Kamikaze Lust Page 15

  “Get in with the competition, are you crazy?”

  “Competition? Is that what’s going on?”

  “You tell me, later,” she smiled. “Now, get out of the rain, Slivowitz. You’re all wet.”

  At that she pulled the door shut. The cab took off, cutting a yellow trail through the pouring rain. Had I not been too chicken-shit yellow myself, I would have jumped in with her. Silver Ray might have. Rachel Silver stopped at the Korean deli on the corner and bought a pack of cigarettes before going home.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” RR said. We’d just finished an awkward cocktail hour, during which I chugged a couple of Cokes and stammered into a monologue about the man who shot himself on the picket line. RR said little. But he did notice I’d gotten a haircut since I’d last seen him. So had he. He didn’t like his cut, said it was a drag he could no longer make a ponytail. Mine was a different story. He told me he liked the way I let it dry naturally instead of straightening it with a blow dryer. He said I looked vibrant, less professional.

  “I don’t usually buy cigarettes,” I said, tossing the used match and inhaling deeply as we pushed through the cold, black night. Veins of highway crisscrossed on Canal Street. We headed south toward the industrial theme park, where Ethan and others in the media gentry had in the past couple of decades settled. It was said to be very chic, but the vacant streets and loft buildings looked lonely in the dark.

  Again, uncomfortable with RR’s silence, I tried to push the cigarette conversation. “I hated people like me when I really smoked.”

  He said nothing.

  “You know the type, always bumming, never buying.”

  Still not a word. I smoked seriously, as if the act itself were an art. “I always said no way would I ever be that kind of tiresome grub, but…”

  “We all become what we hate sooner or later. It’s called growing up.”

  I nodded, because I couldn’t think of a response. RR had a way of stating things so simply they curtailed further conversation, his words resonating, the gaps and long pauses only making them seem more profound. Warhol again. The school of silent geniuses. Perhaps I’d spent too much time around journalists, but most people I knew used words and sentences to project a bit of themselves onto others. Listen closely to most conversations and you’ll find little more than dueling soliloquies. RR wasn’t like that. From what I could tell he used language to get back to silence.

  I decided he must be the kind of guy people thought of when they spoke about the strong, silent type. Although I usually liked more talkative men, it was nice not to battle for conversation time. We could take in the scenery, enjoy the night. But soon the streaming cars and the click of my heels against the concrete grew ominous. The air felt thicker, as if someone had sabotaged the climate control out there on the cold, damp street, and left me in the suffocating silence wishing he would say something. Anything at all.

  Resisting another monologue of my own, I concentrated on walking. The same platform boots that had served me well inside my apartment were a risk on these cracked sidewalks, still slick from the evening’s rain. That I managed to make it the few blocks to Ethan’s without falling was remarkable. My sacrifice in comfort proved worthwhile when we stepped inside Ethan’s loft and, upon relinquishing our coats to a man in a tuxedo, I peeped at myself in the mirrored foyer and thought I looked good, a bit like Alexis with my boots, tight black cocktail dress, and newly tousled curls flowing down my back. I even had her ex-husband along for the ride. As we followed the trail of black and white balloons into the huge living area, I noticed people, particularly those who knew me, doing a double take as if they’d made a mistake and blinking might correct the image. It was him, too. The man was ridiculous, with his fashionably spiked hair more brown and less gray than I remembered, and those tight black trousers. He looked like a rock star middleaging from pop icon to serious artist.

  I couldn’t believe my own moxie, bringing a famous porn star to a party full of journalists, the subgroup of my acquaintance from that fancy journalism school I’d slipped into on my virginity and a dream. I’d always felt the fraud in those ivy-covered buildings, but showed them all when I landed a job right out of school at the daily in Jersey and within a year tripled my circulation in the move to Miami. I finally hit the top when the News came calling and returned to New York where I promptly lost my job. Showed them all, didn’t I?

  We walked to the bar where RR ordered a Coke for me and a beer for himself. Making our way toward the windows with the Hudson River view, I heard Ethan call my name. He was smack in the middle of the blue-chip crowd. We joined them, and Ethan eyed RR as I’d hoped he would. He might have had a pregnant wife, but I had a bona fide boy-toy.

  I said hello and introduced my friend, Robbie…

  “Rob Vaughn.” RR shook hands with Ethan and smiled at everyone else. I quick-referenced people to their jobs for him: Joan Pinchett and Harry Lansing from Wall Street Week, Susan from the computer magazine, Anne from the morning radio show, Jason with his theater magazine and blond boyfriend George, an actor. As I spoke, RR’s name haunted me like a record sample…Rob Vaughn…Rob Vaughn…Rob Vaughn. His last name was Vaughn? It sounded familiar, like somebody else’s name. Later, I would remember that it actually was somebody else’s name, another actor, from straight films and television, but right then, in Ethan’s living room, I was simply shocked that he had a last name other than “Rod” and that I didn’t know it. I’d never thought to ask. Amazing, what gets by when you stop asking questions.

  I was the journalist without questions, and RR my accomplice for the evening. He took the attention away from my downward mobility, although I started getting nervous when Ethan asked him where he worked.

  “Mostly in Vegas,” RR said.

  “No,” Ethan said. “I meant what do you do?”

  “Little of this, little of that.”

  “He’s got his own business, in film,” I added, afraid of what else RR might reveal and also to keep up the mystery. Upon hearing the word film the little networkers smiled. Cartoon bubbles springing from their heads might have said: Synergy. The conversation then turned to questions about the strike, although I wasn’t confident I could answer them being away from the picket line as much as I was.

  “It must be terrible,” Anne said.

  “Yeah, I—” I started to speak, but the circle overwhelmed me, a chorus of concerned eyes and tisk-tisks. I couldn’t follow who was saying what:

  “It can’t last forever.”

  “I only wish I had a few weeks with nothing to do.”

  “At least you can freelance.”

  “I’m actually—”

  “Has anyone heard from Peter?”

  “Still in China.”

  And that was that. Too much talk of suffering made people nervous. They wanted just enough to empathize and think better her than me. Only Joan Pinchett, the bitch, kept staring at us. It figured. She’d been my nemesis back at Columbia, always showing up at the same events as I did and trying to listen in on my conversations in the telephone room; she’d even chosen a similar thesis topic on community policing. I knew I’d finally beaten her when RR offered to get her a drink, and she said “No!” as if she’d seen a roach crawling between the miniature quiches.

  “What’s her problem?” RR said.

  “I think she recognized you, but she’d never admit it. She’s a Republican.”

  “So am I.”

  “Get out!”

  He rolled his eyes, shrugged. “I don’t like people screwing with my money.”

  “I should have known.”

  “Another Coke?”

  “No, something stronger, something Republican.”

  “Scotch?”

  “Champagne,” I said. “But only if it’s really expensive.”

  He laughed, one eyebrow crept up his forehead, and I knew I’d scored points for amusing him. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. I traced his shoulders as he disappeared into
the crowd, leaving me by myself. I thought about barging back into the group now a few feet away, but how? Cocktail parties had never been my forte. Better to pretend I was happy alone, enjoying the three-piece jazz band. Better to turn and look out the window. It was a foggy night. I could barely make out the Jersey skyline, and the Verrazano was a mesh of string and clouds, as if someone had taken a thumb and tried to smudge out the passage to Bay Ridge, disconnecting Brooklyn from the rest of the country and taking Aunt Lorraine away from me. I wondered if she was playing backgammon with Rowdy or watching an Alexis Calyx movie. What a strange bond for us to share, though I did take comfort in it.

  A man came up behind me and by his smell, a woody scent that reminded me of my father, I knew who it was before turning around.

  “Your friend’s no regular studio honcho, is he?” Ethan said.

  “You are a perceptive fellow.”

  “Go on, where’d you pick him up?” His voice was rushed, as if he had to know who my date was before he could move forward with his evening. I smiled and looked off into the party. The trio played an instrumental version of “The Lady is a Tramp,” heavy on the tenor sax. A song about a woman who might buy a man for pleasure.

  “Well?” Ethan said.

  “It’s embarrassing but…I used an escort service.”

  “Oh please, you’re too frigid to pay for it.”

  “Maybe I have to pay for it to get what I want.”

  Ethan dropped his jaw, grunted, and eyed me curiously. As if he were running a computer check to see if my name cross-referenced with escort service. Before he could say anything, Jason and George broke in between us. “I hope we’re interrupting something,” Jason said.

  “Not at all,” Ethan said.

  “Tell them the truth,” I said, then turned to George and Jason. “He’s mad I brought a gigolo to his party.”

  “A gigolo?” Ethan said. “What agency did you get him from?”

  “Boys-R-Us,” I said.

  “Good on you, ducky,” Jason said.

  “You believe that crap?” Ethan huffed and shook his head back and forth before excusing himself.

  Jason and George smiled at each other. “Boys-R-Us,” Jason said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It must be quite exclusive with that kind of personnel.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Really, sugar, we could spot a star such as your friend in a churchyard,” George said in the Mississippi drawl that always made his words sound slightly lascivious. “There is no way you could afford that boy, not on strike.”

  I laughed out loud; they knew too much. “Please, don’t tell Ethan.”

  “Fess up,” George said. “Where’d you meet the movie star?”

  So I told them how I’d come to arrive at the party with Robbie Republican on my arm, although I was wary of too many people knowing about my ghostwriting job. Having work, I often felt as guilty as a splattered scab, especially after the frustration and chaos I’d witnessed today. But I had to admit I liked the image my new job conferred. As if I had an inside line to the mystical forces of sexuality. My date a tenured member of the sexual cognoscenti, it followed that I was wild and exciting in bed. Need I state the power this syllogism—fallacious though it may have been—might work upon a woman who’d entered her thirties convinced she was a lousy lay? It was as if in my Silver Ray mind I’d become multiply orgasmic. And the image was contagious. Even Jason and George seemed more impressed than they would have been had I simply rented RR through Boys-R-Us.

  Turns out, my old friends were porn aficionados, confessing to me and RR who’d just returned with my ritzy champagne that they had a closet full of movies, which was no surprise, although I was confounded by their footnote: most of the collection was heterosexual hard-core. “I don’t get it,” I said to Jason. “You haven’t been within ten feet of a vagina since you were born, but you’re into watching girls.”

  “Oh, no, that’s not it at all,” Jason said. “When I watch, I am the woman. You don’t realize, but this man you’re with,” he turned to RR, “I mean, begging your pardon, Mr. Vaughn.”

  “Go for it,” RR said, and I wondered if Jason had known RR’s last name before he’d said it earlier. The word slid from his lips so easily.

  “This man,” Jason said, pushing his fingertips against his chest for emphasis, “he’s every bottom’s fantasy.”

  RR burst out laughing. “I love gay guys.”

  “Not as much as we love you, dear.”

  They all laughed. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but thought better of saying anything. Instead, I looked around and noticed the loft had emptied considerably. I was nervous about what to do next, whether I would go home with Mr. Rob Vaughn and whether thinking this made me a bottom.

  Jason, too, remarked on the thinning crowd and said they should be going. They had to catch Tricky’s drag act in the West Village and invited us to come along. “Tricky would just die to meet a celebrity like yourself,” George smiled.

  He had no trouble convincing me, and RR said he was ready to leave as soon as we’d arrived, though I never would have known, he seemed so comfortable. On the way out Harry Lansing pulled RR and me aside. “See I’ve got this thing, this script,” he said. “Well, it’s not actually finished, it’s more in the conceptional stage, but it’s dynamite. In fact its so great I’m hesitant to tell you. You are in the business, that’s what she said, right?”

  RR nodded, confirming my stretch of the word film earlier. Although he could have been a big-time movie producer listening to Harry Lansing give up his precious idea as if he’d been fed truth serum. His movie was a thriller about an ambitious young stock broker who discovers that aliens have taken over the Bloomberg numbers on his computer. “But these aliens don’t look like any aliens we’ve ever seen before,” said Harry. “They’re tiny and theylive in colonies, like ant colonies, and that’s how they do it. How they get into the computer system. It’s kind of like Wall Street meets Independence Day. ”

  “It sounds more like a hacker movie,” RR said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Aliens and computers.”

  “Talk about a post-millennial bug,” I said.

  “No,” Harry said. “I really want it to be a moral story, about the broker. All stories are about people. We know this, right Rachel? Anyway, see, this broker’s got the aliens feeding him insider information, so in the end he’s got to choose between making money and saving himself. In the process, of course, he also saves the world.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  RR removed a card from his wallet and handed it to Harry. “Call me at my office,” he said and then turned to me. “You ready?”

  A few feet away I asked, “Was that your real card?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you give it to him? He’s going to be calling you every day.”

  “It’s a good idea.” He led me toward the foyer where we retrieved our coats.

  “So?”

  RR held out my coat for me. “I know people, I can do things,” he said, and I wondered whether his words were meant to humor me or if before my very eyes he was becoming the person I’d invented. Either way I giggled as I turned and slipped my hands through the armholes of my coat, then felt his hand linger on my left shoulder, a soft touch that seemed characteristic of a famous director or Hollywood moneyman. Rob Vaughn. The guy who knows people.

  Snug in my coat, I pivoted to face him. He was smiling seductively, like something I’d seen in Sensurround. “You don’t believe a word I say, do you Silver?” he said, and I knew then that he would never be anything but RR to me.

  Mirroring his flirtation, I said, “I thought you made porn films.”

  “No, I make money.”

  “And you really liked his idea?”

  His eyeballs slid sideways, then back to me. “No.”

  We both burst out laughing.

  “I like your laugh.” He led me
away from the coat check. “It’s healthy, much lighter than the rest of you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

  We arrived at the front door where we met the boys and said goodbye to a surly Ethan standing with his arm around Fran, who according to Jason and George was a total LGQ. “Low Glamour Quotient,” Jason whispered to me on the way downstairs, making me self-conscious about my own glamour quotient.

  “Give her a break, she’s pregnant.”

  “Oh, please. The only reason Ethan married her is for her trust fund. Everybody knows that boy still has his face up every tunnel south of Ninety-sixth Street. I don’t think he ever really got over you.”

  “Then he’s a fool,” I said, though I felt foolish myself. Two months ago I’d been one of Ethan’s tunnels. The night he told me Fran was pregnant and slammed into me, brutally, as if I were the one usurping his freedom. Me, the quintessential bridge-and-tunnel gal. They come in, park, party, and then return to the clean streets of the suburbs. I tried to imagine it being any different with a porn star. Or with a woman. It suddenly seemed possible.

  Down in the street the wind coiled around us, blowing my hair in a thousand different directions. “I always thought you were too good for him,” Jason said. “You’re a total dish.”

  Sweet of him, but I felt like Medusa. I hoped my nose wasn’t greasy and the pink lipstick hadn’t lodged in the runnels of my lips, pursed as they were in disbelief. Jason smiled. “Really, as far as HGQs go, you’re off the scale. Thank you, Robert,” he raised his eyebrows provocatively at RR who held open the back door of a cab for us. At that moment I did feel charmed, though in a Cinderella kind of way, as if I were on borrowed HGQ time.

  George climbed into the front seat, and in just a few minutes, we were ushered through the doors of a converted warehouse building by the West Side Highway.

  The final cab of the evening found me and the porn star silent in the back seat. “Two stops,” he said as we got in and without consulting me gave the driver my address. Then we were off, part of the swarm of urban bumble bees, the black and yellow schools that ruled the streets by night.