What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [39]
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.
Six
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.
Dan Watson kept the truck running after Teresa pointed to the green door. “Right there?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “I live above the bowling alley.”
He peered up at the window, the blue curtains hanging. “I didn’t know that was up there.”
She opened the door. “Well, thank you for the ride.”
“You working tomorrow?”
“I am. Today was my day off.” She stepped out of the truck and