Lunch (2 page)

“But how do you do.” She extends her hand, forgetting it was scratched. Nick squeezes it, hard. She winces and pulls away. He smiles.

“And this is the Major.” I nod at her. She scans my scars, does not shudder, and nods back.

“Major of what?” she asks me.

“Major trouble,” Toledo says. Idiot. I stifle the urge to smash his face into the table. Olivia has ignored his comment, her face molding into a polite blank. It is a skill particular to Nick, as well as myself, seen rarely in the women we meet. Nick is definitely piqued, the boredom of this lunch suddenly enlivened by a simple encounter with a recalcitrant woman.

“This is my friend and dealer, Annette Isaak,” Olivia says.

“Very pleased to meet you,” Annette says, coolly professional, a stain of blush still on her cheeks.

“How do you know James?” Nick asks. He has to say something to Olivia.

“My fiancé played most of the score for one of his movies,” she says, “and then Jamie wanted me to paint the star's portrait, and I wouldn't do it.”

“Why not?” Nick asks.

“Too boring,” she says. “No character in his face.”

“What about my face? Would you paint me?”

“No,” she says, after looking hard at his features. “No, I don't think so.”

Jamie laughs. “Don't mess with her. She's quite picky about whom she paints, and she's one of the most stubborn women I've ever met.”

“From you,” she says, “that's a compliment.” She is rubbing her sore palm gently, an unconscious gesture. The diamond catches the light. “Well, enjoy your lunch.” We are dismissed.

Nick's face is a cipher, but I know what he is thinking. A quick diversion with an American, just what he needs in this sprawling city so far from home. And she is such an odd duck, this one, self-­possessed. Harder to conquer, but ripe for it. A woman's ripeness. Not lithe and leggy like Nick's favored chassis, the Belinda model, those faceless starlets he plows through with such impunity. Tall and streamlined, they were built for speed. Olivia is built for comfort, round but firm. His eyes are alight, he is a jungle cat breathing deep, a long delicious whiff of her peculiar scent of vetiver, pungent, not sweet, breathing deeper, marking his territory, claiming what he wants to be his.

He smells blood. There is a faint trace, still, on her palm, and he means to lick it.

Olivia scans the menu. They order. She gets up. I watch her walk away. I watch Nick watching her, waiting, then excusing himself, and following, a chorus of sighs in his wake. I watch Annette, watching them both, sighing with just a bit of amiable resignation before pulling out a cigarette. I lean over to light it, startling her just a little, and she thanks me. I glance at her wedding band, and our eyes meet. We know. It's obvious. She smiles, conspiratorially. She must be a good friend, honest and true.

Nick is standing by the telephone when Olivia comes out and nearly walks right into him.

“What can I do to make you change your mind,” he says.

Her eyes flicker, frightened, and narrow. “Nothing.” She frowns. He has startled her, there in the narrow hallway, and he is standing too close, tall and feral, an unswerving presence.

“I want you to paint me.”

“I choose the ­people I paint. They don't choose me.” She shrugs by him back to the table.

I see that the angry fear has darkened her eyes into shiny steel. I was right, about them.

Nick inhales the aphrodisiac of her response and soon returns. A brief glance at me, running his fingers through his hair. A panther, grooming.

Their food arrives. Nick's eyes are on her, burning, heated. Even if she switched places, switched tables, ran out into the rain, she'd feel those ferocious eyes boring into the back of her skull. His plate is empty, he may have eaten, but now he is hungry. She feels his hunger. He wants her. He wants to eat her alive, he will devour her whole.

He is looking at her like she is lunch.

A spasm of lust so pure, so unwelcome in its unexpectedness, floods her with such sudden speed that she involuntarily presses her legs together. I can see her do it. Nick, too, feels that fear, he can sense that tension, smell it rising off her, a smoke signal of desire. He has been waiting for that moment, thrilling to a slight recoil of her shoulders, willing it, more delicious than any dessert spun of golden sugar.

We linger. Oh how Nick can change in the blink of an eye, transforming himself into a gracious novice, grateful for discourse about the German Romantics, avidly hanging on to every word of his devoted director. He flirts with the waitress, he toys once more with Annette when she turns to look at him as she pulls another cigarette from her purse and he leans sideways to light it. She bends forward, her face a delightful flush, to whisper to Olivia, who sits stiff and wary, her back defiant. He signs autographs and kisses cheeks, he orders a special grappa, he throws back his head and laughs.

The room is abuzz with the sweet indefinable pleasure of sharing a secret moment with a living god.

Only Olivia will not acknowledge us. She picks at her food, drinks a glass of red wine. She is wearing a long column of a dress made from some shimmering dark velvet, and thick stockings. I cannot see her legs. She is tapping one foot, unaware of it, her chunky boot heel Morse-­coding a rapid staccato, her calf muscles tensing, knotted, belying her nerves as those eyes will her to respond. And she is responding, though she can't articulate why. Desire grabs at her, whispering in her ears, caressing her curls, invading her pores, it tickles, pinpricks of cravings crawling up her spine.

No man has ever looked at her like that before. Not her lover, not her former husband, not anyone. She has met many men of power and potent persuasion, she has painted them and sometimes bedded them, but this man is different. Never before has she felt such an awful, insidious yearning, a dull merciless ache lingering like a bee sting between her legs, demanding satisfaction, gripping her tight, this uncontrollable, unmistakably female reaction to undeniable lust.

They are nearly finished. We get up to leave. Olivia must look up at us when we say goodbye, and there is an electric flash of recognition between her and Nick, a weighted breathless moment before Olivia blinks her eyes as if she could somehow will her acknowledgment away.

Nick blows Annette a kiss. I beckon to the maître d' and palm him two fifty-­pound notes, whispering instructions. We go up the stairs.

Olivia comes up first. The maître d' is detaining Annette, as I had bidden him, with a spurious message.

Nick is standing at the top of the stairs, blocking Olivia's path. She looks up at him, a long moment, and her heart begins thumping a strange wild rhythm.

“Are you always like this?” she asks.

“Worse, usually.”

“Lucky me.”

“Don't go.”

“You must be joking.”

“We'll drive you home.”

“No.”

He steps down toward her. She tries to flatten herself against the wall. This pleases him. He comes nearer, too near. She trembles, she cannot help it, he is hungry, starving, she is there to be eaten, and he means to eat her, because she is lunch.

Nick lifts her hand, he turns it over, he traces a thin line on the pink scratch there, and kisses it.

“I will find you,” he says, and is gone.

 

Chapter 2

P
rocuring is easy. It is especially easy when you live with Nick Muncie, superstar.

The scenario is simple: Look at a woman, a body, admire the color of her hair, perhaps, the curve of her hips, her breasts swelling, her nipples hardening instantly when she sees your face, sees who you are, see her as yours, and then she is yours, because you can take what you want. It had worked so well in the past. Nothing profound. Nothing but the deliberateness of mindless pleasure. The disposable-­glove relationship, easily discarded.

Olivia will shatter our simple rules. She has to be taught the games, and is not a willing player. Nick had grown lazy with conquest, and with the security of his armor protecting him from intrusions. Olivia has already startled him from the shameless facility of his habitual patterns, because she doesn't care who he is, or that he wants her, and because she loves another.

I imagine her now, home, sitting on her bed, no, she is sitting in a rocking chair, she is rocking, because to me she is the kind of woman who sits, thinking of faces she will paint, rocking, her eyes closed, images a vivid tarantella in her head. She sits, rocking, the shadows deepening, the twilight comes so early here in winter and is so easily extinguished, she is sitting in the shadows, wondering at herself, wondering why the silly dull ache does not leave her, wondering.

She wishes she could see Nick as no more than a spoiled selfish man used to indulging the obvious inclinations of the conquering hero. Such men, these elegant barbarians, bore her. But such men do not regard her with the kind of animal admiration usually reserved for the leggy beauties she expects Nick squires around Hollywood with bored impunity. Such men do not stand by the door of a ladies' room in a restaurant, leaning insouciantly against the wall by the telephone as if nothing else in the world existed but the need to say what he wants to her, to try to touch her, to gaze, to bore his eyes through her, because for him she has unwillingly become the only meal worth eating, and he is ravenous. No, she must admit, Olivier, her fiancé, her beloved, has never looked at her like that, with quite that unwavering intensity, although he looks at her with quiet passion simmering, yes, he looks at her with love.

Olivia does not know what to do, so she does nothing.

She has no idea.

N
ICK IS
sitting too, in our suite in the Savoy, eating chocolates from their curt little square box. He eats them slowly, licking the smooth outer shells till they crack, licking them as he wishes to lick the thin faint smear of pink he kissed on Olivia's palm, his tongue circling.

He is plotting.

I am witness to it, as I am ever. Only very rarely did Nick venture out to forage on his own, fearful as we were to the possibility of blackmail or a lurking paparazzo. On his solitary excursions, when he needed to be more discreet and well-­behaved without me to override any boorishness, his most potent pleasure came later, with the telling of the tale. Only in recollection did Nick truly come alive, playing the scene as the impassioned suitor he'd pretended to be. His eyes alight, he'd kick off his boots and lie back on his custom-­made bed with the sculptured bedposts and the lacy yet sturdy ironwork grilles between them on each end, his breath all raggedy, telling me what impossibly ridiculous thing he'd just done. He did not need any response, did not expect one; the more outlandish his descriptions, the various boring sagas of how he'd just used his special toys, the more pleased he was by my customary inscrutability. I never judged him, there was no point. At these moments, he didn't need me for advice or counsel.

He simply needed an audience.

T
HE
DEPTHS
of what made Nick who he is are ­utterly unfathomable to anyone who first meets him. Blinded by the aura of his fame, they see his beauty, what they perceive as his fresh, unpretentious presence, only because he allows them to.

Distracted, they must have been, by the famous forelock of black hair that kept flopping endearingly over his forehead, pushed back in an impatient gesture copied from Gary Cooper, or perhaps by a whiff of his orris cologne, a peculiarly old-­fashioned smell, odd and slightly bitter, the signature scent of Louis XIV, because if it was good enough for the king, he said, then it was good enough for Nick Muncie.

Or distracted by the uniform that subtly limns the long lean lines of his body: a custom-­tailored poet's shirt bleached and starched to an impossible crisp white, the sleeves billowing into thick cuffs linked with an odd gold insignia that matched his heavy gold ring, one he mockingly identifies as the family heirloom. A belt of smooth black leather just thick enough to impress a wide welt, a vivid souvenir of Nick at night, clasped with an intricate buckle of hammered silver given to him by a fervent fan who'd had it blessed by an Iroquois shaman after he emerged from a ceremonial sweat lodge, or so she said. Tight black Levi 501s, button fly, please, so they can be hastily unbuttoned off. Black leather Nocona boots, well-­worn. Black jacket, either Armani or motorcycle, depending on the weather. A perfect study in black and white and blue, what on any other man could have veered easily into the effeminate but on him embodied a masculinity so iconoclastic it has since become known as Putting On the Nick.

And then they see me behind him, the pale, thick scars on my face slashing a wide swath from ear to nose, and wonder yet again who I am and why we are together.

A century or two ago such a debt of honor, dueling, would have made ladies swoon and men pull me aside for a snifter of cognac and a
mano a mano
blow-­by-­blow. Now, however, the scars inspired little more than fear and repulsion, although Nick sometimes teased me that there were plenty of groupies out there who got off on the bizarre. I expect many ­people in Hollywood may have questioned why, with all Nick's money, I never had them fixed. Actually, I had gone for a consultation. The surgeon examined me gravely, shaking his head. “Whoever stitched you was a butcher,” he said. “I've never seen such a botched job. The skin wasn't able to heal properly, especially around these burns—­acid, right?—­and the scar tissue is unusually thick.” He sighed, his professional pride affronted. “I'm sorry, but this is the rare exception where trying to fix things might make them worse. I can't recommend it.”

It didn't matter. I was relieved. A smoother facade might've altered the subtle balance of our life together. I'm used to them, they are part of my face. I've grown accustomed to the convenience of this mask. It serves our purpose. I don't have to answer any questions, because nobody dares ask them.

No one ever figured out that my scars are the tangible reminder of the fearsome genesis of Nick Muncie, superstar.

He has willed himself to forget who we were, where we came from, and what we learned there, and he cannot admit to himself that even forgetfulness has its price.

I
T TOOK
so little time for Nick to become famous that we were giddy with the shock of it, greedy, buying in to the churning machinery. Nick was so eager to please then, because pleasing meant work, and work meant money, and money meant power, and Nick meant to have as much of it as he could stash in his feverish plots of ascension. Deprivation had made him hard, and determined; excess made him indolent, and mean when there was no need for him to be charming.

The meanness, hidden from all save myself, only melted once, for one infinite second, for one interminable, aching moment, which by sheer coincidence I captured on videotape.

Nick never saw that tape. He never knew what I saw.

I saw everything.

It was mine, but all that remains for me is one frozen moment.

N
ONE SAW
him as I did.

He had only to lower those darkly blue eyes and raise them shyly in a move slyly practiced by Princess Diana, bat those impossibly long black eyelashes, the kind women said were wasted on a man but they weren't wasted on Nick, oh no, one sideways glance sufficed. It was a gesture that made him famous practically overnight and took us out of the dump of an apartment we'd rented off La Cienega, 246¼, Nick liked that. A quarter human, that's us.

He was discovered by a casting agent who saw him at the Sunoco station in Beverly Hills, filling up her Mercedes with super unleaded right after he'd fixed Cary Grant's flat tire. He must have had a quixotic look on his face, and so she asked him why he was smiling. “Did you see who that was?” he asked her, goofy with the unexpected proximity to a celebrity. “Cary Grant's not supposed to get a flat tire,” he said. “That's not supposed to happen to ­people like him.”

“You mean because he's a living legend.”

“A legend, yeah, I guess so.”

From such eloquence a star was born.

“What do you do besides inflating flats?” she asked, her honed eye zeroing in on the planes of his face under the grime, the body under the uniform, the hunger under the eyelashes, unwilling to drive away from such a physically perfect specimen without some form of teasing flirtation.

He smiled. “Why do you want to know?”

“You have the kind of face I'm looking for,” she purred.

“Looking for?” His smile slowly faded. “Looking for, for what exactly?”

She handed him her card. “Call me,” she said, “and I'll tell you.”

He called her, waiting a few days, already his instincts guiding him, he made certain he was the last appointment of the day, because he was not stupid, he knew what had to be done, came whistling into her office, pulled the chair he was meant to sit on under the doorknob, and fucked her senseless on her desk, though she was large and ungainly, fucked her for hours, piles of head shots and resumes fluttering to the floor as she moaned beneath him.

He fucked her, and as many others as were necessary, and he was careful. Nor did he mind. It was purposeful, and they were so happy afterward, sated, pleased with his discretion and abashed apologies, he fucked them whenever he felt they were pulling away, always in their offices, these sad lonely women, knowing why he was so willing yet forgiving him because he was so naive and so sweet to them, grateful for any work they threw his way. He told me about them, but never mockingly like so many of the others. It was a job, on-­the-­job training, he called it, it was work, acting so impassioned, and in a very short time he learned to do it extremely well. He found he was gifted with the instinctive intelligence actors must possess, or at least pretend to understand, and a quick wit replete with the requisite repertoire of wry lines and snappy comebacks I'd carefully written for him and that he rehearsed in front of me for hours to hone his delivery.

From there, Nick's career spiraled upward: model, actor, famous face seen at dinners and premieres, unfailingly polite, as generous as a man who divulged nothing could be with journalists, endlessly posing for pictures, uncomplaining. He was never late, sent flowers, praised his colleagues, played the game, showing up at the right parties, flirting, cajoling, slyly insinuating his growing capability as a professional charismatic with a self-­deprecating humor so that he soon became indispensable, a requisite presence, because he was so unbelievably handsome, and vulnerable, and seemingly so alone among the sharks that you couldn't not want to throw your arms around him and tell him that you loved him.

In those days he was well-­behaved. He knew enough not to blow his chances on indiscretions.

Once Nick became essential, with McAllister signing him with a flourish and the requisite cacophony of shrill and basically useless ­people surrounding him, clamoring eagerly to do his bidding, he had them arrange all the paperwork. One day he came to me, barely suppressing a smirk, and handed me an envelope: passport, driver's license, bogus birth certificate made out to John Q. Major. He'd already done the same for himself years before, obtaining the necessary documentation through the mail after a large payoff to preserve his anonymity. Editors had already screamed loudly at their journalists in frustration, trying to find the truth behind his origins, and eventually gave up in despair. The tabloids and even some of the studios had hired private detectives, all in vain. We had covered our tracks deliberately, and so well that we were untraceable, orphans, sprouting like wild things from the sea, nameless, discarded, dredged from hell.

I ran away, was all Nick ever said, I can't tell you what I ran from, I'll let you imagine how hard it was, and how horrible. I never knew my parents, they died in a car wreck when I was a baby, and eventually I came with a friend to Los Angeles.

They learned not to push him: all the better to pin the mythical tale of the woebegone urchin onto the donkeylike fans, inventing a baroque history to exploit the pain of his life. Beset by devils and surrounded by despair, this little boy, nameless and unloved, had become the other, magnified in all his magnificence forty feet wide on a movie screen, the waif sprung phoenixlike from the ashes of an unknowable life, discovered at a gas station wiping windshields of the rich and infamous, transformed into the star triumphant, king of his world, ruler of his universe.

It played much better, this myth of Muncie. So much easier for them to see only the surface, the instant stir, not its aftermath. So much easier for Nick to deny the dangers of the public's mirror, the falsehood and fickleness of its reflection. What remained after the spots had blinked off, the boom mikes were lowered, the cameras were dismantled, and the sets were struck? What was left for Nick Muncie, superstar—­his films, finished and, for him, forgotten, unspooling, for others, in the dark? Or the light reflected off his eyes as he sat watching the preferred images of his choosing in his private movie theater, the one in the blue room of the pool house?

Every time Nick closed his eyes he could open them into another realm, recreated as anyone he chose to be, an invention entirely of self. How could he exist as anything other than the player he'd become?