The Book of Illusions Read online

  Dimly. I don’t think I’ve read it since high school.

  I read it every day for six months. Hawthorne wrote it for me. It was my story.

  A scientist and his young bride. That’s the situation, isn’t it? He tries to remove the birthmark from her face.

  A red birthmark. From the left side of her face.

  No wonder you liked it.

  Like isn’t a strong enough word. I was obsessed by it. That story ate me alive.

  The birthmark looks like a human hand, doesn’t it? I’m starting to remember now. Hawthorne says that it looks like the imprint of a hand pressed against her cheek.

  But small. It’s the size of a pygmy’s hand, the hand of an infant.

  She has that one tiny flaw, but otherwise her face is perfect. She’s known as an extraordinary beauty.

  Georgiana. Until she marries Aylmer, she doesn’t even think of it as a flaw. He’s the one who teaches her to hate it, who turns her against herself and makes her want to have it removed. For him, it’s not just a defect, not just something that destroys her physical beauty. It’s a sign of some inner corruption, a stain on Georgiana’s soul, a mark of sin and death and decay.

  The stamp of mortality.

  Or just simply what we think of as human. That’s what makes it so tragic. Aylmer goes into his laboratory and begins experimenting with elixirs and potions, trying to come up with a formula to erase the dreaded spot, and innocent Georgiana goes along with it. That’s what’s so terrible. She wants him to love her. That’s all she cares about, and if eliminating the birthmark is the price she has to pay for his love, she’s willing to risk her life for it.

  And he winds up murdering her.

  But not before the birthmark disappears. That’s very important. At the last second, just as she’s about to die, the mark fades from her cheek. It’s gone now, entirely gone, and it’s only then, at that exact moment, that poor Georgiana dies.

  The birthmark is who she is. Make it vanish, and she vanishes along with it.

  You have no idea what that story did to me. I kept reading it, kept thinking about it, and little by little I began to see myself as I was. Other people carried their humanity inside them, but I wore mine on my face. That was the difference between me and everyone else. I wasn’t allowed to hide who I was. Every time people looked at me, they were looking right into my soul. I wasn’t a bad-looking girl—I knew that—but I also knew that I would always be defined by that purple blotch on my face. There was no use in trying to get rid of it. It was the central fact of my life, and to wish it away would have been like asking to destroy myself. I was never going to have an ordinary kind of happiness, but after I read that story, I realized that I had something almost as good. I knew what people were thinking. All I had to do was look at them, study their reactions when they saw the left side of my face, and I could tell whether they could be trusted or not. The birthmark was the test of their humanity. It measured the worth of their souls, and if I worked hard at it, I could see straight into them and know who they were. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I had the perfect pitch of a tuning fork. That doesn’t mean I haven’t made mistakes about people, but most of the time I’ve known better. I just haven’t been able to stop myself.

  Like last night.

  No, not like last night. That wasn’t a mistake.

  We nearly killed each other.

  It had to be that way. When you run out of time, everything gets speeded up. We couldn’t afford the luxury of formal introductions, handshakes, discreet conversation over drinks. It had to be violent. Like two planets colliding at the edge of space.

  Don’t tell me you weren’t scared.

  I was scared to death. But I didn’t go into this blind, you know. I had to be ready for anything.

  They told you I was crazy, didn’t they?

  No one ever used that word. The strongest thing anyone said was nervous breakdown.

  What did your tuning fork tell you when you got there?

  You already know the answer to that.

  You were spooked, weren’t you? I spooked the hell out of you.

  It was more than that. I was afraid, but at the same time I was excited, almost trembling with happiness. I looked at you, and for a couple of moments it was almost like looking at myself. That’s never happened to me before.

  You liked it.

  I loved it. I was so lost, I thought I was going to fall to pieces.

  And now you trust me.

  You’re not going to let me down. And I’m not going to let you down. We both know that.

  What else do we know?

  Nothing. That’s why we’re sitting together in this car now. Because we’re the same, and because we don’t know a damn thing other than that.

  We made the four o’clock flight to Albuquerque with twenty minutes to spare. Ideally, I should have taken the Xanax by the time we reached Holyoke or Springfield, Worcester at the latest, but I was too wrapped up in talking to Alma to interrupt the conversation, and I kept putting it off. When we drove past the signs for the 495 exit, I realized that there was no point in bothering to take them. The pills were in Alma’s bag, but she hadn’t read the instructions on the label. She didn’t know that they had to be swallowed an hour or two in advance to be effective.

  At first, I was glad that I hadn’t given in. Every cripple trembles at the thought of abandoning his crutch, but if I could get through the flight without disintegrating into tears or frantic ravings, perhaps I would be better for it in the end. This thought held me for another twenty or thirty minutes. Then, as we approached the outskirts of Boston, I understood that I no longer had a choice. We had been driving for more than three hours, and we still hadn’t talked about Hector. I had assumed that we would do that in the car, but we had wound up talking about other things, things that no doubt had to be talked about first, that were no less important than what was waiting for us in New Mexico, and before I knew it, the first leg of the trip was nearly over. I couldn’t fall asleep on her now. I had to stay awake to listen to the story she’d promised to tell me.

  We sat down in the area next to the departure gate. Alma asked me if I wanted to take a pill, and that was when I told

  her I wasn’t going to use the Xanax. Just hold my hand, I said, and I’ll be all right. I’m feeling good.

  She held my hand, and for a little while we necked in front of the other passengers. It was pure, adolescent abandon—not my adolescence, perhaps, but the one I had always wished for—and it was such a novel experience to be kissing a woman in public that I didn’t have time to dwell on the torture ahead. When we boarded the plane, Alma was rubbing the lipstick off my cheek, and I barely noticed when we crossed the threshold and stepped inside. Walking down the center aisle posed no problem for me, nor did sitting down in my seat. I wasn’t even disturbed when I had to fasten my seat belt, and even less so when the engines roared into full throttle and I felt the machine start to vibrate along my skin. We were in first class. The menu said that they would be serving us chicken for dinner. Alma, who was sitting next to the window on my left—and therefore with her right side turned to me again—took my hand in her hand, raised it to her mouth, and kissed it.

  The only mistake I made was to close my eyes. When the plane backed up from the terminal and began to taxi down the runway, I didn’t want to have to watch us taking off. That was the most dangerous moment, I felt, and if I could survive the transition from earth to sky, simply ignore the fact that we had lost contact with the ground, I figured I might have a chance to survive the rest. But I was wrong to want to block it out, wrong to cut myself off from the event as it unfurled itself in the actuality of the moment. To experience it would have been painful, but much worse was to remove myself from that pain and withdraw into the shell of my thoughts. The world of the present was gone. There was nothing to see, nothing to distract me from succumbing to my fears, and the longer I kept my eyes shut, the more terribly I saw what my fears wanted me t
o see. I had always wished that I had died with Helen and the boys, but I had never let myself fully imagine what they had lived through in the last moments before the plane went down. Now, with my eyes closed, I heard the boys screaming, and I saw Helen holding them in her arms, telling them that she loved them, whispering through the screams of the one hundred forty-eight other people who were about to die that she would always love them, and when I saw her there with the boys in her arms, I broke down and sobbed. Exactly as I had always imagined I would, I broke down and sobbed.

  I put my hands over my face, and for the longest time I went on weeping into my salty, stinking palms, unable to lift my head, unable to open my eyes and stop. Eventually, I felt Alma’s hand on the back of my neck. I had no idea how long it had been there, but a moment came when I started to feel it, and after a while I realized that her other hand was going up and down my left arm, stroking it very gently, using the same soft and rhythmical motion that a mother uses to comfort a miserable child. Oddly enough, the instant I became aware of this thought, aware of the fact that I had conjured up this thought about mothers and children, I imagined that I had slipped into the body of Todd, my own son, and that it was Helen who was comforting me and not Alma. That feeling lasted for only a few seconds, but it was extremely powerful, not a thing of the imagination so much as a real thing, an actual transformation that turned me into someone else, and the moment it started to go away, the worst of what had happened to me was suddenly over.

  5

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, Alma began to talk. We were seven miles up in the air by then, sailing above some nameless county in Pennsylvania or Ohio, and she went on talking all the way to Albuquerque. There was a brief pause when we landed, and then the story continued after we climbed into her car and began the two-and-a-half-hour trip to Tierra del Sueño. We drove down a series of desert highways as the late afternoon turned to dusk and the dusk then turned to night. As I remember it, the story didn’t stop until we came to the gates of the ranch—and even then it wasn’t quite finished. She had talked for almost seven hours, but there hadn’t been enough time to fit everything in.

  She jumped around a lot in the early going, darting back and forth between the past and present, and it took me a while to get my bearings and sort out the chronology of events. It was all in her book, she said, all the names and dates, all the essential facts, and there was no need to rehash the details of Hector’s life prior to his disappearance—not that afternoon on the plane, in any case, not when I would be able to read the book myself in the days and weeks ahead. What mattered were the things that bore on Hector’s destiny as a hidden man, the years he had spent in the desert writing and directing films that were never shown to the public. Those films were the reason why I was traveling to New Mexico with her now, and interesting as it might have been to know that Hector was born Chaim Mandelbaum—on a Dutch steamship in the middle of the Atlantic—it wasn’t terribly important. It didn’t matter that his mother died when he was twelve or that his father, a cabinetmaker with no interest in politics, was nearly beaten to death by an anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic mob during La Semana Tragica in Buenos Aires in 1919. That led to Hector’s departure for America, but his father had been urging him to emigrate for some time before that, and the crisis in Argentina merely accelerated the decision. There was no point in listing the two dozen jobs he held after arriving in New York, and even less urgency to talk about what happened to him after he reached Hollywood in 1925. I knew enough about his early work as an extra, set-builder, and sometime bit player in scores of lost and forgotten films for us to pass over those years, enough about his tangled relations with Hunt not to have to dwell on them again. The experience soured Hector on the movie business, Alma said, but he wasn’t ready to give up, and until the night of January 14, 1929, the last thought in his mind was that he would ever have to leave California.

  One year before he vanished, he had been interviewed by Brigid O’Fallon for Photoplay. She had come to his house on North Orange Drive at three o’clock one Sunday afternoon, and by five o’clock they were on the floor together, rolling around on the carpet and seeking out the holes and crevices in each other’s bodies. Hector was wont to behave like that with women, Alma said, and this was hardly the first time he had used his seductive powers to make a swift and decisive conquest. O’Fallon was just twenty-three, a bright Catholic girl from Spokane who had graduated from Smith and come back west to make it in journalism. As it happened, Alma had also graduated from Smith, and she used her connections there to track down a copy of the 1926 yearbook. The head shot of O’Fallon was inconclusive. Her eyes were too close together, Alma said, her chin was too broad, and her bobbed hair was not flattering to her features. Still, there was something effervescent about her, some spark of mischief or humor lurking in her gaze, a bright inner élan. In a photograph of the Drama Society’s production of The Tempest, O’Fallon had been captured in mid-performance, decked out as Miranda in a thin white gown and sporting a single white flower in her hair, and Alma said that she was lovely in that pose, a small slip of a thing shimmering with life and energy—open-mouthed, an arm flung forward, in the act of declaiming a line. As a journalist, O’Fallon wrote in the style of the day. Her sentences were sharp and punchy, and she had a knack for sprinkling her articles with witty asides and deftly turned puns that helped her move up quickly through the ranks of the magazine. The article about Hector was an exception, far more earnest and openly admiring of her subject than any of the other pieces of hers that Alma had read. The heavy accent, however, was only a slight exaggeration. O’Fallon juiced it up a little for comic effect, but that was essentially how Hector spoke at the time. His English improved over the years, but back in the twenties he still sounded like someone who had just stepped off the boat. He might have landed on his feet in Hollywood, but yesterday he was just another bewildered foreigner, standing on the dock with all his earthly possessions crammed into a cardboard suitcase.

  In the months that followed the interview, Hector went on cavorting with any number of beautiful young actresses. He enjoyed being seen in public with them, he enjoyed going to bed with them, but none of those flings lasted. O’Fallon was cleverer than the other women he knew, and once Hector had tired of his latest plaything, he would invariably call up Brigid and ask to see her again. Between early February and late June, he visited her apartment on the average of once or twice a week, and throughout the middle of that period, for most of April and May, he was with her no less than every second or third night. There was no question that he was fond of her. As the months went by, a comfortable intimacy developed between them, but whereas the less experienced Brigid took that as a sign of eternal love, Hector never deluded himself into thinking they were anything more than close friends. He saw her as his pal, as his sexual companion, as his trusted ally, but that didn’t mean he had any intention of proposing marriage to her.

  She was a reporter, and she must have known what Hector was up to on the nights he didn’t sleep in her bed. All she had to do was open the morning paper to follow his exploits, to breathe in the innuendos about his newest crushes and dalliances. Even if most of the stories she read about him were false, there was more than enough evidence to arouse her jealousy. But Brigid wasn’t jealous—or at least she didn’t appear to be jealous. Every time Hector called, she welcomed him into her arms. She never talked about the other women, and because she didn’t accuse him or berate him or ask him to mend his ways, his affection for her only increased. That was Brigid’s plan. She had lost her heart to him, and rather than force him to make a premature decision about their life together, she decided to be patient. Sooner or later, Hector would stop running around. The frantic womanizing would lose its appeal to him. He would grow bored; he would work it out of his system; he would see the light. And when he did, she would be there for him.

  So plotted the clear-thinking and resourceful Brigid O’Fallon, and for a time it looked as though she would catch her m
an. Hector, embroiled in his various disputes with Hunt, struggling against fatigue and the pressures of having to crank out a new film every month, became less inclined to fritter away his nights in jazz clubs and speakeasys, to expend his strength on pointless seductions. O’Fallon’s apartment became a refuge for him, and the quiet evenings they spent there together helped keep his head and groin in balance. Brigid was an incisive critic, and because she was savvier about the movie business than he was, he came to rely more and more on her judgment. It was she, in fact, who suggested that he audition Dolores Saint John for the role of the sheriff’s daughter in The Prop Man, his upcoming two-reeler. Brigid had been studying Saint John’s career for the past several months, and in her opinion the twenty-one-year-old actress had the potential to become the next big thing, another Mabel Normand or Gloria Swanson, another Norma Talmadge.

  Hector followed her advice. When Saint John walked into his office three days later, he had already watched a couple of her films and was committed to offering her the job. Brigid had been right about Saint John’s talent, but nothing she had said and nothing he had seen of Saint John’s work on film had prepared Hector for the overwhelming effect her presence would have on him. It was one thing to watch a person act in a silent movie; it was quite another to shake that person’s hand and look into her eyes. Other actresses were more impressive on celluloid, perhaps, but in the real world of sound and color, in the fleshed-out, three-dimensional world of the five senses and the four elements and the two sexes, he had never met a creature to compare with this one. It wasn’t that Saint John was more beautiful than other women, and it wasn’t that she said anything remarkable to him during the twenty-five minutes they spent together that afternoon. To be perfectly honest, she seemed to be a bit on the dull side, of no more than average intelligence, but there was a feral quality to her, an animal energy coursing along her skin and radiating from her gestures that made it impossible for him to stop looking at her. The eyes that looked back at him were of the palest Siberian blue. Her skin was white, and her hair was the darkest shade of red, a red verging on mahogany. Unlike the hair of most American women in June of 1928, it was long, and it hung down to her shoulders. They talked for a while about nothing in particular. Then, without any preamble, Hector told her that the part was hers if she wanted it, and she accepted. She had never worked in physical comedy before, she said, and she was looking forward to the challenge. Then she rose from her chair, shook his hand, and left the office. Ten minutes later, with the image of her face still burning in his head, Hector decided that Dolores Saint John was the woman he was going to marry. She was the woman of his life, and if it turned out that she wouldn’t have him, then he would never marry anyone.