Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  Jahne thought about it for a moment. The air was electric between them, but they were talking like a bad movie script. “A little of both, probably,” she said. “What about you? Do you still tremble? Or are you wise?”

  He put his hand on her arm. It was warm, so warm, and she could feel him tremble. God, Michael McLain was trembling for her! For her. Surely he couldn’t fake that. She didn’t move away. “The trappings of stardom don’t make me tremble anymore. No, what turns me on is talent. Raw, driven talent. Like yours.”

  “You know,” Jahne said, looking into Michael’s eyes, “I want to believe that Michael McLain thinks I’m talented. That here I am, of all the girls in town, and Michael McLain is telling me I’m talented. And that it turns him on.” Jahne shrugged and took a step away, breaking the current between them. “It’s nice to hear and all that, but, come on, I’m not the first starry-eyed new-girl-in-town you’ve said this to. And you’ve never even seen my work. So how would you know?”

  “I never lie about talent,” Michael said. “Why would I? To get a woman to sleep with me? I don’t need to lie for that.”

  Jahne thought of Sam and his line about getting her a part in his movie. She shivered.

  Michael kept looking into Jahne’s eyes. “You’re one of three truly talented women that I have met in twelve years. I won’t name the other two—chivalry forbids it—but, trust me, Jahne, you have talent. I saw you at the Melrose Playhouse.” He leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “A unique talent. And a very old soul.”

  “Michael,” Jahne chided, moving her head away. “Next you’ll be telling me we knew each other in a previous life.” But she was touched that he’d actually seen her perform.

  Michael laughed, his charming, deep, baritone laugh. “I guess I mean you’re very mature. Special.” There was a silence between them for a moment; then Michael leaned across and kissed her. Jahne didn’t respond, except to run her tongue gently along her lips afterward at the sensation that lingered when he moved away. This was fun. Maybe dangerous, but fun! It had been so long since she could talk, really talk, to a man. Since Sam, she realized. Too long.

  Jahne knew then that she had already made the decision to sleep with Michael. He seemed considerate, and gentle, and interesting. And he kissed nice. But what about the scars? Would he be repulsed? Just how sophisticated was he?

  Jahne lifted her hand and placed it behind Michael’s head, drawing him closer. This time, she kissed him, first gently, then more insistently. He responded, holding her hard against his chest. Slowly, his hand moved down her back, dipping into her dress.

  She pushed him away, very gently. “Michael, wait. I’ve been in an accident. I have some…well, some scars.”

  He laughed. “Who doesn’t have scars in this town?” he asked, and drew her back toward the sofa. “You’re very beautiful. No scar can mar that beauty,” he whispered as he began to undress her.

  The dress, Mai’s beautiful creation, fell to the floor in an inky black cloud. Jahne took a deep breath and then, in the gentle but frightening light of the living room, she began to peel off the bodysuit. She was ungraceful, she knew, but Michael was fumbling with his own clothes. Only then did he turn to her. What would he say?

  He said nothing. He simply reached across the gulf between them and ran his fingers lightly over the scar at her groin, then to the two that ran up the center of her breasts. His touch was as light as a breeze. She wondered if he could yet see the scars under her arms, or what he would say about the ones under her buttocks and along her inner thighs. No one could mistake them for accident scars: they were too symmetrical, too perfect. She trembled, waiting for his reaction.

  But he merely took her hand and drew her to the sofa. He paused and took out a condom, slipped it on, then pulled her onto the couch, covering her with his own warm body.

  As she lay naked beneath him, she began to shiver. “Please, this is the first time anyone has seen me since…” she whispered, and paused. How could she ever explain? She took a breath and it sounded like a sob. “I’m afraid about how I look.”

  Michael raised himself on his elbows and looked down, scanning her breasts again with his eyes, tracing the thin scars, from nipple to chest wall, with the tip of one finger. He finally looked in her eyes, after examining her. “Beautiful,” he said. “You look beautiful.”

  2

  A television premiere is nothing like a movie premiere, Jahne thought as she slipped into her old terry robe and padded barefoot to the TV. For her network premiere tonight, there was no dressing up, no theater with spotlights searching the sky, no arrival of stars, directors, producers, agents. There was no live coverage by reporters. Just as well, Jahne thought. As it was she was nervous enough. Because this, tonight, would determine her future just as surely as Dr. Moore’s scalpels had.

  Tonight, for the first time, all of America was going to get a chance to tune in to Three for the Road, and all the time and money, all the effort, imagination, sweat, technical tricks, the hours of waiting, the moments of acting, all the makeup, the lighting, the musical scoring, all the stitches made by Mai, all the stunts—all the work was going to be applauded or rejected by the public.

  Some of the crew, she knew, were getting together to watch. But she had not been invited. Was it because she had broken up with Pete? Was there resentment that she had dumped one of their own? Or was it simply that the Hollywood caste system was taking hold? Had anyone already heard she was dating Michael McLain? Did they think she was acting like a starlet? Did they feel that she thought of them as nothing more than techs? She felt—she hoped—that she had never been a snob, that she liked and respected the crew. But did they like and respect her? She couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that, the closer the show came to its debut, the more distant the crew had become.

  Except for Mai Von Trilling. Thank God for Mai. Jahne felt Mai was her only friend in Hollywood. Well, in the whole world right now, except perhaps for Dr. Moore and little Raoul. The old woman had a way about her that charmed Jahne. Tonight, Mai had suggested that she join Jahne to watch the show, and Jahne had gratefully accepted. Somehow, watching her television premiere all alone with ten or even twenty million people had seemed unbearably lonely.

  There was a knock at the door, and Jahne jumped up to get it. Mai stood on the doorstep, a brown paper bag in her arms. She looked Jahne over, taking in the old robe and still-wet hair. “I didn’t know ve vere goink formal,” she said dryly, and walked past Jahne into the living room. As always, she wore the white sweatshirt and soft black cotton pants that seemed, with her immaculate white Keds, to be her trademark.

  She set the bag down on a low table and pulled out a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. “Napoleon and Josephine liked this. Of course, I am only speakink from hearsay. Even I am not that old.” She looked about the room. “I don’t suppose you have champagne flutes?” she asked. Jahne shook her head. “Just as vell I brought these, then.” Mai smiled and pulled out a pair of impossibly graceful blown-glass flutes. “But an ice bucket? This even you must have.”

  “Even me?” Jahne asked, smiling as she went to get the Lucite ice bucket and filled it with cubes. “Am I such a barbarian?”

  “Everyvun under forty is a barbarian. I vas, too.” Mai pulled a second bottle of the champagne out of the bag. “Do you think I grew up drinking vintage French vines? I, the daughter of a tailor? It vas my beauty that let me into the club, und then it took a decade or two to learn vat vas vat. Vell, at least I learned. Gloria Svanson vas alvays a barbarian.”

  Jahne had to giggle at the disapproval. But “Two bottles, Mai?” she asked. “Very extravagant!” How much did vintage Veuve Cliquot cost? she wondered. Could Mai afford it? She knew she could not offer to pay for one: Mai was proud.

  “Vell, how often do you make your national debut? Next time, ve’ll be more conservative.” Mai sat down stiffly while Jahne put one bottle into the refrigerator and the other into the ice bucket. Carefully, she peeled off the lead
seal, exposing the cork.

  “Shall I open it now?” she asked. Mai looked at her watch and nodded. “Ve haff six minutes before the show starts. Shall ve drink a toast?”

  Shyly, Jahne nodded. She twisted the wire basket off the cork slowly. The cork released with a low pop, the bottle smoking from the top. Mai held the two glasses while Jahne filled them quickly, before a drop was spilled.

  “Neatly done,” Mai complimented her. “But I alvays think it is sad ven vimmen must open their own champagne. Don’t you?”

  Jahne nodded, and couldn’t help thinking of Michael. It would have been nice if he could have come over, but since Wednesday he hadn’t called. She felt both excited by and ashamed of her night with him. Had she just been another conquest? Or did he mean it when he said he’d call? He had seemed so warm, so sincere. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him, but she knew she wanted him to like her.

  She turned to Mai, who seemed settled and ready, watching a commercial for the new Buick Skylark, with a minute to go. If the show worked, if it was good, Jahne might yet get to have the career she dreamed of, a worthwhile career. If not…she shook her head.

  “It starts!” Mai hissed, and the screen went dark. The music began: heavy bass back beat, and then Martha and the Vandellas beginning the first verse of “Dancing in the Street.” A red thread snaked across the screen, moving to the musk, followed by a dozen, and then a hundred more. Then a white thread joined, also pulsing to the driving beat. It, too, was followed by hundreds of other white threads. Superimposed over that came an image of a woman rider on a motorcycle. Then another joined her. Finally, there were three. Behind them, the threads now covered the screen, and it became clearer now: they made the alternating stripes of the flag, red and white, with a blue-black patch in the upper left-hand corner. Then the camera moved out, focusing first on Lila, then Jahne, and lastly Sharleen. Crimson, Cara, and Clover. Their names appeared under their faces. Now, though the flag remained in the background, it became clear that it was hair, the mingled hair of the three girls, blowing and twisting, incredibly long, dancing to the Motown music. Then the title appeared, THREE FOR THE ROAD, spelled in tiny white stars.

  The program opened with noise, with quick cuts of chaos. It was the antiwar-demonstration sequence they had shot in Bakersfield. Marty had made sure everything was perfect, and it did look almost like documentary footage to Jahne, until she herself appeared on the screen. But Marty used the cuts, and then a sort of psychedelic smear where one cut bled into another, so that it looked like no documentary Jahne had ever seen. It was sixties content with a nineties edge. Jahne watched as her character, Cara, met Crimson for the first time, on the steps of the courthouse. Then they were confronted by the cops and dragged off to jail. Their dialogue came off well, she thought. Next there was a black-and-white montage, the fingerprinting, the I.D. photos. It reminded her a little of A Hard Day’s Night, but, once again, with an updated edge. The show had its own style. It was unique.

  “It’s good,” Mai said at the first commercial break.

  “I think so,” Jahne agreed. Was it good enough to be popular? Was it too good? Would it go over the heads of the audience? She could see how Marty was making a serious statement about a better, more hopeful era, and yet simultaneously exploiting their looks, youth, and sex appeal. She and Mai watched in silence.

  Using a single camera to shoot, shooting film, not video, working mostly on location rather than in the studio, focusing on the stunts, the fabulous special effects, it all seemed right. Jahne knew that each episode cost over a million dollars. They already had the first eleven done.

  Well, she had nothing to be ashamed of. The show had quality. But it did feel kind of sad, just she and Mai sitting there in the dark. She wondered if anyone she knew would watch the show; if people in New York, or even high school classmates from Scuderstown, would tune in.

  The phone rang. She looked at Mai. “No one has my home number,” she said. It wasn’t exactly true: Michael McLain did, and so did Sy and Marty. Mai shrugged. The phone trilled again. Jahne reached for it.

  “You are great. So is the show. But you are the best thing on it.” It was Sam’s voice. Jahne felt her hand, holding the receiver, begin to shake.

  “Thank you,” she managed to say.

  “This is Sam Shields. I hope I’m the first to congratulate you, and also the first to offer you a new job.”

  Jahne looked over at Mai. Could Mai see how disturbed she was? She took a deep breath. Had he been serious, back on the terrace at April’s? Or was this just another stupid come-on?

  “Are you interested?” he asked. “It’s for a remake of Birth of a Star. I think you’d be perfect for the female lead. Would you consider it?”

  “Call my agent, Sy Ortis,” Jahne managed to tell him. “Let me take a look at the script, and then we’ll let you know.”

  “Spoken like a true star!” Sam laughed. “I’ll have a treatment over to him in the morning. Bear in mind, it’s only in first draft. I can do better. I always do better the second time out.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” she said, and dropped the receiver into the cradle.

  Lila sat in the darkness of her beach house, in the empty room on the second floor that looked out over the Pacific. The room that had once been Nadia’s bedroom. The room Nadia had died in. Nadia Negron, who had starred in the first Birth of a Star. Well, the room wasn’t totally empty. All around its edges, Lila had ranged candles—black candles—of almost every size and thickness. All of them now were lit. Since Ara’s party, Lila had a single obsession, a single desire, a single goal. This was how she’d reach it. An offering. A twofold offering. Because Lila wanted—needed—to get to play Nadia’s part, Theresa’s part, in Birth of a Star.

  On the wall, a single shelf held a sort of altar that Lila had created in the otherwise empty space. On it was a picture of Nadia, two more candles in silver candlesticks, a dish of smoking incense, and the video cassette of Theresa’s Birth of a Star. Since she had heard about the remake, she had had no other goal.

  Lila stood up and bowed to the picture of Nadia. Then she lit a candle, lifted it off the altar, and went around the room lighting one taper after another. Tonight, she had a lot to ask of Nadia. She needed her mother, the Puppet Mistress, to watch 3/4 and feel envy. She needed the premiere of 3/4 to rack up great ratings. She needed April Irons to watch it. But most of all, she needed Sam Shields to cast her in Birth of a Star.

  Lila lay flat on the floor, her face against the bare tile, her arms spread. She said aloud the only prayer she ever said: “Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes.”

  Sharleen switched off the set and turned to Dean, who sat beside her on the floor, finishing the last of the popcorn. “Well, what did you think?”

  “You’re good, Sharleen. Real good,” he said.

  “Really? You really think so?”

  “Sure.” She could see his hesitation.

  “But…”

  “Well…”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, the show sure isn’t as good as Andy Griffith.”

  Flanders Fields was the largest single piece of property in Bel Air. Inside it, in the master suite, Monica Flanders sat beside her Pekingese in her satin-brocade upholstered canopy bed. And not just any canopy bed, mind you, but the one that once belonged to Josephine, back in the days when she was a simple island girl from the West Indies. Of course she, Monica, had had it completely redone, but the provenance still mattered to her. It was the bed of a woman of no special beauty, whose charm and brains had raised her to empress. A woman not unlike herself.

  “Will there be anything else, Madame?” her maid asked. Her Irish maid, not a schvartzer as so many women her age had to put up with. No. Monica Flanders was called the Queen of Cosmetics, and she lived like a queen. All the other great ones were retired, gone, dead. Helena Rubinstein. Elizabeth Arden. Coco Chanel. Now the business was ruled by corporations; heartless, mindless entities that lived
and sold by statistics, by studies, by market share and focus-group results. Men like her son, Hyram. A good boy, perhaps, and a good father to his children, but a bit soulless, no?

  What could those men in control know about a woman’s needs? For half a century Monica had been selling women a dream: the dream of beauty and perfectibility. Perhaps a new face cream, a different color eye shadow, would do the trick: make them beautiful, make them loved, make them happy. That it never worked seemed not to matter; hope was what she sold and it simply kept most of them restlessly looking for the right product—the one that would work.

  She had started by listening to their laments in the little beauty parlor in lower Manhattan: a husband who cheated, an engagement that was broken off, an empty marriage, insecurity, unhappiness, discontent. And to each she had nodded, clicked her teeth in sympathy, let her eyes fill with a sheen of tears. She understood them. And then “Try this,” she would say. “Try this and things will change. You’ll feel younger, you’ll glow. People will notice a new you. A better you. Softer. Dewy. New. Young.”

  Since then, little had changed but the size of her market. Tonight, Monica felt that she had perfected her pitch. Tonight a million, ten million, perhaps even fifty million women would watch the new show that she had caused to happen. And each one, no matter her age, no matter her appearance, would look at the screen and envy the images she had put there. It was like an hour-long commercial. Maybe better. And she had the products ready, the advertisements that would tell these yearning, envious woman what they could do to look like those three beautiful, perfect girls on their screens.

  “Put on the television for me and bring me the remote and my glasses,” she told her maid. “I have something to watch on television.” Monica had bet millions that this show would succeed.

  And, as always, she was right.