"Now? Really?"
"Have you?"
"No."
"She fucked the writer to get ahead."
It took me a moment, but I got it. What I didn't get was why she told me that joke while astride me.
Confusion must have overridden lust in my eyes because she tittered and stroked my jawline comfortingly. "Oh, poor Randall. Don't you get it? Don't you get what I'm saying?"
"I guess not."
"I'm not a stupid actress. I'm not fucking you to get ahead. I'm already bigger than you are." She leaned in close, pressing herself to me, never letting my cock slip from her. "Well, in some ways. I'm fucking you," she whispered, "because I want you to come harder than you've ever come before in your life."
I never kept track of such things, but I'm reasonably certain she succeeded.
Wherein I Invite
The production meeting consisted of me, Malcolm, Crystyl, the duo producing the movie (including the legendary Ira Gold), a studio rep, and a truly bewildering array of assistants, secretarys, and gophers, none of whom sat at the main table, but rather encircled the room's perimeter, lurking, ready to pounce the moment they were needed. I felt naked without my own legion of assistants.
I barely heard anything throughout the meeting. I was replaying the morning and the previous night, as if it had been a movie I'd seen. I could scarcely believe it had happened to me.
I also couldn't believe that when I got out of the meeting and into the car, I had a text from Kiki: What are you up to tonight?
I checked my schedule. I was due to leave for Chicago in the morning and I had a signing at Vroman's that night.
Signing. Then nothing until the morning.
Can I come to the signing?
I paused for a moment. It was a free country; of course she could come. She wasn't really asking about the signing. Even I knew that.
If you're amenable.
LOL
Still in possession of my soul. Still famous and soon-to-be rich.
Kiki Newman's boy toy.
Sherrie glanced over at me as traffic slowed in that special L.A. way. "What are you smiling at?"
"Nothing."
Wherein I Confess
Kiki, I learned, was the kind of person who became enormously turned on by seeing someone do something they're good at. And I was the kind of person who was very good at chatting up a crowd, especially a crowd containing Kiki Newman.
We slipped out a back exit and into her limo before the paparazzi could get to us or confirm my presence with her. In the limo, she threw her day-old rule about backseat sex out the figurative window. Before we hit the first traffic jam, she'd already worked off my pants, hoisted her dress and pushed aside her panties, then sank down on me, swallowing me into her slick depths.
I briefly imagined the bemused drivers around us, stuck in the same traffic, watching the limo rock to and fro. Then I imagined nothing.
Back at her house, we made it as far as the living room sofa before Round Two, then lay in exhausted, entangled repose on the plush carpet, a thin, decorative blanket draped over us.
"You should move to L.A.," she said. "It makes sense."
"Why?" I regretted it the instant I said it. Clearly, she was building something on the time we'd spent together so far. She was the reason.
"You're gonna write the screenplay, right?" Oh. "So you should be here to work on it."
"Del MacCarter's writing the screenplay. He has two Golden Globes and four Oscar nominations."
"Jesus, you already sound like you've been here too long." She waved the air as if it stank. "Who cares about Del MacCarter? You should take a crack at it. Sex it up a little bit. Your way." She wrapped her fingers around my cock to drive home the point.
"Careful with that thing. It's in a fragile state."
"Was I too rough on it?"
"I'm not sure that's possible."
"Let me kiss it and make it better."
"Oh, Jesus."
She planted a soft, sensuous kiss on the head of my cock. I felt a bit of a lurch deep in my pelvis, but after the limo and the sofa, it would take a bit more for me to rise to the occasion.
"Better?"
"Infinitely."
"Even if you don't write the screenplay," she said, "you should stay in L.A. For a little while at least. They'll fuck up the movie if you're not around, Randall. I've seen it happen before. The writer comes to town, everyone falls all over themselves trying to get their tongues as far up his ass as possible. And then when he leaves, they go off in some bullshit direction."
"I don't want to be in the way. Sometimes you have to make changes to the book for the movie."
"Don't let them do it. Your book is perfect the way it is. There's no reason it can't be turned into a movie without major changes. If you just let Del MacCarter do it his way, it'll be unrecognizable on the screen. It might be a good movie, but it won't be your movie."
I thought of brunch, of Malcolm telling me about MacCarter's "metafictional" Lacey Simonson concept.
"Look, if you let a guy like MacCarter get his hands on it, he's going to take out everything that is uniquely you and replace with the standard Hollywood junk. Because that's what he does. That's why they love him. He'll probably give the fucking thing a happy ending. But what's great about your book is that it's a downer, Randall. It's a really, really amazing downer. And sometimes we need that. Because life is like that, and we need a book that isn't a downer for its own sake, but just because life is."
Holy shit. Finally. Finally, someone got it. She was right. She knew it; she nailed it. I could stay. I could keep the movie pure and honest and--
And I thought of my pitiful bank balance.
"Maybe... Maybe when my royalties come in, early next year..."
She snorted and rolled into me. "You can stay here. Don't worry about that. Even if you don't write the screenplay, you can keep a hand on the movie, work on your new book..."
"Are you asking me to move in with you?"
She shrugged. "If you're amenable."
Just that phrase was enough, it seemed, to cause a lurch in my genitals.
"You don't think that's--"
"--too fast? Too soon? There's no such thing. I'm not asking you to marry me. I like you. I like fucking you. And I'm not some insecure party girl, Randall -- I know you like me and I know you like fucking me."
"'Like' might not be a strong enough word."
"So what's the big deal? You come live here. Work on your shit. I'll work on my shit. We'll fuck our eyeballs out. And we'll get to know each other. Absolute worst-case scenario -- it doesn't work out and we both had some great sex."
"When you put it that way..."
"I just need to know one thing. Seriously."
"What's that?"
"Have you ever jerked off while thinking about me?" Kiki asked.
"What?" I said, chiefly because it had the benefit of being neither the truth nor a lie.
"Did you ever jerk off while thinking about me? I have to wonder that, now. Any guy I'm with." She sat up, gloriously and unselfconsciously not draping herself in the blanket. In the half-light, she appeared sculpted, not built of tissue and bone. "I won't be angry. I'm just curious, is all."
I thought back to my fantasy from what now seemed so long ago, a lifetime, even though it was only a few months at the most. Kiki and Fi...
"The fact that you haven't answered tells me everything I need to know." She scowled at me. "I don't care. I just want to know if you have the guts to--"
"It's not that," I told her. "It was just once. I just--"
"Only once?" she teased. "I must be losing it."
"No! No. It's... It was just once."
"So," she said, snuggling against me again, "what did I do to you? Or what did you do to me, you naughty boy?"
"Kiki--"
"I want to know. Seriously, unless it was, like, necrophilia or you had me fuck a horse, I don't care. I'm really just curious."
&nbs
p; "It's not that. Gross. No, I just..."
"Tell me, Randall," she said in a tone that was so commanding and so insistent that I had no choice.
I wimped out. I went vague. "It wasn't just you and me. It was a threesome."
She laughed. "Is that what you feel all guilty about? Oh my God. Were you raised Catholic? How can you feel guilty about that? God, Randall -- I had my first threesome in high school. That's no big deal."
"Well, OK."
"Who was it with?"
"Does it matter?"
"Not at all. I'm just curious."
I invent things for a living -- people, places, stories. But in that moment, I was powerless to lie to her. "It was Fiona."
"Who's Fiona?" She sat up. "Wait -- my Fiona? My agent?"
"She--"
"Oh my God! That's right! You guys dated. I totally forgot."
I shouldn't have been shocked that she knew -- of course Fi would have mentioned it, probably the very moment that Kiki insisted on ditching the MGM deal to star in Flash/Back.
"This was months ago," I hastened to tell her. "I didn't know you. I didn't know I ever would know you. I totally--"
She leaned back, grinning. "Wow. What are the odds, right?"
"You're not angry?"
"Why would I be angry?" In her eyes, I could see that she genuinely couldn't imagine any reason to be angry. "Like you said -- you didn't know. The whole thing is some crazy coincidence."
I thought of the devil. And I wondered.
Her lips at my ear, she whispered. "And besides... I bet I could arrange that."
My life may have flashed before my eyes.
"I don't know," I said, struggling not to whimper. "Fi and me... It was a pretty definitive split."
"She owes me. I can be very persuasive. And even if I can't--" she licked the shell of my ear "--I know people a lot hotter than Fi."
Wherein I Go to a Hell of My Own Making
My tour wended its way back east. A six-hour plane flight became a week-long odyssey through Chicago, Detroit, Houston, and Pittsburgh. By the time I landed at JFK, I struggled to resist the urge to crouch, Pope-like, and kiss the ground.
The devil was my chauffeur. He held up a sign with my name in Baggage Claim.
"So you're really doing it, eh?" he asked. "You're really gonna move out to L.A. and ride the Kiki Newman Express to the big life in Hollywoodland."
"We'll see what happens." I should have just told him off and tried to snag a modicum of sleep. The ride from JFK to my particular corner of Brooklyn never took less than an hour, regardless of traffic, time of day, or day of the week. I could have used that hour. But I was so frazzled that I couldn't stop myself from engaging with him.
"I can tell you what will happen. I've seen it a million times before. Are you ready for your picture splattered all over the tabloids? Are you ready to see Access Hollywood run shitty, grainy video of yourself running out for a latte?"
"Kiki has a pretty good handle on the paparazzi."
"She has a pretty good handle on your crank, is what she has."
"Get it out of your system."
The devil clucked his tongue. "I just never thought I'd see the day when a good, virtuous East Coast boy such as yourself would decamp for the filthy modern-day Gomorrah that is Hollywood. And believe me, Randy, I know from Gomorrah."
"Of course you do." I was weary of him already. I'd been weary of him and his too-cool, hipster bullshit for a long, long time. I wished in that moment that he would just take my fucking soul and disappear and let me get on with my life.
"You're not really going to write the screenplay, are you? You think signing a contract with me is soul-draining... Wait until you see the screenwriting process out there. You'll be begging for fire and brimstone. No lie. No shit."
"Is that really what it's like? When I die?"
"I really don't care what happens to you when you die, Randall."
"Well, anyway, I'm not writing the screenplay. I'm just going to spend a few days with Del to hammer out some stuff. Then, don't worry, I'll be right back to working on your precious novel. It's almost finished."
"It's not my novel, Randy. It's yours. Do with it as you please."
But for a moment -- just a moment -- I forgot that the creature sitting in the driver's seat wasn't a human being. For that moment -- maybe I was tired; maybe he was -- I saw him as a person. Read him like a person.
Writers are good at deducing behavior. We have an intuitive sense of lies and the hidden.
In that moment, I was convinced that the devil was lying to me. That he was worried.
Do with it as you please.
No. He didn't want that. He wanted that book done.
We pulled up to my apartment and the devil popped the trunk for my suitcase. "Aren't you going to help me up the stairs with it?" I asked.
"I just drive the car, buddy," he said.
"Fuck you, Satan," I said with heat, and he took off into the Brooklyn night.
I hauled the suitcase up the stairs and into my apartment, which I hadn't seen in weeks.
Still, though absence may blur one's memory, I was reasonably certain that the gigantic, writhing mass in the middle of the kitchen floor hadn't been there when I left. At first, it seemed to be a single, gelatinous accretion, plated with shiny black pustules, but as stragglers broke off and scrambled around the mound for better access, I saw it for what it was: a swarm (or maybe two swarms) of ants and cockroaches, crawling over and around each other, a throbbing, heartbeat-like tumor of grotesque right in my apartment. I stared at it -- it made a strange sound, the sound of hundreds of cockroach and ant legs as an off-beat percussion. There are no similes or metaphors for that sound; it is what it is and it defies poetry.
It was a symptom of my unique, soul-mortgaged (soul-in-hock?) position in the world, I suppose, that my immediate assumption was that I had just gone to hell (thou cannot say "Fuck you, Satan" with impunity?) and my particular torture would involve creepy-crawlies of all sorts. I thought of an old childhood nightmare, bolstered by some reality... I had woken up one night with a fat spider glimmering in the dark air above me, almost silver in my nightlight, its thread impossibly slender and tremulous. I held my breath, terrified to breathe, lest the vibrations of my breath break that strand and send it tumbling onto my face...into my mouth...
For months afterward, I nightmared bugs scrambling over me, crawling into my mouth and down my gullet, where I could feel them scrambling about in my stomach. I slept face-down, my mouth tightly closed, breathing only through my nose.
This old childhood tableau flashed through me in the moment it took for a portion of the roaches to scatter at my presence. The ants remained, along with a sizable minority of the roaches, perhaps hardened and bolstered by my long absence.
I wasn't in hell. I was just in my kitchen. Which was infested. Beyond infested -- it had been invaded. Bugs had metastasized there.
And yet, a part of me wanted only to crawl into bed. A tired, tired part of me. To that part, it made perfect sense just to deal with this in the morning. They've been here for God knows how long, that part whispered, and they seem confined to the kitchen. Go get some sleep and--
I stomped on two roaches scurrying away from what I now realized was a fetid mash of rotten chicken, old tomatoes, and something slick and glistening that -- after a moment -- I recognized as a combination of honey and chocolate sauce.
Manda. My text. She had a key to my apartment. Hell, she was probably in my apartment when I texted her. More than a week ago.
I had trouble being angry at her, given the circumstances.
I remembered a spray can of bug killer under the kitchen sink. Crushing bugs as I went, I picked my way to the cabinet. I emptied the entire can onto the pile like a Vietnam-era soldier with a canister of napalm strapped to his back, and took a grim, godly satisfaction in watching the bugs twitch and scatter and die. The ants perished quickly and easily. The roaches stumbled around, drunk. Some
I took pity on and crushed under my heel. Others I watched with the sort of clinical detachment only exhaustion can bring. It was like a strange sort of nature documentary.
When all were dead and scattered, I cleaned up the kitchen floor, the sickly sweet smell of a thick layer of bug-killer blunting the reek of decaying food. Then I showered and made a cursory check of the rest of the apartment -- it was small and took little time.
Fortunately, Manda had left no other surprises for me; the rest of the apartment was intact and unmolested, a restraint I'm not sure I'd've shown in similar circumstances.
By then, I was hopped up on adrenaline and righteous, bug-killing God-wrath. Still, I fell asleep in seconds.
Face down. Mouth closed.
Just in case.
Wherein I Make the Move
A few days after the bug incident (for those few days, I still spied the stray roach or ant, but no second bug apocalypse was necessary), my apartment was in boxes. It took a depressingly short amount of time to pack up my belongings. My furniture wouldn't be making the trip west. I somehow couldn't see my very Brooklyn, very vintage secondhand shop treasures mixing and matching with Kiki's cool, restrained ultramodern furnishings. Pointless to try. It was all being sold online as I finished up the packing.
I had considered calling Manda. The way I'd broken up with her, the way I'd just discarded her was unseemly at best, assholish at worst. And I suspected I was leaning toward the latter. An apology was in order, or at least some sort of explanation.
But I realized/decided that a woman enraged enough to leave a pile of festering food as bug-bait on your kitchen floor was probably one also uninterested in apology or explanation. I didn't think it would make much of a difference to her if I explained that I'd thought I was soulless when I'd sent that text. It was a good excuse -- a perfectly reasonable one, for me -- but I couldn't expect her to believe. I pictured the devil lounging in my desk chair (the one piece of furniture not packed or sold or covered with boxes) and saying, "Well, you know what has no fury like that of a woman scorned, Randy!" Or something similar.
I could not repair what I'd done to Manda, but I could avoid doing the same a second time. Gym Girl and I existed in some sort of relationship limbo, but even souls trapped in limbo deserve some sort of reprieve. I'd called her to apologize for being out of touch ("the tour" made for a convenient excuse) and explained that I was moving to L.A. immediately ("the movie" made for another).