Show Me (13 page)

For his first months in porn, he continued working at his internship, carrying manuscripts and sheafs of red pencils to the studio and reading them between scenes. He became adept at excuses, fabricating a spine-chilling dental problem that required constant care—in reality, repeated trips to studios and improvised sets that were often the director’s kitchen or garage. He was aware that sometimes the pages he brought back to the office had a telltale aura of sex; his hands seemed to smell of pussy all the time, no matter how often he washed them. At that age, he could still do multiple sex scenes on two hours of sleep. His life became a strange jumble of subway trains that turned into computer screens that turned into assorted sex goddesses moaning, “Harder! Harder!” that then turned into boozy parties in improbably luxurious apartments, where he would fall asleep beside an indoor swimming pool with his head cradled in a naked girl’s lap.

For a while, he was pursuing a misbegotten love affair with Babylona. She was fifteen years his senior, but her body and face still had a dewy timelessness, her ivory skin unblemished and smooth even on her knuckles and feet. The age difference was less crucial than the difference in their characters. Jared was (in her view) reprehensibly normal. Sometimes she admired his “red-bloodedness,” which signified that he still believed in marriage and America, watched the nightly news, and thought about the future in terms of a house upstate and children. She lived in a parallel universe in which gorgeous people chatted amusingly about anything while knowing nothing. When one of her actresses was in a near-fatal car crash, she readily wrote a check to pay for the surgery, but refused to worry or feel sad. On the subject of fidelity, she was cheerfully incorrigible. “I’ve never felt the lack of it,” she told him. “When I begin to miss something from life, perhaps. But, you see, I’m completely happy as I am.” When he suggested that
he
might not be happy with her sleeping with other men, she said, “Well, you mustn’t be ashamed of it. Many otherwise sensible people suffer from jealousy.” It was impossible even to break up with her. She just said, “Oh, darling. You can come and sleep with me again whenever you like, of course. But you aren’t obliged.”

Meanwhile, he fell further and further behind with his work at the publishing house, until his apologies and excuses became a daily ritual. At last, inevitably, the day came when he woke up in one of those luxurious apartments at three in the afternoon on a Monday. He was lying on a kitchen floor, intertwined with a beautiful Asian girl in a tutu. His head was in a pool of spilled red wine. The girl muttered, “Harder . . . harder,” in her sleep. Jared thought about it for a whole minute before giving up on careers, New York City, success. He cuddled the girl a little closer and fell back into the blessed sleep of the unrepentant sexual delinquent.

In the thirteen years that had passed since then, he had been in so many X-rated films that there was no question of counting them. He had had innumerable “girlfriends” who “adored” him and wanted to marry him “when all this is over.” He had thought he was in love with dozens of them. But then he just fell in love with the next girl and the next girl, until he wasn’t bothering to think about being in love at all, he was just saying carelessly, “You’re wonderful; let’s get married when all this is over,” and not listening to the response.

It had been almost five years now since he’d had a girlfriend. At first, he’d thought it was a reaction against porn, and the world of careless sex that had become a second home to him. But even when he met a girl outside of the porn world, he would imagine her saying, “I adore you,” in that particular, breathless, meaningless way, and all romantic sentiment would evaporate. Girls continued to get crushes on him. Maybe some of them were even “in love,” though he had always been skeptical about the existence of unrequited love. How could you really be in love with someone who didn’t return your feelings? Wasn’t that based on a delusion?

Now that he’d met Zaza, he wasn’t so sure. Even though when he’d met her, he’d felt nothing more than sympathy, his mind returned to her again and again over the days that followed. He couldn’t imagine her saying “I adore you.” He couldn’t imagine her saying anything at all that she didn’t mean. But he could imagine her in his arms, looking into his eyes . . . opening her legs . . . In fact, he couldn’t stop imagining that.

 

 

 

The image of Zaza came back to him now as he sat in Babylona’s office, waiting for her to finish a long-distance phone call to the house-keeper at her castle in the Alps.
“Quatsch, Trudi, nur sag mir . . . stimmt, am Wochenende, aber mit Rudi, das macht neun und dreissig . . . ja . . . nein. . . .”
Jared was staring at her red hair and picturing Zaza, her stricken, sweet face turned up to his, her childishly serious tears. That was Valerie’s doing, of course. He had to keep focused, he had to remember why he was here. If he let his mind stray, he would end up telling Babylona all his romantic woes, and leave without achieving anything. Babylona had an instinct for ferreting out gossip—and an uncanny way of ducking anything unpleasant. Tangling with Valerie was bound to involve extreme unpleasantness.

At last she hung up the phone and turned to him with an expression of sweet weariness in her eyes. “How I hate anything practical. I did think that having money would free me from practical things, but they just became very expensive practical things. I really will retire to some Caribbean island one of these days, and spend my remaining years reading on the beach.”

Babylona was always threatening this, though in the years Jared had known her, she had never opened a book. He said, “Well, I hate to come to you with business, then—”

“Oh, you can’t. I can’t bear it when my friends come and see me for business. Tell me something wonderful.”

“After. First—”

“Oh, well,” she sighed and lowered her long eyelashes. “If we must deal with business, we can talk about the birthday show, which you know you must be in. We’re all going to the Schloss and making a party of it—all proceeds to charity, of course. And I feel it would be bad luck to have a miserable time for charity. The charity would go wrong somehow—it would have the wrong energy. Don’t you think?”

“What are you expecting me to do?” he said suspiciously.

“Oh, nothing out of the ordinary,” she said, waving her hand dismissively in the air. “Something easy but compulsory. You know.”

He looked at her darkly. “I’m not agreeing to it until you tell me. I won’t even come. I don’t even like your castle or Germany or parties. As you know.”

“Oh, so negative,” she said. “Well, you know we have to have you fucking again—just to still the rumors, you understand, grace of the damnable LeBlanc. But if you want to state any preferences, of course I’ll take them into consideration.”

He caught his breath and tried to put it all together in his mind. This was his opening to address the Valerie issue, but he had to get it right. He said cautiously, “I did have an idea.”

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “I do hate to speak ill of anyone, but is there anything good to say about that LeBlanc person? I was so terribly deceived in her. In my own way, I’m horribly innocent.”

“Can’t you just fire her?” Jared asked, with a sudden flush of hope.

“Oh, it’s a matter of advertising dollars. America loves that sort of girl.”

“Valerie asked me to talk to you about her . . . show. Her idea for a new show.” Without intending it, he found himself making a face. “The virgin thing.”

Babylona leaned toward him confidentially. “Isn’t she awful? I told her it was illegal, but apparently it isn’t. I know nothing about such things.”

“But you’re not going to do it.” Jared’s voice rose angrily. “Tell me you’re not going to do it.”

“Oh, no. But I think it might be wise to let her make her pilot episode. The one where she loses
her
virginity, you know. It might . . . defang her somehow.”

“You think all she needs is a good fuck?” Jared smiled skeptically.

“No, I thought it might affect her ratings.” Babylona winked. “I have someone in mind to replace her, but I do need to make it
look
like business. I am pretending to run a business.”

Jared let this pass. In fact, Babylona was a shrewd and committed if not an utterly ruthless businesswoman. Her pretense to “know nothing about such things” became laughable on even a brief acquaintance with her. If she was determined to get rid of Valerie, there was doubtless a business reason. And it came to him that it might be about him. Valerie had damaged the value of one of Babylona’s other properties: Jared Vairy. That could potentially cost her money, and it made Valerie an ongoing risk, a loose cannon.

Now he steeled himself and said, “Perhaps we could kill two birds with one stone.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Oh, you’re willing to make the ultimate sacrifice?”

“I have my reasons.”

She folded her hands and regarded him with the intense affection he always found hard to resist. It was at least partly the cheap thrill of being the boss’s favorite. But there was also affection on his side, and a powerful undertow of nostalgia for those early days, when her sex-laden world seemed like heaven on earth. When she was the sexiest woman in the world, the dirty angel who stepped into his window and changed his life.

“You aren’t curious to know who I want to replace Valerie?”

He frowned. “Is it Emily? I know she’s a little burned-out with her show now.”

“Oh, no. Emily’s doing brilliantly on
In Depth
.”

He tried to think. From the expression on her face, it had to be someone he knew, someone he cared about. At last he shrugged. “Okay. I give up.”

“It’s your Zaza.”

Jared almost said,
She’s not my Zaza.
But the phrase gave him a warm glow, and he found he couldn’t object. Wasn’t the glow he felt at least a little proprietary? The truth was, he fiercely wanted her to be his. But he could have sworn he hadn’t given himself away to Babylona, even to the extent that there was anything to give away. He’d asked her to get Zaza another job, true. But he’d been so casual about it. Hadn’t he? At the same time, he thought of Zaza being rerouted from acting in porn (in effect, having sex with legions of strangers) into being a commentator (naked but untouched), and something deep within him relaxed. Maybe seeing her fucking other men affected him more than he’d realized.

“She has something,” Babylona was saying. “A certain naive charisma. I know
you
know what I mean.”

He shook off his reverie. “Granted. But what are you up to? I know there’s something more to this.”

“Oh, perhaps I thought it would please you. Couldn’t that be the reason?”

“It could. But I have a feeling it’s not.”

“Feelings, reasons—this is all too deep for me. Suppose we leave the psychology for now and go back to our business. Which I seem to remember was your night of passion with Valerie LeBlanc.”

“I guess.”

“There’s a problem with that, of course.”

“What’s that?”

“She doesn’t want to sleep with
you.
”

Jared frowned. “She said that?”

“She said she’s America’s sweetheart, which of course makes one think rather ill of America. But in a twisted sense . . . Anyhow, she wants someone straight to do the deed. A boyfriend type.”

Jared’s face twisted. “Ralph Anderman.”

“Yes. Do you think she knows him? She was very mysterious. She seemed certain he wouldn’t refuse.”

“But I was her first choice,” Jared said. “She wanted me to do it before she thought of Anderman.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Why would she lie about that?”

“Oh, she’s been asking every male star we’ve got at XTV. I suspect she wants to find out who her allies are. Or who can be bought.”

Jared found himself blushing. That was one possibility that had never occurred to him. He imagined Valerie sitting with her phone, placing calls to all the men in the business, insinuating how fucking her would boost their careers, and swearing each of them to secrecy. It was all too easy to imagine. “Well. And I thought I was special.”

“Oh, you
are
special,” Babylona said with a languid smile. “You were the only one who said no.”