18 Barry Bergman’s resumption of his affair with Nancy Fishman Kruger had begun as an act of friendship, but soon came to be driven by physical need on his part (and probably on hers as well). Lesli was dead. Jenni seemed to have cooled to him, and she – except for Lili Long, who had a supporting part in Moving Around – was the only actress currently at the studio, so that the others were on vacation; and Lili had never wanted him anyway. He had made it a point not to fuck any of his other female employees, to forestall any charges of favoritism. There had been a couple of pickup opportunities at the gym, but out of some sort of respect for Lesli’s memory he chose to pass them up. He had, over the years, grown so accustomed to having luscious twenty-somethings – and sometimes even younger, though Helena was by far the exception not the rule, and he had not known Leslie’s true age – fall into his bed like ripe fruit, that he had not paid attention to the growing age gap between him and them. Not that in Hollywood such a gap seemed to matter much anyway. For some of his buddies, like Alan and Doc, the ability to bed girls young enough to be their daughters (and in Doc’s case younger than his daughter) was a matter of pride, but not for him: the gap simply didn’t matter; age is just a number, he would say, and in any case he sought to minimize its effects by staying in shape. Indeed, when in the preceding year Gina had turned thirty, the fuss she made about it annoyed him. “So what,” he had said to her on her birthday, “yesterday you were young and today you’re old? How many twenty-year-olds are there who look like you?” Not many, she had to admit. It was only the simultaneous cooling by Jenni and rekindling with Nancy (a few days after having done her daughter) that brought the matter of age into the forefront of his thoughts. When he and Nancy first began, both were on the early side of their thirties, and while Nancy wondered out loud if she was too old for him, this was a joke at his expense, or so he thought at the time. She too kept in shape and continued to do so; tennis was her favorite activity, and it was in fact on the tennis courts of the country club, while Doc played golf, that they had become friends. The road from tennis court to bed was, as he had experienced with other women, fairly straight. There was something about tennis between a man and a woman that put one in mind of sex: the intense attention to each other’s movements, the back-and-forth rhythm, the sweat... The fact that he had stopped playing tennis, because of a sore knee, around the time that Helena seduced him made the cessation with Nancy that much easier on both of them; or so he thought. What had led to Nancy’s mini-crisis on the last Sunday in November was quite banal, nay, classic: getting dumped by a younger man for an even younger woman. That the man in question (in his thirties) had previously been dumped by Helena and then been (briefly) a therapy client of Nancy’s gave her story a telenovela quality but did not detract from its essential bathos. Barry’s habitual impatience with women’s fretting about age led him to respond to Nancy’s “Prove it!” challenge in a way that was intentionally crude; it was, indeed, worthy of the porn maker that he was: he dropped his pants and displayed his opportunely present erection, at least in part the result of his imagining Jenni, whom he expected back that evening. But Nancy was so moved by the gesture that she immediately pulled off her blouse and brassiere, her God-made breasts appeared, and the rest followed in a flash. It proved to be so nice for both of them that Nancy came by again two days later – by which time it was clear to him that there would be no more sex with Jenni – and the relationship turned into a twice-a-week affair. A kind of delicacy on his part led him to arrange these encounters, at first, to take place on his workout breaks from the studio while Jenni was working there. But now it didn’t matter: Jenni had Mario. What a couple these two would make on screen! he thought as he finished his pedaling. He was curious about Mario’s work with Gina. A videocassette of Lady G in Paradise, in the hard-core version, should be arriving by courier any day now. As he alit from the bicycle he noticed that the leg-extension machine that he had meant to engage next was occupied by a woman past her mid-thirties, one whom he had not seen there before. She was obviously just beginning her fitness program. She was not unattractive, but by the standards of Hollywood – which were, for better or worse, his standards – she was barely worthy of a first, let alone a second look. And yet, as he waited for her to finish her pantingly laborious workout, he found himself intrigued by the thought of what it would be like with a woman like that. Her somewhat flabby hips and arms might feel nice to grasp. Her lined neck might be nice to nuzzle. And her tits might be okay, though her bra did not display them to their best advantage. He looked at her left hand, which was tightly gripping the handle of the machine, and saw a wedding ring. In his set that wouldn’t matter, but this was a different theater of operations, should he choose to do battle there, and its rules of engagement would have to be learned. The woman finished her workout, and only then did she notice him looking at her. She gave him an embarrassed smile that he found charming. He smiled back, and took her place on the machine without a word. She moved on to the leg press. Yes, her quadriceps needed work. He would probably see her again. And then... The clock told him that he didn’t have much time left. He had lingered too long on the bicycle, and in a short time Nancy would be coming to his house. By this time the video might already have been pushed through his mail slot. He wondered if Nancy might want to watch it with him. Albert and Gina were met at Heathrow by the two distributors, Geoff and Julian, and no one else. At last, Gina thought, the talk on the way to the baggage claim, and from there to the garage and then into London, would be in English. They had just completed a nine-day tour of the northern part of the Continent – Central Europe, Scandinavia, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris – stopping in a different city every day, with an incognito visit to the cinema showing Lady G for a first-hand test of audience reaction. While Albert would have preferred that they travel light, with carry-on bags only, Gina had insisted on taking her new winter wardrobe, which, together with all her other stuff, took up three suitcases. She had argued that, aside from the cold weather and the fact that there would be no opportunity for dry-cleaning, for the incognito to be effective she needed a look that was different from the image by which she was known. “I’ll be just another gorgeous blonde,” she had said, “in a part of the world that’s crawling with them.” Albert had to admit that she looked stunning, but not in a Gina George sort of way, except when she smiled. And she took pains to reserve her special smile for him only, in private. In Germany he had told her, “Do me a favor and say Hamburg, as in hamburger, not Homburg, like the hat. Maybe that’s how it sounds in German, but the Hamburgers expect English-speaking people to say Hamburg.” The next day he told her that the Danes like Copenhagen, in English, to rhyme with Reagan; when it rhymes with Häagen, as in Häagen-Dazs – a product that he came to enjoy during his time in California – they think it’s German. But Gina never got to put the phonetics lessons into practice. At each airport they would be met by the local distributor or cinema owner, and after an initial greeting to her the conversation would proceed in German or French. Now, in London, the language was hers, and Geoff was her friend. It was only now, as Albert and Gina were relating their impressions of audience responses to the film, that she realized how different their impressions were. Albert seemed to have missed the gasps provoked by the shot of Mario’s beach erection or the panting caused by her frontally naked body climbing onto him. Albert had only heard the few snickers that, he thought, were due to the jerky cinematography. And the intense whispering that went on during all the explicit sex scenes was attributed by Albert to people wondering, as if they could not quite believe their eyes, if what they were seeing was real. Gina doubted it; to her it sounded just like the whispering that accompanied her other movies: hushed expressions of appreciation. From his local contacts, Albert had received reports of reviews in the papers, and, as he was now relaying, they were generally tepid but only the critics in Munich had expressed anything resembling shock. “Well,” said Geoff, “you don’t expect the Dutch or the Scandies or the Hamburgers to be scandalized by a bit of raw sex, now, do you?” Paris was a special case: the critics there had already reviewed the film in the original version, and whether they had heard about the new one or not, they did not bother revisiting. Their judgment, generally condemnatory, of Albert Bosch’s latest work had been made, it was now in print, and that was that. And Gina had found the French audience hard to figure out. Unlike the other countries they had visited, where people generally knew English, she was not particularly well known in France. Barry Bergman had not allowed his movies to be dubbed – “My people have voices,” he had insisted – and the kinds of people who in France would go to see le porno did not care to read subtitles. The Paris audience for the new version of Lady G in Paradise (the title was left untranslated, on Michel’s advice) did not seem to be very different from the previous one, except more meager. They laughed in places that had not been meant to be funny, and, seemingly, more in response to the subtitles than to the action. The gasping and panting that Gina had heard elsewhere in Europe were almost absent. The Turkey idea was never broached again. The next day Gina would repack – the hotel had promised her that her dry-cleaning would be ready by noon – and the following day fly back to Los Angeles; she wanted to spend Christmas at home (and Los Angeles was, in fact, her home). She would let Albert, Geoff and Julian, if they wanted, go to the cinema; she would stay at the hotel. Albert would stay in London for a couple of days more – there were business matters to discuss with Geoff and Julian, and the hotel had a health club with a treadmill that he would put to use – and then fly back to Switzerland. The snowstorms he had seen on the television news had left plenty of nice powder. Margaret looked out through her kitchen window on the snowscape lit by the waxing moon. She was holding Nigel’s postcard in one hand as she was sipping some warmed rum with the other. She had decided, when she first got the card, that she would not take “immediately” literally but extend its definition to its limit. If he had to cancel his visit, she would rather not know it straightaway. But now it was approaching eleven, ten in England, and the call could not be delayed any longer. She had been on the verge of dialing so many times that day that by now she knew the number by heart. She put down the card and the drink, and finally dialed. After the first ring she heard “Margaret!” She felt her heart jump. His voice sounded cheerful. Perhaps it was good news. She held her breath for a few seconds and said “Hello, Nigel” as calmly as she could. “Margaret, would you like to see me in three days?” “Of course,” she answered before any attempt at thinking about what she had just heard. “But...” “And then,” he rushed on, “would like to see me all the time? I shall be working in Geneva.” This time she could not even utter a “but.” She took a deep breath and waited for him to go on. “Would you?” he repeated. “Yes, of course I would,” she said. “I shall explain it all when I see you, Saturday afternoon. Can you meet me at the airport?” “Of course,” Margaret said for the third time. He gave her the flight number, which she jotted down on the soon-to-be-discarded calendar. They were both too excited for any further talk, and bade each other simple good-byes. She looked out the window again. The moon and snow looked even more glorious than before. She felt the need to paint the scene just as it appeared at that moment. She would do it, quickly, the next day, but she needed a picture. She took her camera and tripod from her bedroom closet and set one on the other, facing the kitchen window. She turned off the kitchen light and set the time release. In the morning she would drive to the photographer’s in the town and have the picture developed and printed as quickly as Marc-Antoine could do it. She had some shopping to do, anyway. And then she realized that Nigel had not specified whether he would be staying with her from the start. She would phone him in the morning. Their no-phone pact was now null and void. As he turned up the street leading to his house, Barry Bergman saw Nancy Fishman Kruger’s Volvo directly in front of him. Whew, he said to himself, just made it. He would have hated to have her wait for him. As she was parking opposite his house, he passed her while turning into his carport and waved to her. She smiled at him as she was turning off the ignition. He parked, got out of his car and into the street in order to meet her. And then he saw another car driving up and parking behind Nancy’s. It was Doc’s Porsche.