What You See in the Dark (12 page)

No one in the carpeted hallway, no maid’s service cart to inspect and memorize in passing, no maid with a downturned look of exhaustion. No one, she began to believe, on the entire
floor. The Actress entered her room and took off her shoes, sitting on the bed to massage her feet. It had been a long morning, and she’d been up so early for the driver to bring her all the way here, only to wait.

A nap would come easy in this silence. She walked over to the door to double-check its lock, and once she was done, she removed her skirt, her blouse, and the constriction of her bra and lay on the bed. She closed her eyes, replaying the conversation she’d had with the driver, regretful of how she had described the role. Could she have told it to him in another way? Would it have mattered? It had been the only moment, really, when the driver had been anything but cordial, kind, respectful, the look that had washed over his face when he realized she would be doing something wrong in this picture. She opened her eyes and rested a hand on her naked breast and sighed. That look on his face. And over a bundle of stolen money. What if she mentioned the detail of the lunchtime tryst in a little hotel room like this one?
I saw the script call for the opening shot to be this woman rolling around luxuriously with her lover. She isn’t wearing a blouse and you can see the hair on his massive chest.
That soft feather downturn of his thumb tip and whether or not he would have done that.

Carter. It could have been, she realized, either a first or a last name.

Because she was alone and no maid was ever going to come down the hallway, and because the door was locked even though she was certain the other rooms had gone unoccupied, the Actress rose from her bed and walked to the mirror and stood in front of it. She stood absolutely still in self-examination, her
reflection cutting off at the waist, so all that was visible to her was her naked torso, her face, her eyes. She had all afternoon, she knew, to stand in front of that mirror in scrutiny, the way empty time manages to hand you nothing but doubt. She had to be convinced it was acceptable to play that first scene in a brassiere, even if the whole theater would have believed a man and a woman being inescapably in love simply because the screen story said so. A whole theater of men looking at her in a brassiere, a whole darkness wanting. She drew her eyes down to her breasts, beautiful and round. Never had she caught the Director looking at them—always at her eyes. Still, she kept thinking of those other actresses, their entrances, their slow-motion kisses, their gowns, their mystery and allure from their first glimpses onward. Maybe it wasn’t much of a role; maybe those other actresses had been approached and had wisely turned it down. The Actress stepped back from the mirror, as far as she could before she reached the opposite wall. She took in the entire image of herself, the doubt as thick as the quiet in the hotel. But she would show them. She would show herself. You don’t just put on a maid’s costume and dust the rooms. You have to know the uncertainty of interaction with guests who couldn’t care less, the ache in your back from bending down to make beds. The Actress was going to play more than a woman who steals money. She was going to play a woman in love, who does something wrong for the sake of it. Her hand on the driver’s a gesture at understanding how it felt to do something illicit, how it felt to draw someone into sin. A woman who was a secretary in a dusty Arizona city. A woman who had a sister who
loved her and would later look for her. A woman with a moral choice, who makes the right one in the end, no matter that the story itself could have cared less what she did or did not do, her little car moving from Phoenix and on westward, the drive so long you’d think she was going to drive off the end of the earth, in a love so deep she was willing to disappear into it without a lingering trace.

Six

F
rom the moment Teresa boarded the pickup, she expected to see Cheno coming up the street, and every figure walking along threatened to be him, only to end up being no one at all that she knew. Dan Watson drove with such leisure that she wondered if he didn’t already suspect that she’d been waiting for someone, and she did her best not to appear nervous, her hands tucked underneath her knees, the guitar resting between them. When they rounded the corner toward her street, she seized at the thought of Cheno waiting at the door, even though it was something he’d never done. The street was bare. The way her pulse raced and eased when she discovered this alarmed her. She was doing nothing wrong.

Dan Watson kept the truck running after Teresa pointed to the green door. “Right there?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “I live above the bowling alley.”

He peered up at the window, the blue curtains hanging. “I didn’t know that was up there.”

She opened the door. “Well, thank you for the ride.”

“You working tomorrow?”

“I am. Today was my day off.” She stepped out of the truck and held the door.

“Can I pick you up for lunch?”

She pressed the guitar against her. “Well …”

“Noon? Is that when Carson lets you off?”

“How do you know I work at the shoe store?” she asked, both astonished and a bit amused.

“Small town,” he said. “How’bout it?”

Something told her that she was supposed to hesitate, but the words bubbled on their own. “I’d like that,” she answered.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Noon it is.” He reached over the bench seat to close the passenger door. “I’ll see you then.”

Teresa scurried up the steps in the dark hallway, and for the remainder of the afternoon she lay on her bed and watched the room tilt from deep yellow to the orange of the west. She kept expecting to hear Cheno’s voice from the street, her windows open to break the heat, but by now she realized he’d been kept at whatever fieldwork he’d been given for the day. Still, she wanted to hear his call, his tiny knock at the foot of the stairs, but as evening came, she thought more and more about Dan Watson and found herself not wanting to see Cheno at all. She let the violet come as her mother had done in the past and didn’t turn on the light. From below, she thought, maybe Cheno would see the dark window and think she’d gone to bed early.

She ate in the dark—a simple dinner of leftover beans heated gently on the stove, and two tortillas. She drew a glass of water from the tap. She thought of Dan sitting down at a table in a
large white house, plates and plates of food, and the silhouettes of his family gathering round.

When even the violet light disappeared, Teresa showered to cool herself off before sleep. She stretched her little radio closer to the edge of her bed, its cord extended as far as possible, and turned on the dial. The face of the radio glowed amber, now the only light in the room. She lay on the bed and listened, irritated by the announcer, but then grateful for his information: he told her the names of the songs and the singers singing them, and each time one caught her attention, Teresa closed her eyes and listened hard. She tried to memorize the words, even though they floated past too quickly, and caught lines here and there when they repeated as a chorus. Men cooed together sweetly, standing behind the one singer as if to help in his pleading: that was how men sang. Songs of pleading and promises, tomorrows, wedding days, and love eternal. All of them in voices so high pitched that they sounded nothing like the men downstairs: they sounded regal, silky, like looking at cigarette smoke but not having to smell it.

Downstairs, she thought she heard the faintest of knocks, and she reached over to turn down the radio. She heard it again, a timid one-two, and then the pause that meant Cheno was waiting, looking up at her window, and wondering if he should knock again.

She wanted to raise herself up on her elbows and look down from the window. He’d come all that way. It was so late. She could feel him waiting. But on the radio, a new song started. It was a man. And all evening, whenever a man sang, she pictured
Dan Watson. If a woman sang, Teresa imagined herself. Even the backup singers had a role, two or three Dan Watsons behind her in complete harmony if the song required it, or sometimes two or three versions of herself, in different-colored cowgirl skirts, with Dan playing a guitar and all three versions of herself reaching out to him from the single microphone.

Downstairs, she could hear Cheno’s footsteps give in to his indecision. Her heart ached for him a bit as she pictured him walking the streets of Bakersfield, dark now, and she lay back down on the bed. Sleep wasn’t going to come tonight, not the way her eyes closed and she saw visions of the pickup truck or the ham-and-butter sandwich Dan had served her or his hands pressing her fingers on the fret board. She reached over and turned up the radio, listening awhile before finally noticing the balance struck by the DJ: sometimes a song would be low and quiet, the love lost, but then a girl group would come up next and chirp like birds about the wonders of a simple smile. They sang as if none of them had ever sat in a dark room with their mothers. They sang as if they always answered the faintest knock at the door from someone too timid to admit his own love. They had voices like sunny mornings, full of a hope so assured it wasn’t really hope anymore.

Could she ever sing like that? She wasn’t sure. But Teresa couldn’t manage the songs of desperation either. She had nothing within her that could match that complete loss of hope. She was alone and she was lonely, but she was not her mother. Could she make it up, imagine that pain? Which song could her mother sing, which one could most truthfully speak to what she carried inside? She wondered how much of one’s life
mattered in giving a song conviction, how much could be heard by a stranger who looked at you knowingly. She closed her eyes and imagined herself singing with Dan. They would have to be, she told herself, happy songs. Unless she thought of Cheno. Then it would be different.

The hours passed and Teresa drifted into sleep, too heavy into it to reach over and turn off the radio. She woke when a ballad came on, so hushed and strange, as if Cheno himself had stolen into the room and started singing for her. Her sleep confused her, this voice and the words being sung. The voice registered defeat and weariness and surrender. She woke enough to picture Cheno and then a whole company of boys she had seen around Bakersfield. The dull, gangly son of the shoe store owner; the two high school boys who rode their bicycles together in the mornings, both of them rail-skinny and sporting thick black glasses. That voice could come out of any one of them in complete sincerity, she thought, but her mind floated back to Cheno.

“That was Ricky Nelson’s hit from last year, ‘Lonesome Town,’” said the announcer at the end of the song, and Teresa thought to reach over and turn off the dial. But she had loved this warm weight brought on by music as she tried to sleep, and she closed her eyes, hoping for another moment like it. She drifted in and out of sleep, at one point hearing a different announcer, with a voice barely a whisper, saying that it was nearly two in the morning, and for a brief moment she dreamed of rising to look out the window to see what Bakersfield would look like at that hour, who else the announcers were keeping awake, the stars above the dark city. That was her at the
window, naked, and the men at the corner grocery store looking up but not whistling, as if seeing her like that at night was a gift they knew they shouldn’t question, just behold.

Morning trucks began coming around four o’clock, only a single engine now and then, but enough to wake her and open her eyes to the sky lightening to indigo. The radio kept playing. By the fourth truck she peered out at the corner to look for Cheno, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and sure enough, she saw him haggling with a driver, his white T-shirt almost glowing in the dawn light. When she saw him jump into the bed of the truck, she watched the brake lights disappear down the road, his head turning back to look at her window, and she wondered if he saw her. She rose soon after and took her time preparing her blouse and skirt for work, making coffee and two slices of toast. She bathed again to get rid of the night’s sweat, dried her hair, and put it up in a bun. It was only seven, still two hours before she had to be at work, but she gathered her purse and descended to the street.

At the foot of her door, as soon as she opened it to the morning, she spotted the little jar. She bent down to pick it up. A Gerber baby-food jar, filled to its brim with toasted pumpkin seeds. She held it in her hand for a moment before placing it in her purse along with her apartment key. It was hardly any weight at all, but she could feel the little jar like a stone in her purse, almost pulsing with Cheno’s long patience at her door the previous night. This wasn’t right, the way she was behaving, and sooner or later, Teresa knew, she would have to say something to Cheno. But what, exactly, when all she knew
was the uncertain fluttering deep in her own throat at every thought of Dan Watson.

She headed to the shoe store in a roundabout way, wondering if she was in love. She lingered by a sale display of laundry detergent, nail polish, and floor wax at the drugstore and found herself dreaming of using them in a large, beautiful home with Dan’s pickup parked in the driveway. Across the street, she was surprised to see the barber shop not only open but busy—she could see the men waiting in chairs, reading the morning paper, and could even hear the soft buzz of a radio report. Married men, all of them, she suspected, maybe even what Dan would turn into later on, and when she thought this, she spied one of the men looking up from his newspaper, his eyes lingering on her.

She walked away from his gaze and went to the record shop down the street. She studied the album covers pasted up against the windows, Elvis Presley and Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra, the black discs hanging down from the ceiling on fish-line, each of them with colorful labels that Teresa regarded as if they were jewels. The logos, the rich colors, even the company names: Chess, Atlantic, Peacock, Imperial, Sun, Decca, Mercury, Capitol, Cadence. Since no one was on the street, Teresa said the names aloud, wanting to hear how grand they sounded, each with its own singularity and suggestion, and she stood there dreaming about which life she’d rather have: one with Dan and the pickup in the driveway, the other where she could arrive at one of those studios in an elegant car, the microphone waiting.