Mr. Peanut (51 page)

“Birds, obviously. For Hitch, birds are symbols of female sexuality. We’ll see them above Miss Torso’s apartment in
Rear Window
, the predatory bird—a horrific stuffed owl—looming behind Norman Bates in
Psycho
. His first victim’s name? Marion
Crane
. We’ll see them flying over the water as Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak stroll before the Palace of Fine Arts in
Vertigo
—where, by the way, we’ll also witness her death—her fall from San Juan Bautista’s tower, and I’ll argue she’s an angel who, deprived of Scottie’s ethereal, idealizing love, gets her wings clipped and no longer can fly. We’ll see
The Birds
, of course.

“Then there’s idleness. Pay close attention to characters who find themselves idle, by circumstance or otherwise. Hannay at the beginning of
The 39 Steps
. Young Charlie in
Shadow of a Doubt
. Bruno in
Strangers on a Train
. Jimmy Stewart in both
Rear Window
and
Vertigo
. Ingrid Bergman at the beginning of
Notorious
. The murder committed out of psychological idleness in
Rope
or Tippi Hedren’s idleness in
The Birds
. Bates in
Psycho
, notoriously. Stillness, for Hitch, seems directly related to the expression of an inner compulsion, and its expression, projecting something buried deep within ourselves onto the world, is both the most violent thing these characters can do and also their best chance of escaping the lives in which they find themselves stuck.

“Finally, blondes. I’ve mentioned Hitch’s leading ladies briefly, but keep in mind the conflict between the idealized, perfect blonde and the imperfect, ever-rejected brunette. When we idealize, we fail to recognize that we’re seeing only our own desires, the perfected
image
rather than the infinite and wonderful imperfections of the beloved. And then there’s the license we subsequently take, or don’t, which is where the
morality
of Hitchcock lies.

“We’ll look at all these themes with a focus on marriage. Do Hitch’s movies argue that we evolve so as to become worthy of the beloved? It’s been said that the primary function of all movies is the making of a couple. Well, once that couple’s made, are they ready for what comes after? Are we viewers? Can this process—the viewing and the going under and the overcoming of these characters, these avatars—be a way out? Can marriage save your life, or is it just the beginning of a long double homicide? Hitch, I believe, knew that on some deep level he’d lost sight of his wife, that Alma, dedicated to him until they died, had always been forsaken by him. Rendered invisible. Do Hitch’s movies shake us out of this complacency? Help us see each other anew? We’ll see … ”

That afternoon, David hacked into the school’s network to get Alice’s schedule. She was a senior, a math and education major, and she also was enrolled in a feminist-theory class that started the next day, which he signed up for with a few keystrokes.

That class focused primarily on female identity, examining images of women in the media in the Fifties, particularly “the suburban housewife and the urban professional,” as Dr. Constance Petersen (a flat-out gorgeous woman, David thought) explained. “Consider, if you will, the burgeoning numbers of both,” she intoned, “and the countervailing sociological and psychological forces at work, what with nearly nineteen million professional women entering the workforce in a decade when June Cleaver was
being celebrated as the ideal woman and the doyenne of that bastion of happiness and safety: the suburban home.” The students laughed knowingly, all of them women except for David, of course, him laughing out of peer pressure and not a little bit of fear, whereas theirs was smug and sprinkled with a dash of anger. “And we’ll focus as well on the male media establishment’s subsequent attempts,” the professor continued, “to assimilate or, as the case may be,
subjugate
this Janus-faced Venus by using acceptable but often demeaning tropes and sexualized images, an endeavor that was and
remains
fraught with violence—a gang rape, if you will, perpetrated by the mad men of Madison Avenue. One which then led to a condition I like to call ‘protofeminist schizophrenia.’”
This
she described as a form of mental illness specific to women, the modern manifestations of which were legion: bulimia, anorexia, obesity, and infertility, not to mention the enormous uptick in managed depression—“Prozac and Lithium,” she said, “were the new One-A-Day for ladies, professional or not, for the subjugated stay-at-homes or the bitches in power suits”—as well as the spike from 1950 to the present in female suicides, brought on by failed attempts to juggle these competing, perhaps mutually exclusive roles.

The class would begin with a study of the famous Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case and its media coverage, particularly the work of Dorothy Kilgallen, a syndicated columnist whose byline was pulled from several major papers after she wrote that the prosecution had failed to prove Sheppard’s guilt, or, in fact, anything at all. “The uppity lady had to be silenced, shut up,” Dr. Petersen said, which brought her to Hitchcock. “‘Shut up’ is something Jimmy Stewart tells Grace Kelly repeatedly when she expresses her opinions in
Rear Window
. Kelly, who’s portrayed as an accomplished professional, a buyer for major department stores, and a sexually aggressive woman, who unlike her literally and symbolically crippled lover, who’s inferred to be impotent, is
not
—I repeat
not
—trapped in love fantasies but wants love
in reality
. And unlike her emotionally sadistic boyfriend, she’s able to move
through
the world as opposed to simply observing it voyeuristically and controlling it virtually. It’s a visionary work about women and their struggles as women qua women and as women qua professionals. The movie, for those of you who haven’t seen it, is about a photographer who’s stuck in his apartment for eight weeks after his leg is broken on an assignment. To pass the time, he watches the tenants in the apartment complexes across from him. He feels his freedom’s being threatened by his girlfriend, Kelly, who wants to marry him. And so he projects his fantasies of killing her on to a jewelry salesman who might
actually
have killed his invalid wife. Remarkably,
Rear Window
came out only a month after the Sheppard murder.
It was in theaters during the trial. And so the feminine public, the silenced
she
, was treated to a twofold horror show, during the day to the first true media circus of the century over the brutal murder of a suburban trophy wife—young, athletic, and beautiful—by her successful doctor husband. The case captivated the nation, directed endless class outrage at Sheppard, and led to a guilty conviction that sent him to jail for ten years until the Supreme Court threw out the verdict. Yet what was the message to women?
That you can be killed for doing the very things expected of you
. Meanwhile, at night, moviegoers relished Jimmy Stewart’s sadistic fantasies about women, even sublimating that character’s own impotent revenge fantasies against the sexually aggressive and professionally powerful Grace Kelly.
Rear Window
was, incidentally, the second-highest grossing film of 1954, right behind
White Christmas.”

The female students again laughed knowingly, David lagging just behind. “It is this intersection”—Dr. Petersen made an X with her arms—“ladies … and gentle
man,”
she added, nodding at David, at which point only Alice turned around and smiled, “between the aesthetic and social spheres that will be our point of departure. For it is
here,”
she concluded, “that the real and imagined roles of women are not only fully figured but also clash
tragically.”

David didn’t understand a word she was saying. But the class was small, and Alice sat three seats ahead of him to his right. He sat in the back, as in Otto’s class, and watched.

And he couldn’t help but watch—not just Alice, of course, but the movies. On Tuesday afternoons Otto showed each film for the first time, encouraging the class to simply get the plot straight. He showed the movie again in the evening, attendance mandatory, for note-taking. Thursday’s class was strictly discussion, and David became as obsessed with Hitchcock’s work as he did with the mysteries and ambiguities surrounding the Sheppard murder.

As for Alice and him, it took David a month to work up the courage to talk to her. By that point they’d watched
The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Young and Innocent
, and
Shadow of a Doubt
. By
Notorious
they were sitting next to each other; during every movie they watched after that, they were holding hands. And once the two of them got together, they watched these movies (and more) all over again and spent their nights analyzing images, speculating about what became of these characters after the screen faded to black, arguing about feminism and sexism after having sex, and whether or not Dr. Sam did it or Marilyn’s killer was someone else. So when David looked back, this time in their lives was itself a montage, images from these
films and the Sheppard murder crosscut with his memories of Alice and of falling in love, and he often thought of Hitchcock’s work and the Sheppard crime as being a part of their DNA—a braided filament that augured their fate.

“I remember all that,” she said. “We were happy then.”

They were still lying in bed together holding hands, and he could see her smiling in the darkness. “So you remember being happy?” Pepin asked.

“I do.”

“Do you think we’ll be happy from now on?”

“I don’t know. I want us to be.”

“I want to wake up tomorrow and feel this blessed.”

He woke, and he did: he felt as happy.
They
did. And for the next month it seemed as if they’d arrived somewhere new.

Then they were robbed.

By the time Pepin finished writing, it was nighttime.

It had been an awful day—with Alice and on the page—and he went to make himself a drink, but before reaching into the freezer for the vodka he stared at their refrigerator door, at the Polaroids of her and her weekly progress, her diminishing size, though to Pepin now they seemed pixels in a single giant portrait, a floating death’s head with black spaces between each fissure, this larger picture not of Alice’s face but rather her fragile psyche about to fly apart. What had happened? How did things change so fast? It was as if they’d fallen into a bottomless hole.

He went into the living room to sit on the couch. He hadn’t showered, though he’d eaten all through the day. Except for his study, the apartment was completely dark. Clouds hung gray-bellied and low over the city, illuminated by the light beaming from the jagged towers. When he heard Alice’s keys at the door, he closed his eyes for a moment and listened to her footfalls enter, stop, and then approach. He looked and she was standing by the window, her fitness now shaming him—she must’ve gone to the gym after their fight—the sight of her doubled by the reflection in the glass, doubled but still smaller by half in her black spandex tights and Under Armour top, svelte as a superhero after a transformation as radical as his own; he’d gained major weight since she’d returned, was heavier now than ever, had let himself go, his black hair furred out, his beard scraggly, frizzed, wild, and unkempt. But hers was an exterior change only. Her mind was
the same—worse, in fact, than ever—and the nights were somehow darker because of it, Pepin dreading her return (tonight as much as every other day) and what mood she might bring with her, the whole apartment doubly darkened with it now. She was in a bad place. He was officially worried about her.

She’d been like this since they were robbed four weeks ago. They’d come home that Sunday afternoon, back from the park, from a walk after breakfast, happy—weren’t they happy then?—only to find the door ajar; and when they slowly pushed it open the very air inside seemed supercharged, heavy with disarray, even before they saw the chaos itself. In the living room, Pepin pressed Alice behind him, shooing her back, hissing, “Call the police,” for here he saw the books pulled down from the shelves, some scattered and others stacked or lying mysteriously open. In the kitchen, the drawers were pulled out, utensils dumped, cabinets raided, glassware broken. Down the long hallway, the paintings and prints were torn down, their frames shattered; in the bedroom, the books were tumbled as well, the closets rifled, the dresser and bedside tables overturned. Only then did they truly feel the violation, even though nothing appeared to have been taken. Nothing, of course, but their sense of security; nothing, he thought, and Pepin didn’t tell Alice this, until he noticed his computer was on, his password somehow cracked, and the end of his novel had been cut, stolen, the external hard drive as well. And in the bathroom, after he heard Alice moan in disgust, he entered to find the medicine cabinet open, her pill bottles lying in the sink and on the floor, and the rim of the toilet dotted with a viscous substance—as yellow by now as wood glue—and floating in the bowl, drifting into formlessness like cloud writing, where the spunk of the intruder made a ghostly, jagged M. Impossible, Pepin thought.

“What’ve you been doing?” she now asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

She crossed her arms and looked at her feet, then turned suddenly as if she heard something and sighed. “The strangest thing happened to me today,” she said.

The air was so bad between them Pepin couldn’t tell if she even wanted him to ask, so he took a pull at his drink.

“I think,” she said, “that someone tried to kill me.”

It took him a second for it to register.

“What did you say?”

She lowered her voice. “You heard me.”

“I know,” he said, “but what do you
mean?”

That sounded like the beginning of a fight. They’d arrived at a state of
communication where every last utterance did. You tried to hold on, to last it out, but he felt a seaman’s certainty about this storm.

“You’re going to say I’m imagining it,” she said.