The Cutting Room (13 page)

“You are a very nice man,” she said.

I had slept in the same room, on the other spacious bed, beside her. It had been a night filled with fearful fantasies of fighting angry soccer players. Even the names of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar winners had not made me drowsy enough to sleep.

“So,” she said, “you read it?”

“Yes. And now I know . . . almost everything.”

“Here’s the rest. Last year, my mother found the diary and the film when my grandmother died. Long before, Bruno had moved the family to Spain and died there. The genius Welles might have been amused that his secret daughter had grown up to be a loving but ignorant woman, barely literate, who never even heard of him.

“In what I guess was a tribute to her real father, my mother just changed the name of her pension—the little boardinghouse she ran in Seville, where I grew up—from Casa de la Noche to Los Ambersons Magníficos.

“My mother never told me the story—she was ashamed of it, also. I was more like my grandmother: wild, interested in the arts or maybe just in having people look at me. But I must admit, I’d never heard of the movie, either.”

“It was made a long time ago,” I said.

“That’s no excuse, but thank you. Only when this”—she swallowed, hesitating—“thing happened to my mother, did I read the diary, and find out.”

I did not press her for details, though, of course I was hungry for them.

“I had moved to Barcelona to be a crazy girl, to party, to meet people, and to become a model or an actress. That was how I got to be the Fizz girl, and how I met Jorge. I learned English and always kept up on entertainment news, and that’s why I read about Ben Williams becoming Orson Welles. That’s why, after it happened, I thought he’d be my big daddy.”

By now, the bun and the coffee were finished. Erendira had an appetite—which was a good thing—and I placed another ice pack on her face, for which she touched my hand in thanks.

There was something about being near her. It was not just her beauty or her skittishness, though she had both in abundance. It was not even her ability to turn on both innocence and worldliness whenever she wanted to—she was an actress, after all. It was her link to greatness, the part of Orson Welles that was in her blood. Erendira was the closest I might ever get to the past that I had spent my life reporting and reconstructing. I could not help it, I moved a little closer to her on the bed.

I finally got up the guts to ask, “So, what exactly did happen?”

She sighed deeply, her swollen eyes closing, then reopening, with difficulty.

“A few months ago, there was a film festival in Barcelona. When I spoke to my mother on the phone, which I did every day, good girl that I really am, she told me that she had tenants who had come down the coast for a vacation after it was over. It was off season, and they were her only guests.

“They had been drawn by the name of the place, she said. It was a man and a woman, both big film fans. They kept grilling her about the new name, and kept flattering her about it. She wasn’t used to anyone paying attention to her, since my father died. Every night, they drank with her, apparently, and my mother didn’t drink well.

“One night, when we talked, she was very tipsy, and she kept going on and on about these guests, how wonderful they were, how excited they seemed about her stories. She said the man had even videotaped her for an American TV show.

“I was getting a little worried about them. What did they want, you know? That’s when I decided to go down there myself, to see.”

Erendira whipped one side of her heavy hair over onto her shoulder. The next installment seemed to hurt even more than her bruises.

“My mother was in her bed. She’d been smothered with a pillow. When the police came, I found her instructions about, you know, in case of her death. And it described her own mother’s diary, and the movie, and . . . that’s when I read the diary and when I realized that the movie was gone.”

She gave a long groan and fell, as if in slow motion, back onto the bed. Then she wept for what seemed forever. Ice packs and food were now inadequate; there was nothing I could do to help her.

Except find her mother’s killers, of course. I had the sneaking suspicion that I knew who at least one of them was.

“I’m sorry to pursue this,” I said, once she had subsided. “But did she describe them? The guests at Los Ambersons Magníficos?”

Erendira shrugged. “She said they were young, though young to her was anywhere from twenty to forty. She said they weren’t the cleanest people on earth, and for once, in her own hotel, she didn’t care. That was about it.”

Now her voice grew more excited. “I should never have left home. I should have stayed and helped her run the place, the way she wanted. What have I gotten? A boyfriend who beats me up. And meeting a movie star . . . who, it turns out, stole the film himself.”

I tried to tell her that Ben Williams had not stolen
Ambersons
, only bought it. But she was right: On some level, Ben was an accomplice to her mother’s murder. And, as Ben’s employee, so was I.

Guilt plus awful memories plus her own physical ordeal made Erendira sleep again, this time to escape. She twitched and moaned a little, from bad dreams.

There was a lot I had to report, and to one person in particular. I did not turn on my laptop. Instead, using Ben’s calling card, I dialed long distance to the States.

“Jeanine?” I said. “Gus Ziegler may have killed Alan Gilbert for
The Magnificent Ambersons
. But first, Alan Gilbert killed somebody else for it.”

Maybe I said the words
vulnerable
or
beautiful
too many times. Maybe I stressed how very different Erendira was from her image. Maybe there was an obvious gush in my voice.

Either way, Jeanine thought the whole thing seemed fishy.

“Have you seen it?” she said.

“Seen what?”

“
The Magnificent Ambersons,
for God’s sake. Have you seen it?”

“Well, no, not yet,” I said, caught. “I mean, the poor woman has had a terrible night, she’s barely been conscious, and—”

“Look, that’s all you care about, am I right? The movie?”

I paused, for an unfortunately long time. Jeanine came back with, “Roy, Ben Williams can afford to be a schmuck. You can’t. And, by the way, Ben wants the girl back. I seem to remember from your stay at The Farmer’s Daughter, and our little trip into the Malibu hills, that he’s got people who will remind you of that.”

I took this tongue-lashing in silence. I knew that she was right, yet I didn’t care as much as I might have.

“Besides,” Jeanine went on, “Alan Gilbert going to Spain? I never knew him to leave the country. He couldn’t afford it.”

“But he went to film festivals, to interview people, didn’t he? He taped Linda Blair that time, remember? And that old guy who said he was Louise Brooks’s lover?”

“Alan later found out that guy had escaped from an asylum. Anybody can say that they knew famous people.” Jeanine’s tone was especially pointed here. “Besides, one of those interviews was at a horror convention in Trenton. The other one was at the Rhinebeck Film Fair. Both were train rides from New York.”

I had to admit all of Jeanine’s points were well taken. But when I heard the rustle of Erendira’s body behind me, and her slight squeal of reawakening, I hurried to get off the phone.

“I’ll see it,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll see the movie.”

“I hope so. Or else you’re helping no one, least of all yourself.”

“I’ve gotten your point.”

“And you forgot one other thing. Even if Alan did travel overseas, he wouldn’t have done it with a woman. Who would have ever agreed to go with him?”

“There was that woman leaving his apartment that night.”

“But—
traveling
with him?”

This remark was the final flick of Jeanine’s lash of common sense. Discombobulated, I nodded in silence, instead of speaking, and then I suddenly hung up on her.

From there, I turned to see Erendira sitting up in bed, her feet dangling over its edge. She was smaller than I thought, almost tiny.

I approached her, carefully.

“How are you feeling?” I said.

“Better. It felt surprisingly good to have said all that. And to someone who understands.”

I couldn’t have explained to Jeanine if I’d tried. But I swore that Erendira looked at me with the same kind of kinship I felt toward her. We were joined by a genius, held together by film history. Now I knelt beside her, like a serf requesting entrance to that kingdom.

“I want to see it,” I said.

She smiled a little, naughtily. “You come right out and say it, don’t you?”

“The movie, I mean.”

“I know you do,” she said gently. “And you will. Soon. But first . . .”

Was knowing a hard-boiled nerd a relief after an abusive macho man? Was she only grateful? Should I not undersell myself, had I actually profoundly endeared myself to her? Or, as I imagined, had the forces of time and artistic talent set up this encounter? I only knew that, after many months alone, Erendira was the woman for whom I had been saving myself.

“We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning,” Brando as Kowalski tells Leigh as Dubois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. The scene had been censored in the Fifties, then restored in 1993.

Erendira slowly pulled her dress up her light brown legs, and, very obediently, I followed it with my lips.

“I don’t have the film,” she said afterward.

I just stared at Erendira. That is to say, I pulled back, since she was in my arms and had been for hours, and
then
I stared at her.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean, I have
a
film. But it’s not
the
film. Not
The Magnificent Ambersons.
”

I tried to keep my voice from becoming shrill. “Don’t you think this is something you should have told me
earlier
?”

Pulling the sheet over herself defensively, she looked me straight in the eyes. “Would it have made a difference?”

I realized what she meant. As calculating—and as insecure—as Erendira was, she had seduced me simply to keep me willing to help her. Had she done the same thing with Ben Williams? Probably.

That morning, I had not known how much I wanted her and how much just
Ambersons
. That morning, the two had seemed the same thing.

Now, at dusk, I surprised myself. I did not care about Erendira’s motives. Or, to be honest, about the movie. I just cared about her. Ignoring Jeanine’s prescience, I moved back and embraced her.

Encouraged, she explained. “In L.A., Ben passed out, of course, before he showed me the film. I ran it here, on an old projector in the basement of the theater in my mother’s town. I watched it with the owner of the place, whom I had known since I was a girl. Imagine my embarrassment when it turned out to be a stag film from, I don’t know, nineteen thirty-eight.” She smiled a little, bitterly. “Ben probably thought I wouldn’t know the difference.

“Actually, what he really thought was: I would get turned on by it. He had bought that innocent but fiery Latina thing I was doing.”

She got up, letting the sheet fall. Far from being the happy peasant she had portrayed herself, in private, in bed, Erendira had been unsure physically, and her posture now, when nude, was slightly stooped and self-protective. Like many actors, for her, attention was one thing, intimacy another.

“Sorry I’m not so good at this,” she had told me, as we began.

First off, I was no expert. Secondly, I did not care.

Erendira made her way to a closet, where she put on the other complimentary hotel bathrobe.

“You don’t think it was an accident?” I said. “That Ben just made a mistake?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Is it possible that there never was a real movie? That Alan Gilbert, that Gus Ziegler—sorry, you don’t know these names—that your
grandmother
never had it? That we’ve all been following, forgive the cliché, a phantom?”

“No,” she said flatly. “It exists. I’m sure.”

Erendira said it, irrationally, because she believed her mother. And I nodded, irrationally, because I believed her.

“That means that Ben still has it?”

“Or he gave it to someone else.”

She was seated on a chair, her fingers fidgeting, flicking at her nails, her legs crossing and uncrossing. Who knew that Erendira, the Fizz girl, the girl of a movie star’s dreams, was really a nervous wreck?

I did.

“Will you help me?” she said.

First, I had slept with the woman Ben had hired me to find. Now I was being asked to work for her—for free, I assumed—in order to corner Ben. Ethically, it was a dilemma.

“Sure,” I said.

She smiled, relaxing for the first time since I had known her. She rested back, and placed her feet up on the ottoman the hotel had so generously provided.

Erendira was not at ease for long. Right then, the door—unlocked obediently by a bellboy—flew open. What looked like the entire soccer team appeared.

It all happened so fast. Whispered Spanish slurs were uttered. I heard a scream, curtailed by a hand over Erendira’s mouth. A drawer of a hotel desk was pulled open.

“Jorge!” I said. “Remember me?”

Then I saw the Barcelona phone book coming right for my face.

When I woke up, I was lying on the floor of the bathroom. To be exact, I lay half in the bathroom and half in the living room, straddling the threshold. Whoever dragged me there had gotten tired before finishing the job.

I was naked, and my broken nose had been bleeding for a long time. I pulled up from the sticky puddle that had stained the white tile and now smeared my nose, mouth, and jaw.

I stood, very shakily. My head throbbed and, with every breath, I heard a crazy trombone blat. I stepped slowly into the suite.

The room showed only mild signs of struggle. Erendira’s bathrobe lay on the floor, with both its sleeves outstretched. It looked like a person who had died while crawling to the door.

Foggy and unable to focus, I decided to file a report to my employer. But before I could, the phone rang. I realized it had been ringing the whole time.