What You See in the Dark (23 page)

It took a year from that moment for the freeway to open, in summer 1962.

Talk around the café was about the boom in business along Union Avenue. The freeway fed the street like a vein with Los Angeles traffic. The café bustled, but her motel vacancy rate jumped, more than half the rooms empty, some weekends without a single customer at all. When Arlene began to recognize a set of regulars—truckers who went all the way north to Oregon and Washington State—she suspected that many of them stopped not only out of loyalty and familiarity but out of a bit of pity as well.

She watched as Union Avenue underwent construction to accommodate the new traffic, the buzz in downtown all about the flood of anticipated business. Construction crews busied themselves with roof work, facade restructurings, paint jobs, drills busting up the concrete sidewalks. Arlene wasn’t fooled by any of it. The small dot inside her told her to watch the condition of the vinyl seating in the café, the minuscule rips
becoming long, jagged tears. It told her to watch as the summer season went by and the owner neglected to freshen up the paint. It told her to watch as the pedestrian traffic began to lessen, the cars inching along the street to the far end, where the town had been dazzled by the newer strip malls and a Texaco gas station selling hot dogs. She kept putting breakfast plates on the table, but now news was about heart attacks and strokes, her sturdy men not doing well in the heat like they used to. The tips got smaller, the hands holding the coins a little sheepish about what they were able to put down. She felt the café slip right through the town’s fingers, the way it stopped being the center of anything, and out in the world, the Cubans threatened, but the small dot within her confirmed that this was the inevitability of all things. The world meant nothing because this was the life she had chosen, this space with plate-glass windows from floor to ceiling, which looked more shoddy by the year.

The president was shot and killed in Dallas and the girls in the kitchen hovered around the TV set, their hands on the antenna to bring in the hazy news. The motel got so bad that Arlene took to letting out some of the rooms at the far end to the café girls who got in trouble with a baby but had no man around. The Los Angeles paper gave her news of the boiling race relations in the South. She had dreams of Kennedy, the president smiling at her with enormous, bloody teeth. Slowly, the familiar faces of the farmers began to disappear, more and more of them.

Things change, but she wasn’t ever going to.

Around town, she was known as just Arlene after all.

When she looked up from the counter, eyes away from the newspaper, it was another year gone, another time coming,
the light in the café window sometimes blunt, sometimes wavering, but she was powerless to ever make it appear otherwise.

That was exactly how the years were going to race, now that she had nothing.

You can’t go back in, ma’am
—the voice of the theater concession clerk coming back to mock her.

When she looked up from the counter, it was 1968 and she was fifty-six years old. It was as if she’d never been anybody’s anything.

“Arlene,” said one of the girls during a break. She was the youngest sibling of one of the girls Arlene used to supervise, years ago, but now here was proof yet again of change. Her name was Peggy.

“Are you going to watch Petula Clark next week?” Peggy asked. “Do you like her?” She pointed to a picture in the newspaper.

“I do, actually,” Arlene replied. She peered down to the newspaper and followed the girl’s finger to the article.

“It says they might not air her special because she touched a black man,” the girl said, her voice a little louder than it needed to be, gleeful at how she’d caused the slight head raises from some of the older farmers.

“Oh, now …” Arlene began to read the article. “It’s Harry Belafonte.”

“So why is it such a big deal?”

“You know how people are,” Arlene said, but she read the rest of the article, which told her about local affiliates being left to choose whether to broadcast the event. Inside, she held a quiver of disbelief and anticipation over how angry the show
sponsors had been about Petula Clark touching Harry Bela-fonte, the fine line being walked. What kind of touching was it, these two being so harmless? She continued through the rest of the article and then handed the newspaper back to the girl. “That’s some stuff.”

“Do you think our affiliate will carry it?”

“Of course they will. LA is right over the hill.” She said it as if she traveled right over the Grapevine all the time, as if she knew all about places like Los Angeles and how the big cities had been facing these years of change.

The only time she’d ever been out of Bakersfield was for her honeymoon drive to the coast with Frederick to see the big rock sitting in the middle of Morro Bay.

For the rest of the afternoon, she couldn’t get Petula Clark’s “Downtown” out of her head despite the café’s constant music. She smiled to herself at the song’s foolishness, thinking of Bakersfield’s broad, desolate avenues, its languishing TG&Y with the empty parking lot, its forlorn flower shop across the street. She shook her head at the thought of how much she had liked the song not that long ago, how’d she thought of the song’s promise and invitation.
Dreaming just like my young girls,
she thought, picturing them awkward with a tray of drinks, the way they flirted with the men their age, what they were imagining for a future. It dawned on her that Petula Clark must’ve been singing of some place she had been enraptured by. Enough to write a song about it. Enough to put to words how the act of going to that place lifted her spirits.

Bakersfield was nothing to sing about.

When the Petula Clark show came on the air, it was the first week of April. The weather was warm. She left the front door open so she could hear any trucks pull into the motel parking lot—she didn’t want to have to rise from her chair once the show started. Petula Clark appeared and sang a handful of songs that Arlene vaguely remembered, others she’d never heard at all. The hour ticked by, but still no Harry Belafonte. The parking lot stayed silent. Finally, he loomed on the screen after a commercial break, Petula Clark in the distance, as if wondering whether to approach him. He began to sing in his delicious voice, and she walked toward him, closer and closer, until she stood by him. The paper said that Petula Clark would touch a black man and wondered openly about an uproar in the South, maybe even in other places throughout the United States. Arlene waited for the moment, almost holding her breath.

Quietly, without much fanfare, Petula Clark rested her hand on Harry Belafonte’s arm. She rested it as if she needed to steady herself. Both of them were wearing white clothing: he in a tucked-in sweater and trousers, she in an elegant and tasteful dress. Maybe the clothing was cream-colored—Arlene couldn’t tell because of the fading picture quality of her television set. They sang the rest of the song with Petula’s hand on Harry Belafonte’s arm, and Arlene heard no murmur of audience disapproval. Then she remembered it had been taped to begin with, not live, not an audience watching them. She imagined people in the South turning off their sets, if they had bothered to watch at all. But she knew they watched. It had been all over the news, how a man and a woman who shouldn’t
touch were going to do so. The newspaper didn’t say how they touched, and that was why everyone needed to see it. To see just how much things were changing.

So much time had passed, so many years. And just how were things really changing? She worked in a café that had nowhere to go but into decline. The motel, in the end, was housing a pregnant girl or two, and there wasn’t much she could ever hope for in selling it.

The program ended. Petula Clark did not sing “Downtown,” but Arlene heard a riff of it near the finish. Outside, the parking lot remained quiet. There would be no one coming tonight. When the credits finished rolling, Arlene debated watching the next program to lull her to sleep, but instead she got up from the chair and turned off the TV. She walked out to the porch. She thought of her days as a little girl. All these years. She was fifty-six years old. She put her hand on her elbow, resting it there the way Petula Clark had touched Harry Belafonte. The gesture had meant nothing more than kindness. The gesture reminded her of Vernon, how long it had been now since she’d seen him, and of all the regrets in her life, this was the one that stung the most.

It was all hers, all private, the one thing that no one else had witnessed, all hers to embrace. She knew Vernon would never have spoken about it. His hand on her hand, then on her knee, the calluses, what a hard worker he was. All those years, he’d been a very kind customer, seated at the counter with a comforting regularity. He had meant well by her. He could have spared her what was coming. He’d been a very decent man,
but it was too late, too late. She was standing on a dark porch, just as she had been years ago, waiting for her brother. She tried to think back to the day when everything—everything, everything—had gone wrong, to the day that had led to this moment, but she couldn’t see it. She looked as hard as she could into the dark but she couldn’t see it.

Eleven

H
e settled into his seat and readied for the journey back. His wife read one of the magazines, the type too small for his comfort. The Director was flying back to Los Angeles after a triumph long in coming. He would never admit such a thing to many around him, but he had missed the dazzle of the red carpet: the jewels parading on by, each piece bigger and more expensive than the last, borrowed emeralds nestled on top of a starlet’s breasts. How was it possible that the starlets got more and more beautiful every year? Daffodil chiffon, green silk, a leopard-print shawl. Handsome men in bow ties too uncomfortable after four whiskeys, and the flashbulbs now just a continuous silent sprinkling of light. He missed the old days, the actual pop of the cameras, and the patience of the women making entrances, waiting for the polite photographers to ready themselves, holding their poses as the magazines did the important work of capturing the women’s evening wear. No longer. It was 1972. Everything was much faster, the cameras mirroring exactly what the films themselves had been doing: less posture and key lighting, more spontaneity and room for
the everyday flaw, with anything beautiful rising straight to the surface.

In Cannes, though, he had mostly stood away from the evening red carpets and the buzz of the cameras and had gone, instead, to the morning cafés with their cigarette smoke and their folded newspapers, the magazine writers nursing gin-and-tonic hangovers, readying for their day’s scheduled viewings. The Director could take very little of the pretensions aired at the evening parties, the mood tight with apprehension and handshakes, who was meeting whom. Evenings brought affect, good impressions, boisterous grace, and big smiles, all lining up for another film deal, a possible magazine article, a job. Mornings, though, brought what the Director enjoyed: the quiet, studious cafés adjacent to the hotels, where the cinema writers in their dark glasses clearly recognized him but left him alone to enjoy the windows open to the sea air drifting in. In the morning came the world newspapers, heavy with the reviews of the festival’s previous evening’s screenings, and he enjoyed eavesdropping on those who had a good handle on French or German as they rustled through all the reviews for comparison. He could spend the entire morning there without saying a word, no one disturbing him, eyes on his own news paper, pretending to read but enjoying the two loud British journalists in the corner disagreeing with a review in
Le Soir,
their tones as surly as the publication’s, both of them with fixed ideas of cinema and no room for change.

The Director was grateful for any morning without intrusion, and on days when a cinephile—always a young man—dared to approach his table, he managed to dissuade him with
a sharp, arched look of disapproval. The young men came, like they all did, hoping for a chance to talk to him about the Great Art, but the truth was, he was rarely in much of a mood for such conversations. He was nearing, he knew, the end of a very long career, and his own embrace of change had slowed, his ideas fixed, the difficulty of a new creation more and more daunting. In America, change had come rapidly after the demise of the old penny-pinching studio heads. Too much had changed for those studio heads to follow only their old ways about story and the traditional three-arc narrative. Now there was color to worry about, and saturation to master, and sound overlap to toy with, as well as 65-millimeter handheld cameras, and antireflective optical lenses, and helicopter shots, and automatic zooms—too many tools for even someone like him to get a handle on, to investigate their best uses. And, certainly, too many young mavericks with the willingness to not only try them out but master them, use the tools alone or together in the service of a story that was beyond what had once been acceptable. Things were changing. The old stories seemed like lazy standbys: pickup scripts from the better Broadway shows, or the more successful novels, or the particularly strange human-interest story glanced at by chance in a newspaper during a transatlantic flight just like this one.

When the plane was airborne, the Director settled back into his seat and closed his eyes, trying to sleep. He needed rest after the excitement of his moderate success. A return to form, it was being called, and he tried not to make much of some of the morning articles he’d read, croissant in hand, that stated it was his first unqualified success in twelve years. Twelve years!
Unqualified! He’d done several pictures since then, some television, the money pouring in because of his shrewd handling. He didn’t like this tone, the implied judgment, but he knew its root. What he had accomplished twelve years earlier with a motel shower had been simultaneously a high and a low, both what he could never surpass and what others imitated, a distinct point in the history of the entire form. There, twelve years ago, was a marker. There was the new violence. There was the door to the unthinkable. There was the door to the unmentionable.