The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen (8 page)

“Yeah, Duane. We're cool.” Eastlin rolls his eyes ever so slightly, and then seems to make up his mind. To me, he says, “Right this way, sir. Let's see how I can help you today.”

He leads us to the middle of the store, past racks of weird dresses that look to me like frayed flour sacks dyed deep eggplant and mauve. I spot Maddie peek at a price tag in the palm of her hand before dropping it like it's on fire.

Eastlin parks us in a dressing room, then closes the velvet curtain behind us and whispers to me “Okay, asshat. That better be her. Also? You owe me.” Aloud he says, “Thirty minutes, then, sir? Can we bring you anything? Ice water? Champagne?”

“Thanks, man,” I say at the same time that Maddie calls, “Champagne would be great, thank you!”

There's a leaden pause from outside the curtain. Then Eastlin says, “Right away, miss,” and his shoes disappear.

“This place is crazy!” Maddie whispers to me, smiling.

“Yeah,” I agree. “Don't worry, though. He's cool.”

I'm nestling her on the stool in the corner, against heaps of fine netting and chiffon from the clothes they haven't put away yet. The light is perfect. I knew the light in here would be perfect. Some places have light that seems to make every woman more beautiful. I grab one of the flour sack dresses from the hook in the dressing room, and hold it under her chin.

“Know what? You should put this on,” I say. It's not really appropriate for a documentarian to costume one of his subjects. But the color is so rich I can't help it.

The burgundy brings out the blue tones in her skin, making her lips look redder. And the texture is so matte and soft that it makes her hair look shinier. I'm so certain of the rightness of it that it's almost creepy. I look down at myself, and note with dismay that no amount of expert lighting can save my cargo shorts from sucking. Eastlin's influence must be rubbing off on me.

“Are you kidding?” She blanches. “Have you seen how much these things cost?”

“So what? We're not buying it.” I grin at her. “Please? Pretend like it's a costume. For a play.”

She smiles at me, uncertain, holding the dress in her lap. Then she gives in.

“Okay, fine,” she says. “I'm going to sweat all over it, though. And you have to step out.”

“I'm gone,” I say, backing away with my hands raised to show I'm unarmed.

I duck out through the curtain and mosey up to where Eastlin's standing behind the counter at the front, fiddling on an iPad. A flute of champagne fizzes enticingly at his elbow. I can't even wrap my mind around shopping in a store so expensive that they give you champagne while you shop. For free.

Without looking up, he says, “You are not having sex with that goth chick in my dressing room. FYI.”

“Don't worry,” I reassure him.

“I'm not worried,” he says, eyes still on the iPad. “You and I both know that, if necessary, I could beat you to death with your own arm.
I
have nothing to worry about.”

He gives me a challenging look and holds it for a long minute. For a split second I can't tell if he's kidding.

Then we both burst out laughing.

“I should start going to the gym,” I muse.

“You really should,” Eastlin says with pity.

“Listen,” I say, leaning my elbows on the counter and craning my neck to look at the iPad. “I've got a favor to ask you.”

“Oh, goody!” He gives me a wicked look.

“Sorry.” I smile and shake my head. “Not that.”

“Don't knock it 'til you've tried it,” he says drily. “So what's the favor?”

“Do you think you could try looking up that girl I told you about?” I say. “The one who shops here.”

Eastlin glances at the dressing room across the store.

“That's not her?” he asks.

“No, that's someone else.”

“I knew that wasn't her.” He shakes his head. “I'd remember. God, I'm so over that nineties' torn-fishnets look.” He pauses for a moment to regret the rest of the world's bad taste. “All right, fine. What's her name?”

“Annie,” I say.

Saying her name out loud makes me light-headed enough that I'm actually glad I'm leaning on the counter.
Annie.
The word feels beautiful in my mouth. As soon as I think that, though, I get embarrassed,
like Eastlin might have heard me think it. Is it lame, to look up one girl while waiting for another? It is, isn't it. But it's for Tyler's release, anyway. It's not like I'm trying to find her because I want to hook up with her or anything.

Do I?

“Annie what?” He's poking at the iPad screen.

“I don't know.”

Eastlin sighs heavily and rolls his head back on his shoulders. “Wes. Come on.”

“What? I didn't ask.”

“What's the matter with you?”

“She had to leave in a hurry. I didn't have time to ask her last name.”

“Wesley Eugene Auckerman—” he starts.

“My middle name's not Eugene,” I interrupt.

“—need I point out to you that in a mere five weeks of roommating I have been laid eleven times, and you have been laid exactly zero?” To emphasize the zero, he holds his finger and thumb in an O shape, looking through it at me.

“Thank you,” I say with mock earnestness. “Thank you for pointing that out.”

“Anytime.” He turns the iPad to face me. “These are all our Annies and Annes. But none of them is her.”

“How do you know?” I ask, looking curiously at the list of names and addresses.

“Well, this one's on the board at MoMA, and this one is a director at Goldman Sachs. This one just landed a walk-on in that new paranormal witch movie, and this one . . .” He ticks them off one at a time.

“All right, all right. I get it,” I groan. I bring my hands up to my face and rub my eyes with my fingertips.

He turns the iPad back to face him.

“The way I see it is, you have two options,” Eastlin tells me. “I suggest the second, which is giving up.”

“I can't,” I say, and it comes out sounding sort of strangled and desperate, which is not what I intended. “Not possible.”

“All right,” Eastlin says, eyeing me. “Then we go with option one.”

“What's option one?” I ask.

He fixes me with an innocent stare, and says, “Find her some other way. Duh.”

“Excellent. This is a good plan. Simple, and to the point. Thank you.” I stare at the countertop. I am the pizza of dismay.

He hands me the champagne flute and smiles. “You're welcome.”

I start to make my way back to the dressing room, where Maddie is waiting. Maddie. That name feels kind of cool in my mouth, too.

“Seriously, dude,” Eastlin calls out to my back. “There're cameras in there.”

Back inside the dressing room, champagne stashed on an end table, lighting a perfect rose-colored scatter totally devoid of shadow, I pull out my video camera and train it on Maddie's face. Her eyes are closed, and she's rubbing a cheek against the silk of one of the dresses behind her. I creep nearer, zooming in without zooming in. I let the camera study her, traveling over her half-closed eyes. There's something. Yes. She's very . . . I get in so close that I can't see her Bettie Page bangs anymore or her neck tattoo, just the round planes of her cheeks, and a soft dimple where her smile deepens. She looks different, this close up. Younger. She looks . . .

A laugh erupts out of my mouth, and I pull the camera away from my eye and stare at her in surprise.

“What?” she asks, eyes flying open at the sound of my laughing. “Do I look weird?”

“No, no,” I reassure her. “You look good. You look actually . . .” A smile pulls at my cheek while I decide. “Beautiful,” I say.

Then I say, “Malou.”

She stiffens, her feet scrambling over the dressing room floor as though she's thinking about bolting. But she doesn't. She just stares at me, hard, waiting to see what I'm going to do. I smile at her, and bring the video camera back to my eye. The pixelated image of her face in my viewfinder relaxes. Her cheeks are framed by tulle, and she gazes at me with heavy lids, watchful and steady.

Maybe it wasn't coincidence, Maddie turning up in my image search for Annie. Maybe I've been looking for the wrong girl all along.

“Guilty,” she whispers, gazing down her nose at me.

“So tell me, Maddie Miss Madwoman Malou,” I whisper, my camera moving over her skin, lingering on her mouth. “Tell me what you want most in the world.”

T
hat Friday night, fiction film workshop night, the screening room is packed, and I've never seen Tyler so nervous. The guy is barely holding it together. He's dressed up, for him, in skinny black jeans with a rubberized wet-look finish and extra eyeliner. His black hair is gelled up higher than usual. And he keeps rubbing his nose, which looks red and raw underneath. He looks like the guitarist in a Japanese Sex Pistols tribute band.

“Are you okay?” I whisper to him.

“What?” he whispers back, distracted. “Yeah, sure.”

His left knee jiggles so fast I can barely see it, and the jiggling is rattling the keys in his jeans pocket.

Tonight all the live-action fiction kids' projects get shown in front of the professors and the rest of the film students, including animation, whose workshop is Monday, and documentary—we're up next week. Up until this point we've seen snippets of one another's work, but nothing complete. Everybody's films have to have music, sound, credits, the whole shebang. Workshop is half of our grade, but more importantly, workshop is when we'll judge one another, silently. Taking the measure of one another is even worse than being graded.

I look around, scanning the faces of my classmates. A couple of them I know are going to pose a serious challenge, but it's hard to tell. Watchers, like me, don't always broadcast their talent to the rest of the world. And sometimes the ones who pretend to be geniuses are kidding themselves more than anyone else.

There aren't that many film students, only about thirty of us in total, about evenly split between girls and guys. Three workshop professors, each of them looking like she'd rather be doing anything else on a Friday night.

Only Tyler looks like he's on the brink of a total meltdown.

“Stop that,” I hiss to Tyler.

“What?” he looks at me, irritated.

“Your knee. It's jingling your keys.”

Tyler looks around, confused. “Huh?” Then he seems to hear the jingling for the first time, and puts both his hands on top of his knee. The jingling stops.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Sorry,” he says. As soon as we stop talking, the other knee starts jingling.

I groan and stare up at the ceiling.

More acoustical tile. I could count the divots, but I won't.

“All right then,” Professor Krauss says. She's gotten up behind the lectern and is shuffling through some notes. “We're just about ready. Cleo? Are you ready on the lights?”

Tyler's head whips around, hunting through the crowd. It's pretty much just our classmates in the screening room, though there are a few parents, and some kids from other classes. One group of girls has brought poster boards that read
DEEPTI ROCKS
.

“Dammit,” Tyler mutters. “They can't start yet. We've still got five minutes.”

I check my watch, but Tyler's wrong—we're actually five minutes past.

“Who are you waiting for?” I ask.

“Nobody.” Tyler frowns into his lap.

“Is the gallery supposed to be sending someone or something?” I ask, looking over my shoulder, too.

“No. Forget it.”

I eye him, but the lights in the screening room start to dim, and whatever Tyler's thinking disappears in the gathering dark.

“All right,” says Professor Krauss. “Let's get started. First up tonight is Deepti Chatterjee, with a narrative piece she's calling
Girl in the Park
. It's seven minutes, shot on digital video, and stars . . . I can't read this. One of the drama kids. Ready?”

The cheering section whoops, and one of the voices calls out, “Starring Laura Gutierrez!”

“Jesus,” Tyler mutters under his breath next to me. “Grow up.”

The screen flickers to life, and then we get seven minutes of the back of a girl's head as she circumnavigates Washington Square Park to the dubbed-in tune of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” by Nancy Sinatra. While the girl walks, she slowly removes one item of clothing at a time, dropping it carelessly behind her, until she's (apparently) totally nude. Except the camera never leaves the back of her head, so I'm reasonably certain that Laura Gutierrez was not actually nude in Washington Square Park. She's probably in swimsuit bottoms and pasties. Okay, I have to hand it to her for the pasties part. You wouldn't catch me going semi-naked in Washington Square Park, if I were a girl. Actually, you probably wouldn't catch me going semi-naked in Washington Square Park if I were myself.

Heads start turning as she passes strangers going about their everyday lives. Nannies with strollers. Office girls on lunch break.
Some dudes playing drums. Hare Krishnas. Once we start to get down to serious skin, the music changes to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs singing “Heads Will Roll,” and a few people have started following Laura like supplicants. I can't tell if they're part of the film project, or just randos. If they're randos, that would have been pretty freaky. When the girl loses the last item of clothing, a pair of thong underpants, she comes to a halt directly under the Washington Square arch, then turns to the camera and winks over her shoulder at the very second the music stops.

The credits roll over a rehash of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin',” while Deepti's cheering section goes totally berserker, and everyone starts clapping.

“God, could that be more derivative?” Tyler says, arms folded over his chest.

“I don't know,” I say. “Her editing was pretty tight, actually.”

“Whatever,” Tyler says.

“Okay,” says Professor Krauss. “Nice job, Deepti. And Laura, too. That took . . . that took some guts. So. What would we say is the narrative thrust of this piece?”

“Um, I'd say it was about the inherent violence of the gendered gaze? And about a woman's control of her body in space?” calls one of Deepti's friends.

“Okay,” Professor Krauss says. “Sure. And how is that story conveyed in a visual lexicon?”

I fade out from the class discussion of Deepti's piece. Maybe Tyler's right, it was kind of derivative. But I had to admire her technique. I don't think my sound editing is going to be nearly that sharp. Okay,
Most
is more complicated. It's got different scenes, different people, lots of different light levels and transition music.
Girl in the Park
is basically one long tracking shot, which if I want to be a jerk about it, I could point out it could've been done in one take, like,
the day before yesterday. Then all she has to do is find music that's the right length. I mean, everybody loves tracking shots. I've probably watched that
Goodfellas
tracking shot where they go through the kitchen to get into the Copa, like, a dozen times. And in
The Player
, there's a whole tracking shot where they spend the entire time talking about tracking shots. The more I think about it, the more irritated I get. Deepti thinks having her friend get naked in the park is, like, some big artistic statement. Like, we'll all be so distracted by thinking about Laura walking naked through the park that we won't notice she made a crappy film.

Thinking about Laura naked in the park makes me shift in my seat, and I look around for a second to make sure no one notices. The lights are dim. I'm safe.

“All right,” Professor Krauss continues. “Next up, we've got
Shuttered Eyes
, by Tyler Lau. Says here Tyler shot using both digital and sixteen millimeter—is that right?” she asks him, sounding impressed.

“Yeah,” Tyler says, like, it's no big deal, and not something he's been obsessing about for weeks.

“Wow. Okay. So it was shot in both sixteen and digital, and he says it's a”—she squints at the paper—“visual tone-poem meditation on the . . . nature of . . . identity and . . .” Professor Krauss gives up, looks at the audience and says, “It's an art film. Let's go.”

We're plunged into darkness, the numbered countdown begins, like I always imagined would roll before one of my films, and then the scene opens on Tyler's eye, filling the frame of the camera. Dissonant classical music plays that I don't recognize, but which Tyler told me a while ago is by some guy named Schoenberg. After a minute, I'm lost. But it's a pleasurable lost. The images tumble together in a way that makes me uncomfortable, but which manages to be beautiful. It's like a kaleidoscope, only it's telling a story. Here's a flickering candle, here's an eye, there's the baby gumming a quartz crystal and
someone taking it away, then hands grasped together on the tabletop and holding perfectly still. There's the woman winding on her turban, there's me falling (oh, man, I can't believe he put that in), then back to a repeat of the woman winding her turban. Time seems to move both forward and back, and it's dizzying, but it's rhythmic and magical. I'm letting myself be pulled into the experience of it.

And then, in a flicker of light, it happens.

I see her.

Annie.

My scalp crawls, and a strangled gasp comes out of my mouth.

She's standing right behind Maddie, and staring straight into the camera. It's shocking, arresting. Her bottomless black eyes pierce into me, and her rose-pink mouth opens. Her hand reaches slowly forward, toward the camera, and the lighting is such that it almost looks like her hand is reaching out from the surface of the screen and into the space where we're sitting. I imagine I see her arm cast a shadow on the flat movie screen. For a second, I'm terrified.

Then just as quickly, she's vanished, the scene is the same—how did he do that?—it's just Maddie at the table, looking down, in fact now I can clearly see that Maddie is asleep (of course she's asleep). The phantasmagoria of images continues: candles, the baby, candles, the guy in the Rangers jersey crying (when did that happen?), the Ouija pointer moving with no one touching it (that totally did not happen), white screen with contrails of lights, quick cuts of color digital film of shapes that I can't make out, Tyler's eye again in soft filter, and then it's over.

There are no credits.

The lights go up, and for a long minute nobody does or says anything. I can see Tyler gripping the armrests of his chair next to me, can feel the anxiety clinging to him like sweat. I can almost smell it.

Then I realize that I'm gripping my armrests, too.

“Well then,” Professor Krauss falters. “Who would like to comment first?”

There's another long pause, and then Deepti's hand creeps up.

“Deepti?”

“Um. I actually thought it was kind of derivative? Kind of like Stan Brakhage, if he, like, used real people?”

Oh, man. Here we go.

Rage vibrates off Tyler so hard it makes the hairs on my arms stand up.

“Deepti,” Professor Krauss says slowly. “Have you ever actually
seen
Stan Brakhage?”

I raise my hand.

“Yes, Wes,” says Professor Krauss.

“Okay, so, maybe I'm biased, since I did sound for Tyler, but . . .” I glance at him to see if it's okay, what I'm doing. His face is a mask. “But I thought it was kind of awesome.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“Well . . .” I hesitate.

I'm not really an art film guy. Documentaries, I can talk about. I can talk about the Up series, I can talk about Michael Moore. The Maysles brothers. The only art film I've seen to my knowledge is
Cremaster 3
, and to be honest, I fell asleep halfway through and woke up with no impression beyond a vague desire to wash my hands. I am totally out of my element. But I can't back out now. I can feel Tyler waiting next to me.

“So,” I start, “one of the things I really admired about it was its use of time?” I wait, wondering if I'm going to say anything else. Then I continue, “It managed to use non-narrative image structures to convey a simultaneous passage of time forward and backward. It
made me really involved in the aesthetic experience of the film. And I thought the way he incorporated diegetic sound with the music was pretty tight.”

A heavy pause deadens the room while everyone stares at me.

“I thought so, too,” Professor Krauss say finally, looking at Tyler over the rims of her reading glasses. “Well done, Tyler. You made some bold visual decisions in this piece that really paid off. The transitions were a little clunky, but that's just a matter of technique. It'll improve with time. And I thought your homage to Kenneth Anger was wry and unexpected. Next time, don't leave off the credits. Okay. Up next, we've got Kanesha Wright, with a piece called
Summertime
 . . .”

Next to me, I hear Tyler exhale long and slow. I glance sidelong at him and smile an encouraging smile.

“Thanks, man,” he whispers to me as the lights start to drop for Kanesha's film. “That means a lot.”

“No problem,” I whisper back. “It rocked.”

There's a long pause, and as Kanesha's opening music kicks in, I just hear Tyler whisper, “You really thought so?”

“Definitely,” I say. But I can't make myself smile when I say it. I'm thinking about how it's going to be my turn, one week from today. One week. That's not much time. One week for me to make something that might get me the thing I want most in the world.

And I'm thinking about Annie's nighttime eyes staring out of the screen, straight at me.

I look up at the ceiling of the screening room to keep myself from tearing up. I count sixteen divots before it gets too dark to see.