The Book of Illusions (37 page)

I missed her. However impetuous our plan might have been, I never had any doubts or second thoughts about it. I pushed on in a state of blind happiness, waiting for the moment when she would finally be able to come east, and whenever I started to miss her too much, I would open the freezer door and look at the gun. The gun proved that Alma had already been there—and if she had been there once, there was no reason to believe she wouldn’t return. At first, I didn’t dwell on the fact that the gun was still loaded, but after two or three days it started to bother me. I hadn’t touched it in all that time, but one afternoon, just to be safe, I lifted it out of the refrigerator and carried it into the woods, where I fired all six bullets into the ground. They made a noise like a string of Chinese firecrackers, like bursting paper bags. When I returned to the house, I put the gun in the top drawer of the bedside table. It couldn’t kill anymore, but that didn’t mean it was any less potent, any less dangerous. It embodied the power of a thought, and every time I looked at it, I remembered how close that thought had come to destroying me.

The phone in Alma’s cottage was temperamental, and I couldn’t always get through to her when I called. Faulty wiring, she said, a loose connection somewhere in the system, which meant that even after I dialed her number and heard the rapid little clicks and beeps that suggested the call was going through, the bell on her end didn’t ring. More often than not, however, that phone could be counted on for outgoing calls. On the day I returned to Vermont, I made several unsuccessful attempts to reach her, and when Alma finally called at eleven (nine o’clock mountain time), we decided to stick to that arrangement in the future. She would call me rather than the other way around. Every time we talked after that, we ended the conversation by fixing the time of the next call, and for three nights running the routine worked as smoothly as a trick in a magic show. We would say seven o’clock, for example, and at ten minutes to seven I would install myself in the kitchen, pour myself a straight shot of tequila (we went on drinking tequila together, even long-distance), and at seven sharp, just as the second hand on the wall clock was sweeping up to mark the hour, the telephone would ring. I came to depend on the precision of those calls. Alma’s punctuality was a sign of faith, a commitment to the principle that two people in two different parts of the world could nevertheless be of one mind about nearly everything.

Then, on the fourth night (the fifth night after I had left Tierra del Sueño), Alma didn’t call. I suspected that she was having trouble with her phone, and therefore I didn’t act right away. I went on sitting in my spot, patiently waiting for the phone to ring, but when the silence stretched on for another twenty minutes, then thirty minutes, I began to worry. If the phone was out of order, she would have sent a fax to explain why I hadn’t heard from her. Alma’s fax machine was hooked up to another line, and there had never been any glitches with that number. I knew it was useless, but I picked up my own phone and called her anyway—with the expected negative result. Then, thinking that she might have been caught up in some business with Frieda, I called the number at the main house, but the result was the same. I called again, just to make sure I had dialed correctly, but again there was no answer. As a last resort, I sent a brief note by fax.
Where are you, Alma?
Is everything all right? Puzzled. Please write (fax) if phone is
out of order. I love you, David
.

There was only one phone in my house, and it was in the kitchen. If I went upstairs to the bedroom, I was afraid I wouldn’t hear it ringing if Alma called later in the night—or, if I did, that I wouldn’t be able to get downstairs in time to answer it. I had no idea what to do with myself. I waited around in the kitchen for several hours, hoping that something would happen, and then, when it finally got to be past one in the morning, I went into the living room and stretched out on the sofa. It was the same lumpy ensemble of springs and cushions that I had turned into a makeshift bed for Alma the first night we were together—a good place for thinking morbid thoughts. I kept at it until dawn, torturing myself with imagined car crashes, fires, medical emergencies, deadly stumbles down flights of stairs. At some point, the birds woke up and started singing in the branches outside. Not long after that, I unexpectedly fell asleep.

I had never thought that Frieda would do to Alma what she had done to me. Hector had wanted me to stay at the ranch and watch his films; then he died, and Frieda had prevented it from happening. Hector had wanted Alma to write his biography. Now that he was dead, why hadn’t it occurred to me that Frieda would take it upon herself to prevent the book from being published? The situations were almost identical, and yet I hadn’t seen the resemblance, had utterly failed to notice the similarities between them. Perhaps it was because the numbers were so far apart. Watching the films would have taken me no more than four or five days; Alma had been working on her book for close to seven years. It never crossed my mind that anyone could be cruel enough to take seven years of a person’s work and rip it to shreds. I simply lacked the courage to think that thought.

If I had seen what was coming, I wouldn’t have left Alma alone at the ranch. I would have forced her to pack her manuscript, pushed her into the van, and taken her with me to the airport on that last morning. Even if I hadn’t acted then, it still might have been possible to do something before it was too late. We had had four telephone conversations since my return to Vermont, and Frieda’s name had come up in every one of them. But I hadn’t wanted to talk about Frieda. That part of the story was over for me now, and I was only interested in talking about the future. I rattled on to Alma about the house, about the room I was preparing for her, about the furniture I had ordered. I should have been asking her questions, pressing her for details about Frieda’s state of mind, but Alma seemed to enjoy hearing me talk about these domestic matters. She was in the early stages of moving—filling up cardboard boxes with her clothes, deciding what to take and what to leave behind, asking me which books in my library duplicated hers—and the last thing she was expecting was trouble.

Three hours after I left for the airport, Alma and Frieda had driven to the funeral parlor in Albuquerque to collect the urn. Later that day, in a windless corner of the garden, they had scattered Hector’s ashes among the rosebushes and tulip beds. It was the same spot where Taddy had been stung by the bee, and Frieda had been quite shaky throughout the ceremony, holding her own for a minute or two and then giving in to prolonged fits of silent crying. When Alma and I talked on the phone that night, she told me that Frieda had never looked so vulnerable to her, so dangerously close to collapse. Early the next morning, however, she walked over to the main house and discovered that Frieda was already awake—sitting on the floor in Hector’s study, combing through mountains of papers, photographs, and drawings that were spread out in a circle around her. The screenplays were next, she told Alma, and after that she was going to make a systematic search for every other document linked to the production of the films: storyboard folios, costume sketches, set-design blueprints, lighting diagrams, notes for the actors. It would all have to be burned, she said, not a single scrap of material could be spared.

Already, then, just one day after I left the ranch, the limits of the destruction had been changed, pushed back to accommodate a broader interpretation of Hector’s will. It wasn’t just the movies anymore. It was every piece of evidence that could prove those movies had ever existed.

There were fires on each of the next two days, but Alma took no part in them, letting Juan and Conchita serve as helpers as she went about her own business. On the third day, scenery was dragged out from the back rooms of the sound stage and burned. Props were burned, costumes were burned, Hector’s journals were burned. Even the notebook I had read in Alma’s house was burned, and still we were unable to grasp where things were headed. That notebook had been written in the early thirties, long before Hector went back to making films. Its only value was as a source of information for Alma’s biography. Destroy that source, and even if the book was eventually published, the story it told would no longer be credible. We should have understood that, but when we talked on the phone that night, Alma mentioned it only in passing. The big news of the day had to do with Hector’s silent films. Copies of those films were already in circulation, of course, but Frieda was worried that if they were discovered on the ranch, someone would make the connection between Hector Spelling and Hector Mann, and so she had decided to burn them as well. It was a gruesome job, Alma reported her as saying, but it had to be done thoroughly. If one part of the job was left unfinished, then all the other parts would become meaningless.

We arranged to talk again at nine o’clock the next evening (seven her time). Alma was going to be in Sorocco for most of the afternoon—shopping at the supermarket, taking care of personal errands—but even though it was an hour-anda-half drive back to Tierra del Sueño, we figured that she would return to the cottage by six. When her call didn’t come, my imagination immediately started filling in the blanks, and by the time I stretched out on the sofa at one o’clock, I was convinced that Alma had never made it home, that something monstrous had happened to her.

It turned out that I was both right and wrong. Wrong that she hadn’t made it home, but right about everything else—although not in any of the ways I had imagined. Alma pulled up in front of her house a few minutes after six. She never locked the door, so she wasn’t unduly alarmed to discover that the door of the cottage was open, but smoke was rising from the chimney, and that struck her as bizarre, altogether incomprehensible. It was a hot day in the middle of July, and even if Juan and Conchita had come to deliver fresh laundry or were taking out the trash, why on earth had they lit a fire? Alma left her groceries in the back of her car and went straight into the house. Crouched in front of the hearth in the living room, Frieda was crumpling up sheets of paper and throwing them into the fire. Gesture for gesture, it was a precise reenactment of the final scene of
Martin Frost:
Norbert Steinhaus burning the manuscript of his story in a desperate attempt to bring Alma’s mother back to life. Bits of paper ash floated out into the room, hovering around Frieda like injured black butterflies. The edges of the wings glowed orange for an instant, then turned whitish gray. Hector’s widow was so absorbed in her work, so intent on finishing the job she had started, that she never even looked up when Alma walked through the door. The unburned pages were spread out across her knees, a small pile of eight-anda-half-by-eleven sheets, perhaps twenty or thirty of them, perhaps forty. If that was all there was left, then the other six hundred pages were already gone.

In her own words, Alma
went into a frenzy, a vicious tirade,
an insane burst of shouting and screaming
. She charged across the living room, and when Frieda stood up to defend herself, Alma shoved her aside. That was all she could remember, she said. One violent shove, and then she was already past Frieda, running toward her study and the computer at the back of the house. The burned manuscript was only a printout. The book was in the computer, and if Frieda hadn’t tampered with the hard drive or found any of the backup disks, then nothing would be lost.

Hope for an instant, a brief surge of optimism as she crossed the threshold of the room, and then no hope. Alma entered the study, and the first thing she saw was a blank space where the computer had been. The desk was bare: no more monitor, no more keyboard, no more printer, no more blue plastic box with the twenty-one labeled floppy disks and the fifty-three different research files. Frieda had carted away the whole lot. No doubt Juan had been in on it with her, and if Alma understood the situation correctly, then it was already too late to do anything about it. The computer would be smashed; the disks would be cut into little pieces. And even if that hadn’t happened yet, where was she going to start looking for them? The ranch spread out over four hundred acres. All you had to do was pick a spot somewhere, dig a hole, and the book would disappear forever.

She wasn’t sure how long she remained in the study. Several minutes, she thought, but it could have been longer than that, perhaps as long as a quarter of an hour. She remembered sitting down at the desk and putting her hands over her face. She wanted to cry, she said, to let loose in a jag of uninterrupted screaming and sobbing, but she was still too stunned to cry, and so she didn’t do anything but sit there and listen to herself breathe through her hands. At a certain point, she began to notice how quiet it had become in the house. She assumed that meant Frieda had already left—that she had simply walked out and gone back to the other house. That was just as well, Alma thought. No amount of arguing or explaining would ever undo what had happened, and the fact was that she never wanted to talk to Frieda again. Was that true? Yes, she decided, it was true. If that was the case, then the time had come to get out of there. She could pack a bag, get into her car, and drive to a motel somewhere near the airport. First thing in the morning, she could be on the plane to Boston.

That was when Alma stood up from the desk and left the study. It wasn’t yet seven o’clock, but she knew me well enough to be certain that I would be in my house—hovering around the phone in the kitchen, pouring myself a tequila in anticipation of her call. She wasn’t going to wait until the appointed time. Years of her life had just been stolen from her, the world was blowing up in her head, and she had to talk to me now, had to start talking to someone before the tears came and she couldn’t get the words out of her mouth. The phone was in the bedroom, the next room over from the study. All she had to do was turn right when she went out the door, and ten seconds later she would have been sitting on her bed dialing my number. When she came to the threshold of the study, however, she hesitated for a moment and turned left instead. Sparks had been flying all over the living room, and before she settled in to a long conversation with me, she had to make sure that the fire was out. It was a reasonable decision, the correct thing to do under the circumstances. So she took that detour to the other side of the house, and a moment later the story of that night turned into a different story, the night became a different night. That’s the horror for me: not just being unable to prevent what happened, but knowing that if Alma had called me first, it might not have happened at all. Frieda would still have been lying dead on the living room floor, but none of Alma’s responses would have been the same, none of the things that happened after she discovered the body would have played out as they did. Talking to me would have made her feel a little stronger, a little less crazy, a little better prepared to absorb the shock. If she had told me about the shove, for example, had described to me how she had pushed Frieda in the chest with the flat of her hand before running past her into the study, I might have been able to warn her about the possible consequences. People lose their balance, I would have told her, they stumble backward, they fall, they hit their heads against hard objects. Go into the living room and check. Find out if Frieda is still there, and Alma would have gone into the living room without hanging up the phone. I would have been able to talk to her immediately after she discovered the body, and that would have calmed her down, given her a chance to think more clearly, made her stop and reconsider before going ahead with the terrible thing she was proposing to do. But Alma hesitated in the doorway, turned left rather than right, and when she found Frieda’s body lying crumpled up on the floor, she forgot about calling me. No, I don’t think she forgot, I don’t mean to suggest that she forgot—but the idea was already taking shape in her head, and she couldn’t bring herself to pick up the phone. Instead, she went into the kitchen, sat down with a bottle of tequila and a ballpoint pen, and spent the rest of the night writing me a letter.