Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  It was hard to believe that he recognized her so quickly, despite the surgery, the time, and the dislocation of this strange venue. But perhaps that was the magic of love. Neil had loved her, had known her, and he still did. She hugged him, then took a seat next to him at the table.

  “I’m sorry that it took me so long to find you,” Jahne was explaining. “I looked. I really did. But your number wasn’t listed and I…”

  “That’s okay, Veronica,” Neil told her sweetly. “I forgive you.”

  He seemed normal, if a little subdued. How do you talk to an old friend who has become a murderer? Should she avoid the issue?

  “What happened?” she asked gently.

  “They made a mistake. It was all wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” He’d been filmed by a dozen cameras doing the deed. Surely he wasn’t going to claim innocence.

  “I wasn’t supposed to be Jughead. I was supposed to be Archie. The one everybody liked. That was the mistake. But it’s fixed now. Roger fixed it. It wasn’t my fault the girl was shot. Someone screwed up. Johnny Burton. He wasn’t supposed to. I was. Master of ceremonies. Me. Forgive me, master.” He looked at her, his mad eyes glittering into hers.

  “I’m sure you’ll be forgiven,” she whispered.

  “Great!” he shouted into the air. Then he turned to her again, a crafty look on his face. “And then I’ll get my show back? Because I can’t take too much more of this shit. Not being recognized, getting no respect. I can’t take too much more.” His voice had risen; now, abruptly, he put his head down on his arms and began to weep. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he cried. “You don’t know how it feels to be so close, so close to that love. And to lose it. To lose it all.”

  “I do, Neil. I do.”

  She patted his shoulder as softly as she could. They sat together as he wept.

  “I’m so sorry. What do you need?” she asked. “I’ll get you anything they allow you to have.”

  “I have everything I need.” He lifted his head from the table and wiped his eyes.

  “What about a lawyer? I could help with…”

  “My sister’s girlfriend is a lawyer. Diana. And there’s Roger. Roger will take care of everything.”

  “Neil, I want to help. I…”

  His face changed from a vacant, soggy smile to an animal snarl. “Not Neil!” he yelled at her. “Archie. I’m Archie now. Really popular. Everyone likes me.”

  “Okay. Okay, Archie,” she said, to calm him down. His face had scared her. Was he crazy? Did he really recognize her? “So, Archie, are you treated well here?”

  “Treated well? Hey, I’m the most popular guy at Riverdale High. I was elected president of the senior class. Reggie ran against me, but I won. It was unanimous. Even Reggie voted for me in the end.”

  Jahne tried to laugh at the feeble joke, but it wasn’t easy. “Archie, I’m just so sorry about everything. About your show getting canceled, and about the…”

  Neil sprang up, overturning the chair. Jahne jumped at the sudden movement, more startled than frightened. The door opened fast, and a big black male prison guard stood over them. Neil looked over at him. “Hello, Veronica,” Neil said. Then he held out his arms, and his eyes filled with tears.

  As Jahne walked down the corridor, away from Neil and his broken mumblings, she had to use all her acting strength not to sob out loud. He hadn’t known her. He didn’t know what day it was, or what had happened. Apparently he had started calling everyone Veronica, or so the assistant warden said. He was locked into his own private prison of pain. His guilt was even worse than his madness, and, from time to time, when he came out of the paranoid fog of his delusions, the pain and terror in his eyes were worse than the ravings of his conspiracy theories. For the first time, Jahne could see why people sought the comfort of madness.

  There in the prison corridor, the long enfilade of barred doors ahead of her, Jahne felt her own eyes fill with tears. How long would Neil be sentenced to a life behind bars? Or no life at all? She felt sick, and dizzy. Oh, God, it had all gone so wrong! She knew that Mary Jane and Neil had had a great deal in common: Both of us were born without the appropriate physical gifts. And both of us had the brains and sensitivity to know it. We’ve both spent half a lifetime overcompensating. But, in the end, Neil had failed, and he couldn’t live with who he was. A skinny, funny, weasel-faced guy without an audience, without a friend. A murderer. Jahne took a shuddering breath. “Oh, Neil, how could you?” she whispered.

  But how close to her own murder had she been, back in Scuderstown? She wouldn’t forget that time after her grandmother’s funeral. After her own failures and rejections had made her almost as crazy as Neil had become from his. Neil, failing, had only been different in deciding to turn his anger outward, to kill another instead of himself. That was what men did. Women killed themselves. Which was the greater sin?

  She stopped, leaned her long, slender body against the wall and felt herself trembling all over. Because, she realized all at once, she, too, was guilty of murder. She had killed Mary Jane Moran back in New York, more than two years ago. Mary Jane had died under Brewster’s knife just as surely as Lila Kyle had died from a bullet. She had ended Mary Jane’s life, sentencing her to death for not being pretty enough, successful enough, to live.

  Poor, pathetic Neil. Poor, motherless, unloved Mary Jane.

  23

  Sam Shields slid into a seat on the aisle so that he could stretch out his legs. He’d forgotten just how uncomfortable regular movie-theater seats could be. He only saw films at screenings or premieres now. When was the last time he’d actually paid to see a movie, the way civilians do? Certainly not since he’d moved here. Maybe not since New York, with Mary Jane.

  His mind jumped away from the thought. He was getting good at that. Move on to the pleasant, to the present. Birth was in its seventh week of distribution, and it had already passed the hundred-million-dollar mark. He would make more than three million on it, and was moving out of the canyon rental to his first real home: a soaring space tucked behind the Hotel Bel-Air. Meanwhile, he’d become the most popular boy in town. Everyone from everywhere was clamoring to have him direct their next film. He’d already met with Rob Reiner at Castle Rock, Mark Cannon from Columbia, and Stanley Jaffe at Paramount. It was nice to be popular.

  The theater darkened, and the trailer began. Sam watched the preview, until a couple stopped at his seat and asked to pass into the row. He stood up. He loomed over them. They were already chubbing up, the way middle-class Americans did. The two of them, in their late teens or early twenties, settled into seats only a short distance from him. Well, you wanted audience reaction, he reminded himself. Now you’ll get it really close at hand. The guy offered his date some popcorn from a paper bucket the size of a snare drum. Sam turned back to the screen.

  The music swelled, and the establishing shot with the LAX sign opened the film, his film. The audience, a pretty large one for an afternoon in Burbank, was still settling in, murmuring to one another and shifting in their seats. Then Jahne’s image flashed on the screen, and that argument with the cabbie where Michael steps in and rescues her. It went fairly well. The audience laughed at Jahne’s put-down, though he didn’t get the second laugh out of them with the quick cut to the cabbie. April had been right about that.

  April wanted him for another project. And why should he say no? So far, they were batting a thousand, and although she still wasn’t giving him final cut, she was negotiating. In the wake of Birth’s success, all the bad blood between them seemed to have washed away in the tide of cash. Offers from the other studios looked promising, but wasn’t the devil you knew better than the one you didn’t? Not that April was a devil, exactly. Where had that image come from? I have not made a deal with the devil, he told himself.

  Birth was unfolding on the screen, and though he had seen it a hundred or five hundred or a thousand times, he was here to feel what it was like when it played to what Sy Ortis would
call “the Regulars.” And it seemed to be playing well. Jahne and Michael—Judy and James—had just kissed for the first time on the big screen. As James stripped off Judy’s blouse, Sam heard the intake of breath from the crowd. Obliquely he glanced at the couple to his right. The guy had his mouth partly open, staring, mesmerized. Then his girlfriend reached over, took the hand that wasn’t in the popcorn bucket, and placed it on her own breast. Sam felt a jolt. Did people—regular people—still neck in movies?

  He turned back to the screen. Jahne did look beautiful. His own empty hand cupped, as if, just once more, he could circle it around her breast. He watched as the scene played. And he could feel it work its magic on the audience. The theater was completely silent as James began his symbolic devouring of Judy.

  It works because all my impotent love and rage is cut into it, Sam thought. I did love her. I do love her. And now, when I can have almost any woman I want, I’ll never have another who loved me before I succeeded. Now they will always love what I can do for them, and what I have done as much as who I am. He looked over at the couple beside him. The guy had discarded his popcorn and was holding the hand of his girlfriend tight against the crotch of his jeans. Sam felt a stab of loneliness so acute that he almost lifted his own hand to his chest.

  The love scene ended, and Sam watched the camera pan Adrienne’s pale bare back and ass, Michael’s tanned hand lying along the beautiful curve of her hips. The illusion was perfect: it was Jahne up there, Jahne exposed. And after the fight scene, in the drunken fuck, it was Jahne who was pinned, Jahne who was mauled. Sam heard a guttural grunt from the guy beside him as, on the screen, Michael pulled off his trunks to ravage his target: a woman, any woman, Every Woman, who could serve as a receptacle for him.

  Sam could feel the heat from the screen igniting the audience. “Give it to her,” someone called out, and “Fuck the bitch!” a deeper voice yelled, and there was a moment of silence, then a high-pitched giggle. Sam felt nausea sweep through him. Yes, he had meant to arouse them; yes, he had tapped his own anger; but what, exactly, had he done?

  He watched the film, and he listened to the audience. He saw then how he’d used his own rage—at his mother, at his ex-wife, at Jahne, at April—and had used Michael’s, to carry the movie. This was no love letter, he saw. The hot scenes were hot, all right, but the undercurrent was anger and fear. Oh, they were not love scenes. No. The drowning male character struck out at the female through sex. He didn’t love her. He fucked her. Just as this film fucked Jahne.

  Sam sat there, alone in the dark, and watched what he had done to Jahne, and then what that did to the audience.

  24

  Sharleen closed the door of the house behind her and jumped in the King Cab of Dobe’s new truck. Dean was in the back seat with the four dogs, each of them fighting for his attention. She slammed the door of the cab and breathed in the delicious scent of new plastic, metal, and upholstery. “Okay,” she nodded to Dobe, and they drove through the gates, Dean twisting in his seat to wave to the security guard looking after them as they drove away.

  “You going to miss any of this, Dean?” Sharleen asked.

  Dean was silent for a moment. “Yes,” he said, the sadness causing him to speak softly. “My garden.”

  Dobe looked into the rearview mirror and caught Dean’s eyes. “How would you like a farm, not just a garden?”

  “How big?” Dean asked for about the three hundredth time.

  “Nine hundred and thirty-two acres.”

  Sharleen laughed for the first time today. “That’s as big as some state parks,” she said.

  “Not much compared to them big suckers’ places. You know, Ted Turner and those types. But it’s just about the prettiest land I ever saw.”

  Dean was shaking his head. “I don’t know about them other farmers, but that’s a big spread. I can’t do it all myself. I’ll need some help.”

  Sharleen turned in her seat to face Dean. “We’ll help you, Dean. Right, Dobe?”

  “Sure. That’s why I’m going, to get out into the air, do some honest hard work.” He laughed, and Sharleen caught him looking at her out of the corner of his eye.

  “It will be that, Dobe. Honest and hard.”

  “Can’t think of a better way to live, Sharleen. Honest and hard.”

  “Does it have an orchard?” Dean asked.

  “Not yet, but it will. If you want one.”

  “And we’ll get a horse,” Dean said. “Are there trails?”

  “We’ll get three horses, and there’s plenty of trails.”

  Sharleen thought again about all that she was leaving behind and what she felt. Leaving this isn’t hard, she thought, as the truck with the few belongings she cherished barreled out of California to Wyoming. She now had everything she wanted. A ranch in Wyoming, Dean, Dobe, the dogs. There would be good, real work, and fun, too. And no people for miles around, Dobe had said.

  No television. Or VCR. No interviews, no parties with dressed-up people who said they liked you when they really didn’t. No newspapers, no magazines, no scandal sheets blaring out people’s shame. No shame, no lies, no secrets. And not much money, either. Sy’s accountant had explained about management fees, and legal fees, and taxes, and the agency’s percentage. It didn’t leave much. But they owned the land, and the furniture that would arrive in a day or two, and that was more than most people had. More than she’d ever expected to have. Leave all this to them as wants it, she thought, as they crossed the state line. It hadn’t made her happy, only sad and lonely. And none of it was real, she thought. Except the pain.

  “Look!” Dean called out.

  “What?” Sharleen asked, bringing her thoughts back to the present.

  “An Idaho license plate. Guess what it says,” Dean said, his face bright with a grin. He couldn’t wait to tell them. “‘Idaho,’” Dean quoted. “‘Famous potatoes.’ Ain’t that a funny tag?”

  Dobe laughed. “Sure ’nough is.”

  “Famous potato,” Sharleen said through the ripples of laughter. “Sounds like me.”

  And then the only sound in the truck that was taking them away from Hollywood—the clothes and parties, the self-indulgence and fame, the security guards, the money, the special privilege, of having everything except privacy and peace of mind—the only sound, as the wheels of Dobe’s new truck passed the state-line marker, was the sound of their laughter.

  25

  Giving it all up wouldn’t be too hard, Jahne thought as she folded clothes into one of the suitcases that lay open on her bed. What was it she was losing? After all, she’d never, except for the time with Jack and Jill, gotten to play the parts she wanted. First it was all the “character” parts, now it would be naked airheads. Moaning, jiggling, naked airheads. She threw a disgusted look at the pile of scripts that had been submitted to her. The women that Hollywood wanted: runaways, whores, victims; desperate, dependent women, and teenagers in trouble. The women that America seemed to want.

  Yes, she could give it up. God, why had she wanted so much to be an actress anyway? That was a question with an answer too sad to ignore. She thought of Neil. Like him, she was a kid who had never had anyone’s approval. And who had never had a family. I was a natural for it, she thought. The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd; the sense of family in a troupe, the attention of an audience, meager as those sometimes were. All I really wanted was someone to look at me and approve. I was so tired of not being looked at. She shook her head and folded a white silk blouse, stuffed it into the suitcase, and shook her head again. No one had ever seen her, except perhaps Neil, and she hadn’t believed him, hadn’t cared enough about his good opinion. Would anyone’s approval ever fill the void in her? Would more of Sam’s love, more of the critics’ raves, a larger audience’s applause, would any of it have made her believe she was good enough? She doubted it.

  With real pain, an actual hurt deep in her chest, she thought of all those kids back in New York, suffering to be seen, to be
heard, to be liked. And the even more pathetic grovelers out here in L.A., desperate for a taste of fame, willing almost to die for a chance to be flavor of the month. Well, she’d had it, and someone else could have it now. She was sick of it. She had wasted herself, gone on a quest for a grail that was vulgar.

  Still, it hadn’t been all bad judgment on her part. Rather, it had been bad judgment foisted on her by every TV show, every magazine, every movie she’d ever seen. Be pretty, be popular, be attractive, be sexy, be wanted, to be desirable. Well, she thought grimly, she was desirable now. There wasn’t a man in the country who couldn’t jerk off to living, moving pictures of her imitation orgasms. And soon she’d go into international release. Today Scuderstown, tomorrow the world. She almost had to laugh at the irony. She had wanted to show them all. Show her grandmother, show the girls back at Scuderstown Regional High, show the casting agents and the producers in New York, show everyone how good, how very good she was. Well, her grandmother was dead, she couldn’t remember the names of her high school classmates, and New York never cared about anything.

  Meanwhile, all she appeared to have shown was her genitalia, to any of the population on earth who could afford a VCR and a two-dollar rental. She had shown them how good she was at counterfeiting orgasms, a trait that almost every young girl would find useful, but hardly what she had originally had in mind. She shook her head at her own bitterness.

  While she was facing home truths, she’d better face another one: Acting had also drawn her because she had been so afraid to live. Afraid of sinking into the day-today routine of a job, a husband, a family. She thought of Sharleen and her bravery: going out to Wyoming to live everyday life. Could Jahne do it? Playing a role was so much easier than living. Well, to hell with this idea of showing other people’s feelings so that a numbed audience could have a few of their own. No, she’d do things from now on, not act them. Michael McLain had certainly taught her the difference between acting a hero and being a villain.