Because They Wanted To: Stories (26 page)

“He probably thinks I am. A lot of people do.” She jerkily tapped cigarette ash into her empty glass and then looked directly at him. “That only makes men want you more, actually.”

“Nicki,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me you’re gay?”

She lowered her eyes and shrugged. “I don’t know. Because I’m not, totally. I do like men sometimes, and I hate the idea that I have to absolutely identify myself as one thing or another. It’s true I generally prefer women and that men are usually more casual for me.” She looked up quickly. “But I liked being with you a lot.” She turned her eyes down again. “It didn’t seem necessary to tell you. Until now.”

For the rest of the wretched evening, he wanted only to go home, to sit in bed and drink. But when he got home he found he was too agitated to do that. He paced the King Farouk Room, thinking of every affected, self-indulgent, obnoxious thing Nicki had ever said. He reflected how his foolish love had blinded him to her offensive personality. He thought of how true it was that the pushiest, most vulgar people always rose to the top. He imagined hitting her. He imagined mashing a grapefruit in her face.

His eyes fell on his screenplay. He threw it across the room. He stood staring after it for a long moment. Had there been a movie camera trained on his face, it would have recorded an expression of pernicious ingenuity dawning, then slowly spreading from feature to feature. He sat down before his computer and began to type. He typed until three in the morning.

He was awakened the following day by the clicking answering machine and then by Nicki’s voice leaving a long, scattershot message.

He got up, made coffee, and returned to his computer.

A few days later she called again, but he was screening his calls. As he listened to her voice, he gave the machine a loud, farting raspberry. As if she’d heard it, she stopped calling, although there were several hang-up calls during the following week. He wasn’t interested in talking to her. He had developed a much more satisfying relationship with the tiny Nicki cavorting across the pages of his new screenplay.

The screenplay had started as an exorcism of his demeaning
anger and had become, on the same night, a serious idea. Nicki was a perfect heroine: capricious, sexually manipulative, ambitious, charming, ruthless. She tripped girlishly over the hearts of maddened men while prattling quintessential nineties sentiments. She was a waitress moonlighting as a hooker until she clawed her way into the film business by sleeping with the right people. She slept with men who would enhance her profile and then cast them aside. She slept with women, leaked stories of their lingerie-clad romps to the press for titillation value, and then cast
them
aside. She capitalized on her incestuous relationship with her uncle by discussing it on talk shows until the frantic fellow shot himself. She was eventually forced to be the sex slave of the cruel editor of a scandal magazine, who was holding over her head an embarrassing kiss and tell written by one of her male victims. That was only the start of her disastrous decline, during which she repented but too late.

Factually the character bore little relationship to the real Nicki, except that he used her favorite jokes, mannerisms, and sayings, and quoted verbatim from private conversations they had had, most notably about Lana and about the pedophile uncle. He would not have thought she was recognizable. But when he finished the first draft and showed it to a friend who worked at the restaurant, the guy called him after reading the first ten pages and said, “Is this Nicki?”

He titled it
Kiss and Tell.

He stuck it in a drawer and took it out a month later. He was shocked at how good it was. He had never written anything this good in his life. It rattled him to think his first belated triumph had sprung from sheer vindictiveness; he stuck it back in the drawer. He started another screenplay but was distracted by persistent day-dreams of Nicki playing scenes from
Kiss and Tell,
particularly the one where the heroine is sodomized by the nasty magazine editor.

He didn’t look at the script again until the first promotional posters for
Queen of Night
appeared. He saw them when he was returning home from work late one night; they were freshly glued to the rotting side of a cheap men’s-clothing store. Nicki’s face was not on it, but to him it might as well have been. He stood and stared at the poster, while the wind blew plastic bags and candy wrappers about his ankles.

The next morning he reread
Kiss and Tell
and felt a certain psychic
prickling. He decided to send it to a film agent whom he’d met eight years before. As he put it in the mail, he felt the faint nausea that always accompanied his attempts to accomplish something.

Queen of Night
opened. He didn’t see it, but he religiously read the reviews. They were mixed about the movie but unanimous in their praise for the “incandescent” performance of “sex imp” Nicki Piastrini. He smiled in spite of himself when he read them. He wanted to call and congratulate her. He did call once but hung up when she answered. He spent an evening at a bar, trying to revive his feelings of anger toward her, and realized that he hadn’t thought of her with passion for some time. He felt sad, then began to flirt with the girl behind the bar.

Early one morning his phone machine clicked on. He’d turned the volume down the night before and he was half asleep, so he was only barely aware of a voice leaving quite a long message. He dimly imagined that it was Nicki; he thought he might return her call when he got up, then he went back to sleep. When he woke and played the tape, he was stunned to hear the confident voice of the film agent.
Kiss and Tell,
he said, was wonderful. Could Lesly call him back as soon as possible?

Then he was in the agent’s office. If he’d worn a hat he would’ve wrung it in his hands. The agent looked at him as if he respected him. In fact, he looked as if people he respected came and sat in his office every day. Lesly felt disoriented and sick. The agent sat back in his chair as if everything were okay.

“I’m not a person who gushes, typically,” said the agent, “but I’ll tell you honestly I haven’t clicked like this with a script for a long time. I could literally see the scenes before my eyes. I could see what the actors looked like. I actually have somebody in mind for the lead. But first things first.”

The next few weeks were a jumble. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t eat. He would tell people about the agent and feel his face in conflicted expressions of happiness and fright. He called Nicki three times and hung up on her machine. He called his parents, and the shocked pride in their voices almost made him weep.

The agent was right. He sold the screenplay within weeks, to a director Lesly had heard of since adolescence. Lesly went into the
agent’s office to sign the contract, and the agent talked to him about going to Los Angeles to meet the director. Lesly nodded dumbly.

“By the way,” said the agent, “remember I mentioned to you that there’s an actress who I think is perfect for the lead? I’m having a colleague of mine show her the script. Have you seen
Queen of Night?”

He flew to Los Angeles the next day. The trip was a series of disconnected still frames out of which popped various animated heads. An escort of palm trees flanked his car trips through each different frame. Bright, winking signs called out to him, doors opened to reveal great expanses of rug and mahogany. Everywhere, people in uniforms wanted to bring him and his friends—smiling men in suits—alcohol, coffee, or snacks. He sat in the sunken tub of his hotel bathroom, drinking Scotch, listening to MTV, and thinking how odd it was to find himself an accessory to all the jokes he’d made about the grossness and vulgarity of Los Angeles. He felt a little hypocritical, but he knew Los Angeles didn’t mind. It knew it was a joke and a face-lift and didn’t try to hide it, and therein, he thought as he swigged, therein lay its charm. In L. A., writing a script called Kiss
and Tell
about a kiss and tell that was an honest-to-God kiss and tell was only one more kooky face appearing in one more frame, the frame of outraged Nicki reading the script, a great punch line underscored by pop music.

He flew back to New York with a terrible headache and a vague sense of guilt.

His answering machine greeted him with an urgently flashing light. He had ten messages! But they were all the irritating kind of hang-up call where the person waits for several seconds and then loudly puts the phone down. He muttered and paced as he listened to them. Well, maybe she hadn’t read it yet. He became so absorbed in hanging his travel-wrinkled shirts on his tatty hangers that he jumped when the phone rang.

Her voice was so tense with politeness and repressed expression that he didn’t recognize it. “So you’re there,” she said. “I’ll be over in two minutes.”

“Nicki, I—”

Click.

His first impulse was to leave the apartment, but that was too embarrassing. Besides, he wanted to see her face. Not just because of
the script but because, he suddenly realized, he’d missed her; he wanted to tell her about L.A. The thing was, she probably didn’t want to hear it. She was probably on her way over to punch him. He reminded himself she was only a girl, but still his hands shook. He decided that when she rang the buzzer he could make up his mind whether to let her in. She rang. He buzzed. He paced the King Farouk Room, trying to compose himself into an expression of implacable rightness. She knocked. He wiped his palms on his pants before he let her in.

Her cold face was very different from the face he had held in memory. She looked oddly diminished, ordinary, and—for the first time—unsexy. He could not picture her sitting on him backward, exposing her cellulite in her abandon.

“Hi,” he said.

She stared at him. She was holding a copy of his script; she dropped it on the floor. “Why,” she said, “did you do this?”

“Nicki,” he said, “no one will know it’s you.”

“Only everybody in the restaurant. But that’s not what matters.”

“It isn’t you, Nicki. It’s an imaginary person. It’s a cartoon character with some of your traits.”

“A lesbian cartoon character who was molested by her uncle. Couldn’t you think up anything by yourself? God, you’re the cartoon character.”

“You’ll have to forgive me, but that sounds a little funny coming from a woman who brags about wearing lingerie and getting fucked by a dyke.”

“I wasn’t bragging, you idiot. I was talking to my friend, or at least I thought I was. You’re a coward and a rip-off. I respected you and—”

“You never respected me. I was a fixture for your vanity.”

“Spare me the masochism. I don’t respect you now.” She turned, manhandled the door, and walked out.

He followed her out onto the sidewalk. When she heard him she turned; he thought he saw a flicker of relief on her face before it went indignant again.

“Nicki, come on. It’s not that bad. I did not rip you off.”

“And what was that shit just now about me and Lana? What was that?”

“I was just responding to—”

“Let’s be honest for a second. The reason you wrote that bitchy piece of junk is that I wouldn’t fuck you. We both know that. You were mad at me because you ran around my heels like a little dog for months and—”

He slapped her hard, clipping her across her cheekbone and nose. She staggered and froze in disbelief. Remorse dilated his heart. The busy tableau of daytime Manhattan became a gray backdrop for the hugeness of Nicki’s face and the disembodied heads of strangers turning to stare in disgust at the swine who’d struck this small, fragile woman. “Watch it, buddy,” said someone. He turned with an impulse to explain himself, and then she was on him, punching his face and body, hammering his shins with her feet.

“You little piece of shit!” she screamed. “You nothing! You dare to hit me, I’ll kill you!” She sprang away and ran down the street, her handbag flapping at her side.

He fled to the King Farouk Room.

That day and the next were rent with sadness. He was mortified that he’d hit her and glad she’d hit him. Perhaps he had done the wrong thing; perhaps he
had
stolen her life. Perhaps he should rewrite the screenplay, modifying her character. Then he would think, Why should he? What about artistic license? What about the way she’d led him on?

He went out and got drunk alone for the first time in weeks. On his way home he emptied his pockets of dollars, to the delight of the homeless who received them. He considered passing out on the side-walk but went home instead.

The next day he crept out to find stabilizing carbohydrates for his listing body. He went into a coffee shop and, while he was waiting for his muffins and coffee, had the irrational wish that he’d never sold his screenplay, that he could just be sitting here among these bleary people, sharing coffee with Nicki. The sun poured through the smeared window, and a swarm of dust churned visibly in the air. A woman’s eyeglasses became fierce shields of opaque reflection, an old man’s hair turned inhumanly silver.

His imagination opened in a dark, fecund slice. He imagined himself five years thence, living in a sun-desiccated white bungalow in
L.A., a sought-after scriptwriter. One day he would get a call; there was renewed interest in
Kiss and Tell.
Why? Because Nicki Piastrini wanted the lead. Once the years had passed and her anger had faded, she had seen that the script was not only brilliant but the role of a life-time, written by—basically—loving hands, for her and only for her.

He took a swallow of the cold, dirty ice water that had been placed before him, not even noticing the long black hair clinging to the lip of the glass. In his mind he heard the climactic finale of a song about doomed love, the singer crying,
“Jamais! Jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais!”

His fantasy did not include a reunion with Nicki or even a conversation. Instead, he fast-forwarded straight to an image of himself at a preliminary screening of
Kiss and Tell,
at which Nicki was strangely absent. He sat in the plush privacy of darkness, feeling intensely replete and resolved, waiting to see the lover who had slipped away, caught in his net of words. In his fantasy the script had not been rewritten, the way scripts always are, and his words fell on him in a rain of affirmation. Nicki’s huge, cinematically beautified face bloomed violently before him, sprung from some part of his psyche that was too dark for him to see. The character—his character—was a mutable androgyne wearing glittering psychic armor over its woman’s form, beautiful and seemingly without substance, yet impenetrable. When she was brought low in the film, it was with fabulous erotic drama, the realization that her armor was torn and her defeat could be boundaryless. He imagined the pivotal scene, her confrontation with the magazine editor. The blood rushed to Lesly’s crotch as the editor circled Nicki, her delicious look of fear increasing with each circle. The scene became sexy. Close-up: Her eyes looked into the camera, inviting penetration through the openness of her expression. His sense of triumphant possession would be mitigated only by his admiration for her acting. He inhaled and leaned forward as if to grab something in his hands—when, like an eel turning around on itself in a tiny space, his fantasy changed direction. Nicki faced the camera as the editor, seen from behind, greedily seized her. Close-up: By sensual gradations, her vulnerable expression became hard and predatory. Irrationally, the scene held static, as Nicki seemed vampirically to draw the editor’s aggression
from him, to make it her own. The man whom Lesly had invented to violate Nicki was alchemically subsumed by her, as she swallowed Lesly’s triumph whole. Except that in his fantasy, her triumph felt like his. His grabbing hands closed on air. From inside his head, Nicki smiled at him and pinned him to his seat. Involuntarily, he smiled back; smiling, he let her go. He came back into the coffee shop as if waking up and, in doing so, releasing a dream into the world. A cloud covered the glaring sun, and someone violently blew his nose.