Lunch (3 page)

Those who belittled Nick's talent had no idea how skillfully he acted every waking moment.

A
NY LI
FE
I had away from him, Nick knew about. It was subsumed into what had become the reality of our days together, and the simple rhythm of their hours. There was the real work, and Nick was unstinting with his energy during filming, no matter how bastardized the scripts became once he'd committed the requisite Muncie persona to these projects; and then there was the unreal: the adulation, the photo sessions, the workouts, the drugs, the dinners, the parties, the pliant bodies, not always in that order. Nothing else existed.

Any woman I had, and I didn't have all that many, Nick wanted. I didn't mind; I chose them for him. I needed them only for sex, for some mindless sort of physical release, and often not even for that.

Love was not something I ever thought about.

I had no wish to make others pay for my past unhappiness unless they tried to provoke me, but few did since my reputation had become more fearsome than my scars, magnified from a whisper to a sharp, keening scream. Don't mess with the Major, they said, if you value your life.

Don't mess with the Major.

But Nick, who could not allow himself to be daunted by the things that to other men were so daunting, loved to extract that payment. It was so easy when they came so willingly, offered themselves as slaves to the sacrifice, head down, arms outstretched, beseeching, but they paid such a terrible price, vexed with the memory of what he did to them, and worst of all they paid with their silence. They paid when they would awaken, still, months later, from the soundest of sleep with the remembrance of having been taken, used, and discarded disturbing their dreams. This forgotten terror plagued their muscles, twitching the very fibers like the legs of a dog lost in slumber, a scary sensation as taut as the silken cords that had bound their limbs to Nick's vast, sculpted bedstead as they'd lain there, begging for mercy.

These lust-­numbed ladies I met in my guise as the procurer, befogged with the power that is Nick Muncie, superstar, pretended my face and demeanor did not repel them. They acted as if they truly wanted me, wanted to fuck me, not simply as slender ruse to get close to Nick. There was the buzz, a whiff of possibility, strangely oblique, enticing enough to lure these girls with their firm proud bodies and sleek hair and capped white teeth into the murky shallows of hopefulness.

I knew how to select them, so it was quick, and simple, and I was cautious. I picked them up and drove them in the big black Range Rover with the windows tinted dark so prying eyes could not see in, drove them through the honking slow traffic up to the slow curves at the top of Mulholland where Nick's compound was hidden behind an electric gate and wired hedges. They never saw the entrance anyway; the rule was they had to be blindfolded when they got into the car. Security, I said. No one ever protested, no, they shivered instead in the bliss of anticipation for a chance to be allowed into the proximity of Nick's inner sanctum.

Once inside, I'd already said her name, many times, so that Nick knew what to call her, he knew what to say when he came into the room after he caught a glimpse of her through the hole he'd bored in the wall opposite his bed, hidden artfully just behind the edge of a seventeenth-­century Gobelin he'd bought during the bankruptcy auction of McAllister's expartner.

He looked at me, ready.

I hit my marks. I never missed.

No matter what I was doing to the woman in his bed, I would shift my position, turn her around, lie on my back, she astride me, facing my feet, facing the tapestry she could not see because the blindfold stayed on. She gladly acquiesced when I took her hands in mine and told her to do as I said. It was better for her not to see me, her revulsion masked behind black silk. It was easier for her to pretend I was Nick, she is in Nick's house, perhaps this is Nick's bed, she is touching his sheets, Nick is coming to her, to be with her, she is the chosen one, he will see her and sweep her breathless into his arms, murmuring words of desire. It is all she wants to hear, his voice, the longing for it pouring off her backside as I rake my nails across it and she barely shudders, oblivious. It is all she is yearning for even as I fuck her, fill her, she does not feel me, I am not real because I am not Nick.

She is moving slowly, I have been gentle, for me, she cannot see. She hears a voice, soft. It cannot be. It is. Nick. Her heart stops. It is Nick. Nick is here. She is trembling with giddy pleasure, she strains away from me, I no longer exist. She feels his hands on her breasts, she knows them, instinctively, those fingers, she is desperate to fling her arms around him but I am still holding them. She hears him murmur her name, murmur that she is so beautiful, she is dripping, disbelieving, she is delirious, she is desperately grateful even when Nick pushes himself rudely into her mouth, how eagerly her lips seek whatever Nick deigns to present to her, never had she welcomed me or any other man with such eagerness, never had she thought she would be blindfolded and gagging, still astride another, Nick Muncie, superstar, pushing himself deeper still as she starts to pull away, pull back, but she cannot, she is impaled on me, and she is starting to panic because she cannot move, she cannot breathe, her hands are jerked high above her head and bound together, she is struggling in earnest now, terrified, this cannot be Nick, not he, not this demon choking her, she cannot move, she cannot breathe, and that is exactly what Nick wants.

Nick pulls away suddenly and caresses her cheeks, wiping away her tears. There are always tears, shock and pain loosened and made liquid. Darling, he says, darling, you are so beautiful, thank you, thank you for doing that to me, so sweet, my darling. He kisses the tears away. She is relaxing again, I can feel the stiffness melting back into the magma of desire. She is turned around, gently, so I won't slip out, I am still hard because Nick wants me to be, and she sits, captive, facing me, and I am rocking her imperceptibly back and forth, back and forth, Nick's lips in her hair, murmuring, always murmuring, the fantasy fulfilled of his voice, her name, it is Nick, really Nick, touching her, sweet, even as her hands are lowered, bound and helpless. Nick's hands cup her breasts, he holds her close, whispering of delights to come in her ear, trailing his famous slim fingers down her back, down where she wants to be touched, she is moaning, his fingers swirling, my movements small, rocking, back and forth, near imperceptible, she is screaming for him to stop, she can't help herself, she is coming in waves, she is engulfed in a rush of pleasure so intense she is sure she will faint, she cannot bear it, please, stop, she says over and over, she is begging for Nick to stop please stop, she is begging for Nick.

She is still begging when he slaps a gag on her pleading. There is nothing he likes more than a muffled moan, there is nothing more deeply satisfying than reaching for the whip stashed under the bed and bringing it down with a thin high whistle before it smacks full on her behind, one straight red welt rising thin on each cheek, nothing better than the surprised confusion he can feel as he pushes her down as I slide backward, still holding her arms, her head on my chest, she could hear my heart beating if the roaring were not so loud in her head.

It happens so quickly it always takes a few seconds for the most primal panic to register in her befuddled senses. She who has been so suffused with pleasure only seconds before cannot voice her fear, she cannot believe the same creature who made her come with such rapture is pounding viciously inside her, oblivious to her distress even as he feeds off it.

Her tears stream out from under the blindfold and fall, rolling sideways off my chest into the sodden sheets.

Nick knows when she's had enough, he always knows, he slows down, he pulls out, he caresses her body with his famous slim fingers, he is whispering again in her ear, kissing her cheeks, the pulse thudding wildly in her neck, thanking her, thanking her for making him happy, she is so beautiful he couldn't help himself, she gives him so much pleasure, he wants her, he wants her to be happy, he wants her very much, his hands caressing, does she want him, will you be mine.

Yes, she is trying to say behind the gag, yes of course I'm yours, she tries to say because she does not know what she is saying, she cannot think anything more real than the fantasy she has nurtured to be lying where she is now, burning yet senseless, deluded yet delirious, violated, take me, she wants to say, take me like that again if it pleases you, take me I'll do anything you want as long as you do it to me.

She is no longer crying.

Nick turns her over gently, and I slip away, unnoticed and no longer needed. Her ass is on fire, stingingly sore, her mouth on fire but she no longer feels it because Nick has yanked off the gag with a sudden loud rip, and he is kissing her, she is a limp rag doll, he does crave her, he wants her, he is kissing her deep, sweet, he says, so sweet, my beautiful darling, she will be his, be helpless once more as waves of pleasure snake through her body, rippling when Nick pulls her close and takes whatever else he desires.

He always makes them come, those silly girls, desperately eager, powerless, exposed, spread-­eagled, bound and blind, pleading, dazed, sandwiched between two men who could just as easily break their necks as stroke their thighs, not knowing if each further second will bring pleasure or pain, the kiss or the whip, the caress or the teeth, biting, not caring how they are turned and twisted because it doesn't really matter, Nick has his arms around them.

And so they never breathe a word, these initiates thrust so carelessly into Nick's realm and scarred by his rituals, once he said how magnificent they were after he'd come violently inside them, once, more if they particularly pleased him, their thighs strong and waxed smooth, their ripe asses firm from dreary months on the Stairmaster, ripe for welts crisscrossing the tan lines of the bikinis they flaunted on the beach at Malibu. He left them with a lingering long kiss on their lips, at the nape of their necks, between their legs, deep, sweet, please they said, stop please stop.

They do not dare breathe. Instead, they shiver.

They are stunned into silence, dazed, they think they are dreaming, a bizarre nightmare of cruel sex and whispers of their beauty. When Nick signals to me I dress them, sling them over my shoulder in a fireman's carry, then ease them down, meek and pliant, into the backseat of the black Rover, driving out through the gates that slide back silently, driving them home, or back to their cars in the parking lot where they'd left them, unwinding the blindfold, pulling them up, and out.

The sight of my face brings them back to earth with a harsh jolt. Do you want to see Nick again, I ask, he likes you very much, he thinks you are beautiful and very sweet. Yes, they nod mutely, still in shock, unable to meet my eyes. Don't worry, I say, we know where you live. At the threat implied in my calmly bland voice they pale, all of them, poor trembling birds, even through their numbed, dazed stupor they can recognize the chilling voice of terror.

That's why none dared speak of what I did to them, what Nick did to them. Not one ever saw Nick again, of course, not that way, and even if they did see him out, laughing with Belinda over vodka martinis, or walking out of a screening, or on the TV, beaming, or on the screen, intense, soulful, and magnificent, they never said a word to anyone. They knew I would find them, and then they would never again have anything truly useful to say to the world.

I
N
H
OLLYWOOD,
everyone wants to direct, they say. Not Nick, not on a real movie. He was content with this scenario, surveyed from the hole bored behind the Gobelin, the hole just wide enough for the lens of his state-­of-­the-­art camcorder. He'd written this script, filmed and recorded it, rewound the tapes, then settled in his crimson velvet dressing gown from Sulka, lounging comfortably on his favorite overstuffed sofa in the blue room of the pool house, and dimmed the lights, hitting Play on the remote with a soft sigh of anticipation. The watching was as much a ritual as the act itself, perhaps even more intense because Nick could see himself, admire the relentlessness of his smooth, vicious thrusts, feel once more the supple body straining against him, pleading.

The script and camera angles never changed. Only the duration, the shapes of the bodies, the texture of the hair clenched in his fists, their murmured names. All else was the same, an endless repetition of his variation on a theme, the melody heard only by Nick, the whining fluted whistle of a whip that so swiftly raised the straight narrow pinkness meant to be caressed under his famous slim fingers, the muffled oboe of a woman's voice, the basso profundo of Nick, whispering sweet lies in a sweeping cadenza.

Nick heard this melody.

Whenever he was feeling particularly engaged, he made me watch. Instead, I watched him engrossed in his listening, his breathing slow and even, a toying smile at the corner of his lips.

I never made a sound.

I could have told Olivia. I could have spared her.

The price for that cowardice is incalculable.

 

Chapter 3

A
t first it was no more than a game, his interest piqued by Olivia's physical peculiarities and obvious disdain, a simple distraction from rehearsals and the tedium of London fans, waiting patiently for him on the Strand, shooed away from the Savoy by impatient doormen, their photographs and felt-­tip pens poised for the satisfaction only his scrawled signature on an 8x10 glossy could buy.

Anything to get close to Nick.

As days flew by, weary days of costume fittings and dialogue coaching, the unfamiliarity of true hard work with thought behind it, the repeated muttering of lines bored into memory, the delving into a complex character with a depth and passion that Nick worried, secretly, he did not possess, hiding his fears of inadequacy under a nonchalant facade, he chose to fixate on a woman he'd briefly encountered, by sheer coincidence. Some small part of me admired his calm determination to plow forward, his refusal to share the burden of his anxiety with the only person he trusted, smothering his apprehension instead with dreams of a woman who'd scorned him, a woman who loved another, if only to prove that his seductive powers, as natural to him as breathing, had not deserted him.

N
ICK'S CHARM,
when he meant it to be, was as unforced as it was devastating. Such a talent is inexplicable, you think you will be impervious to its creeping insidious power even as it invades your pores, irresistibly magnetic. It worked on Annette, less invulnerable to his charisma than Olivia, he tells himself, or perhaps she was simply a businesswoman astute enough to have arranged this lunch. Or rather, Nick figured out how to arrange it through Annette, plotting, beguiling, and determined.

I try to imagine what Annette said to entice Olivia here today.

But I was wrong. It wasn't Annette's cajoling that would bring her to this lunch, no, it was Oliv­ier, her fiancé. She will be here because Olivier laughed. She heard his laughter over the phone from his hotel room in Hong Kong when she told him that Nick Muncie, superstar, was pestering her for a portrait, heard him laugh at her stiff indignation, heard him laugh at the prospect of how she could paint him, how she could demystify the icon, transfer the image so beloved by millions into the myth of her own design. “Do it,” Olivier said, “it will be good for you.”

“But I don't like him,” she told him. “He's a jerk. I don't like how he looks at me. He's so used to taking anything he lays his eyes on that I don't want to be part of his craziness.”

Olivier was still laughing. “Even more reason,” he said. “He's already got you
complètement folle,
my darling, so throw that frustrated energy into your painting. I can just see him now, Monsieur Sex Symbol, trying to seduce you with his charm, and you telling him
va t'en faire foûtre.”

She laughed then, relieved. “But I've still got a bad feeling about him.”

“Don't be silly. It will give me intense pleasure to imagine his
égoïsme
trying to invade your studio. I shall think of you when I'm rehearsing, you my darling, you and the most famous actor in the world, and you will think of me, when you are looking at his face, knowing that I am laughing at the puncturing of his
esprit.
So do it for me.”

“Well, I'll think about it,” she said, sighing. “But only because you ask. And if it goes wrong, it will be entirely your fault, and I hold you completely responsible. Then you'll be sorry.”

“Say it again.”

“What.”

“You'll be sorry.”

“Why?”

“Because it sounds sexy.”

“You're crazy.”

“Yes. Crazy without you.”

“Does this mean you miss me?”

“Horribly.”

“Likewise.”

“I must go now.”

“You're tired.”

“Very.”

“Is it going well?”

“Very.”

She sighs again, she cannot help it. “Well, sleep tight.
Je t'embrasse.”

“Darling,” he said, and hung up.

W
E ARE
at our usual table in the back, and Nick is in a state of unsurpassed impatience, the signs of which—­a nick shaving, a tap of his boot on the floor, his hands ruffling his hair, making the ladies lunching sigh with frustrated pleasure, imagining how much they'd like to do that very thing with their glossy polished nails—­were remarked upon and registered silently only by me.

I have never seen him made anxious like this by a woman before. It alarms me, this obsession, because it is growing, here a tiny weed, needing only the first few rays of slanting whiter sunshine to sprout and spread, unchecked, soon covering the plots of our nasty bad habits, and choking the garden of our solitude.

I wonder what it is about Olivia.

His greeting of Annette is genuine pleasure, and she flushes with grateful surprise, knowing all eyes are upon her. She really is pretty, her cheeks blooming as Nick pulls his chair closer to hang on her every word as if the teller is far more intoxicating than the tale. Her hair naturally blond, streaked with subtle highlights, her makeup understated, her figure slender, her wedding band glinting pale fire, she is a seductive woman who adores the slither of silk underclothes hidden under the mannish yet provocative cut of her Yohji suit. She would almost be Nick's type if she weren't so smart and posh, speaking in the clipped proper cadence of the well-­bred, running a gallery on Cork Street, married to a suitable investment banker, driving their silver-­blue Range Rover to the country house on weekends, flicking off the attention of unsuitable lovers as if they were no more substantial than annoying marsh midges.

That she has a husband is worthy only of a yawn from Nick. She would almost be his type, if she were not Olivia's friend.

“Tell me about your business,” he says. “Tell me about how you find your artists.”

Not artists. Olivia.

“It depends. For instance, I've known Olivia for ages,” she says. “I was acquainted with her ex-­husband when I was working at the Tate, and he went off to teach at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Olivia was a student there, and they fell in love and came over here and it was a huge scandal because he was quite a lot older and married at the time to a certain very proper lady.”

This could be more interesting than I thought.

“Is that why she still lives here?” Nick asks.

“Yes, and why she's got such a marvelously huge studio. Geoffrey turned into a real bastard, and it's why Olivier is so—­” She flushes a deeper rose. “I don't know why I'm telling you this. Olivia will murder me. I'm still not even sure she'll do the portrait. It's never up to me, not really, much as I wish it were, although I am her dealer.”

Nick calmly pours her a glass of champagne.

“Still,” he says, “I imagine you're lucky to represent her. She appears to be very successful.” He doesn't mention how well thumbed the catalogue from Olivia's last show has become, the slim volume I picked up from the concierge at the Savoy after he called the gallery, pretending to represent a sheik in town on a shopping spree.

“Yes, quite. She is. Despite her peculiarities, as she calls them.”

Nick suppresses a smile. He likes that.

“Her support was one of the reasons I could open the gallery,” Annette is saying. “She's a wonderful painter and a wonderful friend.”

“Tell me about her fiancé.”

He has segued so smoothly into the sole topic of interest that Annette barely notices, seeing no farther than the dark blue eyes smiling into her own.

“Olivier.”

“Olivia and Olivier. How cute. Sounds like destiny to me,” Nick says with a saucy grin, “or a bad romance novel.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Curiosity. He's not in town, is he?” he asks. She shakes her head, surprised that he would know. “And hope. Hopefulness, I mean, that it will give me some leverage and persuade her to paint me.”

His candor is unforced, and since he is telling the truth, she believes him, and finds it easy to talk, hypnotized by charisma.

“He's a pianist, quite famous, I'm sure you've heard of him. He's on tour now, in the Orient. He's booked for years in advance. I don't know how she can stand it.”

“The separations, you mean.”

She nods.

“But isn't that better for you, that he's away, and so she keeps herself busy with work?”

“I suppose. I know she misses him dreadfully, but they're both quite independent, and Olivia would never stop painting to follow him around on his tours like a puppy dog. They both seem to thrive on isolation and longing, it becomes part of their work. Strange, isn't it.” Her eyes are fixed on Nick, who doesn't think it strange at all. “That's why Olivier is so perfect for her.”

Nick appears mesmerized, smiling gently, as if he were an unaccustomed audience, thrilling to a slowly rising curtain. He caresses a nonexistent hair off Annette's forehead, watching her melt, liquid putty in his fingers as she unknowingly tears bits of her bread into crusty shreds of nervous tension, silently thanking her husband, who has no interest in her extracurricular activities, for marrying her, so she has a built-­in excuse to either end or prolong Nick's flirtatiousness, should he wish it.

“Tell me how they met,” he says.

“Olivia had just been in Paris, working, so I suppose she still had a soft spot for Frenchmen when he came into the gallery.”

“Why was she in the gallery?”

“Covering for me.” She giggles. “It really was quite a nasty trick.”

“Go on.”

This story does not really interest me, because I know I will hear it again, from Nick, hear it over and over again as he muses upon endless provocative possibilities.

I prefer to imagine Olivia in Paris, a city I know well after spending months there while Nick was shooting that miniseries, an abysmally ridiculous remake of
To Catch a Thief
too low-­budget to shoot on the Riviera yet inexplicably earning that year's highest ratings and a Golden Globe for Nick's performance.

It is easier to imagine Olivia in Paris, reading myths, for inspiration, reading of the Five Nations, and the Celts, and the Etruscans, sitting on a green iron bench in the Jardin de Luxembourg, or wandering in a contented daze through the Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre, sketching. I picture her sitting in a teahouse she stumbles upon one cloudless afternoon, tucked in the Cour de Rohan near the house where Voltaire once lived, it is claimed. They begin to know her there after a while, warming to her shy smile and hesitant French, giving her the table where the light is best, near the window in the corner, upstairs under the low-­beamed ceiling, close to the fireplace that illuminates her odd beauty, flickering quietly, rendering her alabaster skin translucent, her eyes pale, and throwing the strange planes of her face into sharp relief as if she were a Caravaggio peasant come to life. Soon she comes to sketch the
propriétaire,
the waitress, the pastry chef peeling apples for a
tarte tatin,
she gives them these delicate miniatures, received with grateful delight, and they ask her, beg her, really, to paint a mural on their walls. Persephone, she decides, prancing in the wheat fields of her mother, eating a pomegranate, seeds staining her teeth the same sweet ruby as the tea scented with
eaux de fruits
she likes so much, deep crimson, scented with
cynorrhodon
and
pétales d'hélianthe.

In the evenings she lies in her small bed in the flat she'd rented in the Fifteenth Arrondissement near the Eiffel Tower, the top floor, deliberately, so she can have the roofs to herself, the city at her feet. She could see the very top of the tower, glowing yellow, a nightly beacon reflected and repeated, golden little flickering dabs like pats of butter on her windowpanes. Sometimes as she scribbled in her notebooks, a glass of wine on the floor, a candle scented with rosemary and lavender lit, flickering, the radio playing odd bits of jazz and blues, she heard the clickety patter of her neighbor's cat scrabbling up the slate shingles of the roof, or the high chattering voices of the children of the concierge playing games, echoing in the courtyard, laughing, or the quick clatter of high heels on the cobblestones below, or a phone, ringing, or the sudden clap of shutters pulled close, the world shut out, safe for the night.

Paris is a city of secrets. We secret-­sharers recognize that in each other, and belong there. Push open the heavy green door, slightly crooked with age, and a courtyard beckons, thick heavy curtains fluttering in the windows, hiding the life inside.

I see her in the market on Thursdays, under the shade of the elevated Métro, admiring the carefully constructed mountains of fruit, piled
cerises provençales,
glowing white pyramids of mushrooms, curling green snakes of
frisé
and
haricots verts,
she gets yelled at when she touches the fat fingers of white asparagus, the jeweled heaps of beets and turnips. She laughs when she sees the table of fish, gleaming, neatly quivering silver, for they remind her of the market she once stumbled upon, years ago in Hong Kong, there where her lover is now, his fingers on keys of ivory, the audience rapt, the sounds silver, silver like the scales of fish there in the night market, an open-­air market at a crossroads in Kowloon, the tabletops roiling, a wriggling mass of every imaginable variety of creature that crept and crawled in the sea, gathered up, squirming, by bored impassive cooks, dumped into squat black caldrons of boiling water, scooped out seconds later, and as quickly devoured.

Those tables, writhing, alive with the near-­dead of the deep, became the background for the painting that launched her career when she was still in art school, the portrait of Mao and Stalin, cooking together, stirring the boiling morass, the witches' brew of the Orient.