What You See in the Dark Read online

  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

  When 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 p
ut down the movie magazine, close her eyes. But there was no wishing away what she had to face.

  “You’re faster than the young girls,” the new shift manager had said, almost two months after Arlene had taken to volunteering to do anything that would keep her in the kitchen. “I need you back out front.” The shift manager was in his late twenties, but respectful of her. Without prompting, he called her Arlene and not Mrs. Watson. Arlene liked this about him, as if he wanted to let her know that he didn’t think of her as anyone’s mother.

  His voice was fraught with his own need for help, but she could still detect the kindness underneath it. “Those girls,” he said, “are too slow to handle anything all by themselves.”

  At first, put back full-time at the front of the café, Arlene felt on display, charging briskly by customers without saying a word, aware of the large plate-glass windows and the people walking by, maybe staring inside at the woman who worked there. Her fingers trembled sometimes from nerves, jittery in anticipation of the arrival of the police, coming to break the news of how they’d captured Dan. The deputy who used to come in daily for a grilled cheese, home fries, and a cola stopped doing so, as if to spare her the discomfort. It was like that for a while—all jitters, forks slipping out of her fingers, one time being spooked so badly by the glimpse through the plate glass of a Bakersfield officer coming along the sidewalk that Arlene dropped a whole tray full of dirty dishes.

  But things change. She had always told herself that on particularly difficult days. Things change. People would forget. People would find other things to whisper about. Who whispered now about her husband having left her? Who even remembered? Most of the bachelor farmers who used to give her the eye and the sweet talk stopped doing so, their heads dropped over their plates as soon as breakfast came. That had to do, she knew, with her getting older, not with her being divorced, not with what had happened to Dan.

  Spring came, the light sharper in the window, Arlene walking across the street, where she could drop a few coins into the aluminum stand for a copy of the Times. During the postlunch afternoon lull, she would read with increasing interest about the world outside Bakersfield: catastrophic earthquakes in Chile, missiles firing into the skies above the vast oceans, the threatening pulse of the Russians, border skirmishes in Africa becoming near blooms of war. The rubble of the world clouded out her own. She let her eyes rest on sports scores, the columnists eagerly awaiting the baseball season. She read of Kennedy and Johnson, a photograph of Stevenson’s bald head reminding her once again that, indeed, the years had passed, even though her mind insisted on marking time only from the murder in December. It couldn’t be so, she told herself, and opened the folds of the newspaper to bring the world in. Sometimes the arts beat covered the passage of a traveling photography exposition, and Arlene began to read of ancient pottery and medieval paintings with a mixture of awe and regret that such things existed in the world and she had no way of seeing them. European dance troupes pranced across Los Angeles stages, and after more than a few afternoons of making herself read the reviews, another kind of regret began to manifest itself, too: that she could understand, at least a little bit, the measure of argument and feeling that went into such reviews, and that the most joyous of them sparked in her a thirst to see a thing with her own eyes. When that feeling bubbled within her, she’d smooth the newspaper flat on the café counter and look up, the harsh light of Bakersfield coming through the plate windows. Spring had changed to summer.

  The heat appeared to make everyone forget about what had happened in December. In June, the bowling alley put up a new neon sign, so big that it obscured the window of the apartment above, the place where that girl used to live. Sometimes, Arlene would drive by, urged on by a need to see a light on in the window, some sign that the landlord had rented the apartment out again. She was within the safety of her own vehicle, and yet she looked up warily and with a bit of shame, only to see the window always dark and empty of a curtain or a shade, as sure a sign as any that, months later, the apartment remained still and bare.

  Was she the only one who knew this? Was everyone forgetting? As much as she wanted the town to forget, she found herself helpless at the thought of such obliteration, the world overwhelming everything it could contain. The wide pages of the newspaper brought story after story, and even in the middle of summer, when she politely declined the telephone solicitation to resubscribe to the town newspaper she never read, Arlene was certain that even the story of the girl was fading in the minds of everyone in town, tumbling past rumor and into the darker jaws of complete erasure.

  People left her alone. By July, most of the farmers regained a distinct comfort around her, and those who remained for a leisurely cup of coffee in the afternoon borrowed sections of the Times and spoke with her about Cuba and Nixon and the Chicago Cubs and the resurgent Germans. More and more of the men took the front section and the editorials and the sports columns, but she tucked the arts pages under the counter, her own private and more mature version of the daydreaming the girls still did over their movie magazines. The cinema postings sometimes boasted full-page advertisements for films soon to premiere in Los Angeles, the ink so profuse that it rubbed black on her thumbs, but Arlene liked the way she thrilled to the promise of a coming film, along with the attendant glamour of its premiere. She knew it would be weeks before the Jack Lemmon picture arrived in Bakersfield, and that the Italian films, with their curiously abstract but beguiling posters, would never show up at the Fox, but she scanned the advertisements daily whenever a weekend approached, as if the films themselves held something extraordinary in the promise of their arrival.

  One day, that Actress’s face appeared in an advertisement. The lettering of the film title cracked itself over the page, spread jagged like a plate dropped and shattered on the café floor. The Actress looked over her shoulder, mouth agape in a silent scream. Arlene studied it for a moment before raising her head from the counter and looking over at the booth where she remembered that Actress sitting. It was empty now, but she could see her clear as anything, her kind face somehow able to communicate her need to be left alone. And yet there she was on the page, the advertisement’s crooked terror a stark dismissal of what Arlene thought she knew about that Actress, passing through town.

  The next day, the same advertisement appeared in a larger size, the silhouette of a foreboding house added to the background. Arlene hadn’t bothered, the previous day, to pay attention to the cramped credits running along the bottom, but today, because of the larger size, she could read the names, and when she spotted the Director, she saw, as if it were just yesterday, that man’s face peeking out at her from the backseat of a nice sedan.

  If this was the film they had been shooting, she had no idea, then, what they could have wanted at her motel. Houses like the one in the silhouette didn’t look at all like those in Bakersfield, where the roofs sat low and the buildings wide and long, the better to open doors for a cross breeze. She looked at the silhouette of the house, how easy it was to read its implied menace, then thought of the single, bare window above the bowling alley. She had to stop herself from thinking that Bakersfield wasn’t a place that spelled anything out in cracked letters.

  After work, she drove by the Fox to see if the film would be playing, but nothing was showing except a negligible comedy and a western, films she knew had shown briefly in Los Angeles with hardly much interest. Things came slowly to Bakersfield. At the Fox, she got out of her car to see the posters behind the coming-attractions queue, but nothing showed of the Actress’s movie, and she walked back to her car and pulled into the quiet streets where nothing much ever seemed to happen. Her quiet town. She lived here. She had never left.

  The film would come soon enough, she knew, and she resolved to see it, but when the deep heat of August arrived, the film with the menacing house had yet to appear. This was the loop she’d drive: first the silent apartment above the bowling alley, hoping for a light in the window, then to the Fox, hop
ing for the film. Nothing changed.

  Then one afternoon she spotted an earnest but cheap bouquet of flowers at the foot of the green door to the apartment: she pressed the accelerator firmly without looking again, not wanting to catch even the silhouette of the person who may have been trying to remember that girl, and she knew, too, even before she arrived at the Fox, that the Actress’s face would be looking out at the Bakersfield street from the movie poster, her silent scream over her shoulder. Sure enough, when Arlene rounded the corner, the film had arrived.

  A small line of people had queued up to see it, and she joined them without hesitation. Every other woman in line was not only young but with a man—a date, a husband—but Arlene was alone, still in her waitress uniform, and if anyone from town recognized her, no one made a motion. The patrons were a younger set than most at the café, not at all like the farmers or the farmers’ wives, not at all like people who might have whispered behind her back about how Dan Watson had now been missing for almost nine months. They were here to see a film, young people who didn’t bother with busybodies who whispered with the Western Union clerk to see if Dan Watson might be getting secret money transfers in Mexico. They lined up at the refreshments counter for popcorn and candy, Arlene slipping into the screening room and taking her seat as quickly as she could.

  It had been a long time since she’d been to a picture house. It had been years—since Frederick—and when the screen lit up, Arlene startled at the bright white, the scope of what she was about to see, and she remembered that bubble of anticipation. This time, though, the anticipation had been replaced by a sense of confirmation, that her deep suspicion of the Actress and the Director would reveal that they had been up to something—exactly what, she didn’t know—but as the credits cracked across the screen and the film score jittered the audience, she felt even more certain in her desire to maintain the anger she had felt against them that day. The film—she felt it in her bones—was going to confirm it.