaction that Marianne accused her of taking commission. Paula said she merely supported cultural education.
Once Mrs. D'Angelo had gone, Paula resumed the question that had started the day. "You see? She'll be back." Kit asked how an elderly neighbour renting an old movie demonstrated anything about Delaney Chase's future. Paula said people had not forgotten her. Kit replied that nobody had argued they had. Mina, halfway into her coat again, said perhaps that was why the whole question felt unnecessary. Paula looked at her. Mina explained that if Chase wanted to return she would, and if she wanted to stay in the Faroes she would, while everyone else could continue watching the films already made. "That's very mature," Paula said suspiciously. Mina answered that she was mostly tired of the conversation.
The subject did not disappear, but it softened after that. Delaney became one name among dozens passing through the shop. Somebody asked whether an older action title was worth renting, and Kit said Chase had done the same sort of picture better five years later. A customer looking for films directed by women passed the rack without acknowledging the action star at all. The teenager from earlier returned with his mother and finally rented the horror film he had spent half an hour considering. The television in the corner played silently beneath captions until Marianne switched it off because nobody was watching. Outside the window, daylight became thinner and bluer, the dirty ridges of snow along the curb hardening again as the temperature fell.
Around four thirty Marianne wrote small cards for the display. She disliked printed recommendation cards because they made the shop look like a chain store, so Violet used scraps of white card and black marker. Beneath the musical she wrote, "Better if you let it be silly." Beneath the Hungarian film she wrote, "Give it twenty minutes." Kit took the marker and wrote beneath the documentary, "You will think about this afterward," then frowned because she thought it sounded threatening. Marianne said it was accurate. When Kit reached the Delaney film she paused long enough for Marianne to notice. "No retirement jokes." Kit said she had not been planning one. Marianne watched her continue thinking. "No summer jokes either." Kit sighed and wrote simply, "Still works." Marianne read it and nodded. Neither of them needed to specify whether the comment referred to the movie or its absent star.
A different sort of quiet arrived between five and six, when the after-work rush had not yet begun and the people already inside seemed reluctant to return to the cold. Kit ate one of the abandoned bagels behind the counter. Marianne sat on the stool beside her and flexed her aching feet inside her boots. The January display glowed beside the front window under the track lighting, its collection of unrelated covers looking more natural now that each had a handwritten note beneath it. Kit said, "Ruth is going to ask what the theme is." Marianne answered that they could tell her January. Kit said Ruth would point out that every film in the shop was also available in January. Marianne took a bite of Kit's bagel without asking and suggested they tell Ruth the theme was whatever people felt like watching when it was thirty degrees outside. Kit considered this. "Too long for the sign." Marianne said the sign already said January and did not need improving.
The evening rush began with a group of four friends who entered together and immediately split across the shop. Two went toward comedy, one disappeared into foreign films and the fourth stood at the counter asking Kit whether a film she could not name had arrived yet. The description involved a woman with short hair, a train platform and possibly Greece, although she was not sure about Greece. Kit and Marianne began working through possibilities while the other three friends shouted increasingly unhelpful details from different aisles. A regular returned six tapes at once and apologized for monopolising the slot. The telephone rang. Somebody wanted to know whether Violet had a copy of a documentary that had aired on public television. For twenty minutes the shop became too busy for anybody to think about displays, retirements or the cultural meaning of January.
When it eased again, Kit noticed an empty space on the rack where the Delaney Chase tape had been. She checked behind the neighbouring cases in case somebody had moved it, then looked toward the counter. "Did you rent Delaney?" Marianne was checking the ledger and asked which one. Kit gave her the title. Marianne ran her finger down the recent entries and found it. A woman named Eileen Harper had taken it twenty minutes earlier along with a comedy. Neither of them remembered speaking to her about Chase. Kit stared at the empty slot with unexpected satisfaction. Marianne saw her expression and warned, "Don't." Kit said she had not said anything. Marianne replied that her face had.
Kit went to the action section for another copy and found none. The remaining one was already out. She stood looking at the gap in the row, then moved the neighbouring cases closer together. For months people had spoken about Delaney Chase as though absence were a vacuum that needed explaining. Magazines speculated. Customers predicted. Paula constructed imagined return dates. Yet here were the films continuing their ordinary circulation, carried home under people's arms with Chinese takeout or groceries, watched on couches, paused for phone calls, rewound before bed and brought back to Violet two or three days later. Whatever Chase herself was doing across the Atlantic, her disappearance from Hollywood had not made the work disappear with her.
Kit returned to the front rack holding a completely different film, a small independent comedy set in Brooklyn. Marianne looked at it and asked what connection it had to the rest. "None," Kit said. She placed it where Delaney had been. Marianne studied the rack, then slid the Hungarian film an inch to the right so the cases were evenly spaced. "Looks better." Kit accused her of making randomness symmetrical again. Marianne said somebody had to maintain standards.
Paula returned just before seven. Kit stared as the bell rang and said, "No. You have already been here for most of your natural life." Paula held up her hands. "Forgot my wallet." Marianne pointed out that Paula had paid earlier. Paula said she had two wallets. Kit asked why. Paula refused to explain and went toward the drama shelves, where she had apparently set the second one down while arguing with Mina. On her way back she stopped at the display and immediately noticed the missing Delaney film. "Someone rented it?" Kit said yes. Paula looked delighted. "Summer." Kit told her one rental did not constitute a studio contract. Paula put on her gloves and said, "You'll see." Marianne asked what happened if summer arrived and Chase remained in the Faroes. Paula considered this while buttoning her coat. "Then autumn." She left before either employee could answer.
The bell settled behind her, and Marianne began laughing first. Kit tried to maintain irritation for perhaps three seconds before joining her. The laughter was quieter than the conversations that had filled the shop all day, partly from tiredness and partly because Paula's confidence had become too familiar to resist. Marianne wiped beneath one eye and said, "She'll still be saying it in 1995." Kit answered that by then Paula would have moved the date to Christmas. They returned to work before either could develop the joke into another argument.
Closing took longer in winter because everybody seemed to arrive during the final half hour. A couple came in at seven forty-five insisting they knew exactly what they wanted and then spent twenty minutes browsing. A young man returned a tape at seven fifty-eight and apologized through the closing door. When Kit finally turned the sign to CLOSED and locked it, the shop seemed to exhale. Without customers, smaller sounds became noticeable: the humming refrigerator beneath the counter, the radiator ticking as it cooled, traffic hissing through wet streets outside, the soft plastic clack of cases being returned to shelves. Marianne counted the register while Kit took a stack of returns and started at the rear wall.
The shop changed character after hours. During the day the narrow aisles could feel crowded, but empty they seemed unexpectedly long. Thousands of tapes stood shoulder to shoulder under fluorescent light, each one temporarily reduced to a coloured spine and a title. Kit moved through them steadily, checking numbers, sliding cases into the gaps customers had created. At action she reached the place where the rented Delaney film belonged and paused over the empty slot. The absence no longer suggested anything larger to her than a customer currently had it. Tomorrow another person might return another Chase picture. Next week Mrs. D'Angelo might complain that the truck sequence was ridiculous. By June Paula might still be predicting an imminent comeback. None of that required resolution tonight.
Marianne came up the aisle carrying the handwritten JANUARY card. "I fixed it," she said. Kit looked at the card and saw that Marianne had added two words beneath the month in smaller letters: AT VIOLET. Kit considered it. "That's not a theme." Marianne said, "Good." Together they returned to the front and placed it above the rack. The display beneath had changed several times since morning and would change again tomorrow as films went out and came back. The Hungarian drama sat beside the musical, the Brooklyn comedy beside a Japanese detective picture, a lesbian romance beside a documentary whose cover looked as though it had been designed in ten minutes. Nothing matched except the fact that somebody in the shop had wanted each one there.
They switched off the rear lights first, then the aisle lights, leaving only the front window illuminated while they put on coats and scarves. From the pavement, anybody passing could still see the cases beneath the small handwritten card. Kit stood beside Marianne for a moment before turning off the final interior lamp. Across the street, windows glowed above shops already closed for the night. Somewhere farther down the block a taxi horn sounded, followed by a burst of laughter from people Kit could not see. January remained cold, grey and inconvenient, with no particular meaning available to rescue it.
Marianne checked the lock once after they stepped outside. Kit pulled her coat tighter and looked through the window at the display. The shop no longer seemed to require a better explanation than the one they had finally given it. Tomorrow people would come in, disagree, choose badly, change their minds, ask for impossible recommendations and take the films home anyway. The rack would lose titles and gain others until the month ended. Kit started walking beside Marianne toward the corner, leaving Violet glowing behind them with its ordinary assortment of stories waiting for morning.