The crew was still setting up equipment, so with the costume on, I found the craft service table and stood there, drinking lukewarm coffee. Without the weight of clothes I felt light and springy, and because the bodysuit was so snug I was practically nude. Instead of a monster, I felt like a superhero, like Superman or Spider-Man, and when I looked around the warehouse I imagined looking for an evil deed that would need a superhero’s assistance. The warehouse itself was a large open room with lights and several cameras facing a wall covered with blue paper. The images would be shot against this blue screen, and later, when the blue was removed, the images could be placed in whatever context the producers wanted.
The director, whose name was Auggie, patted my back, felt my arm muscles, and told me I was going to be a great monster. “What kind of monster am I?” I asked him, but he was already busy talking to a grip or a lighting person, and when the set was ready I was told to stand in front of the blue wall and then walk back and forth. “In a particular way?” I said, and Auggie told me to crouch, and then to look around as if I was hunting for something. We did this for a while, until the actress came into the room. Her name was Erin, and I could see she was an actress because she was attractive like an actress. Plus, she was the only other person in a bodysuit. We were twins except her bodysuit was white and shimmering, and where I had a cap, she had her hair uncovered. I could see in her long blond hair the electronic wafers that would indicate the action of the strands of her hair.
I was the monster, and my main job was to carry her. When the director told me to lift her up in my arms I nodded to her and she nodded to me and I held her, one arm under her knees and one arm under her back. And because there weren’t any townspeople or houses, just the two of us against the blue wall, there was nothing to take my attention away from her, and because my nose wasn’t covered I could smell her. She smelled good. Her bodysuit covered her completely, but because it closely conformed to the contours of her body, I couldn’t help think, or imagine at least, that she was naked. The lights were bright on her bodysuit, and I didn’t want to stare, but there were her breasts, among other things, clearly defined. And the director was telling me to see her, like King Kong would see her, as a prize I’d just taken away. She was my treasure, he told me, and my love, and so I looked at her as if she was a prize, a prize I deserved, a sexual prize even. I was looking at her, thinking a monster would look at everything, at the cleft in her chin, at her ribs sticking out, at her stomach and the indentations in the fabric made by her pubic hair. Because I was holding her up, I had a view of her abdominal muscles. I could see her belly going in and out, and although she wasn’t what you’d call a large-boned girl, she wasn’t petite either, and after a while I was beginning to feel a tension, in my arms, but mainly in my back. And this sensation of tension gradually turned into a sensation of pain, in a spot right about where a bra strap would have been. I tried accepting the pain, or tried trying to accept, hoping that with acceptance the pain would lose its meaning, or at least its old meaning, but the pain must have seen through my trick because it didn’t go away.
At one point I expressed an interest in taking a break, but I was told the camera person, who always seemed to be in the middle of a shot, was in the middle of a shot, so I never got a break. I was feeling what I called pain, and I knew one way to forestall pain was to find a distraction, and there I was, trying to hold this woman in my arms, looking at her nipples poking through the thin material, and that was certainly a distraction, and the pain partially went away, but what took its place was arousal. I realized I was getting an erection. And the thing was, the erection didn’t feel like mine. And of course I wanted it to go away, but as Erin got heavier in my arms, and as she started slipping down my body, the arousal started to intensify. I was reaching down under her body, trying to get a better purchase on her, finding some place I could grip, and the heavier she got, the lower she slid down my bodysuit, and the lower she slid, the more excited my body, which didn’t seem like my body, became. She was hanging in my arms, and I don’t think the camera could see any telltale bulge in my costume, but if she slipped down any lower she would feel the bulge. “I love and hate, and if you ask me why, who knows? I feel it done to me, and I’m torn in two.” That’s Catullus, the Roman poet, and I think I knew what he meant because I wanted to put her down. And I suppose I could have done that. I could have said, “I have to let go,” and let her slip out of my arms, but the bulge had a mind of its own. So I held her right where she was. And the more I held her where she was, the more my back was aching, and there was a battle between my aching back and my aching prick, between putting her down or holding her there, and between the two of them I didn’t dare move. I was stuck, and half of the experience was agony and half of it was pleasure, and because of the pleasure I didn’t let go of the agony.
In almost any experience there’s usually a little agony and usually a little pleasure, and the problem is, happiness is something else. Happiness is a state containing both pleasure and agony, a state that accepts and encompasses and transforms the whole range of experience, and when I called Jane the following afternoon, happiness was what I thought I wanted.
“Do you want to do something?” I said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Where are you?” I could hear sounds of traffic on her end of the conversation.
“I’m fine.”
“Where are you?” I said.
She was running errands down on Fairfax somewhere, and I told her where I was, at Alan’s house.
Alan had gone away for the day and I was housesitting, taking a break from my room at the Metropole. Since Alan had a reasonably nice kitchen I was going to use it. I was going to make tacos, homemade tongue tacos, and because Jane liked tongue tacos, I invited her over.
And I don’t know if it was the idea of tacos, or the plaintive tone in my voice, but she said she would stop by later. Alan lived in Santa Monica, so I had some time.
I went to several stores to get the various ingredients, boiled the tongue and took off the white coat of skin that covered the taste buds. I set the table with a linen tablecloth, fresh tortillas, Mexican beer, and I put out bowls of lime and cilantro and chopped tomatoes. I fried the tongue in one of Alan’s frying pans, getting it good and salty and flavorful, and when Jane arrived we ate the tacos and drank the beer, and the tacos were excellent and the beer was good and everything was fine except for one thing.
No. That’s wrong.
Everything was fine.
Love is all you need. That’s what the Beatles sang, and I wanted to believe it. I wanted to imagine love, to say yes to love, to tell Jane I loved her and mean it. And I might have been able to do all that except for one thing. Steve.
After we ate, we sat on a sofa underneath a window, lying back on the soft cushions, and I said, “Do you want to watch a movie?” Alan had a large collection of movies.
“We could watch a movie,” she said. But she could tell, I think, that we weren’t going to watch a movie.
We had developed a habit, and part of the habit included the habit of Steve. It was a habit linked in my mind — and hers too probably — with closeness and warmth and physical attraction, and it was a fine habit as far as it went, and because it was all we knew, we started doing it, together, going through the motions, pretending that what we used to have still existed. At a certain point she leaned back on the sofa, raised her hands over her head, and almost without thinking I rolled on top of her and we started kissing. When we started taking off our clothes it all seemed very natural. When she pulled down her tights and I took off my various shirts and she unbuttoned the buttons of her print dress, it all seemed normal enough, and normally when we put our mouths together she enjoyed it, and she would have enjoyed it now except the mouth that used to be there wasn’t there. It wasn’t Steve’s mouth anymore, and that was the problem. We had drifted apart, not for lack of affection, but for lack of Steve. I wasn’t being Steve, and maybe she realized it, or maybe she expected it. Whatever it was didn’t matter, just like the conversation didn’t matter, or how we sat on Alan’s overstuffed blue sofa didn’t matter, because what mattered happened on the bed.