An Accidental Affair (20 page)

“So am I. Well, he’s better looking. Well, he was better looking.”

“But in this industry, in this business, you’re not Johnny Bergs, James.”

“He earns the industry more money, so I’m the disposable one.”

“You know how it is. And you know most line up on the side of the moneymakers.”

“Sounds like you know something and you’re not telling me.”

Hazel Tamana Bijou hesitated. “We’ll talk soon.”

“Hazel.”

“Yes, James.”

“You’re so formal with me.”

“We’re professional. We keep it professional, James.”

“Is it awkward talking to me about this crap that’s going on with Regina Baptiste?”

“I’ve worked with Regina in some capacity for the past decade.”

“You know what I mean. Because of you and me.”

“On the record, there is not now, nor has there ever been, a you and me, James.”

“Of course. Off the record, Hazel.”

“At times. Not as hard as it was when I first found out about you two.”

“I’m sorry. That was something that we never addressed.”

“For what, James? As you said, the earth continues to circle the sun, no matter what.”

“Things didn’t work out between us. And the way you found out about Regina Baptiste.”

“I guess that if I had come inside the bar that night, things would have been different.”

“What bar and which night are you referring to?”

“The night you were with her. The night she came looking for you. I was still there when she had come back. Regina Baptiste was on a mission to meet with you. The script. Everyone was talking about your script. You were everyone’s next big paycheck. She had asked me where you had gone and I had told her. She didn’t know that you and I were…she didn’t know.”

“No one knew. That’s how you wanted it.”

“I stood and watched you and her drinking and flirting. She was living with Bobby Holland. I didn’t think that she would betray Bobby Holland like that. But a woman is a woman.”

“You watched us at the bar.”

“And a man is a man. You and Bobby Holland weren’t friends, but you knew each other.”

“Okay, Hazel.”

“I watched for a while. I thought that I had sent you a text. You didn’t reply. Not long after, I left. Then the next day, I saw that I had sent the text to James Cameron, not to you.”

We laughed laughs that weren’t really laughs. They were chortles of discomfort.

I said, “Hope the message that you sent wasn’t too salacious.”

“I said that I was still in the lobby, that I was outside the bar, said that I saw you chatting with Bobby Holland’s wife. I jokingly called her his wife back then, and then I asked if you could meet me back at my office to go over an urgent contract that needed your signature. I always talk in code. I never text or e-mail anything that could come back to bite me in the end.”

“You never said.”

“Well, by the time I heard from you again, over a week had gone by and you and Regina Baptiste and Bobby Holland were breaking news. You were on the way to my office to meet with me, and the news was breaking. I called you and told you and you never made it to my office, not that day. That was a fire. Maybe if I’d just come inside the bar that night, all would be different.”

“You didn’t call me for at least a week.”

“You didn’t call me either, James. And Miss Baptiste suddenly wasn’t available.”

“I’m sorry, Hazel.”

“No need to be, James. We’re great friends now. We had fun for
months. We watched foreign films in your screening room. We quaffed the best of wine and made love. Each experience was nice.”

“Nice?”

“I adored you. You were fond of me.”

“Adored and fond. Okay.”

“My nerves were shot back then. I confided in you back then.”

“You were pretty stressed. You left and went to Atlanta to go hiking for a few days.”

“And you were an attentive lover. Part of me had hoped for more. Watching you flirt with Regina Baptiste that night, well that was like watching you flirt with my daughter, and I guess in many ways it put things in perspective for me. I’m not an actress so I don’t need to compete for the part of leading lady in another short-lived film. Whatever we had, it was good while it lasted.”

“I’m sorry, Hazel. I don’t know how it happened, to be honest. It just happened.”

“No big deal. Hollywood is worse than high school. Everyone switches partners and it seems like a big game of musical beds. The circles are so small that it seems almost incestuous. We live in a world where there has to be a press release when people date and a press conference when they break up. Everyone out there thinks that they are entitled to the details of your personal life. The best thing that anyone can do is never open that door to the public. People out there are ignorant, small-minded and as vicious as the sixties. And now this. This is an outrage. Despite so many levels of wrongdoing, they praise Johnny as if he is the new Brad Elvis Jesus Presley Pitt.”

“Wait, skip the Johnny Not-Handsome talk for a minute. Rewind this a bit.”

“No need to rewind. No point going back. Flow forward like a river. James, I understand how complicated we were as human beings. I don’t process relationships the same way dime-store novels and trendy magazines with pretty pictures of new clothing and perfumes
and articles about celebrities encourage people to process their complicated existences. We work in an industry where everyone writes fairytales, but no one lives a true fairytale.”

“I know.”

“We have extravagant weddings followed by record-setting divorce payoffs.”

“God bless prenuptials and all the assets that they protect. Amen.”

“We sell the snake oil called love to the public and we make a lot of money making them believe a well-written lie. You know people the same way I know people, James.”

“Look, we can meet at some point, Hazel. We can talk face-to-face. I think that I never really felt like more than a boy toy to you, to be honest. Let’s meet and clear the air.”

“Let’s not open that door, James. It’s closed for a reason and forever.”

“Two years and you never said a word.”

“Don’t do this, James.”

“Do what, Hazel?”

“You picked Regina Baptiste. It didn’t turn out right. Now you’re reaching back. It’s too late to play what-if with us. You have to play what-is. This is your bed, James. This is your bed.”

“This is my bed.”

“I used to be like Regina, the young girl that all men gravitated toward. I work in a business where mature women, beautiful women over forty, if that old, don’t want to be seen in a love scene. In film, they view a woman of forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, as being sexless. Maybe not sexless, simply not sex worthy. And being sexless is definitely not the case. An older woman in love is beautiful. But for some reason, they find the beauty of it disgusting and pathetic on film. At most, if shown, it’s the look of consent, no real kissing, no undressing, him with his shirt off, if he’s young, and the woman fully dressed. They are afraid of mature women.”

“Love the way you changed the course of the conversation.”

“On another note…”

“Back to being professional.”

“I had hoped that you would be around to meet my daughter. Nia Simone is almost as brilliant a writer as you are. Almost. Would have been great to employ your services as a script doctor. But the timing is bad. Studios are interested in an apocalyptic sci-fi screenplay that she has written and I will be in meetings on that matter. She is going to be here for a few days.”

“Take care of your daughter. And tell Nia Simone congratulations. Blood is thicker.”

“I have to take care of you too. You’re
my
star. I brought you into this business.”

“I’ll figure out how to fix this shitstorm I started.”

“You didn’t start it, James. But you definitely didn’t help it with what you did.”

“He put his dick inside my wife. I was supposed to kick his ass.”

“Of course.”

“And I have to pay.”

“But the question you need to ask is if it was worth it.”

Hazel Tamana Bijou hung up and went back to the church where Hollywood was their Father, box office sales were their Son, and the Holy Spirits were made by Patrón.

Socks on my feet and still in my dirty workout clothes, I went and stood in the shower, water as hot as I could take it, screaming. My cry of frustration echoed, hit me in my face like rapid punches from an invisible enemy. I screamed and slammed my fist into the wall two dozen times. This might end up being my real life, luxury lost, using a stained shower-tub combo behind a clear, plastic shower curtain. Clothed and soaking wet, I went to Underwood and put in a sheet of paper, my fingers moving at the speed of light, the keys clicking and
clacking, that sound calming my nerves, bringing my blood pressure down, opening my head and the room.

Calmer, I walked away from the words I had typed over and over: RELAX BREATHE.

Between the dawn and the light, and the occasional afternoon delight, Hazel used to ride me like a wave, showed me the side of her she never showed in business, drove me insane with more than physical desire for her, desire that would never have been reciprocated beyond an occasional statement of
adoration
. And frustrated, I’d moved away from her Trinidadian shores to Livingston. Then I could taste her salt, her secret kisses like wine, and it compounded everything. I repeated what she had said, “I adored you. You were fond of me.”

Hazel Tamana Bijou had thrown away the nights we’d shared, had forgotten how she used to touch me in the night, masturbate me back to consciousness and make love to me, but vanish before day broke. Intimately, I’d never see her at first light of any day. Only in the evenings, the late evenings of our affair. I’d never been invited to her home, not when it wasn’t a group gathering, and never for an overnight stay. The text would always read something like:
WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS AN URGENT CONTRACT THAT NEEDS SIGNING TONIGHT. H. BIJOU.
Or maybe:
I HAVE A SCRIPT AND WOULD LIKE TO GET IT DELIVERED TO YOUR HOME FOR IMMEDIATE DOCTORING.
Or simply:
LOS FELIZ. 9:30 PM.
She had bowdlerized what we’d done from her mind and now I wished that I could expurgate Regina Baptiste from mine. Hazel was a smart woman, and in this town, the talented made the money for the educated. Regina Baptiste wasn’t a slouch. She was a very smart woman as well. My type. I’d never been attracted to magazine reading girls with low vocabulary who thought that learning was a waste of time, or that ambition was for other people.

I saw Hazel Tamana Bijou in my mind. Her image was here, across
the room, on my bed, making love to an image of me. She had doffed all of her fine clothing; every fashionable item gently folded or hung up. Each piece of her jewelry and her watch sitting on the dresser, the right side, near the edge. When she made love, she wanted to be totally nude, no adornments, not even earrings. The room was darkening, became obscure as the memory became clear, as the memory forced itself to the surface of my mind. My memory matched the time of day. Late evening. We were kissing. Deep, passionate kisses. Then slow deliberate kisses, trying to prolong the apex of our passion. She kissed beautifully. My tongue penetrated her, her mouth open and accepting. Then she did the same, sucked my tongue as if it were her vagina tightened around my penis, sucked and pulled me. And while she did, I entered her. Her moans intensified and she tried to move away from me, her primal side unleashed, all of our social graces put on pause. This would have been our second time that evening. The first time, I had her on her back, my hands underneath her ass, squeezing her as I licked circles and figure eights and teased the edges before pushing my tongue deeper inside of her sweetness. Sometimes she sat me on the armless red leather chair and straddled me, took me with the control that she had over Hollywood. I saw all of those possibilities; saw all of those versions of us, until it settled into one. She reached underneath the covers, stroked me until I woke up, then kissed me as she stroked me. She was a hard woman in the office, but a gentle lover in bed. After she had woken me again, I smiled at the way I made love to her. I loved her and that image of me and I smiled. There was no escaping memory. My hands touched her short hair. Her hairstyles were always short, chic, mature, and professional, very cosmopolitan. She ran Hollywood, had A-list actors on speed dial, and she looked the part during the day. But now, in that vivid image, she was a sexy woman. She started to fall off the bed, but I didn’t let her go. As that image of me pulled her back to the bed, as he kissed her and repositioned himself between her legs, I stood in the doorframe. I watched
us make love from the bed then back down to the floor. It became intense. I hadn’t realized how we had looked, until now. It was a wonderful madness. She made glorious faces. A moment later she had me on my back and she mounted me reverse-cowgirl. She was good in that position, a position where she had all the control and could move back and forth over my length as she touched herself. I watched her, looked in her face for some sign of love, thinking that was why she turned her back on me when we had sex, because she was feeling her love for me, and with tears in her eyes, with her back to me in a dimly lit room, I could feel her body, but I couldn’t feel her heart, couldn’t see her lips moving as she told me that she loved me, her soft words drowned by my escalating moans, my eyes closed so I missed seeing the tears in her eyes when she turned to look in my face. I remembered that she always paused. I had thought that she paused to keep her orgasm at bay, to elongate the moment of ecstasy, but she paused because she felt more than adoration. I watched her. She looked at me, looked at me with tears in her eyes as she sat on top of the oblivious version of me, the me who held her ass and pulled at her until she moved again, until she once again moved back and forth and tingles ran across that vision of my aroused body in powerful waves, waves that pounded the shores of Trinidad. I watched her. She looked at me. She saw me. She saw me watching her, watching them. She tilted her head to the side and pulled her lips in. Exposed. Tears rolled down her face. I saw my own face. I saw the stunning ugliness in my face. Orgasm was arriving. The itch was too strong. She had left me with an itch so intense, so powerful that in that moment, I would kill her to get it salved. I watched that younger version of me as he grabbed her ass, tried to sink his nails into her ass to get her to move again. But she was looking at me now, the
me
that was reaching back. It was almost as if she could see me, as if she were looking into the future, and she realized that she wouldn’t be there. We broke our stare and she went back to him. She did move for him; she moved and she felt as
much as he did, on fire, her itch becoming intense as his continued. I knew how my orgasm arrived. I knew how my body worked. I knew what that version of me felt. As it built up in the backside, the frenular delta, and traveled down his penis, as it felt like the fire and itch moved all the way to his perineum and sat there, became more intense, gripped his testicles and made him clench his buttocks. He was out of control. So was she. Lips pulled in, rocking, hoping for a different end, I watched them come together. They shared transcendence. They were above the universe. They were divine. They were with God. I watched him exhaust himself inside her. I watched her in rapture, fighting to get that fire out of her body. Her orgasm faded in increments. I watch her reluctantly return to this world. Then she sat on him in those moments after, breathing heavily. Not moving away. He held her hips, ran his fingers up and down her spine. She licked her lips and sighed as they disconnected, no longer two, no longer transcending, no longer divine, no longer with God, back as they were before. No words were shared. Moments later, she pushed up her elbow and ran a hand over her short hair; then she moved her legs, swung them around and put her feet on the floor. Both hands on the mattress, she pushed down and stood up slowly. She looked at the exhausted man in the bed. A man younger than she. She went to the bathroom and I watched him fall asleep in her two-minute absence. I watched her ease back into bed with him, touching but not cuddling. She was wide awake. Wired. Restless. Afraid to cuddle. Afraid to disturb him. Afraid of attachment. Or afraid of rejection. I had no idea. But she took a finger and traced the edges of his face, his lips, his nose, studied him in silence. She reluctantly pulled herself away from him, her touch ending with a sad expression, and I watched her dress to leave, yawning, pausing in the doorway to blow a good-bye kiss. The words
I love you, James
leaving her lips, unheard. The room was filled with pain and poignancy, muted frustrations, longing and misunderstanding.