“Hey, not there,” Vicky screams, next to her. Katherine turns her head but cannot see what Vicky is complaining about to Maurice, or the other man. She’s no longer sure who is doing what to whom.
After all the fun and games are over, the two women wash themselves out in the adjoining bathroom. Katherine watches the men’s seed mingle in the tub with the soapy water, as it seeps, on and on from her body as she squats over the bathtub.
“Well, that was quite fun,” Vicky remarks, adjusting her make-up in front of the bathroom mirror.
They leave the Mirage together and become friends. But they never have sex together again. “I prefer men,” Vicky tells her one morning when Katherine, curious, questions her. “Anyway, your heart wasn’t in it. You’re not truly bi.”
When the cash runs out, Vicky helps her get a job in a peep show on the wrong side of town, where she herself does the occasional shift when funds are short. The money’s good and the security guys see to it that there’s no funny business. Six hours a day, Katherine sits in a cubicle in diaphanous lingerie, while men open the door to enter the other side of the closet, a glass window separating them. There is a telephone to communicate between the two areas. For five dollars, the men get three minutes during which she strips and follows their utterly predictable instructions. They are without surprises. They ask her to touch herself. Breasts. Pussy. Sometimes even feet. For an extra ten dollars, which they can insert through a hand-sized aperture in the glass partition, she will spread her legs wide and open her vulva to their gaze, for an extra twenty, she will even insert a flesh-coloured dildo inside her cunt and pretend to masturbate. Invariably, they all lower their trousers to jerk off. An attendant has to wipe the come off the glass partition and sweep the floor with disinfectant every fifteen minutes or so. When rent day approaches, Vicky teaches her a new trick, which is strictly speaking not allowed, but where the management operate a blind eye policy. For another fifty dollars, she will also allow the guy to thread his hand through the opening and paw her. One day, one man goes too far and scratches her badly. Katherine gives up the job and packs her meagre belongings. There are too many books, all used, read a few times each already, too much to carry. Vicky says she’ll join her. They leave Las Vegas and head for the Coast.
Katherine is waitressing at the bar of a big hotel near LAX. Randy businessmen make half-hearted passes, but don’t seem too disappointed when she politely turns them down. She’s not the Angeleno type. The tips aren’t too good and the hours are long and awkward. She still lives with Vicky; they share a small apartment in a block near Pacific Palisades. Vicky sometimes disappears for days on end. Katherine never asks where she has been. There are often marks on her body. One morning as she surprises her in the shower, Katherine sees that the small American woman now sports a snake tattoo weaving its way down from her navel to her bush. Christ, that must have been fucking painful, she thinks. Another time, she sees a bad scar on Vicky’s rump. Deliberate. Burnt into the flesh. They are seldom together at the apartment any more. Waitressing and sex work hours seldom coincide.
It’s Katherine’s day off. Big plans for today; she’s going to lounge by the communal pool and finally start Proust. She’s been putting it off for years. And next, she’s planning on Dostoevsky. She’s always been meaning to fill these gaps in her literary culture.
She lies in bed, vaguely daydreaming as always of the men she has left behind. Does she still love, miss, think of them? She just doesn’t know any longer. Vicky walks in. She looks rough.
“Hi, Kate? Got the day off, hey?”
“Yes.”
“Listen. I badly need a favour,” she says. “I’m feeling damn rotten. My period has started and I’m in pain all over. But I’ve been paid in advance for a job today. Can you go there instead?”
“What sort?” Katherine enquires.
“A film.”
“Nudity?” Katherine asks.
“Yeah, of course. But if you ask, they won’t show your face. There are lotsa other girls involved, so they won’t mind.”
Vicky runs to the bathroom where she is promptly sick. She returns, awfully pale and tense. She nervously insists. “Please, I just can’t face it today. Be a pal. Please.”
Katherine acquiesces. She’s stripped before. Never before a camera, though. And she likes Vicky in a quiet, affectionate way.
Vicky books a cab for the afternoon. It’s a villa in the Hollywood Hills. She bargains with the producers.
“It’s all fixed. He even said that if you’re real glamorous, you could get a bonus. I told him you’re incredibly tall and have wild hair. He was very excited. You’ll have to doll yourself up a bit. Here,” she extracts a note from her handbag. “Fifty bucks, buy yourself something special at the mall, something nice. You English gals have so much taste.”
Katherine spends it all, and more, at Victoria’s Secret, where the lingerie is supposed to be English but comes from somewhere in Ohio or thereabouts, she read in a magazine. The underwear is slinky, the silk glistens, she knows how easily she could become a serious silk fetishist with stuff like this. She could spend a fortune on underwear alone. A black slip that adheres to her body through the sheer force of gravity, a pair of knickers, more like a thong, the sheer fabric dissecting her bum cheeks and enhancing the drop of her wide hips. A brassiere that hooks up at the back like a corset. Stockings as soft as flesh. In the cubicle, she looks at her body in the mirror. She feels the onset of wetness between her thighs. God, I’m such a slut.
The villa has white walls, most of the furniture has been moved out the main room, and its windows open up on a large pool outside. They’re already filming there when she arrives. A brassy, artificial blonde stands inside, the water lapping around her waist, her breasts are large and unnatural. A silicone job, no doubt. A tubby guy sits on the edge and she is sucking his cock with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, while the camera peers into the action in close-up. The cameraman is incredibly hairy and wears only Bermuda shorts. Out of camera range, two other couples lounge around, some nude, others with towels around their waist. She recognizes one of the men. It’s Steve; Esteban, from Miami.
He sees and waves.
“Hey, if it isn’t English Eddie?”
She acknowledges his presence with a silent gesture.
The peroxide blonde in the pool changes position with the man and he starts sucking on her genitals, once the cameraman has changed his film. Her pubes are also peroxide blonde. The straw yellow patch seems so damn wrong. A young guy, who looks more like a student, but is actually the director, shouts out:
“Come on, give it some more life. You’re supposed to be enjoying it.”
The porno actor ignores him and chews away impassively.
Finally, “Cut. Let’s move on to another scene. Everybody’s here. The whole cast. Orgy time, kids.”
She’s asked to strip. They won’t even let her wear the new lingerie. A female assistant powders her thigh to hide a small bruise, then moves on to another one of the women who spreads her thighs open and instructs the gofer to powder over the pimples spreading like a rash around her cunt.
The director orders them to spread out in a daisy chain by the pool side. She’s asked to fellate the guy in front of her as he lies on his back and Steve rams her from behind and the peroxide blonde from the previous sequence licks out his arsehole and fingers his balls while he moves in and out of Katherine.
One fleeting moment, she imagines her husband out on the town with a group of other journalists and friends, maybe tomorrow his brother the architect is getting married; they have a meal in Chinatown, cruise the pubs getting increasingly drunker and land in some Soho film club to watch dirty movies. He recognizes her cunt, and is sick as he is forced to watch the alien penis invade her private sanctum in larger than life dimensions. Which is how he must have felt when he had learned of her cheating. The hurt.