TheRapist (2 page)

‘Could you please sign this to Melissa?’

‘I’m coming back to this very theatre to catch the very first screening!’ chortled an overly enthusiastic fan in an orange flowered muumuu.

‘My son will be sorry he missed this, sign it to Dwayne!’

‘I loved your reading, I’ll love your book.’

‘Thank you, Ms. Cage, you are awesome!’

‘Keep up the words!’

‘To Adrian.’

Devon looked up. Amber eyes locked with brown.

‘Adrian,’ she whispered.

*

Manny

Careful Manny Kofsberg sat at his desk by the window of his office on the fifteenth story of a glass and granite structure in Century City. His secretary buzzed through, her voice resembling a throttled cat, howling through the speaker phone.

‘Mr. Arthur on two!’

‘I’ll call him back.’

‘Right you are!’

Manny hated his secretary. He thought she was an annoying stupid bitch. He began to tug on the front of his woven masterpiece, then stopped himself and instead gazed through the window, watching a coating of yellow smog that had insidiously settled over the Pacific. It was great to be this high and have a view of the ocean. Then again, viewing the ocean from a high-rise in Los Angeles was a rarity, due to the smog distorting all in its gloomy, sallow path.

The three monitors on his desk flickered and hummed, almost groveling for attention, the markets changing every second, prices dropping, buyers bidding, New York in full throttle, London closing, Tokyo sleeping. Viewing the world in hazy saturation, Manny gazed on. The phone buzzed.

‘Mrs Moon on one, are you in or out?’

‘Out.’

‘Right you are!’

Manny grabbed the phone and punched three on the memory bank. After two rings followed by a beep, he heard Devon’s voice: ‘Leave a message.’  Manny softly replaced the receiver as he looked out of the window at the bridge that lifted people over Avenue of the Stars. He counted five people on the bridge, two walking to the Westfield mall, three returning to their offices. Where did they have lunch? Food court? Salad bar at the market? Chicken, salad, blue cheese or ranch? Did they buy anything, maybe something special, something for a date? Did they look forward to going back to the office, or did they dread it? And most importantly, he thought, who cared?  Who the fuck gave a fucking shit? He smashed a button on the phone.

‘Yes sir?’ howled the secretary.

‘Get Arthur on the phone!’ he barked, a pit bull to her pussy.

‘Right you are!’

Manny sighed as he waited for the call to connect. He really hated his secretary. He wondered what it would be like to fuck her. She would probably squeal out, ‘right you are!’ as she came.

‘Mr. Arthur on two, sir!’

Manny furiously jabbed the flashing green button on his phone.

‘Mr. Arthur, Manny Kofsberg here, sorry to have kept you, now about the Davenport stock, it’s still a tad weak but looking promising...’

Minutes later, having wrestled the doubts from Mr Arthur’s mind, Manny turned towards his desk, forcing himself to get on with business. If he had carried on watching the bridge below, he would have seen two more figures. A man and a woman. Of course, from this height he would not have been able to identify them. Devon. Adrian.

*

Meringue

Meringue Pavlova was not her real name. The carefully chosen moniker was the name on her SEG, SAG and AFTRA union cards. It was the name she had PKA-ed onto her passport and in her kitten covered check book; the name on her driving license; social security card; library card; Blockbuster card; spa card; gym card. She thought her name sounded scrumptious and she wanted to sound like something everybody wanted to devour. Meringue cared about that, for she liked people to like her. She suffered from the If-You-Like-Me-I’ll-Like-You-Back syndrome. If anybody gave her the slightest compliment, she would be an instant loyal friend. She was tall, pretty and very white. She was also a meat-eater, a lifelong carnivore, a habit which she tried desperately to hide. She did not think that it went along with the image she was trying to cultivate, that of a fresh, healthy, all- American girl. Meringue had come to Los Angeles from a small town tucked away in a north-eastern corner of Florida. She had swapped palm trees for palm trees, sand for sand, an ocean for an ocean and had now been in Los Angeles for seventeen years. Through a variety of different but equally incompetent agents, she had worked on three guest spots on episodic TV (one as a dead bimbo and two under-fives), three commercials (none of which went national), a couple of good, but forgettable scenes in a would-be feature, that ended up on the cutting room floor but went straight to DVD anyway, and a three week stint in a play, in a so far off off Santa Monica theatre that it was practically in another state, she was still there. Still struggling. Still trying to get a ‘really good, really powerful’ agent. Still trying to perfect the perfect 8’ x 10’ head shot, the one that would catch the eye of a casting director instead of ending up lining the trash. It was hard, being rejected constantly and despite lashings of daily moisturising, you had to have the skin of a rhino to survive in Los Angeles. Even her infrequent forays into therapy had failed to prepare her for this constant mind beating, for

handling constant rejection was something in which Meringue had had way too much practice, something in which she had almost strangely begun to relish, trying to use it to her advantage. If ever she landed a part that called for ‘a pretty, white, tall girl who had spent years suffering from rejection’ she probably wouldn’t even have to research her character. She would be able to just slip right into the role, just like that, just like an oyster slipping easily down your throat. If you liked oysters. Which Meringue did not. She thought they looked as if someone with a really bad cold had sneezed into a shell. Boogers on the half-shell. Yum. But she kept that thought to herself, not wanting to make anybody feel uncomfortable. She could not afford to offend anyone in this town, for who knew if someone knew someone with clout. Everybody knew somebody who might know somebody powerful. So she kept her oyster musings and carnivorous dark side to herself.

Meringue dated men. She dated almost any man that asked her. So she dated a lot. She had lots of first dates, but refused to let anything interfere with her self-maintenance schedule. Gym, facial, Brazilians, Restylane in the lips, occasional bouts of liposuction, Botox, highlights, root definition, augmentation, jazz classes, Jujitsu (a girl must learn how to defend herself), Pilates (fashionable but incredibly boring and she already spent way too much time on her back). She had little jobs on the side. Working part time in a variety of trendy boutiques on Melrose. Waitressing in a beachside pizzeria, (unusual pizzas; sushi, matzo ball, chicken fried duck). She was also on the books of an agency that gave her appointments to accompany business men from out of town to dinner. Well, she thought that these men might be lonely in a strange town and again, you never knew who you might meet or who he would know. Although she had no control over casting herself in roles (good, meaty roles, character roles, roles for a serious actress), she was in control in the way she spent her own time: dressing, washing, eating, dating, she even had control over her bathroom habits, thanks to psyllium husks, colon cleanse and spirulina/aloe vera cocktails. There was only one thing over which Meringue had no control and as much as she tried there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Meringue was in love, deeply in love with a wonderful man, and whenever he wanted her, wherever he wanted her, she would be there for him. Because she loved him. How she adored Manny Kofsberg.

*

Devon and Adrian

The Park Hyatt sat on its perch on Avenue of the Stars, hanging over the violently busy Olympic Boulevard. Olympic was not so much of a treacherous route anymore, not since the torn up 10 freeway had been repaired from the destruction of the 7.8 back in ’94. Golden in the sunlight, amber in the shadows, the hotel awaited its guests, visitors, prey. For it was so easy to be seduced by its decadent shades and hues. Fox, the famous studio neighbor, was the only real ‘city’ in Los Angeles. Made up of giant boards with made to measure towns, murals and painted streets, shells of buildings, painted perspective, fronts. All front, all faux, Shallow Town.

Devon and Adrian entered the marble-clad, rug-clad, orchid-clad lobby of the Park Hyatt. Out of the heat of the sun, the light was easy on their eyes, the air cool on their flushed skin. Adrian headed to the reception desk. Devon stayed beside the gargantuan royal blue and lemon yellow ceramic tub of blooms posing unselfconsciously in the centre of the lobby. There was no place for self consciousness in Los Angeles. Devon momentarily lost herself in the sweet color and vision of the orchids. Gazing into the heart, into the most intimate place of an orchid, she understood why this particular flower had no fragrance; it was almost too beautiful, too sculptured, too incredible a vision to have any room left for scent. But she could hear its passion, heartbeat, it’s very breath.

Adrian’s hand lightly brushed her shoulder. She reached up and grabbed his forearm, taut, golden hairs spun menacingly across the protruding veins. Her heart began to pound as they headed for the elevator which damply spat them out onto the fourth floor.

Inside the room, taupe walls and gauzy curtains in shades of creamy coffee, shadows played across the silken walls. This was a pseudo-virginal room, a fresh experience to the people who entered. New to Adrian. He placed the signed copy of her book inside the bedside table next to the bible, took her bag, a stiff, chocolate Hermés envelope and placed it on the beige and taupe striped chenille chair. He moved to her, creating a circle around her throat with his hands, pulling her body gently towards him, inches apart, their breath combining, each feeling the heat from the other.

Beads of perspiration had formed along her upper lip, like a row of auditioning chorus girls, each one anxious to be chosen from the line-up. One was selected, the victor, leaving the others behind, slowly melting its eager, winning way across her flushed lips. Adrian bent his head, licking it away, ruining its success. He sucked on her mouth, her tongue fighting its way inside of him. She won, and they were lost inside their sweet, wet, blended breath. 

Devon eased out of their embrace.

Smiling slyly, she whispered, ‘that was all very romantic and sweet but can we get real now?’

Adrian looked deep into her eyes, a quizzical furrow spanning a miniscule moment in time, swiftly flew from his brow. Their history was unspoken. Words of no necessity. Just the knowledge. A secret. Lodged deep within them.

*

Meringue and Manny

Seven o’clock. Friday night. Everybody had left the office to escape work on the week-end. Except the cleaners. Except the odd, unable-to-flee-work victim.  Except Manny Kofsberg. A navy and gold-braided Uniform sat at his polished desk in the vast, gray marble lobby. In the dim light, the only visible movements were the twitching of the Uniform’s baggy nose and the slow hands of the oversize steel wall clock. One of the exterior large glass doors opened and Meringue Pavlova tripped inside, teetering across the marble floor in her pseudo Louboutins, soles she had painstakingly painted with long lasting Sephora red, hoping nobody would ever find out that her soles had no Louboutin soul.

‘Hi! How are you tonight? I’m going up to fifteen,’ she trilled to the Uniform. Meringue was pleasant to all, due to her monotonous ‘you never knew who was related to whom in this town’ mantra. Doorman on a Monday and the Next Big Thing by the end of the week.