Manuel Munoz - What You See in the Dark

He held the door open for her, and before she stepped outside, before she lost the humid, thick smell of the café and before she was greeted by the dusty odor of the sidewalks, she caught the briefest hint of his aftershave.

She sighed. “I guess we just keep waiting. It’s closing in on noon, and the scene we were supposed to shoot today takes place in the morning.”

He looked up at the October sky. “Can anyone tell the difference?”

“Some people can. The shadows. The way light plays on the face. Especially now in autumn. The sun is a little lower in the sky. You can tell what time it is just by looking outside, can’t you? Roughly?”

“I suppose you’re right,” the driver said, putting his hands in his pockets.

“You know, I really can’t imagine that I’m going to need you to drive me anywhere for the rest of the day. Why don’t you check into your room?”

“I’m not staying at this hotel, ma’am. Me and the crew find places over off the highway, where the truckers stay.”

She knew what those places were, the side motels she’d seen along Highway 99 leading into Bakersfield, work trucks parked patiently in their gravel lots while the drivers rested for the night, a long row of identical doors, identical rooms, meager by comparison to her own hotel room across the street, simple as it was. The Sleep-Tite Motel. The Knight and Day. The Star-dust. Their neon signs off during the daytime, but as the highway approached the outer edges of Bakersfield, they sprang up closer to each other, and she pictured how they might look to a weary driver, a cluster of safety in the darkness, and such a long day of driving that sleep would come with alarming ease, no matter the endless traffic droning on through the night, just outside the door.

He led them across the avenue, and she peered down the road one more time but knew the afternoon was now lost. She wondered briefly — then stopped herself — if there might have been an accident, and by wishing the thought away, she removed it as a possibility. They were running late was all, and when the Director finally arrived, he’d prepare everyone with a new schedule for the brief, decidedly private shoot. It was just the beginning of work on the film — the preliminary stages — and the hard work and the curiosity from the public was yet to come.

“Well, I suppose there’s not much else to do but go up and take a nap.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You should probably go on ahead and check into your room. Save yourself some time. I honestly won’t need you this afternoon.”

“Only if you’re sure, ma’am. I can wait here until the Director arrives.”

“No, no,” she begged off, and started toward the hotel door, and he moved with her, then ahead, in order to open it for her.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll call the front desk on the hour, so if you change your mind, let them know. I’ll drive right back.”

She smiled in thanks and was about to step into the lobby. “Driver,” she called out. “Listen, I feel terrible. I’ve never even asked you for your name.”

“Carter,” he said, returning her smile, and he bowed his head a little.

“Thank you, Carter, for everything this morning,” the Actress said. She stepped into the lobby, knowing he wasn’t going to follow, but disappointed still when his footsteps failed to sound behind her. The desk clerk nodded at her in greeting and also in silent affirmation that he had heard nothing yet from the missing guest, the lobby completely empty of any sound, any movement, and she walked to the tiny elevator and waited in the quiet, while the desk clerk turned a single page of newspaper to sink into his afternoon reading.

No one in the carpeted hallway, no maid’s service cart to inspect and memorize in passing, no maid with a downturned look of exhaustion. No one, she began to believe, on the entire floor. The Actress entered her room and took off her shoes, sitting on the bed to massage her feet. It had been a long morning, and she’d been up so early for the driver to bring her all the way here, only to wait.

A nap would come easy in this silence. She walked over to the door to double-check its lock, and once she was done, she removed her skirt, her blouse, and the constriction of her bra and lay on the bed. She closed her eyes, replaying the conversation she’d had with the driver, regretful of how she had described the role. Could she have told it to him in another way? Would it have mattered? It had been the only moment, really, when the driver had been anything but cordial, kind, respectful, the look that had washed over his face when he realized she would be doing something wrong in this picture. She opened her eyes and rested a hand on her naked breast and sighed. That look on his face. And over a bundle of stolen money. What if she mentioned the detail of the lunchtime tryst in a little hotel room like this one? I saw the script call for the opening shot to be this woman rolling around luxuriously with her lover. She isn’t wearing a blouse and you can see the hair on his massive chest. That soft feather downturn of his thumb tip and whether or not he would have done that.

Carter. It could have been, she realized, either a first or a last name.

Because she was alone and no maid was ever going to come down the hallway, and because the door was locked even though she was certain the other rooms had gone unoccupied, the Actress rose from her bed and walked to the mirror and stood in front of it. She stood absolutely still in self-examination, her reflection cutting off at the waist, so all that was visible to her was her naked torso, her face, her eyes. She had all afternoon, she knew, to stand in front of that mirror in scrutiny, the way empty time manages to hand you nothing but doubt. She had to be convinced it was acceptable to play that first scene in a brassiere, even if the whole theater would have believed a man and a woman being inescapably in love simply because the screen story said so. A whole theater of men looking at her in a brassiere, a whole darkness wanting. She drew her eyes down to her breasts, beautiful and round. Never had she caught the Director looking at them — always at her eyes. Still, she kept thinking of those other actresses, their entrances, their slow-motion kisses, their gowns, their mystery and allure from their first glimpses onward. Maybe it wasn’t much of a role; maybe those other actresses had been approached and had wisely turned it down. The Actress stepped back from the mirror, as far as she could before she reached the opposite wall. She took in the entire image of herself, the doubt as thick as the quiet in the hotel. But she would show them. She would show herself. You don’t just put on a maid’s costume and dust the rooms. You have to know the uncertainty of interaction with guests who couldn’t care less, the ache in your back from bending down to make beds. The Actress was going to play more than a woman who steals money. She was going to play a woman in love, who does something wrong for the sake of it. Her hand on the driver’s a gesture at understanding how it felt to do something illicit, how it felt to draw someone into sin. A woman who was a secretary in a dusty Arizona city. A woman who had a sister who loved her and would later look for her. A woman with a moral choice, who makes the right one in the end, no matter that the story itself could have cared less what she did or did not do, her little car moving from Phoenix and on westward, the drive so long you’d think she was going to drive off the end of the earth, in a love so deep she was willing to disappear into it without a lingering trace.

From the moment Teresa boarded the pickup, she expected to see Cheno coming up the street, and every figure walking along threatened to be him, only to end up being no one at all that she knew. Dan Watson drove with such leisure that she wondered if he didn’t already suspect that she’d been waiting for someone, and she did her best not to appear nervous, her hands tucked underneath her knees, the guitar resting between them. When they rounded the corner toward her street, she seized at the thought of Cheno waiting at the door, even though it was something he’d never done. The street was bare. The way her pulse raced and eased when she discovered this alarmed her. She was doing nothing wrong.