Bonita Avenue (54 page)

The space widened unexpectedly, and with it I caught a whiff of iron and sand: I had entered the immense drill square and become as small as a chipmunk. At the left of the concrete floor, under an arched roof supported by Eiffel Tower–like trusses, three toy cars were parked. Diametrically opposite I saw one of our trucks and an unfamiliar pickup, and next to them a couple of generators on wooden pallets vibrating at high frequency. My cell phone gasped desperately for a signal. I whipped off a text message (“smt w/mike?”) that took three tries to send. I already knew that Boudewijn wouldn’t understand why I’d texted rather than call; compared to his ceaseless care, whatever interest I showed came over as secondhand and spineless. I was happy to admit without reservation that he made a fantastic father, from day one, and even before that: during my pregnancy he outdid me with nearly academic knowledge of what was going on in my womb. He drove to San Francisco for homeopathic morning sickness pills, organic cosmetics, and dandelion tea for water retention, which he then made for me with concentration and precision. “Sharon, one of the secretaries, says the prenatal yoga classes on Valencia Street are terrific.” He was probably so on top of things
because he rightly suspected me of prenatal depression, and was afraid I’d throw myself belly-first down a flight of stairs.

I took my shoes back off and walked around the mobile power station. No one was manning it, the machinery functioned on its own. With half an eye on my cell phone I followed the thick black electricity cables.

“
There
she is,” Kristin said. I had cut through a dusty gym with rings and climbing frames and arrived, after yet another long brick corridor, at a scene of noisy activity. She and Q stood in the doorway to the ballroom I recalled from the tour with Sotomayor’s assistant: an expansive space with narrow strips of parquet flooring like an old-fashioned dance school. Inside, the guys from lighting were setting up a powerful stage lamp.

“Hi doll,” Kristin said. “This place is amazing.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

“You know how cool I think it is that you’re going on film again? Are you psyched?”

“Can’t wait.” I smiled at Q, who lowered his eyes and ran a big white hand down his cheek. The truth be told, I was dreading it like the plague. After Boudewijn’s call, I was feelng anything but sexy. Maybe Bobbi had some cocaine.

“Where’s Rusty and the new guy?” Kristin came right up in front of me and took my face in her hands. I could see her contact lenses.

“Checking out the building. Wells is turning it into a guided tour.”

“Go ahead and change,” said Kristin. “Nice blouse.” Through the satin she pinched my left nipple with her thumb and index finger, gently twisting it in circles like I was a radio that needed fine-tuning.

“Macy’s,” I said. “Sale bin.”

She smiled. “That door. Bobbi’s here already. It’s all kind of makeshift, Joy. Can you make sure she puts on something cheerful?” She took obvious pleasure in giving orders to the woman who had cut her off at the pass. When I first met Rusty at the reception of the independent film festival, he had introduced Kristin as his right-hand woman. A half-hour later he catapulted me, to her unconcealed chagrin, pretty much to co-director. Since then, she’d become
my
right-hand woman.

The washroom block had none of the warm coziness of Coldwater’s dressing rooms, no deep-purple velvet wallpaper, no lacquered make-up tables, no theatre mirrors surrounded by soft-white bulbs. The white plastered walls reflected the harsh fluorescent lighting, the floor consisted of a honeycomb of hexagonal tiles that thousands of officers and cadets had once traversed on their way to the battery of urinals in a break from the military regime, a moment alone with the yellow fluid and the smell of grainy soap from a bucket. Someone, Q probably, had laid a couple of wide planks across a row of twelve washbasins as a sort of improvised make-up table. Two rickety chairs—on one of them hung a pair of jeans and a T-shirt—stood in front of a long mirror, which was half misted up, an undercoat of rust showing through. To the right were two galvanized racks with kinky stuff I recognized from the Coldwater dressing rooms. Lavender soap and steam tickled my nose. To the left, an open door with cracked frosted glass led to an abattoir-ish shower room with eight drippy showerheads dangling from the ceiling. In the middle of the room, a girl stood on the wet tiles, drying herself off with a large white hotel towel. Bobbi glanced skittishly over her shoulder.

“Hello …,” she said with faux bashfulness. She had obviously read Kristin’s script.

“Don’t move.”

I walked across the wet floor and studied her back and remarkably narrow hips. Since living with me she had got two stars tattooed on either side just above her buttocks. The one was red with a thin black outline, the other black with a red outline, probably something Jekyll and Hyde-ish. You didn’t find many under-twenty-fives in this town without a tattoo.

She made a move to turn around, but I gave her a hard slap on her left buttock; she drew a deep breath, a shower cap fell to the floor.

“Did you hear me?” I grabbed her buttocks—both of them now nineteen years old, the left one emblazoned with my handprint in red—and squeezed them. “Legs wider.” She shifted her feet farther apart. I squatted down, stuck my thumbs deep into her butt crack and pulled her cheeks apart; her cleanly scrubbed anus opened up like a monkey’s mouth. I spat on it and eased my thumbs inside; the sphincter closed around them in a sucking reflex.

“Hello, Bobbi, nice to see you again.”

Since the coffee table incident, which seemed to have encouraged rather than embarrassed her, we phoned each other every few months. If I was at Coldwater whenever she did a shoot for one of our websites, I’d drop by the dressing room, if she hadn’t stopped by my office on the way to say hello.

“Yes … ma’am,” she said. “I’m so pleased to be working with you at last.”

“I wouldn’t be so eager if I were you,” I said. “How’d it go with Tyra, Bobbi?”

“Tyra Banks is a … bitch,” she replied. “D’you see it?”

I pulled my left thumb out of her. “
Ma’am,
” I said, and gave her four vicious slaps on her left buttock. “Did you see it,
ma’am
?”

As she let out her breath she said: “Did you see the show, ma’am?”

“You were great.”

“But Joy,” she said, suddenly matter of fact, “that whole fucking show was, like, fucking fake.”

I let go of her and stood up. She turned toward me. She was putting the game on hold.

“Oh yeah?”

“They film it in New York, you know?” she said. “On the phone beforehand one of the production assistants says: wear whatever
you
think is nice.” She shivered for a second, walked over to the chairs by the mirror, and sat down. I took the towel from her and dried her shoulders. “So I fly to New York a whole day early for those people,” she continued, “and spend the afternoon shopping on Madison Avenue. Skinny jeans, a top, earrings. I kinda want to look good on that sofa of hers on national TV, you know? I buy two pairs of Christian Louboutins because I can’t make up my mind, all of it with my own money. Next morning I show up at the studio, and what do you think?”

You’re phenomenal, that’s what. As I got undressed we eyed each other in the mirror. God, what an old tart I am alongside you. Bobbi’s deep-brown eyes were, as always, half shut, and a geisha-like smile floated around her small mouth—controlled mockery, the maximum indignation her stoic face would allow. She was stunning. Hardly surprising that this cult bombshell had caught Steven Soderbergh’s fancy—that is, if what she said on Tyra was true.

“So, what’s with Soderbergh?” I asked. “Did he really offer you a part?”

“Hang on,” she said. “So I get there, and those jerks from production go: this isn’t how an eighteen-year-old girl looks. That’s
right, I say, it’s how a
nine
teen-year-old girl looks. Maybe, they say, but today Tyra’s talking about teenagers in the porn industry, and that’s why you’re here. So they bring me over to a rack of children’s clothes. Oilily. They made me dress up like … like …”

“Gretl von Trapp. Pass me your soap?” I walked toward the showers.

“Did you see that pink sweater?” she called after me. “And those flats? Even the earrings had to go. That production bitch gave me little pink studs.”

I picked up the shower cap and twisted the calcified faucets. The showerheads vibrated and sputtered, the slushy stream of hot water splashed onto my shoulders. She stood in the doorway and watched as I soaped myself up.

“Hair pulled back in a ponytail, hardly any eyeshadow, too much blush, you get the picture. I thought: Just you wait, you fuckers.”

She did look like the Virgin Mary on Holy Saturday, but in fact that only enhanced her performance. What charm, what icy composure. Without getting worked up, she explained her decisions, just as she always did, you couldn’t even call it defending herself. Tyra, with all her prescripted questions, couldn’t poke even the slightest hole in her argument. As always, Bobbi spoke in a dry monotone, her words as salty as beef jerky, the vowels flat. Her speech was filled with street-smart wisdom, she exuded a faint disdain that even put that Tyra on edge. (“Bobbi, you don’t have to answer this, but I’m going to ask you anyway: were you sexually abused when you were young?” “Me? Oh no. I had a terrific childhood. Why? Were you, Tyra?”)

But the knockout was that Soderbergh movie. Right after a censored compilation of Bobbi in action, Tyra asked how long she was planning to stay in the business, and when she answered that she’d keep going until she stopped having fun, Tyra asked how
she saw her life
after
the porn industry. She replied that she was considering a mainstream acting career, and when Tyra only just managed to stifle a patronizing titter and asked Bobbi if she really thought Hollywood was sitting around waiting for her, she said that of course she didn’t know for sure, but that she’d be having lunch on Broadway tomorrow afternoon with Steven Soderbergh.

“Steven Soderbergh?” Tyra said. “You mean the
director
Steven Soderbergh?”

“
Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen,
” Bobbi answered, “you know, with Clooney and Pitt?” And when Tyra gawped at her for a few seconds like a bumper car with a dead battery, she continued: “
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
?”

“I know who Soderbergh is,” Tyra snapped. “You have an audition, I take it?”

“A role. I’ve got the lead in Steve’s new movie.”

Just the wrong starlet to bring out to New York. What a delight to watch the desperation glide over Tyra’s smug face. In the audience, a shell-shocked delegation from the Anti-Porn Movement: a Bible-basher and a feminist, both of them with a Ph.D. on the psychological and sociological damage that people like Bobbi and me and Rusty inflict on society. Are we supposed to believe this teenage floozy? This depraved cocksucker whom the underworld plebs of L.A. elected SuperSlut 2008? Who has won awards for the year’s filthiest blow-job scene, the year’s filthiest threesome, the year’s filthiest whatever—are we supposed to believe this doe-eyed skank? You saw Banks thinking: why don’t I know this? Why didn’t my editors know this? And the desperation spread over the rest of the audience, and then onto us, the viewers at home. Is she lying? But in the studio there was no time for that, the show must go on, so the question just hovered there like a buzzard over Tyra’s head: is this
possible
? Or has she been fucked so senseless that she’s
delusional? And
if
she’s telling the truth, what’s the point of this whole show? What exactly am I trying to tell America?

I turned off the faucet. It was Q—I hadn’t heard him come in—who handed me a towel. I was struck, not for the first time, how much his craggy face reminded me of Larry King, but without the glasses.

“So is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“The movie, Bobbi.”

She chuckled. “I thought it couldn’t hurt to do a little PR. Of course it’s true.”

I walked over to Q, who was fussing with a plastic crate he’d placed on the improvised make-up table. “So how’d this all come about?”

While Bobbi told me how she’d received a message on her MySpace a few months ago from someone claiming to be Steven Soderbergh—not just one message, but four—and who turned out to really
be
Steven Soderbergh, Q hoisted a sort of leather harness onto my hips. A week later she had “Steve” on the phone, he knew her work, that’s how he put it, he’d read about her in
Los Angeles
magazine. Steve was looking for someone for his new project, a movie about a high-class call girl in Manhattan. It wasn’t a bit part, as she initially thought, but top billing. She was the first person he’d thought of. She did not believe him. The next day they met for coffee in the L.A. Zoo, and while the man did look just like the director Steven Soderbergh she still didn’t believe him. The plan was for the movie to open the Berlin Film Festival in February.

His knees creaking, Q sank to his haunches and buckled the belts around my waist and thighs. With a face like a gravedigger he fished a green hard-plastic penis out of his crate and screwed it into a notch in the corset right above my mound of Venus.

“It was in
Newsweek
the day before yesterday, by the way.”

“Did you know this before you went on Tyra?”

She smirked sarcastically. “Well yeah, how else could I have told her about it?”

“I know that. I mean, at the time of the phone call. Did you keep your mouth shut on purpose?”

“I kept my mouth shut on purpose.”

There was a knock on the heavy industrial door, and right away it swung open. A slim-built black guy in a shiny blue shirt came in. “Ladies; sir.”

“Hi, Ralph.”

“Because you knew you’d get your chance.”

“Those jerks were just itching to tell me I’d blown my whole future.
Itching
to. From the very first minute I was sitting there with my finger on the trigger.” She extended her arm, her dainty hand formed into a pistol. “
Bang
. Tyra got it right between the eyes.”