24

“Do you know any movie people in Mexico?” she asked him the next morning, still in bed.

“Do you remember my friend Al Rosen?” he asked in return.

“Your college friend? Sure,” she said. Her slight blush confirmed his suspicion that Nancy and Al might have had a fling during his last visit, a couple of years before, around New Year’s.

“Well, when he comes here, he’s just Al Rosen, and he doesn’t let on either that he’s Mexican or that he has anything to do with the movies. But actually he’s Alfredo Rosen Rivera, he’s Jewish only on his father’s side – his mother’s an actress who’s originally from Spain – and he owns one of the biggest studios in Mexico, which he inherited from his father. Until his father died he really didn’t have much to do with the business; he’s a lawyer, and back there everybody calls him licenciado. When I call him and a secretary answers, I have to say ¿puedo hablar con el licenciado? But he learned very quickly how to be a studio boss, and these days he’s never seen without some twenty-year-old blonde who’s going to be the star of his next telenovela. He’s not too interested in the technical side of movie-making, but he’s going to introduce me to producers and directors and casting directors. It should be fun. First we’ll do some location scouting, then he’s going to take us to his house in Acapulco, and then we’ll go back to DF for some negotiating. You can come with me, or stay back in Acapulco and play tennis with Al’s wife.”

He wondered if the mention of Al’s wife would elicit an involuntary reflex on Nancy’s part, but there was no indication of one.

“It sounds like fun either way,” Nancy said matter-of-factly, “but I think I’d rather be with you. I’d like to get to know the producer side of you.”

“You mean, beyond what I produce for you?”

“Mmmm... For now that’s good enough.”

Over coffee she asked him, “Will your studio be running while you’re away?”

“Yes. I will have finished Moving Around, but I’ll still have one project going. After that I’m putting everything into Dangerous Acquaintances.

“Who will be running it? I think it would be unlike you to have a second-in-command.”

“Doctor Fishman knows her subjects. No, I don’t have one, but in this case I’ll give the director more leeway than I usually do. This guy has done a lot of stuff for me before. Why are you so concerned, if I may ask?”

“I know that, when we’re in Mexico, you’ll be busy with meetings and stuff, and I’ll be taking some work with me too...”

“You mean the revision of your book?”

“That, and an article I’m working on. But what I’m saying is that when it’s just us, I’d like to have you to myself. I remember the times when we would sneak away for a day or two, and you’d be spending a lot of time on the phone, giving instructions. There was a time, just after we’d made love, when it sounded like you were talking about us.”

“You mean, I was giving instructions about a hot sex scene?”

“No, about a hot argument scene, in which the woman feels neglected. You didn’t know it, but you were saying what I felt.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he said with a mischievous smile. “You know us creative geniuses...”

“You bastard!” she said and mock-slapped him.

“... everything is material for us,” he finished. “For example,” he added very slowly and waited for her to express curiosity.

“Yes?”

“You probably haven’t seen one of my last movies, Campus Capers, have you?”

“No. I doesn’t have Gina in it, does it?”

“No. It has Jenny and Leslie. I’m going to have to pull it from theaters and stores, because of Lesli; she wasn’t eighteen yet when we made it.”

“But you didn’t know!”

“It doesn’t matter, under federal law. Anyway, what I was going to tell you is that in that movie there’s a psychology professor, and guess where I got some of her lines from!”

“My book?”

He nodded.

“Is she like me?”

“Well, she isn’t nearly as gorgeous as you.” And he wasn’t bullshitting. At that moment Nancy, forty-something Nancy, looked more gorgeous to him than any of the many gorgeous women he had fucked, including Gina, Helena and Jenny. Well, maybe not Jenny. He had viewed footage from Moving Around the previous day, and Jenny (still Jenni Jarman) had looked spectacular.

Jenny Galvin was also pleased with how Jenni Jarman looked in Moving Around. She was especially pleased with the results of her efforts to make the sex scenes convincingly demonstrate a woman’s varied pleasures with various men. But the polymorphously perverse woman on the screen, Jenni Jarman, was, in the mind of the passionately-in-love Jenny Galvin, not only not the same woman as she, but she was dead. Dead and gone, preserved only on celluloid and magnetic tape. Jennifer Garabedian had been reborn as Jenny Galvin on the day when she met Mario Farga, and Jenny Galvin, for the moment at least, could not imagine herself making love, or having sex, with any man other than Mario for the rest of her life.

In her early teens she had persistently asked those of her friends and relatives who had called her Jenny to call her Jennifer. Except Rachel: “Jenny and Rachel” was like a secret society. But on her next visit to Fresno, probably around Armenian Christmas, she would begin doing the opposite. Not that she would explicitly say “Call me Jenny!”, but she would use the shorter name in any reference to herself that she might make, and she would try to make plenty. And of course Mario would be with her, and they would hear Mario calling her Jenny.

In Barry’s projected movie there would be explicit on-screen sex between her and Mario. But Mario would be having sex with others: with Gina – assuming she pulled through her cancer – and with Carla Ortiz, at the very least. He would be having sex with them, but he would be making love with her: that was consistent with the book, because her character is the one he falls in love with. The problem was that, Latin Mediterranean that he was, he used the term ‘making love’ indiscriminately. In Spanish hacer el amor, in Catalan fer l’amor, he had explained to her, doesn’t mean that you’re in love. Well, she had countered, perhaps not ‘in love,’ but there had to be some feeling of love. But there’s always such a feeling, he had argued, even if it’s only a little bit, even if it’s only for the moment that you’re together. What about rape? she had asked. There’s different kinds of rape, he had begun to reply, and sometimes a rapist could love his victim... This was more than she could take, and she had stopped the argument abruptly. But, she had assured him, some day they would get back to the subject.

They had not done so as of this day, when, in the morning, she lay in her bed, with the sleeping Mario lying on his side, facing away from her. And the subject was nagging at her. She was searching for a way to express her feeling to him, a way that he would understand: that it was fine with her that he, in the course of filming Dangerous Acquaintances, would have sex with Gina George and Carla Ortiz, but not that he would make love with them. That, she knew, would be difficult, since he had told her quite openly that he had been in bed with both of them in Barcelona, and had enjoyed it. And she loved his openness.

She longed to nuzzle his muscular back – the legacy, he had said, of many generations of hard-working blacksmiths – but did not want to wake him. She treasured the moments when he would wake up spontaneously and his eyes, as they opened, would reveal his gradually growing awareness of her presence, his face would light up into a smile, his arms would slowly come around to grasp her, and she would feel his body ready to greet her. He might whisper bon dia just before kissing her.

Her period was due that day. She had hastened its coming by stopping the pill early (and using her diaphragm in the interim), because later that morning he would fly to Barcelona in order to spend Christmas with his extended family in their hometown, but only for five days. He would be back in LA in time for New Year’s, and in January he would go to Fresno with her for Armenian Christmas, and meet her extended family. At the end of January he would go back to Barcelona for a six-week engagement in the theater, doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in Catalan. He had been studying his lines in Los Angeles, and she had wished that she could help him, but when she tried reading the text aloud she pronounced the words as if they were Spanish, provoking his good-natured laughter and a challenge to repeat some stupid verse about sixteen judges eating a hanged man’s liver. She managed the feat quite well, finding the consonants of Catalan no more difficult than those of Armenian. Setze jutges d’un jutjat / mengen fetge de penjat...

She also thought, but had not told him, that during his time in Barcelona she might fly out there to visit him and perhaps even meet his family.

Among the things he had told her about his family was how he came to be named Mario: it was for Mario Lanza, after his opera-loving parents had seen The Great Caruso. At the time, at the height of the dictatorship, children could be given only Spanish names, and Mario was a perfectly good Spanish name. Its Catalan form, though, was Màrius, and, not wanting to bear the name of a Roman politician, Mario had insisted to those of his friends who were Catalan nationalists that his name was Italian, not Spanish. His nickname at school therefore had been l’italià, the Italian.

But the Roman gods, with their fine sense of irony, had decreed that his first dramatic role was to be that of a Roman politician: Mark Antony in Julius Caesar.

And now Somnus, the god of sleep, seemed to be deserting him; he was beginning to stir. She was not feeling any blood yet. It was going to be a good morning. Bon dia.

A part of the price that Albert Bosch had to pay for living with Sylvie was Christmas with her family. They were farmers who had become rich by selling land for chalets, and they were a strange blend of Calvinist and hedonist. They took their own pleasures – mainly food and drink, as well as skiing and hiking – for granted, but were not tolerant of other people’s pleasures, including such things as watching films made by the likes of Albert Bosch, with their blatant (if, in the end, simulated) sexuality, and even the exotic sensuality of Sylvie’s photography. Sylvie had special status in the family as the rebel who had somehow done well on her own, and therefore managed to escape harsh judgment, especially since her quick wit helped turn such judgments against those who made them. Besides, she was a good cook, and could be trusted to give an exotic gastronomic touch to the traditional mountain recipes. But her friend Albert, whom they would be seeing for the first time in four years, was another matter; worst of all, he – who had not stepped inside a church, except as a visitor, since the age of ten – was a Catholic.

This year, Christmas eve was on Wednesday, and the holiday would overlap with what would be the first serious skiing weekend of the season, with all runs open. They would have to leave Lausanne on Wednesday morning, because Sylvie was expected to help her mother and aunts with the cooking.

Christmas day, Albert thought, he would probably be too bloated with food and too hung over with drink for any decent skiing. And since Friday was a bridge day between the holiday and the weekend, the slopes would be super-crowded. Now, on the afternoon of the Tuesday before Christmas, as he was leafing through a book he had pulled from Sylvie’s bookshelf while waiting for her to come home from work, he remembered why it was that he had deserted the Swiss Alps for the French Jura in the first place: to get away from the crowds.

The book was one that he, like all francophones, had read in his youth: the epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses, by Choderlos de Laclos. He had also seen the modern-day film version that Roger Vadim had made with Gérard Philipe and Jeanne Moreau. He was therefore skipping around the book, looking for the racier passages.

All in all, he had no regrets about having cast his lot with Sylvie. However the skiing would be, he would enjoy the nights with her ready laugh and her strong, muscular body, as he already was enjoying them, even before the season had begun.

That evening Barry called Nancy.

“You know,” he said, “Hanukkah is coming up, and I don’t quite see you going to your in-laws’ to celebrate the first night.”

“Oh God,” Nancy said. “I hadn’t thought about it. No, of course not. Not with Paul and Helena there.”

“So I was thinking, how about coming with me to the Marcuses’?”

“Are you asking me for a date?”

“No, dear, I know the date. Today is December twen...”

“Shut up, smart-ass.”

“Sorry. Let me clarify. I’m not asking you for a date. I’m asking you, as my girlfriend, to come with me this Friday to Alan and Marilyn’s for latkes and dreydel and whatever.”

“As your girlfriend?”

“Well, I can’t quite call you my fiancée as long as you’re married, but some day I will.”

“Is that a proposal?”

“No,” he laughed. “I’m just asking you for a date.”

“You are a smart-ass. A smarter-ass than I ever was.”

“No ass compares with yours, sweetheart.” A knock was heard on his back door. “Come in!” he yelled in the direction of the door, and went on talking to Nancy. “I think there’s a lonely young lady coming to visit,” he said. But when Jenny appeared she was her radiant self, betraying not a trace of loneliness.

“Mario just called me from Kennedy,” she said joyfully, loud enough to be heard over the telephone.

“See what a phone call can do?” Barry said to Nancy. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Good night.” And he hung up.

Jenny sat down. “Mario told me that he was concerned about Carla being on the project,” she said.

“Carla? But she’s so excited to be on it!”

“Mario thought about it on the plane, and he just doesn’t trust her.”

“She’ll be fine,” Barry said.

“Did you fuck her?” Jenny asked after a brief silence.

“Yes.”

“So I guess she’s hired.”

There was a cynical edge to Jenny’s voice. He wanted to tell her that he found Carla quite talented; that after he had told her on the phone that she would play a Mexican teenager she showed up at his house in her grandmother’s schoolgirl uniform, looking just right for the part; that she put on a convincing performance of a virgin being seduced. But he did not want to appear defensive, and limited himself to confirming Jenny’s guess.

“Yes,” he said, and continued, “informally. It’s confidential, though.”

“Because of Bill Martinez?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Jenny said. It seemed to Barry Bergman that there was a tacit addendum of ‘you’re the boss,’ and that Jenny would not relish performing together with Carla. As far as he could remember from the book, Madame de Tourvel, on whom Jenny’s character would be based, may have been once or twice in the same place as Cécile, the model for Carla’s character, but had no interactions with her. He would try to keep them apart.

“I’ve made some chicken and rice,” Jenny said suddenly. “Wanna have some with me?”

What Jenny modestly called chicken and rice was in fact an elaborate concoction of chicken baked with peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic and herbs, accompanied by a fragrant pilaf. Barry had caught a whiff of the aroma the moment the door had opened.

“Sure,” he said. “You know, Jenny, Mario is the luckiest bastard in the world, but I’m the second-luckiest. Watching you two fall in love is what made me fall in love with Nancy. There were times before when I thought that I might be a little bit in love – with Gina, even with you – but really I was just your basic Hollywood playboy. Now I know, and I’ve never been so happy.”

“That’s wonderful, Barry!” Jenny said as she jumped up from her seat and threw herself into his arms. Feeling her body hard against his had the customary effect, but the effect brought to his attention the presence of a pad. It’s just as well, he said to himself.

“Are you going to miss Mario at Christmas?” he asked her.

“No way!” she said as she disengaged from him and began to walk to the back door. “My Christmas isn’t for another two weeks, and he’s coming back Sunday. We’re going to be together all of January, until the thirtieth! Now let me go get the food.”

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