What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [80]
It was all hers, all private, the one thing that no one else had witnessed, all hers to embrace. She knew Vernon would never have spoken about it. His hand on her hand, then on her knee, the calluses, what a hard worker he was. All those years, he’d been a very kind customer, seated at the counter with a comforting regularity. He had meant well by her. He could have spared her what was coming. He’d been a very decent man, but it was too late, too late. She was standing on a dark porch, just as she had been years ago, waiting for her brother. She tried to think back to the day when everything—everything, everything—had gone wrong, to the day that had led to this moment, but she couldn’t see it. She looked as hard as she could into the dark but she couldn’t see it.
Eleven
He settled into his seat and readied for the journey back. His wife read one of the magazines, the type too small for his comfort. The Director was flying back to Los Angeles after a triumph long in coming. He would never admit such a thing to many around him, but he had missed the dazzle of the red carpet: the jewels parading on by, each piece bigger and more expensive than the last, borrowed emeralds nestled on top of a starlet’s breasts. How was it possible that the starlets got more and more beautiful every year? Daffodil chiffon, green silk, a leopard-print shawl. Handsome men in bow ties too uncomfortable after four whiskeys, and the flashbulbs now just a continuous silent sprinkling of light. He missed the old days, the actual pop of the cameras, and the patience of the women making entrances, waiting for the polite photographers to ready themselves, holding their poses as the magazines did the important work of capturing the women’s evening wear. No longer. It was 1972. Everything was much faster, the cameras mirroring exactly what the films themselves had been doing: less posture and key lighting, more spontaneity and room for the everyday flaw, with anything beautiful rising straight to the surface.
In Cannes, though, he had mostly stood away from the evening red carpets and the buzz of the cameras and had gone, instead, to the morning cafés with their cigarette smoke and their folded newspapers, the magazine writers nursing gin-and-tonic hangovers, readying for their day’s scheduled viewings. The Director could take very little of the pretensions aired at the evening parties, the mood tight with apprehension and handshakes, who was meeting whom. Evenings brought affect, good impressions, boisterous grace, and big smiles, all lining up for another film deal, a possible magazine article, a job. Mornings, though, brought what the Director enjoyed: the quiet, studious cafés adjacent to the hotels, where the cinema writers in their dark glasses clearly recognized him but left him alone to enjoy the windows open to the sea air drifting in. In the morning came the world newspapers, heavy with the reviews of the festival’s previous evening’s screenings, and he enjoyed eavesdropping on those who had a good handle on French or German as they rustled through all the reviews for comparison. He could spend the entire morning there without saying a word, no one disturbing him, eyes on his own news paper, pretending to read but enjoying the two loud British journalists in the corner disagreeing with a review in Le Soir, their tones as surly as the publication’s, both of them with fixed ideas of cinema and no room for change.
The Director was grateful for any morning without intrusion, and on days when a cinephile—always a young man—dared to approach his