Blue Movie (4 page)

She glanced from one to the other, wondering if they weren’t surely putting her on.

“Well, gosh, I don’t know,” she admitted. “. . .I mean, you’d actually show . . . you know, show his thing—I mean, going in and out and everything, like in the ones we saw?”

“Yes, do you think that could be beautiful?”

The darling girl seemed to gulp slightly. “Well, gosh, I . . . I really . . .”

“Or to put it another way,” interjected gross Sid, “would
you
be interested in the role?”

“Wait a minute, Sid,” said Boris, “I’m not saying that you can’t use inserts there—I mean, in the close-ups, on the . . . on the cock, where you show, uh,
penetration
. . . I’m not saying you can’t use doubles there. I mean, it’s something I haven’t thought through yet.”

The girl, obviously sympathetic to anything either of them might suggest, was troubled. “But how could you get the film . . . well, you know, how could you get it
shown
anywhere . . . I mean, it’s against the law, isn’t it, a film like that?”

“Aw well, you’re missing the point, baby,” said Sid brusquely, “I mean that’s the whole idea, to spend three million dollars on a film and then never show it. Don’t you think that’s sort of cute?”

“Well, gosh . . .”

She was at a loss to continue, but reprieve came with the lurching arrival of matinee idol Rex McGuire, whacked out of his skull. He was half crying and half laughing; and while it is unlikely that he was actually wearing makeup at this hour, his face was so strangely tan that the two separate streams of tears seemed to be etching furrows down each cheek. In any case, it was a grand job of weeping, thesp-wise.

“Hi guys,” he said in the sepulchral tones of the New York stage; there was almost no discernible connection between his drunkenness and his voice control as he stumbled slightly then leaned over to support himself on one arm against the rail of the terrace.

“Hey, you know what that bastard Rat Prick Harrison just said? Go on, guess what he just said.”

“That you were pissed?” hazarded Sid.

Penny Pilgrim twittered nervously, thinking what a daring thing to say to Rex McGuire, but the latter was quite impervious. “Well, you know this thing we’re doing, it was
supposed
to be a
three-way co-production
—I mean,
me
and
him
and
the director
were
supposed
to have an
equal
say about
everything.
Democratic, right? Handshake deal, right? Good faith, right? Right. Okay, so Rat Prick Les has got this little cunt he wants to use in the picture—tests her, she’s lousy, he
still
wants to use her. So we argue back and forth, I don’t want her,
Allen
don’t want her, but
he
still wants her. Finally we say to him, ‘Sorry, Les, but, well, it looks like the vote is
two to one
against you.’ And he just smiles and shakes his head. ‘No, boys,’ he says, ‘it isn’t
two to one
. . . it’s
one to nothing.
’ So now we’re going to use this lousy little cunt, and it’s going to fuck up the whole picture! How do you like that for a dirty rat-prick trick?!?”

Sid shook his head solemnly. “Gower Street is paved with the bones of guys who thought it was two to one against the Rat Prick.”

“What’s the girl’s name,” Penny wanted to know, “the girl who
did
get the part?”

“Name?”
Rex howled like a wounded Lear. “She
has
no name! Her
name
is Lousy Little Cunt,
that’
s her name! That is
actually her name!
Incredible, isn’t it? I mean how is
that
going to look in lights?” He turned, facing the rest of the terrace, and moved his outstretched arm in a dramatic sweep to define an imaginary marquee.
“Night Song,”
he intoned gravely, “starring Rex McGuire and Lousy Little Cunt!”

“Maybe she’ll get top billing,” said Sid.

“That’s right!” yelled Rex with hysterical glee, “that’s right!”

“Or you could make it the title,” suggested Sid.

“Perfect!”
shrieked Rex, and began shouting at the top of his voice, à la Olivier:
“Lousy Little Cunt! Lousy Little Cunt! That’s
the name of our picture!”

People nearby looked around, startled not so much by the sentiment expressed as by its sheer volume and rage-like intensity. It seemed to herald violence of some sort; and he did actually wheel about then, and fling his empty glass in the general direction of Les Harrison—bad aim though, and it shattered explosively against a driftwood candelabra. “LOUSY LITTLE CUNT!” he bellowed.

“Did someone call?” asked Teeny Marie shrilly, with a devastatingly sweet smile as she scurried up out of nowhere.

Rex, who was prepared for a stout kick in the groin, or at least a reprimand, was not prepared for this—or perhaps was especially prepared for it—and dropped to his knees, grasping Teeny about the legs. “Oh, Teeny, Teeny,” he sobbed, “Why must everything in the world be governed by such total shits?” Then he collapsed at her feet, a quivering heap of Man-tanned muscle.

Boris had regarded the entire vignette with an expression of bemused interest. He tended to think of most things in terms of pans, angles, close-ups . . .

“Dig that,” he said, raising the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, boxed by his right into a rectangular semblance of a view-finder, focused on the curious image of the internationally famous film star crumpled at the feet of this crippled boss freak.

“Forget it,” said Sid, “he ain’t gonna sign no release.”

“Gosh, do you think he’s all right?” gasped Penny.

“Sure,” said Sid, “nothing that a kick in the gourd won’t fix,” and he raised his foot to deliver a simulated stomp on the face of the fallen Rex.

“Oh, my God,” screamed Penny, bursting into tears, “don’t,
please don’t!”
Not realizing, of course, that iron-in-the-soul Sid couldn’t care less, and, in fact, wouldn’t hurt a fly—especially a fly.

Boris had to comfort the girl, drawing her close, smiling, whispering: “It’s okay, it’s okay—just a little Freudian equation being worked out.”

And, natch, Sid didn’t really kick him, just pretended to, and Teeny fell on top of him, cradling his Man-tan head in her arms, closed-eyed and murmuring, “Oh my baby, my baby, my precious motherfucking baby.”

Then his agent, Bat Orkin, arrived, all loyal efficiency to Rex but hip enough to be slightly embarrassed in the presence of Boris and Sid. “I’ll take care of him, I’ll take care of him,” he kept saying, hoping for Christ’s fucking sake there were no photographers present, giving a sly wink to B. and Sid as he began to hoist and drag Rex off the terrace.

Penny was still upset—not really too upset perhaps, but did recognize the chance of expressing a bit of emotional sensitivity, and also, of course, not adverse to her cute sobbing being calmed and soothed away by boss B., and she sat down in his lap to be cuddled.

“That loony fruit,” muttered Sid, “he’s as crazy as you are, B.—except
he’s
working. Excuse me, I gotta get a drink,” and he got up and trudged toward the bar.

“I’ll take you home,” said Boris, very gently to the girl. “Where do you live?”

“The Studio Club,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. She couldn’t cry as well as Rex, but somehow it was more engaging.

S
HE DIDN’T REALLY
smoke pot, but she was afraid to admit it—so, after they were there, at Boris’s place, on a terrace overlooking the dark-blue twinkling lights of Hollywood (each light, natch, fraught with promise), and he, not really caring much one way or the other, lit a joint, took a couple of drags, and handed it to her, she had just enough presence of mind to accept it and say, “oh,
groovy
” yet could scarcely repress surprise when, after passing it back (as she knew one was supposed to), he just smiled, and didn’t take it. Suddenly she was very much in the wrong—now he would think of her as some sort of dopey flower-person, and not a serious actress at all. “But I thought
you
. . .” she began, holding the smoldering stick helplessly between them, “. . . well, I mean, I don’t really . . . that is, I’ve never actually . . .” She stammered, holding it at a distance now, as though it were a hateful thing which had surely destroyed their future.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, taking it from her, “it isn’t important.” And he took a few deep pokes and sat it on the ashtray. “You know . . . the thing that
really
attracted me to you,” he began quietly, as though thinking aloud to himself, “the thing I find really . . .
beautiful,
maybe even
uniquely beautiful
in you, at least for today—and I say this with all humility and respect, because I know you must have other qualities, and I recognize that it may be some kind of weakness in myself—not weakness exactly, but still not the sort of thing I’d like to be able to say, the sort of thing I imagine you’d like to hear . . . but the thing that makes you really . . .
exceptional—well,
I mean to me, anyway . . . is your ass.”

He said it with such patent, introspective, almost childish sincerity that the girl was unable to take offense. It was as though two art dealers were discussing the qualities of a Dresden mantelpiece. In her loss for a reaction, she reached out and picked up the cigarette. “Well,” she began uneasily, but then channeled that into the motion of relighting it.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” said B., “I’ve been trying to figure it out—I mean, in the aesthetic sense. I’ve seen a lot of great, marvelous asses.” Saying this in an objective, clinical way, and proceeding then to give as examples a bevy of famous nifties, about whom his familiarity with their derrières could not be questioned. “Is there such a thing as the ‘perfect ass’—and if so—what does it mean?” Then he turned to Penny, looking at her very directly, almost as if he had suddenly remembered she was there. “I don’t think it’s homosexual,” he said, and she just stared at him and nodded dumbly. “I mean I don’t care about
making love
to a girl in the ass . . . you know, fucking her in the ass—it isn’t that. I’m not sure
what
it is. I mean, why should a girl’s ass be so aesthetically erotic? Maybe it’s just something to hold on to . . . an extension of her thing, you know, her cooze.”

He reached over and took the dead cigarette from her.

“Oh sorry,” she said, a little flustered, having forgotten it entirely.

He relit it, inhaled deeply, and stared out at the blinking world, his world, below.

But Penny was the kind who couldn’t stand silence—perhaps a subconscious cultural memory of the “no dead-air” radio concept. “Well,” she said, “I just hope that, uh . . .”

He handed the joint back to her.

“Take
you,
for example,” he said, “I mean, what was it about . . . your
bottom
that was so attractive? You leaned over, right?”

She nodded.

“But I’m sure you weren’t doing it deliberately to provoke.”

“Oh no, I . . .”

He retrieved the joint.

“I don’t mean to say you may not have been
vaguely aware
of what was happening. I don’t mean you’re
insensitive,
or
imperceptive,
or anything like that. I just mean that you weren’t really thinking of it as your
best shot.
Right?”

“Oh right, yes, right.”

“And yet . . . it was.” He sighed as though at a loss with himself to understand the vagaries of human nature, mostly his own. “Maybe it was . . .”—he searched for the answer, one hand to contemplative brow—“. . . maybe it was the underwear, maybe it was something completely superficial. Here, let’s do it again. Now, how was I sitting? Yes, I was sitting like this, and you were . . . yes, you stand here, and . . .”

The girl, under his direction, obeyed like someone in hypnosis. She took her place as though adroitly hitting her mark for the big production number in
My Fair Lady.

“Yes, that’s it,” said B. “Perfect. Now bend forward. Not too fast,” he reminded her, “not too fast. Easy does it . . .”

W
HEN THE PHONE
rang at one-thirty the next day, he was already half-awake, and he knew it had to be important. His instructions with the service were never to ring through unless it was a call from one of his children—four, six, and eight. He reached for the instrument which, by chance, was still draped with the tiny, ice-blue, white-trimmed panties, just as they had fallen, and he didn’t bother to unveil it when he spoke—nor yet fail to consider the irony of talking to the eight-year-old boy (who, being the eldest, always initiated the calls) with the filmy sheen and scent of Arpège against his cheek. As it happened however, it was the gross Sid, who through the ruse of mimicking the child’s voice, had outmaneuvered the vigilant service.

“I
got
it,” said Sid with an excitement that trembled, “I mean, this time I
really got it—
and this is no fucking shit, B., I swear to Christ!”

Boris closed his eyes again, waited about five seconds, just breathing Arpège through blue sheen, then said: “Uh,
what
is it you’ve got, Sid?”

“The
picture!
The
three-million-dollar dirty picture
we were talking about last night! I got the
money,
baby, I tell you, I got the
money!”

Boris didn’t reply, nor hang up. Eyes still closed, he reached his free hand behind him over to the other side of the bed—where it came to rest, as with a homing instinct, on the girl’s perfect bottom, she lying on her stomach, her marvelous tush perked out, round and all golden down, the resilience of two rubber balls inflated to exactly the right pressure.

“Uh-huh,” said B. slowly, “that’s swell, Sid.”

“Listen,” said Sid, “I’ll be right over.”

“Uh, don’t do that, Sid.”