Kamikaze Lust (31 page)

We woke up to daylight. Streams of sun filtered through metallic blinds, splattering a painful glow throughout the room. RR stepped out of bed, and the lake beneath me trembled. He was still in his jeans. I was naked and dehydrated. He walked around to my side of the bed and kissed my forehead. His lips were soothing. A palliative. But I was too shy to get up until he left the room to make breakfast.

Downstairs, he whipped together an omelet out of an egg substitute—same kind they used on the space shuttle—and prepackaged vegetables. His food tasted delicious, the coffee stood strong as it should, and I wondered whether he’d drugged me or if, truly, I was starting to believe I might stay a while, here in the light of the desert sun, staring out of his dining room windows into mountains like milky-brown chocolate.

We ate quickly, then lingered over coffee, laughing, teasing each other. We wore sunglasses inside. I felt his hands reach for me underneath the table, my head thrown back in the warmth of morning, my bare foot in his denim crotch.

“Do something for me,” he said, and I said sure. He said he wanted to watch me come. I sighed, jerked my foot from his lap.

“You want to know why I didn’t.”

“No, I want you to.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“What do you mean, don’t?” He stared at me and I thought, here we go again. I was still sensitive about the Tina Macadam episode, not to mention the years I’d spent listening to little Einsteins theorize about why I was so bad in bed: coldhearted mother, hot-blooded father; late bloomer, early riser; repressed homosexual, hard-pressed in general. It was my fear of commitment, my need for control, something I’d eaten, too much caffeine, whatever.

The way RR was staring I knew it was coming. “You don’t at all?” he said.

“Not with people.”

“What then, with animals?”

“Yeah, me and Catherine the Great.” I pursed my lips. He looked perplexed. “She died fucking a horse.”

“No, that was Queen Elizabeth.”

“She’s not dead yet, moron.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“And while we’re on the subject, I don’t remember you getting off. You’re still wearing your pants!”

“What can I say, it’s not what interests me.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“Seriously,” he nodded. “I’m leather dick. You can stroke me, scrape me, suck me, bang it up all you want, or kiss me gently, I’m totally resistant. Always have been.”

“You don’t come?”

“Of course I do, but at my discretion. I can hold out forever or shoot on command. You’re forgetting who I am.”

“A real prototype.”

He laughed. “So you don’t with other people, but you do alone, but what about by yourself with somebody watching?”

“That’s sort of stupid.”

“Okay, what if it wasn’t stupid? What if, actually, there was a reason, a wager so to speak?”

“Go on.” I felt the insides of my rib cage warm, like photosynthesis, as if I were conducting a superhero transformation from frigid female to porn star. He took out a huge wad of cash. Hundreds.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “You start, you know…”

“To masturbate.”

“Yes, thank you. Every sound you make, moaning, screaming, whatever, I give you a hundred bucks, and then when you come…oh, I don’t know, let’s make it five hundred.”

“Dollars? Five hundred dollars?”

“Not enough?”

“No, no, fine. But how do you know it’s real?”

“I trust you.”

I stretched the elastic band of my satin boxers, summoning Silver Ray. She’d gotten me through the long hours of the night, the scene that left the insides of my vagina raw. I was thankful he didn’t want to fuck me this morning, but this seemed an odd substitute. “Wait a minute,” I stopped myself. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“You’ve seen the money, everything I’ve got is out on the table.”

“Everything?”

He put a hundred dollar bill in front of me. “Everything. Now, let’s see your fingers.”

“I thought you trusted me.” I pulled down my boxers with my left hand so he could see me touching myself with the other. He smiled, and I knew I didn’t trust him, but it had little to do with money. It was that somewhere back in New York he’d crept into my fantasies; somewhere between our first dinner and that day on the set with Wanda Lynne’s boots, he’d sussed out my burgeoning romance with the sex industry. He could tell I wanted to play porn star, only not for the camera.

I let out an audible sigh. He dropped another hundred on the table. I tried to be in the moment, click on Silver Ray, but Shade stalked my memory. We were at the Tannon benefit, standing outside in the freezing cold:
You don’t know what you want, Slivowitz. It’s like we’re all part of your big experiment.

“Talk to me,” RR said, bringing me back to the mountains of Boulder City. I looked at him, confounded by his own part, why he was so eager to indulge me. “How old were you when you first did this?”

“I don’t know, nineteen, twenty.”

“So late?” he said, adding a bill to the pile.

“It never occurred to me,” I lied. I wouldn’t set a finger to my body while Neil was still living at home. Once, I’d even gone a week without showering after he’d drilled the holes in the bathroom wall.

Another hundred hit the table, and I was as rebellious as a horse-fucker, here in Neil’s city, but on my terms: Screw you big brother and the city you live in. I felt my cheeks flush, let out a sonorous oh. One more bill on the table. I looked at him, suddenly self-conscious. “I can’t believe this.”

“Sure you can, you just want me to tell you it’s okay, you want my blessing. I’m like a priest.”

“I’d prefer rabbi.”

“Do rabbis hear confessions?”

“I don’t care.”

“Do they make you feel slutty for touching yourself? You feeling slutty, Silver?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Silver Ray shouted.

“Yeah, that’s it.” He put down another bill. “I love it when you say fuck. You sound like a filthy debutante.”

“Fuck.”

“That for me?”

“All yours.”

He smiled. The money pile multiplied, and we were back in the casino. Only it was his table, his rules. I was playing again, the stakes Silver-Ray high. I didn’t want to lose. I would fake it rather than lose.

His words garbled; I was through with them entirely. Slipping in and out of real time. Through the window I caught the line of the burning sun. The shimmer of water. Me wearing sunglasses, double-exposed on the lenses of his sunglasses. On his face together: me and Silver Ray.

“Come for me, Silver,” he said, and I thought, yes, I could, because it was tied to nothing but Monopoly money; yes, I would, because it was all an act anyway. There was no past, no future, no sweat, no strings, no goddamn desert shutdown. I could let it go, let myself slip from gibberish whispers to sweet, inescapable screams. I’m rich, I thought or might have shouted. So fucking rich! He started counting out loud: One-Two-Three…I screamed until my voice went hoarse, and I collapsed on top of the dining room table.

“Silver,” he said. “You just made yourself twenty-one hundred dollars!”

“Blackjack.” I could barely breathe.

He leaned across the table, lifted my cheeks in between his hands. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

I smiled, “Your turn, leather dick.”

People have always accused me of being cheap. Personally, I view myself as more of a fiscal conservative; I don’t take many vacations or eat in fancy restaurants, unless of course it’s on someone else’s tab, and until recently, I used to calculate my expenses to number of hours worked, a habit I’d picked up during my waitressing days in college. So it was no surprise that at the end of our masturbatory interlude I was still up thirteen hundred dollars.

But who cares about the money, I got his pants off. Then, upstairs, in the chalky light, I knelt down before him with a wooden ruler. (In my frenzy to leave New York it had somehow ended up in my bag.) He found this amusing. He said he’d never let anyone measure him before. He was erect. I held his penis against the ruler and its head hit the groove at two. He was only ten inches! And lean. Manageable, perhaps. I ran my fingertips up and down the silky shaft and my throat constricted. I wanted it inside me so badly, but wouldn’t let him know. I took a deep breath and sat back on my ankles. “The camera adds a few pounds,” he smiled, and two oval dimples chiseled into his unshaven cheeks. He had light purple rings underneath his eyes. He looked scruffy and attentive. I leaned over and kissed him.

The kiss dissolved into a forty-eight hour game of truth or dare as money changed hands and gels squirted into orifices and showers were taken and food was carted in from the family restaurant in town. When I finally got him inside me it was almost anti-climactic, not nearly as dramatic as all the begging he made me do for it. And to fuck a porn star was an expensive scenario. He gave it to me at a steal for five hundred bucks. I felt like a contestant on an X-rated game show.
I’d like to buy a blow job please….
Had he let me, I would have spent every last hundred watching him come. I loved how the moment made him tiny and beetlelike, reduced him to nothing but the stream of his semen. It was where he lived for me. But he had a similar vision. He paid absurd amounts of money to finger my asshole while I brought myself off, which I did with alarming ease. As if in those concupiscent hours I’d shed more than a few layers of skin.

Why he’d taken me into his bed, however, still puzzled me. Surely, he could have paid any number of women to play these games, and in his life there had been so many lovers, both on and off screen. Maybe I did remind him of Alexis. Or he had a thing for the orgasmically challenged. Or it was just something to do.

I worried he was getting bored. No way could this be enough, could I be enough. I kept waiting for him to snap out of his trance and ask, “Who are you?” A question I couldn’t answer with the slightest bit of clarity, reduced as I was to a piece of pulsating flesh, one minute surfeited in ecstasy, the next choking back tears. But whenever he tickled the inside of my knee with his toe, scratched his fingers against my back, or told me I looked good naked, sailing casually upon the stained black sheets, I submitted hoggishly to the next round. It took two days before my stomach constricted at his touch and I found myself stifling a yawn. Maybe
I
was the one getting bored.

He climbed on top of me. “Should we go somewhere tonight?”

My resounding yes came too quickly, but I felt almost as claustrophobic as we’d been in that airplane bathroom. I wanted to get out of the house and be public. We needed a few supporting characters. That was the difference with Shade, I never wanted to be anywhere else.

He got up out of bed and cranked the lights a little, giving a cocktail lounge effect. The music reminded me of crooners in polyester. RR, my celluloid hero, this man with the invincible penis, was mad about barber shop quartets. It made me want to pinch his cheeks. Then I felt guilty for wanting to leave the bedroom. “Where to then?” He stood half-cocked, his hair puffed up like a seaman’s cap. “Caesar’s? Downtown?”

“Let’s go to a different place, somewhere sleazy.”

“Sleazy,” he nodded, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he lumbered into the bathroom. He must have liked the idea.

Downstairs, dusk had sucked its way through the water and up into the well-carved mountains. By the time we got to Vegas night had fallen, and the desert, rugged and timeless by day, was obliterated in a multiple birth of neon.

We ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant, played a few rounds of blackjack, before RR took me to a place called The Rocking Horse. It was down-scale and exactly what I’d imagined a Vegas strip bar to be. A smoke-filled laziness was the lay of the land, offering stark contrast to the pump of fresh oxygen that jolted the casinos. Atmospheric pressure here rendered itself in visuals.

We drank flat beer. RR watched me watching the women dance in front of us. My favorites were the theme dancers: the Wall Street banker, the cowgirl, the Wal-Mart cashier. I found their artifice comforting, for these women were no more executives and shopkeepers and schoolgirls than I was Silver Ray. We were all traveling through the land of make-believe, paper moons and canvas skies as far as the eyes could see. Even naked, the veneer never faltered. Yet their writhing bodies gave voice to my longing. How much I missed seeing naked women, one naked woman really.