Night Film(118)

In the film’s last chilling shot, he drowsily wraps his arm around her, as she, wide awake, stares out into the darkness of their immaculate bedroom—a picture that seemed to encapsulate Cordova’s view on the tenuous bonds between people, the deepest secrets about ourselves that we, in the ultimate act of humanity, will spare those we truly love.

I took out my phone and took a few shots of the costumes, then zipped the garment bags up, returning them to their spot in the back of the closet, and switched off the lights.

As I stepped back into the bedroom, however, I stared in disbelief.

The bed was empty.

That shriveled lump was no longer there. The pink satin sheets had been flung aside.

“Miss Hughes?”

There was no response. Fuck.





85


She had to be hiding somewhere here.

The wheelchair remained folded beside the bookshelf, the bedroom door still closed. I lifted up the pink taffeta bed skirt.

Nothing but a few balls of Kleenex.

I strode to the curtains, jerking them aside, then checked the bathroom. It was empty. Only two working bulbs above a dirty mirror, a counter littered with old makeup—blushes and chalky powders, fake eyelashes in plastic cases—behind the door, a limp red robe. I flung back the shower curtain. A filthy loofah hung from a rusty showerhead, a caddy laden with cruddy bottles. Prell. Breck Silk ’N Hold. I hope those don’t date back to the last time she washed her hair.

I slipped out into the hall, finding Nora in the next room, which was cluttered with suitcases and old boxes. She’d switched on a lamp and was going through the closet.

“I lost Marlowe.”

“What?”

“She slipped out of bed when I wasn’t looking.”

“But Harold said she needed a wheelchair to move.”

“Harold is mistaken. The woman moves like the Vietcong.”

I darted out, Nora right behind me. We searched the next room, an ornate living room that looked like a rotten terrarium, then headed into a dated kitchen, where we found Hopper taking pictures of clippings magnetized to the fridge—all of them faded photo spreads of Marlowe.

“She couldn’t be in here,” he said, after I explained. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

As he said it, I spotted, right behind him, the kitchen door moving.

“Miss Hughes?” I called out. “Don’t be alarmed. We just want to talk.”

As I stepped toward the door, it banged forward and a diminutive figure shrouded in black satin, a voluminous hood hiding her face, jumped down from a countertop with a whoosh and came lunging at me, wielding a meat cleaver.

I easily deflected it—she had the strength of a dandelion—the knife clattering to the floor. Her shoulder was shockingly brittle—like grabbing a spike in a railing. I instinctively let go as she wheeled around, kicking me hard in the groin before darting out, the kitchen door swinging wildly. We lurched after, Hopper snatching the hood of her robe.

She shrieked as he clamped his arms around her, hauling her, flailing, into the living room and setting her down in a purple velvet chair underneath some fake palms.

“Calm down,” he said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

Nora switched on the overhead lights, and Marlowe immediately curled up into a fetal position, burying her face in her knees as if she were some light-sensitive night bloom. Her silk robe covered her, the interior tomato red, so she was little more than a heap of fabric lumped on the chair.

“Turn the light off,” she whispered in a husky voice. “Turn it off.”

I felt an icy chill on the back of my neck. It was her voice.

Marlowe had a very distinct one—“a voice that lounges in its bathrobe all day,” Pauline Kael had written in her rapturous New Yorker review of Lovechild. And it was true. Even when Marlowe was running from thugs, hanging off the side of a building, pouring gasoline over her blackmailer and lighting him with a match, her voice still came out slow honey sighs and goo.

After all these years, it sounded the same, if slightly slower and gooier.

I motioned to Nora, and she turned off the lights. I opened the curtains, and the orange neon light along FDR Drive lit the room, softening the décor, transforming the gaudiness into a garden at midnight. Fake roses, gilt chairs, a floral couch became mysterious tree stumps tangled with overgrowth and wildflowers.

Slowly Hughes raised her head and pale light caught the side of her face.

All three of us stared in awe, in shock. The famous cleft chin, the valentine face, the wide-set eyes were still there, yet so eroded as to be nearly unrecognizable. She was a temple in ruins. She’d had terrible plastic surgery, the kind that wasn’t a nip and tuck but vandalism: bulging cheekbones, her eyes and skin stretched as if life had literally pulled her apart at the seams. Her skin was waxy and ashen, her eyebrows drawn in shaky dark lines with what looked like a felt-tip pen.

If there was ever evidence that nothing lasted, that time ravaged all roses, it was here. My first thought was from a sci-fi movie, that her immense beauty had been an alien thing that had feasted upon her, eaten her alive, and when it had moved on, it left this ravaged skeleton.

“Have you come here to kill me?” Marlowe whispered gleefully, maybe even with hope, tilting her head as if posing for a camera, her profile gilded in the light. It had the same slopes and angles of her youth (“a profile you’d love to ski down,” Vincent Canby had rhapsodized in his Times review), but now it was a sluggish sketch of what it’d once been.