What You See in the Dark (24 page)

To be fair, this was said all the time. Five years ago, the handsome Warren Beatty had traded in his own shiny stardom for the crude mask of a criminal, shooting his way into the psyche of an audience who had forever wanted him in only minor variations of the cad, the suave suitor. A year later, Frank Sinatra’s wife cut off all of her hair and headlined as a woman raped by Satan himself. Someone had the nerve to show full blood in the chaos of a gangster shoot-out! Someone had the nerve to show the devil’s eyes! The line could be pushed forward without end, what the human eye could possibly witness without turning away, and already he felt far away from the moment when he had made such a mark. Could he ever make one again?

There was going to be an end point to all these visual high-bars. The Americans—they always crossed the line, not knowing when to stop. They saw no poetry in taking the strange road into the desert, hesitating to go any further. The Director recalled talks in the French cafés about Rossellini and how the Americans devoured the man’s personal indiscretions with Ingrid Bergman, as if the man had never captured the city of
Rome at its most desolate and crumbling, his camera swooping into place to order all the chaos with nothing but the vigor of story. Could the Americans ever have pulled off that kind of realism? Could they have offered an elegant answer to Anna Magnani’s frantic run in the street, chasing the military truck that had carted off her fiancé, her arm raised in a futile gesture to halt? The Americans didn’t have an actress who could have tumbled in the street at the sound of machine-gun fire. They had body doubles to save the million-dollar legs.

The Director was heading home to Los Angeles, but he knew that once he returned to the States, the great glow of this recent public appearance would quickly fade. The Americans looked at nothing but surface. He had no big stars this time around, his radiant blonds not in place. What would the Americans do with nothing glamorous to look at? This was why they were so good at those CinemaScope films, made to combat the lure of the home television sets, even if the screen held only wide, long landscape shots without a human being in sight. The Americans were good at lineups of Broadway dancers with legs kicking across the screen. They were exceptional at Bible stories acted out in tony British accents and couture costumes, or star vehicles with exquisite set design but not much of a script. They were good at hookers with hearts of gold. They were good at buckshot violence and bullet sprays, two-bit actors falling in familiar agony. At one time, even the Director would admit, they had been the best at women’s pictures, never enough ways for a woman to quiver at the hell of keeping the secret of an illegitimate child close to her heart, all the while weeping.

The problem with the Americans was that they had had no
idea what to do with the violence since he’d given them permission, in his mind, to start filming it with his own bravura take, twelve years earlier. The Americans were always good at dying, but not death. Good at plot, but not fatalism. Good at cowboys shot down from the backs of horses, but not the finality of writhing in the dust. Good at the cars roaring lustily into each other as if no one were in them, but not the full horror of a body hurtling into the rigidity of the steering column. Good at the beautiful Radcliffe heroine succumbing to cancer in her bed, but not the ugly business of the night nurse wiping her clean at two in the morning.

What they didn’t know was that you take the little glimmer of the truth of death when you see it, and then have the nerve to give it light.

Like Gene Hackman being lured into the dark, dangerous silence of an abandoned warehouse, gun drawn in both fear and stubborn will, and the audience left in unfulfilled suspense.

Like the dance marathon contestant, played by Jane Fonda, shot in the head while standing on a California pier, yet falling in a field of tall grass.

Like the wondrous Altman western, with Warren Beatty again, the outlaw fatally wounded in the deepening snow.

Or like the Coppola picture he’d screened only two months ago, a man shot bullet dead center in the head, the bullet continuing its travel to shatter the window in the background. As real bullets must, the force they carry not to be impeded.

He’d seen how an audience rustled in the dark when they responded to a moment like this. He liked the feeling of unease, of excitement, of repulsion, the terrific jolt he received from
knowing he had created an image that provoked people. In this film, he knew he had such a sequence. But even he had been astounded by the response.

The film had been slated to screen out of competition. The Director had, at most, modest expectations. The setting was not America, but London. There were no American stars, only Brits. The film had a washed-out color to it, an unfamiliarity. Gone were the actresses with the stylized wardrobes. Gone were the actresses as gorgeous centerpieces. Gone were the days when he could get away with suggesting the menace of violence. Now everyone had to see it. He was over seventy years old, and some people in the audience thought the Director had lost his sure hand when they witnessed the vulgarity of a rape, the pink bud of a nipple being loosened from behind a bra cup. They sat in silence as the killer removed his necktie to strangle his victim. That would have been enough in the old days, the hand on the necktie, the audience already aware that a man was wandering the streets of London strangling women. But this was no longer the old days. Some people groaned at the extended scene of the woman’s struggle, her fingers panicked at the tightening around her neck. Some people groaned at its excess. Some people groaned at the time in which they were all living, how even someone like the Director had little choice but to cave in to such unthinkable images. A woman’s violated breast. A stretch of spittle from a dead woman’s gaping mouth.

But later in the film, something different happened. Another death was coming. The audience knew. There was no suspense. It was coming, like seeing two cars careering into
an intersection with no way for either to slow down. There she was, the woman. By this point, the audience knew what women were for. She wore an ordinary dress, orange with white buttons, nothing glamorous like the one some people in the audience remembered Grace Kelly wearing—ice blue satin. She carried a white bag and stormed out of a pub, only to be met unexpectedly by the killer. He was a charmer. They walked together through the bustle of Covent Garden, passersby hauling flowers and sacks of vegetables. The killer lured her easily to his flat. They walked there together. They climbed the red-carpeted stairs, her white shoes and the give of the carpet. The audience knew what was going to happen in that room, but the camera stopped on the landing. It stopped on the landing and watched the woman enter, the killer following behind. The camera did not move. The audience noticed. The camera stayed as if to watch, then began a slow reversal down the steps. The camera looked away from the door. The camera caught the deep red floral pattern of the cheap curtains on the landing window. It caught the zigzag of the fire escape of the building across the way. It caught the quiet of the stairwell, no one hearing what was going on upstairs. It caught the gradual descent into the empty, lonely hallway, then the slow exit to the street, to the bustle of the everyday, the trundling wheelbarrows, the footsteps, the trucks loaded with produce, the vegetable sacks being lugged over shoulders, the street so noisy and the window up above where everything terrible was happening but need not be shown.

In his airplane seat, the Director floated halfway between a mild nap and the fluttering of his eyes, fully awake to the
world, but he remained in the magic of the audience’s response to the long sequence, a standing ovation right in the middle of his film. All the papers made mention of the moment. They cheered his restraint, his elegant answer to prurience, as much as they cheered his return, as if acknowledging how much they’d taken for granted his enormous skill and grandeur, the great pleasure he had given them. Back in the world of the airplane, the lights low, his wife turning the pages of her magazine, his mind refused to leave that space where the applause deafened and would not yield, and he let himself drown in the cascade of acclaim. There was no star in the sequence, no blond arching to reach for a pair of scissors, no blond in a fitted pea green jacket fending off an attack of crows. Just the camera on the landing. Just him.

He opened his eyes for a moment and caught the stewardess in first class observing him. Her eyes made as if to shift away, but then she moved forward, smiling, as if to check whether he needed something. He needed nothing. He closed his eyes once more, and soon enough he was back in the audience, enjoying its echo, the shouts of approval, the keen embrace of complete adoration.

Twelve

T
he ring on your finger means a beginning is coming, but also an end. This is the aim in this town, to get a ring on the finger, to be ushered past the white fence and the rich red roses, to be pulled out of the rain. To step into a church and then step out of it, back out into the Bakersfield sunshine, but not alone, and all around are people who have joined themselves to others in the same way. The ring means you’ll be a wife, and the clean-cut boy who presented it has already promised you will no longer have to work in the shoe store. A beginning, but an end. No more toiling for Mr. Carson, no more long hours in the hot stuffiness of the store’s back room. A wife need not work. A wife gets a bouquet of promises: devotion, security, honor, hard work from her husband’s hands. The clean-cut boy wants no wife of his working, and this satisfies you. You have deserved this all along.

But the ring also means no more being the center. No more being able to lean toward the women patrons when they come not to try on shoes but to gossip, to let you in on whatever rumor floats around town.

In December, in early January, after the girl was murdered, the clientele had come in droves. Mr. Carson had pursed his lips at the women who arrived in the shop, who hardly even glanced at the merchandise, didn’t even bother to pretend. He stuffed his face with danish to keep himself from speaking out, not wanting to chastise his best customers at the height of the holiday buying season, but he bristled at the same thing you bristled at: the lack of decorum in these ladies, their visible thirst for word about that girl, the way they looked at the heavy curtain leading to the back room of the shop, as if tracing her steps would tell them everything they wanted to know about her. You wanted to point out the inexpensive black flats that the girl liked to wear—
These, right here,
you wanted to tell them—knowing the ladies in the group would feel a proximity to that girl just by the weight of her shoes, the smallest detail budding into significance.

But what could you have said to them? What did you know? You saw nothing. You weren’t there. You weren’t in her shoes.

“She was such a quiet girl,” you told them. This was true, but you didn’t want to tell them much more than that.

The ladies all knew about Dan Watson. Their feigned expressions of surprise didn’t convince you. They knew his mother from the town café, but his mother wasn’t in his swagger. His good mother wasn’t in the way he stepped out of his truck, cocked his hips as he lit a cigarette, waiting to cross the street. You know they had all looked at him with longing. He was no clean-cut boy like your soon-to-be husband, no straight line across the back of his neck from a dutiful Monday-morning haircut.

Actions like that should surprise no one. All around town, if people had only put their heads together, done the hard work of separating rumor from truth, of confirming what had been seen and not heard, nothing should have surprised anyone.

You didn’t tell these ladies much, no, not in December in the early days of the shock, and not in January, when it felt as if it might be best to toss out an observation, like a coin into a pool of water, just to see the ripples. But then the ring changed everything, and with it came a promise that you would be able to put all such ugliness to rest, never again having to step into Mr. Carson’s store, not one more reminder of that girl, living and breathing as she once was, coming around to haunt you. Marriage was coming for you, and with it would come a startling privacy, you nested in your brand-new home, guarding the things you learned about the family you would be married into: your husband-to-be the middle brother of three boys, the other two living in suspicious bachelorhood.

Marriage was going to save you from having to say anything at all to these ladies. You didn’t tell them about the last time you had been escorted to Las Cuatro Copas, your boyfriend eager to see what all the fuss had been about, those illustrations in the town newspaper and the drive-in shut down for the winter. If the murder hadn’t happened, perhaps you would’ve been able to make small talk about the crudeness of the cantina, the unsavory mixing of whites and Mexicans and how maybe Bakersfield shouldn’t be allowing such a thing. Or maybe you would’ve complimented the cheap but delicious taquitos served up by that girl, who looked only at your boyfriend, not willing to look you in the eye, not willing to acknowledge
that she needed another job, that she even knew you. But you wouldn’t tell the women that—you’d tell them only about the cheap food, point to this as perhaps one of the reasons the night was such a weekly success. None of you would admit that it was really about Dan Watson up onstage. None of you would admit that it was the way that girl sang, the way her head turned to look at Dan Watson while she held a long note. The little storm he created inside her pushed to get out: you could all see it, how he was teaching her to sing, to let go of whatever caught in her throat. He shaped the thrust of her shoulder when she stood sideways to the audience, hand on the microphone, all those men looking at her. The more she sang, the more comfortable she became with their looking, the more she wanted their looks.

To say you saw this would mean you envied her. To say you saw this would mean you, too, looked at Dan Watson.