Plus One

by Christopher Noxon

  Alex kept his focus on Zev as he walked over to the Jacuzzi. Dressed in a snug leather jacket with the hood of a sweatshirt poking out from under the collar, he spoke briefly with an assistant and checked a light meter attached to a belt loop. As the two talked, Zev kept one hand on the assistant’s shoulder. Okay, Alex thought—he’s a toucher. Maybe it’s an Israeli thing.

  On the other side of the lawn, Alex caught sight of Katherine Pool, cross-legged in a high director’s chair and fussed over by two assistants and Dani Dooling, the Diva Whisperer. Katherine’s performances had been flat the past few episodes, which Figgy attributed to cosmetic surgery or a new med combo. Her face had always had a vaguely sock puppet–like quality, all wiggly and expressive. But now it was as flat and hard as a dinner plate. At the moment she stared impassively into the middle distance. Beside her, one assistant dabbed her forehead and a second held a tray of freshly cut pineapple spears. Katherine’s neck was long and luxuriously curved. Dani wedged herself into the scrum, whispering notes for the upcoming scene.

  Despite Figgy’s initial worries, Dani was turning out to be a godsend. Where Figgy approached her star like a toddler whose tantrums would only be encouraged if indulged, Dani was only too happy to sit for hours as Katherine recited her grievances. Eventually she’d run out of steam and they’d move on to the only subject that seemed to bring Katherine any real happiness: Dani as a makeover model.

  “Just let me get my hands on you,” she’d say, stroking Dani’s chin. Katherine had taken her on as a sort of top-to-tail makeover project. Dani now showed up to work each day in one of Katherine’s castoff outfits and a new Kate-approved hairstyle. It seemed creepy to Alex, this grown woman submitting so completely to a celebrity’s control, but the results were undeniable—Dani looked terrific.

  • • •

  The crew was setting up by the Jacuzzi, and Alex went over to check on the water. There had been a whole rigmarole over the Jacuzzi after the mother of the brooding, blond-haired Cliff Clampert, who played Toni the madam’s teenage son, complained he was “uncomfortable” with standard chlorination. He wouldn’t agree to do the Jacuzzi scene unless they equipped the pool with reverse-osmosis filtration. The production refused, so Mrs. Clampert threatened to lodge a grievance with SAG. So now, seven grand later, the Jacuzzi had been drained, retrofitted, and refilled with water as clear and chemical-free as Evian.

  Alex turned around at the percussive slap of flip-flops on the granite pavers. Coming around the corner from the trailers were nine women in cotton bathrobes. They’d just come out of hair and makeup, and their eyes were huge and raccoon-like beneath thick streaks of kohl. Alex hopped up and made way for today’s crop of hookers.

  It was a running bit on Tricks that the stable of prostitutes changed from week to week. Hardly an episode went by when Toni wasn’t breaking in a new hire or headhunting new girls to meet her clients’ ever-enlarging list of specialty kinks. This week’s crop included a heavily tattooed Indian girl, a couple of Kardashian lookalikes, and a freckled redhead who Alex guessed was about seven months pregnant.

  One by one, the women dropped their robes and took up positions in and around the water. Just like that, there were breasts everywhere. Big, bulbous, tiny, pointy, natural, fabricated—he’d never seen so many boobs in one place. Alex’s mouth went dry.

  “Oh Alex! There you are!”

  He turned, quickly scanning the crowd to confirm that the voice booming across the patio indeed belonged to his mother. She hustled through the crowd, charging ahead of a flustered production assistant.

  How had he forgotten? His mother. Coming today from Ojai. 10:30. To see the house.

  She crossed the patio and enfolded him in a big hug. Alex grinned weakly.

  “Cashmere?” she said, smoothing his sleeve as she pulled away, oblivious to the scene behind them. “My sweater, on the other hand,” she motioned to the nubby purple pullover she had on. “Acrylic. Sums it up, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh stop it—you look great,” he said, taking a quick sideways step in an attempt to block her view. She’d dressed up for the occasion, in spangly slippers and some sort of beaded hair band.

  “Alex, do you know there are police outside? They wouldn’t let me in. They questioned me.”

  “That’s just the detail guys—they’re retired cops,” Alex said. “That’s their job—security for the shoot.”

  She shook her head furiously, jostling the brown-frosted sunglasses propped on her forehead. “Well if they’re retired I don’t see why they’re allowed to wear those awful costumes.”

  “They’re uniforms, ma. You made it here, so I guess—”

  Alex stopped short as his mother looked past him and registered the scene around the Jacuzzi. Figgy was checking in with each of the day players, who’d arranged themselves in a stunning tableau of extended limbs, splayed pelvises, and oiled rumps. Two of the Latino girls—twins?—had taken up positions on either side of Cliff, whose expression, Alex noticed, had gotten noticeably less relaxed.

  “Oh hi, Jane!” Figgy called from across the water. “Good to see you!”

  Jane brought a quivering hand to her chest. “Good to see you,” she said.

  Alex was frozen, unsure whether to stay put or grab his mom and flee. Figgy flashed another smile and got back to work, kneeling beside the Indian woman, who was tossing a great bundle of dark hair over her headrest. “Nice vejazzling!” Figgy cooed, nodding down at the woman’s midsection, where a glittering constellation of rhinestones burst forth in the place of pubic hair. “Let’s get that in the shot. Don’t hurt yourself, but really stretch out—arch that back!”

  Figgy reached under the woman’s back and tilted her pelvis a few inches forward. Then she turned and called out to the rest of the set: “Don’t be shy, ladies! Absolutely no crossing of legs! Remember: premium cable!”

  Alex took a quick, sharp breath and looked over at his mom. She was rigid in the same stricken pose, her breath sucked in and one hand clenched over her chest.

  “Are you… okay, Ma?” he asked. “I probably should’ve warned you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she finally said, blowing out a long hot breath. “I’m just fine.”

  • • •

  She was fine, too, a lot finer than Alex. When the makeup artist appeared to administer spritzes of moisture to the women’s cheeks and shoulders, he looked away, crossing his arms tightly and trying desperately to think of a single thing more uncomfortable than admiring naked women with his mother.

  “I’m so glad you invited me over,” she finally said. “Why didn’t you do it sooner?”

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  The fact was, he’d been trying to get her to visit for weeks. She’d just been so busy, she said. A couple of years ago she’d secured a state grant for a program devoted to introducing fourth graders to the protest songs of Appalachia. It was great on paper—“Grant-makers go absolutely ga-ga for Appalachia,” she said—but Alex could only wonder what sort of response this hefty white lady got from crammed classrooms to the same loud, throaty, super-enunciated rendition of “If I Had a Hammer” that had pretty much been the soundtrack to his childhood.

  “How about that tour?” he asked.

  Jane kept her eyes locked forward, her only response a long, low moan.

  “Can you try to contain yourself?” he said.

  She turned toward him, annoyed. “What?”

  “Maybe dial down the ogling?” he whispered.

  “Oh Alex. You’re missing the point entirely.”

  She motioned toward the pregnant woman, who was now splayed across a lounge chair, her great swollen belly huge and glistening.

  “She’s obviously doing a statement about fertility,” she said, her eyes locked forward. “That lone boy, so isolated and ignored, amidst all that female power. It’s a Sapphic fantasia.”

  “Pretty sure it’s just a Jacuzzi full of hookers.”

  “Whatever it is,” she said,
“it’s marvelous.”

  Zev called “action,” and two of the women closest to the camera began an animated exchange about the environmental impact of petroleum-based rubber sex toys. “Oh, Tammy,” one said, “you lube up a daikon radish and it’s just as good as a dildo.” The other women giggled and arched, the lot of them completely ignoring Cliff in the back of the shot, whose expression turned progressively more intense. Alex noticed a handheld camera positioned off to the side to get a close-up of the water near Cliff’s foot, which was pressed up against a jet. As Cliff began to thrash around in the water, Alex felt his face go hot.

  “Okay—time to go,” he said.

  “But it’s just getting good,” his mom whispered as he hustled her away. “That boy? Can’t you see? No one’s even touching him! And he’s about to….”

  “I know what he’s about to do,” Alex said. “Let’s go inside. Please. Please, Mom.”

  He led her away from the cameras and toward a pair of French doors leading to the house. Swap the naked day players for his grandmother and the scene was a faithful reenactment of what was quite possibly the most humiliating episode of Alex’s adolescence. It was the footgasm story. His footgasm story. Figgy often used material from her own life for the show, but she hadn’t warned him about this. It was especially bad because of the presence of his mom, who he blamed for the whole thing. When he was ten or eleven, she’d sat him down with a stack of richly illustrated books and magazines to give him a complete rundown on “the many beautiful varieties of sexual expression.” Intercourse, cunnilingus, fellatio, sadomasochism, group sex, transgender issues—she’d covered it all. He seemed to remember a detour into the topic of fisting.

  This graphic crash course on the subject of sex did not have the liberating effect his mother had intended. After the talk, Alex knew abstractly that boys played with their penises and that was okay; that knowledge was filed alongside the fact that some men took drugs that allowed them to grow breasts and that some cut off their penises and that these brave and oppressed people were called transgendered. Stunned by all the new information, Alex steered well clear of his own equipment long after other boys his age had become self-taught experts in the operation of theirs. He finally got some direct experience at the age of fifteen while visiting his grandparent’s condo in Palm Springs and resting his foot against the jet of a Jacuzzi. In an instant his legs straightened out, his belly got quivery, and he exploded right there, a few feet away from his grandma.

  Jacuzzis had never been the same for Alex after that.

  • • •

  He could still hear the teenage actor making exaggerated whoops of pleasure as he and Jane made their way up the main stairwell. In Sylvie’s bathroom, he pointed out the pink-and-black checkerboard tile, determined to change the subject from the scene downstairs. After leading her into the hall and pointing out the carved walnut moldings, he noticed his mother’s expression turn, her eyebrows arch and mouth set.

  “Amazing, right?” he asked, standing on the balcony of the master bedroom, looking out over the front lawn. “I’d like to get some solar panels in here, maybe a cistern to help with the water.”

  Jane made a noncommittal murmur, then turned away and kept walking. He followed her to a pair of pocket doors that led to a spare bedroom that Judy Benjamin had lined with floor-to-ceiling shoe racks. Oh God, Alex thought: not the shoe closet. For all her sex-positive, “Free to Be You and Me” tolerance, he knew his mother to be a woman of scorchingly severe opinions about certain things. SUVs. Golf. Obscenely large shoe closets.

  Alex knew he shouldn’t care what she thought—what did he expect from a mountain mystic with a LIVE SIMPLY SO OTHERS MAY SIMPLY LIVE bumper sticker on her guitar case and defiantly hairy legs and armpits (Jane apparently being the last lesbian alive still waging war against the hypocrisy of gender-based personal grooming)? He was a grown man with a life of his own—why did he physically flinch at the thought of her disapproval?

  Jane ran a finger down the metal rack, and then swiveled around to face him. “All this space!”

  Alex leaned up against the doorframe and hung his head.

  “Every mother hopes her children find some security,” she said, sweeping her hand out with a regal wave. “But this—this is something else.”

  “I know—it’s way more than we need. But do you, you know… like it?”

  She dropped her arms to her sides and released a big laugh. “What’s not to like? It’s a dream!”

  “I thought you’d be, I don’t know, offended. By the excess. I’m still kind of shocked I get to live here. I mean, this couldn’t possibly be my house, right?”

  “Oh sweetie,” she said. “Of course it’s your house—yours and that marvelous woman of yours. Just look at her down there at the center of all that action.”

  Alex went over to the window. The lighting guys were inflating a huge, white hot-air balloon that mimicked the effulgence of moonlight. He spotted Figgy back on her canvas chair, huddled with a costume guy.

  His mom came over and stood beside him, her fingers cradling a turquoise amulet strung around her neck with a leather cord. “And just think how great this house is going to feel after a good cleansing.”

  “We already had a service come in and do the floors—”

  “No sweetie,” she said. “A spiritual cleansing. Deny it all you want, but Alex—you’re sensitive to these things. You feel all the bottled-up energy in here, all that residual juju.”

  “Oh, Ma.” There was no way he was going to pay some Ojai crackpot to come wave feathers around.

  “I put together a bag of goodies—it’s in my car,” she said, practically levitating with excitement. “Wild sage from the mountain. Vials of spring water blessed by a nephew of the Krishnamurti. It’ll be fun! The kids will love it—did you know that it’s an ancient Native American rite to urinate on the perimeter of a new homestead?”

  Alex smiled and agreed that yes, his kids would undoubtedly love that particular ritual. But he knew what he’d do with his mother’s bag of mystical do-dads—the same thing he’d done with Joan’s assortment of mezuzahs. Show it to Figgy for laughs, then stash it away in a junk drawer and forget about it.

  Jane touched his shoulder. “It’s a beautiful house, honey. It’s even more beautiful because you and Figgy are in it. You have to understand, Alex, honey—never in my lifetime did I think that we’d make such tremendous gains so fast, that our daughters would achieve so much. We thought the movement would be a long, slow, gradual struggle. But look around—right here! We won!”

  She smiled triumphantly, and then stepped around Alex toward the door. “The age of testosterone is over,” she said. “Now show me this solarium of yours.”

  • • •

  At the end of the tour, Jane went out to her car to fetch her bag of magical do-dads, and Alex marched over to the half-circle of canvas folding chairs where Figgy and Dani were huddled around a monitor playing back the Jacuzzi scene.

  Alex was relieved to discover that Zev was nowhere to be seen. He watched a few seconds of Cliff’s contorted face on the monitor and then hooked a finger under one of Figgy’s headphones and popped them off.

  “Footgasm? Really?”

  “Oh, honey!” Figgy made a half-grimace, half-laugh. “I know—I forgot to tell you! It’s just that I mentioned it in the room and everyone agreed it’s the best first orgasm story ever.”

  Alex didn’t return the smile. “You might have checked. You know—before using the unbelievably embarrassing thing I told you privately… in your TV show!”

  Figgy started to respond, but Dani came to her aid. “Oh, Alex, we absolutely had to use it. Obviously, we added the naked girls—no one would ever believe how it really happened, would they? Seriously, did you actually—splooge? Next to your grandmother?”

  Alex coughed. “She was a very youthful eighty-year-old. And water pressure in the seventies was entirely different.”

  Dani hopped up and dow
n and clapped. “Oh, you are hi-larious,” she said. “He is, Figgy. Just like you’re always saying. You really are the man behind the woman.”

  Alex kept an accusing stare focused on Figgy.

  She got up from her chair and wrapped her arms around him. “Oh shit honey,” she said. Alex could hear the concern in her voice—it hadn’t occurred to her before this moment what a betrayal this was. “I’m sorry for not talking to you about it beforehand. But I’ve been so crazy. I haven’t seen the kids in a week. I’m so exhausted I can barely walk. I just forgot. Don’t be mad.”

  Alex softened, his complaint now dwarfed by her upset. He knew the drill. They were back in the misery marathon—whoever had it worse earned the credit and forgiveness. And according to those rules, she’d just inched ahead. “It’s okay,” he said. “I guess no one but us knows it’s… true, right?”

  Figgy made a quick—Alex thought a little too quick—pulling-it-together snuffle and then collected herself, looking up at the house. “So how was the tour? Jane give you grief?”

  “No—not really,” he said. “Apparently she made it all possible.”

  “What? How’s that?”

  “You know, by singlehandedly forging the way for you—and women everywhere? Kind of like how she invented lesbianism.”

  “Oh right,” Figgy said. “Well, she was a dyke way before it was cool.”

  Dani motioned to the yard, where Jane was barreling onto the grass, her battered guitar swinging at her side. She quickly surveyed the scene, fixing herself on a spot a few feet down a hill from where Zev was about to start the next scene. Jane made a theatrical toss of her pullover and then knelt down and unpacked her instrument.

  Dani arched an eyebrow and smiled warily. “She’s not going to—”

  Alex felt his stomach turn.

  Within a minute, Jane was crouched into a cross-legged position in the grass. She closed her eyes and locked her face in a beatific, rapt expression Alex recognized from a picture on her bathroom wall of Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966. And then she broke into the first chords of “If I Had a Hammer.”