Kamikaze Lust (23 page)

Shade ghosting me, I removed my platforms and lifted one of the shiny thigh-highs. It felt smooth against my fingers and smelled of shoe polish. “It’s like a heel upgrade,” I said, conscious of RR’s eyes on my feet as I slid them one after the other into Wanda Lynne’s boots, pulling up at the thighs so the leather gripped tightly. His staring aroused me, for despite his pleas to the contrary, I couldn’t separate him from his porn star identity. He was all sex. The frivolous and seedy kind. The kind they advertised in the back of magazines and on cable TV.

“You gonna walk or what?” he said.

“Hold your horses.” I balanced myself on the back of a chair, took a few steps. It was as if I were walking on stilts. Awkward and defiantly nonerotic. I kept thinking, please don’t fall, please don’t fall. But I’d always been a fast learner. A few more steps and I sailed with the curve of Sliver Ray’s hips, the swagger of her triple-X ass.

“Not bad,” he said.

Not bad?
I was pacing in front of him like a Madison Avenue hooker, and he says not bad. Bastard. I handed over the reins to Silver Ray. She took a step toward him, then another. Close enough to touch, she teased, pivoted, the back of her thighs in his face. She leaned forward, keeping all of the weight on her legs, and felt him move closer, his breath on her ass.

A quick second, the shift of my eyes, and there was Mistress Wanda Lynne, yellow-blond hair glimmering against her black satin cape, the chunky soles of her white combat boots lifting her almost six feet in the air.

“Excuse me, but what the fuck is this?” Her eyebrows swept up her forehead. I slipped forward, would have fallen on my face were it not for the dressing table. As it was, I knocked a riding crop to the floor.

“I…uh…I was just—”

“You’re wearing my boots!”

My mouth opened, but no words came out. I was counting on RR to speak, but he just sat there. Smiling, I think.

“Jesus Christ…Alexis!” she screamed, then ranted. “These are my things, this is my work. I don’t go to your job and go through your things! You wouldn’t catch me trying to do your job!” Alexis pulled back the screen, took a quick survey. A few of her minions came running behind her.

“Wanda?” she said, and I knew I was in trouble. Alexis Calyx frightened me more than some tatty dominatrix, more than a belligerent Santa Claus or the entire NYPD for that matter. It wasn’t that she was my employer, but that her opinions had started to count.

“Who the fuck is she? She’s wearing my boots!” Wanda Lynne shouted.

“I was just trying them on,” I protested.

“You can’t do that, who said you could do that?”

“Okay, look, she’s not going anywhere with them,” Alexis said. “Rachel, take off the boots.”

I sat down and yanked the left boot by its five-inch heel. “No!” Wanda said, hands on hips, cape flying out at the sides. She looked like a superhero. “Don’t pull from the heel! It doesn’t matter, they’re ruined.”

“What are you talking about?” Alexis said.

“I can’t wear them if someone else’s feet were in them. It’s a bad omen, ask anybody. This is so unprofessional.”

“They’re just shoes,” RR said.

“Shut up, Robbie,” Alexis said. “But, you know, Wanda, this is a little extreme.”

“Oh you think this is extreme? Watch.”

She turned and started packing her equipment, the back of her cape flailing left and right with each aggravated movement. By this time, what seemed like the entire cast and crew of
One in the Hand, Two in the Bush
had descended upon Mistress Wanda Lynne’s dressing table. Nobody uttered a word. A few chains clinked and zippers locked, every sound amplified as if the set had been miked. Wanda’s stilettos bound my feet in day-glow cuffs.

As with yesterday’s run-in with Santa Claus, I had difficulty placing myself in this scene. I hated being the center of attention and, usually, did whatever I could to blend into the background. This wasn’t so odd for a journalist. I was great with people one-on-one, could lure confessions out of the most stoic of subjects, and I had no trouble walking into a room full of lawyers, cops, or junkies as long as I knew I wouldn’t have to participate. On the other hand, editorial meetings were torture, dinner parties a nightmare. The one time I’d mistakenly accepted an invitation to speak in front of a group of journalism students, I spent a couple of weeks vomiting, my body reaching unprecedented levels of dehydration, before I had to cancel the engagement. Sam suggested hypnosis. I think I told him to piss off, or words to that effect. Funny, I wasn’t nauseous now, though all eyes led inevitably toward my feet. I was more nervous about Alexis.

Finished with her packing, Wanda stomped off the set. Then, as if a pause button had been released, confusion ensued. It was the only scene left to shoot, and they needed a dominatrix, Alexis said she wouldn’t compromise. Call Wanda and apologize, someone said. Offer her more money, new boots, anything. “Get another mistress,” said Alia the directorial ingenue.

Alexis looked apoplectic, as if the suggestion had been for her to walk across burning coals. “On Christmas Eve?” she said. “Where am I going to find a dominatrix on Christmas Eve?”

“This is New York,” said a young man I didn’t remember and would have remembered because he had a row of about twenty metal rings in each ear.

“Fine, okay. Fine.” Alexis swung her arms overhead. “You think you can get someone, by all means, go right ahead, whatever you have to do, go for it.”

They walked off. Others paced, making frustrated faces, offering the same suggestions over and over again. Listening to them, I felt guilty and feared being banished from the magical kingdom. Another casualty of the Alexis Calyx ghostwriting wars: Rachel the porn star wanna-be. She was fourth, fifth if you included the sister. I bent down to remove the offending thigh-highs.

“Hey, why don’t you use Silver here,” RR said, forcing me to look up at him. “She’s wearing the shoes.”

“What?” Alexis snarled, and I wanted to smack the sanctimonious smile from his face. I couldn’t believe he said that after he’d made me try on the boots, the traitor.

“Of course, sure, she could be,” said Claire Blue. It was the first time she’d addressed me other than a quick
bonjour
and slight slip of the lip, so much like her take-me mouth in
X-posure
it always made me blush. I could barely even look at her, let alone think about acting in a movie with her. As if I could act in any kind of movie, with anyone. I fidgeted when Rowdy pointed his video camera in my direction, and Silver Ray, too, was a behind-the-scenes kind of gal. It was part of her shtick, the camera-shy porn star. But silence had fallen on the set, everyone staring at me as if the suggestion that I stand in for Mistress Wanda Lynne were not the height of absurdity.

“Oh, no,” I nodded fiercely. “I can’t do it, no way.”

“Yes, but, why not?” Claire Blue looked at me, and I made myself hold her gaze. Her ink-black hair framed her face; her eyes were perfectly blue, depressed but regal like the weather, like blue M&Ms. Stage fright or not, I might do the scene if I got to kiss her afterwards. “You see yourself with the shoes, that’s all,” she said. “I am the one really who is doing everything. You just say the words, hold the whip, tie me around.”

“The shoes do fit,” said Bob Florida, a blond military type also in the scene.

“Yes, they are good,” Claire Blue said. “She looks beautiful too, eh? A little fear makes a woman more, I don’t know, sensual I think.”

“Absolutely,” RR said.

“Um…thanks,” I stammered. “But, I don’t think so.”

“Hello, over here, objection!” Alexis shouted. All eyes turned to her. “Can we get back to the planet earth now?”

While I was thankful for her clarity, I was also insulted. She didn’t want me in her movie. I wasn’t good enough, pretty enough, sexy enough.

“You should listen to Claire,” RR said. “She’s French, she knows about these things. Haven’t you read
Story of O?
”

“Get out, okay? Just get out!” Alexis pointed her cell phone at RR’s face. He rolled his eyes.

“You’re overreacting, Alexis,” he said.

“Don’t patronize me, just get off my fucking set. You’ve done what you wanted, so get out.”

“You serious?” he glared at Alexis, his prune face meaner than I’d ever seen, taunting and belligerent. A look of panic seized her, the olive tones draining from her skin as if someone had drawn them from her cheeks with a hypodermic. But only for a few seconds. She managed to shake it off and walk toward RR. The rest of us were immobile, a captive audience. “You bet I’m serious,” she said. “I’m sick of you trying to sabotage me, and I’m really sick of feeling guilty about your career.”

“You’re forgetting whose movie this is.”

“No, I won’t let you do this anymore!” She swung her phone like an epileptic conductor. I was afraid she might hit him with it. “I want you out of here and I don’t give a shit if you pull your goddamn money. I shouldn’t have taken it in the first place.”

“You can’t do this without me,” he said.

“I’m serious, get the fuck off my set, Robbie. Just leave me alone!”

He pursed his lips dismissively and laughed. Then he did something so audacious, so vulgar, so fucked-up and aggressive….

He winked at me. As if we’d been in collusion! Mortified, I wanted to disappear inside of Wanda Lynne’s boots. But I felt gigantic, awkward, and inflated with anger. I could have pummeled him the way I’d taken out Santa Claus. He was such an asshole. I took a deep, calming breath, trying to convince myself nobody had seen him wink or that maybe I’d imagined it. RR turned back to Alexis, and they stared, the set so quiet I could hear Claire Blue fidgeting next to me. I held my breath until finally, like my mother leaving the Thanksgiving dinner table, RR strutted out of there as if he were the innocent victim of a witch hunt and the rest of us the condemning masses. The worst part was I wanted to storm out with him.

When he was gone, Alexis turned to me. “Meet me out front, I need some air. And get rid of those boots, please.”

“What should I do with them?”

“I don’t care, just get them away from me, I never want to see them again.”

Claire Blue helped me slip the boots from my feet. I put on my platforms, my coat, grabbed my bag. She rolled each of the thigh-highs from the bottom, then stood up next to me. She was short, maybe five feet. On her back she gave the impression of being a towering figure.

“Take them, they look good.” She handed me the boots and smiled softly. I couldn’t believe this was Claire Blue, the woman I fast-forwarded to whenever I watched
X-posure.
I wanted to tell her that I’d seen the film a few times, thirty or forty, not too many; tell her that I’d been coming more than ever and she was somehow part of it; tell her that I might make myself available to do the scene in my bedroom, away from the cameras. Maybe I could be her rehearsal partner.

But, ultimately, all I said was, “Thanks.”

She gave me a card for her one-woman show at The Performance Warehouse in January. “You can write something perhaps.”

I slipped the card in my pocket, buried the boots deep inside my bag, and left the sound stage. Alexis was waiting for me outside. She wore a tight leather coat over her skirt with the high slit, a knit skull cap, and sunglasses—all black. I felt as if I were cavorting with a fashionable corpse, only I was the one being led to the gallows.

We walked to Tompkins Square; it was another chilly, wet afternoon, the clouds a radioactive gray. I felt overwhelmingly sad and guilty. Worse, every time I tried to apologize, Alexis brushed me off with a cold glance then picked up the pace. I wished she would yell at me or reprimand me, let me repent at least.

Alexis stopped at the dog run, and we hung our arms over the fence, both of us looking forward. She sighed, shaking her head at me. “Little Rachel Silver from Bay Ridge,” she said.

“I’m really sorry,” I said again. A small furry dog humped the leg of a golden retriever, as if he were hanging on the only way he knew. It took me back to the porn set, Wanda storming off, those burnished boots declaring it my fault. The wave of fear that had washed over Alexis, destabilizing her in a way I never imagined possible, if only for a few seconds. I felt miserable.

“Are you going to fire me?” I asked and immediately felt my heart leap.

“Do you think I should?”

“No.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

“So in other words I’m sitting in limbo.”

“Look,” she said. “You’ve put me in a strange place. I don’t want to lose you. You’re smart, you laugh at my jokes, and I think we understand each other.”

“But?”

“You’re a lot like me, too curious for your own good.”

“Are you talking about him?”

“You won’t listen, that’s clear.”

Her words pierced my chest like a stiletto heel. I was a ball of self-loathing and trickery. That we both knew RR was behind my trying on Wanda’s boots made my betrayal more poisonous. I vowed silently not to see him again and wanted to convey this to Alexis. Maybe then she would console me the way she’d comforted Tessa Torpedo my first day on the set. She pivoted toward me, and I felt hopeful. But I couldn’t get beyond her dark sunglasses.

Again, we looked out at the dogs running happily, chasing sticks and balls, barking, growling, and crotch sniffing. Maybe they knew more than we did about communication. There was something to be said for sniffing people out before getting too close.

A cold wind settled between us. My fingers started feeling brittle inside my leather gloves, and I wished I were at home in bed. The ring of the cell phone made me jump. Alexis grabbed it from her bag, and a conversation ensued. She said “Fabulous!” a few times, while I shifted my weight from leg to leg to keep them from freezing. Apparently, they’d found a dominatrix willing to work all night if need be. Alexis was pleased.

She slipped the phone back into her bag, raised her eyebrows. “Okay, let’s do a little experiment, which one is the Rachel dog?”

“The what?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m getting tired of this. The Rachel dog? I say it’s that big black sheepdog.” She directed my attention to a silly dog lounging beneath a tree, panting as she watched the rest of them play. It was a good guess, the doggy-voyeur with her hair flopping in the wind. I figured she was making fun of me.