Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  Jahne flicked on the light, blinked, and saw herself, reflected in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. She approached it more closely, scrutinizing her face, the face she had bought. She stared into her eyes, her own, unaltered eyes. But in the light of the new bathroom, it seemed to her even her eyes had changed. She couldn’t bear to look at them.

  She flicked off the light and wandered into the high-ceilinged living room of her new house. It was impressive. The white tile floor seemed to stretch endlessly into the dining room, the long hall, and through to the kitchen. Jahne drifted toward the glass doors that led out to the pool and garden. The moonlight poured down, one of the few smog-free nights in L.A. Jahne stood and looked out to the perfect terrace, the perfect topiary trees, the perfect Roman pool, the perfect everything. And, La Brecque had assured her, all perfectly safe. Little or no chance of madmen intruders, fans breaching the walls, photographers telezooming in on her.

  Too bad she didn’t like the place. It had nothing to do with her, it had nothing to do with her taste, who she was, or the way she wanted to live. It was forced on her, like her fame, like her new life. And it was grand, but no place she wanted to be. She sighed. Her feet were very cold on the tiles of the floor.

  Then Snowball, her sleek black cat, rubbed up against her leg. When they had arrived at the house after their trip, Sam had admired everything but Snowball. Back in New York, he had never really liked Midnight, either. The city cat used to pounce on his chest at night and wake him. “Why do women have cats?” he’d grumbled. As if sensing that, Snowball had kept away, but now he nuzzled Jahne’s left foot, as if that would warm her. She scooped him up gratefully and went back to the bedroom.

  Sam was awake when she entered. “Where were you?” he asked, out of the darkness.

  “I had a dream. It woke me, so I just took a look around.”

  He held his hand out to her, tried to pull her onto the bed. “I had a dream, too. It was about you,” he murmured. He tugged at her and she stumbled, almost falling over him. Snowball jumped out of her arms, tried to gain a footing, and took off across Sam’s chest. Sam shrieked with surprise and pain at the scratch.

  “Oh, no, Midnight!” Jahne cried. “I’m so sorry, Sam. I was holding the cat.”

  Sam was silent for a moment, then longer. In the darkness, she became frightened. “Are you all right?” she asked. He said nothing; then she heard him move, fumble for the light, and the room was ablaze. She blinked in the sudden glare, saw the scratches across his chest, the blood just beginning to ooze up. But it was his face that scared her.

  “Not Midnight,” he said. “That isn’t the cat’s name.”

  “What did I call him?” Jahne asked. But she knew. The dark, her voice, the cat had all conspired at last to give her away.

  Black cats named Snowball, white ones named Midnight. Contrary Mary. “Who are you?” he whispered.

  She sat, frozen, at the side of the bed.

  “Who are you?” he demanded again, and moved across to her, a hand gripping each of her shoulders. “This has all happened before, hasn’t it? A cat pouncing on me in bed. Except it wasn’t a black cat named Snowball, it was a white one named Midnight. Who are you?”

  His voice had risen now, and he stared deep, deep into her eyes. Eyes from which she’d removed her deep-blue contact lenses. “Oh, my God,” he said, and she saw the recognition come to his face. But “Who are you?” he asked again.

  She felt as if her world were coming apart, as if she were spinning out of control. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  They sat opposite one another, on either side of the kitchen table, the overhead light unbelievably harsh. The clock ticked loudly. A quarter past three in the morning. Sam was pale, his mouth compressed to a colorless line.

  “When did you decide to do this?” he asked again.

  They had been going around and around. Jahne had never been so tired. She had tried to answer all his questions. Despite her rage, she felt, somehow, guilty. Well, she should have told him. She should have let him make the decision, not forced this on them. But she was tired of all his questions. She had told him the story, all of it, and now he was asking her to repeat, to clarify. Like he was a lawyer, or something. But she owed him at least this, she told herself, and took a deep breath. “In the winter. After you left.”

  “Hey, don’t make it sound as if those things were related—our breakup and your surgery.”

  “They were, though.”

  “Jahne…Mary Jane…you made a decision to slice up your flesh, and you can’t blame it on me!”

  “Oh, can’t I? Why not? Didn’t you always let me know I wasn’t pretty enough? Didn’t you?”

  “That’s a complete lie! Goddamn it! I never said a word about your looks.”

  “I didn’t say that you said anything. But you let me know. You slept with all the pretty ones. Because I wasn’t enough. Not the way I was. And then Hollywood agreed with you, and you left me. So I decided to change things. Don’t you dare rebuke me for that.”

  “It was all in your head. We broke up because it was over, that’s all.”

  Jahne stood up. She felt herself trembling all over, and a heat in her belly and chest that she recognized for the pure rage it was. “Don’t you dare lie to me about that!” she roared, and her own voice filled the kitchen. “I’ve slept with you, and I know the truth. Mary Jane never got a word, never a goddamn word of praise. But Jahne…” She took a breath, lowered her voice and began to imitate his during lovemaking. “You’re so beautiful. Yes, Jahne, yes. God, I love your legs, your breasts. You’re so perfect. You’re…”

  “Shut up!” he shouted. Her mimicry had been eerie. He jumped up, striding to the door.

  “Where are you going? Don’t you dare leave now.”

  “Goddamn it! Don’t tell me what to do!” He tripped over the chair at the counter, and it clattered to the floor. He continued to move toward the door. Jahne knew that if he walked out now she would kill him or she would die. She picked up the heavy pottery bowl from the center of the table and hurled it at the door. It smashed against the wall, leaving a deep scar in the door frame. The shards flew around the room and skittered on the floor. She hadn’t missed his head by much. He turned back to her, blinking his eyes. Was that fear she saw there?

  “Don’t turn your back on me,” she warned him. “Don’t lie, and don’t take me for granted. I’m not the same woman you abandoned in New York, you son-of-a-bitch.”

  “You’ve lied to me. What do you want me to do, ignore it? I don’t even know who the fuck you are. I can’t ever trust you again.”

  “Big fucking deal! Like you haven’t lied to me daily. About the part in Jack and Jill, about Bethanie Lake, about April Irons, about who was going to play opposite me in Birth, about whether the script was any good…” Despite her determination not to, she began to cry. Because she knew that, in part, he was right. Who was she? The aging, abandoned Miss Havisham, raging in her rotting bridal gown, or was she Estella, the cold revenge? It felt as if she was both, and couldn’t contain them. It felt as if victimized Mary Jane and the new Jahne were tearing at her own guts. She moved to the counter, picked up the vase of anemones, and threw them across the floor. The release felt necessary. She wiped her arm across the counter, smashing the pitcher, the crystal glasses. Because either the glassware or she was going to be smashed. She turned to him. Sam still stood in the doorway, frozen by her outburst. He was not a violent man.

  “What do you want from me, Jahne? What the hell do you want?”

  “I want you to love me.”

  “But I did love you! And you do this.”

  “Well, see how it feels. I loved you more than anyone in my life. You weren’t just a walk-on in a cast of thousands. You don’t know what it felt like, loving you and knowing I wasn’t enough. Not perfect enough. Not pretty enough. Not young enough.”

  “So you decided to teach me a lesson? Jesus Christ, it’s macabre. The Revenge of the Stepford Wife.
That’s not your nose, that’s half of your ass, and that’s a plastic chin. All the time we were together, you were laughing at me. I was groveling at your feet, and you were laughing.”

  She looked up at him. “Laughing is the last thing I was doing,” she said.

  Then, there, under the unforgiving glare, in the shambles that had been her kitchen, she realized the enormity of her problem: he was the only man who could heal her pain. If he could love her now, knowing who she had been and what she had done, he could heal the split in her. His absolution, his understanding and acceptance, his love would be the blessing of total acceptance. If he forgave her, she could forgive herself. If he loved her, she could love herself.

  And if he couldn’t, she realized that all she had been would blow away, be gone forever. And she could never trust that any man who loved her new incarnation was not betraying her old one.

  A fear, deeper and colder than any she had known, slipped like a knife into her belly and froze the anger. She shivered. Her future, her life, depended on Sam’s seeing the truth, owning it, and being able to come through this with her. He had loved her, he did love her. He must continue to love her. If she stopped, right now, and made him realize that here, at last, their better selves could meet, there was a chance that both of them could win. “Please, Sam. Please,” she began. “I know you’re hurt. I’m so sorry. But this is important. Really, really important.” She started walking toward him, her bare feet numb to the broken glass beneath her soles. Tears ran down her cheeks. “Don’t just blame, Sam. Because, if you do, I won’t be able to forgive you.” Jahne continued to walk toward him and to sob, but Sam, pale as death, didn’t try to console her. He merely shook his head.

  “How could you?” he asked. “Mary Jane, how could you?”

  Oh, God, it seemed hopeless. All at once, she felt the glass beneath her feet, and the pain that began to throb. She looked down. Blood was mixing with the glass shards on the white ceramic tile. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t important. What was important was getting him to understand. How could she explain the self-hate, the desperation, the ambition that had driven her? How could she defend having her flesh vacuumed, cut, and stapled, having her skin peeled from her tissue and relocated? How could she explain giving up sensation in her nipples for sensational breasts? How could she explain dropping her friends, her life, and doing all this? How could she explain, to the only person that she wanted—that she needed—to understand, how could she explain what it had felt like to be plain, aging, an invisible, undesirable lump of a woman? How could she tell him? She must gain his compassion. How could she do this? she wondered. But also, how could she not?

  Sam looked at her again, with horror and disgust. “How could you do this to me?” he asked.

  Infamy

  I wouldn’t do nudity in films. To act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary.

  —JULIA ROBERTS

  Facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper.

  —MOTHER TERESA

  It’s all fantasy that if you’re considered attractive you have a perfect life and there’s no dark side.

  —MICHELLE PFEIFFER

  1

  So, you hate Sam Shields, right? He’s like all those bums you’ve had in your own life, all those men who left you, who lied, who weren’t there for you in the end. But remember, like all those bums, Sam Shields feels like he’s the one with an ax to grind, he’s the one who’s gotten a raw deal, the one who has been disappointed, the one who was betrayed.

  After the scene in the kitchen, Sam reeled out of Jahne’s house as if he were drunk. He could hardly believe that the woman he had loved, the woman he had risked his career for, had betrayed him in this way. Jahne was Mary Jane. It was unbelievable. It was ghoulish, a Stephen King horror. She had fooled him, made a fool of him. With a kind of sick fascination, he tried to remember conversations about their past. How often had she laughed at him, how often had she caught him in lies, evasions, and half-truths?

  Inevitably, defensiveness set in. After all, he’d been caught posturing, foolish for months. But how much longer had she worked at setting him up for it? He was, perhaps, not all that he should be, but she, she was crazy and malevolent. What kind of woman would dream of such an act? And what kind would actually achieve it? Well, Reader, how would you answer that question?

  Sam sat in the darkened screening room watching the new rough cut of Birth of a Star, squirming nervously in his seat. It worked. Well, it worked in a way. It certainly wasn’t the movie he had envisioned Birth of a Star to be. It was more like Blue Velvet meets Akkbar. But it did work.

  He and April, Laslo and Michael, along with the body doubles, had flown to Hong Kong to work for nineteen feverish days on the new scenes for the film. Joy Wah Studios—“Where Hollywood Comes to Get Oriented”—was a film factory that turned out dozens of action and porn films for the Asian market each month. They had technicians and special-effects crews that worked fast and cheap. And now their efforts had transformed the movie.

  Sam lifted one of his hands to his temple. He had had a merciless headache for a week or maybe more. Nothing seemed to help. Perhaps it was the food or water in Hong Kong, maybe it was staring at the moviola editing screen for hours, but even the daily massages and the Chinese acupuncturist hadn’t helped.

  Sam had worked day and night to save the film. Well, to save his ass. After the new scenes had been written and shot, after the more difficult splicing had been done, only then could he leave the scene of the crime, return to L.A. with the rough cut and his headaches.

  He hadn’t sold out, he told himself fiercely. The film was different from what he’d intended, but not necessarily worse. In fact, the first version of the film, as he had originally envisioned it, was a failure, stillborn. He’d always had reservations about the stupid melodrama. He even now wasn’t sure if it was his forced revisions, Michael’s hostility, or Jahne’s flat performance that had miscarried, but, whatever it was, the film as it had been was a certain failure. Now, with the music laid in and a little more tightening, this Birth of a Star had a chance. That it was the costliest sexually explicit mainstream film ever made, he had no doubt. That it would make back its cost, he was almost certain. But whether it was any good or not, he was still not sure.

  He had left for Hong Kong furious with Jahne. He had not spoken to her before he left. But, in the few hours that he had to himself there, he stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Regent Hotel at the magnificent view of the Hong Kong harbor and tried to fit pieces back together. He had loved Jahne—perhaps he still loved her—and now he knew why. She had been able to please his eye, as only a beautiful woman could, while caring for him in the way that Mary Jane had. She had the passion of the plain. Mary Jane had made him feel comfortable, and worshipped. He did not have to strive to please her. She had given him the acceptance of a mother, while Jahne had given him the sexual thrill of a girl the age of a daughter. Had he been judged harshly for wanting that? Wasn’t that what all men craved? The security of unjudgmental love without the boredom? Sexual temptation without challenge or the threat of abandonment? Jahne had all the maturity of a forty-year-old woman in the body of a teen. And the vulnerability of both.

  Back in New York, he had been ashamed of Mary Jane, and ashamed of his dependence on her, but he knew now that he had loved her. And if she was someone he would never have introduced to his parents, or felt comfortable with at a Hollywood party, that was human, wasn’t it? Anyone could understand that. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the images on the screen torturing him. Jahne’s face, Jahne’s body looming up at him. Overpowering him.

  He also knew that he had loved Jahne. And had been proud of her. Surely she could tell that, and she would have to be the first to admit that as Mary Jane she had not been a partner he could show off with pride. The knowledge felt like a weight in his gut, but it was the truth, for good or ill. He was ashamed, and the shame made him a
ngry. Now he just had to decide what to do about it.

  Had Jahne made him a laughingstock? Did jerks like Molly and Chuck and that little rat Neil know and laugh at him? At his shallowness, and his stupidity? Who else thought he was a fool? All of Hollywood? He sighed. Had she done it all in spite? Or had Jahne loved him? Surely M.J. had. Had she gone through this transformation out of love, or revenge? The fact was, despite this horrible trick, despite this betrayal, he did still love Jahne. And perhaps, just possibly, they could work something out. Later. After he had done what he could to salvage Birth.

  Now, returned to L.A., he holed up in editing rooms and guarded the screenings. No one but Michael, Seymore, and April could gain entry. He’d keep coaxing it into shape. Only then would the suits get to see it. But it would all be kept under wraps. And he would not speak to Jahne or see her. He would let her sit this out alone. She’d caused him enough grief for right now.

  In the meantime, word had already appeared in the trades that the movie was in trouble. April was furious. “Those fuckers could bury us before we have a chance,” she screamed. “We won’t be able to get distributors to even look at it.” She’d ordered Marketing to move up the opening of the film and to have a quick roll-out to eleven hundred theaters. Jahne, Laslo, none of the others, not even little A. Joel Grossman would get to see it. Sam shook his aching head. Poor A. Joel. He was a lost man anyway since Adrienne had coupled up with Michael McLain. Losing a love could do that to a man. Sam had to smile, despite the pain in his head. The smile increased his pain, and he winced, staring at the scene on the screen. The scene was as intense as his headache.

  He knew it was the pressure, the guilt, and the anger. But he also knew he wasn’t doing this to Jahne, to Mary Jane, out of anger or revenge. Not that she didn’t deserve it. But he was going to work that out between them. No, he was doing this to the movie because he had to, to keep control of the project. To keep his career viable. As April told him plainly, if he didn’t, someone else would.