Passing Through the Flame (38 page)

Sandra was paralyzed by conflicting emotion. On the one hand, the sight of Paul’s personality blossoming like this, suddenly dominating the room, filled her with pride. But on the other hand, he was screwing things up royally, he was antagonizing these people, and he was getting into a heavy rap with Stein, which, for some awful reason, was clearly where Stein wanted him.

“Now I understand what sort of attitude the people at this festival are going to be faced with,” Stein said. “Tell me, Mr. Conrad, who is producing this epic?”

“Jango Beck,” Paul said ingenuously. Ouch! thought Sandra.

“Jango Beck,” Stein said slowly, rolling the words around his mouth, then spitting them out. “Jango Beck, who’s made millions off the people, not one lousy dime of which has ever come home! Now, all of a sudden he’s our brother, putting on a free rock festival for his brothers and sisters, just to show how much he cares.... But actually, so he can use the people as extras in a cheap exploitation film that rips them off!”

Paul took two quick steps forward, and the people at the tables cringed back involuntarily. “I don’t see how you can bum-rap a film that hasn’t even started shooting,” he snapped. “When you haven’t even read the script.” The last, with a touching, plaintive quality in his voice.

“I’m not concerned with how good your movie will or won’t be, man,” Stein said. “Whether that can penetrate your ego or not. I’m concerned that the people who will make it possible by being a beautiful collection of tribes that uptight straights want to gawk at, that the people, that the Movement, be portrayed in a sympathetic manner. That your film make a positive political contribution to the forces of liberation, not a regressive political contribution to the forces of social fascism and political repression!”

“Right on!”

Christ, this is awful, Sandra thought, as fists were raised and two dimwits shouted, “Power to the people!” Lord, what this is going to look like in the
Flash
and
Rolling Stone!

“I told you, I’m nobody’s propagandist,” Paul said. “The film will show what the people are and what the people do. What the people are and what they do is beyond my control. And beyond your control too, whether
that
can penetrate
your
ego or not.”

“Heavy,” someone shouted.

“Bullshit,” said Barry Stein. Paul’s hands clawed halfway into fists. My God, Sandra thought, all we need is a fistfight!

“Don’t bullshit me, and I won’t bullshit you.”

“Are you—”

“Leave the bullshit to me,” Sandra said with a great false smile, using the mike to drown both of them out. “At least
I
get paid for it. Come on, fellas, let’s not turn this into Altamont before it even gets started.” She stepped out from behind the podium, took Paul’s hand, kissed him lightly on the lips. He jerked away in surprise and anger. “I’d kiss you too, Barry,” she said, “but you’re not as pretty.”

There were a few embarrassed titters and some unpleasant mutterings, but at least the momentum of events had been broken. Sandra led Paul back to the podium, his hand in hers having all the warmth of a lobster claw, his face a wooden mask over a musculature of rage.

“Now then,” she said, “if anyone has a loving, noncontroversial question....”

“Who are the stars?” piped up good old nonpolitical Cindy. “Only the leading lady has been signed,” Sandra replied. “She’s a new young actress named Velva Leecock.”

“When are you going to announce a male lead?”

“—groups do you expect to be in—”

“—start shooting—”

“—union crews, or—”

The press conference mercifully tailed off into the usual dumb, harmless questions. Barry Stein didn’t say another word, nor did Paul, and Sandra was able to end it in five more minutes with no further damage done.

But when it was over, Paul turned his back on her and stalked out. What’ve I done? she wondered, watching his back disappear through the door. I don’t want to lose you, baby, oh, no, I don’t want to lose you....

Paul Conrad sat at his dinette table, moodily picking at the cold, gluey carcass of a half-eaten Swanson turkey dinner, the aftertaste of the press conference still sour bile in his mouth. Just what was she trying to prove? he asked himself for the hundredth time. That the hotshot young director is balling her? That she’s got what it takes to get herself a younger man? That she can cut his balls off in public and get away with it? That he’ll jump when she says frog?

He got up, slid the remains of the TV dinner into the garbage disposal, went into the living room, and began pacing the tacky blue-gray carpeting. The room, the apartment, with its pseudo-Danish motel furniture and plastic scenic prints on cream-colored walls, suddenly seemed actively depressing, a self-made jail.

I’ve got to catch up with who I am
now
, Paul thought. Everything’s happening so fast. From scuffling and scraping to seven hundred and fifty dollars a week. From balling an innocent like Velva to being involved with someone like Sandy who parades me in front of her damn press conference like a trophy, like her pet poodle. From lusting hopelessly after any chance to make a real movie to getting paranoid because I’ve got myself a producer who wants me to spend money.

He went back into the kitchen, made himself a bourbon and water, took it back into the living room with him, and continued pacing as if trying to catch up to himself. In two months of being on salary at seven hundred and fifty a week, Paul had made very few changes in his life-style. The MG—which Jango had thrust upon him. A closetful of new clothes. A willingness to eat anything in any restaurant without thinking about price. A falling away from the people he knew in the porn industry, including Velva. Maybe the beginnings of an affair with an older, twice-divorced woman, a woman who had shown herself capable of patronizing him, of treating him like a kid in public, like a goddamn piece of ass!

He sat down on the edge of the uncomfortable green couch, really aware of its crumminess for the first time. Two months ago, the Paul I was would’ve been in heaven if he could’ve seen the Paul he was about to become. But I’m not that kid anymore, he realized. I’m a writer and director involved in a project I don’t really understand, working under conditions that don’t make sense, involved with a woman who just made an ass of me in public. If I was still that kid, I’d be in my idea of heaven. But I’m not, I’m in a new reality, and surprise, surprise, it’s no more perfect than the last one.

It seemed to Paul as if he were inhabiting this furnished apartment like a snail still carrying around an obsolete old shell. I’m not the guy that rented this place, but I don’t know who I’ve become yet, so I hang onto it like a security blanket. Because I don’t have the foggiest notion of what kind of persona to move into. He took a deep drink of bourbon, shook his head.

Too bad Jango didn’t move me into a new pad when he got me the car, he thought sarcastically. Maybe he should’ve made that change for me too, scooped me out and filled me with his version of myself—

The door buzzer sounded, cutting across Paul’s self-flagellation. He went to the door and opened it.

“Hi.”

There in the doorway was Sandra Bayne. She was wearing a loose yellow dress and nothing underneath. Her long brown hair hung freely over her shoulders. She was smiling faintly, but there was fear and hurt in her eyes. She was carrying a bottle of champagne in a cardboard icebucket and two disposable plastic wineglasses. She looked both young and old at the same time: the soul of a teen-age girl making up to her steady in the body of a mature woman.

“Hi,” Paul said, not knowing what else to say.

“I kind of think you’re mad at me,” she said. “I don’t want you to be mad at me. Can I come in and find out why you’re mad and apologize and promise never to do it again?”

Paul stepped aside, nodding foolishly. She walked into the living room, put the icebucket and glasses on the coffee table in front of the couch, looked around shaking her head almost imperceptibly, and sat down. Paul stood at the door watching all this; watching her walk into his place and judge it as the long-term motel that it was, watching her make herself as much at home as she could without a welcoming word from him. He felt angry and sorry for himself and loved, all at the same time.

He closed the door and walked over to her without sitting down. She looked up at him. She smiled. She patted the couch beside her. “Sit down,” she said. “Make yourself at home.”

He laughed involuntarily and sat down beside her, perching on the edge of the couch, trying to figure out what to say.

“Want to tell me what it’s all about, love?” she said.

“You mean you really don’t know?”

“I mean I really don’t know.”

There was such sincerity in her voice, such softness in her eyes, that Paul was immediately convinced that she was really blind to how she had humiliated him, that if a power trip was really what she had been running, it was something of which she had been genuinely unaware. It exasperated him, but at the same time he felt his anger soften.

“You really want me to tell you?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. She took the champagne out of the cardboard ice bucket, peeled off the foil, and popped off the cap, neatly catching the frothing overflow in the ice bucket. She poured two glasses of champagne, handed him one, looked at him with a strange, touching solemnity, clinked her plastic glass dully against his. “Truth between us,” she said, taking a gulp of champagne.

Mechanically, Paul took a sip of champagne, feeling foolish and touched. Feeling like an uptight asshole for harboring a grudge against her for what she had done at the press conference. Feeling the affection—the love—she was radiating at him. Feeling like a prig for even wanting to bitch to her about how she had treated him. And yet still realizing that what she had done was too gross to simply ignore,
especially
if she hadn’t understood it. Especially if she cared for him and wanted a relationship. Most especially if he cared for her and wanted to keep seeing her. The champagne was cold and bubbly, but too sweet for his taste.

“Truth between us,” he said. “All right, if you really don’t know, I’ll tell you. I don’t like being treated like a sexual trophy in public. Like a kid. Like a pet poodle you’re showing off.”

Her eyes flashed hurt, incomprehension, anger. “Paul Conrad, what in the hell are you talking about?”

He felt her anger rekindling his own. “You lead me in there like a little boy, you stick your hand down my pants, you make a big joke out of it in front of two dozen people, you shut me up with a dumb patter routine in which I serve as the patsy,
and you ask me what the hell I’m talking about?”

She looked at him silently for a long, long moment. Paul watched the anger drain out of her eyes, watched incomprehension replace it, watched tenderness replace the incomprehension, and inside himself he felt a mirror image of the same process. She put her free hand atop his, and he found that it felt right and good.

“Poor baby,” she said. “You really don’t understand what happened, do you? I held your hand when I felt bad vibes because I wanted some comfort. I put my hand down, your pants because... because....”

She leaned over, kissed him full on the lips, and thrust her tongue deep into his mouth; her hand snaked down behind his belt buckle into the front of his pants, stroking, caressing. After a while, she broke the kiss but kept her hand in place, cupping his loins possessively, fondling him with a warm melding of lust and tenderness.

“Because I just wanted to,” she said.

Paul felt his flesh blossoming under her touch, felt himself go out to her, felt the lust rising within him as she stroked him with a fond familiarity that was somehow as soothing as it was exciting. But the memory of the press conference was still a thorn in the rose of his delight.

“All right,” he said tenderly, “so you can’t keep your hands off my bod. I think I could learn to live with that.” Then more coldly: “But why did you have to humiliate me?”

“Baby, baby, I wasn’t humiliating you! I don’t know why, but that was a hostile press conference, and Stein in particular was really trying to cut you up. I was just doing my job, protecting you by stopping the confrontation, by distracting them with jokes. I was just using whatever came to mind. I’m sorry, I really am sorry, if I hurt you in the process.”

“I was doing okay,” Paul said sullenly, “I was at least holding my own.”

Sandy kissed him wetly on the lips. “You were doing better than holding your own, love,” she said. “You were putting him down. That’s why I had to stop it.”

“Huh?”

“You were giving Stein what he wanted. You were attacking him, you were talking too much—you were giving him copy. You’re going to look like an arrogant rip-off bastard as it is when the
Flash
and some of the others write up the press conference. I hope I stopped it before you really got hurt. I don’t want you to look bad, love.” She put down her glass, touched his lips with a free fingertip, grinned. “How would it look for you to get cut up in the press when your lover is your employer’s PR chief?” He found himself grinning back reflexively.

“Next time tell me what’s going on,” he said. “Don’t run a number like that in public, okay?”

“Okay. You Tarzan, me Jane.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t,” Paul said. “But I don’t want to play Jane to
your
Tarzan either.” He cracked a smile, taking the edge off the conversation. “And I don’t even want to think about the hairy ape that’s playing Cheetah.”

“Kreegah!” Sandy yelled, moving her hand between his thighs and throwing herself on top of him, knocking the champagne glass out of his hand and onto the anonymous carpeting of the furnished apartment.

He laughed, and he glowed, and her mouth on his tasted sweet and bubbly.

Paul poured the last of his champagne and fell back on his pillow. There was enough for half a glass for each of them. He took a sip; it was warm, flat and syrupy, and his head was warm, pink, and fuzzy inside. He gathered Sandy’s naked body against him. Her skin seemed like pink-orange velvet in the light of the single candle on the night table. The soft pinkness of her body seemed to melt into the fuzzy pink champagne softness of his mind, and for some reason he was reminded of the times he had felt Velva’s body against his in this very bed. How much better Sandy feels, he thought. How much more this seems to mean.