‘What the fuck!’
Violet paused, her mouth open, as Hunter scrambled away from her, finally resting in defensive position against the quilted headboard. It was very difficult to know quite what to say. On the three previous occasions that Violet had tried this move on a new beau, she had never once been met with anything other than honey-dipped delirium. Everyone was different, she supposed.
‘No one, I mean NO ONE, touches the H-Man unless I say so.’
Now at least she knew his nickname for his penis. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Violet. She knew better than to take Hunter’s reaction as a personal affront. Besides, the H-Man was standing to attention, indicating that even if Hunter was committed to the ‘hands off without permission’ rule, the H-Man probably wasn’t. Radiant heat and the glow of a tequila sunrise made him appear, in Violet’s eyes, all the more inviting. She changed position slightly, letting the sheet slip from her shoulders and her hair fall forward as she pressed up onto her hands and knees and crawled, ever so slowly, toward the vigilant defender of virtue. ‘May I,’ she said, her hair brushing the inside of Hunter’s thigh, ‘touch the H-Man?’
The H-Man twitched. Hunter flashed his teeth. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but just this once.’
‘Once,’ of course, turned out to be a flexible limit. Violet stayed with Hunter the whole day, building on the bad start with layers of intensity that left them both crying out for protein. After a long shower in the turbo-jet multi-massager, during which Violet reached for the H-Man without asking and was not refused, Hunter made Violet poached eggs and smoked salmon on a whole wheat bagel which she consumed with the dedication of a starving artist. Hunter, meanwhile, munched on power bars and turkey jerky, which he washed down with 18 fluid ounces of Gatorade. Thus replenished, they made love on the kitchen bench that previously had only seen the denuded gyrations of strippers and starlets. But this was different. This was silent.
When Hunter finally drove Violet home, they sat parked outside her house for half an hour, talking in playful, intimate tones, their hands toying with fingertips, palms, forearms, Massive Attack on the stereo, the moon a sliver, the stars a minor miracle. When he said goodbye he kissed her shoulder and her eyelids and rested his forehead against hers.
She wouldn’t see him again for almost a month.
35.
‘What is that?’ said Hermes. Although he was peering closely at the shaving mirror, he couldn’t for the life of him make out the image.
‘Try the magnified side,’ Jesus suggested.
Eros obliged and flipped the mirror over, positioning it just above his groin and angling it towards the ceiling, giving Jesus and Hermes a clearer view. ‘What does it look like?’ said Eros. He was still too weak to sit up, and the adrenalin rush precipitated by Alfa’s reaction had sapped whatever strength he had managed to toke from his cinnamon bark. It took all his willpower just to hold up the mirror.
‘It looks like squares,’ said Hermes.
‘Squares?’
‘Colored squares,’ agreed Jesus. ‘But they’re kind of…’ He trailed off, lost for words. He had never seen anything like it before, which didn’t happen very often in his line of work.
‘Do that again!’ commanded Hermes.
‘Do what again?’ said Eros.
‘Shift your business.’
‘My what?’
‘You know, your –’ Hermes paused, glancing sideways at Jesus. Swearing in front of Jesus always made him feel uncomfortable. Not that he really considered ‘penis’ to be a swear word. It was just that he had never heard Jesus say anything more R-rated than ‘ass’, and in that instance Hermes was pretty sure he’d actually meant ‘donkey.’ Fortunately, Eros cottoned on before Hermes had to spell it out.
‘Like that?’ He managed a little side-to-side.
‘Freaky,’ said Hermes. Jesus nodded.
‘What’s freaky?’ Eros was beginning to lose the strength in his arm. ‘I can’t hold this mirror up much longer.’
‘When you move,’ said Hermes, taking over the mirror, ‘the colored squares move too. What does it feel like?’
‘What does what feel like?’
‘YOUR COCK!’ yelled Hermes, losing his patience. ‘Sorry, Jesus,’ he added.
Eros reached down and gave the boys a jiggle. ‘It feels totally normal,’ he said. ‘I don’t really get what she’s done.’
‘I think I know,’ said Jesus. He’d been through a reality TV phase a few years back, and there was something oddly familiar about the dancing squares. Taking out his iPhone, he took a few steps back from the prostrate god and angled down the lens, filling up the screen with Eros’ truncated torso before hitting ‘capture’. ‘Now what does that look like to you?’ he said, handing the image across to Hermes.
‘Holy goat,’ said Hermes. In the broader context, it was perfectly clear. He gazed sympathetically down at his cousin. ‘You’ve been pixelated,’ he said, handing the phone back to Jesus.
‘What?’ Eros demanded in a high pitched panic. He had no idea what ‘pixelated’ meant, but it didn’t sound like ice cream.
Jesus took another look at the picture before passing it down to Eros. ‘I’m guessing you’ve never seen Big Brother Uncut,’ he said.
36.
The plane touched down in Vegas with the weary resignation of a third time bridesmaid. Toward the pointy end, Ares cracked his knuckles and scowled at a passing flight attendant. His decade long campaign for a private jet had finally been put to rest – insofar as the explosive wrath of Zeus could ever be considered restful. But that didn’t mean that Ares had to enjoy slumming it. ‘It is now safe for you to move about the cabin,’ said some aging android with tassels on her tits. It was also safe to assume that Ares was not in the mood for love. During the flight from Los Angeles he had decided to remove every conciliatory impulse, every pacifistic platitude and every redemptive sentiment from the script of Foxhole Fury. In fat red strokes. Fortunately this had only taken him about fifteen minutes, which left him plenty of time to pretend to get drunk, abuse the flight attendants and graffiti the tray table with crimson hieroglyphics.
By the time Kurt Sivitz had traversed the long aisle from coach, Ares had attracted the attention of the co-pilot, a federal marshal and several thin-lipped flight attendants. Ares was refusing to hand over any personal information, save for his crumpled boarding pass, which served only to convince the marshal that ‘Aaron Martini’ was an alias and that the gentleman in 2C was traveling under a false identity. Which, of course, he was. Ares was on a fast track to a cavity search when Kurt intervened, handing out his business card and avoiding disaster by promising to read the marshal’s TV comedy pilot, Kill Patrol.
On the way to the hotel, Ares sobered up instantly. Fake drunkenness, it seemed, didn’t produce the kind of regret and/or contrition that is so often a side effect of genuine drunkenness. As usual, Kurt was left with a butchered script and a gaping hole on the debit side of his gratitude ledger. ‘Fuck you too,’ he muttered under his breath, as his boss casually thanked him, in advance, for ‘taking care’ of the script. By this, Aaron didn’t simply mean that Kurt should incorporate his corrections into a fresh document. What he actually meant was that Kurt should type up the corrections, incorporate them into a fresh document, FedEx them to the director, then spend two hours hosing down the histrionics.
The director was a hot young Norwegian genius. Everyone was agreed on this. His debut feature, Gullalderen Moose, was a haunting, atmospheric examination of black market art trafficking in 1950s Lapland, seen through the eyes of a young Sami girl whose Nazi collaborator father left her a couple of Munch paintings before throwing himself in front of the Oslo Express. After winning the Academy Award for best foreign film, the director moved to New York where he directed a five hour independent feature, a four minute video clip and a one minute commercial, producing the kind of inverse earning curve that would make any good social democrat weep. But instead of crying all the way to the bank, young Øyvin cried
all the way to Los Angeles, where he bought himself a house in Bel Air and a chocolate Labrador that he named Ibsen, until untold confusion at the vet and a sexual identity crisis at the dog park forced him to rename her Coco.
Øyvin was a natural choice for Foxhole Fury. Everyone was agreed on this. Especially his new agent at CAA, his attorney, his accountant, his publicist and his new girlfriend, the hot young Swedish-Iranian rapper, Fatima-K. The only person not convinced was Øyvin himself, but as he had recently acquired an insidious army of support staff, whose yearly wages combined were approximately twice the budget of Gullalderen Moose, he had pretty much resigned himself to the project. Although he had spent most of his two years of compulsory military service making a documentary on transgender naval cadets, he still knew how to fire a rifle and, at a pinch, skin an arctic hare and make a pretty decent stew. After several steak meals at The Palm in West Hollywood and a special delivery of Norwegian raw milk cheese, couriered right to his door, he began to feel confident that he could bring some kind of military realism to the project, especially after the studio promised to bring in Lucia Sanchez, the hot young Mexican writer of the searing Catholic parody, My Heroin Habit, for an expensive rewrite.
Unfortunately, the only line of the rewrite to survive the trip to Las Vegas was half of a moving exchange between the hero, Hawke, and his long-suffering mistress, Lee Lin. In Lucia’s version, Hawke’s angry-yet-lustful: ‘If looks could kill…’ was paired with Lee Lin’s weary-yet-adoring: ‘I could finally stop holding my breath.’ In the version entrusted to Kurt, Lee Lin’s line had been replaced by a SMASH CUT to Hawke blasting his way through a bamboo forest, machine gun on hip, screaming ‘Buddha’s not going to save you now, panda fuckers!’ Kurt was no student of cinema, but he was beginning to suspect that Foxhole Fury might turn out to be the most violent, most offensive and most historically inaccurate war film ever made, in a genre literally bursting at the seams with contenders for the title.
Kurt, of course, had no idea that the reason for his boss’ editorial rage was a close relative of the reason for the anti-anxiety medication that he himself had recently started taking, after doing so well for so long on medical marijuana and self-help books. The ‘restroom incident’ had kicked Kurt into a state of hyper-vigilance, where the augmented sound of his beating heart was like a constant reminder of his romantic inadequacy. His heart, he felt, was literally aching. Of course, if he’d mentioned this to the subject of his heartache, she could have reassured him that his shallow breathing and tensed chest muscles were the cause of this pain and not – poetic though it may seem – his bruised and battered heart. She might also have given him a few pointers on how to recognize the triggers for his panic attacks, how to counteract the physical symptoms and how to detach from his self-defeating thoughts. Unfortunately, Kurt was not familiar with Violet’s professional background and at any rate, preferred to think of her as a gold digging whore.
The Las Vegas production office was situated on an industrial estate on the outskirts of town with a view of an ill-conceived theme park. Kurt didn’t mind. He wasn’t much of a gambler and found strippers intimidating. While it was expected that most of the talent would stay in the casinos, Kurt and the rest of the production staff were to be housed in modest furnished apartments with abrasive towels and a Denny’s around the corner. Regardless of where he was staying, it was inevitable that he would spend most of his time on the strip, cleaning up after Angus ‘Beef’ McDougall, notorious bad-boy, fucknuckle and Hunter’s co-star. Kurt, of course, had no say in casting but if he had, he would have offered his pinkie fingernail and a pair of pliers to the casting director in exchange for pretty much any other actor in the world. However, women’s magazine readers regularly ranked Beef more highly that Hunter as the bad boy with whom they would most like to cheat on their husbands, which pretty much made him a permanent fixture on the Olympic Studios marquis. Thank god he got his brains blown out by a militant yak herder at the end of the first act, was all Kurt could say.
Kurt was the first one to arrive at the accommodation and he took advantage of the quiet time to clear his head, using a little ritual he had developed over the years. He set the air conditioner to freezing. He switched his Blackberry to silent. He pulled off the contaminated quilt and shoved it under the bed. He tore a mini soap from its package and jerked off in the shower. He took a Xanax and fell asleep on the bed. Two hours later when he woke up, he felt sufficiently refreshed to tackle the script corrections over a beer and a burrito at Denny’s. Or would have done, if Aaron hadn’t beaten him to it. ‘Faxed script w notes to Ø, please email him clean copy when done,’ said the message from Aaron. Kurt had barely managed to formulate a tirade of mental abuse when his Blackberry lit up like the northern lights.
The Norwegian was crying. Not fake crying, not hysterically hyperventilating, but sobbing. Genuine North Sea tears. He was going back to Trondheim. He was going to wax his Telemark skis. He was going to wear quaint cardigans and eat pickled herring. He was going to write moody crime fiction. He was going to –
‘Øyvin,’ said Kurt sympathetically. And when that didn’t work: ‘Øyvin, Øyvin, ØYVIN!’
The director paused in his blubbering. ‘I mean it,’ he sniffed.
‘I know how you’re feeling. You feel like you’ve compromised your creative vision,’ said Kurt, who had never created anything more original than a club sandwich. ‘You feel like you’ve sold out.’
‘Yes,’ said Øyvin, relieved to finally be talking to someone who understood. ‘That is exactly how I feel.’
‘You feel like no matter what you do, the studio is going to fuck with your film.’
‘Yes. It is true.’
‘Until it doesn’t even feel like your film any more.’
A muffled snort. Kurt could almost see Øyvin wiping his nose on his sleeve.
‘You’re sitting there at the premiere. You hear the rumble of the Dolby, the screen hauntingly, eerily black. It sends a shiver down your spine. You see your name fading in from the darkness, a film by Øyvin Bjorn Kristiansen. Can you see it, Øyvin?’
‘I can see it.’
‘But it’s not even your film. It’s those fuckers at the studio’s film. I mean, they may as well have their names up there, right? A film by Aaron Martini, right? Right?’ Kurt was very good at his job.
‘Er…’
‘I can totally understand,’ said Kurt, tossing a pair of socks from his suitcase toward an open drawer, ‘if you want to pull out. I mean, you’re gonna have to suck up the penalties but I’m sure we can all work something out. You talk to your attorney, we talk to our legal team, we work this out as quickly and quietly as possible. You’re back in Stockholm before it makes the trades.’
‘Trondheim.’
‘Right, Trondheim.’ Kurt was shooting like a demon, averaging two out of three shots from the foul line. ‘You still there, Øyvin?’
‘I am still here.’ Kurt heard a long sigh, a sigh of great depth and despondency that he had heard many times before. He liked to think of it as the sound of hundred dollar bills, whooshing down a well-greased sewer. ‘But the script –’ said Øyvin.
‘We can work on the script,’ said Kurt. ‘Leave it to me.’
‘Thank you,’ said Øyvin, with such heartfelt sincerity that Kurt thought for a moment that he might cry himself. But he didn’t. Instead, he hung up the phone, dumped the rest of his clothes into a drawer and walked over to Denny’s, where he ordered the most expensive dish on the menu, even though it featured seafood and he had a rule about ordering seafood more than fifty miles from the ocean. And as he sucked the marrow out of his shrimp T-bone, he made a metal note to get hold of a copy of The Golden Moose, just to see what all the fuss was about.
37.
Violet smoothed Crème de la Mer on her hands and stared at the screen in front of her. The expensive skin cream had appeared on her desk, unwrapped, without note or comment, but Violet knew better than to hope that the gift �
� despite its anonymous presentation – was from the man who had been silently tormenting her for the past two weeks. It was so obviously Aaron’s doing, but the lack of sticky note made her uneasy. It was also obvious that he knew about ‘the incident’, but despite the unadorned gift, his behavior toward her had not changed in the slightest. If anything, he had been more friendly than usual. She presumed – wrongly – that her dalliance with his leading man had barely registered on his give-a-shitometer. This was what women did in his world. They developed crushes on the unattainable, and if they got lucky, emerged from a night of passion with sore thighs and a story for the grandkids. If unlucky, they got herpes and a viral video.
So far, all evidence seemed to indicate that Violet fell into the first category. Unfortunately, the twenty-four hours she had spent with Hunter had swollen up like prunes in liqueur. The memory was now rich and delicious, dark and decadent, exotic and overpowering. She could taste it on her lips, see it when she closed her eyes, feel it when she fell asleep. And now, here she was, staring at her inbox and willing it to fill with a promise, his last words as she had stepped out of his car: ‘I’ll email you.’ As far as she knew, he didn’t even have her email address.
Ignoring every logical impulse, she hit ‘refresh’ for the hundredth time that day. The grey screen flickered and was still. Her heart, she felt, was literally aching.
‘Got indigestion?’ said a voice behind her. She spun around in her chair, coming face to face with –
‘Oh,’ she said, coloring slightly, ‘Henry.’
‘It’s wonderful to see you too,’ said Hermes, meaning it. Violet raised her eyebrows. She hadn’t seen him since ‘the restroom incident’, but hadn’t thought too much about it, distracted as she was by subsequent developments. As far as she was concerned, Henry’s role had been a walk-on and his absence was easily explained by the whimsical schedule of the fall intern. And now he had returned, apparently with a friend.
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