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.
The machine won’t take nickels; Stanley’s out of dimes. In a minute he’ll have the attendant break a dollar, but in the meantime there’s one last nickel show left.
The label has worn away, or been removed. The title card just says JULY 4, 1905. Stanley’s nickel falls with a hollow lonely clank.
The first thing he sees is a long black boat, making its way down a broad canal, a massive rollercoaster in the background. That image is quickly replaced by others: camels and pachyderms, a miniature railroad, bathing beauties in bizarre swimsuits, bowler-hatted men and their corseted wives strolling through shaded arcades. Then Stanley spots a familiar sign: ST. MARK’S HOTEL.