Lunch

by Karen Moline

  “Don’t you have anything better to think about?”

  “No. There is nothing better to think about.”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Not your career.”

  “Fuck my career. It has nothing to do with me. I’m just the Nick in Nick Muncie Enterprises. McAllister and all the other assholes in suits take care of my ‘career’ for me. And what a career it is, all those blockbusters, all those front-­end grosses and back-­end grosses and slices of the pie, all those tidy little sequels for me, the trained monkey.” His voice is harsh. “All that money, and all the shit that comes with it. And, oh yes, let’s not forget Faust while we’re on the topic of shit, shall we, what a great idea for our action superstar, a real movie, a real man, just the thing for our hero to play. Don’t make me laugh. As if they thought I didn’t hear them laughing, and snickering, and spreading rumors behind my back. Even the number-­one box-­office draw in the world is not immune to all that fucking Hollywood shit.”

  He lights up a cigarette, he doesn’t care if she hates it, and runs his fingers through his hair. “Have you ever thought about the unconscionable amount of money I actually earn?” he asks. “Me, Nick Muncie, superstar, the most undeserving fuck who ever lived and breathed.”

  I’d had that bad feeling about today from the minute Olivia walked in the door, and it tightens more deeply when I hear Nick’s unprovoked candor, and see the startled expression on Olivia’s face. They are talking too much of the hell on earth where he lives, too much reality is beginning to seep through the leaded windowpanes, intruding on the fantasy of their gilded wonderland when Olivia should be lying underneath him, writhing in ecstasy, pleading.

  “You’re not undeserving,” Olivia says, her arms around him. “I imagine you’re paid what producers think you’re worth, and that’s why you earn it. Besides, I can think of a million things I’d do with all that money.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, set up a foundation for young artists, for starters. Another one for art therapy for battered children, and—­”

  “That’s the difference between us, isn’t it?” he interrupts, he can’t bear to hear any more. “You have a heart and soul and I have McAllister.”

  “Don’t say that,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “Don’t say that. Don’t say anything else. Just kiss me.”

  He buries his head in her lap, and they stay like that, locked in a frozen embrace, until Nick comes back to himself with a start and kisses her so deeply she thinks she will never be able to draw another breath again.

  “YOU’RE IN a strange mood today,” he says to her afterward, twirling a stray curl in his fingers. “I guess we both are. What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says, but he feels her tighten. “I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, I guess.”

  “What a delectable thought.”

  “Very funny,” she says, pretending to swat him, then nestling down to him. He pulls her tight, caressing the round curves of her belly.

  “I owe you an apology,” she says eventually.

  “What for?”

  “For being a jerk. For being, as you so succinctly put it, passive-­aggressive. Because I’m always late, and cranky when I come in. Acting like a spoiled little brat. I don’t mean to, you know. I’ve always hated being late, actually. But when I’m walking across the park my feet just start slowing down, and . . . well, if you’re going to do something, you should—­I mean—­” She buries her head in a pillow. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  He is still holding her tight. She can feel his tense breathing, and the absolute rigidity of his muscles.

  They both know what she is trying to say.

  The bad feeling is getting stronger, and my stomach is churning.

  “What’s the worst thing you ever did?” she asks, turning around to face him. It is a surprising question, even for Olivia.

  I do not move from my perch, rooted with anxiety yet intrigued by their conversation, watching them, watching Nick, nerves on edge, to see if he snaps.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he says.

  “Why not? Is it that bad?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters,” she says, sitting up, her eyes wide. “Everything matters. Everything that’s happened has made you who you are.”

  “And who am I?” He sits up and snakes closer to her, pulling her back into his lap, scooting back with her until he is propped securely against the bedframe, holding her tight, one arm an iron vise across her chest, the other running down her body, bending her with him, caressing her breasts, his thumb and forefinger playing with her nipples till they harden, her belly, her thighs, his fingers swirling in that familiar teasing waltz of urgent hunger. She feels him growing harder against her back, it takes so little time for him to stiffen, and then take what he wants, over and over again.

  His hands, swirling, harder, and faster. She is arching away from him, and he pulls her back, sliding up and into her.

  “Who am I?” he asks again.

  “Nick.”

  “Nick who?”

  “Nick Muncie.”

  He claps one hand over her mouth. “Who am I?” he says, his voice raspy. “Say my name. Say it like this. I want to feel you say it.”

  She tries to bite his fingers, and he pinches her, cruelly, just to hear her scream beneath his hand.

  “Who am I?”

  “Nick.” He feels her say it. “You fucking bastard, Nick.”

  He laughs and takes his hand away.

  “Why do you always have to ruin it?” she says, gasping, his abrupt changes of mood so unpredictable and terrifying, so inflaming, always leaving her defenseless against him. “You can never be nice, and just stay nice, never.”

  “You don’t want me to just be nice and stay nice, so shut up and take it,” he says, knowing her body too well, knowing that as long as he is moving like this inside her, her protests are feeble shams and his fears are groundless. “You know you have to take it, whether you like it or not.”

  “Fuck you,” she says, twisting away so suddenly that she falls free from him, and tries to crawl off the bed.

  “So you want to play, do you,” he says, grabbing her ankles and dragging her back as she claws helplessly for a handhold. “We’ll play ‘Who Am I?’ and it’s your him to guess.” He spanks her. “So,” he says, punctuating each word with a resounding smack as she writhes frantically, trying to get away, “who am I?”

  “Stop,” she screams.

  “Stop? No, I’m not ‘Stop.’ ” Spanking her harder. “Try again.”

  “Nick,” she says, sobbing with rage and pain. “You’re Nick.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he says, lifting her up and telling her to blow her nose on the large handkerchief he keeps tucked inside one of the pillows, there, like a good girl, before turning her around to sit back on his lap, facing him this time, one hand gripping her wrists tight behind her back, kissing the tears away, smiling triumphant as she twists her head away from his lips, smiling still as he impales her and she shudders, despite herself. “Where were we? Ah, yes,” he says, “we’re playing ‘Who Am I?’ So, who am I?”

  “Nick,” she says, her eyes shut, her ass on fire, riding him, heedless. “Nick Muncie.”

  “Nick Muncie, who?”

  “Nick Muncie, superstar.” He lets go of her hands and she leans forward into him, pressing down, hard, feeling him deeper, her breathing ragged. “The most famous actor in the world.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes.” Oh, why so many questions, she can’t think. “More famous than anyone. More, more, more.”

  He is laughing softly, watchin
g her, so close to the brink. “More than anyone else in the world?”

  “Yes, more,” she says, delirious, until she can bear it no longer, how can he hurt her and then make her feel like this, it’s not possible, no, don’t stop, she is falling in the sea, drenched, wave after wave of unbearable satisfaction flooding over her.

  When she can think again she opens her eyes, surprised to see Nick’s face so close, still with that awful smug grin, and she is suddenly aware of a sharp stinging pain on her rear.

  “You prick,” she says, pouting. “You spanked me.”

  “You deserve it, and worse. Much, much worse.”

  “Let me go.”

  “Not a chance.” He is still hard, inside her, rocking her back and forth, imperceptibly, and she bites her lip to keep from crying out. “We’re still playing.”

  “I don’t like this game.”

  “Ah, but I do. And I think you do, too.” His hands on her breasts, pulling her down. “So tell me, who am I?”

  “I told you already,” she says, stretching out her full length on him, as he wants her to, she has no choice but to obey the overwhelming mastery of her will when she is lying in his arms, she isn’t strong enough to fight him, no woman is. Not like this. “Nick. Muncie. Superstar. The most famous actor in the world. More famous than anyone.”

  “Anyone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Acting is my job.”

  “Yes.”

  “My life.”

  “Yes. I don’t know. How should I know?”

  “It is.” His grip tightens, squeezing her till she cries out. “Acting all the time. You have no fucking idea.”

  He pulls away from her suddenly, pushing her off, and sits up, lighting another cigarette, and she is so startled by his abrupt standoffishness that she sits up behind him.

  “Acting at what, Nick?”

  “Acting at living,” he says savagely.

  There is a look on his face she’s never seen before, worse than the silence she’d glimpsed there already and wished she could block out of her dreams. Not pain, not anguish, just emptiness, a gaping black void, his features still so starkly handsome and so terrifyingly empty, a face wiped clean of any human emotion as if a squeegee had passed over it like the one Nick used to use at the Sunoco station in Beverly Hills, retreating inward, far away, dropping deep into a fathomless cavern.

  It is like looking at the face of annihilation itself.

  I haven’t seen that face for a long time. No one should ever have to see that face.

  She doesn’t know him at all, Olivia realizes with a shiver so sudden it is like footsteps tap-­dancing on her grave, all she knows is how much he wants her. It is their unspoken rule not to talk of who they are, who he is or his life outside this flat. She only knows what he means to other ­people, what his body means to her—­and hers, she guesses, to him—­but not where he came from, what incomprehensible brutality molded him, what sparked that indefinable longing driving him on into life, plaguing him always to take more than is offered, even when he has her nakedness, exposed and vulnerable, dissolving into his, bending to his will, and begging him to stop.

  For the first time, she is truly afraid.

  He wants more. He will always want more.

  “You want to know what I was like?” Nick says, the dreadful blankness fading into the simplicity of anger. “Okay, I’ll tell you what I was like. I’ll tell you a nice little story about what I was like, since you asked. I was just a kid. I needed money.”

  She doesn’t ask why a kid would need money, she thinks she can imagine.

  “I knew this boy, and he told me he had a secret place to get some quick change.”

  He sits staring out the window for a few silent minutes, dragging on his cigarette. A terrible dread is growing inside Olivia, akin to mine, and she says nothing.

  “You mean M?” she asks finally, because the silence is worse than the knowing.

  “Not M. Before M.” He turns to look right at me. A warning. As if I could do anything now, my nerves jangling.

  “We’d go the night after the funerals,” Nick says. “No one ever found out, because we were strong, and quick. We’d get jewelry and watches and fence them for a fraction of their value because we didn’t know where else to sell them. Once we got a guy with hundred-­dollar bills in all his pockets. That lasted awhile.” He leans back on the pillows, blowing smoke rings. “They were dead, and I was hungry. They didn’t know.”

  “Go on,” Olivia says, trying to keep the revulsion out of her face. “There must be more.”

  He stubs out the cigarette and pulls her close and she lies cuddled in his arms, sinking into him. His fingers find their way inside her, a feather duster, idly stroking, because he can always do that, detached and mechanical, even though the rest of him is miles away. She shudders, not in the pleasure he assumes, but from nervous apprehension.

  “I’m not sorry,” he says. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he says, his fingers pressing, insistent, harder, and she tries to pull away but he won’t let her go, not now. “What do the dead know?” he asks, his voice blunt. “I can just see you, you know, you and your precious little Frog bastard up there at the gates of heaven so smug and secure, expecting Saint Peter to let you in. Do you think you’ll end up there or wherever it is ­people like you go, looking down on all the mourners at your funeral? Or will you be some screaming ghost standing by your grave, scaring off the nasty little boys like me who come to steal the rings on your fingers and bells on your toes?”

  She is struggling wildly against him, what he expects from her, what he covets, what she always does, without thinking, because, with him, it has always been that way. He wrenches one of her hands back to feel his hardness. “Does this feel better,” he says savagely, forcing her to stroke him, “better than the cold wet ground? Are you as wet as the cold wet ground? Of course you are, because you know what you like, and you can lie to yourself all you want, and always show up late because you’re scared, and guilty, and tell yourself that you don’t really care about me or the dead, but the bitter truth is that right now you don’t care about anything else except how I’m going to fuck you.”

  He shifts his weight away for just a second and she kicks back, wildly. “Liar,” she screams.

  He laughs and twists down to the side of the bed, knifing his legs around her so she can’t escape, feeling for his favorite whip stashed underneath, just in case, the one he’d had made after I found the Murano vase. The artisan had sculpted a glass handle to fit exactly in Nick’s hand, hand-­blowing with intense precision the looping swirls of red and orange, delicate and delicious together, yet far less fragile than they seem. It is an object of exquisite beauty, perversely attached to a sleek implement of pain.

  Nick swishes it back and forth in the air, testing his wrist. When Olivia hears the horrid noise she tries to bite him, but her legs are pinioned and Nick quickly turns back up, pushing her face down into the pillows and straddling her, trailing the thin end of the whip down her back, like a snake, watching her body quaver helplessly beneath it.

  “You can struggle all you want but you can’t get away because you’re not dead and buried in the cold wet ground, and I’m not going to steal the precious little ring your precious little Frog bastard gave you.” He whacks her hard across her ass, once, twice, again, the welts so darkly pink on her white skin, rising instantly, slender strips of embossed pain, and she is screaming for him to stop but he won’t stop at this, no, not when he can force his way inside her, writhing under his weight.

  “It doesn’t take you long to beg,” he says. “I didn’t think you were such a wimp.”

  “Let me go,” she is still screaming, “I’ll kill you let me go let me.”

  “No,” he says, turning he
r over so she lies on her back, the pressure on her welts a burning fire, swiftly fastening her hands to the silken cords as he always does, then leaning over to pick up two fat down pillows that have fallen to the floor, propping them gently under her ass, smiling as she winces. “Better?” he asks sarcastically, tracing a finger down her face, her neck, circling her breasts, caressing, slow, so slow, kissing her belly, and slipping inside her again. “I thought you wanted to hear a story,” he says, moving languidly in and out, in and out, probing until she is certain she will go quite mad, but he is not even close to letting her go quite mad enough.

  He has the triumphant grin again, propped on his elbows, brushing her hair gently out of her face even as he goes on, relentless. “And then do you know what I did?” he says.

  She shakes her head no, unable to speak, her chest heaving.

  “We got a job working for a crook in a funeral parlor. And after the viewing, when we were supposed to be loading the body into the hearse, we’d open the casket and grab whatever we could.

  “One time there was this guy and we were trying to get this big fat diamond, a really nice diamond, tons bigger than yours, off his big fat finger.”

  “Stop,” she says. “Stop.”

  “He was fat, that bastard, a greedy fat pig, and he was dead dead dead, but we really wanted that ring and we only had a minute to get it off. In my pocket I had a jar of hair grease, the same gunk they’d put on the stiff’s hair, but it didn’t work, and we didn’t have time to get anything else. So I took out my knife and cut off his finger.”

  Moving on her, cruelly persistent, his fingers stroking her body, teasing, his eyes on hers, not letting her go, she asked for it, and he is going to watch her when she hears it.

  “Do you want to know what happened?” he asks, his voice softening, so tranquilly at odds with the revulsion of his story.

  “No,” she says, turning her head to the side. He turns it back.

  “I sold the ring,” he says, whispering, his lips so close to her ear, kissing her cheeks, her eyes, kissing her, endless kisses till she whimpers, hooking her legs around him, desperate to pull him closer, she needs him close, there, just there. “Diamonds are forever.”