Night Film(84)

“What’s your name?” Sam asked the dog, though he didn’t respond.

“What’s his name?” I asked Peg.

She looked irritated to be addressed again.

“Leopold.”

“Leopold,” said Sam. She was petting the top of his head with her hand rigidly flat like a spatula. She might have been carefully spreading icing.

“You look familiar,” I said, glancing at Peg. “You don’t teach Sunday school at Saint Thomas, do you?”

She looked flustered.

“Uh, no. That, uh, definitely wouldn’t be me.”

“My mistake.”

She smiled thinly, returning her attention to the dogs.

I took a minute to watch them, too, so as not to appear forward. A hyper Dalmatian was the leader of the pack. That white hoochie-mama Chihuahua was making her rounds—yipping, desperate for a john—but every dog was besotted with a soggy tennis ball.

“Okay,” I said. “This is a long shot, and you’re probably going to think I’m crazy.”

She glanced at me, wary.

“Isolate 3. The maid with the broken arm. It was you, wasn’t it?”

She blinked in surprise. She was never recognized. I was certain I overplayed it, sounding a little too amazed, but she nodded.

“That’s right.”

“You were great in it. The only thing that kept me from losing my mind.”

She smiled, her face flushing.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no actor ever tires of hearing they were brilliant in a role.

“I have to ask. What was he like? Cordova.”

Her smile vanished like a match blown out. Glancing at her watch, she grabbed the strap of her backpack, pulling it into the crook of her arm, about to leave. But then, to my relief, Sam had managed to fully woo Leopold. He was wagging his tail. It moved like a windshield wiper. Seeing this—and Sam, quietly discussing something of great importance with the dog—she hesitated.

“It’s tragic what happened to his daughter,” I noted.

Peg scratched her nose.

“But then, I’m not surprised,” I went on. “To create a body of work that twisted and visceral, the man has to be horrifying in his personal life. You have to be. Look at Picasso. O’Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.”

I figured if I steamrolled the woman with words she might not get up and leave. She was sitting back against the bench, studying me with an absorbed expression.

“Maybe,” she said. “You can never tell how a family is from the outside. But I just …”

She fell silent because that goddamn tennis ball had just rolled exactly behind her feet. She bent down, grabbing it, the dogs freezing in incredulity, mouths closed, ears perked. She threw it, sitting back again as they took off in a stampede across the gravel.

“You just … ?” I prompted quietly.

Good God, let her speak. And calm down, for Christ’s sake.

“When they first started shooting Isolate,” she said, glancing at me, “he invited my boyfriend to spend the afternoon with his family up at the house. The Peak. He never did things like that. He was private. At least that’s what I’d heard. But his wife was organizing a picnic. They did it all the time in the summer. Billy was invited. So I got to tag along.”

He was private. She actually meant Cordova.

And Billy—it had to be William Bassfender, the boyfriend she’d mentioned in the Sneak interview. He was the muscular, tattooed Scottish man who’d played the prisoner in the Isolate, Specimen 12. If I remembered correctly, after Isolate 3 Bassfender went on to do a play on London’s West End and had been about to appear in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, when he was killed in a car accident in Germany.

I turned my gaze back to the dogs so she wouldn’t realize I was hanging on her every word.

“It was surreal. Granted, any family that was together, not shouting or stumbling-down drunk, would have been surreal to me. But even now I think there was more love and joy in that family than I’ve ever seen before or since.” She shook her head in disbelief. “They had their own language.”

I stared. “What?”

“Cordova’s son, Theo, invented a language for the family. They spoke it to each other, telling jokes and laughing, which made them even more intimidating. I remember Astrid explaining it to me like it was yesterday. ‘The Russians have sixteen words for love. Our language has twenty.’ She brought out all of these notebooks Theo had done. He’d written his own dictionary thick as a Bible, filled with grammar rules and conjugations of irregular verbs he’d made up. Astrid taught me some of the words. I’ve never forgotten them. One was terulya. It meant deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It’s something you have to have before you die in order to have lived. I remember being shocked a teenage boy came up with this stuff. But that’s how they all were. They mopped life up with themselves. None of them were encumbered by anything. There were no limits.”

She fell silent, wistful, maybe even slightly jealous of this family she was describing. She crossed her arms, frowning out at the dogs again.

“A picnic,” I repeated, a prompt for her to keep talking.