A Stranger Like You (26 page)

“You drank too much.”

“You don’t know me,” she says.

“I want to know you.”

The door opens and you can feel the car adjusting to their weight. The doors close.

“You don’t know anything about me!”

“Start talking. It’s a long way to Nevada. I should know you real good by the time we get there.”

Ida had not answered his calls. He felt somewhat at a loss. He supposed he’d been pretty rough on her. She hadn’t liked what he’d done to her, more than once she’d cried out, begging him to stop—but you never knew with women what they really wanted, and it had felt so good he wasn’t able to. It was a powerful feeling, as though he had gotten to the very core of her, as though he had tapped into her soul—a dirty place, a dark place—the place that most defined her—and he possessed that part of her now. It was for him and nobody else. And she’d never get it back.

It had been selfish, he understood that now. She had decided not to forgive him. And he had decided that it was all right with him. Maybe he didn’t care. Then again, she was in his thoughts. He thought about her constantly.

He sat on the edge of the unmade bed, watching the people down on the street. A crowd emerged from the old stucco church and the bells were ringing in the tower. He liked the sound they made. It was hot that morning, the sun white on a white sky, and there was talk of a heat wave. As usual, the little dog across the street was yapping at the window. Out in front, its oblivious owner was shoveling a hole in the grass, wearing a house dress, her hair in curlers, her husband in a lawn chair on the red-painted stoop, shielding his eyes with a newspaper. It was a strange house, Hugh thought, and they seemed a strange couple. All the while the dog went on barking.

He had gotten a call earlier from Marion’s lawyer, a man who was once a personal friend. Hugh thought he could hear Marion in the background and wondered if the lawyer and his wife had become lovers. He wanted an address. She was suing him for divorce. The lawyer had mentioned that his position at Equitable Life had been terminated.

Hugh dressed and went to get something to eat. At the coffee shop, he sat at the counter and ordered a turkey sandwich. It was the same waitress. She brought him the meatloaf instead then disappeared. He sat there looking at the plate. He got up and went to the men’s room and saw her smoking in the back, talking to somebody on her cell phone. In the sunlight, he saw that her hair was red.

He spoke through the screen, “I didn’t order that. You brought me the wrong thing.”

She looked up, confused. “What? I can’t hear you?”

“That meal. It wasn’t what I ordered.”

“I’m on my break.” She turned her back on him, muttering into the phone.

When he returned to the counter he picked up the plate of meatloaf and dropped it on the floor. It made a loud sound and everybody stopped what they were doing and looked at him. He stood there a moment, gathering his thoughts. He walked out without paying, jerking the door, shaking up the sleigh bells along the side of it.

When he got back to the motel he saw a FOR RENT sign on the front lawn across the street. On an impulse, Hugh went over and rang the bell. The dog started to bark and growl as if it smelled something on Hugh it didn’t like. The woman answered the door in her housecoat, unfazed, holding the dog like a parcel she wanted to mail without a return address. Now the dog was grimacing, baring its teeth, nudging him with its pointy wet snout. The woman had curlers in her hair, secured under a plastic shower cap. Thick tortoiseshell glasses rested on her rather prominent nose. Under the housecoat she wore support stockings and orthopedic shoes. As they walked past an open doorway Hugh saw the woman’s husband sitting at a table having a meal, watching some routine catastrophe on TV. The woman took Hugh up the red-carpeted stairs to see the room. It was a furnished efficiency with the same red carpet and a Murphy bed and it smelled a little like bug spray. Still, it might work, he thought. For a little while anyway. “I’ll take it,” he told her.

That afternoon he went out and bought a computer and a printer, charging the items on his credit card, then stopped in a bookstore and bought the Leo Zaklos tapes to see what all the fuss was about. When he returned to the apartment he could hear his landlords bickering and the little dog torpedoed up the stairs after him and ran around his apartment in circles, yapping and shrieking with delight as Hugh tried in vain to catch it. Then it came in again and urinated on the carpet. Hugh was so incensed that he kicked it out into the hall. The landlord scooped the whimpering, mop-headed creature into her arms and gave Hugh a dirty look.

He set up his desk near the window and dug out his old screenplay,
The Adjuster,
determined to revise it. Going over the script, making notes in the margins with a number two pencil, he felt like a real writer, and he quickly concluded that the script he had sold to Cory Rogers wasn’t any good, it had been beyond miraculous that he had sold it in the first place. Hedda Chase had been right. Philosophically, he understood that the thing he had done to her had been wrong, the result of some tragic compulsive neurosis or, even worse, some deep, unfounded sadness. And yet, he didn’t really feel that bad about it. It was like something that had happened to him in a dream, not in real life, and when he thought about it from time to time, he tried to understand the lesson in it, tried to fathom the impending consequences, but he could not.

As the sun gently descended the façade of the motel across the street, Hugh poured his first drink. It was his little ritual. He had bought the whiskey around the corner from an Indian with a glass eye who made his wife work the register while he roamed the filthy linoleum floors, helping customers. The wife’s eyes were green and spectacular, Hugh thought, although she had met his gaze only once and by accident. She only dressed in saris, some red, some green, gold. Hugh wondered if the owner and his wife thought he was an alcoholic; since his arrival in Los Angeles he’d made frequent visits to their shop, and he imagined the two of them discussing Hugh at home, trying to understand why he drank so much. Sometimes, Hugh felt guilty going in there, and he’d make up an excuse about why, again, he needed a bottle of whiskey, claiming that he was having a party. The wife would smile a little if her husband wasn’t around. If you were a good customer, they lowered their eyes whenever they saw you, as though you were committing a royal sin. The wife would lower the bottle into the paper bag, symbolically, he thought, and try not to look at him when she handed him his change. Sometimes he would ask her a question so that she’d have to acknowledge him, something about the weather or the time, and he’d get a brief flash of recognition.

He took the drink to his desk and sat there, staring at the computer screen, at the words waiting for him. Something about the alcohol made him able to focus on his work. The images flushed into his mind like fresh cold water. After an hour of intense work, he felt drained, and lay on his bed, counting the tiny cracks in the ceiling. He thought about his days in the insurance business, what it had been like sitting at that desk with his boss looming over his shoulder. Then he thought about Hedda Chase, alone in the darkness of the trunk. Coming to terms with his crime was not easy for him. If she was dead, he thought, then she was haunting him, he sensed her presence everywhere he went.

He fell into a drowsy stupor and dreamed that the bed was floating. In the dream he sat up and looked down at the carpet, which had turned into a sea of blood. He woke in a cold sweat, hearing the bells of evening Mass, and ran into the bathroom, heaving into the toilet.

Maybe he was drinking too much after all.

Hugh called Tom Foster on his cell phone and asked if he could see him. “I need to talk to you about something.”

“Sure, Hugh.” Tom told him he was at an editing room in Burbank, with his friend Bruno Morelli. “Come on by,” he said, and gave him directions.

It was a nondescript building with narrow corridors lit with long fluorescent tubes. Hugh roamed the hallways, poking his head through doors that were ajar, hearing the backward squeal of rewinding sound tape. Most of the editors looked sleepy, he thought. He found Tom in room number eleven, having a sloppy corned beef sandwich that looked delicious. Bruno and the editor were watching something on the small screen. From what he could see of it, a woman wrapped in white cloth was being buried in sand up to her waist. She looked distraught. There were men standing around her, watching her with disgust, their hands curled in fists.

Hugh knocked lightly and Tom put down his sandwich, wiped his hands on a napkin, took a sip of his water, and came out into the hall.

“I thought you’d gone back east by now.”

“I decided to stay for a while. I’m working on something with Ida Kent,” he lied.

“Good for you,” Tom said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I’ve been thinking about Hedda. Any word?”

Tom shook his head. “They haven’t found her car yet.”

Hugh coughed. “I’ve been worried. I’ve really been worried sick.”

“They’re on it, my friend. They’re all over it.” Tom patted him on the back. “Appreciate your concern.”

Hugh nodded. “Do they have any idea what happened?”

Tom nodded, gravely. “They think it has something to do with our film.” He motioned over his shoulder into the editing room. “The previews went well, but we changed the ending. Now that she’s gone missing. We want it to be accurate. We did it for her—for Fatima Kassim too.”

“Who?”

“The girl who died in the fire. People should know,” he said. “People should know what goes on.”

Later that night a story about Chase’s disappearance appeared on the news. Hugh flipped the channels, only to discover that every station was covering it. Suddenly, the whole town was talking about the missing producer, speculating what might have happened to her. Anyone who knew Chase was considered newsworthy and had been scrounged up for a two-minute interview on prime time. There was Armand, her supercilious, flounder-boned assistant in his tidy Arthur Gluck shirts, and the far less well-dressed Harold Unger, who, like a recalcitrant turtle shrugged at the camera, gulping out each word as if he had swallowed a spoon. There were the people who called themselves her friends, who were interviewed on couches, in offices, kitchens, or outside with their dogs. Even Bruno Morelli, the famous director, was questioned on his terrace with his quartet of notorious bulldogs. It seemed like every time Hugh turned on the television there was some sort of story on the Chase Disappearance. Everyone had an opinion about what had happened to her; her car had not been found. They had pictures of the house on Lomita Avenue, roped off with police tape, the cops going through it. There was an interview with her neighbor, Mr. Romeo, standing on her lawn, he hadn’t seen or heard anything. “She’s a real nice lady, keeps to herself.” Shaking his head, arms crossed over his chest. “This is a good neighborhood, quiet. We don’t have any trouble here.”

Like the complicated choreography of a dance, Hugh reviewed his actions inside her house, both on the occasion of the abduction and the second time, with Tom Foster. Foolishly, he’d drunk from a glass upon which he’d left behind his prints. Well, if they came to inquire he’d tell them that, yes, he’d been there. Of course he had. He and Tom had had a few drinks, waiting for Hedda to get home. They were all friends; what did they expect?

Hedda’s parents were interviewed. They came from New Jersey, two elderly academics in Thanksgiving colors, they’d had their daughter late in life, they were now in their eighties. Psychiatrists by profession each had segued into teaching, the father a professor emeritus at Rutgers. Hedda, born Hedda Chastowsky, had grown up an only child in a wealthy suburb—of course he already knew all this. Her mother had named her after a character in a Henrik Ibsen play.

A day later, after the premiere of her film at Cannes, a rumor began to circulate that Chase had been abducted by Shiite terrorists. The film had instigated a protest. During the scene he had glimpsed in Bruno Morelli’s editing room in which a woman—an adulteress—is stoned to death, people in the audience had thrown their programs at the screen. The FBI had been called. Charlie Rose did a show about the Muslim student, Fatima Kassim, who had, months before, brought the story on which the film was based to Tom Foster. The girl had been found dead in her dorm room. On the program, Tom and Bruno sat around the famous wooden table. They showed pictures of the girl when she was little, growing up in Iraq. They showed pictures of Baghdad before the invasion, and afterward. They showed pictures of the girl’s mother, who had been killed in a car bombing on a street near her home. They interviewed the girl’s aunt in Syria, who cried into a handkerchief. Hugh supposed it was possible—that what had happened to Hedda Chase was a form of political retaliation for her film. The fact that she was a woman—an extremely powerful woman—who’d been abruptly silenced, sent a certain message to people, one that, in this country anyway, inspired rage.

But it wasn’t the truth.

And yet maybe the truth didn’t matter anymore.

On Monday afternoon his cell phone rang. It was Tom. “You never told me about your script,” he said.

“What?”

“The script you wrote.
The Adjuster.
”

Hugh hesitated. At length he said, “What about it?”

“I’m over in her office, poking around. Digging through stuff. Imagine my surprise finding it there.”

“That old piece of crap? I’d forgotten I’d even sent it. Where’d you find it?”

“Buried in some file.” Hugh could hear Tom flipping through the script. “What’s it about?”

“It’s about some asshole in the insurance business. It’s crap. It’s fucking embarrassing. Do me a favor, Tom. Trash it for me, will you? I don’t want anyone seeing that garbage.”