by Todd Grimson
From the jaguar couch, her tongue throbbing, she climbed up the ladder without a backward glance, languid and sure, graceful as an animal, in harmony. She closed the trapdoor, arranged the rug, and returned to the bedroom, where Christine, watching her, lying on her side, propped up on an elbow, smiled at her, and Lisa bent over to kiss her, they lay side by side and slept heavily, without remorse.
EIGHTEEN
In the morning they awoke almost simultaneously and, yawning, looked into each other’s eyes and knew … that they had shared the same dream.
Christine said, tasting her lips, “Your blood is in my mouth.” Lisa’s tongue was swollen and sore. Had it really been pierced? How fast could it possibly heal?
They raced into the front room, pulled back the Turkish rug … to reveal nothing. The trapdoor was gone.
“God!” Lisa exclaimed, letting herself fall down onto the couch in dismay
Christine walked around, yawning again, sleepy, thinking—she made coffee—and then, when she came back into the room, bursting to ask questions, Lisa stopped her, rather wild-eyed, pointing—and, looking down at her own left ankle, Christine saw, to her amazement, an arrangement of flowers on an entwined vine.
She couldn’t believe it. She tried to wash it off. It appeared to be a fresh tattoo.
“How have you handled this shit?” Christine said. “It’s all true, isn’t it?”
“I’m such an asshole,” she said, a while later, drinking coffee. “I
couldn’t understand what you were going through, I refused to accept it … I just thought I would wait, see what happened to you … whether you were crazy or not, or what. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course I forgive you. I don’t blame you.”
“Also, I … I’ve been a little judgmental, like the way it looked when you got the job from Jules Brandenberg. And then I had the nerve to fucking ask you for a job!”
Christine seemed quite moved by the revelation of her hypocrisy … and she kept looking down at her bare ankle to see if the decoration might magically disappear. They talked about the dream: Christine had not gone down the ladder, but she had looked down, observing Lisa, and seen the mysterious couch.
“I don’t know why Boro would mark you,” Lisa said. “It might be just—some kind of overflow.”
The phone rang, and Lisa answered it there in the kitchen. It sounded like someone was asking her out; the banality of this brought Christine somewhat back to ordinary life, and she realized she was supposed to be in Century City by noon. Working on an independent film, helping with postproduction sound. Foley walking, for Assbackward, a sex flick directed by Evelyn Roo. Everything, the smallest atmospheric noise, needed to be dubbed.
“Tonight? Sure…. Yeah, that sounds good…. No, why don’t I come over there, so I’ll have my car…. Really? OK…. Yeah, I’ll see you then…. Sure.”
Lisa hung up and said to Christine, “That was Selwyn Popcorn. We’re going to have dinner tonight, at some Italian place he knows. You heard about his divorce? Well, somehow he got to keep the house.”
“What’s he like?”
Lisa gave Christine a calculating, knowingly ironic (and self-ironic) smile. “He’s probably, really, if you think about it … a lot like you would expect. He lives inside his head. I’m studying him,” she said, more seriously, “and he’s studying me.”
“Does that bother you?”
“No. It’s worth it. He didn’t come on to me at all in Berlin. Now I think he wants it.”
Together, they laughed. Lisa’s tongue hurt, not too badly—it ached. The pain reminded her that it was a muscle, sensitive, subtle, constantly used.
“You know,” Christine said, “Manoa might really catch on. Roy Hardway’s great in it. I want to see it again—there’s so much to see. Just on the level of spectacle, it should have its cult.”
“Roy does what Roy does best… kills as many people as he can.”
NINETEEN
When Selwyn Popcorn saw Lisa Nova drive up and park her some-what-the-worse-for-wear red sports car in the turnaround, he thought, I should marry her, just for the stimulation and adventure. Another divorce wouldn’t hurt me at all.
He was still enough of the old school that the tattoos got to him— they made her look like a whore, and this whiplash feeling excited him, the erotic curiosity it aroused was overwhelming to him right now.
She was, today, in the sunshine, nubile in an extremely short dress, red and orange melting sunbursts on white, bare thighs and calves, dusty cowboy boots with a design, bracelets and long dangly Aztec earrings, sunglasses, puffy lips. She smiled as soon as she saw him, and Popcorn was in love. This was exactly what he wanted, he’d known it as soon as she’d departed from Berlin.
“Do you want to have a drink? You look a trifle … harassed.”
“Yes, I would like something. You’ve heard, I’m sure, that they fired me from Ripper IP.”
Popcorn shook his head, but he was lying. Hearing it had moved him to call.
“Well, Robert Hand’s behind it, really,” she said. “I don’t even care, I think it’s for the best. Oh cool, is that champagne?”
“Yes. It’s something Phoebe bought a long time ago, as an investment. Do you see? Roy Lichtenstein designed the bottle … let’s see if it’s any good.” Popcorn removed the cork with a minimum of fuss and poured them each a glass.
“I love champagne,” Lisa said. She drank down about half her glass. “Idea One wants to distribute my film. They’re offering to do more for it than they did for the first one, but I’m not very excited. I guess I imagined that if I was working on Ripper, Hand would say yeah, let’s pick up Manoa, promote her like, I don’t know …”
“You’re the new bad girl,” Popcorn said.
“Exactly. An image, a hook.” She finished off the glass of champagne,
looking around in more detail for the first time. It was a luxurious house. “Do you have a swimming pool?” she asked.
“Yes. This way.” But first he poured her more champagne. Her eyes were a bit red, like she was tired or sad, but she was young and full of vitality, her body was full of life.
“I’ve had trouble with Robert Hand myself,” Popcorn said, as they strolled out onto the terrace to look down at the turquoise waters of the pool. There wasn’t much of a breeze, but the waters lightly rippled and moved. “Have you ever met him? He’s brilliant, in his way, but he’s a technocrat. All he knows are his focus groups, he’s always gathering data … and so he ends up only wanting to OK appropriated projects—to borrow a word—kid movies, and special effects. And anything with the short-term star flavor of the month. He’s so bedazzled by his irrefutable computer projections that he becomes infantilized by the machinery, it’s something I’ve noticed happens to a lot of technically brilliant men—they become big babies. They stay childish in the bad sense. I don’t know if it happens to women.”
“Don’t look at me” Lisa said. “I’m technically inept.”
Popcorn was puzzled by this—the models and shots were so wonderful in Manoa, and the photography was consciously beautiful to the point of showing off. He felt he had to handle her carefully. If he pressed her at the wrong moment or contradicted her on something trivial, she might react perversely, irrationally … she was complicated, she had secrets, problems he could not guess.
“My assistant is arriving tomorrow, from London,” Lisa said. “And I don’t know where to put her. She’s a lesbian, she’s idealistic, she loves art … but my apartment’s too small. Also, I’ve got a detective following me.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Nehi Laughton hired him, just out of spite, I guess. He can’t accept that I don’t know where Roy is anymore.”
“Why don’t you stay here for a while?” Selwyn Popcorn said. “There’s a maid, a cook, a gardener, my assistant—you’ve met her— and me. What’s your friend’s name?”
“Raelyn.”
“Have her stay here too.”
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely. I like having people around me, that’s why I’m usually so happy on location. I’d almost go so far as to say I enjoy chaos.”
“Is there a dog here?”
“No. Why? Do you have a dog?”
“No,” Lisa said. “But if I come, Tve got to bring my cat. I don’t want some Doberman killing him.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that.”
He could not, however he tried, completely conceal the sexual component of his interest in her, but that was all right. He was older, he wasn’t as attractive or sexy as any number of young men she could have—his best chance was to admit everything, all his vulnerabilities, it was much better to throw himself on her mercy, in effect, than to show false ego … that was how he might look a fool. (All of this transaction, or most of it, was beneath the surface of their social intercourse, on the more significant level of looks and nonverbal signals, little shrugs, expressions, and smiles. A raised shoulder, a feline stretch, secret intelligence passed through an occult gaze.)
They went to a trattoria-style restaurant in Santa Monica. It was trendy, but Selwyn knew Antonio, the chef. He would be recognized, and there would be gossip about him and Lisa. This sort of publicity wouldn’t do either of them any harm.
They sat in the small loft, under wooden rafters; it was more private. Antonio came out to say hello. Nehi Laughton and his wife, along with yet another vice president in charge of development, Witkiewicz or something—passed by on their way out, as Lisa and Selwyn were eating antipasto. The superagent gave them a kind of friendly wave; Popcorn slightly inclined his head, smiling impersonally, and he was amazed to see the dirty look Lisa gave Laughton, her open mouth twisted, and she was almost ugly for a split second, it really looked like she hated the guy. She should learn to control herself better, Selwyn thought.
Back at his house, there was some vague intention of watching something in his screening room, but she chose an opportune moment to suddenly kiss him, and the only plan left was to climb the stairs and walk down the hall, open the door, and go to bed.
TWENTY
Sex with Selwyn Popcorn had no particular interest for Lisa, considered simply as sex. It was half-assed. (This is the term she would use
to describe it to Christine.) A man of forty-nine, he had a little bit of a hard time getting and keeping it up, and so she spent quite some time sucking him, for a few minutes beginning to fear (defensively, but with cruelty) that he’d be Mister Softee, and this affected how she experienced it as he ate her, which he did for a long time, lost in his own movie … she was pleased when his erection became dependably hard. She liked him, after all. She liked him a great deal. But her tongue hurt, it felt swollen, and after a good spell of giving him a blowjob, her jaw was threatening to lock up. She just wanted to fuck and get it over with. She concentrated with her eyes shut tight, allowing him to be the audience, the friction wasn’t real exciting, it was boring but she liked it … sure, she had an orgasm. She let him see her come.
The transaction’s residue left her in a bad mood the next morning. He didn’t seem to notice, which was cool. He was preoccupied by a looming Santa Barbara test screening of his new film, Call It Love. Lisa did want to stay here for a few days, maybe a week. She felt that here she would be safe. His place functioned as a hideout, and she would have to keep him under her spell to some extent.
He reiterated, evidently meaning it, that he’d expect to see her and Raelyn here later on. He kissed her without trying to give her any tongue, and then a limousine came to pick him up, there was some important meeting he had to attend. Lisa said hi to his wan young assistant, Nicole, who in Berlin hadn’t seemed to know whether to like her or not. Now she smiled, letting this smile convey that she recognized Lisa and they had an invented retrospective history of mutual friendliness and cordial respect.
Lisa went home to get some clothes and Caz. She checked, nervously, under the rug, but again there was no trapdoor. There was a message on her phone: Christine, calling from Adrian’s. And the head of security at the studio, sounding menacing, asking her to immediately return the gun. Maybe she should. Could she lie and say she’d lost it or that it had been stolen from her?
Caz sat on the kitchen table, like an Egyptian cat, posing, content in his being with her and in casually keeping an eye on her as she sat there in her peach-colored underwear and the cowboy boots, reading last month’s issue of Elle. False eyelashes were back. She didn’t believe it. She ate a spoonful of peanut butter, some grapes, a banana, a nectarine. She was tired; maybe drinking some more Lapsang souchong tea would help to clear her brain.
She wondered what the tattoo on Christine meant. It had shocked her, and yet … she had been glad. It made Christine understand, at least much better than she had. Maybe it was possible that together they could actually go into a dream … and direct it, and the vision would be preserved on film. Access to the unconscious, the question of a collective image bank for the whole species, a honeycombed structure with endless rooms and endless access codes … it was fascinating. If Christine could help her, she would feel far more able to use the Mayan tongue ritual or whatever it took.
There was a noise. Someone was messing with the front door. It almost sounded like the mailman; or maybe it was the person who’d left the script. Or the police. She went in there, intending to look through the peephole—the door came open; Duane Moyer came in and shut it behind him, throwing the deadbolt.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Lisa said. “Get out of here. You fucker, I’ll call the police.”
She felt at a disadvantage, wearing only semitransparent underwear and cowboy boots. She didn’t like the look on Moyer’s face. She was scared of him.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said.
“I know. But you’re trespassing now. What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s been driving me crazy … I’ve been sitting in my car, thinking about it, sitting there, hour after hour … when the gig ran out on Monday, I had to start doing it all myself.”
Lisa thought she understood this, that Nehi Laughton had stopped paying. The implications were unsettling. Duane Moyer wore a lemon yellow and azure Hawaiian shirt and tan jeans, and desert boots. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and she had the sense that he hadn’t washed. He came closer, stepping just enough in the way that he cut off the escape route to the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, phone … she bumped against the piano and said, “I can pay you. I’ll pay you to stop following me, to leave me alone.”
“You’re not listening. We need to communicate. There’s something I want to communicate to you. It’s important that you understand.”
“Tell me. I’ll listen.”
His eyes saw her, but they were not eyes she could stand to look into. She was so stupidly vulnerable—but who could have known he was going to get obsessed and go crazy and use a credit card or whatever to get in her door?
“You’ll listen to me, huh?” Moyer knew she was afraid, knew she was just trying to keep him talking. He smiled. “I saw that Mexican come over the other night. What was he like? Was he a good fuck?”
“We didn’t do that,” Lisa said. “He’s a boxer; he never has sex before a fight. Look, you better leave. If you leave now, I won’t even call the police. You’ve been in your car too long; you need to go home and get some sleep.”
“And that skinhead,” Moyer went on. “And your girlfriend. And then the famous fucking director—I want some of it. I’ve been watching you, I feel like I know you, but we’ll know each other much better after this.” To her vast alarm, he pulled a coiled length of rope out of his back pocket, still just staring at her, not looking down at his hands as he tested it, stretching, letting most of it unfurl from tense, knuckly, strong hands.
“I want to get to know you,” he said, “and I want you to get to know me. I fuck like a nigger”—at which point she made a bound to her right, to go over the couch and ou
t the front door. She was quick and got by him at first, he touched but couldn’t hold her, but then he caught her at the door, she screamed and he said, “Shut up or I’ll kill you.” She fought him and he twisted and threw her down onto the floor, swinging her like somebody tackling a quarterback, landing on top of her on purpose to crush her—the combined impact of hitting the floor and then as she bounced having this big man crash down on her with all his considerable bulk and weight—she was stunned for a while. He tore off her bra and then started trying to loop some of the rope around her left wrist … when she screamed again, as loudly as she could, he smacked her with his fist and then couldn’t resist hitting her again. She tried to knee him, and he pinned her down, he was much stronger, and he put his knees into her thighs, opening them, holding both of her wrists pinned down above her head with his left hand.
“Don’t do it,” she begged him, “don’t hurt me.”
“I don’t have to be rough,” he said, his breathing slowing little by little. “If you don’t fight me, I won’t hurt you.”
He was going to, though, she thought, but she went limp. He was determined to tie both of her wrists. His knees hurt her thighs a great deal. She couldn’t struggle again until he was off her legs.
Luckily, he apparently wanted to rape her in the bedroom. How could he get a hard-on from all this? She was feeling strangely sure that she could do something to him; her body was cold but she was only waiting, absolutely alert, for the right moment to surge. He smelled bad, there were all kinds of strangely intense smells stuck to him. Stale sweat under his arms, now renewed, yesterday’s Big Mac, coffee, candy bars, peppermint Life Savers, a trace of urine, of old shit, upholstery from his car, gasoline, french fries …