“Ah, but is it well-written simpering gossip?”
“Oh, it’s excellently written simpering gossip.”
“Then don’t bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”
5
“Hitchcock loves the limelight,” says Luisa, her bladder now growing uncomfortable, “but hates interviews. He didn’t answer my questions because he didn’t really hear them. His best works, he said, are roller coasters that scare the riders out of their wits but let them off at the end giggling and eager for another ride. I put it to the great man, the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that’s . . . the stuff of Buchenwald, dystopia, depression. We’ll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless universe—but only our toes. Hitchcock’s response was”—Luisa does an above-average impersonation—“ ‘I’m a director in Hollywood, young lady, not an Oracle at Delphi.’ I asked why Buenas Yerbas had never featured in his films. Hitchcock answered, ‘This town marries the worst of San Francisco with the worst of Los Angeles. Buenas Yerbas is a city of nowhere.’ He spoke in bons mots like that, not to you, but into the ear of posterity, for dinner-party guests of the future to say, ‘That’s one of Hitchcock’s, you know.’ ”
Sixsmith wrings sweat from his handkerchief. “I saw Charade with my niece at an art-house cinema last year. Was that Hitchcock? She strong-arms me into seeing these things, to prevent me from growing ‘square.’ I rather enjoyed it, but my niece said Audrey Hepburn was a ‘bubblehead.’ Delicious word.”
“Charade’s the one where the plot swings on the stamps?”
“A contrived puzzle, yes, but all thrillers would wither without contrivance. Hitchcock’s Buenas Yerbas remark puts me in mind of John F. Kennedy’s observation about New York. Do you know it? ‘Most cities are nouns, but New York is a verb.’ What might Buenas Yerbas be, I wonder?”
“A string of adjectives and conjunctions?”
“Or an expletive?”
6
“Megan, my treasured niece.” Rufus Sixsmith shows Luisa a photograph of a bronzed young woman and a fitter, healthier self taken at a sunny marina. The photographer said something funny just before the shutter clicked. Their legs dangle over the stern of a small yacht named Starfish. “That’s my old tub, a relic from more dynamic days.”
Luisa makes polite noises about not being old.
“Truly. If I went on a serious voyage now I’d need to hire a small crew. I still spend a lot of weekends on her, pottering about the marina and doing a little thinking, a little work. Megan likes the sea, too. She’s a born physicist with a better head for mathematics than I ever had, rather to her mother’s chagrin. My brother didn’t marry Megan’s mother for her brain, I’m sorry to say. She buys into feng shui or I Ching or whatever instant-enlightenment mumbo jumbo is top of the charts. But Megan possesses a superb mind. She spent a year of her Ph.D. at my old college at Cambridge. A woman, at Caius! Now she’s finishing her radioastronomy research at the big dishes on Hawaii. While her mother and her stepfather crisp themselves to toast on the beach in the name of Leisure, Megan and I knock around equations in the bar.”
“Any children of your own, Rufus?”
“I’ve been married to science all my life.” Sixsmith changes the subject. “A hypothetical question, Miss Rey. What price would you pay, as a journalist I mean, to protect a source?”
Luisa doesn’t consider the question. “If I believed in the issue? Any.”
“Prison, for example, for contempt of court?”
“If it came to it, yes.”
“Would you be prepared to . . . compromise your own safety?”
“Well . . .” Luisa does consider this. “I . . . guess I’d have to.”
“Have to? How so?”
“My father braved booby-trapped marshes and the wrath of generals for the sake of his journalistic integrity. What kind of a mockery of his life would it be if his daughter bailed when things got a little tough?”
Tell her. Sixsmith opens his mouth to tell her everything—the whitewashing at Seaboard, the blackmailing, the corruption—but without warning the elevator lurches, rumbles, and resumes its descent. Its occupants squint in the restored light, and Sixsmith finds his resolve has crumbled away. The needle swings round to G.
The air in the lobby feels as fresh as mountain water.
“I’ll telephone you, Miss Rey,” says Sixsmith, as Luisa hands him his stick, “soon.” Will I break this promise or keep it? “Do you know?” he says. “I feel I’ve known you for years, not ninety minutes.”
7
The flat world is curved in the boy’s eye. Javier Gomez leafs through a stamp album under an Anglepoise lamp. A team of huskies barks on an Alaskan stamp, a Hawaiian nene honks and waddles on a fifty-cents special edition, a paddle steamer churns up an inky Congo. A key turns in the lock, and Luisa Rey stumbles in, kicking off her shoes in the kitchenette. She is exasperated to find him here. “Javier!”
“Oh, hi.”
“Don’t ‘Oh, hi’ me. You promised not to jump across the balconies ever again! Suppose someone reports a burglar to the cops? Suppose you slipped and fell?”
“Then just give me a key.”
Luisa strangles an invisible neck. “I can’t rest easy knowing an eleven-year-old can waltz into my living space whenever . . .” your mom’s out all night, Luisa replaces with “. . . there’s a slow night on TV.”
“So why leave the bathroom window open?”
“Because if there’s one thing worse than you jumping the gap once, it’d be you jumping the gap again when you couldn’t get in.”
“I’ll be eleven in January.”
“No key.”
“Friends give each other keys.”
“Not when one is twenty-six and the other is still in the fifth grade.”
“So why are you back so late? Meet anyone interesting?”
Luisa glares. “Trapped by the brownout in an elevator. None of your business, anyhow, mister.” She switches on the main light and flinches when she sees the mean red welt on Javier’s face. “What the—what happened?”
The boy glances at the apartment wall, then returns to his stamps.
“Wolfman?”
Javier shakes his head, folds a tiny paper strip, and licks both sides. “That Clark guy came back. Mom’s working the graveyard shift at the hotel all this week, and he’s waiting for her. He asked me stuff about Wolfman, and I told him it wasn’t any of his business.” Javier attaches the hinge to the stamp. “It doesn’t hurt. I already dabbed stuff on it.” Luisa’s hand is already on the telephone. “Don’t phone Mom! She’ll rush back, there’ll be a massive fight, and the hotel’ll fire her like last time and the time before.” Luisa considers this, replaces the receiver, and starts for the door. “Don’t go around there! He’s sick in the head! He’ll get angry and wreck our stuff, then we’ll probably get evicted or something! Please.”