Insecurity clutched at his gut. Not helping.
“It wouldn’t be fair to you,” Jewel said.
Got it! Wilma said. Now kiss her!
Like he needed advice on how to seduce a woman.
“Do me a favor, Officer,” he murmured. “Be unfair for once.”
“But you—”
He silenced her with his mouth, very gently. A tear leaked out of the corner of her eye and he kissed that. He kissed her until his head swam, and then Wilma said Here we go in his head, and he felt himself slipping into a beautiful dream.
After a long, sweet, mindless kiss, he realized he smelled fresh-cut grass and hot sunshine and rain on pavement, heard the spatter of water droplets and the distant sound of children playing. He was falling into Jewel’s kiss. It felt sweet and solid and real.
Then something cold and slimy fell on the crook of his neck.
Right in his ear, a dog barked.
He jerked his head back. Oh, for—
In his arms, Jewel laughed. She wants you to throw it.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw a golden retriever staring at him with eager intensity. Behind the dog was a white picket fence, a lawn sprinkler sending up a glittering arc of spray, and a shady tree. And by his elbow on the grass lay a slimy, green, dog-spit-covered tennis ball.
The dog barked again. Clay was lying on the grass, his arms around Jewel. The cut-grass smell mixed with her smell and it smelled like heaven.
He looked into her face and saw her laughter turn to confusion.
That’s funny. The dog has a wig on, she said.
It did. The dog wore a mop of blonde curls.
He felt his lips move. Sex is supposed to be funny. He didn’t dare tell Wilma to stop with the dog, because his thought would come out loud and clear in this weird place.
Jewel heaved herself onto one elbow, frowning Where? Where “are we?” Her voice sounded in his head and in his ears.
The next moment, they were lying on her living room floor.
Her face twisted with growing horror. “Oh my God! Clay!”
She shoved him away and leaped to her feet. With one hand she swept the afghan off the sofa, and with the other she felt the upholstery, then lay her ear against it. “Randy? Dammit, are you in there?” She did the same to the carpet.
Clay stood beside her, watching disaster unfold.
She looked up at him. “He’s not in there.” With a puzzled frown, she leaned her knuckles on the sofa arm. Then she turned her back on Clay and sat, slumping.
Clay sat with her, putting his arm around her. “I thought that was nice. Except for the slimy wet tennis ball. I don’t know where that came from,” he added darkly.
Her hands made fists on her thighs. “You said you thought maybe Randy was rubbing off on me. That’s how you got into demonspace with us.”
His heart stopped.
This was it. She would find out about Wilma and kill him. Plus, she’d never speak to him again. His mouth opened and closed.
“Is that so bad?” he said weakly.
Her eyes grew round, and she filled her lungs slowly, and then she screamed.
“Aaaaaughhhhh!” She slapped her hands over her eyes.
“Maybe it was the cow plops,” he suggested. “You’ve been exposed to hinky sex so long — maybe they affect you more.”
“Oh, my God! I’ll never have normal sex again!”
“Jewel, it’s not so bad—”
“Go home,” she said from behind her hands. “I have to be hysterical now.”
“Jewel—”
“Go home!” she screamed.
o0o
On the walk back to The Drake, Clay tried to explain to Wilma why her contribution was such a disaster.
She didn’t get it. You don’t realize what an opportunity this is, she kept saying.
“I realize I’m screwed with Jewel if she finds out about you.”
He felt sticky and sweaty and used, and his two-hundred-dollar Hawaiian shirt smelled like General Tso.
Jewel might never touch him again.
“Why do I have to be your avatar, anyway?”
Because Steven Tannyhill keeps ducking me, she pouted.
Maybe she could be deflected onto this Steven character. “I can’t believe he would refuse you.”
He won’t stay in the building long enough for me to get to him. He used to come in every week, real early in the morning, before the office staff arrived, and picked up big stacks of magazines from the printing plant. He also bought pastry. That’s where I got the idea to—
“To poison it.”
She looked wounded. To remind him of me. He should be my avatar. He would love it. Bill Tannyhill loved it. You love it.
“I’m more in like, I guess I would say.”
Oh, come on, I’m on your wood every minute. I would know if you didn’t like it.
“My wood isn’t the smartest part of me,” Clay muttered.
He hated to admit it, but he was broken. Sometimes a straight question was the only option.
He phoned Randy’s cell.
Randy answered on the first ring.
“Why haven’t you told Jewel about Wilma?” Clay demanded.
“Haven’t you?” Randy said with amusement in his voice.
Clay had to call on all his con-artist training to swallow curse words. “Why haven’t you?”
“I’m giving you enough rope to hang yourself,” Randy said.
“Why should I trust you?”
“On my honor,” Randy said. “You have a free hand.”
“Bull,” Clay said angrily. “You could get rid of me forever if you told her.”
“But I need both of you to survive in this world,” Randy said. “It is you who will not share.”
Clay snorted. “You’ve never shared anything in your life.”
After a pause Randy said, “I think, upon reflection, you’ll realize that I have.”
Clay hung up.
Chapter Thirty
Lena was putting the finishing touches on a script for Onika when the doorbell rang. She went to the peephole. Outside, somebody dark hung his head so low that she couldn’t see his face. He looked up to ring the doorbell again. Randy.
“What in the world?” She held the door wide. “You have a key.”
He shuffled in. “I felt we were insufficiently acquainted for me to walk in unannounced.” His head was still hanging.
He met Jewel and she ripped him a fresh one. Lena sighed. If all the ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends in Chicago were laid end-to-end, she’d be out of a job.
“Come in and tell me about it.”
She got him a glass of wine and sat him on a milk crate. He looked like two cents. “Tell me what she said.”
He raised wounded eyes to her face. “You know what we are.”
“No. What are you? Lovers? Friends?”
“No,” he said, “you and I.”
She and Randy had only one thing in common. “She dissed you for acting in porn movies?”
“And for whoring for two hundred years.” He blinked. “She complains of it often. At first I thought she must be jealous, but I learned better the night she came for me at the studio.”
“Uh—” Lena frowned.
“I gave her the fantasy she wanted, a fantasy about—”
“Should you be telling me her fantasy?”
He shrugged. “I have told women of others’ fantasies before. How else could I learn, if I didn’t offer them choices?”
Yeah, but you weren’t in love with any of them. If he didn’t get it, maybe he deserved that Jewel had ripped him a fresh one. “Go ahead.”
“She wished to be in a porn shoot. She pretended to be a novice. I was her director, her leading man, her crew.”
“Tricky,” Lena said.
He brushed that away with two fingers, his eyes elsewhere. “Her understanding of our work — it was all wrong. Disturbingly wrong. But I had to deliver the fantasy she
wanted.”
“You certainly do that.”
“A successful fantasy has a hinge where orgasm becomes possible. The hinge is a moment where a woman feels ambivalent.”
“Did you find out why she wanted to be in a porn shoot?”
He swallowed. “Shame. The hinge was shame.” He covered his face with both hands.
Lena touched his shoulder. “Seems she isn’t the only one who’s ashamed.” He didn’t move. “Haven’t you met a lot of women with that hinge?”
He nodded behind his hands. “I don’t know why it should affect me so, in her case.”
Because you’re in love with her, you big dumbell. Lena resigned herself to a long night. “Tell me about her.”
He drew his long fingers over his eyes and down his face. Hunkered with his elbows on his knees and his hands dangling, his white dress shirt open at the throat, his too-long black hair shaggy around his face, he looked unreally beautiful, like a fox or a unicorn.
Lucky bitch, Lena thought.
“She’s morbidly fearful and astonishingly brave. She throws herself upon the spears of her enemies and they are crushed. What I have seen her do—” He shook his head, his lip curling. “The man she’s with now is a coward to his bones. Although, if he can convince himself he has some hidden advantage, he too can perform prodigies. As if a flimsy secret were his shield. That will undo him with her. I have only to wait,” Randy said forlornly.
“You were telling me about her.”
Lifting his forefinger, he said, “Let me tell you about the porn shoot fantasy I created for her.”
Lena rolled her eyes. “Okay.”
“The hinge was shame. She had two desires hung upon that hinge. One was the desire to be whole again, virginal, free of shame.” He shook his head. “If she only knew that she is whole! She’s always been whole. She was involuntarily despoiled in some way. But the despoiler can take from her only what she believes he can take. She is still whole.”
“That’s an odd idea. I don’t see how that’s possible, but I’m listening.”
“She’s whole, and yet she feels despoiled. That’s the meaning of her choosing to be a novice porn actress.”
Lena felt a shiver.
“She walks into the studio — my lair, as she fancies it — innocently, perhaps by accident. But the magic of the fantasy holds her. She pretends to herself she’s afraid to admit that she doesn’t belong. So, to preserve her sense of control, she pretends she knows what she is doing.”
Randy turned his dark eyes on Lena. “This is the other side of the hinge. Power. She wants to be whole, and yet she wants to give up power. She can’t see how she can have both those things at once. She comes to me.” He shut his eyes. “And I — abuse her.” His face pinched up.
Lena thought she understood now. “She wants you to.”
“Yes. At some point in the fantasy she has come to the limit of her courage, and she needs my help. So I give commands. And, to preserve the secret that she’s still a virgin, she obeys. Do you see? I have taken the reins out of her hands. I drive her as I might drive a team of horses, drive her over the edge of her own self-control.”
“But she isn’t a virgin.”
“No. She is. She thinks she is no longer a virgin.” Randy put a hard finger on Lena’s knee. “Everyone is still a virgin. What is a virgin? Clean, whole, honest, pure. When is a virgin despoiled? When she feels dirty, broken, dishonest, as if evil has been stirred into her insides.”
The way I felt when Mom refused to help me against Steven, Lena thought.
“The fantasy becomes a trap in which she may recapture her virginity. She permits herself to feel innocent only in the tiny confines of her body, which she has brought to the studio to be despoiled, so that she may renew her wholeness, her virginity. Throwing herself on the spear of her enemy.” He shook his head.
Lena followed all this with difficulty. “She’s doing something that scares her. That seems brave to me.”
“As I said.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“When she wakes from the dream, she’s satisfied, but shame rolls back over her. She can’t keep it at bay for long. And so she tells herself a lie. It is the man who made her do these things who should be ashamed.” Bitterly, he said, “I am he.”
“I see.” Lena felt like spitting. “I hate when people do that. I could see my mom being hostile to my work. She’s a mom. But if I make the mistake of telling some guy what I do—”
“He treats you like a whore,” Randy finished for her. “That is to say, he has an opportunity to make himself whole by laying his shame upon your back. He can’t even admit that he mourns his virginity, because he’s a man.”
Lena eyed him. “You know a lot. You’ve only been in porn a few days.”
He lifted his head. “I’ve been a sex demon to pious women for two hundred years.”
“Well, brother, you know the whole song, verse and chorus.” She smiled.
Every inch an aristocrat, he bowed. “Thank you. It’s an honor to be accepted into the guild.”
Lena peeked at her watch. “What will you do about Jewel?”
Randy deflated. “I shall wait.”
Lena snorted. “I think you’re holding out on her.”
“Holding—?”
“You expect her to understand you. You think she should know how ashamed you feel. She should know not to beat you up — she shouldn’t try to make you feel more ashamed.”
Randy’s mouth fell open. “How can she not know?”
“Uh, duh, maybe because you don’t tell her?”
“We have been together every night in what she calls demonspace. This is merely the vast space inside her mind, but of course she must demonize it, literally, and blame that on me,” he added grumpily. “My mind is exposed to hers there, just as hers is to me. We are equals in demonspace.”
“Let me get this straight.” Lena put up both hands. “You expect her to rummage around in your brain the way you rummage around in hers.”
“She could, if she willed.”
“Have you invited her to poke around in your demonspace?”
He said nothing.
“You are such a guy.”
“Mock me if you choose—”
“Men are so dense. Number one, you’re mad because nobody has ever rummaged in your head the way you rummage in our heads. And why is this? I hate to break it to you, but most of us aren’t looking past the sex, which is great, by the way. Number two, you are still a lord. You love presenting yourself as a sex demon and you don’t want your power questioned.”
“I abase myself every night, providing for her desires, without regard for cost to my dignity—”
“Do you hear yourself? Providing for her desires means you have to ‘abase yourself.’ ‘Your dignity suffers.’ You dork, my co-stars don’t think it’s beneath their dignity to ‘provide for my desires.’ At least they don’t say so out loud, if they want to have any wood to work with.” She looked at him with affection. “She’s right. You’re totally a lord. I think you deserve each other.”
After a stiff look down his nose, Randy slumped. “I wish she thought so.”
“Have you been listening to me? Because I’ve been listening to you. On and on and on.”
“I beg your pardon.” He swallowed. “What should I do?”
“In words of one syllable? Tell her how you feel.” Every single conversation she had with a heartbroken guy, she wound up saying the same thing. Why did she bother listening at all?
And, like every other heartbroken guy, he answered the same way. “I can’t.”
She got up from her milk crate. “Okay, bedtime for me. I have church in the morning.”
“Please!” He caught at her hand. “Advise me.”
Leaning over his gaunt face and his beautiful, black, heartbroken eyes, she said slowly, “Tell. Her. How. You. Feel. You gotta show some pink, buddy. Write her a letter, if you can’t say it out loud.”
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“A letter?” Slowly, he nodded. “I could do that.”
“Don’t tell her she’s still a virgin, or dump on her for dumping her shame on you. Tell her what you like about her. Tell her how she makes you feel. A love letter. You know what that is?”
He swallowed. “I believe so.”
“Right. Okay. Nighty-night.” She dropped a kiss on top of his head and crashed out.
He didn’t come to bed all night. She knew, because if he had, he would have done something amazing to her, and she would have remembered that.
In the morning she found a few yellow sheets torn from a legal pad on the kitchen counter.
“What’s this?”
Randy came in from the shower, rubbing his head with a towel. “My letter to Jewel. You may read it.”
She really didn’t have time, but she leaned against the counter and sipped coffee and read.
Five minutes later she looked up, a lump in her throat. He was still watching her.
“It’s a good letter.”
He smiled.
“Now send it.”
“I can’t.”
She put her cup on the counter and went into the bedroom, handing him the letter as she passed. “I’m going to church.”
He followed. “I have to let her go. She will tire of Clay. Or she won’t.”
Lena threw off her bathrobe. “You’re wasting my time.”
“I can’t send it. If I’d thought she would read it, I could never have written it.” He gave a pathetic smile. “It was reward enough to watch your face as you read it.”
She looked up then. “Tell me straight. Did you write the letter to her, pretending you would send it, or did you write it so I would read it? Because I’m not getting in between you two.”
“For Jewel.”
“And you won’t send it.” She opened fresh pantyhose.
He hesitated. “No.”
“So should I burn it?”
“No!”
Lena sighed wistfully and went back to pulling on pantyhose. She put on a suit and her German Army shoes and put her hair back in a french twist, avoiding his eye.
“Would you keep it for me?” he said finally.
She couldn’t resist those big dark eyes. “For how long? Because if I make enough money to move, it might get lost.”
“Should something happen to me, would you send it to her?”
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