by Diane Duane
The young man didn’t run. Instead his eyes rolled back in his head and he slithered down the wall in a dead faint. A pseudopod reached out and delicately pulled one of the fluttering eyelids back. “Well, we suppose you’ve had a busy night,” he said. “Rest awhile.”
Darkness shimmered around Venom, and a moment later he was dressed once more in his dark suit, with the briefcase in his hand. “No rest for the wicked,” he said. “At least, not while we’re around.”
Then he walked off into the night.
FOUR
MARY Jane Watson-Parker walked down the street in a foul mood. She had been walking for about an hour, trying to ditch the mood, so far to no success.
She glanced at her watch. It was pushing eleven-thirty, and she had walked all the way down to Seventieth Street and all the way across to First Avenue. Now she paused at the corner of First and Seventieth, looking down toward the newly constructed towers of Cornell and New York Hospital Medical Center. Over on York Avenue, a couple of blocks down, was Baja, the restaurant that was a haven for models and the occasional confused nurse who stumbled in.
She had been putting off actually going into Baja, partly because it was still fairly early, and also because she knew that the sight of other people in there with work would annoy her. All the same, she thought, it’ll be a poor state of affairs when you can’t face down your own kind—even when they’re working and you’re not. The tables turn fast enough in this town.
She walked on up to York, turned the corner, and headed back up to Seventy-third. Baja stood on the corner there, yet another pseudo-Southwestern-chic restaurant with cloth cactuses in brass pots, too much white stucco, and too much bleached oak, but fairly passable Tex-Mex food, and a bar the size of the launch deck of an aircraft carrier. There the models perched on the stools, leaned their sometimes fairly ample cleavages on the bar, and complained to each other, male and female together. MJ smiled slightly. She was in the right mood for the complaining.
The outside sidewalk terrace was empty as yet—too much sun. It would start filling when the shadows swung around to cover it. MJ stepped in through the front door into the relative dark and looked around.
Sitting back there at the long polished bar were two models she knew, one male, one female. The man was Ted Huron, one of the tall-dark-and-handsome school, with cheekbones that could have been used to chop trees down, and stunning green eyes. The other was a female model called Hendra, with trademark six-inch-long nails, and hair that was never the same color twice. It was blue today, fading to white at the punked-out tips.
“Hi, Hen, hi, Tom,” she said, strolling up and sitting down by Tom. They muttered at her cordially enough. Their nonvolubility was no surprise: it was early yet, and when they weren’t working, they were club people. MJ was surprised even to be seeing them up and about before noon.
Bob the bartender came up. “Hi, MJ. Whatcha having?”
“Double kiwi,” she said, “heavy on the lemon.”
He went off to get her the juice. She glanced at the others. “How’re you two doing?”
It was a noncommittal enough question. If they were here this time of day, it might mean they weren’t working; but then again, she was here this time of day.
“Resting,” Tom said glumly.
Hendra rolled her eyes. “I just finished a gig,” she said. “A week in Bavaria.”
“Oh? How was it?”
“Rained constantly.” Hendra pushed her orange-juice glass back toward Bob as he approached with MJ’s kiwi juice in a tall glass with a transparent umbrella sticking out of it. “You off today?”
“I just blew a job off,” MJ said.
“Oh? What?”
She held out her injured hand. Tom gazed at it for a moment, not comprehending immediately. “You need a thorn pulled out of your paw or something?”
“No, dummy. I was doing hand work.”
“You won’t be doing any for a couple of weeks,” Hendra said regretfully. “You want to put some vitamin E on that, make sure it heals right.”
“Sure, why not?”
They gabbed for a little while, talking sports (the present hopelessness of the Mets), art (Christo’s intention to wrap the Statue of Liberty), the utter uselessness of TV in the summer (“They’re showing reruns of Gilligan’s Island again,” Tom muttered), politics (the recent coup d’état in Atlantis and Reed Richards’s dramatic, and failed, plea to the UN for assistance). All these things were generally agreed by the three of them as signs of the imminent downfall of civilization as they knew it. After that, the subject turned rapidly to the bashing of producers, directors, and shoot administrators that they had known. No more than ten or fifteen minutes into the character assassination, the door swung open, and they all looked over to see if it was someone they had been assassinating.
Lalande Joel came in. Six feet three, weighing possibly a hundred and sixty pounds, Lalande had long, raven-black hair that had caused her to be cast in a couple of commercials as a Morticia Addams clone, and beautiful cerulean-blue eyes, blue as a Siamese cat’s. Lalande had a reputation as a friendly if slightly loopy sort, and they all greeted her cordially enough as she swung up to sit by MJ.
“And how are you this fine day?” Tom said.
“Very retrograde,” Lalande said wearily. “Hi, Bob. Gimme a Coke?”
“Retrograde?” MJ said.
“Well, not me. Neptune.”
“Oh.” MJ thought for a moment. “Neptune’s a long way out. Isn’t it going to be retrograde for a long time?”
“Yes,” Lalande said sadly. “Forty-five years, I think.”
“By the time that changes, you’ll be doing senior citizens’ insurance ads,” said Hendra. “If I were you. I’d stop worrying about it.”
“Oh, I’m not worrying, it’s just—I’m conscious of it, that’s all.” Her Coke came and she took a sip. “And I just blew off a job.”
“Oh? What?”
She presented her perfect face to them, and pointed at it with an expression of profound annoyance and regret. “Look at that,” she said.
They all looked. “I can’t see anything,” MJ said.
“That’s because I’ve covered it up so that I can walk the streets without someone walking in front of me ringing a little bell and saying ‘Unclean, unclean,’” Lalande said. “It’s a zit.”
“It’s a very flat zit,” said Tom.
“It’s not flat enough to be covered up by the amount of makeup they’ll let you use in a lipstick ad,” said Lalande. “And see that?” She pointed at the corner of her mouth. “There’s a cold sore coming up right there. It’ll be the size of my head.”
MJ raised her eyebrows. It was nowhere near the size of Lalande’s beautiful head yet, but she understood the problem. “Yeah,” she said, “welcome to the ‘I am scarred’ club.” She held up the offending finger for examination.
Lalande looked at it, then looked at her face. “But you’re fine.”
“Not for hand work, I’m not.”
But Lalande was still examining her face. “Have you ever done lipstick?” she said.
“Well, I did something for Max Factor a while ago. Why?”
“Look,” Lalande said, “your face is in good shape. And our lips are kind of the same shape. And you still have a SAG card. Why don’t you beat it over to the job I just blew off? Maybe they’ll hire you.”
MJ stared at her. “Lalande,” she said, “that’s very kind, but what makes you think they’d take me?”
“It’s like I said. They’re desperate, they’re on a timetable, and they have to get this thing finished by, what did they say, Wednesday, Thursday? Anyway, they’ve got to get it moving. And they’re all just standing around there right now, howling that they can’t find another model. But our mouths are really kind of close—you ought to try.”
“My teeth aren’t as good as yours, though,” MJ said.
“I don’t think it’s going to matter. They were doing mostly closed
-mouthed stuff with me, except for one smile—but—I don’t know. MJ, go try!”
“Lalande, that’s really nice of you.”
“I might as well be nice,” Lalande said, rolling her eyes expansively, “since I’m going to have to go into a leper colony pretty soon, at this rate. I look like the poster child for Dr. Jenner’s Smallpox Cure.”
“Lalaaaaaaande,” said MJ and Hendra and Tom, more or less in exasperated unison. And MJ added, “It’s not quite that bad, yet. Where is this job, anyway?”
“Here.” She pulled out a business card, handed it to MJ. She turned it over; the address was just up Third Avenue, near Seventy-eighth.
“Go, just go,” Lalande said. “They were ready to start about an hour ago, when I had to walk in and show myself to them like this.”
MJ finished her juice and stood up. “Well, I’ll give it a try.”
“One thing,” Lalande said as MJ slung her purse over her shoulder. “The director.”
MJ raised her eyebrows again. “What about him? Her? It?”
“It,” Lalande said. “No question. Scuttlebutt has it that this guy has dumped a bunch of models over the past few weeks. Having worked with him for a whole day, I suspect it may be the other way around. He may hire you, but make sure you get his name and yours on the dotted line, and the pay amounts inked in and dry before you actually do any work. He is”—she glanced up and around as if looking desperately for a cue card—“indescribable.”
“Okay,” MJ said. “Lalande—do I really want this job?”
“I don’t know,” Lalande said. “ I really wanted it, until I turned into Pockmarked Grandmother Ma. But the pay’s not bad. They were going to give me fifteen hundred.”
“What did they wind up giving you?”
“Seven. But then they shot with me yesterday, and they couldn’t use me today.”
“Small world,” MJ said. “Okay.”
“Let me know how it comes out,” Lalande said, taking another drink of her Coke. “And I hope you bite the bastard for me.”
MJ heard that, though she wondered whether she’d been meant to. Yet another interesting director. Well, we’ll see.…
She headed out and looked around for a cab so as not to get sweaty on the way over. She had had her share of “indescribable” directors in her time, including the unforgettable Maurice, on this last shoot in Miami: a master of the crazed waffle, a man who didn’t know what he wanted whether he saw it or not. If he did see it, he usually danced around it for an hour or so before getting down to it. Now, as MJ climbed into her cab, she wondered whether she was about to be saddled with something similar. At least, she thought, I probably won’t find this guy standing on the beach, signaling to drug runners with a flashlight.
When she got to the address on Third Avenue, she was surprised to see that it was a side building of Auve, one of the new European cosmetic houses that had established itself in New York over the past year, and was busy making inroads into Elizabeth Arden’s and Helena Rubenstein’s business. It was all plate glass on the outside, and trees and green marble on the inside. She walked in the front door, paused at the front desk, and mentioned—she consulted the card—Delano Rodriguez’s shoot.
“Oh yes,” said the young blond receptionist, with a look that suggested that MJ had asked to do a commercial shoot with Jeffrey Dahmer. “Second floor, photo studio B.”
MJ nodded and headed for the elevator. She spent the next few seconds admiring the spotless white carpet on its floor, and the shining stainless-steel walls. How do they keep this clean? she wondered as the bell dinged and the doors opened for her to step out. If we had any carpet like this in my house, Peter would drop a pizza on it, facedown, within the first week.
She headed for the studio to which she’d been directed. Down yet another white-carpeted hall with brushed-aluminum walls and a softly glowing ceiling. A pair of brushed-aluminum doors finally said studio b. She pushed one of them open and went in.
The soundproofing was very good here. She actually had to get the door right open before she heard the voice screaming, “How the hell am I supposed to make this commercial without a warm body to put the lipstick on?”
The place was chaos, the usual large number of bright lights trained on a very small space, the usual small and very uncomfortable stool on which the working cosmetic model got to perch while thousand-watt lights were positioned three inches from her perfect skin. Three of the tremendous wide-aperture movie cameras used for this kind of work sat idle around the chair. People rushed around in all directions. And storming back and forth across the room, like a beast in a cage, was the director.
ADs, assistants, script people, sound people, who knew what else, ran all over, and Delano the director was banging around in the midst of them, aimless and screaming. A few quiet people stood around on the sidelines looking like they weren’t going insane, but also looking like they didn’t work for this director. The room, taken as a whole, looked like a commercial for Brownian motion.
MJ had seen shoots like this before, and they had long since ceased to faze her. She strolled slowly into the maelstrom, and eventually the director’s eye lit on her as he careened back and forth. He more or less screamed, “Who let you in here?”
“Lalande Joel suggested that I come over,” she said coolly and held out the business card she had been given. “I understand you need some lips.”
There might have been a better way to put this, since the director was the thinnest-lipped, thinnest-faced, palest, narrowest little man she had ever seen; he looked like a two-dimensional life-form trying out the third dimension, and not sure whether he shouldn’t just take it back to the shop. But he seemed not to notice the verbal misstep, came over to MJ, and stared at her mouth as if it were the first one he’d ever seen.
He’ll ask to see my teeth next, MJ thought. “Open, please,” Delano Rodriguez said, and MJ did.
“Hmm,” he said. “Not bad. It’s not a speaking part. Five hundred.”
“Fifteen,” MJ said, wondering what kind of brain this man had. Didn’t he realize Lalande would have told her how much she had been getting?
“Not for half a day.”
“Yes,” MJ said, amazed at her own temerity, “for half a day.” He’s got all these people waiting around here, and the dollars are just burning away….
“All right, get over there.”
“Not until we get a contract signed.”
The director shrieked some more at that, but she stood her ground, and after a few minutes a shoot manager materialized and handed her a template contract. There were no unexpected waiver clauses; MJ made sure the amounts were filled in correctly, and signed it after the director did. It called for “one business day,” which in the business meant nine to five, or a fraction thereof.
The next eight hours were—well, indescribable. Lalande had been right about that. One thing it took MJ a little time to get used to again: the makeup going on and coming off, going on and coming off, time after time, a hundred times. Then a layer of moisturizer and a break so that the lips could recover a little—and then the whole process started again.
All through this, Delano the director went plunging around, endlessly yelling. MJ hadn’t thought that anyone could yell so interminably. He yelled at the lighting technicians, the camera operators, at the ADs and the script girls, and the DGA trainee, and most of all, he yelled at MJ and the makeup artists. The lipliner was too broad, too thin, the lighting wasn’t right, the lipstick shade needed to be corrected, the skin tone was bad. And this accusation he lodged against MJ as if there were something she could do about it. Her pores were too big, she couldn’t hold still, she didn’t look moist enough, her tongue was too red….
For a very long while, MJ asked herself the question that Lalande had asked her: Do I want this job? Then she thought about a bill for $4,689.72 and decided that yes, she did want it. So she sat still, and opened and closed her mouth a hundred times on order, while the lipstick w
as put on and taken off—and the place began to smell entirely too much like skin and toning lotion and moisturizer and lipstick melting under the heat of the lights. And the powder made her sneeze.
The hours dragged by, accompanied by the sound of screaming. MJ began to wonder whether her ears might actually be damaged by this constant noise. Certainly other people didn’t spend any time nearer it than they could: the parts of the crew not actively shooting seemed to spend most of their time out of the room, leaving MJ and the poor long-suffering script girl to take most of the abuse. Honestly, now, she said to herself around four-thirty, this is bad—but it’s not as bad as coming home to your apartment and finding Venom waiting for you. Now, that was bad.
The screaming continued while she was filmed with an “unseen hand” applying lipstick to her somewhat down-pouted lower lip. MJ held quite still through that, momentarily transfixed by the vision of Venom meeting the director, or the other way around. You want to scream? she imagined herself saying. Here. Here’s something to scream about.…
“Are you listening to me?” Delano screeched, practically by her ear. “Don’t you pay attention? If you don’t at least get conscious, I’m going to throw you the hell out of here!”
MJ opened one thoughtful eye and looked at Delano out of the corner of it. Some of the makeup crew near her saw the motion. One of them froze where he stood, watching. You make it sound good, she thought. But for the moment she said nothing, and her eye slid to the big clock across the room.
It was two minutes of five.
Delano ranted in her face. She shut the sound out, catching only occasional excerpts.
A minute forty, she thought.
“Useless, redheaded bimbo—”
A minute and twenty.
“—brains of a duck—”
Forty-five seconds.
“—dragged in off the street like a—”
Thirty.
“—waste of my valuable time—”
Eleven. Ten. Nine.
“—don’t know why I don’t just go down to Bloomingdale’s and hire a dummy—”