It wasn’t there because Hugh had thrown it into her bag, attempting to produce, in the minds of the police, the possibility that she had left on her own accord. “Look,” Hugh said, scrambling for some clarity. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation, Tom.” Saying his new friend’s name aloud made him feel important. “Maybe something happened to her. Something bad.”
But Tom shook his head. “Bad things don’t happen to Hedda Chase. She’s with him,” he pointed to the cell phone. “The fucking tart,” he muttered.
“Couldn’t it be . . . couldn’t you be jumping to conclusions?” Hugh attempted to speak clearly. “What if something happened? You never know these days. There are lots of bad people out there.”
“Let me tell you something about that woman,” Tom said, his voice lit with spite. “Nothing happens by chance—it may appear that way—but trust me. She’s strategic. She’s got all the moves planned out way before anyone else has even sat down at the table.”
Hugh felt a fresh surge of hatred for Hedda Chase—almost to the point where he could rationalize what he’d done—like maybe even he’d done Tom a favor. He swallowed the rest of his drink. “I hope, for her sake, you’re right.”
Like a pair of drunken comrades they took the Bronco and stopped at a package store on Franklin for some beer. It was nearly two a.m., but the city was alive. All the creeps had crawled out of their dark little corners. The extras, he thought, the filthy, ugly, stinking people you rarely saw in daylight. They were nocturnal, like all the other unpleasant creatures that came out at night—including me, he thought.
They drove up to the snake, a circuitous road that ran along the canyon, the city of Los Angeles twinkling below. They were unlikely brothers, Hugh thought, at once awkward and intimate. Tom parked the jeep in an overlook and lit up a joint. The moon was fat and dirty. It was a big fat bundt cake of a moon, he thought. The lights of the city winked like the lattice wings of dragonflies. They passed the joint back and forth. The pot was good. It made him languid, amphibious. His skin stippled with goose bumps. His face hot, and yet cool and damp too, as if he’d just stepped out of a sauna. He could hear everything. The sound their bodies made, taking in air. Swallowing; sniffling; moving. The sudden wind. The branches of trees like magic wands, casting spells.
He focused on his own breathing, the sound of his beating heart. He had this same feeling when he’d gone to court to contest a speeding ticket. Sitting there with all the other infracted people, waiting to speak to the judge. Some of them had serious problems. For one reason or another, they had all been caught.
Hugh thought: What have I done? He thought of his wife, alone in their house. He imagined that she had fallen asleep watching television, as she often did. He’d find her there in the morning lying on the brown couch they’d inherited from her parents, under a crocheted blanket some distant aunt had made, surrounded by crumpled tissues. Marion didn’t get high, she didn’t approve of it, and he rarely smoked in front of her. Pot had saved him from the ravages of suburban blight, all the hours he’d spent alone in his basement getting stoned and watching movies. He hadn’t been ready to leave her, he supposed, but he was ready now. For months, she had been a vacant presence in their house; they were roommates, sharing a place. Even on the rare occasion when they’d make love it was a silent, absorbing act, akin to some sudden physical drama that they didn’t discuss. They had met at Keene State in a behavioral science class and started dating, he a freshman, she a sophomore. He’d lost his virginity to her on the narrow bed in his dorm. He could remember feeling a certain terror when he’d entered her for the first time. Her touch had been tentative. Light and abrupt as the sudden, deadly appearance of a praying mantis, the iron smell afterward, of one crushed bug. He didn’t really know why he’d decided to marry her. He supposed it was because he hadn’t met anyone else. No one who showed any interest in him, anyway—not because he wasn’t good-looking—he fancied himself a rather attractive man and even his mother had told him he was—she’d described him as having aristocratic good looks—clean and well-groomed with neatly trimmed fingernails and fine clothes that she’d find on sale at Lord & Taylor’s—but he was and always had been exceptionally shy, a gentle, unassuming manner, his mother called it, and always polite. His parents had encouraged their marriage, wanting him out on his own, wanting some other woman to wash his dishes and do his laundry and iron his shirts—relieved, perhaps, that it was a woman he’d chosen after all. Shortly after their marriage, they lived in a studio apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up on Cornelia Street. It was a lively neighborhood, and the city was a good distraction, the restaurants and theater, the cinema. Marion worked in a small flower shop and was often busy on weekends, doing weddings and bar mitzvahs and funerals. Aside from an occasional blowjob from a male prostitute—something he spoke of to no one—he’d remained faithful to Marion for six years and then, quite by chance, about a month after they’d moved out of the city, he met a woman named Jolene in a Hoboken bar. She lived in Newark, in city housing. She brought him to her apartment, complaining of the mice, the slow elevator, the spotted orange carpet. The corridors smelled of cumin and cloves, turmeric and cinnamon. The apartment was nicer than he’d expected. Jolene was an unemployed graphic artist who worked as a temp at a printing company in Hoboken. She wore long skirts and g-strings and bright scarves. They would smoke pot and make love, her skin the impenitent green of old bay leaves, her nipples like the smudged rubber thimbles of a bookkeeper, and then she’d make him tea with mint that she grew on her windowsill. Compared to his wife, Jolene was easily satisfied, uninhibited about her nakedness, her smells, her moody breath. She moved with the unhindered heft of a wrestler, whereas Marion moved very little, as though the weight of Hugh’s body upon hers was too much to bear. He knew he could not satisfy her—nor did he feel he could discuss it with her. She was not willing to be open to him, he thought. For him, he supposed, she endured sex, but she did not enjoy even a second of it. It made him feel bad, like he had no right. With Jolene, he could be himself or some closer version of himself. She would grip his shoulders and throw back her head, her breasts swaying, her flesh rumpled and damp. After sex, he would lie on her mattress naked, his penis soft, and she would feed him slices of apple. She’d stand at the mirror and fix her hair, using a pungent wintergreen oil that he carried home on his clothes. His affair with Jolene didn’t last; she’d gotten a job in Cincinnati and moved away. Eventually, she’d married and they’d lost touch, but whenever he’d open the closet he could smell her there on his coat.
The pot had finally dulled his guilt. For a few minutes he had forgotten about Hedda Chase; he was able to suspend, in a dark little bubble inside his brain, the truth about what he’d done to her and what might become of him as a result.
“Tell me about this wife of yours,” Tom said.
There were many nice things he could have said about Marion, but for some reason the only thing that came to his mind was, “My wife is a mouse.”
Tom laughed. “You married a mouse?”
“I’m leaving her,” Hugh said. “I don’t love her anymore.”
“That’s a good reason to leave. Love is a strange thing,” Tom said. “It can be fickle. It can disappear.”
“She doesn’t know it yet. When I get home—” His voice faltered and somehow he couldn’t finish the sentence.
Tom took him to a nightclub where strippers pranced around deerlike on a stage to canned music. Hugh found it depressing but acted like he was having fun. Tom was traipsing all over the place in his baggy suit, spilling his drink, kissing strangers on the mouth, and then wandered off somewhere into the back of the club. Hugh sat there, waiting for him to return. It was three o’clock in the morning; he was getting tired. For a split second, he found himself wishing he were at home, in bed beside his wife.
Those days are over, he thought.
When Tom came back he tossed something at Hugh—a little square ticket that sa
id PAID on it. “Go for it, Tiger. She’s waiting for you.”
“What?”
Tom nodded toward the back. “Room sixteen.”
Hugh sat there.
“Go on, man. You deserve it.” Tom waved over a waitress and ordered another round and started talking to someone he knew, a man with a shaved head in a black suit.
Hugh got up and shuffled down the carpeted incline toward the stage. You deserve it, he told himself. There was an odor—of sweat and perfume and something else—wet money. The woman in room sixteen didn’t speak any English. Her yellow skin turned green under the strange blue lights. “You like?” she said. “You like me?”
He told her he did, but he didn’t, not really. He didn’t like her at all. Still, he was curious. The room was very small, windowless. She put his ticket in a jar. He watched as she took off her clothes. He noticed a tiny snag in her stocking. He could hear her wheezing a little as she danced and he thought she must be a smoker. There were sounds all around, the kinds of sounds you hear at night, walking outdoors, sounds you cannot place. The woman, too, was like some kind of nocturnal creature, something you might catch in your headlights that gave you the willies.
When he got back to the table Tom was gone. Hugh looked around the club then went outside. There was no sign of his friend. It had gotten cool and he shivered. The night had been long and he suddenly felt lost—betrayed by the fact that Tom had left him there. In the cab back to Hedda Chase’s neighborhood, he began to cry. The driver glanced at him uneasily in the rearview mirror. Hugh had not cried for many years. Bad thoughts crowded his mind. He had the driver stop on Los Feliz Boulevard, several blocks from Chase’s street, and got out. He walked on the crooked sidewalks, hearing the insects, the keening of the overhead lamps. Her house was dark; there was nobody home. He stood there for a moment, looking at it. A car came down the road. As it passed, he stepped into the darkness, its headlights brimming across his back. When it had disappeared, he continued down the sidewalk to find his car.
In the motel, he showered, scrubbing himself raw. Hugh had never been to one of those places before. His dancer had been a woman of uncertain descent. While she shimmied in the tight space, her face seemed disengaged, as if the batteries in her head had worn out, while the batteries in her body were still good. Her sweat had sprinkled his skin like sea spray. He dried himself off and got into bed and lay there listening to the night. In high school, he had been abused. It had been a teacher he admired, a short little man in a bow tie with a prodigious command of the romance languages. Hugh had had difficulty with languages. One afternoon it had simply happened. He wasn’t even sure if it fell into the category of abuse. He didn’t know, really. It had been a strange incident, a fluke. The teacher’s fingers had smelled of tobacco. The file cabinet shook. It wasn’t something he liked to think about. He’d never told anyone. Sometimes it came back to him and he had to try to shut it out. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair some of the things you had to deal with in life, things you didn’t ask for.
Through the open window, he could hear people on the street, a drunken crowd outside of a bar. A car alarm went off. He got out of bed to have a look. The men outside the bar had begun to fight, one man shoving the other against the car. A helicopter erupted overhead and they scattered. Another man came out of the bar to check his car and silenced the alarm. He stood there, cursing, looking left and right, then spit into the gutter and went back inside.
Hugh lay awake thinking about Hedda Chase—trying to picture her inside the trunk in a fetal position, her hands tied behind her back. When he had tied her up he had felt something real, something like hate. Reflecting on it now, he felt worried; ashamed. Who was the man on her cell phone? he wondered. And where were they now? Had he opened the trunk and discovered her yet? And if he had, what had he done next?
Ever since that night Hugh had tried to convince himself that what he’d done to her had only been a joke that had gone awry—he’d never intended for her to disappear, really—perhaps he hadn’t thought it through—perhaps he’d been in some kind of a mental state—yes, a deranged state at that—but he was better now, he’d come out of it. He wasn’t a bad person, he wasn’t!
Somebody else had her now. That man who’d answered her phone. It was his crime now. He was the real criminal.
PART TWO
SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
4
It begins in late September, when you first see the car. It is raining and you are happy for the rain because you have grown irritable with so much sun and the rain soothes you somehow and reinforces the fact that you were not born in this sun-bleached emotional wasteland, but back east where people are moodier and unapologetically disenchanted. The sky is grim, the air cool, and you are driving home from the studio as on most afternoons around this time, only today is different because of the rain, the long line of traffic down Los Feliz Boulevard. The car is parked on a grassy corner, adjacent to one of those prehistoric mansions, an enormous, mushroom-colored Spanish Colonial entrapped in vines. It is a blue BMW, an older model, a For Sale sign taped on the windshield. You think of stopping, but in truth you are not the sort of person who buys things from strangers—you have come to rely on the expertise of people you trust for getting you what you need, when you need it, and you are not really comfortable pursuing things on your own. For the several weeks that follow, you notice the car as you pass by, as the grass grows up around it, dappled with fluffy dandelions, and you begin to dream about owning it, driving home in it, showing it to your colleagues at the studio, your small collection of important friends.
Then, days later, again on your way home from work, you happen to notice a van parked in the driveway. It is raining again, the clouds hauntingly black, a yellow fluorescence to the light as if the sky, the air, is sick. The driveway runs up off of Delacroix Avenue, a side street off the boulevard. The van is black with gold lettering: COUNTY CORONER. Instinctively, you take your foot off the accelerator and turn onto Delacroix, pulling up alongside the curb with the car idling. They are bringing a body out. It is covered with a black water-repellent sheet. It is an eerie thing to witness and you watch with apologetic fascination as they load it into the van. You have felt the same uncertain empathy whenever you pass an accident on the freeway—that morbid anticipation—you can’t help thinking of the famous scene in Weekend , the Godard film, a ten-minute tracking shot of a traffic jam caused by an accident—or when you are behind an ambulance and can see inside, the EMT’s diligent face, his solemn concentration as he works on the patient. It is an expression reserved for the saving of a life, and it is rare, and fine. As a filmmaker, you have come to know about expressions and there are certain expressions that are not for everyone and that are difficult to duplicate for the camera. You have come to realize that both saviors and executioners wear the same expression and there is, of course, a heady irony in that.
The rain begins to fall harder and you see a woman come outside with an umbrella. She is Mexican, in a housekeeping dress, holding the umbrella over the coroner’s head. At one point he takes her hand and guides the umbrella over her head, and she smiles gratefully. It is a brief and touching exchange and you make a mental note to work it into a movie. Thinking about the car, the strange dark house, the alarming appearance of the body, you drive home to your rented bungalow. Death is something you fear and you can never gauge its proximity. Sometimes you sense it encroaching upon you like some thief in the night, looking into your windows. Sometimes you lay in bed, brittle, waiting for evil to find you. Images sprawl through your mind, arbitrary scraps of terror that have become all too ordinary. To some degree, you have been nurtured on fear.
Stopped at a traffic light you review the facts of your life: You have achieved so much, and yet your heart is empty. It is the truth; it is something you know. You have come to a point in your life—success has garnered certain privileges—you are grossly overpaid, and yet you are overworked; you are rarely alone, and yet you ar
e intensely lonesome; you have accomplished what you set out to, and yet you feel your ideals have been compromised. When all is said and done, you feel a weary sense of ambivalence.
You are forty, which in Hollywood is not a good thing. Not that you are actually old, because of course you are not, but you have begun to feel slightly invisible at meetings with certain people, the younger directors for example, most of them men, who grow impatient with your lengthy discussions of character and plot—your questions about context and rationale—and your desire to tell stories that resonate in the hearts and minds of the American public—yes, it is true, your ambitions are lofty—and some of them actually rush you through lunch. In a town like this, where passive aggression is something of an art form, you have invented your own special version of subliminal espionage. In order to survive as a female you are forced to behave like someone with a personality disorder, limiting your range of expression to a deadpan grimace. The smile, that old-fashioned symbol of genuine assurance, has become obsolete, replaced by its nasty cousin the smirk which, when coupled with the cruel but effective once-over, conveys to its recipient that he or she is a complete waste of time. The only time people sustain a genuine smile is when they are certain you can make them money. On your way up you had acquired your own battle scars. And even now—even with all your success—you are besieged with doubt. You have not entirely outgrown the need for approval, the lavishing praise of an expert. Doubt is your compass. It prevents you from feeling happy. Your unhappiness is a strategic part of the mechanism that drives you, the feverish self-loathing that shoves you forward, toward that shimmering light of your destiny.
A Stranger Like You Page 7