For the rest of the wretched evening, he wanted only to go home, to sit in bed and drink. But when he got home he found he was too agitated to do that. He paced the King Farouk Room, thinking of every affected, self-indulgent, obnoxious thing Nicki had ever said. He reflected how his foolish love had blinded him to her offensive personality. He thought of how true it was that the pushiest, most vulgar people always rose to the top. He imagined hitting her. He imagined mashing a grapefruit in her face.
His eyes fell on his screenplay. He threw it across the room. He stood staring after it for a long moment. Had there been a movie camera trained on his face, it would have recorded an expression of pernicious ingenuity dawning, then slowly spreading from feature to feature. He sat down before his computer and began to type. He typed until three in the morning.
He was awakened the following day by the clicking answering machine and then by Nicki’s voice leaving a long, scattershot message.
He got up, made coffee, and returned to his computer.
A few days later she called again, but he was screening his calls. As he listened to her voice, he gave the machine a loud, farting raspberry. As if she’d heard it, she stopped calling, although there were several hang-up calls during the following week. He wasn’t interested in talking to her. He had developed a much more satisfying relationship with the tiny Nicki cavorting across the pages of his new screenplay.
The screenplay had started as an exorcism of his demeaning anger and had become, on the same night, a serious idea. Nicki was a perfect heroine: capricious, sexually manipulative, ambitious, charming, ruthless. She tripped girlishly over the hearts of maddened men while prattling quintessential nineties sentiments. She was a waitress moonlighting as a hooker until she clawed her way into the film business by sleeping with the right people. She slept with men who would enhance her profile and then cast them aside. She slept with women, leaked stories of their lingerie-clad romps to the press for titillation value, and then cast them aside. She capitalized on her incestuous relationship with her uncle by discussing it on talk shows until the frantic fellow shot himself. She was eventually forced to be the sex slave of the cruel editor of a scandal magazine, who was holding over her head an embarrassing kiss and tell written by one of her male victims. That was only the start of her disastrous decline, during which she repented but too late.
Factually the character bore little relationship to the real Nicki, except that he used her favorite jokes, mannerisms, and sayings, and quoted verbatim from private conversations they had had, most notably about Lana and about the pedophile uncle. He would not have thought she was recognizable. But when he finished the first draft and showed it to a friend who worked at the restaurant, the guy called him after reading the first ten pages and said, “Is this Nicki?”
He titled it Kiss and Tell.
He stuck it in a drawer and took it out a month later. He was shocked at how good it was. He had never written anything this good in his life. It rattled him to think his first belated triumph had sprung from sheer vindictiveness; he stuck it back in the drawer. He started another screenplay but was distracted by persistent day-dreams of Nicki playing scenes from Kiss and Tell, particularly the one where the heroine is sodomized by the nasty magazine editor.
He didn’t look at the script again until the first promotional posters for Queen of Night appeared. He saw them when he was returning home from work late one night; they were freshly glued to the rotting side of a cheap men’s-clothing store. Nicki’s face was not on it, but to him it might as well have been. He stood and stared at the poster, while the wind blew plastic bags and candy wrappers about his ankles.
The next morning he reread Kiss and Tell and felt a certain psychic prickling. He decided to send it to a film agent whom he’d met eight years before. As he put it in the mail, he felt the faint nausea that always accompanied his attempts to accomplish something.
Queen of Night opened. He didn’t see it, but he religiously read the reviews. They were mixed about the movie but unanimous in their praise for the “incandescent” performance of “sex imp” Nicki Piastrini. He smiled in spite of himself when he read them. He wanted to call and congratulate her. He did call once but hung up when she answered. He spent an evening at a bar, trying to revive his feelings of anger toward her, and realized that he hadn’t thought of her with passion for some time. He felt sad, then began to flirt with the girl behind the bar.
Early one morning his phone machine clicked on. He’d turned the volume down the night before and he was half asleep, so he was only barely aware of a voice leaving quite a long message. He dimly imagined that it was Nicki; he thought he might return her call when he got up, then he went back to sleep. When he woke and played the tape, he was stunned to hear the confident voice of the film agent. Kiss and Tell, he said, was wonderful. Could Lesly call him back as soon as possible?
Then he was in the agent’s office. If he’d worn a hat he would’ve wrung it in his hands. The agent looked at him as if he respected him. In fact, he looked as if people he respected came and sat in his office every day. Lesly felt disoriented and sick. The agent sat back in his chair as if everything were okay.
“I’m not a person who gushes, typically,” said the agent, “but I’ll tell you honestly I haven’t clicked like this with a script for a long time. I could literally see the scenes before my eyes. I could see what the actors looked like. I actually have somebody in mind for the lead. But first things first.”
The next few weeks were a jumble. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t eat. He would tell people about the agent and feel his face in conflicted expressions of happiness and fright. He called Nicki three times and hung up on her machine. He called his parents, and the shocked pride in their voices almost made him weep.
The agent was right. He sold the screenplay within weeks, to a director Lesly had heard of since adolescence. Lesly went into the agent’s office to sign the contract, and the agent talked to him about going to Los Angeles to meet the director. Lesly nodded dumbly.
“By the way,” said the agent, “remember I mentioned to you that there’s an actress who I think is perfect for the lead? I’m having a colleague of mine show her the script. Have you seen Queen of Night?”
He flew to Los Angeles the next day. The trip was a series of disconnected still frames out of which popped various animated heads. An escort of palm trees flanked his car trips through each different frame. Bright, winking signs called out to him, doors opened to reveal great expanses of rug and mahogany. Everywhere, people in uniforms wanted to bring him and his friends—smiling men in suits—alcohol, coffee, or snacks. He sat in the sunken tub of his hotel bathroom, drinking Scotch, listening to MTV, and thinking how odd it was to find himself an accessory to all the jokes he’d made about the grossness and vulgarity of Los Angeles. He felt a little hypocritical, but he knew Los Angeles didn’t mind. It knew it was a joke and a face-lift and didn’t try to hide it, and therein, he thought as he swigged, therein lay its charm. In L. A., writing a script called Kiss and Tell about a kiss and tell that was an honest-to-God kiss and tell was only one more kooky face appearing in one more frame, the frame of outraged Nicki reading the script, a great punch line underscored by pop music.