Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“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 my 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.

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.”