The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (8 page)

Just inside the orange slit, two eyes locked on him. Startled, he stepped backward and almost fell. The eyes rose higher and the tent opened. A large woman lunged out, glaring at him. Before she drew the flap shut behind her he got a glimpse of something bathed in the unnaturally warm glow of the interior, something pale and nearly shapeless laid out on a white towel.

“Yes?”

He cleared his throat. “Can I be of any help?”

The woman stood guard at the entrance. Her bathing suit stretched to enclose her massive form, rolled black straps cutting into her doughy shoulders.

“You’re new,” she said. Though her protruding eyes did not move he knew that every detail, every inch of his body was being examined.

“Forgive me for bothering you,” he said evenly. “But I didn’t know . . .” He looked to the note as though it would explain everything. Unaccountably his hand shook. Already sweat ran from his wrists and blurred the lettering. He crumpled it and tossed it away.

Behind her something groaned.

“He gets cramps when I leave him in one position too long.” She regarded Wintner warily for another moment, then abruptly stood aside. “He says he’d like to meet you.”

“Are you sure?” Wintner was at a complete loss. He felt like he had stepped into a nudist colony without his papers.

The woman held out a wattled arm. The canvas curled open.

A man lay sweltering in the livid interior. Essentially he had no legs. One grew to the knee, one was a mere flipper. Ignoring Wintner, the woman sat and took the man’s great grey head into her lap.

She proceeded to massage his temples. She wiped his forehead with a cloth. She took up a cotton swab and then, after she had painstakingly cleaned the whorls of one ear, used manicure scissors to snip at the salt-and-pepper hairs growing there. Wintner stood by, a spy observing a private ritual.

“We always come here this time of year,” she said. “For the weather. We don’t like the cold, do we, honey?” She kneaded his speckled shoulders, his jutting breastbone.

The old man rolled his head to the side, a mighty effort. His eyes were black as beads but with a tinge of blue-grey around the frayed pupils. His shortened body was scarred, folded in on itself at every joint and orifice. The stump-ends where his hands should have been were sucked in like navels, as though sewn to a point inside. His eyes searched Wintner’s vicinity.

“Can I bring you something?” Wintner offered. “A cold drink? A glass of water? Anything?”

The grey head lolled in a swoon. The interior was sweltering; the sun transformed the walls of the tent into incandescent screens, the stripes a pattern of bars. Wintner itched to be gone.

He backstepped, feeling for the opening.

As if on cue the woman recentered the head on the towel, put down her tools and followed Wintner out.

He was instantly cooler. It was a sweatbox in there. Didn’t she realize that? With his circulation so drastically shortened, the poor man’s natural body temperature would be abnormally high to begin with; such confinement would become unbearable by midday. Was the tent a last resort to shield his condition from prying eyes? But wouldn’t they do better in their air-conditioned room? Surely the man didn’t care that there was a pool a few feet away, on the other side of the canvas barrier.

“Such a beautiful day!” she said. She inhaled deeply and shook her hair free. Moist curls flung jewels of perspiration into the glare. “I dream about this place all year long.”

“Yes,” said Wintner. He found his voice. “I was just on my way—”

“But you can’t go. I won’t let you.” Her mood became generous, her lumpy face girlishly animated. “We must talk.”

Wintner did not know whether he should feel flattered or threatened. Either attitude seemed absurd.

“Sure,” he said. “But right now I’m expecting a call. I’ll be back later, though. I—” and here he foundered, “I hope your husband feels better.” How else to put it?

Her face sagged, the mere mention dragging her down like gravity. “It’s Tachs-Meisner Syndrome,” she said, her voice coarse again. “We thought he was safe from the bloodline. But since his fortieth birthday . . . One can only try to be as comfortable as possible, until the end.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You shouldn’t be. We are almost free.”

He nodded and stared at the cement. His feet were as pale as they had been the first day of summer on the sidewalks of the town where he grew up. He had never before felt grateful for his strong arches, his well-shaped toes. But now he noticed that his fourth and fifth toes were no longer perfect; distorted by years of proper shoes, they had grown inward—now they were mere knobs, the nails squeezed down to slivers and all but vanished, suggesting evolution to a lower form. How could he not have noticed until now? He was aware of a tightening. The concrete heated under his delicate soles, which had been pampered for so long that they were hypersensitive, less able to protect him from the real world. The taut skin covering his insteps wavered in a rising heat mirage. He detected a smell that was dangerously like burning meat. He needed to get away, back to his sandals and a patch of shade. But there was no shade here except in the tent.

“I’ll stop by later,” he suggested. “Do you take your meals in the dining room? Perhaps I’ll see you this evening. I won’t be alone, but you might enjoy meeting a friend of mine.”

She shook her head. “There’s no time. He needs me. Always.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Every hour, every minute, every second!” she said with shocking bitterness, almost spitting the words. She gazed longingly at the pool as though it were an impossible distance away.

He moved off. “Well, I’m sure I’ll see you later. This afternoon, probably. Good luck, Mrs. . . . ?”

“I was like my mother. I believed the dream. Young girls always do. We marry, thinking what a joy it will be. But somehow it changes.” Her eyes distended above her puffy cheeks. “And now, God help me, it’s too much!”

She lumbered toward Wintner to prevent his leaving, but too late. She stood there sadly, her fat bosom heaving, then wheeled around wearily and stooped to reenter the tent. Wintner could not avoid seeing the shapeless mass inside struggling to turn onto its side, the misshapen features, the ruined arms batting out for leverage. Resigned, the woman returned to her duties. She took up cotton and alcohol and began cleansing the pores on his neck.

Wintner retrieved his sandals and beat a hasty retreat.

The path was harder to follow than he remembered, but he hurried back faster than ever through the lush vegetation. Blood-red bougainvillaea dripped over arbors, huge ivy choked off plots of delphinium and quivered at the borders of the walk, eager to overgrow and split the painted cement. The table setting next to the hidden cottages remained immaculate and untouched. Below, in the botanical gardens, variegated plants were locked in a stalemate of symbiosis. He came to the gazebo, white as a lattice of crossed bones, and finally saw that the hole in the roof had been cut out to make room for a rapidly maturing tree; as he passed, heavily pruned limbs were already thrusting upward to fill the empty circle.

He realized that he could not call the girl from the pool even if he wanted to; he had forgotten to ask her name.

Now he would never know.

He remembered the last image of the man in the cabana, face crawling with sweat, mouth open on darkness in a desperate rictus. Wintner lay sprawled on the bed in his room and tried to put the memory out of his mind, but could not.

The morning lagged, the afternoon slackened until the sun came to a standstill above a blanket of smog. He made the call twice in the first hour, then every twenty minutes, then every ten. Each time Joe Gillis’s voice droned the same prerecorded message. The actor’s presence projected through the telephone to an extraordinary degree; even on tape his dark power was immediately recognizable. By midafternoon Wintner gave up leaving any word at all on the machine.

He pitied the man in the tent, but soon felt nearly as confined himself. The walls of his room narrowed in the lengthening shadows. He rode the elevator down to the lobby, which now seemed nothing more than a fey decorator’s wet dream, hand-rubbed and unlivable. When he returned with a newspaper and a sandwich, the ceiling had closed in even more dramatically.

He considered renting a car. He had Gillis’s address. He could simply drive over.

Why not?

He picked up the phone directory.

There was a knock on the door.

At first he didn’t recognize her. She had put on a blouse and skirt; the lapels of the blouse, slightly too large, hung wide over the bathing suit so that she appeared childishly small, half-hidden in her loose clothes. She kept a reasonable distance and blinked at him from beneath dark curls.

“Were you sleeping? I can come back.”

“No! No, please. I’m glad to see you. Come in.”

“I got your room number from the desk.” The young woman sidled in, visibly ill at ease. Did she notice what had happened to the walls and ceiling? “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. I could use some company.” He moved his suitcase, pushed aside the unopened newspaper so she could sit on the bed.

“Have you heard from your friend yet?”

“I’ll talk to him later. You know how it is in this business—hurry up and wait.”

“Oh.”

“Can I get you anything? I think there’s a room service menu somewhere.”

She tossed her curls, inexplicably amused. “No, but I’ll be glad to get
you
something.” She eyed the bottle of MacAllan Single Malt in his open suitcase. He had brought it to celebrate with Gillis. She reached for it. Before he could stop her she twisted off the seal with a flourish, an exaggerated bit of business she might have seen in a movie once. If she went to the movies. “Do you like it plain or with water?” she asked sweetly.

“No, really, I don’t need anything.” Then again maybe he did. It was not such a bad idea. Yet he felt oddly guilty. “You don’t have to serve me. This was my idea, remember?”

“Was it?” she said. “That’s all right. I enjoy it.”

He believed she meant it. He leaned one arm back against the pillow and waited.

She removed the paper cover from one of his sanitized glasses and poured what she estimated to be a couple of fingers. She was trying so hard to learn the moves, to get it all down. She wanted to make it true, the way it would be on a bad television show. He was touched. The clothes, for example, were not quite right; he wondered where she had got them. He thought: She still accepts everything she was taught. She probably forces herself to go to the right places, do the right things, like staying at this hotel. And why? Is it worth it? She thinks it is. It may be all she knows. But what’s the payoff for her?

He drank the Scotch down to the vapors while she sat on the end of the bed, one leg half-concealed under her.

“Did you hurt yourself?” He pointed to a small circle of cauterized skin on her shinbone. He had not noticed it earlier.

She made an attempt to cover it but her skirt was not long enough. “Oh, it’s nothing. I don’t mind anymore. It’s only—only scar tissue.”

Now he saw another mark an inch or two below her kneecap. She repositioned her legs nervously and her skirt hiked up. There were three, four, several more spots scattered along her calves, irregular patches of tissue, nearly round as if burned into her flesh by heated coins. Each scar covered a small concavity, suggesting that abscesses or tumors of some kind had developed there and been removed. They had healed well, but the indentations remained.

He had a hunch. “You didn’t grow up on the beach, did you?” he asked.

She tilted her head quizzically.

Of course not, he thought. She was definitely not from around here. “My nephew had something like that. He was raised in San Diego. Surfer’s knots, they were called. Calcium deposits. He had them removed, too.”

“Oh, no,” she said with forced casualness, “these were—were bone marrow transplants. Afterwards there’s always an empty space.” She smoothed the hollows with her hands. “They’ll fill out, though. It takes time, but something else grows in. I’m sure that’s what will happen with me. The doctor says you can’t leave nothing where something used to be. Till then it’s just deadspace.”

“I see.” He was careful not to show any revulsion. “Does it hurt?”

“It used to. After a while you don’t notice it anymore. Now there’s no feeling. There will be again, though. If not . . .”

Fascinated, he bent closer. He touched one of the spots with infinite care. It was softer than anything he had ever touched before. Her leg tensed, then relaxed slowly as if from an effort of will. He felt the silkiness of tiny hairs growing in around the scar.

She pressed his finger lightly into the gap and smiled with satisfaction. The fingertip filled it perfectly.

The sensation was unnerving. He was both attracted and repelled. He pulled away and sat back against the headboard.

“You look tired,” she said.

He knew it was true. He hadn’t slept well and the long day was taking its toll. His neck ached. His mouth was sour with the peaty taste of the Scotch and his eyes felt scorched. He wanted to close them. Until it was time.