“Follow the road,” I say.
He nears the car, a faceless man who has become the size of two men. I count to myself as he steps forward, as Emily’s uneven and lurching footsteps fade into the sound of the rain, and then, as he comes even with the driver’s side door, I lift the handle, release the hinges and slam the door into him with the full strength of my body.
Three
Los Angeles, California
2008
The Los Angeles night is so clear, you can almost see the stars, but the switchback roads that lead high into the hills afford scant visibility. It is not until we see the cars crowding the circular driveway that I recall Lew is throwing a party. It’s not a minor party, not an inexpensive one, but like everything in porn, there is something cheap and shitty bordering the decadent center. The house, dried leaves collected in the corners of the unused rooms, smog dust grayly embedded in the white shag carpeting, isn’t actually Lew’s, because his place is undergoing construction from the fire damage. The actual owner is doing time for something which may or may not be relevant to Lew’s urgent call this evening.
The muscle at the door is packing, but plays like he’s just there to take coats. Paul offers up his messenger bag but I hang onto my oversized purse which is scuffed and unfashionable. Lew’s in the study, the door guy tells me, so Paul and I separate at the entrance to the patio, him heading for his gym guys and me for the stairs. The music from the poolside is a Latin mix, favoring Brazilian. Through the window, I can see the usual early dance floor of actresses and hair stylists. Paul, in the designer t-shirt he’d swiped from the gym, blends.
Lew looks up from his phone as I enter. “Mellie,” he says. He stands from behind the too-small desk, his belly straining against the buttons of his tropical shirt. He gestures toward the window, the goings-on below. “I know you hate this shit as much as I do, Mellie. Thank you for coming.”
“You plan to hide out here all evening?”
“I wish,” he says. “Trudi would have my head.” Tonight’s event, whether the people below know it or not, inaugurates a new venture, one which has been in the works for just over nine months, and which will never appear in the books.
“So there’s a new tape?” I say, sitting. “You think it’s the thing?”
“It’s going to be just like with that Baywatch girl’s video.” He picks up his phone, which is one of those new ones where you can watch a video if you’re patient for it to download. He shows me the image on the screen, a still of a woman, head and feet cropped out of the frame. “Like that, only bigger, because this pop star is bigger. Ninety-nine percent of internet searches in the next thirty days will be for this sex tape. Meanwhile, the pop star is getting injunctions, is lawyering all the ISPs and search engines, and so the tape’s coming down almost as fast as it’s shared. Trust me, we are not the only ones paying attention. Bangkok is already making a version with Thai hookers. We’re in a race, Mellie. It’s a race, not to remind you of unpleasantness, we lost last time we had the chance.”
He does not need to remind me. After the house fire, he’d sat me down in the screening room to do forensics. On screen, the actress’s vagina was the size of an elephant. At that scale, and hairless as a newborn rat, the human pussy looks totally sci fi, a probe’s photo of a Martian sea. Lew ate greasy popcorn and sucked on a lime rickey, commenting on the lighting and the angle. The question we were discussing was whether it was leaked on purpose.
“How you know the whole thing is premeditated: the high angles, the washed lighting. In normal hotel fluorescents, a woman like that would look like Baba Yaga.”
“It’s produced,” I said, “of course. You’re right. But imagine the vanity entailed here; these people aren’t going to make private tapes that look like shit either.”
“My theory: the is-it-or-isn’t-it question isn’t one you want to resolve. The uncertainty, for the audience, is key.” Lew fast-forwarded through a few scenes. “They stay tuned in exactly just because they’re trying to figure it out.”
“That’s trickier to manipulate than simple arousal, though.”
“Simple arousal?” says Lew. “Are you aware that it’s almost impossible to make money on prostitution anymore? It’s too easy to get laid without paying a hooker. The johns now, they’re all repressed foreigners, or guys with some kind of real kink or deficit. We traffic in sex in a world where sex is too cheap to sell.”
Tonight, in his criminal-buddy’s study, Lew taps the screen of his phone. The loading icon appears. “The tech assistants, even now, they’re mapping all the broken links. In seventy-two hours, we get the film in the can, and when Iggy from Indiana searches for the pop star sex tape, he gets ours. And the genius thing is, the providers and the Googles, they permit all this activity because they want the traffic through their browsers; they want what we provide which is the content without the lawsuit.”
“You think we can pull it off? Make a clone, or whatever, which is convincing enough?”
“Convincing is not the point, Mellie. I’ve said it before. You screen the original. Map us the tension points. Think in terms of uncertainty, of putting the audience on edge.”
“Tonight?”
“It’s all on the chip. If I had my way, we’d have started shooting before she leaked the damn thing. If it was her who leaked it. If it was even leaked. Point being, tomorrow, you are in the editing booth as we film.”
On Lew’s screen, the video is still loading. “Fucking guy. Who fucking owned this place? Wrote the program you are holding. You’d think, technical wizard, all that shit, he’d have a faster connection.” He puts down the phone on the desk. “I’ll have my guy burn a copy to disc.”
“Good,” I say.
“Good?” he says. “I don’t have to remind you how important this project is.”
Lew says, the internet has accelerated porn-making into some other physics. Everything is over the instant it is made. This is why embed approach has become crucial. Even porn as a delivery mechanism may be in decline. It’s in the code now, he says, the tease, the delay, the final payoff.
“So,” he says.
“So?”
“So, you’re finally leaving me?” He says it in a friendly way, but with Lew, tone is never to be trusted. In Laos, he ran interrogations, and he still wears cyanide around his neck, still gives the impression he might use it. Tonight, however, nothing he says feels as urgent as the whispering of perfect and soon.
“I can still work for you from Boston. These days, telecommuting. Everything’s electronic—”
“Mellie,” he says. “Mellie. Do I have to spell it out for you? This thing is not such a thing as you carry on your merry way afterwards. We have a deal, you and I. I believe your recompense is more than adequate, but you have to be clear that this is not the usual project. Parties involved, and parties uninvolved, will be genocidally displeased. But before the shit hits the fan, there’s a window. When it does, I will not be sitting at my known address and waiting for that outcome, understood?”
“Right,” I say.
“What I am doing for you, you will be protected. So, you understand. You’re ready with the payment?”
I lift my giant bag, remove my wallet and keys, and slide it across the desk.
Lew takes a look inside and thumbs quickly through the stacks. “Now, be sure. You sure about this? This represents a lot of trust.”
I nod.
He stands and opens the safe behind him. There are a few manila envelopes within, and the butt of a gun, which I recognize as Trudi’s. “Good. The guy at the bank, in Brookline. So, according to him, this transaction doesn’t exist. On the other hand, I am making you an identical-sized gift into your new account.” He writes out a receipt which I tuck next to seven similar receipts, then he places my purse in the safe on top of the gun and locks it. When he turns around again, he is holding a small, red chip reader. “I trust you, too,” he says, and hands me the object. “This is the program. All
the magic, it’s right in there. I’m counting on you to get it right. Now, let’s go, whatever. Mingle.”
For fifteen years, I took pride in my work—which I get is a weird thing to say about porn. In the video rental era, most of what we made were mainstream film knockoffs, Night of the Headhunter, that kind of thing. I had a skill in managing what you might call tone. You’d reference the original, which made it funny, fun, but it couldn’t be a kind of humor that took you out of the libidinous high, funny but not farce. Lew worked with other people, at first. At first, I was contract. But I was the best, which mattered to me, and then he refused to work with anyone else. The fine points of my craftsmanship, you might imagine, do not entirely apply to the amphetamine-fast era of modern porn, click-throughs, peer-to-peer, and camgirls, but I can see, if only in rough outline, how this new project might require my personal skills.
I talk tech, thanks to the classes Trudi pays for. We’ve done our best to evolve, but it’s already obvious the future belongs to the man who wrote the program on the red chip, not to the woman who discerns the subtle tumescent moment between the tug of the zipper and the emergence of flesh.
It belongs to the money men picking hors d’oeuvres from the tray as I make my way through the bikini-clad bodies at the party, to the conspicuous bodyguards, and the insectile assistants peering down at their phones. There is a mood in the air—and part of it comes from this new thing of phones you can watch, of people’s interacting in the light of a screen. Lew may talk to crew as if this project were a baton-passing, but I know him to be a man who would not step down lightly from anything. It rankles him, that he has been turned into a middle man, while the real money, the retire-to-an-island money, is being made somewhere above. For this project, there are aspects of my assignment which aren’t meant to be visible to the new partners. And there are things, I believe, he is withholding from me. Lew, whose affective spectrum runs from sardonic to sadistic, has been nervous. And there are other variables. On the outer perimeter of the party, a Dodge Charger, in inconspicuous black, circles the block.
The mood of the woman on the phone had said, soon, and this seems to be the tenor of the entire evening, the money men, and Lew, and the new video. It is my mood, too. Paul is poolside, talking to Valerie Weston’s latest boyfriend, who, like all her men, is under twenty-five and has limited English. As I said, my boyfriend can look as if he belongs in a scene like this one, but as I pass, he touches my arm and gives me a private nod. The East Coast nod, you might call it. The acknowledgment we’ve landed on an alien planet and that at any moment, we’re going to be unmasked. I do not cling, on a night like tonight. I do not act the jealous girlfriend. I know how to play cool but that doesn’t mean I’m not watching for signs. I have my own soon.
For the time being, there are rounds to be made, mingling to be done. From the other side of the pool, I am being waved over by the only other brunettes at the party.
Westie and Trudi have ensconced themselves in a little grotto, out of the way of the hard bodies and blondes. The artist is already good and sauced, while Lew’s wife gets funky on the red dye in maraschino cherries. Lew has emerged from his study as well, to join Paul and Westie’s boyfriend by the diving board. He places an arm on each man’s shoulder and shows them the thing on the phone.
Paul nods his head at the video, laughs. His voice carries over the water. “It’s fucking uncanny.”
Westie’s boyfriend, incidentally, is not smiling.
“Lew should give me a producer credit,” Valerie says.
Trudi nods at the grouping, then turns in her lounge chair toward me. “It was Val who found it for us. The pop star piece.”
“Is it any good?” I ask.
Trudi shrugs. “Not my taste.”
“It’s supposed to be awful,” Westie says. “The woman gives head for thirty-seven minutes—single shot, one camera, real time. My tonsils ache just thinking about it.”
Trudi shrugs. “People will watch it because it’s awful. Like a car wreck.”
“I don’t know,” says Valerie. “That’s not why I watched it.”
Now, a couple of the insectile boys appear beside Lew and Paul, and then everyone’s got screens in their hands, is shaking their heads—‘amazing.’ Valerie Weston’s boyfriend is crowded out of the circle. He marches past us sulkily, sheds his robe and jackknifes into the pool.
“You know why Giovanni’s angry?” asks Westie. “It’s lunatic. He thinks she looks like me, the woman in the dirty video, and now he’s convinced I’m sleeping with someone else.”
“It isn’t actually you, right? Lew said it was some pop star.”
“That’s what so nutty,” says Westie. She draws hard on her cigarette, exhales. “The woman is famous. He knows it’s not me, but seeing her film made him imagine it could be me, so he’s having a jealous fit. Gio—” she stands, and waves to her latest lover.
“It’s that one from the 1980s,” says Trudi.
“The super-famous one, or the one that wore those crazy dresses?”
“For legal reasons, Lew is calling her pop star for the duration.”
I look at Westie. “I guess I can see it.”
“If you still imagine her the way she was in her heyday, a blonde, trashy, showing her lingerie, it’s a stretch. But she wears her hair like mine now, and she’s had a lot of work, and somehow she ended up with my face.”
Giovanni emerges from the pool in his tiny Speedo. He steps into a towel which magically appears on the arm of a nearly equally handsome pool boy. A funny thing about Los Angeles is how much of real life seems to have been scripted by a pornographer. Westie stretches a lean freckled leg through the slit of her white skirt. “Let’s make up,” she says. “Come here.”
“Even if it wasn’t you,” says Giovanni. “I hear you on the telephone. You have conversations with other men. You want to fuck them.”
“You’re the one I’m taking to Cartagena,” Valerie soothes.
Giovanni crawls across the deck and places his head against Westie’s legs, gazing up like a pet at her. “They have nice beaches,” he says from her lap. “It is not dangerous like in Romancing the Stone.”
“Go find your guitar, honey,” says Westie, “and get the party planner to shut off the sound system. I want to hear you play.”
Gio beams at her, thrilled.
“He’s actually really good,” she says. “Hilariously, he plays only Hawaiian music. He found out I used to like it when I was in my twenties. Plus, Barack Obama. Giovanni thinks all things Hawaiian are radical now. Oh, my God, it fucks me up to hear him sing Aloha Oe.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to miss it,” says Trudi. “We all have an early start.”
They lean in and plant dry kisses on one another’s cheeks, and then Giovanni is calling some question to Valerie and she pads off after him.
Trudi snaps shut her two thousand-dollar purse and looks down at me. “Lew is going to miss you. But things are changing. I think this is right, your going.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“So, this piece. Are you up for it?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I say.
Trudi holds my gaze for just a moment. There’s some unspoken message she’s trying to communicate, but I am not receiving. More and more I have this impression lately, that people are expecting me to pick up on hints, or read expressions and I just can’t see what they expect me to see.
“Don’t worry,” I say.
She nods, leans in for goodbyes, and then she’s making her way across the party just as Valerie returns. “Amplifier,” says the artist. “Somebody’s looking for the amplifier.”
Valerie lights a cigarette and I take out my lip gloss container full of cloud. Trudi still lingers on the outer edge of the party.
“Have you ever made one?” Valerie asks. And when I don’t register her meaning, she adds, “a sex tape.”
“Me?” I laugh and shake my head. “There’s every fetish in the world,
you know. People who fantasize about being eaten, about having a carrot stuffed in their asses and being trussed up like turkeys. But no one wants to watch me get it on, including me.”
Valerie shrugs. “I don’t have the mindset to evaluate that,” she says. “For me, whether it arouses or not is boring, is a boring question. I’m interested in the dynamics. How does what happens off the set transform what happens on? I’d like to cast divorcing people; the victim of a crime and the criminal. I’d like to lock everyone in a basement for a week with only crackers and water, and then start shooting.”
Everything Westie does is like a Milgram experiment, is an unethical test to see how terrible other humans can be made to behave. For example, she had this recent project in which she produced really top-notch quality forgeries with like tiny images sketched into the corner, and then exposed the idiots who bought them from her. Her art is this way, obviously, but so are just like her interactions with others, the shit she pulls on her men, her way of being friends with me. Her life is a longitudinal study in which she does harm and records the impact.
Now, Valerie watches me staring at my boyfriend who has just been drawn into conversation with one of Lew’s new actresses.
Valerie says: “You almost want him to step out on you, you think about it so much. It’s like you’re willing it to happen.”
I know she’s picturing it, me naked in some film of hers, being humiliated in some way.
She smiles, extracts herself from the lounge chair. “Some morning, you’re going to wake up and wonder what you ever saw in him.”
“You’re kind of a bad person, Valerie. You’re just actually not good.”
“I’m not, like the rest of the world, on some long desperate quest to be loved.”
“I know,” I say. “If you weren’t sleeping with an underpants model, I’d find you sad.”
“Not sad,” she says. “I’m never sad.” Then, she stands and pads after her boyfriend. She’s curious, a curious person I guess. When I met her in New York, I know, it wasn’t the first time, but whatever the initial meeting had been, the memory has been a casualty of my adult habits. Maybe there’d be some insight if I could recall it, but with Valerie it’s probably best not to look too deeply.
The Likely World Page 36