Evil Eye Read Free Page B

frame.
    She’d lost ten to twelve pounds: she weighed hardly more than one hundred pounds, at five feet six.
    In a kindly voice altogether different from the public personality that was eloquent, playful, and “witty,” Austin Mohr asked Mariana about her parents. Her father, her mother.
    Gravely he listened as she spoke. And tentatively, then with more emotion, Mariana spoke as she had not spoken since her mother’s death.
    Stumbling, faltering. Trying not to cry. But telling Austin Mohr something of what had happened, that still seemed to be unbelievable, unfathomable.
    He asked her about how she was taking care of herself.
    Mariana had no idea how to reply. Her self was of little interest to her now, a flimsy remnant of a time now past, extraneous, worthless.
    â€œIt’s a dangerous time for you now, Mariana. The pull of the ‘other’ is so strong.”
    Mariana knew that Austin Mohr meant the other world .
    â€œYou must not be alone, my dear. I hope you know that.”
    Mariana wept, pressing a wadded tissue against her eyes. Austin Mohr spoke gently yet forcibly.
    â€œWe all have losses we think we can’t survive. And sometimes, some of us can’t. So we need help. We need emergency help. I will provide you what I can of ‘emergency’ help—first, I will cancel the rest of my appointments for the afternoon.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œOf course. I will. I have.”
    â€œJust talk to me. Tell me more about yourself. Your work. Why you’d come to the Institute last fall. We have many applicants, you know—we can accept only one in ten—and so you’re very special to us, Mariana. To me.”
    Mariana hadn’t known she’d had so much to say, or the energy with which to say it.
    It was said of the director of the Institute that in addition to the numerous essays and books he’d written on the subject of twentieth-century cinema, both American and European, he’d virtually memorized classic films and could recite long passages of dialogue. And so it seemed to Mariana that Austin knew as much, or more, about the noir films of Ida Lupino as she herself knew. He succeeded in distracting her from her grief to discuss the directorial strategy of Lupino’s major films, as well as an obscure Twilight Zone episode Lupino had directed called “The Masks” in the 1950s. Together, Mariana and Austin analyzed the parable-like plot of this TV drama in which craven individuals at Mardi Gras in New Orleans are obliged to don masks whose ugly features reveal their inner selves—and, when they remove the masks at midnight, their faces bear the imprint of the ugly masks.
    â€œIt’s a brilliant little moral fable, worthy of Poe. The mask deforms the face—the mask reveals the soul. So convincing is Lupino’s presentation of the fantastical material, it hardly seems surreal. And hardly like typical television in the 1950s or even now.”
    Mariana was amazed that Austin knew so much about her thesis subject, that others thought to be obscure if not of questionable relevance. And that he seemed so clearly, so sincerely to care about her.
    Though he was somewhere in the vicinity of sixty Austin spoke with the animation of a young person excited by films. Almost, there was a kind of naïveté in the man’s enthusiasm, Mariana recognized as very like her own, until recent months.
    Austin Mohr was a large gregarious man with gingery-silver hair still thick, wiry. At times—though not today—he wore this slightly long hair in a little ponytail, or pigtail; he had about him a Latino sort of swagger, though he didn’t have Hispanic features; he wore crisply ironed dazzling-white cotton shirts open at the throat, showing tufts of gingery-silver hair on his chest. His eyes were alert, intense, unnerving in their intensity. On his left wrist was a large beautifully designed watch, on his right wrist a bracelet