What You See in the Dark Page 15

  The Actress had studied the sequence carefully. The Director clarified once again the number of camera setups, the lighting changes, even the position of the crew. Already it occurred to her that it would take an enormous amount of time between setups: a glitch in the opening, once her hair was already wet, would require the hairdresser’s blow-dryer at the very least. She flipped through the storyboards with a measured, silent alarm, moving past the issue of having to disrobe in front of the crew: she was going to have to be in that state continuously, always reaching for cover whenever the camera stopped rolling.

  Last week, there’d been difficulties with the initial set design, a plumbing flaw with the drain and a lack of warm water, clearly frustrating the Director, and it was then that she understood just how attuned he was planning to be to the specificity of his mind’s eye, and she thought—of all things—of a painter setting a bowl of fruit on a sunlit windowsill, sketching quickly to catch the shadow of pear against orange, the shallow depth of the bowl, before the sun interrupted the composition.

  How fleeting it would all be. She removed her robe and waited for the first of the difficult shots involving water: unwrapping the bar of soap and turning on the showerhead. There she is, finally admitting to her wrongdoing in her own mind, and she’s rinsing all of the bad thoughts away. This was what she was meant to convey, but the Actress stared at the unwrapped bar of soap sitting on the edge of the tub, doubting if she could ascribe that much meaning to such a banal act. It seemed ludicrous to her now, standing in her moleskin covering and bikini bottom, to be acting, almost impossible, given the number of eyes on her. More and more, the Director had told her, mentioning Europe and its realism, the shedding of the American style of artifice, and the ever-closer tilt to the vulgarity of everyday life. Goose pimples broke out on her arms when she thought of the water, praying it would come out warm.

  The action started and she stepped into the tub with complete faith, the way she would enter an elevator in a tall building and trust the cables to bring her safely down the heights. The camera was positioned just below where the showerhead would be. She pulled back the curtain and bent down to pick up the soap from the ledge, unwrapping it carefully, trying not to be distracted by the microphone near her hands, off camera, capturing the sound of the paper. All eyes were on the task at hand, but still she felt their intrusion, the many hours she would be standing like this in front of them. She turned on the water, a small, almost involuntary grimace as it poured out, a little chilly but not especially cold, and she let it run on her face for as long as she could before the Director called cut, her hands immediately reaching out for a towel, the wardrobe mistress ready with a dry robe in her hand.

  All that for a mere couple of seconds of film at best. She sat to wait as the back breakaway wall of the shower stall was removed from its sturdy hinges by the grips. The Actress asked for a towel to dry her hair, but the wardrobe mistress shook her head, the next shot appearing imminent. The camera was repositioned where the back wall had once been, as if looking out to the bathroom door, and when it became clear that the shot setup was going to take some time, the wardrobe mistress finally produced a towel and let out a sigh, the look on her face that of a noticeable need for a cigarette.

  The Actress waited, listening to the proceedings and trying to stay alert to help the Director move quickly if he called her to her spot. She saw what they were busy arranging: the camera would face the bathroom door, so it was a matter of light and shadow, not just the blinding surface of a shower wall. The set decorators were on hand with a batch of shower curtains of varying opacity. The curtain was pulled to and fro as the lights waxed and dimmed, the Director shaking his head at what he could and could not see. He called out to her. “I just need to see you in this spot here,” he said, pointing, and she rose from her seat, her back hurting already from not even a half morning of doing nothing but waiting. She stood in her spot as directed, her warm robe pulled around, the men arguing over the finer shadings of her light.

  At ten, another woman came in and sat quietly in a chair. She, too, wore a robe, but already the Actress knew she had no clothing on underneath—no bathing suit, no moleskin coverings, no bikini. The other woman sat without saying a word, her time being paid for, though it seemed today her services might not be required. Even though she had a robe on, anyone could see she was endowed with a magnificent pair of breasts, hips curved for a Las Vegas floor show, yet she sat in the chair reading a Marguerite Duras novel in French without once glancing up to meet the eyes of the crew, who stole quick glances and grinned at each other.

  Not fifteen minutes later, another woman appeared, this one tall and thin, accompanied by more people from wardrobe, a scattering of props on hand while the Director guided the talk about the lighting. The Actress observed them as they positioned the tall actress at the frame of the bathroom door, silhouetting her, discussing the width of her shoulders, the shape of the wig, the appearance of the knife in her hand. For the rest of the morning, the Actress and the Las Vegas starlet sat in their identical chairs, the nuances of the lighting details becoming so particular and technical that they hardly made sense anymore. For the rest of the morning, it was the tall, thin woman who received the direction, who was guided in how to raise the knife menacingly, who was urged to slow down her entrance through the door, even though she was nothing but a shadow.

  Finally, when they were ready to shoot again, the Director called for the Actress, and it occurred to her that even the pivotal scene of turning to face her surprising demise was not yet in the cards. It was merely the entrance of the silhouette. “Can we run the water a little bit, just to warm it up?” she asked, and one of the crew answered politely that it was hardly going to get much warmer. Still, they ran the water some, the Director asking her to keep her right arm close to her body as she rinsed, to conceal the shape of her breast from the camera as best she could.

  By this time her hair had dried, and the Actress wondered to herself about just how wet her hair had been in the previous shot. She stood with her face under the tepid water for as long as she could before raising her arms, involuntarily, to run her fingers through her hair.

  “Cut right there,” the Director said. And though everyone could hear him, the Actress felt he whispered what he said next. “I could see the shape of your breast. Keep your right arm down and use the left if you must, but keep the right one down, elbow in.”

  “Hair?” asked the stylist. “Do you need it dry again?”

  “No, just go as is. As if you’ve been under the nozzle for several moments,” he said to the Actress, and the camera rolled again.

  This time, the Actress monitored her right arm, the feeling like a constriction. Suddenly the bathroom set seemed oppressively contained, the physicality of the scene becoming like a series of dance steps to be practiced, rehearsed, and replicated with supreme precision. She rinsed her hair, her body contained, but her face registering what it was supposed to.

  “Cut. Stop there. Your entrance,” he said, before the Actress realized he was speaking to the tall, thin woman. “Open the door, but pause before you enter. Don’t rush through.”

  The water was still running and the Actress stood as far away from the stream as she could. It was getting cold.

  “Again,” the Director said, motioning them all to start. She stood back in the shower stream, her eyes closed serenely against the water, realizing she wasn’t playing the part at the moment, but no matter. She just wanted to hear the sound of the curtain being pulled, but the seconds dragged on. Even before the Director called out for a cut, she knew something had gone wrong.

  Something about the lighting was displeasing the Director, and the wardrobe mistress motioned to the Actress to get out of the shower. The water was turned off, the set becoming quiet as the Director conferred with the men around him, until finally he said, a little dejectedly, “Early lunch. One hour.”

  Half a day and hardly anything burned onto film just yet.
Over a sandwich and a cup of coffee, the Actress studied the script again, turning to the pages that described the shower scene, but then she pushed the whole thing aside. For all its audacity, this was a technical exercise, and all she had in her head about this woman’s vulnerability, her moment of surprise, and her terror was now revealing itself to be almost irrelevant. When the scream came, it needn’t be done with an eye to its believability, but to its function, how she looked when she did it, if her face was in focus, how she carried her scream over the sound of the water falling in the echo of the shower. On the one hand, yes, it was a moment that she knew was different from other movie deaths. It was real carnage, not an actor going down in an elegant ballet, clutching his stomach, his face grimaced in perfect pain. In her teenage days back in the Valley, sneaking into movies midway through a screening, she’d seen gangsters fall majestically in a rain of bullets, women screaming bug-eyed at a movie monster and raising their hands like museum statues. But for this scene, something else was at work, and even the Director’s explanations and his revelations on the storyboards hadn’t been enough for her to realize what he was doing until she had come into the middle of the action. It was now a measure of camera angles, how water appeared on the screen, the height of the shot, the overheads, the sound—her body as a prop—and she finished her coffee and sandwich and reported back to the set a little early, readying herself to be used as needed.

  All afternoon, they worked with slow precision. The Las Vegas girl stood in the shower completely nude, and a different shower curtain, a little more opaque, was hung up to conceal her nipples. Lens condensation corrupted a couple of the shots when the shower ran too long, and they had to start over. The back wall of the shower jammed in place and the grips finally muscled it out, their dirty fingerprints wiped away from the edges to maintain the illusion of a bathroom so pristine it gleamed. The warm water ran out and they had to wait awhile to let the tanks reheat. The Las Vegas girl took to sitting topless so much that even the crew stopped noticing.

  The next day, it was the same thing. A new girl, equally curvy and coached to be more demure when off camera, came in as a replacement. More camera setups, failed takes, mole-skin applications, arms over breasts with the back almost to the camera but not quite. Sometimes it was the new girl in the tub, doing exactly as she was told while a camera shot from overhead, keeping her head down as much as she could so there was never a possibility of noticing she was a stand-in. She dried off and quickly robed, paper cup of coffee in hand, watching the proceedings. The screaming was easily done, only a couple of takes because the editing would take care of the rest, and all the thinking the Actress had done about the moment of this young woman’s death was really for naught. What was more important was how the woman walked into the bathroom, what she was doing right before, the casual way she went about making a grand decision in her life, her effort to change course, and how the certainty of that decision was going to be silently clear to the audience: this was a changed woman, and she was doing the right thing. She was good enough to be forgiven.

  It took seven days to shoot the scene, almost as long as it had taken to shoot the preceding drama, and with the holidays so near at hand, the pressure to finish fell heavy on the set. Who knew it was going to be so demanding? But it wasn’t the time involved—it was the physicality and trusting that the Director could see what he needed to see. It was the appearance of nakedness without being naked, hard as it was to tilt her body away from the camera when, right out of the corner of her eye, she could always see a voluptuous pair of Las Vegas breasts at the ready.

  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 stre
et-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.