What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [0]
Also by Manuel Muñoz
The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue
Zigzagger
WHAT YOU SEE
IN THE DARK
A NOVEL BY
MANUEL MUÑOZ
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2011 by Manuel Muñoz.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Anne Winslow.
A small portion of this novel appeared, in slightly different form,
as “Sweet Talk” in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas.
“Last Seen” from Fate by Ai. Copyright © 1991 by Ai.
Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary
perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names,
characters, places, and incidents either are products of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Muñoz, Manuel, [date]
What you see in the dark : a novel / by Manuel Muñoz. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56512-533-9
1. Couples — Fiction. 2. Motion pictures — Production and
direction — Fiction. 3. Bakersfield (Calif.) — Fiction.
4. California — History — 1850–1950 — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.U69W47 2011
813’.6 — dc22
2010038452
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
For Stuart Bernstein
If the thirst for love
is not the thirst for death, what is it?—
—Ai, “Last Seen”
WHAT YOU SEE IN THE DARK
Part One
One
If you had been across the street, pretending to investigate the local summer roses outside Holliday’s Flower Shop, you could have seen them through the café’s plate glass, the two sitting in a booth by the window, eating lunch. You could have seen them even if you had been inside the shop, peering from behind the window display of native Bakersfield succulents, wide-faced California sunflowers, blue flax in hanging pots. The two of them sat in full view of everyone passing by, minding their own business. Their mouths moved alternately in long, drawn-out soliloquies, or sometimes they paused and deliberated, as if they had to choose their words carefully, grinning if they spoke at the same time. The girl was eating a thin sandwich and taking short sips from a thick glass of cola. The man ate with a knife and fork, his elbows up in a sawing motion, his eyes sometimes looking down to concentrate.
He was the most handsome man in town for sure, and his mother owned a little motel out on the highway. He always seemed to be wearing only brand-new shirts: no one could keep shirts that color, that softness, time after time, hanging them to dry stiff on a backyard line.
He would be a good man to marry.
They were eating in the café located on one of the choice corners on a better stretch of Union Avenue, the café that still had the plate-glass windows all the way down to the sidewalk, one of the few places that still did after the’52 earthquake. You could see the entire booth through those windows: the table, the red vinyl, their dishes, the waitress’s white shoes when she came by to check on them, how the girl crossed her feet and rocked them nervously. She was not dressed as crisply as he was. Even if her clothes looked clean and pressed, you could tell right off that the day she began wearing nice things around town was the day the two of them had done more than talk and have lunch. His mother, whom everybody knew, had worked at the café since before the earthquake, and the waitresses who served him at any of the shifts—breakfast, lunch, dinner, or late-night coffee and cherry pie—had all known him as a boy, so it was hard to tell if their attentions to him were motherly or something more flirtatious.
And yet the one to grab his attention was that skinny brown girl who lived above the bowling alley. Always on foot, always staring into the windows of the record shop, of the TG&Y, of the furniture store, of the Rexall, even of the shoe store