Girl of My Dreams (18 page)

A man named Willard at Jubilee, a junior writer like me but a lot bolder, had sent Valentine cards to good-looking women around the studio—stenographers, women in makeup, in the sound department, even a couple of actresses. He may have sent a dozen. On each card he wrote that he had been a secret admirer for months and hoped they could soon get to know one another. Willard was able to date five of these women, an unjustifiably high batting average in my opinion. What would he do here?

“That would be okay,” I said. Her car was even rattier than mine, a Model A from the twenties. An empty baby bottle was in the passenger seat when I climbed in for the short drive to Sumac Lane.

“Looks like where Hansel and Gretel lived,” she said.

Inside, I asked her if she wanted anything to drink and hoped I had a Coca-Cola or some beer though I was doubtful.

“Water, that would be nice.”

She sat down, and I guessed she wasn't in too much of a hurry to get back to Arcadia. Reading my thoughts, she said, “My little girl will be asleep before I get back anyway. She's only one and a half. My name is Jasmine.”

To come up with that name, someone must have been reaching for something in her family. I didn't know where to go after I said it was good she had parents who were so understanding and watched her baby on a Sunday. But I was wondering where her husband was. Again anticipating me, she said, “My baby's father and I are separated.”

“Oh, I'm sorry.”

“I'm not and he's not either. What do you do?”

“I write pictures.”

She laughed. “That's impossible. Are you kidding? You can't write a picture any more than I can paint a symphony.”

“I write scripts for the movies.”

“I don't go to them, but that's nice.”

“Why don't you go?”

“I used to. It was all either bang bang, ha ha, or kiss kiss.” She sipped her water.

Hearing my entire profession reduced to this predictable set of triplets, I recalled my father's warning when I told him I was going out to Hollywood. “Corn flakes manufactured by short order cooks pretending they're chefs,” he said. “Nothing but bluffers. Underneath your bashfulness, you may be one too.” The problem was I respected my father and was afraid he was right. All of us just bluffers.

I answered my guest lamely, downcast at the memory of my father's words. “Maybe that's true,” I said, “but themes do have all kinds of variations. Uh, like in music or literature. I suppose you don't work yourself.”

“Heaven help the working girl,” she said, “because no one else will. I'm a secretary for a lawyer in Pasadena. A regular career girl.” She sat up and jutted her jaw assertively. She was so thin I thought her ribs must feel like a washboard.

“I guess that's interesting work,” I said.

“It is. He represents all kinds, bankrobbers to illegal Mexicans to old ladies swindled out of their savings. He keeps his hands to himself.”

Where was this heading? If she was telling me the lawyer didn't make advances, surely that was a not-very-veiled hint that I shouldn't either. Not that I had any idea in that direction. Still, why did she keep talking instead of just washing up and leaving? The little gap between her two front teeth was interesting, promising.

“Well, that's good,” I said. “At the studios some of the supervisors try—”

“I've heard about casting couches,” she said. “My mother can't wait for every new
Photoplay
, and she reads Louella Parsons like the Bible. You're a strange one for working in pictures, though, aren't you?”

She seemed to be sizing me up. I said, “I don't know what you mean.”

She said, “You're not so cocky as I think of picture people, and you're not trying to sell me anything. Are you sure you're in the movie business?” She was smiling.

“What would I be trying to sell you anyway?” I felt I was being tested.

Then she floored me. Her voice went up a couple of notes and sounded almost like a jittery bird. “Do you want to make me?” she asked sweetly.

Make me
was what she'd said. I misunderstood utterly. This was the come-on phrase of the day, well known to everyone, even to me. Usually uttered by a man, as in Christ, wouldn't I like to make that dame. Yet somehow I mistook it and immediately thought, make her what? A ham sandwich? A drink? Despite the currency of the words—
make me
—I was as unaccustomed to the question as to the act it implied. Let's not count a couple of fumblings in college. All this I revolved inwardly, as Homer liked to put it, while pondering an answer.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “I shouldn't even mention—”

“No, no,” I interrupted, finally awake to the prospect here. “Actually, I'd like that so much.” I went over to her chair and took her head in my hands because I couldn't think of what else to do.

Her kisses were good and a little salty, and I reflected she'd been swimming all afternoon though I further reflected that shouldn't turn her mouth into the ocean. With her tongue she began to explore my teeth and lips, and she no sooner finished the inside of my mouth than she began on my chin and then ears. Ears! At that still-for-me-tender age I had no idea ears were used for anything but listening. When she stood up, my arms around her touched my own shoulders, she was that thin. Her body didn't feel like a teenager's after all; she felt, as she tasted, like a hungry woman. From the sea.

Undressing, I began to shake. She must have seen what she was dealing with. “Relax, Owen,” she said. Before my nerves had a chance to take over completely, something else was happening. Aaaah.

What a surprise! It is maintained by some evolutionists that opposable thumbs are what set us apart from dolphins and other brainy organisms unable to use tools. Moralists say our conscience is what defines us as human and superior. These people are forgetting the blow job. What other beast of any genus or phylum has devised such a way of being pleased and pleasing others? Orangutans? Forget it. We have no way of knowing whether the original discoverer—let's just see what happens if I place this hole in my face over that thing sticking out of his crotch and give it a good suck—was a man or woman, and given what we do know about the ancient Greeks we have to conclude it's a toss-up. Fellatio, the very signature of gratificatio. For this moment, the gravid glorious oral moment, the tongue and lips and warm wetness were all; the person who administers this favor of favors dispenses joy, and a man is blessed to be the recipient. Jasmine was my initiation, and she spun my head off. Sing hey nonnie nonnie and a posthumous Nobel for the inventor of this wonder.

Then I was inside her and we were on my single bed though I had no idea how we arrived there. Her ribs touched mine, and her breasts, bursting with energy, ground into my chest. Her slenderness felt, to my feverish embrace, like the tines of a fork covered with the peel of a juicy grape.

Jasmine moved with the skill and knowingness of an athlete. Her legs traveled from my hips to my back and moved up almost around my shoulders, pulling me to her faster than I imagined even when I had previously tried to imagine what full sex really consisted of. I understood Jasmine was aiming for something, and what she was aiming for was her own pleasure, not mine, which increased mine by powers. Not long after that realization I slipped my mooring utterly. She was still moving, more quietly now, having arrived at her own moment just before I had at mine.

Then I was bathing us both in sweat, a young buck issuing forth his liquids. I felt like an entire irrigation system.

When I could say anything, it was an apology. “I'm sorry, I know I've gotten you all wet. I hope … ”

“Don't hope and don't sorry,” she said. “Hope is for what hasn't happened. This has happened quite well, thank you so much.”

She showered while I heated her some mushroom soup, the only can I could find in the only cabinet in my kitchen, such as it was.

She came out of the shower with one towel around her waist, another turbaning her hair. That left me staring at her uncovered chest. I tried to look away, to busy myself pouring her soup from saucepan to bowl. But no matter where I turned I couldn't avoid her small, upwardly tilted breasts with nipples like the eyes in Renaissance paintings that follow you wherever you are. As she ate her soup I again felt the push of my desire. I was embarrassed for what was going on just below my T-shirt and underpants.

“I'm suddenly starved,” she said, “and this soup tastes better than it has any right to. Do you have any bread?”

I made her some toast and took a slice for myself.

“Mmmm,” she said. “Dunk yours in my soup.”

I did that and fished out a mushroom. “Just like a bachelor,” she said. “You have almost nothing to eat, yet the one thing you do have is delicious. Know anyone famous?”

“I see them around,” I told her. “They don't know me, so no I don't, not really.”

“Someday,” she said, “they'll know you. My mother likes Wally Beery.”

I had edited out the afternoon as well as Mossy's party the previous night and told her something more honest, by accident, than if I'd given her an account of the great names of Hollywood gathered one evening earlier. I thought of Pammy and Mossy now, and I added, “Even if one or two said they know my name, none really know me. Maybe one. Do you know who Amos Zangwill is?”

“Who's that?”

“He's head of the studio I work for, he keeps behind the scenes, Jasmine.”

“I don't really follow pictures. My mother and father go to anything Wally Beery is in. I'd like to tell you my name is not really Jasmine. It's Janice.”

“That's all right. You have to protect yourself.”

“It wasn't that. Jasmine sounds better. I was trying to get your interest with an exotic name. Janice, ugh.”

“It's fine. Don't worry.” I was glad we'd both been square with each other. I could easily have recited a list of famous people, but I'd already achieved whatever such a recital might have been thought to be worth. I barely suppressed a smile of self-satisfaction. Don't be so smug, I scolded myself, she doesn't give a damn.

Jasmine-Janice had finished our soup, still bare-chested and turbaned.

I felt I should say something. “You look pretty terrific that way,” I said.

Before I could finish reaching for her hand she was in my lap. This time her kiss tasted of the mushroom soup, yet still a little briny. She had parted the towel and already had me inside her as I hoisted her to the bed. I don't know how I navigated.

It was better this time because I wasn't so nervous and she wasn't so needy. We were here for the sheer delight of it. As we proceeded, I also understood how much we were strangers, nothing in common but our desire. People married for this and then regretted it their whole lives, didn't they?

Janice stopped moving. “Do you think it would be all right if I turned over?”

I had as much idea of what she was suggesting as if she'd asked whether I'd mind her speaking Telugu. But I said, “Please do what you want.”

Janice rolled and thrust her bum skyward. She had me re-enter. Her vagina felt tighter from behind, more supple and arrangeable for her own pleasure. We resumed moving. She whirred and churned as if she were a mixing bowl and I her humble spoon. “Shoot it up to my shoulder blades,” she said. “Unnnnh,” I said if I said anything. We remained this way, upping and downing, for longer than I'd have thought possible, my hands on her hips, her head buried in my pillow. I was in a rodeo of ecstasy. At length she began to make little feral sounds, and I realized she was concluding. I charged now toward my own conclusion. She became more urgent, female, biological. I flew.

Resting my head on her upper back, I wondered when I'd see her next because now I wanted to. Surely I'd see Jasmine or Janice, whoever she wanted to be, again. Would she come back to the ocean next Sunday? “Oh gee,” I began, “I really hope we—”

Reading my thoughts one more time, she said, still facing my pillow, “Oh dear, how swell this has been. We'll just keep it that way and not burden it with a future.”

“But,” I began again, “I was kind of thinking—”

She disengaged so abruptly when she turned to face me that I felt just as abruptly deprived. “Don't,” she said, and kissed me on the chin. She added, with some emphasis, “Mustn't try to repeat perfection.”

Yet that itself sounded repeated. She chuckled, then was serious. “You wouldn't like one thing about my life, and I couldn't adjust to yours.”

She was up and dressed quickly. “No shower,” she said. “I want to keep you on me for the drive home.”

We'd each had something from the other, something pleasurable, for me immensely pleasurable, and then, like snails, were receding back into our own shells.

“Thank you,” she said, kissing me on the cheek, which I thought both odd and right. “You're a good man, Owen.” Then quickly put her lips on mine without parting them. And was gone.

It occurred to me that no one—in my personal life or in my career as errand-runner, junior writer, general factotum—had ever before called me a man.

I fell on my bed and slept, a leaden drunk on the steps of a church.

11

A Life in the Day

Part I: Morning

Question: Where is God when you need him?

The next morning, Mossy's secretary Elena Frye told me later, the boss's office was an early hive of dispute. Nils Maynard charged in at seven o'clock because he had to be on his own set by eight. As much as he admired Pammy, he thought she'd be wrong in his next picture, a brittle satire on an upperclass marriage in which the husband's fortune plummets along with the stock market, whereupon his scheming wife dumps him in favor of a mortgage-foreclosing banker. The picture would belong to the two men; the fickle wife was only a lever setting up the antagonism between them. Nils said Pammy had the flesh of a hot water bottle, looking as though she might be running a slight fever, her eyes dark and bright at the same time. No camera could hide that. Mossy was insistent, and the former magician could find no rabbit in his hat either to charm or dissuade the studio chief. Mossy promised to have his ace construction man, Tutor Beedleman, warm up the wife's part to please Nils by the time shooting started. “But Millevoix does your picture,” he said. Nils said, “I don't think so,” and left for his set.