s when I wasn’t crying or feeling sad or happy, I just felt alive and I knew that Jack was alive and although there was a kind of theatrical backdrop to everything, as if it were all some pleasant, innocent, even decorous farce, I knew it was real and worthwhile, and then I put my head in the crook of his neck and fell asleep. One day around midday Jack turned up while we were shooting. I was on all fours, sucking Bull Edwards while Shane Bogart sodomized me. At first I didn’t realize that Jack had come onto the set, I was concentrating; it’s not easy to groan with an eight-inch dick moving back and forth in your mouth; I know really photogenic girls who lose it as soon as they start a blow job, they look terrible, maybe because they’re too into it, but I like to keep my face looking good. So my mind was on the job and, anyway, because of the position I was in, I couldn’t see what was happening around me, while Bull and Shane, who were on their knees, but upright, heads raised, they saw that Jack had just come in, and their cocks got harder almost straightaway, and it wasn’t just Bull and Shane who reacted, the director, Randy Cash, and Danny Lo Bello and his wife and Robbie and Ronnie and the technicians and everyone, I think, except for the cameraman, Jacinto Ventura, who was a bright, cheerful kid and a true professional, he literally couldn’t take his eyes off the scene he was filming, everyone except for him reacted in some way to Jack’s unexpected presence, and a silence fell over the set, not a heavy silence, not the kind that foreshadows bad news, but a luminous silence, so to speak, the silence of water falling in slow motion, and I sensed the silence and thought it must have been because I was feeling so good, because of those beautiful California days, but I also sensed something else, something indecipherable approaching, announced by the rhythmic bumping of Shane’s hips on my butt, by Bull’s gentle thrusting in my mouth, and then I knew that something was happening on the set, though I didn’t look up, and I knew that what was happening involved and revolved around me; it was as if reality had been torn, ripped open from one end to the other, like in those operations that leave a scar from neck to groin, a broad, rough, hard scar, but I hung on and kept concentrating till Shane took his cock out of my ass and came on my butt and just after that Bull ejaculated on my face. Then they turned me over and I could see the expressions on their faces, they were very focused on what they were doing, much more than usual, and as they caressed me and said tender words, I thought, There’s something going on here, there must be someone from the industry on the set, some big fish from Hollywood, and Shane and Bull have realized, they’re acting for him, and I remember glancing sideways at the silhouettes surrounding us in the shadows, all still, all turned to stone — that was exactly what I thought, they’ve turned to stone, it must be a really important producer — but I kept quiet, I wasn’t ambitious the way Shane and Bull were, I think it has something to do with being European, we have a different outlook, but I also thought, Maybe it isn’t a producer, maybe an angel has come onto the set, and that was when I saw him. Jack was next to Ronnie, smiling at me. And then I saw the others: Robbie, the technicians, Danny Lo Bello and his wife, Jennifer Pullman, Margo Killer, Samantha Edge, two guys in dark suits, Jacinto Ventura, who wasn’t looking into the viewfinder, and it was only then that I realized he wasn’t filming anymore, and for a second or a minute we all froze, as if we’d lost the capacity to speak and move, and the only one smiling (though he was quiet too) was Jack, whose presence seemed to sanctify the set, or that’s what I thought later, much later on, remembering that scene again and again: he seemed to be sanctifying our movie and our work and our lives. Then the minute came to an end, another minute began, someone said it was a wrap, someone brought bathrobes for Bull and Shane and me, Jack came over and gave me a kiss; I wasn’t in the other scenes they were shooting that day, so I said let’s go and have dinner in an Italian restaurant, I’d heard about one on Figueroa Street, and Robbie invited us to a party that one of his new business partners was throwing; Jack seemed reluctant but I convinced him in the end. So we went back to my place in the Alfa Romeo and talked and drank whiskey for a while, and then we went out to dinner and at about eleven we turned up at the party. Everyone was there and they all knew Jack or came over to be introduced to him. And then Jack and I went to his place and watched TV in the living room — there was a silent movie on — and kissed until we fell asleep. He didn’t come back to the set. I had another week’s work there, but I’d already decided to stay in Los Angeles for a while after the end of the shoot. Of course I had commitments in Italy and France, but I thought I could put them off, or I thought I’d be able to convince Jack to come with me; he’d been to Italy a number of times, he’d made some movies with La Cicciolina, which had been big hits — some with just me, and some with both of us; Jack liked Italy, so one night I told him what I was thinking. But I had to give up on that idea or hope, I had to wrench it out of my head and heart, or out of my cunt, as the women say back in Torre del Greco, and although I never completely gave up, somehow I understood Jack’s reluctance or his stubbornness, the luminous, fresh, honey-slow silence surrounding him and his few words, as if his tall thin figure were vanishing, and all of California along with it; in spite of my happiness, my joy, or what until shortly before I had thought of as happiness and joy, he was going, and I understood that his departure or farewell was a kind of solidification: strange, oblique, almost secret, but still a solidification, and the understanding, the certainty (if that’s what it was) made me happy and yet at the same time it made me cry, it made me keep fixing my eye make-up and made me see everything differently, as if I had X-ray vision, and that power or superpower made me nervous, but I liked it too; it was like being Marvilla, the daughter of the Queen of the Amazons, although Marvilla had dark hair and mine is blonde, and one afternoon, in Jack’s yard, I saw something on the horizon, I don’t know what, clouds, a bird of some kind, a plane, and I felt a pain so strong I fainted and lost control of my bladder and when I woke up I was in Jack’s arms and I looked into his grey eyes and began to cry and didn’t stop crying for a long time. Robbie and Ronnie came to the airport to see me off along with Danny Lo Bello and his wife, who were planning to visit Italy in a few months’ time. I said good-bye to Jack at his bungalow in Monrovia. Don’t get up, I said, but he got up and came to the door with me. Be a good girl, Joannie, he said, and write me some time. I’ll call you, I said, it’s not the end of the world. He was nervous and forgot to put on his shirt. I didn’t say anything; I picked up my bag and put it on the passenger seat of the Alfa Romeo. I don’t know why I thought that when I turned back to look at him for the last time he’d be gone and the space he’d occupied next to the rickety little wooden gate would be empty, so fear made me delay that moment, it was the first time I’d felt afraid in Los Angeles (on that visit I mean; there’d been plenty of fear and boredom the other times) and I was annoyed to be feeling afraid, and I didn’t want to turn around until I had opened the door of the Alfa Romeo and was ready to get in and drive away fast, and when I did finally open the door, I turned and Jack was there, standing by the gate, watching me, and then I knew that everything was all right, and I could go. That everything was all wrong, and I could go. That everything was sorrow, and I could go. And while the detective watches me out of the corner of his eye (he’s pretending to look at the foot of the bed, but I know he’s looking at my legs, my long legs underneath the sheets) and talks about a cameraman who worked with Mancuso or Marcantonio, a certain R. P. English, poor Marcantonio’s second cameraman, I know that in some sense I’m still in California, on my last trip to California, although I didn’t know that at the time, and Jack is still alive and looking at the sky, sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet dangling in the water, in the void, the misty synthesis of our love and our separation. And what did this man called English do? I ask the detective. He would prefer not to answer, but faced with my steady gaze, he replies: Terrible things, and then he looks at the floor, as if it were forbidden to say those words in the Clinique Les Trapèzes, in Nîmes, as if I hadn’t been acquainted with some terrible things in my time. And at this point I could press him for more, but why spoil such a beautiful afternoon by obliging him to tell what would surely be a sad story. And anyway the photo he has shown me of the man presumed to be English is old and blurry, it shows a young man of twenty-something, and the English I remember was well into his thirties, maybe even over forty, a definite shadow, if you’ll pardon the paradox, a broken shadow; I didn’t pay much attention to him, although his features have remained in my memory: blue eyes, prominent cheekbones, full lips, small ears. But describing him like that gives a false impression. I met R. P. English on one of my many shoots around Italy, but his face receded into the shadows long ago. And the detective says, It’s all right, don’t worry, take your time, Madame Silvestri, at least you remember him, even that is useful, now I know for sure he’s not a ghost. And I’m tempted to tell him that we are all ghosts, that all of us have gone too soon into the world of ghost movies, but he’s a good man and I don’t want to hurt him, so I keep it to myself. Anyway, who’s to say he doesn’t already know?