Night Film(103)

Olivia paused to take two orange petits fours from the tea stand, feeding one to herself, the other to a Pekingese. When she looked back at us, she smiled ruefully.

“Of course, the more time that went by, when I thought back to that incident I felt humiliated. Time leeches most horror and pain from our memories. All that so-called terror I’d felt, I reasoned it’d been my youth, an overwrought imagination. Distortion, his picture about the teenagers’ contagious insanity—it had made a deep impression on me. I’d gotten mixed up. I’d confused the art with the life. I wrote Cordova three notes of apology shortly after the episode and heard nothing back from him except a very churlish response.”

“What was it?”

“Something to the effect of, if I was the last person on Earth, he’d never cast me in one of his pictures. I suppose that invitation to The Peak was my audition and I’d blown it.”

I couldn’t help but smile. What she said corroborated seamlessly with Beckman’s letter from Cordova to Endicott, the one he passed around to his students.

She shrugged dismissively. “It was fine by me. Two years later, I was a married woman. I had a family, real love, a real life. I’d long given up my actress dreams, dreams of fame, which I understood was nothing more than consigning oneself to a cheap carnival where one lives forever in a cage, applauded and ridiculed by equal measure. Then, in 1999, I received an invitation quite out of the blue. It was from Cordova. He was inviting me to a private dinner at his home, this time in the city. This was a few years after his final film, To Breathe with Kings, long after he’d buried himself underground, when he was more secretive and chilling a figure than ever before. I was hesitant to accept, but then again, it was Cordova. I was still a fan. I’d gone to considerable lengths to obtain copies of his contraband work. To me he was more of a magician, a hypnotist in the vein of Rasputin. Not a filmmaker. All these years later, I still felt unrequited about him. It gnawed at me, ever so slightly, this question about him I needed answered. The location of the dinner was almost next door, just across Park Avenue on Seventy-first Street. If I felt uncomfortable I could leave at any time and simply walk home.”

I glanced at Nora, and she nodded imperceptibly, making the same connection I was. The townhouse Hopper had broken into last night was on East Seventy-first; Olivia had to be referring to that very house. I also recognized the sentiments she described, the unrequited feeling about Cordova, the need for a resolution, for an end, how it nibbled at you over the years; I had it myself.

“By then, I was fifty years old, no longer the skittish ingenue. I’d been married for twenty years, had raised three boys. It would take a hell of a lot more to terrify me.”

She leaned forward, taking another cake. The three Pekingese’s eyes were glued to it. To their evident heartbreak, she placed it in her own mouth, chewing.

“It was a beautiful dinner, but oddly enough Cordova wasn’t even there. There was only his wife, Astrid, who explained her husband had gotten waylaid working in the country and wouldn’t be able to make it. I was thrown by this. I suspected something was wrong, as if it were a trap. And yet it was a wonderful mix of people, two of whom I knew from my old theater days. Whatever reservations I had about being there soon dissipated. A Russian opera star, a Danish scientist, a French actress known for her immense beauty—and yet the unmistakable center of attention was Cordova’s daughter, Ashley. She was cultivating a rather stellar piano career at the time. She was twelve, the most beautiful child I’d ever seen, eyes almost clear. She played for us. Shubert, a Bach concerto, a movement from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and then she joined us for dinner. Oddly enough, she chose to sit right beside me. Immediately, I felt disconcerted. Her eyes, they were so beautiful and yet so …”

Olivia clasped her hands, frowning.

“What?” I prompted.

Her eyes met mine. “Old. They’d seen too much.”

She paused to take a deep breath, smiling ruefully.

“Dinner was fantastic. The conversation, fascinating. Ashley was charming. And yet when she fell silent she seemed absent, as if she’d slipped off somewhere else, into some other world. When dinner was over, Astrid suggested we play a Japanese game that she claimed the family often played after dinner, having learned it from a real Japanese samurai who apparently lived with the family. It was called The Game of One Hundred Candles. Later, I looked up the Japanese term. Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai is what it’s called. Have you heard of it?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“It’s an old Japanese parlor game. It dates back to the Edo period. The seventeenth, eighteenth centuries. One hundred candles are lit, and each candle is blown out after someone tells a short kaidan. Kaidan is Japanese for ghost story. This continues, the room gradually getting darker and darker, until the final candle is blown out. It’s at this moment that a supernatural entity is finally inside the room. It’s usually an onryoˉ—a Japanese ghost who seeks vengeance.”

Olivia took a long breath, exhaling.

“We began to play, all of us fairly drunk on port and dessert wine, each of us grasping at our stories, but when Ashley told hers they were perfectly succinct tales. I assumed she’d memorized them—unless at twelve she could speak so eloquently, right off the top of her head. Her voice was leisurely and low, and at times it sounded like it was coming from somewhere else in the room. Every story she told was riveting, some disturbingly violent. One I remember described a master raping a poor servant girl and leaving her for dead on the side of the road. I was amazed at how easily her lips formed the words as if she were talking about something perfectly natural. At times I had a sense of being outside myself as she talked, somewhere else. And then—I don’t know how exactly it turned out that way—there was one candle left and Ashley was up to tell the final story. It was a tale of unrequited love, a Romeo and Juliet tale of illness and hope, a girl dying young, thereby setting her lover free. Everyone was mesmerized. She blew out the candle, and it was pitch-black in the room. Too dark. People were giggling. Someone told a dirty joke. Suddenly, there was a sucking noise and I felt a cold finger touching my forehead. I was certain Ashley had reached over and touched me. I shrieked, tried to stand, yet both of my legs had fallen asleep. To my utter humiliation, I tumbled out of my chair, right onto the floor. Astrid, apologizing, helped me to my feet and turned the lights on. Everyone was laughing. Ashley sat there, without looking at me, but smiling. That feeling I’d had all those years ago when I was at The Peak, that pressing, as if my insides were being taken hold of, it was there again. I waited a few moments, feeling ill, then made my excuses and left. I went home, fixed myself some tea, and went to bed. But hours later, when Mike woke up beside me, I was in a coma. I’d had a stroke. I regained consciousness in the hospital and realized I’d lost the use of my right arm.”