Palm Springs

Palm Springs is both a remembered summer refuge and the setting of Bret’s discovery that Susan Reynolds and Robert Mallory are dating in secret. In the fall of 1981, he drives there to follow them, finds them together at Las Casuelas Terraza, and returns to the empty house on Toledo Avenue. During the night, the house’s lights and telephone fail, and a beam appears outside. Bret flees before dawn. The visit joins an intimate revelation to an unresolved intrusion, making a place associated with earlier ease feel newly exposed to danger.

A remembered refuge

Bret’s arrival in Palm Springs calls up the spring-break trip he had made with Susan and Thom Wright, before Debbie Schaffer had become his girlfriend. The three stayed at his aunt’s house on Toledo Avenue, where the days were filled with parties, meals, poolside afternoons, music, and horseback riding. He remembers Susan in a white bikini, Thom emerging from the bedroom in his jockey shorts, and the ordinary ease of sharing the house. The recollection is not simply cheerful: Bret acknowledges that he carried his own tensions with him, but says they dissipated there. In retrospect, that calm belongs to a period when their futures still seemed to follow the paths expected of them.

By the later visit, that past is sharply contrasted with what Bret calls a bleak, death-haunted present. He drives into town on a Saturday, covering the distance in under a hundred minutes, and reaches the empty Toledo Avenue house as dusk falls. The journey is driven by uncertainty about how dangerous Robert may be and by Bret’s suspicion that his relationship with Susan has changed. The same house that had held a shared spring-break idyll now offers a temporary base for watching the people who have left Bret outside their intimacy.

Following Susan and Robert

At the house, Bret finds a key beneath a terra-cotta pot and enters a dark interior. A Sputnik chandelier illuminates the high-ceilinged, sunken living room; the refrigerator is empty, and the pool outside is a black, flat surface. In the master bedroom, he sits on the bed, unsure what he has come to find. Thoughts of Matt Kellner and Audrey Barbour, and his conviction that he may be the only one who recognizes Robert’s danger, push him to leave for the nearby home of Susan’s grandparents.

On the cul-de-sac, Susan’s BMW and a white Cadillac reassure him that she is there. Then he sees Robert’s black Porsche parked at the curb. Bret waits in his car with the headlights off, watching the house for hours. When Susan and Robert finally emerge, Robert opens the passenger door for her and scans the neighborhood before getting in. Bret follows them into town, circling the parking lot at La Plaza before walking to Las Casuelas Terraza on North Palm Canyon Drive.

Bret enters through the cantina, sits partly concealed by a date palm, and sees the pair at a green-tiled table. Susan has ordered a margarita; Robert appears to have a Coke. Their easy conversation and Robert’s genuine-seeming laughter settle a question that has troubled Bret for weeks: the meeting is a date, not an encounter between casual friends. The sight brings relief because it confirms what he suspected, but the relief gives way to sadness. The couple seem so absorbed in each other that Bret feels the rest of the room has disappeared for them.

The house in darkness

Afterward, Bret returns to his aunt’s house and falls asleep. A faint crash wakes him. The lights he left on are out, the house is dark, and the telephone line is dead. At first he considers whether the Santa Ana winds have caused a power outage, but streetlamps and lights at other entrances remain on. His digital watch reads 3:30. Moving from switch to switch changes nothing; the house stays without power.

The failure transforms the empty house from a place of shelter into an uncertain space. Bret tries to account for the darkness, but the phone’s silence and the contrast with the lit street undermine a simple explanation. The episode takes place amid his growing suspicion of Robert and his fear of being watched, yet the evidence available to him in the house does not establish who—or what—has caused the blackout. That uncertainty matters: the visit confirms one hidden truth about Susan and Robert while leaving the danger around Bret unresolved.

Bret’s ordeal lasts only about seven minutes, though in the moment it feels much longer. He gathers his backpack and car keys and drives out of Palm Springs wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. He reaches Los Angeles at dawn. The abrupt flight ends the visit without resolving what happened inside the house, and the desert refuge becomes another location he associates with the threat that has taken hold of his life.

A place under surveillance

Later, photographs shown to Bret by Susan connect Palm Springs to a wider pattern of surveillance. Among the black-and-white images are distant shots of Susan and Robert at Las Casuelas and in the backyard of her grandparents’ house: Robert in a bathing suit, Susan in a bikini, and the pair together in the pool. Other pictures show Susan at Century Towers and on Gilley Field. Their long-distance framing makes the Palm Springs scenes part of a photographic record assembled from concealed vantage points, rather than private moments witnessed openly.

A separate set of five photographs depicts the interior of Bret’s aunt’s house on South Toledo Avenue, though the rooms are empty: the living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and the view through a sliding glass door toward the pool and backyard. The images establish that the house itself was photographed from inside. They do not, by themselves, explain when the photographer entered or connect that person conclusively to the nighttime blackout. Their later appearance nevertheless recasts the visit: the darkness Bret encountered was not the only sign that his movements and private spaces had been observed.

Palm Springs thus holds several incompatible versions of privacy. In Bret’s earlier memory, the house is a setting for friendship and an apparently open future; during the later visit, it becomes a place from which he spies on Susan and Robert; in the photographs, it is itself an object of covert observation. The contrast between the desert’s remembered calm and the later images of hidden surveillance gives the location significance beyond the romantic revelation. Bret learns who Susan is seeing, but he leaves without knowing who has been watching him—or how far that observation extends.