It was a 15-minute drive from the office to the Drako house. Two minutes in, a storm started to form. Eston was looking absently out the windshield of his car, failing desperately to remember something, when it began to downpour. He snapped back into focus, gripped the wheel, and then was taken away again; gray sheets of rain waved in the wind, and he gazed at them, thinking of the folds of his velvet theater curtains.
Eston lived in a shotgun apartment above a small theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Despite being amid the beauty and bustle, the theater’s profits were dwindling by the time he moved in. As a consequence, they only put on the same handful of shows each week. Friday was Richard Strauss’s opera Salome. Eston never missed a Friday. The seats grew emptier as the year went on, as did the stage. In the last show he attended, five men played 14 different roles. Baritones were forced to sing tenor, sopranos were forced to sing bass, and basses were forced to sing everything. But he never heard the increasingly chaotic mixture of their voices. He only ever heard her—Salome.
Her voice was both seductive and saintly, like a siren call leading one away from danger. The other performers, in light of the theater’s size and vacancy, lowered their voices. She did not. She belted beautiful notes as if she were singing to an auditorium of thousands. Her sharp jaw pivoted up and down with exacting precision. The delicate muscles of her neck moved systematically to control her breath. Her bright cherry lips expanded and contracted into concentric red circles, making her voice resonate across the theater. Every movement and every note was a display of confident, calculated beauty.
Eston would sit in the orchestra left of center so he could see her fair white skin glow against the crimson curtains. When she approached the front of the stage, he envisioned Winged Victory, the sculpture of Nike stepping out to the bow of a ship. He envisioned her gorgeous face and slender arms completing that sculpture.
Eston did not covet her. He revered her. He never approached the singer or learned of her name. It would ruin the illusion, he thought. Instead, he placed her on a lofty pedestal in his mind, so lofty that even he could not reach it.
One afternoon, upon returning from the Caller, he looked up at the small theater’s marquee, and it read: BANKRUPTCY: EVERYTHING MUST GO. In one moment, he looked ready to cry; in the next, like he would kill the person responsible. But no one person was. Times and tastes had both changed, as they always had. A fact he came to despise. After his anger gave way to despair, his numb body shuffled reluctantly into the theater. He walked down the center aisle toward the stage, as one would walk toward an open casket at a funeral.
Every item in the theater was tagged with a bright yellow sticker displaying some absurdly low number, including the crimson curtains. As Eston limply handed his money to the theater attendant, he asked in a tone of fading hope, “Do you know what will be made of this place?”
“A record store… a pop-record store.”
Sacrilege, Eston thought, but he had no energy left for outrage.
Like a soldier carrying a fallen friend off the battlefield, he gathered the curtains, threw them over one shoulder, and trudged up the stairs to his apartment. When he reached the landing, he threw them down at his side, unhurriedly rummaged through his trousers for the keys, and opened the door. When he turned back, he saw his shadow cast over the pool of red curtains; he saw his silhouette, lifeless, bleeding out on the floor.
He gathered them again, dragged them into the living space, and with dead eyes surveyed his apartment for a place to hang them. To his right, a window framing a distant view of the Hollywood sign; to his left, a window looking right out at the humming of Hollywood Blvd. Having made his decision, he grabbed five nails and a hammer from beneath his kitchen sink. He hung the heavy curtains just below the ceiling, and they shrouded the entire wall. Then he drew them, closing his view of Hollywood Boulevard. He had kept them drawn ever since
.