What You See in the Dark (20 page)

But in the end, she was stunned at the effect. Sitting in their screening room, never having seen any of the daily rushes, never having seen the rough cut, but now watching the finished film itself—with music!—the Actress hardly recalled that she was witnessing herself. At every sequence, she could remember the Director’s hand guiding her through the moment. Her elevated sensuality in the hotel room with her handsome costar. Her face registering the feeling of being pursued and the fear of being caught as she made her getaway. The shadings in her expression as she reveled in her own conniving and cunning while her character listened to interior voices. Even the angle of her head as she listened over a motel dinner of sandwiches and milk, a woman listening to a story, but matching it to her own, comparing it, her disrupted life not ruined at all, but a shiny thing in her hands once again, renewed.

She had become that woman entirely.

The Actress knew it even as she watched her character sit at a motel room desk, her moment of reckoning coming. In a little notebook, she scribbled out the simplest of subtractions: seven hundred from forty thousand. Something she could have done in her head. But she did it because her character was alone and silent, not even a voice in her head, and the audience in the dark needed to be looking over her shoulder as she began making amends.

She tore up the note, about to throw it in the trash, but then turned to look to the bathroom, as if remembering it as the one place where everything vile gets washed or flushed away, the camera gliding along with her as she moved to that space.

She was framed in the doorway of the bathroom, bending down to the toilet.

The camera showed the toilet, pristine and white, but unsettling somehow, a toilet never having been on the screen before, and she soiled it with the torn-up pieces of her crime and then flushed.

She bent down to lower the lid, stepping over to close the door firmly, looking up as if to make sure it was closed, then took off her robe, her back exposed to the camera.

Off came her slippers one by one, the robe on the toilet haphazard, her bare legs stepping into the clean tub, and the curtain pulled back with a quick rush of metal rings.

The Las Vegas girl bent down—they used her shots after all—her nipples hardly registering through the thick shower curtain, but from up above, the Actress knew, the crew had looked down in hunger.

Now the Actress, facing the side wall of the shower—the shot from the first day of filming—her hands up in anticipation of the water, her hands up as if in ecstatic prayer.

The showerhead looked down at her like a giant eye.

The water warmer now, her face in relief at finally cleansing, nearly two days, remember, without a shower, a Phoenix secretary spending a night in her car out in the desert foothills east of Los Angeles.

Her arms to block her breasts, the soap beginning to lather. She was beginning to understand why the Director asked her to turn slowly to the left. Patiently. Even taking a shower requires technique. You don’t just stand. You turn to wet every
part of the body.
Turn,
he had said. Slowly.
Clean.
She tilted her head back like a ballerina.

It came closer to her, the camera. Her head back like a dancer’s. That’s what she’d been thinking, but what it did was show her neck, offering it up to what was coming.
Keep turning. Slower.

The showerhead, as if observing quietly, the way the crew had, respectful even though they had wanted an eyeful.

Then the camera, as if it had magically sat on the back wall of the shower, more water coming from another nozzle a little above, like a second curtain of water.
Keep turning. Other direction now. Slower.

And there it was. When she had stood in the shower, anticipating. When the body double kept stumbling in too loudly; when they oiled the hinges on the door to a smooth silence. A silhouette coming with a horrific certainty that the Actress herself hadn’t been able to see from her position. A terrible silhouette darkening the frame, the Actress deliberately moving out of the camera’s eye as it closed in on the curtain. The menace of the silhouette terrifying her even now as she watched herself on the screen.

Up there, she turned around from her slow, deliberate dance.

Up there, the camera cut in close as she screamed.

Up there, the camera cut in even closer to just her open mouth.

A silhouette in women’s clothes, and a big butcher knife. Any knife will do in real life—a pocket blade in a street-corner mugging, a sharpened screwdriver in a jail cell. But this was the movies and it had to be a butcher knife.

The knife came at her like a tiger’s paw reaching through a cage, not able to strike, but the illusion was the same.

The silhouette brought the knife up.

What was (or wasn’t) a Las Vegas breast.

From overhead, it was heartbreakingly easy to see how she had nowhere to go, trapped as she was on all sides.

More screaming.
Keep your face in the water. It will force you to shut your eyes.

Her hands over her breasts: an effort to conceal herself, the Actress knew, but now it read like a gesture of futile defense.

Her own open mouth. She hardly remembered screaming that loudly. Or for that long. But the sound editing made it interminable.

Her hands over her breasts: but by this time, no one in the audience would be thinking of breasts.

The silhouette bringing up the knife yet again.

Put up your hands now. All five fingers.

The silhouette, even closer. The head of a monstrous woman.

Her head moving side to side, as if to say no.

The only thing the knife ever cut through was the water.

Her hands up, but nothing to hold on to.

The knife coming through the veil of water even more forcefully, tearing through it as if it were flesh.

No, no.

When you bring down the knife,
he had told the double,
hold it like so. I want to see the glisten of your fingers holding it. I want to see the fingers.

The Las Vegas girl’s naked torso. A dancer turning to her left
to meet the knife at just the tip. Not a breast curve or a pubic hair in sight. Not even blood on the knife.

No, no.

The arm still coming down. The knife in silhouette because by this point it would be dripping in blood. Not even all that water could wash it clean so quickly.

The Las Vegas girl kept turning, her breasts visible to everybody on the set, but on the screen, just the curve.

No, no.
The futility of no.

She’d stood in ketchup, movie paint, and all manner of liquids, the special-effects guys watching how it pooled around her feet, mixed with the water, and here it was. Chocolate syrup—but in black and white, it was a terrible river.

Start dancing. To the right. Slowly.

She sees herself face the back of the shower wall and clenches in her seat as the knife comes down, despite the pantomime.

Her feet turning, the river churning now in deep, horrible color.

I want to see the fingers. Show me the fingers.
She showed them, and there they were, out of focus.

The silhouette exited the bathroom forcefully. An angry, venal exit.

Her hand again, extended like a starfish. And now she saw the power of repetition.

Keep your hand there and turn slowly.
She did so with a look of resignation, her body slumping into the tub.

Reach out. Extend all your fingers.
Hands did everything here: tore up, cleansed, revealed, resisted, murdered. Now it was a single hand, reaching, with nothing for it to hold but
the shower curtain. The Las Vegas girl, her breasts barely in focus.

From overhead, like before, it was easy to see she’d had nowhere to go. Yet it had happened, the way God looks down at everything and lets it happen.

The hooks on the shower curtain popped off in release, twirling around the shower rod, one by one, like dancers releasing their movements in sequence.

She slumped near the toilet, the hardest part of all, the rim of the tub lodged in her ribs.

The showerhead looked down at everything.

The blood streamed down, second by second, the tub being rinsed clean. It spiraled into the drain, disappearing.

And then her own eyes, in a close, tight focus and a slow, painful pullback, trying not to blink. But it had been worth it, her face frozen in the stupor of cruel death, the close-up of her eye. A spiral, a circling. The slow dance in the tub repeating. Such brutality meant erasure, a cold, unblinking eye, a woman lying in a pool of her blood, which was draining away, vanishing. The bathroom in near silence, save the flow of the water, as the camera glided over to a newspaper concealing the stolen money.

The Actress watched the rest of the film in disbelief, terrified at the shock, but strangely satisfied at her last, unblinking appearance, her face registering—for the first time she could remember in a film—that a death meant something. An absence. There was something unsettlingly gorgeous about the slow spiral of her eye, the movement gradually coming to a finish, the way a dance ends.

She wasn’t in the rest of the picture, and yet she was.

At the close of the film, she stood up proudly as the people in the screening room—the other stars, some of the crew, some of the studio people—congratulated one another on a job well done. She knew she had nailed it. A death scene, what every actress wanted. Even if it wasn’t a hospital, a slow and wasting disease.

This had a dark beauty to it. The character worked because of everything that had come before, the suggestion she’d granted to her in the quiet, strange flashes of feeling across her face. The Actress shook more hands, proud, grateful. Might this ever come again, the chance to make a woman out of nothing but words on the page? The woman had to live before she could die. It was as simple as that. Even if it was the vulgarity of real life—the needs and the mistakes, but also the desire to correct them, the effort toward a forgiveness of herself. A woman like that. All those lonely hours. All the things people do to try to escape.

Part Three

Ten

W
hen had she picked up the habit of faithfully reading the
Los Angeles Times
every day? Not the
Californian,
the local newspaper she glanced at while at the kitchen table or in the motel office or swiping down the café counters, but the print from over the Grapevine, the pulse of the large city but a couple of hours away. At the café, Arlene had always been left to clean up the discarded copies of
Modern Screen
and
Look
that the girls left behind, and for a while she took these home with her on the sly, the magazines tucked into a paper bag in case anyone saw her slipping out the door with the very gossip she chastised the girls for believing. And people were watching her, after all. Back then, in the initial days after the news spread about the dead girl and Dan’s involvement with her, Arlene thought she would never live down the heavy stares in the dining area of the café. Arlene volunteered for kitchen cleanup and washed dishes and bused tables, kept herself moving, all to avoid those eyes. In the kitchen’s break area, she swept up the girls’ cigarette butts and candy wrappers and, at first, stacked the magazines neatly in a corner. As the months went on, Arlene found her voice again—the stern, somewhat
prickly voice she was capable of—and when the girls found the magazines gone one day, none of them dared ask what might have happened to them.

The pleasure she took in the magazines, she knew, was nothing but escape, yet maybe for the first time, sitting in the armchair of her living room, flipping through the pages of a
Photoplay,
Arlene knew what the girls of the café might be dreaming about, why they were moved by picture after picture of movie stars posed with one leg pivoted forward, jewels haloed with gleam. All of this taking place just over the Grapevine, another way to live altogether, the dust giving way to red carpet and camera flash and expensive champagne. Sometimes, in the pictures of the much younger starlets, she could almost see vague semblances of the café girls, similarities so sharp that Arlene felt she, too, could imagine their regret over living in Bakersfield.

The local paper, carrying word of her own real world, appeared on her porch every day and remained there, curled up with its rubber band, yellowing after a few days of going un-collected. She knew what the paper said. She had a life much more regrettable than the café girls did. She stuck to the magazines: perfectly useless information, but a needed distraction from the local news, the chatter that went on in the café as she ran plates under hot water. What ran in the newspaper was not rumor anymore as the days went on. Truth was confirmed. It was true that the girl had no family in town and that there was no one to claim her. It was true that Dan had fled and no trace of him had been found. It was true that he had beaten the girl to death in the dark stairwell leading to her apartment above
the bowling alley. It was true that a Mexican was deported, though everyone knew he had had no involvement in the death whatsoever.

Other things were true as well: Arlene did not know where Dan had gone, though sometimes she felt as if the town didn’t believe her. It was true that the girl was the daughter of a woman who used to work in the café years ago, around the time of the earthquake in 1952, but so much time had passed that people couldn’t even remember where that woman had gone.

Arlene knew what was in the local paper better than anyone else did, yet her eyes never left the glossy movie magazines, seeing the same pictures, the same stars, over and over, as she leafed through the pages day after day. Would the news about Dan ever go away? Would the feeling of being stared at in the café’s serving area ever lessen, the silent accusation? At home, she would pause and put down the movie magazine, close her eyes. But there was no wishing away what she had to face.