Lena was putting the finishing touches on a script for Onika when the doorbell rang. She went to the peephole. Outside, somebody dark hung his head so low that she couldn’t see his face. He looked up to ring the doorbell again. Randy.
“What in the world?” She held the door wide. “You have a key.”
He shuffled in. “I felt we were insufficiently acquainted for me to walk in unannounced.” His head was still hanging.
He met Jewel and she ripped him a fresh one. Lena sighed. If all the ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends in Chicago were laid end-to-end, she’d be out of a job.
“Come in and tell me about it.”
She got him a glass of wine and sat him on a milk crate. He looked like two cents. “Tell me what she said.”
He raised wounded eyes to her face. “You know what we are.”
“No. What are you? Lovers? Friends?”
“No,” he said, “you and I.”
She and Randy had only one thing in common. “She dissed you for acting in porn movies?”
“And for whoring for two hundred years.” He blinked. “She complains of it often. At first I thought she must be jealous, but I learned better the night she came for me at the studio.”
“Uh—” Lena frowned.
“I gave her the fantasy she wanted, a fantasy about—”
“Should you be telling me her fantasy?”
He shrugged. “I have told women of others’ fantasies before. How else could I learn, if I didn’t offer them choices?”
Yeah, but you weren’t in love with any of them. If he didn’t get it, maybe he deserved that Jewel had ripped him a fresh one. “Go ahead.”
“She wished to be in a porn shoot. She pretended to be a novice. I was her director, her leading man, her crew.”
“Tricky,” Lena said.
He brushed that away with two fingers, his eyes elsewhere. “Her understanding of our work — it was all wrong. Disturbingly wrong. But I had to deliver the fantasy she wanted.”
“You certainly do that.”
“A successful fantasy has a hinge where orgasm becomes possible. The hinge is a moment where a woman feels ambivalent.”
“Did you find out why she wanted to be in a porn shoot?”
He swallowed. “Shame. The hinge was shame.” He covered his face with both hands.
Lena touched his shoulder. “Seems she isn’t the only one who’s ashamed.” He didn’t move. “Haven’t you met a lot of women with that hinge?”
He nodded behind his hands. “I don’t know why it should affect me so, in her case.”
Because you’re in love with her, you big dumbell. Lena resigned herself to a long night. “Tell me about her.”
He drew his long fingers over his eyes and down his face. Hunkered with his elbows on his knees and his hands dangling, his white dress shirt open at the throat, his too-long black hair shaggy around his face, he looked unreally beautiful, like a fox or a unicorn.
Lucky bitch, Lena thought.
“She’s morbidly fearful and astonishingly brave. She throws herself upon the spears of her enemies and they are crushed. What I have seen her do—” He shook his head, his lip curling. “The man she’s with now is a coward to his bones. Although, if he can convince himself he has some hidden advantage, he too can perform prodigies. As if a flimsy secret were his shield. That will undo him with her. I have only to wait,” Randy said forlornly.
“You were telling me about her.”
Lifting his forefinger, he said, “Let me tell you about the porn shoot fantasy I created for her.”
Lena rolled her eyes. “Okay.”
“The hinge was shame. She had two desires hung upon that hinge. One was the desire to be whole again, virginal, free of shame.” He shook his head. “If she only knew that she is whole! She’s always been whole. She was involuntarily despoiled in some way. But the despoiler can take from her only what she believes he can take. She is still whole.”
“That’s an odd idea. I don’t see how that’s possible, but I’m listening.”
“She’s whole, and yet she feels despoiled. That’s the meaning of her choosing to be a novice porn actress.”
Lena felt a shiver.
“She walks into the studio — my lair, as she fancies it — innocently, perhaps by accident. But the magic of the fantasy holds her. She pretends to herself she’s afraid to admit that she doesn’t belong. So, to preserve her sense of control, she pretends she knows what she is doing.”
Randy turned his dark eyes on Lena. “This is the other side of the hinge. Power. She wants to be whole, and yet she wants to give up power. She can’t see how she can have both those things at once. She comes to me.” He shut his eyes. “And I — abuse her.” His face pinched up.
Lena thought she understood now. “She wants you to.”
“Yes. At some point in the fantasy she has come to the limit of her courage, and she needs my help. So I give commands. And, to preserve the secret that she’s still a virgin, she obeys. Do you see? I have taken the reins out of her hands. I drive her as I might drive a team of horses, drive her over the edge of her own self-control.”
“But she isn’t a virgin.”
“No. She is. She thinks she is no longer a virgin.” Randy put a hard finger on Lena’s knee. “Everyone is still a virgin. What is a virgin? Clean, whole, honest, pure. When is a virgin despoiled? When she feels dirty, broken, dishonest, as if evil has been stirred into her insides.”
The way I felt when Mom refused to help me against Steven, Lena thought.
“The fantasy becomes a trap in which she may recapture her virginity. She permits herself to feel innocent only in the tiny confines of her body, which she has brought to the studio to be despoiled, so that she may renew her wholeness, her virginity. Throwing herself on the spear of her enemy.” He shook his head.
Lena followed all this with difficulty. “She’s doing something that scares her. That seems brave to me.”
“As I said.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“When she wakes from the dream, she’s satisfied, but shame rolls back over her. She can’t keep it at bay for long. And so she tells herself a lie. It is the man who made her do these things who should be ashamed.” Bitterly, he said, “I am he.”
“I see.” Lena felt like spitting. “I hate when people do that. I could see my mom being hostile to my work. She’s a mom. But if I make the mistake of telling some guy what I do—”
“He treats you like a whore,” Randy finished for her. “That is to say, he has an opportunity to make himself whole by laying his shame upon your back. He can’t even admit that he mourns his virginity, because he’s a man.”
Lena eyed him. “You know a lot. You’ve only been in porn a few days.”
He lifted his head. “I’ve been a sex demon to pious women for two hundred years.”
“Well, brother, you know the whole song, verse and chorus.” She smiled.
Every inch an aristocrat, he bowed. “Thank you. It’s an honor to be accepted into the guild.”
Lena peeked at her watch. “What will you do about Jewel?”
Randy deflated. “I shall wait.”
Lena snorted. “I think you’re holding out on her.”
“Holding—?”
“You expect her to understand you. You think she should know how ashamed you feel. She should know not to beat you up — she shouldn’t try to make you feel more ashamed.”
Randy’s mouth fell open. “How can she not know?”
“Uh, duh, maybe because you don’t tell her?”
“We have been together every night in what she calls demonspace. This is merely the vast space inside her mind, but of course she must demonize it, literally, and blame that on me,” he added grumpily. “My mind is exposed to hers there, just as hers is to me. We are equals in demonspace.”
“Let me get this straight.” Lena put up both hands. “You expect her to rummage around in your brain the way you rummage around in hers.”
“She could, if she willed.”
“Have you invited her to poke around in your demonspace?”
He said nothing.
“You are such a guy.”
“Mock me if you choose—”
“Men are so dense. Number one, you’re mad because nobody has ever rummaged in your head the way you rummage in our heads. And why is this? I hate to break it to you, but most of us aren’t looking past the sex, which is great, by the way. Number two, you are still a lord. You love presenting yourself as a sex demon and you don’t want your power questioned.”
“I abase myself every night, providing for her desires, without regard for cost to my dignity—”
“Do you hear yourself? Providing for her desires means you have to ‘abase yourself.’ ‘Your dignity suffers.’ You dork, my co-stars don’t think it’s beneath their dignity to ‘provide for my desires.’ At least they don’t say so out loud, if they want to have any wood to work with.” She looked at him with affection. “She’s right. You’re totally a lord. I think you deserve each other.”
After a stiff look down his nose, Randy slumped. “I wish she thought so.”
“Have you been listening to me? Because I’ve been listening to you. On and on and on.”
“I beg your pardon.” He swallowed. “What should I do?”
“In words of one syllable? Tell her how you feel.” Every single conversation she had with a heartbroken guy, she wound up saying the same thing. Why did she bother listening at all?
And, like every other heartbroken guy, he answered the same way. “I can’t.”
She got up from her milk crate. “Okay, bedtime for me. I have church in the morning.”
“Please!” He caught at her hand. “Advise me.”
Leaning over his gaunt face and his beautiful, black, heartbroken eyes, she said slowly, “Tell. Her. How. You. Feel. You gotta show some pink, buddy. Write her a letter, if you can’t say it out loud.”
“A letter?” Slowly, he nodded. “I could do that.”
“Don’t tell her she’s still a virgin, or dump on her for dumping her shame on you. Tell her what you like about her. Tell her how she makes you feel. A love letter. You know what that is?”
He swallowed. “I believe so.”
“Right. Okay. Nighty-night.” She dropped a kiss on top of his head and crashed out.
He didn’t come to bed all night. She knew, because if he had, he would have done something amazing to her, and she would have remembered that.
In the morning she found a few yellow sheets torn from a legal pad on the kitchen counter.
“What’s this?”
Randy came in from the shower, rubbing his head with a towel. “My letter to Jewel. You may read it.”
She really didn’t have time, but she leaned against the counter and sipped coffee and read.
Five minutes later she looked up, a lump in her throat. He was still watching her.
“It’s a good letter.”
He smiled.
“Now send it.”
“I can’t.”
She put her cup on the counter and went into the bedroom, handing him the letter as she passed. “I’m going to church.”
He followed. “I have to let her go. She will tire of Clay. Or she won’t.”
Lena threw off her bathrobe. “You’re wasting my time.”
“I can’t send it. If I’d thought she would read it, I could never have written it.” He gave a pathetic smile. “It was reward enough to watch your face as you read it.”
She looked up then. “Tell me straight. Did you write the letter to her, pretending you would send it, or did you write it so I would read it? Because I’m not getting in between you two.”
“For Jewel.”
“And you won’t send it.” She opened fresh pantyhose.
He hesitated. “No.”
“So should I burn it?”
“No!”
Lena sighed wistfully and went back to pulling on pantyhose. She put on a suit and her German Army shoes and put her hair back in a french twist, avoiding his eye.
“Would you keep it for me?” he said finally.
She couldn’t resist those big dark eyes. “For how long? Because if I make enough money to move, it might get lost.”
“Should something happen to me, would you send it to her?”
Yellow-bellied coward! “Oooh, all right. Put it in an envelope and address it and leave it by the toaster. It won’t get thrown away there.”