Part 3 (1/2)

”I know it's not ideal. ...” Viv agreed.

”It's not ideal?” I said. ”Personally, I think it's distinctly less than ideal. That's just my own personal opinion, you understand. No, I would say we're in agreement on this, that a naked man playing the part of a naked woman is not ideal. And somehow-I'll grant you I'm biased on this-somehow the fact that I'm the naked man makes it really not ideal.”

”Yes, well,” Viv retorted, ”I don't have the luxury of ideal right now. You know, it's not like you haven't read with Amy before-you did at the casting session, if you'll remember. She'll be comfortable with you.”

”See, at the casting session? I had my clothes on. That was the big difference there. I'll bet Amy is a lot more comfortable with my clothes on than my clothes off. Ask her.”

”Amy!” Seconds later Amy was at Viv's side. ”He's going to read the lines with you so we can get your close-ups. Given that your character is supposed to be responding to a naked model when you hear these lines, doesn't it make perfect sense that he should take all his clothes off?”

”Absolutely,” said Amy.

”I just thought,” Viv turned back to me, ”you wanted this movie to be good. I thought you cared as much about it as I did. Don't you think I'd be very happy right now to have an actress who could play Jasper without falling apart? Don't you think, at this point, I'd even be happy with Catwoman, for G.o.d's sake? But I don't have a Jasper or a Catwoman, what I have is you. I don't imagine Catwoman would hesitate two seconds to take her clothes off.”

”I'm sure Catwoman wouldn't,” I said bitterly. ”If she had bothered to show up, I mean.”

”I have no more time,” Viv calmly answered, as though explaining the suns.h.i.+ne to a three-year-old. She spun on her heels again. ”Think about it a minute and let me know what you decide, so I can tell everyone whether they should just go home and I can figure out how I'm going to give Veroneek back her money.”

That was her crowning blow, because she knew that in the end I was incapable of letting her down. Christ, if the Cabal ever hears about this I'm cooked, was all I could think thirty minutes later on the model's platform. Around me was a great flurry of activity and preparation. The crew bustled with heavily suppressed hilarity; they couldn't wait for me to finish so they could all explode with laughter. Only Amy, focused as ever, never cracked a smile. In my mind I kept going back to the beginning, to the night Viv first proposed this project. I don't think it occurred to me then that I would wind up naked in this movie. In fact, I'm sure I had it in my head that it was other people who would wind up naked in this movie. Action! Viv barked behind the camera and, behind her canvas, Amy asked, ”Where does he touch you?”

”Under my breast,” I sighed, ”below my nipple.”

”Which one?” said Amy.

”The left.” Out of the corner of my eye I was watching everyone around me. Everyone around me was looking not at me or Amy but the ground and their feet, trying to contain themselves; the only sound I heard was snickering, a solitary chortle from back in the shadows of the set. After a moment I realized it was Niles. It was Niles snickering and a certain peace came over me, because now I knew that in a few seconds I was going to kill him, just as I had been wanting to do, and it would make everything worth it. Thinking about it now I was glad I was naked, because it would just make Niles' demise all that much more humiliating, to be throttled in front of all these people by a naked man. ”When his hands are raised to my breast,” I went on, ”you know ... he's exposed to me. He's disarmed.”

”Disarmed?”

”Like in the gangster movies, when the bad guy puts his hands in the air.”

”Or the good guy sometimes.”

”Or the good guy.”

”Is he the good guy or the bad guy?”

”He's the good guy when I'm the bad guy.” Later it would occur to me that this was one of those common primal dreams, to be die only one naked in a room full of people. I don't remember what it's supposed to mean, beyond the obvious sense of exposure and vulnerability; and I certainly don't know what it meant that in this dream I was not only naked but in the role of a naked woman, talking to another woman about which breast I preferred having touched. Interestingly, as we did take after take, moving on from one section of dialogue to the next, everyone else on the set fell away from my consciousness and I became lost in what Amy was saying and what I was saying, until I had almost forgotten that my voice would not be on the film at all, that nothing of me would be on the film, that I would have been only the ghost who revealed himself, herself, whatever my self was at this moment, for the sake of the look on the face of that person who witnessed my revelation. At this moment, everything and everyone else was exposed to me. I was free of the threat or possibility of any further exposure, as naked on the outside as I was inside, and everyone cowered before me, prisoners of their pride and secrets.

But later, going over the footage and looking at Jasper's scenes on the monitor, Viv and I both noticed something right off. Mid-air, between her nervous breakdown on the set and the image caught by the camera lens, Jasper transformed into the woman I met at the Feverish-the spellbinding eyes, the vague German accent and strange stillborn smile. ... The effect was electrifying. ”Jeez,” Viv shook her head, unabashedly infatuated, ”she makes the movie.” She called Jasper into the network a few days later to overdub some lines, and for the next week Jasper was all Viv could talk about.

I think it was mostly Viv's obsession with Jasper that gave us the idea for the party. In order to coax Jasper into her lair, Viv decided to have a Nude Artists Ball on Halloween at the Bunker. We would invite all of Viv's friends, painters and sculptors and photographers and curators, plus some of my pals and their various women and wives, plus Veroneek and Joe and the crew who worked on White Whisper, and the other actresses and maybe even a select few of the auditioners, the Chinese lesbians perhaps, and perhaps Sahara and some of the girls from the Cathode Flower. h.e.l.l, we might even invite Catwoman and then tie her to the floor and stand around spilling wine and tequila on her and eating hors d'oeuvres off her body. Viv created invitations out of parchment and feathers and foil, drawing an elaborate image of a genie emerging from a pod with stupendous, dripping b.r.e.a.s.t.s like Jasper's, and a p.e.n.i.s I had the funny feeling I'd seen somewhere before, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. a blue pool that bled around the card's edges. It was left to me to write the announcement. But going over it in my mind it occurred to me I wasn't sure how many of these particular people I really wanted to see nude, even at a Nude Artists Ball; the Cabal, for instance, I felt reasonably certain I didn't want to see any of them nude, whereas I kind of liked the idea of Niles-invited in the first place only out of deference to Lydia, whose bottom was tattooed with his name after all-turning out to be the only person at the ball who was nude. So I made some adjustments in the invitations, customizing them, so to speak.

The closer the party got, the more elaborate it became. Viv's loft didn't need a lot of extra ambiance, given the metal coffins and pyramids and mannequins and dead bugs on the walls, but she unpacked an exotic array of artifacts anyway from her various travels: masks and dolls and strange figurines from Africa and South America and the Middle East. Overcoming her dread of even imaginary spiders, she draped makes.h.i.+ft webs from one corner of the ceiling to the next. On the monitor intercut with Network Vs. broadcasts was an ongoing montage of Metropolis and Vampyr and Kiss Me Deadly, Louise Brooks and Val Lewton movies, outtakes from White Whisper and selected blasts from the Cinema of Hysteria; and in the center of the room, on a low gla.s.s table, burned a huge candle, which was actually the once-melted, twisted mutation of many candles. By Halloween night we had turned the whole Bunker into a maze, confiscating the bulbs from the light fixtures and throwing the corridors into blackness, extending the winding pa.s.sages into the loft so that if people took one turn they wound up on the main level and if they took another they wound up on the upper platform looking down. Not intelligent enough to become truly confused, the first person actually to make it all the way through to the end of the maze was the dim little eighteen-year-old half of the Chinese lesbian couple. Three minutes of social intercourse confirmed she had the vocabulary of a parrot and enough brains to fill a shot gla.s.s. The other lesbian was lost somewhere on the Bunker's second floor; all night we heard her distant screams. ”You're getting closer!” someone would shout into the pa.s.sage every now and then, just for the sheer h.e.l.l of it.

People arrived in baffled, agitated bursts, spewed from the Bunker's concrete aqueducts in general states of dishevelment. It was hugely entertaining to watch them tumble in on top of each other, snapping and snarling like trapped dogs. The women were in varying degrees of nakedness, costumed as leopards or birds or in nothing more than a striking shade of blue or white champagne and glitter. Some of the more brazen men wore only cod pieces while a few were in evening attire, escorting nymphs on their arms. Viv was resplendent in nothing but white stockings and white shoes; I wore my black boxer shorts with the dancing orange skulls and a green D'Artagnan hat with a purple feather. In his hat and boots the only thing different about Ventura's usual appearance was the look on his face that said, Now will somebody please explain to me what the f.u.c.k I'm doing here? Per my plan, the only completely naked man was Niles, arriving as bare as the day he was born. Dangling obliviously, and eagerly scanning the room for Amy Brown, he didn't have the sense to be mortified; rather he had about him the air of someone who couldn't believe the dumb luck of all these women that there should be one singularly naked man for them and it was him.

One of Jasper's thighs was blurting across the monitor when she arrived in person. Taking her cue from Viv's drawing on the invitation, and perhaps recognizing the inspiration of her own b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she came as the genie herself, completely bare in a deep bronze tint with a huge phallus strapped to her that waved wildly from her pubic hair, which was dyed white like the hair on her head. Her eyes were made up to accentuate their light, and her lips were a metallic blue. Behind her was a guy in a loincloth and turban whose ankles were bound by chains and who lugged behind him, on another chain, a huge papier-mache lamp from which a genie presumably could emerge. I have no idea how they got the lamp up through the Bunker corridors. I couldn't help wondering if this was the guy who wound up bound to his bed the night Jasper went barhopping, a.s.suming Jasper's story at the Feverish was true or that she had ever really been there at all; he had on his face the look of a man who has been down at the bottom of a deep amniotic shaft so long and is so dazed and dithering from the experience that the only thing he can imagine anymore is returning there. At any rate, the entrance made a big impression. Where Jasper stopped in the middle of the room the temperature rocketed twenty degrees, and everyone stared, not knowing whether to swarm over her like Bolivian jungle ants or back away cowering from her as some kind of unholy vision of s.e.x. Instead they rushed to the refrigerator and gulped down the pitchers of tequila I had laced with cognac.

After this the only two things that could happen to the ball was that everyone would clear out altogether or explode in a drunken frenzy, and since people were too transfixed by Jasper to navigate their way back down through the Bunker, and we could still hear the cries and thuds of the other Chinese lesbian trying to grope her way toward us, a drunken frenzy it was. The party became a night-long din of breaking gla.s.s and shattering lights and ripping fabric and bodies hurtling from the overhanging loft. Several times in all the blind inebriated confusion I considered weaving my way over to Niles and giving him a good kick in the nuts. At one point someone got the idea of hauling the huge centerpiece candle up to the rooftop and casting it to the street below, and so the whole party became a caravan staggering its way up through the Bunkers pitch-black arteries to the overhanging night, from where we could see in the distance the freeway bonfires and dark Magritte ocean slowly rolling in toward the city. Off the side of the building went the candle in a streak of fire, its flame flickering valiantly all the way to the bottom, where it smashed and erupted in a white rain of wax.

I turned from the rooftops edge to look right into Jaspers eyes as she stood behind me. In the moonlight her hair and lips and eyes and phallus glimmered, and she took my hand to lead me with the others back down through the Bunker to Viv's loft. When she pulled me past Viv's doorway, deeper into the black halls toward the bottom of the building, I tried to pull back: ”Wait,” I said, because I didn't want to go without Viv, especially with Jasper. But she fastened her grip on me. I couldn't see her or anyone or anything else before or behind me. At the bottom of the building the door opened and we emerged onto the street where I found, to my mystification, that it was not Jasper attached to my hand but Viv-”What ...?” was all I could start to say; I looked over my shoulder to see that Jasper had somehow wound up behind me. Her slave was nowhere in sight, having tangled his chains on a drainpipe up on the roof. Let's go to my place, Jasper suggested. Let's go, Viv agreed. We could still hear from the third floor of the Bunker the noise of the party along with the stray cries of the lost Chinese lesbian who, on our way up and down, must have pa.s.sed through us like a ghost.

We got in my car. Viv and Jasper sat in back. North of Baghdadville the second ring was burning so I headed out Pico Boulevard and then cut up to Sixth Street, driving east on Sixth through the dark knolls of Hanc.o.c.k Park and slipping through a Black Pa.s.sage just beyond MacArthur Park. On into Downtown we continued past the Glow Lofts to the industrial veldt of the switching yard that lay before the old gothic stone bridges of East Los Angeles. The smell of the ocean fell behind us, the smell of backfires wafted through the window. ... Half a mile from Jasper's house we could see it, growing alone out of the wasteland of the railroad tracks next to a junkyard of twisted metal, disposed concrete beams and the abandoned hulls of tanker trucks, in the middle of a circle of low but constant fire. The fire never rose more than a couple of feet, and never went out. I could feel the heat a couple of hundred yards away and it was blasting in through the body of the car when we pulled to a stop. Jasper got out to voice-activate the huge iron door that let us into a concrete tunnel, which led the remaining fifty feet to the house itself. ”We keep the fire burning,” she muttered from the back seat of the car, when she got back in, ”to discourage the vandals and gangs. ...”

”We?” I said.

At the entryway of the house a small parking foyer opened up. An antique car shone in waiting. ”Let's drink something!” Viv chirped, launching herself from the car before it came to a complete stop. Jasper had become much quieter since the house came into view. We followed her in; the front door was small and una.s.suming, like a service entrance. Immediately beyond it rose a concrete stairway to the second level, where the whole house opened up into a skyward-spiraling ma.s.s of turrets and gussets and beams shooting off in diagonals and parabolas, so that you were inside when you thought you were outside and outside when you thought you were inside, except for when you were both at the same time. This level forked off into several other directions, including a kitchen, another set of stairs and an elevated outdoor patio; disappearing another direction out into the open air, from where we could feel the heat of the fire moat, a metal catwalk curled around the outer circ.u.mference of the house. The stairs led up to a study from where came a light, and then the bedroom, and from there another series of stairs again led out into the night and up the side of the house's tower to the top. By my count there were about four levels to the house in all, except for all the half-levels in between, the top two overlooking a huge circular living s.p.a.ce on the second level that was lined by gla.s.s from one end to the next. The gla.s.s alternated between window and mirrors that ran from the ceiling to the floor, each window confronted on the opposite side of the room by a mirror so you could look out on the city and see your own face floating above it. In the middle of the room, where the floor was slightly sunken, a low black sofa and two matching black chairs surrounded a low black table, and the whole room was filled by an icy blue light like the color of Jasper's lip gloss. Shooting up the middle of the house like a metal spine was the disembodied hull of a tanker truck, an open chute that exposed the night far above us.

The house must have been eighty feet high. From the windows of the living room was a panorama of the sc.r.a.pyards, the surrounding hills, the ravine cut through by the black Los Angeles River, the old baseball stadium that had been taken over by coyotes and homeless people and fourth-generation descendants of the blacks and latinos who had been displaced by the stadium in the first place, and just beyond the flames of the house's moat the trains that slithered through the switching yard in the dark, one coiling silently by just at the edge of the fire. We stood over a pool that invaded the living room from the elevated patio outside. This too was made from the tank of a fuel truck, a narrow oblong ca.n.a.l of water leading out to a much larger pool. The pool lights were on and the water was red with the light of the fires; the reflection of the distant city skyline floated on the surface. Hovering just beneath the skyline and the surface of the water, in the middle of the larger pool, was a large module, with aortas and ventricles like a huge mechanical heart, roomy enough from all appearances to hold a couple of people. There appeared to be portholes on all sides. Through the water I could see on top of the module a gla.s.s hatch. ”What is that?” I said.

”It's a bathysphere,” Jasper answered. She was now distinctly sullen, and made her way straight to the table in the center of the room that held gla.s.ses, several crystal liquor bottles, and an ice bucket full of melted ice. She kept looking over her shoulder at the pool and then up at the stairs toward the study where the light was coming from the doorway. Viv was humming and dancing from window to mirror while Jasper poured her a drink; she handed the drink to Viv and asked if I wanted anything, and I said no. ”Where did you find this house?” asked Viv.

After what seemed a long moment Jasper said, ”It's my stepfather's. He built it. He's an architect.” She added, rather caustically, ”His bathysphere, too.”

”You mean he built the bathysphere?” I asked. Almost in response a flurry of bubbles exploded on the surface of the pool. The three of us watched from the dark of the house as the bathysphere surfaced in the bubbles' wake, where a motor kicked on and navigated the craft to the side of the pool. The motor shut off and after a minute the gla.s.s door on the top of the bathysphere opened and a distinguished looking man in his early fifties got out, fully dressed. Even in the light of the pool his tawny resemblance to Jasper was unmistakable. Stepfather? I was thinking, watching the two of them, when he looked over to the living room from beyond the gla.s.s and now seemed to notice there was someone in the house. ”Jasper,” he said, not like a question or even a greeting but a perfunctory accusation, with a demeanor that rendered everything an accusation. He circled the pool, ascended the outer steps and entered the house on the next level up, looking down at us. There was no rail; I had already noticed that none of the landings or stairs had rails, as though rails had been deliberately omitted from the design so no one could ever get completely comfortable or secure. In front of the light from the study, the man's frame was silhouetted. Viv staggered a little but not particularly engaged by the moment; both she and Jasper had been naked enough of the evening to have seemingly forgotten about it. The man on the balcony also appeared not to notice that standing in his living room was a blonde in nothing but slightly askew stockings, wobbling on a pair of high heels, and another blonde, his stepdaughter, saluting him with a plastic p.e.n.i.s, the only thing about the evening that hadn't begun to wilt.

He looked from me to Viv back to me with clear disdain, and then back to Jasper, who returned his look and then turned her back on him, walking around the end of the black sofa and plopping herself down, staring out into the night at the ring of flames in the distance and drinking her drink. From the top of the stairs the man looked at me again, and then vanished back into the study.

”What's happening,” Viv slurred vaguely. She was a little pickled.

”Nothing,” Jasper answered, and then, after a minute, suddenly brightened, in one of her now familiar psychotic s.h.i.+fts. She leapt up from the sofa so fast her d.i.l.d.o nearly knocked over a bottle of scotch, and grabbing Viv she pulled her giggling toward another room beneath the stairs. For the next half hour I could overhear Jasper showing Viv her life. She was hauling out yearbooks and poetry journals and glossy magazine photo layouts from younger days, and newspaper stories of beauty compet.i.tions where triumph was only a smile away, though it sounded like it usually wound up being some other girl's smile. The recounting had about it the desperate wistfulness of a valediction to a life that was already over. At one point, very clearly and soberly, Viv said, ”Jasper, don't do this,” and then after a few minutes they returned. I was sitting in one of the chairs and Viv and Jasper were slouching on the sofa.

For a few minutes we were quiet in the dark. Viv sipped another drink and Jasper absently flicked her phallus with her thumb, lost in thought. ”My father is not a good person,” she finally felt compelled to explain, breaking the silence. ”That's why I was rude. I didn't know he would be here tonight, I thought he was out of town.”

Neither Viv nor I was sure what to say. ”Your stepfather,” I finally clarified.

”What?” said Jasper.

”Your stepfather, you mean.”

”That's what I said.”

Viv turned to me. ”That's what she said.”

I didn't argue with them. I waited for Jasper to go on but instead, after several more minutes, she started to talk about when she had lived in Berlin with a man named Rudi, during the time when all the animals from the Berlin Zoo were running wild in the streets. One night, when Rudi was out, she had picked up the phone and started dialing numbers at random. She kept dialing until she reached someone who didn't hang up on her; they had s.e.x on the phone and a couple of nights later she called another number and did it again, and went on doing this for weeks until finally she got an American who lived in a nearby hotel. As with all the other numbers, she had just pulled this one out of the air, and then pulled out of the air a room number when the concierge answered. The American was shy, not at all sure what to say when she told him she wanted to take him in her mouth. He asked if she would wait while he closed the window shutters. On the phone his o.r.g.a.s.m was frightening and, for the sound of that frightening o.r.g.a.s.m, she called him back, always around the same time of the evening until, finally, he insisted he would no longer do it on the telephone. There and then, by sheer impulse, she agreed to meet him in the most anonymous of circ.u.mstances: she would go to a hotel the next night and take a room, and call him from the room with the name of the hotel and the room number, and leave the door unlocked for him, with all the lights off. They would say nothing to each other. He would f.u.c.k her and then they would leave, first one, then the other. And that, Jasper said, is exactly what happened. When she called him the next night, from a hotel not far from his, he answered the phone without saying a word; a little less than an hour later, waiting for him in the dark naked on the hotel bed, she heard the door open and shut, followed by his approach. Never saying a word, nothing but a dark form, he waited by the side of the bed as she unbuckled his pants and slipped him into her mouth, and just when she could feel he was about to come, she turned on her hands and knees and knelt before him, and reached behind her and put him inside her. As he was f.u.c.king her, she realized she was going to leave Rudi. ”There was no doubt in my mind,” Jasper said, ”that I would rather feel the hands and c.o.c.k of a complete stranger than Rudi's dead heart for another single minute. When I cried out I could feel his excitement. He was a beast, of course-I could have told that from the wound in his voice on the phone. But you know, when the heart is broken and the dream is gone, annihilation is delicious. All I really wanted was to feel whether his o.r.g.a.s.m was as frightening as it sounded on the telephone.”

”Was it?” Viv said.

”No.”

”How do you know,” I said, swallowing hard, ”that it was the same man?”

For the first time since I had known her, Jasper seemed profoundly bewildered. ”What?”

”The same man as the one you talked to on the phone.”

”What do you mean?” she said. Viv looked confused too.

”How do you know the man in the room was the same as the man on the phone-?”

”How do I know it was the same man?” The question almost incensed her.