What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [83]
But later in the film, something different happened. Another death was coming. The audience knew. There was no suspense. It was coming, like seeing two cars careering into an intersection with no way for either to slow down. There she was, the woman. By this point, the audience knew what women were for. She wore an ordinary dress, orange with white buttons, nothing glamorous like the one some people in the audience remembered Grace Kelly wearing—ice blue satin. She carried a white bag and stormed out of a pub, only to be met unexpectedly by the killer. He was a charmer. They walked together through the bustle of Covent Garden, passersby hauling flowers and sacks of vegetables. The killer lured her easily to his flat. They walked there together. They climbed the red-carpeted stairs, her white shoes and the give of the carpet. The audience knew what was going to happen in that room, but the camera stopped on the landing. It stopped on the landing and watched the woman enter, the killer following behind. The camera did not move. The audience noticed. The camera stayed as if to watch, then began a slow reversal down the steps. The camera looked away from the door. The camera caught the deep red floral pattern of the cheap curtains on the landing window. It caught the zigzag of the fire escape of the building across the way. It caught the quiet of the stairwell, no one hearing what was going on upstairs. It caught the gradual descent into the empty, lonely hallway, then the slow exit to the street, to the bustle of the everyday, the trundling wheelbarrows, the footsteps, the trucks loaded with produce, the vegetable sacks being lugged over shoulders, the street so noisy and the window up above where everything terrible was happening but need not be shown.
In his airplane seat, the Director floated halfway between a mild nap and the fluttering of his eyes, fully awake to the world, but he remained in the magic of the audience’s response to the long sequence, a standing ovation right in the middle of his film. All the papers made mention of the moment. They cheered his restraint, his elegant answer to prurience, as much as they cheered his return, as if acknowledging how much they’d taken for granted his enormous skill and grandeur, the great pleasure he had given them. Back in the world of the airplane, the lights low, his wife turning the pages of her magazine, his mind refused to leave that space where the applause deafened and would not yield, and he let himself drown in the cascade of acclaim. There was no star in the sequence, no blond arching to reach for a pair of scissors, no blond in a fitted pea green jacket fending off an attack of crows. Just the camera on the landing. Just him.
He opened his eyes for a moment and caught the stewardess in first class observing him. Her eyes made as if to shift away, but then she moved forward, smiling, as if to check whether he needed something. He needed nothing. He closed his eyes once more, and soon enough he was back in the audience, enjoying its echo, the shouts of approval, the keen embrace of complete adoration.
Twelve
The ring on your finger means a beginning is coming, but also an end. This is the aim in this town, to get a ring on the finger, to be ushered past the white fence and the rich red roses, to be pulled out of the rain. To step into a church and then step out of it, back out into the Bakersfield sunshine, but not alone, and all around are people who have joined themselves to others in the same way. The ring means you’ll be a wife, and the clean-cut boy who presented it has already promised you will no longer have to work in the shoe store. A beginning, but an end. No more toiling for Mr. Carson, no more long hours in the hot stuffiness of the store’s back room. A wife need not work. A wife