“Can I still come and take lessons?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it would make us both unhappy.”
Sylvie went out of the room slowly, took off her ballet slippers slowly, put them in her bag slowly, all the time hoping that something would happen to keep her from leaving. Nothing did. She went outside, walked alone to a diner down the street and used a pay telephone to call her mother, then waited in a booth for her mother to arrive.
For a year after that, she did nothing except go to school and do her homework. She ate and she grew. In a very short time, she stopped looking like an emaciated child and began to acquire curves. She grew taller, had her first period. Her resentment and sense of grievance seemed to be what transformed her into a pretty young woman over six feet tall.
Sylvie glanced at Paul again. He was driving with his usual graceful aggression, cutting in and out among the other cars, never making the others nervous, never attracting attention from the police because his coordination seemed to make his speed justified. His driving was like his dancing. When they met, she had not danced for almost ten years.
She had graduated from high school in Van Nuys and gotten a job as a receptionist at a company that sold ceramic tiles for bathrooms and kitchens. She still went out with her high-school boyfriend, Mark Karsh. She had been in love with Mark Karsh from the age of sixteen. Mark Karsh had curly black hair and brown eyes that promised intelligence. Mark had decided not to go to college because he had an uncle who was a film editor. After graduation, the uncle drew heavily upon old friendships and got Mark a job at a company that used computers to make special effects for television shows. After a few days at work, Mark was shocked: He was expected to start at the very bottom of a strict hierarchy. All he had been given was a chance to learn difficult technical skills, and to prove himself by working harder and longer than he was paid to.
Sylvie accepted his complaint that his employers were exploiting him. If they had appreciated his true worth, then he would already have been promoted, and his real movie career would have begun. But after a few months, he still had not learned to operate the machines with any skill, and he had grown sullen and lazy, so he was fired. Sylvie paid for their dates while he searched unsuccessfully for a new position. Finally he accepted the job Sylvie had gotten him in the tile factory.
One night after about a year at the tile factory, Mark asked Sylvie out to an early dinner at Il Calamari. He said he was celebrating something that he wanted to be a surprise. She had always wanted to go there, and she had waited a long time for Mark to take her on a real date, where he invited her somewhere and drove her there and paid. All through dinner he teased her, refusing to tell her what the surprise was. After dinner he drove her to her apartment. She had thoughts of special new careers for Mark, and in unguarded moments, a vision of a ring for her.
Once inside, he told her the news. “You’re not going to believe this. When I was working at the digital-imaging studio, I met a few industry people. One of them was a guy named Al Molineri. He’s known in the business.” Mark was artful in the way he underplayed it. “He’s not a major player or something. He’s just a guy who has connections. He’s written a few scripts, done some editing, video and sound, produced a movie or two. He knew my uncle’s name and he introduced me to some other guys who can get a movie made. They liked me. While I was at it, I showed them your picture, too.”
She began to feel a difficulty in her breathing. He was keeping something back—no, keeping a lot back—and she was afraid she knew what some of it was. “What picture?”
“Well, just the one I carry in my wallet at first, but then a few other things.” He hurried past that topic and into his news. “They were really interested. They want to meet with us and put us in a movie.”
“What did you show them?”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember everything. What difference does it make? Didn’t you hear what I said? We’re going to be in a movie.”
“You showed them the pictures you took of me that time. The ones you said you would never let anyone see.” She began to cry.
He rolled his eyes. “We’ll both be stuck working all day every day in the fucking tile company for the rest of our lives unless we do something. I’m trying to give us a future.”
“It’s a porn movie!”
“There’s a love scene. There’s one in just about every movie. It’s nothing we haven’t done a million times, and nothing I’d be ashamed to have anyone see.”
“Then do it yourself with somebody else.”
“They want us both, not one of us. Both. Look, just come with me. We go to a restaurant tomorrow night, have dinner with them, and hear what they have to say. That’s all. If you think it’s a bad idea, we’ll say, ‘No, thanks.’”
They met the two producers at a coffee shop in Reseda that wasn’t too far from the part of Van Nuys where Sylvie had grown up. The producers were a man in his forties named Eddie Durant with a beard so short it just looked as though he had forgotten to shave, and a woman named Cherie Will. They were sitting together in a booth near the back drinking coffee and looking over a stack of papers from an open briefcase.
When Sylvie and Mark approached their booth, Eddie Durant didn’t stand up or shake hands, but Cherie Will smiled and reached across the table to each of them. She didn’t seem exactly attractive to Sylvie, because she was twice Sylvie’s age, and there were some wrinkles on her forehead and, oddly, her upper lip. Instead, she seemed athletic, with tight bulbous young breasts that were too high on her chest. She said, “Hi, sweetie” to Sylvie and called Mark “dude.”
Sylvie was fascinated by Cherie Will. Cherie looked into Sylvie’s eyes when she spoke. “Why don’t you two order something to eat?”
Sylvie and Mark ordered and ate, but all the waitress seemed to bring Eddie and Cherie was more coffee. Eddie said, “The story is that you’re a young housewife who has an argument with her husband before work in the morning.”
“Is that Mark?” Sylvie asked.
“No. Not sure who it is yet. But it’s another guy about your age. You get mad. You both go to work. You work in an office, as a receptionist.”
“I do. I really do.”
“Then it’s not a big stretch. This delivery boy, played by Mark, comes in. He’s delivering a box of paper or something. You like the look of him, so you offer to show him where the storeroom is. You take him in there, close the door, and have sex. Then you’ve gotten back at your husband, and you’re not mad anymore.”
Cherie smiled. “It’s an old, simple story, but it always works. Men have fantasies that the pretty receptionist will fuck them in the storeroom, and women have fantasies of getting even with their husbands by fucking the pretty delivery boy, who will appreciate them. I’ve been in that story about forty times myself, in some variation or other.”
Mark Karsh said, “How much would the gig pay?”
Eddie Durant said, “A thousand dollars each for one day’s shooting.” He smiled. “If you find you like the work and you’re good at it, the pay goes up. There’s a lot of work for people who can do it. The Valley is the adult-cinema capital of the world. About eighty percent of the adult features shown anywhere are shot within four miles of here.”
Mark looked at Sylvie, tried to fathom what she was thinking, but failed. “I think we have to talk about it first.”
“Okay. We shoot day after tomorrow at eight A.M. sharp. Call me by noon tomorrow.” He held out his hand and Mark shook it. As he and Sylvie walked up the aisle toward the front entrance, two women in their early twenties came in and stood in the entry, blocking their way out while they craned their necks looking for someone. Sylvie couldn’t help feeling jealous for a second. She instinctively moved closer to Mark and put her hand on his, even though she was furious at him.