anton was reading a short story by a Czech writer in a six-month-old copy of The New Yorker when the phone rang.
“Hello?” He did his best to sound like a citizen of the world, filled with optimism about the near future, but the chances were high that the person on the other end of the phone was from the Punjab and calling about a bill that had not been paid. He had learned to dread the polite persistence of their rhetoric. “We value you as a customer, when do you think you might be able to make the payment?”
“Mr. McDonald? Have you directed any feelms yet?” The voice laughed. Cyrus Dumond. Anton’s heart began to race. Every week, he had been writing down names of former film school classmates as proof of his alleged job search. Most of them had jobs in the business, but none had the power to actually give him a job. Having worked his way through the class, he’d begun to recycle a few names. Was Dumond busting him?
“A job came in you might be qualified for. ‘Experienced cameraman needed. Union not necessary. Day rates, two hundred fifty dollars.’ That’s more than I make.”
“Really?” Anton asked.
“I’m not in the habit of making jokes about a man’s livelihood.”
“Do they need a reel?”
“A what?”
“Nothing.”
“Given the fact that they want you to start work tomorrow, I gather the previous employee walked off the job in a somewhat precipitous manner.” Dumond gave him an address off Ventura Boulevard in the Valley, told him to show up at eight a.m., and wished him good luck.
Anton stared at the address. Outside, the sun was the deep yellow of an egg yolk. Headache-making light. He rarely went to the Valley but he knew its reputation. Korean nail salons. Sushi restaurants. Moms in SUVs. Pornography. The grease pan collecting the film industry’s leftovers. Did Cyrus Dumond know that? Anton’s friend Scudder once worked as a grip on a two-day shoot filmed on a boat moored off the Catalina Islands. The first day, he said, he had a hard-on the whole time. The second day, he was disgusted by the sight of a human body. His girlfriend claimed Scudder was never the same in bed after the experience. Anton wasn’t sure what she meant and never asked.
He needed the money. More important, he needed an adventure. In the three months since he had lost his job, he’d been having the literally sickening feeling that the world was moving forward while he was stuck in one place. Like the inner-ear confusion of sitting on a stopped bus watching another bus in motion. But Anton was afraid of sex. He’d done it once in high school and a few times with two girls from film school. Each encounter had been a fumbling, knee-bumping, nose-crushing exercise in awkwardness. Every time he got close to a girl, he could smell the onion odor of fear rising off him. His hands trembled like an old man’s, and he could hardly breathe long enough to maintain a decent kiss. Everywhere he thought to put his hip, there was girl flesh getting crushed, her whimpering a soft “ow.” Sorry, sorry, he’d mutter.
At first, he thought it was because he liked the girls too much. So when pale, square-faced Maddie Famm, who had a mouth like a grouper fish and protuberant eyes that took every thing in without blinking, had asked him out, he’d said yes. Maddie wanted to be a screenwriter, but nobody could tell if her scripts were comedy, suspense, or horror.
“Let’s just say, it’s a metaphor,” she’d say unhelpfully in the seminars in which students discussed their work.
“Well, Maddie, you’re either a genius or an idiot,” the teacher answered.
“Genius. Definitely.”
Maddie was flat as a board. When she walked, it was as if her torso were connected to a different body. Hips swiveling to the left, waist arching to the right, like a robot. Also, her arms were disproportionately long, which made her look vaguely simian. Anton decided her unfortunate personality had been formed defensively, in response to the cruelty of other children. But when he mentioned as much to her, she laughed.
“No fucking way. I was totally popular.”
Like him, Maddie would go see any movie. When they ran into each other at an Iranian film festival at the Los Angeles Academy of Art, it would have been more awkward to sit apart, so they sat together, allowing a provisional friendship to spring up between them. She was the only person he knew who could happily debate the merit of all ten films in Kieslowski’s Decalogue. They even agreed on which was the best (the first) and the worst (the eighth). He probably never would have made a pass at her had she not said on their fifth outing. “So, are you, like, waiting for an engraved invitation or what?”
“What?”
“Are you going to ball me?”
“Ball?”
“Fuck. Shag. Hide the salami. Do the nasty. Whatever you want to call it.”
Interestingly, things had gone better with Maddie than with any other girl. In bed, with her boyish breasts and wide hips, he felt like an Iowa farmer making love to his plain, hardworking wife. A woman chosen not for her feminine charms but her ability to pull a plow, pop out babies. If only she’d kept her mouth shut, things might have worked. But in bed, Maddie had a mouth like a longshoreman. “C’monbaby,” she’d whisper in his ear during sex, “fuckmehardwithyourbighardcock.” It made Anton blush and, worse, go temporarily soft. It surprised him that she never noticed.
“Is there something wrong?” she finally asked one afternoon. Her bare breast was pointing toward the ceiling, but if it hadn’t been for the dark aureole surrounding the nipple, he wouldn’t have known it was a breast.
“No,” he answered. “Why?”
“Sometimes you look like you’re in pain.”
“I’m just not used to so much, you know, talking.”
“All the books say communication is healthy.”
“I’m not sure if ‘Fuck my wet pussy’ is communication.” He’d meant it as a sort-of joke, but he recognized the offended look on her face from their writing seminar.
“Well, I’m a verbal person. That’s what gets me off.” She’d raised herself up on both elbows, filling the sacs of her breasts with flesh.
Anton hadn’t known what to say, so he’d stayed quiet. In retrospect, he could see that had been a mistake.
“You know,” she said, “maybe this isn’t working out.”
“Okay,” Anton said, and nodded. Too late, he saw her cringe from the phantom blow of his rejection. And he had only been trying to be accommodating!
After that, his love life had been a desert. The idea of sex, so deliciously tantalizing when he had been around women on a regular basis, was beginning to look more and more like something he would never understand, an obscure sport to watch, briefly, during the Olympics like curling or rhythmic gymnastics. He knew that other men in his position turned to pornography as if it were no big deal, and he would smile knowingly when they mentioned it casually, laughingly: “Last night, while I was jacking off to this porno…” But inside a filament of shame quivered at the mention. The few times he let himself wander porn sites on the Internet, he’d been overcome with a nagging fear that his future capacity for love was being tainted by what he had seen.
He called the number Dumond had given him. A voice-mail system directed him to leave a message for Hippocampus Productions at the beep. He hung up instead. That night, he watched an old video of Last Tango in Paris. People called this pornography, he told himself as Marlon Brando mounted the skinny French girl, but it had been miscategorized. All he saw in their coupling was animal sadness, the kind you can’t be talked out of.
The next morning, Anton woke earlier than usual. Technically, he hadn’t yet made up his mind to take the job, but as he showered and ate his breakfast he could feel his movements powered by a sense of purpose. Today, he was going somewhere. People were expecting him. That had to count for something.
The attendant at the parking lot was huge, three hundred pounds at least. A red bandanna was tied around his head and his ears were pierced in half a dozen places. A pirate parking cars.
“Can I help you?” The pirate leaned his head into Anton’s car and craned his head toward the backseat.
“Hippocampus Productions?” Anton asked.
He asked Anton to open the trunk of his car. Anton turned off his engine and got out of the car. His trunk was a jumbled mess of things that seemed to belong to someone else—a Frisbee, a swollen paperback book, an old beach towel. The trunk of someone without a care in the world. The fat man leaned over, picked up a tire iron and weighed it in his hand, like it was a melon he was thinking of buying. “Amazing how much damage you can do with these things,” he said.
“To a tire?” Anton asked.
“Heh, heh,” the man chuckled, and threw it back. “Okay.” He waved him in.
The Hippocampus office reminded him of his dentist’s waiting room. Gray carpet, acoustical tiling on the ceiling, a banana tree in the corner. Not sleazy but not fancy. A utilitarian place for conducting business. He gave his name to a receptionist through a thick sheet of what looked like bulletproof glass (a touch lacking at his dentist’s office) and took a seat. After staring at his feet a full minute, during which he ascertained that nobody in that room gave a shit about him, he allowed himself to look openly at the women surrounding him. He was used to the poignant hopefulness of casting calls but there was something different about the girls in the waiting room. They seemed harder, meaner, immune to disappointment and therefore, he had to admit, somehow sexier. You couldn’t hurt these girls even if you tried. The girl sitting to his right, a freckled redhead wearing cut-off jeans and white go-go boots, leaned forward in her seat and held out her hand.
“Misty Moon,” she said. Her legs were long and shapely but her body was lanky and lean, more like a fashion model’s than a porn star’s.
“Really?” he asked.
“No. But have you ever noticed that the girls who’ve made it big in this business are all named after natural phenomena? Savannah. Fern. Canyon. River.”
Anton nodded. Abyss, chasm, gap, he thought, but did not say. His leg was bobbing up and down like the needle on a sewing machine.
“No offense”—she dropped her voice—“but you don’t look like you’re here for an audition.”
“I’m a cameraman.”
“Really?” She perked up. “Do you have any, like, tips for me? This is my third audition.”
Anton could feel the other girls in the room staring at them.
“Don’t look into the camera.”
When the girl laughed—a rattley sound like a tin can being kicked down an empty alley—Anton realized that she was as nervous as he was. It gave him the courage to look at her more closely. Big pale blue eyes, the color of window cleaner; the well-defined clavicle of a ballerina; and an eager, uncertain smile that kept wavering on and off, like a broken filament in a lightbulb. She wasn’t like the others. This girl could be hurt.
“To be honest, you don’t really look…” Anton began, but didn’t know how to finish.
“Tell me about it.” The girl rolled her eyes, stretched her long legs straight out in front of her, and blew a stream of air upward so that her bangs fluttered in the jet of air. “I was reading the autobiography of the biggest star in adult cinema, and she got turned away five times until someone gave her a chance. These things work in cycles. Blond hair and big tits—that’s only interesting for so long. Taste changes. And when it does, I’m going to be there.”
She looked at Anton defiantly, ready for him to disagree.
“Have you always wanted…” He wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.
“To be an actress?” She finished the sentence. “Most definitely. Ever since I was Becky in Tom Sawyer. I got every good role in town. Annie, naturally, thanks to my hair, what’s her name in Our Town, Mary in God-spell. Everyone said I was good so, naturally, I came here to find out. I told myself, ‘Six months.’ If I didn’t make it in six months, I was going back to Amarillo.” She checked her watch. “Tomorrow, it will be seven and a half months, but I’m not ready to go back. Six months wasn’t long enough. I can see that now. Los Angeles is expensive. Did you know a girl can make twenty-five hundred dollars in one day doing this stuff?”
“Ten times what they’re paying me.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to worry that your English teacher from the seventh grade will happen on a picture of you on the Internet blowing three guys.”
Anton smiled. Misty wasn’t stupid.
“Anyway, nowadays it’s easy to diversify. Did you know Savannah owns a winery? And Fern has a clothing line?”
He didn’t know that but he also didn’t know who Savannah or Fern was. “Couldn’t you, like, waitress or something?” he asked.
“Yesterday I made forty-one dollars in tips on the lunch shift. Last night, I slept in the long-term parking lot at Burbank Airport. Don’t look like that. I drive a Mercury Sable—that’s a Ford in a tuxedo—the backseat is very comfortable. In the morning, I shower at the gym. Most gyms have a free two-week membership. I’m on my third. This one is my favorite, though, they have a salt scrub in the shower that makes your skin glow. With the new digital cameras, that’s especially important. They pick up every thing. One pimple and—”
“If you need a place to stay…” Anton interrupted her, suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to help a stranger. If he’d had time to think it over, he never would have blurted it out. Already, the smirking faces of the women who had been listening to their conversation made his face burn with embarrassment, but for that one moment, he felt like one of those inexplicable heroes who jump into freezing water to save a drowning person.
She tilted her head, as if to let his invitation penetrate deeper in her skull. “Thanks,” she said. “I was living with my boyfriend.”
“I didn’t mean romantically.” And he didn’t. She talked too much. Besides, her kind of fragile beauty made him feel uncomfortably beastly.
“I know. I can see you’re a gentleman. Not like my ex. He was in a band. His house was a few blocks from the ocean. You couldn’t see it but you could smell it and, at night, when there was no traffic, you could hear it. First time I went there, I thought it was heaven.”
A fiftyish woman with thinning blond hair, pale pink lipstick, and the surprised expression of a newly hatched gosling opened a door and read names from a list. Misty went suddenly still, like a bird-watcher hearing a rare trill in the forest canopy. Anton looked down at the piece of paper in her hand. There was a list of questions with a yes, no, and maybe box next to each.
Misty had marked maybe next to all of them.
“Misty.” Anton tried to get her attention.
“The problem was,” Misty said, eyes still glued to the woman, “he did not believe in being faithful.” She brought her gaze back to Anton. “‘Monogamy equals monotony.’ That was his favorite saying. He met someone new. Someone young. Really young. Jail bait. So I had to let him go.” Her hands were squeezing and unsqueezing the strap to her purse.
“Misty?” The blond woman scanned the room impatiently.
When she stood up, Anton saw she was even taller than he had first thought.
“Do you have a card?” She looked down at him.
Anton took out his wallet. Last Christmas, his mother had surprised him with a box of business cards containing his name, his address, phone number, and the word filmmaker. “Mom,” he’d responded, flushed with embarrassment, “I’m just a cameraman.”
“For now,” she’d answered.
Misty read the card without blinking. “Cool,” she said, and nodded, shouldering a white leather bag ringed with beaded fringe. As she walked away, the fringe of the bag danced like the tail of a horse.
Anton tried to sort through the cocktail of emotions churning through him. Relief—the last thing he needed was a homeless, would-be porn-star roommate—but also regret. As she walked away, Anton felt the earlier promise of the day’s adventure fade like a passing song from a car radio.
“Anton McDonald.” He looked up. The same birdlike blonde who had taken Misty behind the door was looking at him.
“We’re waiting.” She raised an eyebrow at him. Or, rather, she raised the area of skin where an eyebrow should be. On her, it looked as if the eyebrow had been erased, then penciled in half an inch higher.
“I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I can’t do this.”
She looked surprised, then pulled her lips back, baring her teeth like an aged cheetah. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Don’t be such a pussy.”
Anton’s mouth dropped open in astonishment at the word he had just been called. Pussy! He tried to suppress the giggle tickling his solar plexus, but the more he tried, the more it seemed to insist on bursting free.