Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  Hugo Gregor Villarde III.

  On the Waldorf list, he was Hugo Villarde.

  Villarde was a guest in room 3010 for one night on October the first. He made no phone calls. His home address was in Spanish Harlem.

  175 East 104th Street.

  I Googled the name on my BlackBerry.

  Not a single result came up.

  “That’s the scariest result of all,” said Nora.

  “Try Googling his address,” said Hopper.

  A business listing came up, a shop called The Broken Door. It had no website, only a bare-bones listing on Yelp.com, which described it as a shop for “discerning connoisseurs of oddity antiques.”

  “Open Thursday and Friday, four to six,” Nora read over my shoulder. “Those are weird hours.”

  “We’ll go there tomorrow when it opens,” I said.

  Staring down at the single name on both pages, I felt a wave of exhilaration and relief. At long last, a decent break—a minute crack to wedge my fingers into to pry the whole thing wide open: the man Ashley had been searching for in the days before she died.

  84

  “You have nothing to worry about,” Harold explained, stopping on the tenth-floor landing to wipe his bald forehead, drenched with sweat, before continuing up the flight behind us. “Her dealer came by at eight tonight so she’s deep in Candy Land.”

  “Does she stay conked out the whole night?” Nora asked him.

  “If you keep quiet. Coupla months ago we sent up a workman to do some repairs. She sat up in bed and started talking to him like he was her ex-husband. Accused the poor guy of screwing around. All he wanted to do was replace a radiator valve. But she’s weak and needs a wheelchair to move even a few feet, so don’t worry about her getting physical.”

  I stopped to make sure he was joking, but he was only wheezing heavily as he cleared the last step onto the eleventh-floor landing, catching up to us. He dug in his pants pockets for the keys and stepped toward one of two white doors marked 1102.

  “If you need me for an emergency, there’s an intercom in the kitchen.”

  “What kind of emergency?” I asked.

  “Just be careful. Try not to touch anything. She hates her things moved.” He twisted the knob, gently opening the door, but it was locked on the inside with a chain.

  “She must be extra-paranoid tonight,” he muttered, slipping his hand through and nimbly sliding the chain loose. “Lock the door from inside when you leave.” He took off back down the stairs. “Good luck to you.”

  The three of us exchanged bewildered glances.

  “I feel sorry for her,” said Nora. “Locked up in here.”

  The only sound was the neon sizzle of the bulb in the stairwell, the steady thuds of Harold’s footsteps retreating below.

  We slipped inside, entering a dim laundry room reeking of body odor and baby powder. I switched on the overhead light. Mountains of silk robes and pajamas were piled everywhere, on top of the washing machine, spilling out of laundry baskets, heaped on the floor. One looked like something worn by the King of Siam, billowing sleeves, a red sash. I cracked the door opposite, staring into a long, dark hall.

  It was silent. The only light came from an open doorway at the very end, Marlowe’s bedroom, according to Harold’s instructions.

  “She must sleep with her lights on,” whispered Nora, beside me.

  “We’ll check in on her,” I said. “Then take a look around.”

  We moved into the hall, the walls covered, salon style, with framed photos. There was just enough light to make them out: Marlowe reclining poolside surrounded by palm trees, a wide-brimmed black hat on her head; Marlowe at the premiere of The Godfather II with Pacino on her arm; wearing an eighties wedding dress (puffed sleeves like flotation devices), smiling up at a nondescript groom who looked rather shell-shocked to be marrying such a knockout. It had to be the veterinarian she’d married after Cordova. Beckman had just one thing to say about him: “A man so far out of his league he suffered from altitude sickness.” I looked, but there was no evident shot of Cordova or her time at The Peak. After a photo of Marlowe on the film set of Lovers and Other Strangers sitting in Gig Young’s lap, exactly midway down the hall was the centerpiece: a giant black-and-white print of her glorious profile, her head tipped back, soaked in shadows and light. Her beauty was astounding, so high-decibel it blew out lenses and lightbulbs, made the mind short-circuit and stutter impossible. A signature graced the corner: Cecil Beaton, 1979.

  We passed three dark open doorways, though I couldn’t see anything. The curtains had to be pulled.

  Outside Marlowe’s bedroom, we stopped, stunned by the vision in front of us. Never before had I seen such decayed tropical splendor.

  It looked like a dried-up lagoon, a flamingo habitat for a zoo that had gone bankrupt years ago. Two giant fake palms dolefully touched the ceiling. Black mold spangled the faded pink floral wallpaper, giving the room a five-o’clock shadow. There was a strong stench of Glade air freshener on top of mildew on top of chlorine from a motel pool. A tiny brass lamp drenched rose light all over antique wooden dressers and end tables carved and gilded. Porcelain figurines were sprinkled everywhere—drummer boys and pugs and swans with chipped beaks. Vases bulged with fake flowers that made no attempt to look real, the leaves shiny and plastic, the giant blooms colored like synthetic candy. Dominating the far side of the room, floating there like an old docked ferry, was a baroque king-size bed.

  Right in the center, submerged under ripples of pink satin sheets, was a tiny curled-up form.

  Marlowe Hughes. The last flamingo.

  She was so small and bony, it was almost inconceivable there was actually a woman under there—certainly not the one Life magazine had proclaimed “a swimming pool in the Gobi.” Spiky tufts of platinum-blond hair sprouted out of the sheets like dune grass.

  I tiptoed inside, Hopper behind me, our footsteps silenced by the carpet, which looked to have once been pale cream, now browned in deeply treaded pathways around the room. I stepped over to the bedside table on the left, littered with orange prescription bottles; a glass bottle filled with a strange, neon yellow liquid; an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, many smudged with maroon lipstick. A red fire extinguisher stood beside the bed. In case she accidentally incinerated herself.

  Her face was entirely concealed under the sheet. There was something so vulnerable about that immobile, deflated mound, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt about what we were doing.

  “Ms. Hughes?” I whispered.

  She didn’t stir.

  “What does she look like?” whispered Nora anxiously from the doorway. “Is she okay?”

  “As okay as a blown-out tire on the side of the highway.”

  “Seriously. Is she asleep?”

  “I think so.”

  Hopper, who’d moved to the other nightstand, was inspecting the label of a prescription bottle.

  “Nembutal,” he whispered, shaking it, pills rattling, setting it down. “Very retro.”

  He wandered over to the chest of drawers along the wall between the windows—concealed under bloated pink curtains, which looked like faded bridesmaid dresses from the early eighties. He pulled open the top drawer, staring inside, and pulled out a piece of paper.

  “ ‘My dear Miss Hughes,’ ” he read quietly. “ ‘Let me start out by saying I am your number-one fan.’ ”

  I moved beside him. Inside the drawer were stacks upon stacks of envelopes, some loose and crumpled, others bound with rubber bands. It was fan mail. I pulled out an envelope. It read BOONVILLE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY C-3 in the return address, the stamp reading MAY 21, 1980. The letter was crudely typed on thin typing paper. Deer Miss Hughes, On July 4th, 1973, at 1:32 A.M. I shot and killed a man in the parking lot of Joe’s Barbecue. I read through the rest, a plea for her to write to him, signed with a profession of love. I refolded it and pulled out another. Dear Marlowe, if you ever pass through D’Lo, Mississippi, please visit m
y restaurant, Villa Italia. I named an entrée after you, the Bellissima Marlowe. It is a capellini dish with white clam sauce. I put the letter back.

  In the corner was a bookshelf crammed with magazines, a folded-up wheelchair in front of it. Stepping toward it, I realized these fan letters had actually infiltrated the room like parasites; they were tucked into every nook and cranny, filling every vacant hole, stashed above piles of Hello! magazines, issues of Star dating back to the seventies, one with an ugly shot of Marlowe on the cover (WASTED! REHAB FOR MARLOWE was the headline, THE INSIDE SCOOP ON HER SECRET COLLAPSE), a bound stack of papers, which I saw, pulling it out, was a coffee-stained screenplay, The Intoxicator, by Paddy Chayefsky. The Oscar-winning screenwriter had actually written Marlowe a handwritten note on the title page. Miss M—I wrote this with you in mind, P. I pulled out another stack and saw it was a printout of Google returns.

  Marlowe Hughes. About 32,000,000 results.

  Hopper was scrutinizing another letter, Nora was bent over the vanity table strewn with old perfume bottles and jewelry boxes, inspecting what looked to be sepia baby pictures tucked along the dappled mirror.

  “Let’s get moving,” I whispered. “You guys check those rooms off of the hall. I’ll look around here and keep an eye on her.”

  They seemed reluctant to leave. The room itself had a sort of barbiturate effect; it’d be easy to browse forever around this Pompeii of lost promise. But Nora nodded, re-tucking a picture into the mirror, and with a last look at me, they filed out, closing the door.

  I glanced back at that mound on the bed. It hadn’t stirred.

  Across the room, beyond the vanity table, was another doorway. I crept over to it, gently pushed it open, switching on the light.

  It was a large walk-in dressing room bloated with clothes, warped pumps and stilettos lined up in rows, a door opposite leading into a bathroom.

  There was a strong smell of mothballs. The clothes looked to be mostly from the seventies and eighties. Toward the very back of a rack I noticed a set of pale purple garment bags peeking out from a cluster of sequined evening gowns, as if hoping to remain unseen. There were nine of them. For the hell of it, I yanked back the dresses, pulled down the first bag, and unzipped it.

  To my surprise, it was the chic white suit Hughes wore throughout Lovechild, covered in grass stains, the pale purple label of Cordova’s costume designer, Larkin, sewn into the inside pocket.

  I pulled down the next, unzipping it. It was the same suit. I unzipped the bag behind that. It was identical, though this one was splattered in blood. I scratched at the rusty brown streaks. They looked convincingly real.

  I unzipped the bag behind it. Again, it was the same suit, covered in even more blood and mud, the skirt ripped. The bag behind that was the same suit, only absolutely clean, a pristine white.

  Hughes wore only the white suit in the film, which took place over the course of a single day. Larkin had obviously made nine versions of the suit, each one stained with varying amounts of blood, mud, sweat, beer, and grass stains, depending on where Hughes was in the narrative. By the end of the movie, after everything she endures in her hunt for her blackmailer and former pimp—she’s raped, beaten, chased through housing projects, across highways and alleys, injected with sedatives—the suit is torn up and brown. She peels it off and torches it in the barbecue grill in her serene suburban backyard before climbing into bed next to her sleeping husband—a pediatrician, who is and will forever remain entirely ignorant of his wife’s past and her last twenty-four hours of perdition.

  In the film’s last chilling shot, he drowsily wraps his arm around her, as she, wide awake, stares out into the darkness of their immaculate bedroom—a picture that seemed to encapsulate Cordova’s view on the tenuous bonds between people, the deepest secrets about ourselves that we, in the ultimate act of humanity, will spare those we truly love.

  I took out my phone and took a few shots of the costumes, then zipped the garment bags up, returning them to their spot in the back of the closet, and switched off the lights.

  As I stepped back into the bedroom, however, I stared in disbelief.

  The bed was empty.

  That shriveled lump was no longer there. The pink satin sheets had been flung aside.

  “Miss Hughes?”

  There was no response. Fuck.

  85

  She had to be hiding somewhere here.

  The wheelchair remained folded beside the bookshelf, the bedroom door still closed. I lifted up the pink taffeta bed skirt.

  Nothing but a few balls of Kleenex.

  I strode to the curtains, jerking them aside, then checked the bathroom. It was empty. Only two working bulbs above a dirty mirror, a counter littered with old makeup—blushes and chalky powders, fake eyelashes in plastic cases—behind the door, a limp red robe. I flung back the shower curtain. A filthy loofah hung from a rusty showerhead, a caddy laden with cruddy bottles. Prell. Breck Silk ’N Hold. I hope those don’t date back to the last time she washed her hair.

  I slipped out into the hall, finding Nora in the next room, which was cluttered with suitcases and old boxes. She’d switched on a lamp and was going through the closet.

  “I lost Marlowe.”

  “What?”

  “She slipped out of bed when I wasn’t looking.”

  “But Harold said she needed a wheelchair to move.”

  “Harold is mistaken. The woman moves like the Vietcong.”

  I darted out, Nora right behind me. We searched the next room, an ornate living room that looked like a rotten terrarium, then headed into a dated kitchen, where we found Hopper taking pictures of clippings magnetized to the fridge—all of them faded photo spreads of Marlowe.

  “She couldn’t be in here,” he said, after I explained. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

  As he said it, I spotted, right behind him, the kitchen door moving.

  “Miss Hughes?” I called out. “Don’t be alarmed. We just want to talk.”

  As I stepped toward the door, it banged forward and a diminutive figure shrouded in black satin, a voluminous hood hiding her face, jumped down from a countertop with a whoosh and came lunging at me, wielding a meat cleaver.

  I easily deflected it—she had the strength of a dandelion—the knife clattering to the floor. Her shoulder was shockingly brittle—like grabbing a spike in a railing. I instinctively let go as she wheeled around, kicking me hard in the groin before darting out, the kitchen door swinging wildly. We lurched after, Hopper snatching the hood of her robe.

  She shrieked as he clamped his arms around her, hauling her, flailing, into the living room and setting her down in a purple velvet chair underneath some fake palms.

  “Calm down,” he said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  Nora switched on the overhead lights, and Marlowe immediately curled up into a fetal position, burying her face in her knees as if she were some light-sensitive night bloom. Her silk robe covered her, the interior tomato red, so she was little more than a heap of fabric lumped on the chair.

  “Turn the light off,” she whispered in a husky voice. “Turn it off.”

  I felt an icy chill on the back of my neck. It was her voice.

  Marlowe had a very distinct one—“a voice that lounges in its bathrobe all day,” Pauline Kael had written in her rapturous New Yorker review of Lovechild. And it was true. Even when Marlowe was running from thugs, hanging off the side of a building, pouring gasoline over her blackmailer and lighting him with a match, her voice still came out slow honey sighs and goo.

  After all these years, it sounded the same, if slightly slower and gooier.

  I motioned to Nora, and she turned off the lights. I opened the curtains, and the orange neon light along FDR Drive lit the room, softening the décor, transforming the gaudiness into a garden at midnight. Fake roses, gilt chairs, a floral couch became mysterious tree stumps tangled with overgrowth and wildflowers.

  Slowly Hughes raised her head and p
ale light caught the side of her face.

  All three of us stared in awe, in shock. The famous cleft chin, the valentine face, the wide-set eyes were still there, yet so eroded as to be nearly unrecognizable. She was a temple in ruins. She’d had terrible plastic surgery, the kind that wasn’t a nip and tuck but vandalism: bulging cheekbones, her eyes and skin stretched as if life had literally pulled her apart at the seams. Her skin was waxy and ashen, her eyebrows drawn in shaky dark lines with what looked like a felt-tip pen.

  If there was ever evidence that nothing lasted, that time ravaged all roses, it was here. My first thought was from a sci-fi movie, that her immense beauty had been an alien thing that had feasted upon her, eaten her alive, and when it had moved on, it left this ravaged skeleton.

  “Have you come here to kill me?” Marlowe whispered gleefully, maybe even with hope, tilting her head as if posing for a camera, her profile gilded in the light. It had the same slopes and angles of her youth (“a profile you’d love to ski down,” Vincent Canby had rhapsodized in his Times review), but now it was a sluggish sketch of what it’d once been.

  “No,” I said calmly, sitting on a chair in front of her. “We’re here because we want to know about Cordova.”

  “Cordova.”

  She said it with wonder, as if she hadn’t intoned the word in years, almost sucking on his name hungrily like a hard candy.

  “His daughter’s dead as a doornail,” she blurted.

  “What do you know about it?” I asked, surprised. Obviously we didn’t have the full picture of Marlowe’s mental state; she knew Ashley was dead.

  “Girl never stood a chance,” she muttered under her breath.

  “What did you say?” Hopper demanded, stepping toward her.

  I wanted to kill him for interrupting her. She was gazing at him with a knowing smile as he sat down on an adjacent velvet chair.

  “This must be Tarzan, Greystoke, Lord of the Apes. You’re missing a grunt and a club. Can’t wait to see you in your loincloth. Now, who else do we have here?” Enunciating this acidly, she leaned forward to survey Nora. “A chorus girl. You won’t be able to fuck your way to the middle, Debbie. And you.” She turned to me. “A wannabe Warren straight from Reds. Every one of you, the farting demeanor of the artfully clueless. You people demand to know about Cordova?” She scoffed dramatically, though it sounded like a handful of pebbles rasping in her throat. “And so fleas look up at the sky and wonder why stars.”