8

By July, Margaret Blackwood had grown tired of her rain-drenched walks to and from tube stations, bus stops and the hospice – though she preferred them to the weekend drives with Peter – and decided to hire a car. The monthly rate that she was quoted seemed quite reasonable for London, and so she took it, first for one month, and then another. Her mother’s condition deteriorated steadily. By late August she was in a seemingly irreversible coma, while the quirky English weather had taken a turn for the better, so that there seemed to be no point in renewing the car hire for another month. Indeed, there was little more than a vestigial sense of propriety, which took hold of Margaret whenever she would visit England, that impelled her to continue with the visits. She returned the car well before the due date – “You understand there’s no refund, Ma’am,” said the agent, but she didn’t care – and went back to using London Transport and enjoying the precious English sun. She did not find Peter’s stoicism in the face of his wife’s impending death as irritating as she might have.

She thought of looking up old acquaintances, mostly fellow students at Wimbledon School of Art – back in the days when the school gave only diplomas and not bachelor’s degrees – including the boyfriend that she had amicably broken up with when she moved to the Continent, with the help of her half of her father’s sizable life-insurance benefit, which his grieving colleagues had paid out in record time. The chap had stayed in London and achieved some success as a sculptor, and according to what she could glean from reading about him in art magazines, he was still single. But she decided against it; she had unmoored herself from England, and did not want to renew any ties that might bind her. The few relatives she had ever had contact with lived in the Midlands. When the time came, Peter would notify them.

And while, as she had told Peter, she could not really work in England in the sense of actual painting, as the weather improved she began to go outside with her sketchbook and filling its pages. She was not one to analyze the psychological underpinnings of her work, and she hated it when critics tried to do that, but she did find something changing in her creative impulses under the effect of her two losses, the completed one of Albert and the impending one of her mother. It was something strangely liberating, something that made her bend lines that she might previously have drawn straight and vice versa.

It was only then that she realized how little thought she had given to Albert up to that moment.

Albert Bosch and Barry Bergman had something in common besides an appreciation of the charms of Gina George: they were both fast workers. Though Albert Bosch did not skimp on retakes, he rarely needed more than two or three, even in this situation, when most of his actors, aside from the three leads, were essentially amateurs who did not speak English (though some spoke French), and his assistant director Nacho – whose services as interpreter were indispensable – had very little experience in film, and none in the kind of unconventional filmmaking practiced by Albert Bosch. Accustomed to working on limited budgets, he was indeed, as Gina George had already discovered, an efficient organizer. Within a week of the beginning of pre-production – he was able to hire his accustomed art director and cameraman, and the local crews proved quite skillful – he calculated that the budget needed a fifteen-percent augmentation. He was essentially his own producer, though it would of course be the two London distributors, as well as whatever local personage the culture commissioner would designate, who would get producer credit, alongside him and Gina George. With Gina’s help, he was able to wheedle the additional money from his three sources without much difficulty. To provide a pretext for the quick trip to London, the script was rewritten so as to require a hand-held location shot there. A November opening in Barcelona, preceded by a week by a pro-forma world premiere in London to satisfy the two distributors who had provided more than half of the budget, and followed by one in Paris, seemed likely.

Albert Bosch was also his own editor. In fact, he had gotten his start in film as an editor, and critics would often single out his editing skill for praise; un grand maître du montage, one French critic had called him. There was very little wasted footage. Some takes might be placed in a sequence other than the scripted one, but no one could ever tell, since the shooting script was something he revealed to no one, in this case not even to Gina, even though the original idea had been hers and she would be given co-writer credit as well.

The shooting phase was enjoyable. Mario Farga and Sofia Marés, like the good body-worshiping Mediterraneans they were, turned out to be quite comfortable with nudity and simulated sex in front of – or beneath – the camera. It was Gina George who seemed to need a period of adjustment from her hard-core habits, but a few practice sessions with Albert in their hotel suite helped her to overcome them. Yes, she told herself, she was an actress.

The post-production facilities at the regional government’s film studio turned out to be the best Albert had ever used. The computer editing enabled him to indulge his love of detail to the utmost. Whatever the reviews of the film might turn out to be, no one would question its production values.

Whatever an Albert Bosch may have thought of the production values of Young Wives’ Tales, Barry Bergman liked to think that his work was at the high-quality end of his genre. His thinking was confirmed by the fans and connoisseurs of the medium, who were quite willing to pay the higher price of videos with “Barry Bergman Presents” on the box. His movies had a devoted audience abroad – Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, even Japan. “There’s porn, and then there’s Barry Bergman” was a common saying in several languages. He did not really regard himself as a pornographer (or a pornocinematographer, as his Oxford-educated friend Geoff, his London distributor, insisted on saying), but as someone who made movies that had plot (with conflict, motivation, character development, resolution – he mostly wrote the storylines himself), acting, art direction, soundtrack – the works – and also explicit sex, lots and lots of it. If, because of this last ingredient, his product was lumped by the canons of Hollywood in the same box as the stuff that was made cheaply and simply for titillation, then so be it. If people chose to watch it in order to be titillated and thereby made him rich, so much the better. What’s wrong with titillation? he would ask rhetorically.

Another factor that distinguished his movies, especially since Gina George became his star, was that a woman’s pleasure was just as important as a man’s, and was not confined to having a schlong thrust into her. As a result, his audience numbered almost as many women as men.

Barry Bergman liked to think of himself as an old-school producer who was the author of his movies, as in the days before directors became auteurs. He regarded the directors who worked for him as technicians in the same way as cameramen, production designers or lighting directors.

He liked to give each project around three months, sometimes more – an eternity by the standards of the industry – between pre-production, shooting, post-production and promotion. The economics of the industry, however, required that he produce eight to ten movies a year, so that he was invariably working on two or three at a time, in different phases. And so it was that shortly after Labor Day, when he was simultaneously packaging the finished Campus Capers, shooting a fill-in quickie (he had to make some of those as well) written mainly to give Lesli some practice and titled Vixens at Play, and sketching out the rehearsal and shooting schedule for A Bard in the Bush, he received a phone call in his studio office from Cydni, who had just come back from her summer job as a guide at a national park. “Cydni with a C. Remember me?” she asked him, to his amusement. He remembered giving her his card, with the number of his direct line, when she left his house the morning after the party. Also, one of his final editing touches on Campus Capers was to give her boob shot more screen time than in the raw footage, by repeating it after Frank Bond’s reaction shot and again after a shot of Frank’s crotch.

He felt suspicious when she told him that she needed to see him in person, and his suspicion was confirmed when she showed up in his office a little after five, as he had invited her to do: she was pregnant, and while she had had a relationship with a fellow park guide, from the timing it could be only be either Barry or Frank Bond – she had not been seeing anyone else at the time – and more likely Frank. He remembered that her “yes” to his question about her taking the pill had been less than convincing, but that he had, uncharacteristically, let it go. She now admitted that she had been somewhat nonchalant with the pill after her boyfriend her broken up with her on hearing that she was going to be an extra in a skin flick. “Not doing it regularly makes you kinda forgetful,” she told Barry, who in turn assured her that he would take care of everything; he had access to the best clinic in the San Fernando Valley, and he could take her there the next day. Meanwhile, he would take her out to dinner, and she could leave her car safely parked in the studio lot. In the course of the evening her anxiety turned into a giddy lightheartedness, and her condition, though not apparent to someone unacquainted with her skinny frame, gave her body a pleasing fullness. After dinner he brought her to his house for a viewing of a videocassette of Campus Capers. It was the fifth time he was seeing it, but this time he hit “pause” on Cydni’s boob shot and each of its repetitions. At the third one he said,

“You seem to have had quite an effect on Mr. Bond, Frank Bond.”

“I guess so,” she answered with a little laugh. “Right after the shooting he asked me to come to his dressing room. Well, he didn’t really ask me, he told me.”

“And you went.”

“Well, sure, who wouldn’t? It’s Frank Bond!”

“And how was it?”

“It was okay, but, you know, he didn’t kiss me or anything; he just, like, took it out, showed it off and put it in.”

“Well, he gets paid a lot of money for doing that, and you got a free private performance,” said Barry as he tweaked her cheek.

“I guess so,” said Cydni, “but it was much nicer with you.”

“How so?”

“Well, for one thing, you kiss real nice...”

Without waiting for her to tell him what it might be for another thing, Barry Bergman gave Cydni a quick but full kiss and hit “play.” In the course of watching the movie Cydni, despite her reservations about Frank Bond’s style, grew increasingly excited, and by the time of the final foursome she was kneeling on Barry’s lap, pressing her breasts into him and kissing him. “Feel me, Barry,” she said as she guided his hand under her skirt to the wet cotton crotch of her undies. “Let’s do it.” And so they did, but not before Campus Capers had come to its end. It turned into a most enjoyable night.

As he drove her to the clinic in the morning, he thought about proposing to her that she work for him, but a sense of decorum – one that, in view of the situation, he thought strange – kept him from voicing the thought to a pregnant woman. During the procedure he sat in the waiting room, working on the Bard script but already envisioning scenes in some future project with Cydni, not with Frank Bond but with some guy who knew how to kiss, like maybe Steve Kelly. He would broach it to her on the drive back to the studio; maybe he would give her a little tour while the Vixens shooting was going on...

The dial of the antique rotary telephone that Peter used for his private line had come back from its fifth turn when Margaret, who after some searching had found her old boyfriend’s number, hung up the receiver and decided to go back to her mountain home. Her mother’s coma had become static – “she could go on like this for months,” the attending doctor had said – and Margaret was itching to get back to work. Peter had been urging her to go – “I shall call you immediately there’s a change,” he had told her several times – and she had delayed the decision, even allowing herself a stab at renewing old ties, probably only to spite him. She was coming to the realization that her dislike of her stepfather’s personality was something she had made up as a cover for something deeper: the feeling, most likely unjustified, that Peter, who had been attending her father after his heart attack, had not done enough to save him. Her mother certainly had not thought so; indeed, she had been so appreciative of Peter’s efforts that she ended up marrying him as soon as his divorce became final. But Margaret could never forgive fate, or whatever, for keeping her father, an amateur painter who had made his living as an insurance-office manager and had always encouraged her – his only child – to pursue a career in art, from seeing her receive her diploma.

She was brimming with ideas as she walked to the boarding gate. The sales reports from her dealer were good, but they would get better once she started sending him her new stuff. Even the canvasses that were almost done would be finished otherwise than she had originally envisaged.

About that time, at the same theater on Hollywood Boulevard where Albert Bosch had seen Young Wives’ Tales, or at least a part of it, the marquee reading GINA GEORGE IN FLESHPOTS OF THE WEST / WITH FRANK BOND was being replaced with one that proclaimed FRANK BOND IN CAMPUS CAPERS / WITH NEW SENSATIONS JENNI JARMAN AND LESLI LYMAN.

It was only then that Jenni Jarman confirmed to Barry Bergman that she had indeed had an affair with a professor, in her senior year at Fresno. The man – who fortunately was neither in her major nor in her minor department – had become so obsessed with her that he was ready to leave his wife and children for her. Jenni, or Jennifer, who liked her sex – especially with older men – without emotion, needed to escape the situation and left Fresno for Los Angeles immediately after graduation, leaving no forwarding address.

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