Teddy was more than willing to give her some sexual attention, but he felt hesitant, too. Sometimes he felt that Jane only wanted Claudia now. It was after Claudia’s visits that she was in her best moods.
“I guess it does, a little,” Teddy admitted, taking his shoes off. “He only seems to fantasize about poisoning us or bombing us.”
“You want to hear about a fantasy I had when I was about seven or eight?” Jane asked. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to her. She slid over a little and reached around him to unbuckle his belt. Once that was accomplished, she began to unzip his pants.
“Sure,” Teddy said. “You think I’m not going to want to hear my own wife’s fantasies?”
“I dreamed that Santa Claus drove his sleigh right into my bedroom,” Jane said. She lolled on her back while Teddy stood up to finish undressing.
“So he could bring you your presents in bed?” Teddy asked.
“Nope, he got out of his sleigh and jumped in bed with me and ate my box,” Jane said, smiling. “Boy, I can’t tell you what a powerful fantasy that was. I got about five years’ mileage out of that one.”
“Lucky you,” Teddy said. “So do you want to play like I’m Santa, or what?”
“You’re kind of shy with me now, Theodore,” Jane said later, after their play. “I mean, you’re a beautiful lover—if you weren’t, I wouldn’t be living with you and I wouldn’t have had a child by you, either. What’s causing this shyness?”
“Maybe I’m just an inherently shy person,” Teddy suggested.
“No, you aren’t—it’s something more,” Jane said. “Once you’re going, you’re the best—I just wonder sometimes if I’m gonna be able to get you going.”
“You got me going immediately,” Teddy said, though he did feel a little melancholy. Sometimes after sex, he felt himself receding. It was as if a normal thing—his penis, receding out of Jane—took on an abnormal twist, or an abnormal momentum, or something. He felt as if he might be receding from happiness, from his mate, from his child, from normal life. He felt himself slipping away toward the edge of the world—he had felt that same sense of slippage just before he had to go to the mental hospital for the first time.
“I get you going on the outside, sure,” Jane allowed, her large eyes searching his face. “But it’s on the inside that you’re shy.”
Teddy didn’t answer. He thought maybe Jane would start reading or go to sleep, but she didn’t.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting a little girl nooky in the morning and then a little boy nooky at night,” she pointed out. “Or do you disagree?”
“I don’t disagree—I don’t anything,” Teddy said. “I like Claudia.
“I don’t even know if I could handle you now, if Claudia weren’t in our life,” he added.
“I don’t know if you could either,” Jane said. “But if that’s the case, why do you look so worried? Claudia’s here to stay.”
“I wasn’t worried about Claudia,” Teddy said. It didn’t seem as if Jane wanted to read, so he turned off the bed light. She got up, went to the bathroom, came back, and stood by the bed a moment, pulling on her gown.
“So what are you worried about?” she asked.
“Going crazy, I guess,” Teddy said.
“Teddy, don’t you dare go crazy,” Jane said, straightening her gown. “Don’t you dare. I’ll never forgive you if you do.”
13
Shirley, a nice redhead who worked in wardrobe, more or less saved Melanie’s life, or at least her sanity, by arranging to get Bruce a job as a gofer on a little cheap horror move that was being shot in Azuza. Up until then Melanie had been trying to save all her strength for her job as an actress in the sitcom pilot, and Bruce had been slowly but surely dragging her down. Half the time she didn’t get back to her apartment until nearly midnight, with a six o’clock call staring her in the face, and there Bruce would be, waiting to argue with her about the fact that she had deserted him and had a new relationship already. He hated it that she had a new relationship—she didn’t even dare bring Lee, her new boyfriend, home with her, for fear Bruce would attack him or something—but what was really driving Bruce crazy—the real bottom line—was that she had a job on TV and he didn’t.
“I know they’d take me on if you’d just ask,” he said maybe a thousand times. “Can’t you just ask?”
“No, asshole, I can’t just ask!” Melanie said, over and over again. “It’s a miracle I have a job myself. I’ve never acted before, I don’t know anybody, I have no pull, and I could get replaced in a minute if I do anything they don’t like. It’s not like I’m Greta Garbo or Madonna or somebody. I’m not even a trained actress.”
None of that mattered to Bruce, who sat on the couch, smoked grass, and sulked.
“Look, nobody in Hollywood has less leverage than I do, can’t you understand that?” Melanie pleaded.
“You could get me a job, you just don’t want to,” Bruce said, before stomping out. “You don’t want to because of him.”
Usually Melanie cried when he left—partly from fatigue. Bruce was wrong to think she could just walk up to the producer or the production manager and get her old boyfriend a job, but the part about Lee wasn’t so wrong. The last thing she wanted as to have to deal with Lee and Bruce at the same time, on the same set, when really it took all the stability she could muster just to concentrate on her scenes so she could try to perform when the time came. The set was like a movable slum, the hours were endless, she was too low on the totem pole to have a trailer, a dressing room, or even a folding chair to call her own—it was all she could do to keep sane anyway without having two jealous men to worry about: not that there weren’t ample possibilities for jealousy arising with the crew itself. A couple of the carpenters and the head grip had been giving her looks of a sort that indicated interest. Lee was the youngest A.D. on the set, he was fresh out of NYU film school, and was a little too brash and Eastern and apt to get a little too imperious with the crew sometimes, so naturally they hated him; several of them would have been glad to pick off his girlfriend, just to bring him down a little.
The time the crew—or most of the crew—laughed at one of her scenes, Melanie was so totally into the scene that she didn’t even notice. When Shirley told her about it later, Melanie almost didn’t believe it.
“They like you, honey—they realize you’re gifted,” Shirley said. Shirley was about fifty and had had her ups and downs. She had four daughters herself, by four different men, and she immediately took a motherly interest in Melanie. It made a big difference. Melanie had felt totally lost the first day or two—she didn’t know the terminology, didn’t even know what a master was, didn’t know anything. At first she was just doing her best to be a quick learner, and she tried to be very careful, like you try to be in a frightening dream. Underneath, she still had a little bit of fear that getting the part had been some combination of dream and mistake; she was worried that the mistake would be discovered or the dream would end, and then she would have to go back to being clunky old fat Melanie, an unemployed person with no boyfriend.
Sometimes, too, she felt that the only reason Lee liked her was because she was so un-Hollywood. Lee had a smart New York lip; he didn’t bother to conceal the fact that he thought southern California really was La-La land. He bought magazines such as Cahiers du Cinéma to the set with him and left them lying around so nobody could miss what a highbrow he was. He also made it clear that he wasn’t planning to be a second A.D. forever—all of which added up to several reasons why Lee wasn’t exactly popular with the crew, especially not with the older members of the crew, most of whom had had to put up with dozens of New York kids with smart lips in the course of doing their jobs for thirty or forty years.
When Shirley made the remark about the crew’s recognizing that Melanie was gifted, Melanie’s heart bounced up—until that moment the only time in her life when she had felt herself to be the least bit gifted was in the eighth
grade, when she won a national math competition. After Shirley said it, Melanie started noticing when someone on the crew laughed at one of her scenes. Once, when she had just finished a take in which she outdid herself with her Rosie routine, nearly the whole crew broke up. It made her feel really wonderful, particularly since several people came up afterward and gave her a hug or a smile, or made a comment. After that, she could sort of allow herself to believe that what was happening wasn’t a dream or a mistake; it might be something that would last. Maybe she was actually an actress. Maybe she had a talent, after all, and to feel that was so wonderful that it more than canceled out the negatives—the slummy set, the hours, no place to sit, Lee’s unpopularity, all of it. Instead of hating it, as she had the first two weeks, she began to love it and to hope it would last forever.
Almost the luckiest thing of all, though, was that one of Shirley’s former husbands was a production manager, and a good one.
“Eddie’s always got a picture,” Shirley said. “He don’t always have a good picture, but Eddie’s always got a picture.”
Fortunately Eddie was also still sweet on Shirley—apparently he was the only one of the four husbands who was. He was happy to do her little favors, such as providing a gofering job for some kid he had never met.
From Melanie’s point of view, that one little favor changed everything, vis-à-vis Bruce. From being sulky, belligerent, and disparaging, Bruce underwent a total transformation and became almost too grateful. Despite his resentment of her relationship with Lee, it turned out, after some investigation, that he had not really bothered to really break up with Katie.
“She sort of came back into the picture,” he admitted finally. Just hearing it made Melanie feel better. Though she had no reason to feel guilty about the fact that Bruce was lonely and girl-less, at some level she felt guilty about it anyway. Right away she felt a little more free to enjoy life with Lee.
What made it all seem even luckier was that Eddie actually took a liking to Bruce, and when the horror flick wrapped he took Bruce along to his next job, a spy movie being made at one of the majors.
Getting the second movie job produced such a sense of good feeling in Bruce that he himself actually suggested that he and Katie and Melanie and Lee have lunch sometime. Melanie wasn’t so crazy about the idea, but she put it to Lee and Lee agreed. They decided to go to Venice some Sunday and eat sushi.
When the Sunday came, one effect of the lunch—Melanie knew she should have predicted it—was to get Lee interested in Katie, who was still sporadically attending UCLA and taking the same kind of film classes Lee had taken at NYU. They started debating the UCLA film school versus the NYU film school, and then went on to talk about Czech directors and new Russian directors and even Dutch directors. Melanie did not exactly take a prominent part in the conversation, since she had not seen a single film by any of the people they were talking about.
The surprising aspect of that conversation was that Bruce contributed a lot more than Melanie would have expected him to. Evidently he spent his spare time at Katie’s house by watching videos of all the right foreign movies, or else reading all the hip film magazines that Katie’s mother subscribed to and that Katie filched from her mother’s L.A. town house.
Watching Bruce transform himself into a highbrow who looked as if he’d been reading film history for a hundred years was pretty amazing; no less amazing, at least to Melanie, was how quickly the big sexual rivalry between Bruce and Lee died down. By the time they finished their raw octopus, they had more or less become buddies. All three of them, Bruce, Lee, and Katie, did their best to talk over Melanie’s head, behavior which ordinarily would have really pissed her off. It didn’t piss her off this time, though—she stuffed down a lot of sushi and felt really sort of serene. What made her serene was her sense that the real point of all the knowing chatter was to impress her—after all, however much the three of them might know about the new Dutch cinema, she was still the one who had a part in a TV pilot. She was the one working as an actress—never mind that it was just a pilot for a series that might never happen. Meanwhile, Lee was only one of about a million A.D.s, Bruce was only one of several million gofers, and Katie was still just in school, and in a half-assed way at that. But Melanie was the one with the real part in the real show, and they were all jealous and envious and showing it the only way they knew how, which was to try to snow her with their vast knowledge of everything having to do with cinema. Melanie ate and let the vast knowledge fly on by. She knew she herself didn’t have very much knowledge, but on the other hand she also knew that she seemed to have something none of them had—the ability to be funny on camera. It might not be something she would have forever—how could she know about that?—but at the moment she had it and it gave her the upper hand in her little peer group of sushi eaters.
Later, though, when she and Lee were back home and Melanie was about to drift off into a pleasant nap, Lee suddenly strutted out of the bathroom with his dick sticking out in front of him. Before Melanie could even reverse directions and get herself back into a wakeful and receptive state Lee revealed that what he had in mind as a little Sunday afternoon treat for both of them was anal sex.
“Nope, get that idea out of your head,” Melanie said. She had made a few experiments along that line and they had not been very successful. Of course, someday she might get in the mood to make more such experiments and maybe they would be more successful, but right at the moment, she definitely wasn’t in that mood.
“Why not, what’s wrong with it?” Lee wanted to know. He instantly got a pissed-off, petulant look, as he was apt to do if denied whatever he happened to want at the moment.
“I didn’t say anything was wrong with it, if you mean wrong in capital letters or something,” Melanie said. “I just said I didn’t want to.”
“But I want to,” Lee said. “Can’t we ever do anything I want to do?”
“Will you just not get mad, please?” Melanie requested. “We can do a lot of things you want to. We do do a lot of things you want to. I just don’t happen to be in the mood for butt-fucking this afternoon.”
“How do you know? We haven’t even started,” Lee said, looking even more petulant and even more pissed off.
“I know what I don’t feel like,” Melanie said, getting annoyed herself. Despite her plain statement, Lee had hopped behind her and was definitely trying to mess around. Melanie thwarted that simply by flopping onto her back and raising her feet as if she meant to kick him. Her move enraged him, he kept trying to mess around, and finally Melanie did kick him with both feet. Despite the fact that she had raised her feet in warning, it seemed not to occur to Lee that she might actually kick him. He was too preoccupied with pointing his dick at her. Both her heels caught him in the chest and knocked him right off the bed—Lee was not a large guy.
“Oops, I didn’t really mean to do that, I’m sorry,” Melanie said, but quick as her apology was, it wasn’t quick enough. Before she could move Lee yanked her off the bed and began to hit her with both fists.
“Lee, stop! It was just an accident,” Melanie yelled, covering her face with both arms. Immediately what went through her mind was that if she showed up on the set at seven the next morning with a black eye and a fat lip or something, that might be that: she might be replaced on the spot. At all cost she wanted to protect her face, and she did protect it—she got a hard bump to the back of her head when he jerked her off the bed, and also some bruises on her arms, but Lee was mostly just flailing; he was too mad to aim his blows. He smoked too much and wasn’t in good shape anyway—it probably wasn’t thirty seconds before he wore out and stopped trying to hit her. He was still plenty mad, though. Before Melanie could really recover from the storm of blows, he called her a cunt and a bitch and three or four other choice names—then got up and stormed out the door.
Melanie didn’t try to stop him—she felt too stunned, and once she got over being stunned, too disappointed. Because of the Bruce factor, it
had been almost the first time she had brought Lee home with her for the day. When they got to her apartment after the meal she had felt at peace—she was just looking forward to being comfortable with Lee for a while in her own setting. It seemed like a big luxury she was getting to have, just being at home with Lee. She had been thinking she might make him pasta for dinner—they had never just had a simple meal at her apartment before. Sex would have been fine, too; she would have probably been in the mood after her nap, although so far sex with Lee had not really been world-shaking—being tired from the long hours, or worrying about Bruce or something, had sort of put a hitch in her response. Lee was a little to rabbity, he was not one for much foreplay, but Melanie was confident that if she was just a little patient they’d hit a groove—she was actually real attracted to Lee; she took the optimistic view that their love-making was going to get better once they could relax and she could get him to take a little more time with her.
But now it was ruined—he had hit her with the wrong suggestion at the wrong moment, he would probably never forgive her for kicking him off the stupid bed. Before she knew it she was crying, which is what she mostly did for the rest of the afternoon. She looked in the mirror many times to be sure she wasn’t getting a black eye, and when she wasn’t looking in the mirror or crying she was mostly looking out the window, hoping Lee would get over it and come back. She didn’t really think it would happen—he was too arrogant—but for an hour or two she did keep hoping.
Later, feeling really lonely and shocked because a relationship she mainly enjoyed and was sort of banking on had been ruined in less than five minutes and for a stupid reason at that, she called Rosie and told her what had happened.
“Anal sex, yuk!” Rosie said.
Aurora happened to be in the kitchen at the time, sniffing some sweetbreads she had decided to cook for Pascal. He had apologized for his rudeness so many times that Aurora finally decided enough was enough and invited him to dinner.