Flavor of the Month (103 page)

“What do you want from me, Jahne? What the hell do you want?”

“I want you to love me.”

“But I did love you! And you do this.”

“Well, see how it feels. I loved you more than anyone in my life. You weren’t just a walk-on in a cast of thousands. You don’t know what it felt like, loving you and knowing I wasn’t enough. Not perfect enough. Not pretty enough. Not young enough.”

“So you decided to teach me a lesson? Jesus Christ, it’s macabre. The Revenge of the Stepford Wife. That’s not your nose, that’s half of your ass, and that’s a plastic chin. All the time we were together, you were laughing at me. I was groveling at your feet, and you were laughing.”

She looked up at him. “Laughing is the last thing I was doing,” she said.

Then, there, under the unforgiving glare, in the shambles that had been her kitchen, she realized the enormity of her problem: he was the only man who could heal her pain. If he could love her now, knowing who she had been and what she had done, he could heal the split in her. His absolution, his understanding and acceptance, his love would be the blessing of total acceptance. If he forgave her, she could forgive herself. If he loved her, she could love herself.

And if he couldn’t, she realized that all she had been would blow away, be gone forever. And she could never trust that any man who loved her new incarnation was not betraying her old one.

A fear, deeper and colder than any she had known, slipped like a knife into her belly and froze the anger. She shivered. Her future, her life, depended on Sam’s seeing the truth, owning it, and being able to come through this with her. He had loved her, he did love her. He must continue to love her. If she stopped, right now, and made him realize that here, at last, their better selves could meet, there was a chance that both of them could win. “Please, Sam. Please,” she began. “I know you’re hurt. I’m so sorry. But this is important. Really, really important.” She started walking toward him, her bare feet numb to the broken glass beneath her soles. Tears ran down her cheeks. “Don’t just blame, Sam. Because, if you do, I won’t be able to forgive you.” Jahne continued to walk toward him and to sob, but Sam, pale as death, didn’t try to console her. He merely shook his head.

“How could you?” he asked. “Mary Jane, how could you?”

Oh, God, it seemed hopeless. All at once, she felt the glass beneath her feet, and the pain that began to throb. She looked down. Blood was mixing with the glass shards on the white ceramic tile. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t important. What was important was getting him to understand. How could she explain the self-hate, the desperation, the ambition that had driven her? How could she defend having her flesh vacuumed, cut, and stapled, having her skin peeled from her tissue and relocated? How could she explain giving up sensation in her nipples for sensational breasts? How could she explain dropping her friends, her life, and doing all this? How could she explain, to the only person that she wanted—that she needed—to understand, how could she explain what it had felt like to be plain, aging, an invisible, undesirable lump of a woman? How could she tell him? She must gain his compassion. How could she do this? she wondered. But also, how could she not?

Sam looked at her again, with horror and disgust. “How could you do this to me?” he asked.

I wouldn’t do nudity in films. To act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary.

—
JULIA ROBERTS

Facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper.

—
MOTHER TERESA

It’s all fantasy that if you’re considered attractive you have a perfect life and there’s no dark side.

—
MICHELLE PFEIFFER

So, you hate Sam Shields, right? He’s like all those bums you’ve had in your own life, all those men who left you, who lied, who weren’t there for you in the end. But remember, like all those bums, Sam Shields feels like
he’s
the one with an ax to grind
, he’s
the one who’s gotten a raw deal, the one who has been disappointed, the one who was betrayed
.

After the scene in the kitchen, Sam reeled out of Jahne’s house as if he were drunk. He could hardly believe that the woman he had loved, the woman he had risked his career for, had betrayed him in this way. Jahne was Mary Jane. It was unbelievable. It was ghoulish, a Stephen King horror. She had fooled him, made a fool of him. With a kind of sick fascination, he tried to remember conversations about their past. How often had she laughed at him, how often had she caught him in lies, evasions, and half-truths?

Inevitably, defensiveness set in. After all, he’d been caught posturing, foolish for months. But how much longer had she worked at setting him up for it? He was, perhaps, not all that he should be, but she
, she
was crazy and malevolent. What kind of woman would dream of such an act? And what kind would actually achieve it? Well, Reader, how would you answer that question?

Sam sat in the darkened screening room watching the new rough cut of
Birth of a Star
, squirming nervously in his seat. It worked. Well, it worked in a way. It certainly wasn’t the movie he had envisioned
Birth of a Star
to be. It was more like
Blue Velvet
meets
Akkbar
. But it did work.

He and April, Laslo and Michael, along with the body doubles, had flown to Hong Kong to work for nineteen feverish days on the new scenes for the film. Joy Wah Studios—“Where Hollywood Comes to Get Oriented”—was a film factory that turned out dozens of action and porn films for the Asian market each month. They had technicians and special-effects crews that worked fast and cheap. And now their efforts had transformed the movie.

Sam lifted one of his hands to his temple. He had had a merciless headache for a week or maybe more. Nothing seemed to help. Perhaps it was the food or water in Hong Kong, maybe it was staring at the moviola editing screen for hours, but even the daily massages and the Chinese acupuncturist hadn’t helped.

Sam had worked day and night to save the film. Well, to save his ass. After the new scenes had been written and shot, after the more difficult splicing had been done, only then could he leave the scene of the crime, return to L.A. with the rough cut and his headaches.

He hadn’t sold out, he told himself fiercely. The film was different from what he’d intended, but not necessarily worse. In fact, the first version of the film, as he had originally envisioned it, was a failure, stillborn. He’d always had reservations about the stupid melodrama. He even now wasn’t sure if it was his forced revisions, Michael’s hostility, or Jahne’s flat performance that had miscarried, but, whatever it was, the film as it had been was a certain failure. Now, with the music laid in and a little more tightening, this
Birth of a Star
had a chance. That it was the costliest sexually explicit mainstream film ever made, he had no doubt. That it would make back its cost, he was almost certain. But whether it was any good or not, he was still not sure.

He had left for Hong Kong furious with Jahne. He had not spoken to her before he left. But, in the few hours that he had to himself there, he stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Regent Hotel at the magnificent view of the Hong Kong harbor and tried to fit pieces back together. He had loved Jahne—perhaps he still loved her—and now he knew why. She had been able to please his eye, as only a beautiful woman could, while caring for him in the way that Mary Jane had. She had the passion of the plain. Mary Jane had made him feel comfortable, and worshipped. He did not have to strive to please her. She had given him the acceptance of a mother, while Jahne had given him the sexual thrill of a girl the age of a daughter. Had he been judged harshly for wanting that? Wasn’t that what all men craved? The security of unjudgmental love without the boredom? Sexual temptation without challenge or the threat of abandonment? Jahne had all the maturity of a forty-year-old woman in the body of a teen. And the vulnerability of both.

Back in New York, he had been ashamed of Mary Jane, and ashamed of his dependence on her, but he knew now that he
had
loved her. And if she was someone he would never have introduced to his parents, or felt comfortable with at a Hollywood party, that was human, wasn’t it? Anyone could understand that. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the images on the screen torturing him. Jahne’s face, Jahne’s body looming up at him. Overpowering him.

He also knew that he had loved Jahne.
And
had been proud of her. Surely she could tell that, and she would have to be the first to admit that as Mary Jane she had not been a partner he could show off with pride. The knowledge felt like a weight in his gut, but it was the truth, for good or ill. He was ashamed, and the shame made him angry. Now he just had to decide what to do about it.

Had Jahne made him a laughingstock? Did jerks like Molly and Chuck and that little rat Neil know and laugh at him? At his shallowness, and his stupidity? Who else thought he was a fool? All of Hollywood? He sighed. Had she done it all in spite? Or had Jahne loved him? Surely M.J. had. Had she gone through this transformation out of love, or revenge? The fact was, despite this horrible trick, despite this betrayal, he did still love Jahne. And perhaps, just possibly, they could work something out. Later. After he had done what he could to salvage
Birth
.

Now, returned to L.A., he holed up in editing rooms and guarded the screenings. No one but Michael, Seymore, and April could gain entry. He’d keep coaxing it into shape. Only then would the suits get to see it. But it would all be kept under wraps. And he would not speak to Jahne or see her. He would let her sit this out alone. She’d caused him enough grief for right now.

In the meantime, word had already appeared in the trades that the movie was in trouble. April was furious. “Those fuckers could bury us before we have a chance,” she screamed. “We won’t be able to get distributors to even
look
at it.” She’d ordered Marketing to move up the opening of the film and to have a quick roll-out to eleven hundred theaters. Jahne, Laslo, none of the others, not even little A. Joel Grossman would get to see it. Sam shook his aching head. Poor A. Joel. He was a lost man anyway since Adrienne had coupled up with Michael McLain. Losing a love could do that to a man. Sam had to smile, despite the pain in his head. The smile increased his pain, and he winced, staring at the scene on the screen. The scene was as intense as his headache.

He knew it was the pressure, the guilt, and the anger. But he also knew he wasn’t doing this to Jahne, to Mary Jane, out of anger or revenge. Not that she didn’t deserve it. But he was going to work that out between them. No, he was doing this to the movie because he had to, to keep control of the project. To keep his career viable. As April told him plainly, if he didn’t, someone else would.

And, after all, he told himself, looking up at the screen, it wasn’t so very bad, what he had done. Adrienne’s body looked beautiful, and the cuts had been seamless: far more seamless than the work that had been done on Jahne’s own torso. She would see herself as perfect. Everyone would see her as perfect.

After all, wasn’t that what she and every woman really wanted?

Michael McLain leaned back into the softness of the sheets and smiled. And it wasn’t even for the camera. Things had taken a definite turn for the better. Shooting had ended a week ago, and it had been, no doubt about it, a real pleasure. Although there had definitely been a certain—how shall we say—awkwardness about stepping out of the scene when his body double took over, Adrienne, the girl who was doubling for Jahne Moore, made it clear that she only had eyes for him. So, even if his stomach wasn’t washboard-flat anymore, he still had what it takes. He reached out and patted Adrienne’s bare ass, pushed against his back. She had stayed on with him to vacation for a week in Hong Kong. A week of shopping and sex. He loved doing both with her.

And he loved what he had seen in the dailies. The stuff wasn’t just hot, it was beautiful and hot. In fact, it was
gorgeous
and
very
hot. The best stroke film ever made. Laslo and that shmuck Sam had figured out some clever angles and approaches. Not since
Don’t Look Now
, when Donald Sutherland went down on Julie Christie, had sex looked this good on the screen.

And they had made it as easy for him at the studio as they could. They had a cadre of Oriental girls who powdered and massaged him, who sprayed him with glycerine to imitate sweat, who deferred, who bowed. They even had a “fluffer,” the pretty, slender girl who ensured his erection.

Yes, it had worked, and it looked to him as if the rough cuts would work. It was risky, of course. But if Nicholson could have a career coup frugging as a fat Joker in
Batman
, and Lancaster and Kirk Douglas could get away with mooning the audience with their wrinkled old asses, surely Michael McLain could bow out as a leading man with lovemaking: bold, graphic lovemaking on the silver screen. And after that, he was history. He was going to get out of the picture business and into something with dignity.

Maybe he’d finally get married.

In her twenty years of life so far, there were a lot of things Lila had hated, but working with her mother definitely topped the list. She’d had to watch the old bitch arrive every morning as if
3/4
were
her
show, greeting all the crew by name (how the fuck did she learn their names so
quickly
? Lila didn’t know any of them after more than a year), seeing Theresa preen her pulled and lifted old face for the makeup man and consult with the boom operator. It all made Lila sick with rage.

Worst of all had been watching her with Marty. Marty had been surprised when Lila had told him she’d changed her mind, that she would allow her mother on the show, but he’d jumped at it. Lila watched him work with Theresa. Jesus, he didn’t have to suck up to the Puppet Mistress. But he deferred to her, he laughed at her stupid jokes, he gave serious consideration to her suggestions about lighting and camera angles.