The heat appeared to make everyone forget about what had happened in December. In June, the bowling alley put up a new neon sign, so big that it obscured the window of the apartment above, the place where that girl used to live. Sometimes, Arlene would drive by, urged on by a need to see a light on in the window, some sign that the landlord had rented the apartment out again. She was within the safety of her own vehicle, and yet she looked up warily and with a bit of shame, only to see the window always dark and empty of a curtain or a shade, as sure a sign as any that, months later, the apartment remained still and bare.
Was she the only one who knew this? Was everyone forgetting? As much as she wanted the town to forget, she found herself helpless at the thought of such obliteration, the world overwhelming everything it could contain. The wide pages of the newspaper brought story after story, and even in the middle of summer, when she politely declined the telephone solicitation to resubscribe to the town newspaper she never read, Arlene was certain that even the story of the girl was fading in the minds of everyone in town, tumbling past rumor and into the darker jaws of complete erasure.
People left her alone. By July, most of the farmers regained a distinct comfort around her, and those who remained for a leisurely cup of coffee in the afternoon borrowed sections of the Times and spoke with her about Cuba and Nixon and the Chicago Cubs and the resurgent Germans. More and more of the men took the front section and the editorials and the sports columns, but she tucked the arts pages under the counter, her own private and more mature version of the daydreaming the girls still did over their movie magazines. The cinema postings sometimes boasted full-page advertisements for films soon to premiere in Los Angeles, the ink so profuse that it rubbed black on her thumbs, but Arlene liked the way she thrilled to the promise of a coming film, along with the attendant glamour of its premiere. She knew it would be weeks before the Jack Lemmon picture arrived in Bakersfield, and that the Italian films, with their curiously abstract but beguiling posters, would never show up at the Fox, but she scanned the advertisements daily whenever a weekend approached, as if the films themselves held something extraordinary in the promise of their arrival.
One day, that Actress’s face appeared in an advertisement. The lettering of the film title cracked itself over the page, spread jagged like a plate dropped and shattered on the café floor. The Actress looked over her shoulder, mouth agape in a silent scream. Arlene studied it for a moment before raising her head from the counter and looking over at the booth where she remembered that Actress sitting. It was empty now, but she could see her clear as anything, her kind face somehow able to communicate her need to be left alone. And yet there she was on the page, the advertisement’s crooked terror a stark dismissal of what Arlene thought she knew about that Actress, passing through town.
The next day, the same advertisement appeared in a larger size, the silhouette of a foreboding house added to the background. Arlene hadn’t bothered, the previous day, to pay attention to the cramped credits running along the bottom, but today, because of the larger size, she could read the names, and when she spotted the Director, she saw, as if it were just yesterday, that man’s face peeking out at her from the backseat of a nice sedan.
If this was the film they had been shooting, she had no idea, then, what they could have wanted at her motel. Houses like the one in the silhouette didn’t look at all like those in Bakersfield, where the roofs sat low and the buildings wide and long, the better to open doors for a cross breeze. She looked at the silhouette of the house, how easy it was to read its implied menace, then thought of the single, bare window above the bowling alley. She had to stop herself from thinking that Bakersfield wasn’t a place that spelled anything out in cracked letters.
After work, she drove by the Fox to see if the film would be playing, but nothing was showing except a negligible comedy and a western, films she knew had shown briefly in Los Angeles with hardly much interest. Things came slowly to Bakersfield. At the Fox, she got out of her car to see the posters behind the coming-attractions queue, but nothing showed of the Actress’s movie, and she walked back to her car and pulled into the quiet streets where nothing much ever seemed to happen. Her quiet town. She lived here. She had never left.
The film would come soon enough, she knew, and she resolved to see it, but when the deep heat of August arrived, the film with the menacing house had yet to appear. This was the loop she’d drive: first the silent apartment above the bowling alley, hoping for a light in the window, then to the Fox, hoping for the film. Nothing changed.
Then one afternoon she spotted an earnest but cheap bouquet of flowers at the foot of the green door to the apartment: she pressed the accelerator firmly without looking again, not wanting to catch even the silhouette of the person who may have been trying to remember that girl, and she knew, too, even before she arrived at the Fox, that the Actress’s face would be looking out at the Bakersfield street from the movie poster, her silent scream over her shoulder. Sure enough, when Arlene rounded the corner, the film had arrived.
A small line of people had queued up to see it, and she joined them without hesitation. Every other woman in line was not only young but with a man — a date, a husband — but Arlene was alone, still in her waitress uniform, and if anyone from town recognized her, no one made a motion. The patrons were a younger set than most at the café, not at all like the farmers or the farmers’ wives, not at all like people who might have whispered behind her back about how Dan Watson had now been missing for almost nine months. They were here to see a film, young people who didn’t bother with busybodies who whispered with the Western Union clerk to see if Dan Watson might be getting secret money transfers in Mexico. They lined up at the refreshments counter for popcorn and candy, Arlene slipping into the screening room and taking her seat as quickly as she could.
It had been a long time since she’d been to a picture house. It had been years — since Frederick — and when the screen lit up, Arlene startled at the bright white, the scope of what she was about to see, and she remembered that bubble of anticipation. This time, though, the anticipation had been replaced by a sense of confirmation, that her deep suspicion of the Actress and the Director would reveal that they had been up to something — exactly what, she didn’t know — but as the credits cracked across the screen and the film score jittered the audience, she felt even more certain in her desire to maintain the anger she had felt against them that day. The film — she felt it in her bones — was going to confirm it.
But when the screen read “Phoenix” rather than “Bakers-field,” and the camera’s prying eye brought her inside a room that looked nothing like her highway motel, Arlene let go of the righteous grip she’d held on her purse, but then tightened it again: she felt fooled by the Actress — brazen in her underclothes in the very first scene of the film! All along, Arlene had thought she would see her motel or even a replica of it. For all her hopes of seeing her place on the screen as a confirmation that she existed in the world, the story was set in Arizona, a woman in a bra and a man bare chested in a hotel chair.
Arlene almost stood up, indignant, but thought of all the young women in the audience, all the young men, and their silence behind her meant they didn’t mind at all what the Actress was doing on the screen. Arlene wouldn’t fool any of them, walking up the aisle with a nonchalance that suggested she was merely going to get a box of chocolates, so she sat and watched the Actress. Arlene quieted her mind enough to listen rather than just watch, and she learned that the Actress was playing a secretary deeply in love with the bare-chested man. She listened as they declared themselves to each other, thinking of Frederick, remembering the man who had sat across from the Actress that day, wondering if this might even be the same actor now. She saw immediately the Actress’s dilemma, the wish to be with a man she loved — what an old story — but there was no way in which they could be happy.