A Stranger Like You Read Online Free PDF Page A

she was shaking and he confirmed in his mind that nothing quite made an impression on a person like physical contact. He had once read an article about it, suggesting that if you wanted to leave someone with a lasting impression on a job interview you might gently touch their arm while looking at them with a sense of intensity. Your eyes should say, I want this job, while your gentle touch implied, I’m your friend, you can trust me.
    “Give me your keys,” he said.
    “This is ridiculous,” she said. “This isn’t happening.”
    It’s happening all right, he thought. It’s happening to you.
    He unlocked her door and they went inside and he dropped the keys into his pocket. The house was disappointing, not what he would expect from a movie executive. The furnishings were ordinary; uninspired, as if the room were part of a hotel suite and not a person’s private home. Hedda Chase was not a housekeeper. There were heaping piles of dirty clothes, dirty plates scattered around the room, ashtrays full of cigarettes, lipstick-stained glasses with day-old booze. Stacks and stacks of screenplays. Screenplays strewn across the floor or left half-read on the coffee table like fallen birds at a skeet shoot. He pressed the gun into her back and shuffled behind her into the kitchen. “Pour us some coffee,” he said, noticing the leftover pot on the counter.
    He stood behind her, like a puppeteer, and watched as she took down two cups from the shelf and set them on the counter and poured the coffee.
    Outside, two men were arguing in Spanish, and shortly afterward they heard the neighbor’s car pulling down the driveway. Hedda glimpsed through the window, longingly, he thought, squinting in the bright sun. For a moment he imagined they were a couple, that he lived here with her, instead of back in Montclair with his wife. He indulged in the fantasy, briefly. Pictures and colors flared up in his head.
    “Bring the coffee,” he said, motioning to the table with the pistol.
    She took the two cups in her shaking hands, the coffee spilling on her fingers. Then she set them down and looked at him as if for instruction.
    “Sit.” He pointed to the chair with his gun. He thought of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. Early in the film the actor had aimed his gun in jest—later it was the very thing that caused his demise. But in Hugh’s case, the gun was only a prop; he had no intention of using it and, for that matter, had not even loaded it. He found it pathetic, of course, and very sad, that it was the only way he could get this woman to meet with him.
    Just now he had the producer’s full attention.
    “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened, all right? It’s not like it’s a big deal, it happens all the time. Rogers and I had different ideas,” she tried to explain. “We had different ideas about things. Anyway, he’s dead.”
    “And you’re in charge.”
    “That’s right.”
    “We had a deal,” he said. “We had a green light.”
    “We’re not doing those sorts of pictures anymore, Mr. Waters. We have a different philosophy now. I’m sure you understand.”
    “I don’t think I do.”
    “Violence, for one thing. I think the American people have had enough of it.”
    “You sound like a politician.”
    “I read all these scripts—the stuff that goes on, the things people write . . .” She looked at him. “All the incredibly sick things people come up with—people like you, Mr. Waters.” She gave him a cold look. “It’s very disturbing.”
    “It’s what people want,” he said. “It’s what people want to see.”
    “I’m not so sure.” She pulled herself up dramatically like a woman about to break into song. “To be brutally honest, Mr. Waters, your script—it just wasn’t any good. I didn’t buy it for a minute. The ending in particular. That business about the kidnapping, parking the car at the airport. I had a hard time believing that nobody heard her.”
    “She was in the