What You See in the Dark Page 19

  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

  The 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 sa
y 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.

  That night, there was another man in the back. You could tell by the way that girl brought her voice inward, her eyes squinting as if to confirm what she had recognized, and her easy flirtation with Dan Watson hardened into a forced gesture. Something had changed within her. You turned your head to look back there because you knew she was ashamed—all along she should have been ashamed, the way she held the edge of her baby blue satin cowgirl dress, and those boots. Those boots! You hardly had time to register where you had seen those boots when that look flickered across her face, and you turned to study who was in the back, which face was going to shimmer into the person who could make her so apprehensive. Back there, though, stood a line of short Mexican men with no dates, hands in their pockets, their white T-shirts gleaming through the cigarette smoke.

  You don’t tell the ladies any of this because you don’t know where to start. She wore boots she’d stolen from Mr. Carson, but what did that fact say about her murder? A line of short Mexican men stared at her through the smoke, but what did that say about the one the police ended up deporting?

  Or this: A few days later, on a Monday, as you stepped out of the shop’s back room into the dusty alley out back, a little jar sitting on top of the garbage can. At first you thought it was from your clean-cut boyfriend, the jar sealed tight, with its label removed, and but inside lay a card from the Mexican bingo game, tilted to the side. A picture of a rose. Such specificity! Such imagination! la rosa and the number 41. Not your language. Colors in the faded scheme of the Mexican restaurant on the corner, that dusty blue, that exhausted pink. The gift was for that girl, but you crammed the jar into your purse as you scanned the empty alley. Around the corner, you tossed it into one of the city’s corner trash bins.

  You don’t tell the ladies about that. What would this fact mean? What is the fact? That there was a jar? Or that the girl never received it?

  Another jar appeared, its Gerber baby-food label missing and inside a store of shelled walnuts. The only reason you didn’t take it was the dark shape of a head ducking around the building at the end of the alley, studying, watching, guarding. Off you went, as you always would, rounding the corner, and just a ways down stood a short Mexican man in a white T-shirt, everything about his slender body tight and worked, as if he’d gathered those walnuts himself, up in Pixley in the center of the Valley, where the harvest had been going on, and when you passed him—this Mexican man who had no business just standing on a street corner like that—you understood that something had gone on between him and that girl, something Dan Watson didn’t know about, something that girl had held close to her when she measured the sultriness of her singing.

  These are facts. Everyone in town has facts. They bring them out into the open to give them sense, even when there is none to be made. But you saw it. You put it all together.

  That night, the girl held a hand at her throat, as if the thick cotton of a cold was catching. She had begged off singing. The crowd had been disappointed when Dan Watson made the announcement, but they lured her onstage with determined applause. She sang a Patsy Cline number very poorly, and even though she was showered with polite clapping, she made a funny grimace and gestured at her throat. The crowd allowed her offstage without much protest, and Dan Watson had to sing alone. She had stepped back behind the bar to watch him. Everyone watched him. You watched him. The hard stare of that man hiding in the shadows watched him. Dan Watson took command of the stage in his dark jeans and boots, a white cowboy hat still on. His body stood still—hips, upper body, even his knees refusing to quiver with nerves—and he announced that he would be doing an old Carl Smith song, “Hey Joe!” He held the guitar firmly and then began, all eyes on the quick dancing of his right hand, the song jumpy and energetic, a song about making his attentions clear to steal a friend’s girl.

  She had watched him, his stiff, hard body, the white hat casting a shadow over his eyes, over half of his face, so that all the women in the audience could look only at his hard mouth.

  That girl had been jealous, knowing those women had looked at Dan like that.

  You had looked at Dan Watson like that.

  That nameless Mexican face along the back wall must have seethed at how the women looked at Dan, the ripple of need he set off in them, sitting next to their clean-cut men.

  All that need. Husbands fail. Boyfriends cannot provide. Men in the cantina feeling they could never match up against someone like Dan Watson, the collapsing darkness of the place allowing them to hide that fear. Whoever that Mexican face belonged to, nothing he could ever do would match whatever Dan Watson offered her.

  Not a week later came the night in question.

  That girl looking up at the painted ceiling of the Fox Theater, up at every tiny light shining down on her, the ceiling painted dark and swirled with faint clouds, studded with tiny lights that beamed down like stars. She looked up at the painted sky as if Dan Watson had offered it to her himself, as if he were the one who opened the barely contained promise of the Fox Theater in daytime: the scrolls of neon piping, the gallery of lightbulbs waiting to burst bright once the sun went down. All around them, people chose seats without a fuss, but that girl kept looking up in wonder. You knew without knowing that on her lunch breaks she’d gone down to the theater just as she’d gone to the record shop, to peek through the shut doors for the red carpet inside, the velvet ropes hanging on brass stands, the poster images of serious drama, of women in gowns, of love and long looks, of color and intensity, beauty shimmering all around her. She traced the ceiling with her eyes, then followed it all the way down front, where the dark velvet theater ended with an enormous white screen, blank and brilliant with promise.

  People milled and chatted, and because it was December, the act of removing a coat gave the men a chance to be gallant, assisting their dates. People got comfortable, the rustle building into the excitement about whatever the screen held in store. This was not the dust and darkness of the drive-in, but the spotlight of standing in queue out front, people showing off their best garments. The women, both the older wives and the younger ones on dates, had arrived in dresses and scarves and earrings. Some of the older men wore hats, which they removed only after they had finally chosen a seat. That girl—what nerve—wore the baby blue satin cowgirl dress with the white fringe from her cantina performances, as if she knew people would recognize her, and you watched as she pretended to fix her hair in the back, the lift of her arm making the fringe on her sleeves dance and sparkle.

  The chatter in the theater calmed a
bit when the lights dimmed halfway. The gather of smoke from a few cigarettes floated visibly now, but the projector shot out such a bright beam that it hardly mattered. A Looney Tunes cartoon appeared to apparent indifference from the crowd, the last few people scurrying back from the concession stand. More coats removed and draped on the backs of chairs, more people settling in, but when the cartoon ended and the lights went down, the screen went dark, and up came the cheers, the whistles of anticipation.

  After all this time, this is the moment you hold and remember, down to the sweaty, nervous palm of your boyfriend: the quiet in the dark of the theater, the story coming.

  Darkness used to be the delicious moment of not knowing what would come next. You don’t see things like that anymore.

  When the light burst on the screen, a desert appeared in a golden hue, a caravan of horses on a winding trail. Your heart sank—a western—but then rose again when the names appeared, one by one, in yellow, rough letters: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson. His name flashed like an impossible promise. His name flashed as if it had been Dan Watson’s, and you read the name with a jealous scan of that girl’s head, sitting not four rows ahead of you, how you’d watched her at the record shop that morning, then scurried across the street to see what had captured her attention. Even her obsessions couldn’t be your own, Ricky Nelson all hers, and you heard yourself gasp, searching for him in the opening shot of a caravan approaching town, as if seeing him first could give you claim to him. Your eye caught him almost instantly, the cowboy slumped on his horse, looking insolent in his fringed brown suede jacket, his light-colored hat. His name was Colorado, and the caravan leader and John Wayne had a conversation about him that left him unpleased.

  “I speak English, Sheriff,” he said, “if you want to ask me.” His speaking voice sang out just like the one on his records, the ones that girl closed her eyes to in the dark. You closed your eyes, wanting to be like her for a moment, to test whether you could hear his approach like she could, but the possibility of missing that face defeated you. That beautiful face, his lips glistening moist even under the desert sun, his mouth gentle even when it fixed to sing.