This Other Eden (7 page)

Expensive
bodywork.

Max looked at the
slumbering woman. How the hell had this happened? How had he ended up crashed
out on a carpet with a naked woman? He wasn’t even the sleep around type. What
Max liked to do was get off his face, act like a rich asshole and fall over.
Certainly he liked to flirt, but screwing around was stupid. Getting caught was
stupider. Could he get away with this? Not easily, he thought, and certainly
not cheaply. The  woman stretched out before him had not spent the countless
dollars she clearly had spent getting a body like that in order to hand it out
gratis. That body was a career move.

 It was
too perfect, too calculated, not one centimetre of it had been left to chance.
This was a body that would almost certainly be featuring in next year’s Coscars
(Cosmetic Surgery Awards). Max searched in vain for signs of human frailty.
Just one dimple of cellulite on the extraordinary limb stretched out before him
might have given him hope that here was a straight-shooter. A woman who would
wake up and say, ‘Wow! That was fun and so unlike me, now you go back to your
life and I’ll go back to mine.’ But there were no dimples of cellulite, not the
tiniest stretch mark, hair or crease to suggest that this was a real human
being.

The leg
pointing at Max seemed to be singling him out, accusing him. ‘There’s the
jerk,’ its stern posture seemed to say. ‘There’s the guy I’m going to be
talking about on every chat show for the next ten years. The asshole who’s
going to make me a celebrity.’

Max
never understood why he got married. His wife Krystal, herself a huge star, was
no clearer about her own motives. It was almost as if they’d been forced into
it to feed the Max and Krystal industry that had grown up around them. Like a
king, Max lived in a world where everything he did was deemed to be important.
If he got drunk it was important. If he hit a journalist it was important. His
notorious decision to have a penis
reduction
(‘I owe it to the women I
sleep with’) had made the cover of
Premiere
and the number one news item
on MTV. This, despite the fact that MTV now had a core audience in its fifties,
twice Max’s age.

The
problem was that, like most kings, Max began to believe that what he did was
important. There are few Canutes in the entertainment industry, people with the
strength of character to turn their face against the tide of popular obsession
and say, ‘I am not even one millionth as interesting a person as I’m cracked up
to be’. Certainly, Max could not resist the endless seduction of
self-importance. It was a short step from throwing up on request to getting
married on request.

Since
then, both Krystal and he had assured the world that they had been tamed by
love and that their hell-raising days were over. But they weren’t. Krystal had
continued to paint the town at night and have her body reconstructed in the
morning, while Max had kept right on drinking, punching people, getting punched
and waking up face-down, not knowing where he was. Now it seemed he’d got
sufficiently off his head to make a real idiot of himself. Max did not love
Krystal but he had no desire to insult and embarrass her on the front page of
the
National Enquirer.

The
woman stirred.

‘Max, I
want a divorce,’ she said.

Max was
surprised. He squinted his aching eyes to focus.

‘Krystal?’
he said.

‘What?’
she replied.

Max
fell silent. He felt ashamed. It was all very well being a complete screw-up,
but not recognising your own wife was just gross. Certainly she had had a
number of faces since he married her, but a husband is supposed to keep track
of these things.

‘I want
a divorce, Max. Last night at Simone’s we got treated like yesterday’s news. I
felt like an old married lady. Well I’m not an old lady, I’m just twenty-four
and I want a divorce.’

‘OK,’
said Max.

‘Don’t
you have anything else to say?’ Krystal asked.

‘Well…’
Max thought for a moment. This was his wife and yet he scarcely knew her. This
beautiful woman was a stranger to him. The aimlessness of his existence swept
over him. For a moment he saw himself clearly and he saw nothing, for there was
nothing to see. His whole life was a pointless charade. Fortunately, for Max
introspection was a passing thing.

‘Any
chance of a final jump?’ he said.

Krystal
never could resist a bit of romance.

‘Oh, go
on then.’

Max
crawled forward across the carpet and up along Krystal’s astonishing body.

‘I
don’t think my breath’s too sweet,’ he confessed. ‘You didn’t see anyone taking
a leak in my mouth last night, did you?’

Krystal
always had her disinfectant at hand. She sprayed Max’s mouth and then her own,
for she had dined on pepper vodka and garlic corn chips the previous evening.
Stretching across to her handbag she produced an altogether more formidable looking
aerosol.

‘OK.
Stand up and drop them,’ she said. ‘You may be my husband but I don’t know
where you’ve been.’

‘I
don’t think I can stand up, Krystal. Going anything higher than carpet before
I’ve had some coffee gives me vertigo.’

‘Stand
up and show, Max, or you can whistle for a wriggle,’ said Krystal, who had very
strict views when it came to sexual hygiene. Max knew that nothing blew a screw
quicker than resisting the precautions, so he staggered to his feet and dropped
his jeans. Krystal sprayed his crotch, coating his dick in spermicidal stretch
laminate.

‘The
spray-on condom has to be the greatest invention since inflatable handguns,’
said Krystal as she blew on it to help it dry.

‘I like
this bit,’ said Max. ‘I hope you have some solvent, though.’

Max
spoke from painful experience. The spray-on condom was a triumph of synthetic
fibre engineering. It could be applied to a flaccid member and would then
stretch and move like a second skin. Obviously, with a conventional condom
there is a teat on the end which provides somewhere for the ejaculation to go.
With spray-on jobs the laminate simply stretched to accommodate whatever was
necessary. It would stretch, but it would not break, ever. This was fine for
the containment of a bit of sexual effluvia, but less convenient if you needed
a wee and you had no solvent. Max, like most men, had experienced the pain and
embarrassment of driving to the chemist with a big balloon of piss hanging off
the end of his dong.

Krystal
drew Max down on top of her. They embraced and she kissed him long and hard. In
a town where good kissing was the norm, Krystal was a star. It was said that if
you had had a cosmetic lift you should not kiss Krystal for at least six
months, because she would suck your face right off. This rumour began when
Krystal was just sixteen. She had been a child star and, having been through
sex, drugs, college and fully diagnosed media dependency, she had married an
ageing star, a man with the career of a seventy-year-old and the face of a
thirty-five-year-old. At least, he had the face of a thirty-five-year-old until
his wedding night with young Krystal. Loud screams were heard from their hotel
suite in Aspen, Colorado. A paramedic Cosmetic Surgical Rapid Response unit was
scrambled from Cedars Hospital LA, and the ageing star was not seen in public
for four months.

‘Ate
the old boy’s face right off,’ the gossips assured each other.

‘I
heard they had to cut his teeth out of the back of her throat. That little girl
nearly choked on her old man’s dentures.’

Krystal
was now giving Max the benefit of her plunger-like skills, but despite
administering a kiss that could have unblocked a drain, she could feel that the
fire was not getting lit.

‘I’m
not stretching your laminate, am I, honey?’ she inquired gently.

‘It
isn’t you, Krystal, it’s just early, you know? I had a gutful of booze last
night and. .

‘Hangover
hanging over, is it?’ she said. ‘Let me show you something I had fitted last
week.’

Krystal
rose to her feet and glided across the room. It was a walk that had made a
hundred million Virtual Reality helmets steam. Crossing to her dressing-table
and perching herself gently against it, she looked down at the prostrate Max.

‘Like
what you see?’ she inquired, and Max would have had to have been made out of
granite to demur. What’s more, it would have had to have been granite which was
probably gay, anyway. Krystal was an extraordinary vision of market research generated
design perfection. She looked as if a Japanese porn artist had just created her
from computer graphics. Certainly it was a little soulless, but as her body
sculptor often said, Krystal, there are tits men, and there are ass men, the
only soul men I ever knew were musicians’.

‘You
think this is good, huh?’ Krystal pouted. ‘Watch.’

She
took up a thin tube that was attached to a little cylinder in her vanity case.
Max watched in astonishment as she removed what he had imagined was a tiny mole
deep within her cleavage. She attached the tube to the spot where the mole had
been, there was a hiss and Krystal’s already generous bosom began to expand.
Max gaped, he had never seen anything like it. Krystal laughed at his
confusion.

‘Neat,
huh? It cost an awful lot,’ she said. ‘Great for the career, though, so it
should pay for itself. You see, now I can do big girl parts and little girl
parts. Versatility is so important for a serious actress, don’t you think? I’ve
had the skin elasticated so it won’t stretch either, and they go down after a
couple of hours. You like?’

Well,
as it happened, Max wasn’t particularly into big ones, but it seemed churlish
to say so when a woman had just gone to the trouble of inflating her body for
his benefit. Besides, Max’s libido was finally beginning to struggle through
the fog of stale booze and old smokes that had so far kept it down and Krystal
was a woman who would look good in any proportions. He definitely wanted to get
horizontal with her. The problem was getting the message through downstairs.

Max had
had trouble with hard-ons for years. It was that age-old problem, erection
awareness. The minute he started thinking about them, boof! they were gone. It
was not a physical thing, it was purely mental. As every man knows, the penis
is a paranoid portion. If it knows you’re worrying about it, it heads south.
Fortunately there is a solution. It is a matter of getting one’s mind off the
subject. Max’s method was to indulge in a discreet fantasy, in order to
transport his libido away from the current pressurised circumstance. However,
Krystal would not have felt put out had she been a party to Max’s secret
thoughts for it was not other women of whom he thought, but of himself. Not
sexually, but professionally. Max was an actor and the most exciting thing in
the world to him was just how
bloody good
he was. He thought of the triumphs,
the tears, the quirky little workshop productions he still got involved in
because, despite being a megastar, he was first and foremost an artist. He
thought about how great he looked warming up in leg warmers and an old torn
T-shirt … and there it was, a great big proud upstander, all present,
correct and ready for action.

Krystal
was pleased. As far as she was concerned, her inflatable tits had worked their
magic.

‘So you
do like,’ she purred, giving them a jiggle.

‘Sure I
like, Krystal,’ Max said. ‘Just so long as they don’t go pop and you end up
being blown all round the room like a balloon.’

Raunchy
sex scene.

Max had already dropped
his jeans and underpants in order to receive the laminate. Now he kicked off
his mocassins, advanced across the room and stood before her, smouldering for a
moment. Without taking his eyes off hers, he pulled off his T-shirt to reveal
the taut, tanned torso beneath. He was naked, and looking great.

Apart
from his socks.

Socks
are terrible things. There is no way you can take them off in a sexually
charged manner. Shoes, you can kick .

T-shirts,
you can pull … underwear you can drop … But socks, you have to hop around
on one leg, tugging at. A few years previously, someone had attempted to market
socks that dissolved under the heat of passion, but since the temperature of
most people’s feet drops by about forty degrees the moment they get into bed
with anyone, the idea was a flop.

Having
disposed of his socks as quickly as possible, Max gathered Krystal up in his
arms and carried her to the bed. Max was a small man, but he was strong and
wiry, and at just twenty-six the booze and smokes had yet to reduce his
strength. They fell upon the bed together with the usual, slightly ungainly
thud and tangle of arms and legs that traditionally accompanies this move. They
both laughed a little, as if to acknowledge the moment, then they clinched into
an embrace.

It is
an irony which only movie stars can truly appreciate that sex is not like in
the movies. Here were two international icons of popular entertainment, who had
delivered more sensational sauce in their time than Mr Heinz and yet, when it
came to actually having it off for real, they were as dodgy as anybody else.