Carter. It could have been, she realized, either a first or a last name.
Because she was alone and no maid was ever going to come down the hallway, and because the door was locked even though she was certain the other rooms had gone unoccupied, the Actress rose from her bed and walked to the mirror and stood in front of it. She stood absolutely still in self-examination, her reflection cutting off at the waist, so all that was visible to her was her naked torso, her face, her eyes. She had all afternoon, she knew, to stand in front of that mirror in scrutiny, the way empty time manages to hand you nothing but doubt. She had to be convinced it was acceptable to play that first scene in a brassiere, even if the whole theater would have believed a man and a woman being inescapably in love simply because the screen story said so. A whole theater of men looking at her in a brassiere, a whole darkness wanting. She drew her eyes down to her breasts, beautiful and round. Never had she caught the Director looking at them — always at her eyes. Still, she kept thinking of those other actresses, their entrances, their slow-motion kisses, their gowns, their mystery and allure from their first glimpses onward. Maybe it wasn’t much of a role; maybe those other actresses had been approached and had wisely turned it down. The Actress stepped back from the mirror, as far as she could before she reached the opposite wall. She took in the entire image of herself, the doubt as thick as the quiet in the hotel. But she would show them. She would show herself. You don’t just put on a maid’s costume and dust the rooms. You have to know the uncertainty of interaction with guests who couldn’t care less, the ache in your back from bending down to make beds. The Actress was going to play more than a woman who steals money. She was going to play a woman in love, who does something wrong for the sake of it. Her hand on the driver’s a gesture at understanding how it felt to do something illicit, how it felt to draw someone into sin. A woman who was a secretary in a dusty Arizona city. A woman who had a sister who loved her and would later look for her. A woman with a moral choice, who makes the right one in the end, no matter that the story itself could have cared less what she did or did not do, her little car moving from Phoenix and on westward, the drive so long you’d think she was going to drive off the end of the earth, in a love so deep she was willing to disappear into it without a lingering trace.
Six
From the moment Teresa boarded the pickup, she expected to see Cheno coming up the street, and every figure walking along threatened to be him, only to end up being no one at all that she knew. Dan Watson drove with such leisure that she wondered if he didn’t already suspect that she’d been waiting for someone, and she did her best not to appear nervous, her hands tucked underneath her knees, the guitar resting between them. When they rounded the corner toward her street, she seized at the thought of Cheno waiting at the door, even though it was something he’d never done. The street was bare. The way her pulse raced and eased when she discovered this alarmed her. She was doing nothing wrong.
Dan Watson kept the truck running after Teresa pointed to the green door. “Right there?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “I live above the bowling alley.”
He peered up at the window, the blue curtains hanging. “I didn’t know that was up there.”
She opened the door. “Well, thank you for the ride.”
“You working tomorrow?”
“I am. Today was my day off.” She stepped out of the truck and held the door.
“Can I pick you up for lunch?”
She pressed the guitar against her. “Well …”
“Noon? Is that when Carson lets you off?”
“How do you know I work at the shoe store?” she asked, both astonished and a bit amused.
“Small town,” he said. “How’bout it?”
Something told her that she was supposed to hesitate, but the words bubbled on their own. “I’d like that,” she answered.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Noon it is.” He reached over the bench seat to close the passenger door. “I’ll see you then.”
Teresa scurried up the steps in the dark hallway, and for the remainder of the afternoon she lay on her bed and watched the room tilt from deep yellow to the orange of the west. She kept expecting to hear Cheno’s voice from the street, her windows open to break the heat, but by now she realized he’d been kept at whatever fieldwork he’d been given for the day. Still, she wanted to hear his call, his tiny knock at the foot of the stairs, but as evening came, she thought more and more about Dan Watson and found herself not wanting to see Cheno at all. She let the violet come as her mother had done in the past and didn’t turn on the light. From below, she thought, maybe Cheno would see the dark window and think she’d gone to bed early.
She ate in the dark — a simple dinner of leftover beans heated gently on the stove, and two tortillas. She drew a glass of water from the tap. She thought of Dan sitting down at a table in a large white house, plates and plates of food, and the silhouettes of his family gathering round.
When even the violet light disappeared, Teresa showered to cool herself off before sleep. She stretched her little radio closer to the edge of her bed, its cord extended as far as possible, and turned on the dial. The face of the radio glowed amber, now the only light in the room. She lay on the bed and listened, irritated by the announcer, but then grateful for his information: he told her the names of the songs and the singers singing them, and each time one caught her attention, Teresa closed her eyes and listened hard. She tried to memorize the words, even though they floated past too quickly, and caught lines here and there when they repeated as a chorus. Men cooed together sweetly, standing behind the one singer as if to help in his pleading: that was how men sang. Songs of pleading and promises, tomorrows, wedding days, and love eternal. All of them in voices so high pitched that they sounded nothing like the men downstairs: they sounded regal, silky, like looking at cigarette smoke but not having to smell it.
Downstairs, she thought she heard the faintest of knocks, and she reached over to turn down the radio. She heard it again, a timid one-two, and then the pause that meant Cheno was waiting, looking up at her window, and wondering if he should knock again.
She wanted to raise herself up on her elbows and look down from the window. He’d come all that way. It was so late. She could feel him waiting. But on the radio, a new song started. It was a man. And all evening, whenever a man sang, she pictured Dan Watson. If a woman sang, Teresa imagined herself. Even the backup singers had a role, two or three Dan Watsons behind her in complete harmony if the song required it, or sometimes two or three versions of herself, in different-colored cowgirl skirts, with Dan playing a guitar and all three versions of herself reaching out to him from the single microphone.
Downstairs, she could hear Cheno’s footsteps give in to his indecision. Her heart ached for him a bit as she pictured him walking the streets of Bakersfield, dark now, and she lay back down on the bed. Sleep wasn’t going to come tonight, not the way her eyes closed and she saw visions of the pickup truck or the ham-and-butter sandwich Dan had served her or his hands pressing her fingers on the fret board. She reached over and turned up the radio, listening awhile before finally noticing the balance struck by the DJ: sometimes a song would be low and quiet, the love lost, but then a girl group would come up next and chirp like birds about the wonders of a simple smile. They sang as if none of them had ever sat in a dark room with their mothers. They sang as if they always answered the faintest knock at the door from someone too timid to admit his own love. They had voices like sunny mornings, full of a hope so assured it wasn’t really hope anymore.