everything. Even your chemicals.”
After a long, languid pause. “I see. Well, what was it you wanted to know?”
I find I am unable to answer, not because my mind has gone blank but because it has acquired such a crystalline clarity, such a sharpness of definition in both thought and sense, that I don’t want to waste the moment on work. Especially when I can read the file in the night sky. Time passes, but I have lost the measure of it.
“Solved everything yet?” Doctor Moi inquires.
“Yes.”
“There never was a problem, was there?”
“No.”
“More cocoa?”
“Yes.”
“Letter first.”
“No.”
“Detective, I believe that letter is addressed to me.”
“It’s addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ and whether you get it or not is entirely up to me.”
We hang there like that for fully two hours. It really is good stuff. Finally, Moi says, “Just tell me exactly what you want from me.”
“A sign, Doctor, a word, anything that will confirm that what I’ve just read in the sky is all true. That it isn’t just chemicals screwing my head up.”
When I raise my head as a follow-up to my words, I see she is thinking profoundly. She picks up a little bell to ring for the maid, who brings a new cheroot and helps her light it, then goes back into the house without a word. Moi stands up to look at the river, which is black and shiny as an oil slick under the climbing moon. All I have of her is a three-quarter back shot with her long black hair trapped loosely in a tortoiseshell clip with silver inlay, the white silk of her cheungsam catching the moonlight thread by thread.
“The life of a pariah is not easy, Detective, even if you are lucky enough to be a rich one. He and I understood one another. We even talked about it. He told me that when he made his films—not the one good one, but the two dozen schmaltzy ones—he always kept a typical member of the public in mind. That person, for him, was a middle-aged librarian he met just once in Arkansas when he was running around the country promoting his first movie. She was a woman with a college degree whose taste remained mainstream and somewhat redneck, a product of a tribe and culture so complacent, so certain of her own goodness—because everyone in her vicinity agreed she was good—that he was able to identify her as a perfect ersatz muse. Although she didn’t know it, she was the golden one for whom he made the films. And she, in her unlimited mediocrity, is the one who made him rich.”
Moi turns to me for a moment to show the mirth on her face.
“When he first told me that I thought it was so funny—and so clever of him—I couldn’t stop laughing. He didn’t see it that way, though. He told me that this middle-aged librarian in Arkansas had come to dominate his whole life. He had thought that after his first ten million he wouldn’t give a damn about anyone in the audience anymore, but somehow it didn’t work out like that. This librarian had avatars everywhere, especially inside his head and among the matriarchs of Hollywood. He’d done a deal with the devil, you see? That’s who she was, that perfect, good, clean-living, no-nonsense, mainstream, somewhat-redneck librarian from Arkansas. For any pariah, especially an artist, she was the opposition. Poor Frank had done a deal, and the devil had kept her part of the bargain. Frank Charles was very rich. And very lost. There was no way he could get back to that other Frank Charles, the young one who was going to shock and delight the world with his originality and genius. That was all gone. Sold.”
“No way out?”
Doctor Moi nods slowly and profoundly. “He begged me, you know, over and over again. He kept begging me to help until I finally gave in.”
“Yes,” I say, “I can see that.” And so I can. Moi’s mood of sorrow penetrates me as if her aura has quite eclipsed my own. I do not analyze what she might mean by “help;” I feel it with such intensity that no analysis is necessary—or possible. I can actually see Frank Charles here on this balcony in a morose mood, begging Moi, and Moi, elegant and gracious to a fault, doing all she can to help; it’s like watching a scene from a play, with the balcony as stage, but instead of dialogue there is