26
February in Southern
California began as it had ended the preceding year: with the warm spell that
continued from the end of January and that those misinformed people who did not
call it unseasonable called false spring. But for Jenny Galvin, newly returned
from the true winter of Park City, Utah, it was simply spring, the season that
allows people to wear whatever they please and feel comfortable. And what she
pleased to wear on that first Sunday in February was simply nothing. It was
warm, and she was all alone in the well-shielded backyard of Barry Bergman’s
house. Barry was in Mexico, so that she had the house to herself. And two days
before, she had driven Mario to the airport for his flight to New York and
thence to Barcelona, so that, for the first time in weeks, she had her bed, or
any bed, to herself. Sleeping with Mario night after night was fantastic, but
so was being able to stretch and loll at will.
Her plan, or rather Alan Marcus’s, for
buying a place of her own had been put on hold. As a precaution against
possible federal prosecution, Barry had pulled not only
Vixens at Play but also the hugely successful
Campus Capers (which had been made when Leslie was still seventeen)
from video stores and theaters, at least in America.
Moving Around had just been released, and, though it had looked
good in previews, it wasn’t clear yet how big a hit it was going to be, while
A Bard in the Bush was, for the moment,
doing only moderately well. Consequently Jenny’s income – beyond her salary
under her contract with BB Productions – was not going to be quite what Alan,
as he had told her the last time he had come by for a visit, had originally
projected. Of course she would be able to rent a pretty nice place, but she
liked living in Barry’s guest cottage, and Barry liked having her there. Barry
had, in fact, said something strange to Alan on that occasion: “If anything
happens to me, I want this house to be Jenny’s. Put it in my will, Alan.” And
Alan had said, “Sure.”
The mention of a will had made her curious
about who the other beneficiaries might be. Probably his family back in
Cleveland, she thought, the one that he was the black sheep of. But that would
imply liquidating the studio, and the real estate, when not occupied by BB
Productions, probably wasn’t worth all that much. But why bother her head with
such stuff? Barry had a lot of life left in him, and in any case his life was
about to change drastically, with the Dangerous
Acquaintances project.
She had taken what was left of the Sunday Times,
after getting rid of the advertising sections and supplements, with her to
Mort’s, read some of it there, and now she was reading some more of it beside
Barry’s pool with nothing on her except sunhat, glasses and sunscreen, under
the caressing noontime sun. She opened the Calendar section and found an
article titled ‘Park City Wrap-up.’
This year’s record at the
United States Film Festival at Park City, Utah, which insiders are beginning to
call the Sundance Festival (for its organizing body, Robert Redford’s Sundance
Institute), does not bode well for the young festival’s future. For the first
time, not a single distribution deal was struck.
On the gossip front, the
biggest item concerns the eagerly anticipated US opening of Swiss director
Albert Bosch’s Lady G in Paradise,
starring Hollywood adult-cinema queen Gina George (who co-wrote and co-produced
the film), hunky Spanish actor Mario Farga and his countrywoman Sofia Mares.
According to reports from Europe, the film contains the most explicit sex scenes
– featuring Mr. Farga, Ms. George, and a body double for Ms. Mares – ever seen
in an art film, even a European one.
The film’s showing was,
however, abruptly canceled by festival authorities when it was learned that
Lady G in Paradise is being marketed in
Europe as erotica. “Much as we believe in artistic freedom,” a Sundance
Institute spokesperson said, “this festival cannot become a showplace for
porn.”
It was also reported that
at the film’s openings in London, Paris and Barcelona (where most of it was
shot), the X-rated footage was replaced by a soft-core version, so that reviews
coming from there did not reflect the film’s true nature. It was only in the
more liberal countries of Northern Europe – Scandinavia, the Netherlands and
Northern Germany – that the hard-core version was shown from the start, barely
causing a ripple in those tolerant climes.
At the press conference
that took place at the time scheduled for the showing, Mr. Bosch argued that
the decision regarding video distribution was a purely economic one and
represented the only way for the producers to recoup their investments. He
predicted that such marketing would become the norm in the future. He regretted
the cancellation of the showing, but said that he understood the power of
American censorship wielded by the country’s highest authorities, a clear
reference to the recent Meese Commission report. A festival spokesperson,
however, denied any governmental influence on the decision to cancel.
Of the film’s stars, only
Mr. Farga came to Park City; Ms. Mares works in the theater in Barcelona, and
Ms. George was kept away by an unspecified illness. This reporter can attest to
the magnetic power the Spanish Adonis exercised over the women, and even some
of the men, at the scene. What saved him from perhaps unwanted attention by
hordes of women in Park City was the constant company of the hitherto unknown
young American actress Jenny Galvin, a striking auburn-haired beauty. Some of
those present claimed to have recognized her from adult movies, but as of this
writing the claim could not be confirmed.
“Striking auburn-haired beauty”: that
didn’t sound bad. “Hitherto unknown”: that implied that henceforth she would be
known, but as what? As the constant companion of the Spanish Adonis, or as
someone trying to cross over from adult movies? Neither one, she hopefully said
to herself. The reporter couldn’t know about it, but she was going to be a
co-star in a sensational production of Dangerous
Acquaintances.
She put down Calendar and picked up the
main news section, whose first six pages she had scanned at Mort’s. On page
seven she saw an item under the heading ‘LA Pair Feared Lost in Mexico.’
A private plane belonging
to Mexican movie mogul Alfredo Rosen Rivera did not arrive in Mexico City when
expected on its flight from Acapulco Saturday morning. Mexican aviation
authorities expressed the fear that the plane may have crashed over the rugged
mountains of Guerrero state. Aboard were a crew of three, three members of
Rosen Rivera’s production staff, and two prominent Angelenos: producer Barry
Bergman, noted for his high-quality adult movies, and psychologist Nancy
Fishman (formerly Nancy Fishman Kruger), the author of the popular college
textbook Being and Personality and
its best-selling version for the general public,
Being a Person.
Nancy Fishman is the
estranged wife of plastic surgeon Paul Kruger, and she, her husband and Bergman
were all involved in an incident last December in which Kruger allegedly took a
shot at Bergman, injuring him slightly, and justifying his act by claiming that
Bergman was his wife’s lover, something that Nancy Fishman categorically denied
at the time. Since then, however, Bergman and Fishman have been seen out on the
town together continually, and they flew to Mexico together to visit Rosen
Rivera, an old friend of Bergman’s.
Nancy Fishman and Paul
Kruger have a 19-year-old daughter, Helena, a sophomore at UC San Diego. Barry
Bergman was never married.
No reports of a plane crash
or wreckage sighting have as yet been received from the Guerrero mountain
region, but this is an area of intense political unrest and guerrilla activity,
and relations between the local population and state and federal police have
been strained for years. One Mexico City commentator even suggested that one or
more crew members may have been disguised guerrillas and that the plane may
have been hijacked. Others, however, expressed skepticism about this
hypothesis.
Rosen Rivera said that no
resource, public or private, would be spared in the effort to find the missing
plane and its occupants.
Not again, Jenny said to herself. This is
too much. Lesli – well, she did it to herself. Doc shooting Barry – that didn’t
turn out too bad: Barry and Nancy got together at last. But Barry and Nancy in
a plane crash? Why? Why why why why why?
And who besides her knew about it? Has it
been on the TV news? Did Alan know? Did Doc? How about Gina George, whom Jenny
had not met yet?
She would call Alan. And then she
remembered: if Barry was dead, the house was hers.
I don’t want the house, she said to
herself as she walked into the cottage and put on a robe. No, I don’t want the
house. I don’t want the fucking house.
Alan’s phone was busy. She looked at her
watch. It was now eight in the evening in Barcelona. Mario might be home. But
first she would try Alan again.
Still busy.
She dialed 011-343 and the seven-digit
number Mario had left her. There were two rings.
“Digui’m.”
The voice was Mario’s, and a tender feeling shot
through her.
“Mario? It’s Jenny.”
“Jenny, my love...”
“I love you too, but I have some terrible
news. Muy malas noticias, mi amor. I
just read in the paper that an airplane that Barry and Nancy were flying in, in
Mexico, may have crashed.”
“No,” Mario said firmly after a long
silence. “Impossible. I don’t believe it.”
“I wish I could say the same. These
crashes do happen in Mexico.”
“I know how much Barry means to you. I
wish that I could be with you.”
She heard the call-waiting signal on her
phone.
“So do I,” she said, “but someone is
trying to call me. I’ll call you again.” And she pressed the flash button.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi, it’s Alan...”
“Alan! I’ve been trying to...”
“So you know! I’ve been on the phone with
someone who was listening to short-wave radio from Mexico, and they’ve found
the wreckage. No bodies, but they expect them to have been burned.” She heard
his voice breaking. “Barry and Nancy...” and he could do nothing more but sob.
She felt her tears welling up. “Thanks,
Alan,” she said with all the calm she could muster. “It’s better to know than
not to know.” She hung up the receiver gently, as though it too were a tender
creature. She lay down on her bed and let herself cry in silence. Tears began
to drop softly onto her pillow.
It was evening and a soft rain was falling over the
lake, but, as Albert Bosch looked out the train window toward the Alpine
foothills, it seemed to him that it was snowing on that side. It was hard to
tell in the dark. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking on his part.
After the fiasco of the festival he had
indulged himself in a few days of skiing in Utah. Not in Park City – he had
wanted at all cost to get away from that place – but in Alta. He skied alone,
but he had après-ski company.
The company appeared on the day of his
leaving Park City, right after saying good-bye to Mario Farga and his beautiful
new American girlfriend. He was checking out at the hotel desk when a young
woman, wearing big sunglasses and a heavy ski cap over bleached hair,
approached him. “Hi, Mr. Bosch,” she said. “Remember me?” He did not recognize
her until, giggling, she removed the accoutrements that blocked her face. “Oh,
hello, Carla,” he said. “What are you doing here?” “I, like, had some free time
between jobs, so I thought I’d come here to see the movie we made, I mean that
you made, with my body in it,” she said with another giggle, “and I didn’t get
to.” “Well,” he said, “I have a videotape, and I’m on my way to Alta. Maybe at
the hotel there they have a machine...” “You mean, like, a VCR?” “Yes,” he
said, having forgotten what Americans called a magnetoscope. “Would you like to
come with me?” “Sure,” she said, “if you don’t mind stopping at my hotel so I
can get my bag.” And so they drove in his rented car to Alta, where the hotel
rented him a VCR. They watched the film sitting side by side, with their shoes
off, on the foot end of the bed. At the first sex scene – between Mario and
Gina – she took his hand, and with each successive one she squeezed it and
moved her body closer to his. At her orgasm shot, which had been spliced into the
beach scene shortly before the end, she seemed to be almost reliving the
experience, and pressed her right breast hard into his back. At the end he
asked her what she thought and she said, “I’m so excited! Aren’t you?” When he
said yes she gave him a quick but hard kiss on the mouth, with one movement
pulled down her pants, underpants and socks, and with another pulled up her
sweater and whatever she was wearing under it. He took a little more time
undressing, but when he was done she pulled him on top of her and into her.
They finished in a short time, and she said, “I needed that. That was great,
Mr. Bosch!” “You’re still calling me Mr. Bosch?” he asked. “Yeah,” she replied,
“I like calling you Mr. Bosch. I like it that you’re, like, older. You’re older
than my dad! He also likes younger women. He left my mom for a younger woman,
and she was, like, only thirty, but she’d gotten fat, ‘cause she’d had us kids
bang-bang-bang one after another and never got a chance to get her figure back.
And then he had two more kids with the other woman and left her for a younger
one. You know, my boss, Bill Martinez, he’s like my dad’s age, and all the
girls that work for him compete over who gets to sleep with him.” “I suppose
you get to,” he said. “Yeah,” she said, “but not that much, ‘cause I’m, like,
just a starlet, not a star. I would’ve been one if it had worked out with
Mario, but he chickened out. And then he met this girl that works for Barry
Bergman!” “Yes, I saw her,” he said. “By the way,” she said, “How long are you
staying here?” “Three days,” he said. “Can I stay with you?” she asked, adding
“I’ve got the rest of this week off.” “Well,” he said, “yes, but what will you
be doing during the day when I ski?” “I’ll ski too,” she said, “I took a lesson
in Park City and I can take some more here.” “All right,” he said as he reached
to the nightstand for the phone and called the desk to tell them that his room
would be double occupancy and to ask about the ski school. “It’s okay,” he said
to her after hanging up, “the ski school even has a shuttle that will pick you
up.” “Cool!” she said and, putting her arms around him, began to rub him with
her breasts. “Let’s do it again,” she said. This time it took longer to start
and to finish, and when it was over he was hungry. “Let’s have lunch,” he said.
They dressed quickly and went to the hotel’s coffee shop. The food there was
mediocre, but after the afternoon’s skiing they went there for dinner as well,
because Carla had brought a low-cut, short black dress and high-heeled shoes
and wanted to wear them, but it was too cold and snowy to go out in such an
outfit. Albert did not mind; the insipid food was worth the sight of Carla’s
sexy look. He enjoyed the contrast between her exotic, youthful – almost
adolescent – face, framed by hair that was now blond, and her ripe body with
its full hips and large breasts, not quite the perfect hemispheres that graced
Gina George but nicely outlined by the low, round neckline of the dress. He
thought that some day he might write a type like Carla into one of his films.
But he did not find that the mere fact of her youth – she was twenty, as he
found out when he tried to order wine for her – was the stimulant that it was
reputed to be. He also felt cloyed by her intense, unusual perfume, and by
their third night together he found himself missing the familiar,
well-explored, muscular contours of Sylvie Cottier.
He
had also come to relish Sylvie’s company on the slopes, despite her tendency to
mock him at every opportunity. Skiing had provided many such opportunities,
since she was by far the better skier. She was practically born on skis, and
the story she told – he never knew whether to believe it – was that her mother,
feeling labor pains, had simply skied over to the clinic.
But there had not been any point in going
back to Lausanne while Sylvie was still in Thailand. He had therefore spent a
couple of days in London, talking business with Julian Burroughs, and only then
flown to Geneva, from where he was now returning to Lausanne. Sylvie was due
back the next morning. She was taking the nonstop night flight from Bangkok to
Zurich and then the InterCity from Zurich airport to Lausanne. If everything
worked out according to schedule, she would be arriving at 10:40, and he would
meet her at the station. She would call him only if she missed that train.
Was it really despite Sylvie’s mocking
that he enjoyed her company, he wondered upon reflection, or because of it? He
had to admit that she helped him keep a sense of proportion about himself and
not take himself too seriously. Certainly her calling him a pornographer made
it a lot easier to strike the distribution deal with Julian and Geoff, and
Julian had told him that within a year their investment would have been
recouped, and Albert would begin to have some significant income.
He felt somewhat guilty about not clearing
the deal ahead of time with Gina, but only leaving her a message announcing the
fait accompli. Her share as an investor was a small one; she certainly had no
veto power; but it was she who had initiated the project, conceived as an art
film. But, he told himself, the moment the change to hard-core was made, the
dynamic changed; specifically, it had foreclosed any possibility of a deal at
Park City. He wished Gina well; she really had it in her, he felt, to make it
as a legitimate actress. But perhaps not in an Albert Bosch film.
Gina George’s ordeal by radiation was finally over. It
left her exhausted. For six weeks she had felt her energy ebb day by day, hour
by hour. Sex had been out of the question, as had partying of any kind. She had
spent Christmas eve alone with her mother, who had brought over a Christmas
dinner that was delicious but for which she had no appetite. New Year’s eve was
spent alone with Paul. In previous years they would both be at Barry’s party,
but after what had happened last year...
Paul had come to see her every day, and at
first he had stayed to spend the night with her, just to cuddle, but after a
while the forced abstinence proved too frustrating for both of them, and, for
her, worse than sleeping alone. A few times she even thought that it might have
been better if she had been given something to suppress her libido.
But now it was over. The tests had proved
negative, and she could expect her natural vigor to begin its return. She was
looking forward to Paul’s visit that afternoon with growing excitement. Maybe
they would do it this time.
She untied her robe and looked at herself
in the bathroom mirror. Her boobs looked good. Slightly uneven, from the lumpectomy,
but Paul would take care of that. The creams she had used to counteract the
drying effects of the radiation had worked. They still looked creamy and sweet,
as someone had once told her... Who was it? Oh yes, Albert Bosch. Poor
Albert...
She buzzed Paul in, and felt her
excitement grow even more. That morning she had eaten her breakfast with gusto,
having felt hungry for the first time this year, and now it was her pussy’s
turn to feel hungry. She retied the sash of her robe, leaving just the right
amount of cleavage showing. She stepped into her high-heeled slippers in order
to meet him at the door.
His face looked tired and grave, without a
trace of the smile that he usually had for her. He kissed her lightly but held
the kiss for a long time.
“Gina, will you marry me?” he asked as he
stepped back from her, almost bumping into the still-open door.
“What are you talking about?” she said as
she closed the door behind him. “You’re nowhere near being divorced.”
He sighed deeply. “I’m a widower,” he said.
“Nancy’s dead, and so’s Barry. They got killed in a plane crash in Mexico.”
She felt her knees buckling beneath her.
Paul helped her to her living-room sofa, where he sat her down and then sat
beside her, putting one arm around her neck. He pulled her toward him and
kissed her again.
“Barry’s dead?” she asked incredulously,
almost in a whisper.
“Barry and Nancy,” he said. “And, by the
way, the charges against me have been dropped, since without them there’s no
case. My lawyer just called me this morning.”
“Good for you,” she said, feeling slightly
disgusted. She moved away from a little, but not enough to get out of his
one-armed embrace. He’ll always be Doc, she thought.
“You can imagine how hysterical Helena got
when she found out,” he said.
No, she could not imagine. She had never
even met the little bitch, who, if Doc had his way, would be her stepdaughter.
She moved away a little more.
“Is your office open again?” she asked.
“As of tomorrow,” he said, almost
gleefully.
“We should talk about my reconstruction,”
she said, “but not now. I think I need to be alone.”
He seemed surprised. “Really?” he asked.
“Alone? At a time like this?”
She patted his knee and smiled. “Yes,” she
said. “I didn’t love Barry, but he was very important in my life. I feel like I
need to grieve. I’m Greek, you know.”
He didn’t seem to know. “All right,” he
said as he stood up from the sofa and stroked her hand. His stroking felt good.
“Just remember, I’m there for you. And I meant what I said.”
“Thanks, Paul,” she said without getting
up. She watched him walk toward the door and said, “Good-bye, Paul!” only when
he was on the threshold. “Take care, Gina,” he said and closed the door behind
him. Her pussy still felt hungry, and she decided to satisfy its hunger all by
herself. Her own stroking felt good, too.
|