(Villiers, Tomorrow’s Eve)
…
At the moment that Hadaly, in her new guise as Miss Alicia Clary, is revealed to Lord Ewald, Villiers writes, “He had just experienced, all of a sudden, the sensation that comes over a traveler when he is lost on a mountain pathway, hears his guide say in an undertone, ‘Don’t look to your left,’ then carelessly does so — and suddenly sees, right beside his foot, one of those perpendicular drops so deep and steep that its bottom is hidden from him in the mists, but which, as it returns his horrified look, seems to be inviting him over the precipice.”
…
Without this stupefying machine for manufacturing the Ideal, he might never have known such joy. The words proffered by Hadaly had been spoken by the real actress, who never experienced them, never understood them. She had thought she was “playing a part,” and here now the character had taken her place within the invisible scene, had not only “assumed” but become the role. The false Alicia thus seemed far more natural than the true one.
(Villiers, Tomorrow’s Eve)
…
It seems so unlikely to me that the tower would be open to the public, even a year later, after Madeleine Elster had “committed suicide” there. Why wouldn’t the mission close it off, at least to visitors? Is this just a doubt I have because of the times I live in, a symptom of the security-obsessed (really, indemnification-obsessed) culture of America in the early 21st century? Or is it as unlikely as I think it is? And this is the same man who has already been questioned about Madeleine’s death, who was present at that “suicide” a year prior. How could he go unnoticed at the Mission?
…
Then again, authorities have resisted putting up barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge for decades, because to do so would be to mar the bridge’s beauty.
…
Madeleine E.
This is a book about a man writing a book about Vertigo. In his book, he thinks, he will trace his thoughts about the film as they relate to the guilt he has about how he has lived his life, about the lives he hasn’t led, and about the lives of others he believes he has ruined. “The past is the only inaccessible part of our present, the one thing we can’t change about how we are now,” he writes. This is the first line of the book.
He writes every day. He writes quickly and confidently. He writes about his troubled relationship with a woman, how they met, how quickly things moved in the relationship, how she became pregnant and how he fears he may have manipulated her into getting an abortion. He writes about Vertigo and the things he finds most interesting about it. He intends to draw parallels between his actions and those of Scottie, but he realizes he can’t quite understand Scottie as a character or as a person. He can’t enter into that mindset. Still, he tries. As he is writing the scene at Planned Parenthood, he realizes he feels more at home with Elster. This, for him, is a disturbing realization.
Now, he has a great deal of trouble writing. He has never had trouble before, but now he cannot write — not the book, not anything. We understand it is a difficult process for him, not only the process of producing a work of art, but the process of reckoning, of understanding what he has done as others understand it. He struggles with the best way of writing his story — should it be plain or baroque? fractured or carefully constructed? — but then he thinks, Aren’t I trivializing things by wondering about the best way to represent them? Isn’t there something evil about struggling with aesthetics in the face of one’s past bad actions? In a weak moment, he wonders whether the two things — the expression of one’s past actions and those actions — can truly be separated.
And so he erases it, the entire book, piece by piece. He worries writing about this woman is exploitative. He worries that taking on so much responsibility for what happened is itself disrespectful to her. First, he erases everything having to do with her. Then, worried he has only made things worse, he erases everything having to do with himself. All that is left are his thoughts on the film, and these are nothing special, he thinks. He erases them, too, one at a time, until he is left with nothing. He has brought himself back to a time before he began writing this book, but he wants to go back even further, to a time when he was still innocent.
If I can make her life better somehow, he thinks, maybe I can make up for all that I’ve done. But I’m a writer, he thinks, which means I’m incompetent to do most things. The only thing I can do, he thinks, is write. So he writes, but now he doesn’t concern himself with “art” and instead writes a thriller as dumb and hackneyed as he can make it. The characters are cardboard and the sentences are wooden. His new book is about a killer who preys on young women. We leave the story of this man to follow the story he is writing.
In the man’s book, we follow a woman. She goes to work, goes to the gym, goes to a coworker’s birthday party, goes on vacation with her boyfriend, etc. When we least expect it, almost eighty pages in, our protagonist is murdered. This — this cycle of being introduced to a character, following her, and then learning she has been murdered — repeats itself, happens three times, with each subsequent murder happening at a random interval so that it will come as a surprise to us. Indeed, one of the writer’s obvious strengths is in convincing us that each woman will make it out alive, that each will defy the pattern being established. The murders are not described; at the end of each of these sections, we see the police arrest a man, an excellent suspect, almost always with motive and opportunity and a history of violence against women. Each time, some piece of evidence turns up exonerating him. It is always a different man the police arrest, but we get the idea that the murderer has been the same in every case.
We leave this book to return to the story of the man writing it. We are told the book has sold to a publisher and has become an overnight sensation. The rights are sold to a Hollywood producer, and now the writer has money to burn. This has been his plan all along: to make money writing so that he can make the woman’s life better. He is shocked that he has been successful in his plan, that things could be so easy, but now his fortunes change. He doesn’t know how to get in touch with the woman anymore. He goes to her friends, asks them where she is, but he can’t get anything out of them, and he can’t find her family — to whom he was never introduced, he realizes. He asks everyone where he can find her, what happened to her, and always the answer is I don’t know, I haven’t seen her, I can’t help you.
He can’t spend the money, and he can’t just give it away, either, he thinks — at least half of it is rightfully hers. She was the inspiration for the book, the reason he wrote it. He says as much in interviews, though he never says how she inspired the book or what her name is, still worried the story isn’t his to tell. She doesn’t come forward, so finally, he hires a private detective. After many, many months, the detective finds the woman, living under an alias. The detective tells the woman the situation, or at least as much as he knows about it: There is a man, a writer, who wants to know where she is and is willing to spend quite a bit of money to find her. She is scared when the detective first approaches her — as it turns out, she is wanted for a crime under a different alias, a fact not even the detective knows, but with which she lives in abject guilt. We are not told what the crime is, only that it is serious. She cannot afford to be in the spotlight, she thinks, and if she comes forward, the story will be everywhere. She’ll be caught. She pleads with the detective not to tell anyone where she is or what name she is now going under. She doesn’t tell the detective about her crime; instead, she tells him the writer abused her, mentally. The detective listens to her story. He seems genuinely sympathetic. He tells her he won’t say anything, her secret is safe with him.