What You See in the Dark Read online

  Dan Watson disappears, and by the time the newspaper reports this, it is old news, if news at all. The newspaper cannot say anything except that the situation is under investigation. The rain clears up and patrons in the café discuss it with the waitresses when Dan’s mother is not on shift. They scoff at the paper, calling it a situation and not a murder. Someone calls the paper and admonishes them for having run the cantina’s advertisement. But there are still some who don’t know that the girl and La Reina are one and the same.

  You can hear people discuss it as December goes on, but no one goes into the uglier details. Was there really blood on the wall? At the drive-in movie, the beautiful woman was strangled to death, but she slumped over as if in a sudden sleep. Music thrummed ominously. At the drive-in movie, boys and men undid bras and pulled off panties, eager to get to the wet warmth underneath the skirts. Maybe not every girl let them. There was that one who moaned hard, enjoying it, and the laughter from people sitting on the hoods of their cars. But not every girl was like that. Not every girl allowed that. Maybe Dan never did that with her at the drive-in. The landlord said she was a nice girl. You could see how she sang, how she chose songs that were always about love, Dan stepping out of the record shop with brown-papered packages. But then again, all the songs nowadays were about love, whether you lost it or found it or gave it away.

  At the café, no one talks about it when Dan’s mother is on shift. No one can imagine what it is like to be the mother of a man like that. All the waitresses who flirted with him can only talk about remembering him when he was a little, little boy.

  The rain lets up and is promptly replaced by the fog. There are Mexican men at the corner grocery store near the girl’s apartment, waiting every morning for fieldwork. They sit watching people driving by slowly to get a look at the splintered green door that opens to that stairwell, or at the dark window of the girl’s apartment. They watch people actually go up to the door and try the knob. Her face was beaten so badly, goes the story around town, that there was a closed casket. Others say she had no funeral at all, that she was just buried in what they call the public side of the city cemetery because she didn’t have any people in Bakersfield.

  She was twenty-three. The cemetery put a little marker about the size of a fist over in a corner lot—teresa garza—because city regulations mandate that no graves go unmarked.

  In late December, Dan Watson is nowhere to be found. Later, the police detain one of the Mexican men from across the street, that bunch of men who sit around the corner grocery waiting for work. That man, people say, was another boyfriend, but by this point, no one really knows the story anymore. The rest of the Mexican workers scatter for days, not returning, but it doesn’t matter. By January, work is scarce. All of Bakersfield has to tighten its wallet as the thick of winter settles in. Hardly anyone comes to the shoe store, even out of curiosity, and you rest your elbows on the counter and count the days until spring. The Mexican man is deported, but the newspaper never says why—that’s something you hear only on the street. All winter long, the splintered green door remains locked, a strange brightness in the dull of the January fog.

  Two

  The Actress was set to arrive in Bakersfield in the morning. She would be driven from Los Angeles, picked up from the studio at 6 a.m. sharp in a black sedan, and carried over the mountains into the city of Bakersfield to meet with the Director. She was a dedicated actress, script in hand as the sedan wound its way out of the quiet Los Angeles morning, a croissant and a carton of juice to sate her appetite. The driver respected her need for silence, her head bent over the script. She fought the nausea of reading against the car’s steady thrum.

  The Director had told her explicitly not to worry much about the entire script: they were shooting only two exterior shots, coming quietly into Bakersfield without a lot of fanfare, and the rest would be filmed at a Los Angeles studio. The Actress already knew her lines, but it never hurt to read again or to review scenes that had nothing to do with her. The exteriors were to be shot on the outskirts of the city, somewhere along Highway 99: A woman is driving a car on a road, all alone. The woman has no one to talk to, hence the Actress had no real lines to rehearse. But the Actress knew, at the very least, that her facial expressions would have to match the mood of the final edit, would have to match what she saw in the parentheticals scattered all over the script: there would be voice-overs, something else telling the story besides her own face.

  She put down the script and watched the slope of the hills roll by in the October morning light. Excursions like these—trips to actual locations, away from the studio lot, all in the name of authenticity—made her wonder about the fuss, whether it was much of a role at all. The Actress had two children and a husband at home. Luckily, most of this film was scheduled to shoot in Los Angeles; it was becoming too difficult to get away from the city for work. The roles had to be studio-shot for her to be able to accept them, but these days that meant only the smaller pictures or television. Color was splashing across enormous screens and that meant directors wanted to go out to the Painted Desert, to the skyscrapers of New York City, even Japan—the real thing, not a backdrop, had to appear on the screen. At first, she believed it to be nothing more than the directors and the studios wanting to show off their enormous budgets, but the films coming over from Europe flashed with a bold realism that signaled a readiness to deepen the craft. Even the actresses appeared as if they were hauled in from the street, frighteningly believable and fully invested in their roles, not a hint of studio training in their performances. Maybe they were not even actresses at all, but authentics: a housewife, a drunk, a gold digger, a prostitute.

  She had her own doubts about her ability. Sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t been born twenty years too late, the way she’d been ushered in, discovered when she was up north in the Valley, way past Bakersfield, at the little college where she had modeled. Ushered in: a little star on a string, handshakes with the right people, a contract to sign, scripts to read, and her cooperation at every turn. In exchange, a whole bevy of people hovered around her: hair stylists and publicists, women who led her to Los Angeles department stores for personal fittings, awards ceremony appearances. A whole other life that had nothing to do with acting, nothing to do with any realism, nothing on the level of those European actresses, who came from places rising up out of the rubble of the war and knew a thing or two about stories.

  Her scene today would be a woman driving a car, not a word said to anyone. Tomorrow, a character actor would arrive for a scene to be shot somewhere to the east of this very road she was traveling, maybe out by Lancaster. In the scene, the woman has pulled over to the side of the road to sleep for the night, only to be awakened in the morning by a policeman, who knocks on her window and questions her. At most, a three-minute scene, but there was a crucial signpost for Gorman, California, the Director had told them, some signal to the audience that this woman was headed north. Did it matter that no one knew Gorman? She knew it, the little stop-off point for the traffic snaking through the Grapevine from the Valley on through to the Los Angeles area. Almost anyone in Los Angeles would probably know that. But would an audience member in New York City know, or even care?

  The Actress wasn’t supposed to ask those questions, and she smirked at herself dismissively, looking out the window. It wasn’t her place to ask. She had a task at hand and nothing more. A silent scene of nervousness just this side of panic. Yes, she thought. That was exactly how she would play it.

  It was easy, she knew, and maybe even halfway logical, for an audience to think a film was shot scene by ordered scene. That’s how life worked, after all, one thing happening after another. But this picture was being done piecemeal, a haphazard schedule. She had to think hard about the story. She found it difficult to follow the script sometimes, forgetting where the scene was placed in the story’s arc, what her character did or did not know. But she held her tongue and chided herself: she knew exactly what the Director w
ould tell her. You hold in your hands a script. It tells you everything you need to know. If it’s not there, you don’t need to know it.

  She looked up at the October sky over the hills, completely and unsurprisingly blue. Would the weather hold? No rain was expected, not even cloud cover, no worries for tomorrow. Just the technicalities of a short location shoot, away from the city itself and no onlookers: the equipment, the crew, the two actors. All for a scene that wouldn’t take place until well into the movie’s first act. But that was the beauty of editing, the layered splices after so many takes, a story without a seam. Such was her responsibility, to suggest continuity without effort, every scene making its crucial contribution, even though she had little to say. She looked at the script again and pictured how the shooting would go. First, the scene shot with a camera near the driver’s side window. Then the scene shot again with the camera crowding into her by the passenger seat. Then the shots again for line delivery, for lighting, for the position of the actor playing the policeman, for the microphones, for the position of her hands on the steering wheel, for the lighting director to adjust his reflective screens as the sun slowly made its way through morning. Again and again and again.

  For such a small role. She wasn’t going to be in the picture after the first third. When the Actress had first read the script, she stopped on the character’s fate, then flipped back to the first page and the cast of characters. She was going to disappear. Violently. She tried to pay no mind to how the Director might have to stage this particular scene, focused only on the end of her character, the bulk of the script’s pages still gripped in the fingers of her right hand.

  A supporting role. Nothing more. In the Director’s previous picture, that one actress had appeared playing two roles. She hadn’t done a particularly stellar job, some in the industry had said, but the Actress thought the performance more than adequate. She had sat in the theater with mild envy, the role too rich for words: A distraught wife is trailed silently throughout San Francisco by a police detective, from flower shop to museum to the foot of the glorious Golden Gate Bridge, where she finally tries to hurl herself into the bay. The detective rescues her and later falls in love, only to lose her again to a successful suicide attempt. It played, the Actress thought, like an odd type of silent movie, and she felt maybe she had fooled herself into believing she could have fit perfectly into the part. Was it really requiring much beyond posing, or was there something about silent-movie acting that she didn’t know? She wondered what the script must have looked like, that other actress—who couldn’t have been professionally trained—skimming the pages until she found her first line.

  No matter how small the role was going to be, it would have been foolish to say no to the Director. He was in the midst of doing something extraordinary and uncanny with some actresses, finessing their star wattage and burnishing it into a singular, almost iconic image. That was the way the Actress saw it anyway, mesmerized by how he was stripping out all the trappings of the industry and pushing these women toward something beyond even acting, something nakedly cinematic—postures, poses, gestures, as if the women were in magazine ads come to life for just split seconds at a time, just enough motion for the public to remember them as images and not characters. It was like opening up a jewelry box she had had many years ago as a young girl, fascinated by the tiny plastic ballerina in the center and its brief circle of motion. She had closed and opened that box endlessly, even though the ballerina did nothing differently. But even now, in a black sedan carrying her over the Grapevine back toward the Valley, where she had grown up, the Actress could close her eyes and remember the golden lace of the ballerina’s costume, the full circle of her deliciously patient twirl, her perfect timing with the delicate chime of the music box’s single tune. And that was the way the screen worked, too, she had discovered. Every actress’s trajectory carried a moment like that, and the Director was staging them effortlessly.

  She could feel the car’s engine release a little—the upward climb was ending, and the road was leveling out briefly before the inevitable decline. She peered over the bench seat to get a look out the front window, but so far they hadn’t reached a place where she could see the horizon of the Valley stretching out before them.

  “We’re almost there, ma’am,” the driver said. “Probably another hour or so.”

  “Oh, I hope I didn’t look impatient,” she said. “There’s a point in the road where you can see for miles across. I thought I had missed it.”

  “You’ve been on this road before, ma’am?”

  “Absolutely. Does that surprise you?”

  “Well, mostly it’s people going the other way,” the driver said. “Getting away from Bakersfield, Fresno, all those little towns in between. Everyone wants to go to Los Angeles. I don’t see any reason why anybody would be going into the Valley.”

  “Fruit buyers. Cotton. Oilmen, too. There’s money to be made down there.”

  “You’re a smart lady. I’m from the Valley, you know, and most people don’t think of this place that way.”

  She said nothing in response for a moment, not wanting to reveal much about herself. She had learned to be careful over the years. She studied the back of the driver’s head, his careful concentration on the road. “I was born here,” she finally offered, “over past Fresno.”

  “Is that right?” he said, meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror. “I’m from Stockton myself, born and raised.”

  “Do you still have family there?”

  “Yes, ma’am. My parents are still there, but they’re getting on in years.”

  She smiled at him when he glanced at her in the mirror, but did not respond. But the silence wasn’t awkward. He went back to the task at hand; she knew how the studios laid down the law on drivers, on crew, even on extras. She studied the back of his head, a handsome square with a clean line from a fresh haircut. Ever so slightly now, the sedan was beginning to pick up speed, the road taking a gradual slope downward, but she resisted leaning forward again to catch a view.

  “I hope you won’t think I’m being nosy,” said the driver, “but I hardly think you’re on your way to do a musical.”

  She laughed a little and shook her head. “No, nothing like that. Not in Bakersfield.”

  “Well, it is a big music city, you know. Lots of country. I’m sure there’s a good story in there somehow. With a country music star and all.”

  “Maybe,” she replied. “But you couldn’t see me as a cowgirl, could you?”

  “I sure could!” He was beginning to take his eyes off the road just a bit much for her comfort, but there wasn’t going to be a way to return to the silence of before without seeming rude. She could feel the pull of the road downward. “I tell you what—you’d make a prettier cowgirl than that Elizabeth Taylor.”

  “That’s very kind of you to say,” she said, then leaned up to look at the road. They were most definitely on the way down the slope of the Grapevine, but the road curved here and there and the full, unobstructed view of the Valley had yet to come. They went silent again, and she looked once more at the driver’s clean hairline, the square rigidity, and then let her eyes travel briefly down the slope of his shoulder.

  This girl is in love with a divorced man and will do anything for him, she’d been told, but the direction had ended right there during the read-through. This girl. A read-through, not a rehearsal. Silently, she had sat at the table with the Director and the other actors and asked herself if she knew what it would be like to love another woman’s ex-husband, but the script said nothing about shame, about moral obligations, nothing about right or wrong. And the Director had long ago put his foot down on any shenanigans about character, about Method, about needing quiet spaces before a scene started: this was a job, not a psychiatric couch.

  She pictured running her finger along the edge of the driver’s shoulder and wondered if his eyes would register complicity when they looked up to meet hers in the rearview mirror.

&n
bsp; Is that how the European actresses did it, how they lost themselves in their scripted terrors?

  You have beautiful eyes, said the woman who had discovered her years ago, a silent-film star. It’s all in the eyes.

  “I’m not exaggerating, ma’am. My wife and I both admire you very much, especially in the movies where you sing and dance. You’re an absolutely talented lady. First class! We think you’re just wonderful!”

  “Thank you,” the Actress replied, and the moment she said it, she wished she could have given the words more than the note of resignation underneath. She wondered if she had betrayed what she had been thinking just by speaking aloud, and this worried and thrilled her at the same time: it was a private knowledge she wanted to hone, to use during the filming, in order to practice at being a real actress, to use every available tool. Her voice, her eyes, her fluttering tone. That would be all she could control. Everything else, she was beginning to suspect, would be modeled for her.

  The driver went quiet again, his eyes back on the road, and she felt sorry for not taking in his pleasure, his willingness to give her praise, even though she had long ago discarded the need for adulation, that small bird singing inside. It was one thing to enter this business for that very reason—she could be honest with herself about that—but it was quite another to let that feeling guide her well-being. She had come from this very Valley to Hollywood as a starlet—a dancer and singer with enough talent not to embarrass anyone—but that was over ten years ago now, and somewhere along the line, she had realized the adoration would not last very long. She should drink it in, every chance she had.

  You have beautiful eyes, the silent-film star had told her, as if there were an urgency in using them, as if the silent-film star herself had never noticed anyone taking an indiscreet glance at her lazy eye, drooping a little when she had too much champagne.

  “Look,” said the driver. “There’s your view.”