Sunburn: A Novel(57)
She stands up, begins to shimmy out of her clothes, not trying to divert him. Quite the opposite. This isn’t a striptease, it’s a disappearing act. Good-bye, Joan Crawford, hello, Polly. She drifts toward their bedroom, pale and cold as a ghost.
Within five minutes, the set clicks off and he is in bed with her. They both play it savage tonight. She pulls his hair, bites him hard. And when he’s done and she’s still on top of him, she braces herself with her arms on either side of his ears so he couldn’t look away if he wanted to.
“Do you think I killed Cath?”
He doesn’t answer right away, which she likes. A lie would come quickly. He should have to think about this. He has avoided thinking about it, all these weeks. That morning, when they came onto the accident scene, when he agreed she had reached his place by midnight, he might have been confused, nothing more. It could have been an honest mistake. But if he did lie, it was for love of her. And that kind of love can turn.
“I’ve wondered,” he admits.
“Because of my past.”
“Because she was in your apartment and there was a freak accident. It’s quite the coincidence.”
“Coincidences happen all the time.”
“That’s true.” His tone is agreeable, but that doesn’t mean he’s agreeing.
She lets it go. Soon enough, he’ll see how wrong he was.
34
Bob Riley is eating a turkey sub, extra hots, and thinking about his next week’s picks when he notices a new customer, a stranger, walking into Video Americain. Not that Bob knows every VA customer, but most of the customers know him, greet him by name—or, rather, the name he uses on his shelf talkers, Baba O’Riley.
Bob’s—Baba’s—staff picks have earned him a following, mainly with guys. The idea of cults growing up around a staffer’s recommendations has gone so mainstream that Seinfeld even did an episode about it, but Bob likes to think his picks have an oblique wit that rewards the people who really get him. He’s not obscure or arty, but his choices are clever, no obvious or literal connections, similar to the best mix tapes. This week, for example, he’s featuring Songwriter and Payday. Everybody—well, the kind of everybody who rents from Video Americain—knows Payday and most of them know Alan Rudolph, although he never lived up to the promise of his early stuff. And even people who love Choose Me and Trouble in Mind seem to have missed Songwriter. Part of it, Bob thinks, is the entrenched snobbery about country music, which shows how ignorant people in the Northeast can be. They think country music is what’s on the radio right now—Alan Jackson and Tracy Lawrence and Reba McEntire. They’ve never listened to Johnny Cash, much less bluegrass. Alison Krauss is fine, but what about Marty Stuart? People mock him for the hair and the sequins, but he’s only the best mandolin player ever; he was even in Cash’s band for a while.
Johnny Cash. Bob wishes Cash would act more. Have the old Columbo episodes even been released on VHS? He could add the season with “Swan Song,” featuring Cash as one of the best Columbo villains ever. Because you can tell Columbo kind of feels for the guy, gets that he got a raw deal. If he had killed just the harridan of a wife in the plane crash instead of taking out the wife and the girl, the Cash character would have been almost heroic. Bob goes over to the television section, which is not his specialty, but no luck. There are not a lot of old television shows on VHS. People don’t want to rent things they once saw for free.
The new customer is browsing the mystery section, clearly trying to figure out the store’s classification system, which is deliberately offbeat. Bob scored a job here two years ago, which gives a guy some bragging rights in Newark. The owner won’t hire just anyone. There’s a hundred-question test. And film knowledge isn’t enough. You have to have people skills, too. A lot of would-be hires ace the test and fail the customer relations part of the interview. They can tell you every film that Bernard Herrmann scored, but they can’t make eye contact with a human being.
“I’m looking for a movie,” the guy finally admits to Bob. He’s probably the kind of man who doesn’t like to ask for directions unless he’s desperate.
Bob gestures at the walls with his sandwich. “I think we got you covered.”
The man smiles. He’s got a Sergio Leone man-with-no-name vibe; you can almost hear the Morricone music coming up. Is he the good or the bad? He’s definitely not ugly. Bob’s always a little confused, as most men are, about what women find attractive, but he figures this guy checks all the boxes. Tall with broad shoulders, strong jaw, pale blue eyes, olive skin, sort of James Caan crossed with Paul Newman. Bob is medium height and lanky with sandy hair, not a hunchback, but not swoonworthy on first sight.
“I’m looking for a movie that my”—long pause, as if he’s lost his train of thought—“that my girlfriend described to me. Only she doesn’t know the title or the stars.”
Bob doesn’t sigh, not even inwardly. On a slow afternoon, this kind of challenge is what he loves. “Does she remember when she saw it in the theater? A year would help narrow it down plenty.”
“She saw it on television, when she was growing up in Baltimore, so I’m guessing it’s older. Fifties, no later than sixties.”
“Black and white?”