Show Me

by Carole Hart

  Unfortunately, the embarrassment came out as irritation. “So,” she said, “let me guess. You wanted to meet me from curiosity?”

  “Not exactly.” He looked uncomfortable. “At least, that’s not how I would put it.”

  “You thought you might get a free sample? Because—”

  “Not at all.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a fan.”

  “I’ve never seen the show.”

  She was about to say Oh, you’re too good for my show? but she caught herself in time. Then she was blushing. Why should he watch her show? If Emily hadn’t been the star, she probably never would have seen it, either.

  He was looking at her with a contained amusement, and for the first time she was struck by his looks. He was blond, with a face that might have been too pretty if it weren’t for his brawny physique. Blond with deep brown eyes—it was a striking combination that somehow emphasized the cool intelligence in his face. But perhaps he just looked better to her because she wasn’t going to sleep with him. Meeting gorgeous men she was guaranteed to sleep with had become old hat.

  He said, “Let’s just say that you’re here because I wanted to apologize. Turning down beautiful women is new to me.”

  “This is business,” she said, but her voice was weak. “You can apologize to my producers.”

  “I know I could,” he said, with an irritation that echoed hers.

  “So?”

  “I don’t know. Is it necessary for me to explain my least motivations?” He was glaring at her now, and she remembered his reputation for being merciless with fools and incompetents. But she wasn’t a fool, and she hadn’t done anything incompetent. She hadn’t done anything at all!

  “You did waste my afternoon,” she pointed out. “There’s necessary and there’s simple courtesy. It’s also not that flattering to be described as someone’s least motivation.”

  They glared at each other for a moment. But as she watched, his eyes softened into an expression she couldn’t read. Maybe it was only confusion; after a minute, he shook his head.

  Then, to her astonishment, he said, “Busted.”

  “Busted? What do you mean?”

  “I am a fan, and I did invite you here from curiosity—if just wanting to meet you counts as curiosity. I wouldn’t have used that word, but it’s close enough. The shoe fi ts, even if it pinches a little.” He was smiling ruefully.

  She found herself smiling back, with a sudden lightheartedness that made her realize that both of them were being fools. And, seen from the point of view of a business meeting, definitely incompetent. “So you have watched the show?”

  “No, that was really true,” he said. “I don’t even have cable.”

  She was surprised to find that she filled with relief. But why would she be relieved? In fact, why would she care one way or the other? Just to say something, she said, “Wow, you really don’t have cable?”

  “No,” he said. “I have to save every penny toward a hostile takeover of Microsoft.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  “You underestimate me.”

  “Granted.” Smiling at him, she fell into the habit of imagining where she would touch him first, what kind of approach would inflame him most. Then she caught herself and said, with a somewhat forced lightness, “I didn’t know it was so easy to be a business visionary.”

  “Don’t interview me,” he said softly.

  She blushed again. Then she was foolishly thinking about how she had always blushed easily, and how people had mentioned it on blogs, and how it was one of the things that set her apart from other porn stars; it made her reactions seem so real, because they were. And all that time, they were staring into each other’s eyes. It had been at least a minute.

  She said, “I wasn’t interviewing you. I guess I sound like I am sometimes. Bad habit.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’m being terrible. I ought to send you flowers to apologize. That’s what a gentleman would do.”

  She imagined receiving the flowers in her dressing room and was hit by an inexplicable wave of loneliness. “Well, don’t.”

  Again, she was confronted by the enigmatic dark eyes, the somber expression she could not fathom. Then he was standing and saying, “I’ll see you out.”

  In the corridor, he told her, seemingly calm again, that he kept a private elevator in the building; even though he deliberately used a small office and disliked superficial signs of hierarchy, it just wasn’t practical for him to appear randomly in public places. “There’s always a person who’s here to replace ceiling tiles, but who has a million-dollar business idea. It’s not so much that I can’t spare the time; I just can’t stand to hear the business ideas.”

  Emily, meanwhile, was strangely affected by the idea of being in the private elevator with him. Her mind was sketching a scenario in which the elevator got stuck and . . . but she made herself match his calmness. “Are they all really terrible?”

  “It’s not that the people are always stupid,” he said. “It’s just that business ideas are usually only worthwhile in the context of doing business. You know, when you have a problem to solve, the solution to the problem could be a great business idea. But I guess you’re not interested in business.”

  They had arrived at the elevator; he pulled a little key out of his pocket and put it into the wall.

  She said, “Oh, it’s interesting. Though I don’t know much about any business except . . .”

  “Yes, actually, a lot of the elevator-ride business ideas turn out to be porn.”

  She laughed. “Oh, well, you know I never wanted to be in porn.”

  “You wanted to be a veterinarian.”

  She frowned at him.

  “I’ve read your interviews,” he said. “I was wondering why you hadn’t asked how I could be a fan without having seen the show.”

  Then the elevator had arrived, and he was drawing back the gates; the thundering sound it made relieved her from the necessity of answering. He stepped back to let her get into the elevator first. He entered after, and the thundering sound came again as he closed the cage.

  Then they were standing together in the enclosed space, shoulder to shoulder. Emily was keenly aware of every detail: the elevator’s hum, the cool air, his shoulder inches away from her. The moment that he turned toward her, she was keenly aware of turning toward him, her heart pounding as if everything she cared about was hanging in the balance.

  He said, “Hold still.”

  Then he put his hand on her cheek and bent down and kissed her on the forehead. It was a gentle kiss that contained the same enigmatic freight of tenderness—it had been tenderness—she’d seen in his eyes earlier. It made her feel weak and desperate. When he let her go and stood back, she felt as lonely as she’d ever felt in her life.

  Then the elevator doors opened. He pulled back the gate and she stepped out, propelled by the necessity of acting normal. People had to behave as if they were sane, even if they weren’t sane at all. Even if they had just felt the craziest thing they’d ever felt in their lives.

  But when she heard the gate begin to thunder closed behind her, she whirled in a panic. He put his hand to the cage and said, “So long.”

  Then the elevator doors closed again and she was walking, stumbling, through the lobby.

  She took a cab home—she couldn’t face going back to the studio. In the cab, she sat with her eyes closed, trying to find a way back to her daily life. She knew if she let herself think about Ralph, she would only be miserable. Still, she thought about Ralph. “You wanted to be a veterinarian,” he’d said, and even though it was something he’d read in a magazine, it still made her feel impossibly warm and known.

  When she wasn’t avoiding thinking about Ralph, she was avoiding thinking of In Depth, which meant, of course, that she thought about it. Not for the first time, she longed to put it all behind her, to go back to being an everyday person who could walk down the st
reet without having people stare and nudge their friends. A person who could meet a man without obsessively wondering whether he judged her, whether he liked her for herself or for the idea of dating a porn star—whether he was The One but was dismissing her because he didn’t want to deal with competition from a hundred hours of X-rated film.

  When In Depth had started, the interviewees were still ordinary members of the public. It was nearly impossible to get celebrities to have public sex even now, and Emily’s ability to do so was one of the things that made her XTV’s greatest asset. With an unknown hostess on a brand-new network, it had been completely impossible. So the focus was on men with interesting stories (“I survived a plane crash in the Himalayas,” “I’m a real-life cowboy,” etc.) who were both extraordinarily good-looking and willing to have sex on air.

  At first, Emily was painfully shy about the whole endeavor. Her researchers had had to do most of the talking when vetting interviewees. Her participation had been confined to saying diffidently afterward, “Um, I don’t think I want to . . . with that guy. If that’s okay?” Or else, “Yes, he seems—I mean, don’t you think? I’d like to, if it’s okay.” The charm of that first season (released as a set, it was now selling like hotcakes) was partly her shyness. It made every moment of film feel compellingly real.

  The format of the show took shape around the drama of two attractive strangers meeting, getting to know each other, and then having sex in front of the cameras. Every week there was a restaurant date (in a restaurant where the other diners were all paid extras), then a “cute” date based on the gentleman’s real-life job (Emily perched in the cockpit of a plane; Emily getting a riding lesson from the real-life cowboy), and finally a long, leisurely, wine-soaked chat in bed, followed by . . .

  Well, the first few times, what followed was difficult. The difficulty sometimes turned into multiple takes and humiliating long afternoons. Emily’s “magic touch” had completely failed her. It was impossible for her to concentrate on someone else’s body with a forest of microphones and camera lenses staring her down. The cowboy had taken two hours to get an erection, and then had threatened to beat up one of the cameramen who laughed at the wrong moment. Another man, an oceanographer who had a fascinating story to tell but a childish sense of humor, had been incapable of stopping himself from saying the wrong thing while they were fucking. In the middle of the sex scene, he would say something like “Wait. What’s that birthmark? Why—you’re my sister!” He’d apologized later, confessing, “Well, it felt so good when you laughed.”

  By the second season, she’d begun to relax more. The magic touch returned, and she began to enjoy the way men reacted to her. Making them shift from self-conscious posing to uncontrolled sexuality gave her a feeling of power, not to mention the actual fucking, which was often a fantasy come true. At the same time, she became comfortable being sexual in front of an audience; she could either blank out the cameras or perversely enjoy the illicit thrill of being watched.

  But of course, by the second season, she hadn’t had sex off camera for a year. She’d been too preoccupied and too busy getting used to her new life to think about dating. So it became perfectly natural to fall into a sex trance in a TV studio, knowing that any minute the director could interrupt with a request. “Turn a little toward camera one.” “Can we have more vocalizing?” All of this became part of sex, until when she was attracted to a man off camera, she immediately imagined him in that double-king-sized bed, surrounded by film equipment.

  “I’m worried that I’m becoming strange,” she told Babylona. “What if I can never have a normal relationship after this?”

  “Oh, you’ll have normal relationships,” Babylona said, with a sad tinge to her voice. “You’ll fall in love and desert me; I can tell these things. It’s tragic.”

  But Emily was not so sure. The show had become a crazy dream world of sensuality. She would wander through the city, noticing all the good-looking men and wondering if they had a story, if she could get them on the show. One day she actually struck up a conversation with an absurdly sexy man in a bar, who turned out to be a successful artist and a fan of In Depth. He was the first near-celebrity she’d had on the show—the first person, anyhow, who had considered it a possible boost to his career. The day after it aired, her producers were besieged by phone calls from slightly less well-known artists. Soon Emily was sleeping with a series of C-list celebrities trying to become B-list celebrities. At that point, the show became something that was written about in Newsweek: a symptom of a decadent age. Emily was suddenly famous as an emblem of the “pornification” of media.

  It had never occurred to her to think of herself in that light. Porn had always existed (well, as long as people could draw). And she wasn’t selling sex on a major network; it was a porn channel. A place people went to specifically for porn. And, once she thought about it, she herself didn’t approve of pornography becoming a part of mainstream culture. She found herself in a bar one night with her friend Jared (internationally renowned star of Mile-High Club), both of them tipsily denouncing pornification. “It’s horrible how kids’ first experience of sex is Internet porn nowadays,” she was saying. “I mean, I never had that. I got to come to it from my own . . . you know . . . my private fantasies that were really about falling in love.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “up to a point. Like, I watched porn when I was a teenager, but it wasn’t so normalized. You didn’t think that was all sex was about.”

  “And it’s different for girls,” she said with a touch of anger. “I just think of thirteen-year-old girls seeing something like In Depth and it makes me feel sick.”

  Here she noticed two men at the next booth eavesdropping intently and looked fiercely at the floor. She heard one of them say to the other in an undertone, “You’re right. That can’t be Emily Lister.”

  It was also then that the hate mail began, in tandem with a flood of love letters and proposals of marriage. Looking back on it, she didn’t know how she’d maintained any balance at all. Jared was helpful—he was going through his own crisis, giving up on-screen sex just as she was getting used to it. He and Emily would spend long nights together, talking about all the stresses and the moral dilemmas until the sun came up. He was also the first person she had private sex with in the In Depth era. He turned out to be a thoughtful, sensitive lover as well as a wonderful confidant, although their relationship never had a romantic component. It was the only time she’d been able to have sex with someone whom she loved as a friend.

  And then she’d met Evan. Their relationship had started on the show. He was a fashion designer with a bad-boy reputation. Being a straight male designer gave him privileged access to models, of which he took full advantage—before and after he began to go out with Emily. When she found out he was still sleeping with other women, he said, “You do remember how we met, right? I mean, I can go get images of you cheating on me from the Internet right now, if you really want to have this argument.”

  And when she said she would give up her job, he stammered and said, “Oh . . . you couldn’t do that. It’s your dream.”

  It had never been her dream. Maybe, in a weak moment, the five-room apartment she’d just bought overlooking Central Park was her dream. When she was an awkward teenager, being on Hottest Women lists, as she routinely was now, could have been her dream. But . . .

  “My dream, for your information, was to be a veterinarian,” she’d told him furiously.

  Well, she could hardly blame him for laughing.

  Babylona was no help at all. She wanted to be a help, but she just didn’t understand Emily’s psychology. She admitted as much herself.

  “I am sorry about Evan,” she’d said with real sympathy. “He was such a beautiful man. But only one man for the rest of your life? I don’t know how you people face the idea. It’s like only eating steak for the rest of you life. However good the steak . . . I suppose Evan is still taboo. Oh, I see. Well, I will tear up his number, cross my
heart.”

  Now, in her third year of In Depth, Emily was both more comfortable with the unsavory fame, and more certain that she wanted to leave. Some days, the only thing that stopped her from writing a letter of resignation was the image of herself in a class on canine respiratory illnesses, hearing the inevitable giggles and whispers from the people behind her. There would be rude come-ons, cattiness from other women. And although she hated the notoriety, surely life would seem boring without it? Would she really be happy to go back to being an ordinary person?

  All this was turning in the back of her mind as she accompanied Ralph Anderman into his Upper East Side pied-à-terre. When he’d asked her to lunch, she’d assumed it would be at a restaurant. But of course he couldn’t be seen with her without risking gossip about their relationship. The idea depressed her even as she was glad to be with him alone. His apartment windows overlooked the park, from almost exactly opposite her apartment building. She knew, with a sinking feeling, that she was going to be looking for his window at night. In spite of herself, she took notice of the floor—twenty-one—and figured out which corner of the building it was, ensuring later sleepless nights.

  The living room they were entering was a huge sweep of gleaming wood floor on two levels, and the side overlooking the park was glass from floor to ceiling. The view was breathtaking. The furniture was a motley collection of antiques, with the odd masculine wrong note thrown in here and there—a dartboard over the chesterfield armchair, a punching bag hanging beside an ornately carved bookshelf. The bookshelf itself held a jumble of reference books, classics, airport novels, and—she noticed with an odd tenderness—children’s books that he had obviously saved from his own early years. (Thanks to her researchers, she knew Ralph had no children. He had, in fact, never had a relationship that lasted longer than three months, which had made her feel a certain kinship to him. At four months, Evan was her personal long-distance record.)