Amnesiascope: A Novel (13 page)

“But wouldn’t it be better for a woman to read the lines?”

“Why would it better?” She threw up her hands. “No,
fine
. We’ll find a woman to read the lines.”

“All right, all right. I’ll read it.”

“I just thought it would be easier for Amy.”

“I’ll read the lines.”

“I think you should take your clothes off.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Amy is supposed to be a repressed painter, remember? You wrote it. Remember, she’s exploring her own psychological nakedness, through the physical nakedness of the model she paints? She’s
affronted
by that nakedness.”

“It’s a naked
woman
she’s affronted by.”

“I know it’s not ideal. …” Viv agreed.

“It’s not ideal?” I said. “Personally, I think it’s distinctly less than ideal. That’s just my own personal opinion, you understand. No, I would say we’re in agreement on this, that a naked man playing the part of a naked woman is not ideal. And somehow—I’ll grant you I’m biased on this—somehow the fact that
I’m
the naked man makes it
really
not ideal.”

“Yes, well,” Viv retorted, “I don’t have the
luxury
of
ideal
right now. You know, it’s not like you haven’t read with Amy before—you did at the casting session, if you’ll remember. She’ll be comfortable with you.”

“See, at the casting session?
I had my clothes on.
That was the big difference there. I’ll bet Amy is a lot more comfortable with my clothes on than my clothes off. Ask her.”

“Amy!” Seconds later Amy was at Viv’s side. “He’s going to read the lines with you so we can get your close-ups. Given that your character is supposed to be responding to a naked model when you hear these lines, doesn’t it make perfect sense that he should take all his clothes off?”

“Absolutely,” said Amy.

“I just thought,” Viv turned back to me, “you wanted this movie to be good. I thought you cared as much about it as I did. Don’t you think I’d be very happy right now to have an actress who could play Jasper without falling apart? Don’t you think, at this point, I’d even be happy with Catwoman, for God’s sake? But I don’t have a Jasper or a Catwoman, what I have is you. I don’t imagine Catwoman would hesitate two seconds to take her clothes off.”

“I’m sure Catwoman wouldn’t,” I said bitterly. “If she had bothered to show up, I mean.”

“I have no more time,” Viv calmly answered, as though explaining the sunshine to a three-year-old. She spun on her heels again. “Think about it a minute and let me know what you decide, so I can tell everyone whether they should just go home and I can figure out how I’m going to give Veroneek back her money.”

That was her crowning blow, because she knew that in the end I was incapable of letting her down. Christ, if the Cabal ever hears about this I’m cooked, was all I could think thirty minutes later on the model’s platform. Around me was a great flurry of activity and preparation. The crew bustled with heavily suppressed hilarity; they couldn’t wait for me to finish so they could all explode with laughter. Only Amy, focused as ever, never cracked a smile. In my mind I kept going back to the beginning, to the night Viv first proposed this project. I don’t think it occurred to me then that I would wind up naked in this movie. In fact, I’m sure I had it in my head that it was
other
people who would wind up naked in this movie. Action! Viv barked behind the camera and, behind her canvas, Amy asked, “Where does he touch you?”

“Under my breast,” I sighed, “below my nipple.”

“Which one?” said Amy.

“The left.” Out of the corner of my eye I was watching everyone around me. Everyone around me was looking not at me or Amy but the ground and their feet, trying to contain themselves; the only sound I heard was snickering, a solitary chortle from back in the shadows of the set. After a moment I realized it was Niles. It was Niles snickering and a certain peace came over me, because now I knew that in a few seconds I was going to kill him, just as I had been wanting to do, and it would make everything worth it. Thinking about it now I was glad I was naked, because it would just make Niles’ demise all that much more humiliating, to be throttled in front of all these people by a naked man. “When his hands are raised to my breast,” I went on, “you know … he’s exposed to me. He’s disarmed.”

“Disarmed?”

“Like in the gangster movies, when the bad guy puts his hands in the air.”

“Or the good guy sometimes.”

“Or the good guy.”

“Is he the good guy or the bad guy?”

“He’s the good guy when I’m the bad guy.” Later it would occur to me that this was one of those common primal dreams, to be die only one naked in a room full of people. I don’t remember what it’s supposed to mean, beyond the obvious sense of exposure and vulnerability; and I certainly don’t know what it meant that in this dream I was not only naked but in the role of a naked woman, talking to another woman about which breast I preferred having touched. Interestingly, as we did take after take, moving on from one section of dialogue to the next, everyone else on the set fell away from my consciousness and I became lost in what Amy was saying and what I was saying, until I had almost forgotten that my voice would not be on the film at all, that nothing of me would be on the film, that I would have been only the ghost who revealed himself, herself, whatever my self was at this moment, for the sake of the look on the face of that person who witnessed my revelation. At this moment, everything and everyone else was exposed to me. I was free of the threat or possibility of any further exposure, as naked on the outside as I was inside, and everyone cowered before me, prisoners of their pride and secrets.

But later, going over the footage and looking at Jasper’s scenes on the monitor, Viv and I both noticed something right off. Mid-air, between her nervous breakdown on the set and the image caught by the camera lens, Jasper transformed into the woman I met at the Feverish—the spellbinding eyes, the vague German accent and strange stillborn smile. … The effect was electrifying. “Jeez,” Viv shook her head, unabashedly infatuated, “she
makes
the movie.” She called Jasper into the network a few days later to overdub some lines, and for the next week Jasper was all Viv could talk about.

I think it was mostly Viv’s obsession with Jasper that gave us the idea for the party. In order to coax Jasper into her lair, Viv decided to have a Nude Artists Ball on Halloween at the Bunker. We would invite all of Viv’s friends, painters and sculptors and photographers and curators, plus some of my pals and their various women and wives, plus Veroneek and Joe and the crew who worked on
White Whisper
, and the other actresses and maybe even a select few of the auditioners, the Chinese lesbians perhaps, and perhaps Sahara and some of the girls from the Cathode Flower. Hell, we might even invite Catwoman and then tie her to the floor and stand around spilling wine and tequila on her and eating hors d’oeuvres off her body. Viv created invitations out of parchment and feathers and foil, drawing an elaborate image of a genie emerging from a pod with stupendous, dripping breasts like Jasper’s, and a penis I had the funny feeling I’d seen somewhere before, ejaculating a blue pool that bled around the card’s edges. It was left to me to write the announcement. But going over it in my mind it occurred to me I wasn’t sure how many of these particular people I really wanted to see nude, even at a Nude Artists Ball; the Cabal, for instance, I felt reasonably certain I didn’t want to see any of them nude, whereas I kind of liked the idea of Niles—invited in the first place only out of deference to Lydia, whose bottom was tattooed with his name after all—turning out to be the only person at the ball who was nude. So I made some adjustments in the invitations, customizing them, so to speak.

The closer the party got, the more elaborate it became. Viv’s loft didn’t need a lot of extra ambiance, given the metal coffins and pyramids and mannequins and dead bugs on the walls, but she unpacked an exotic array of artifacts anyway from her various travels: masks and dolls and strange figurines from Africa and South America and the Middle East. Overcoming her dread of even imaginary spiders, she draped makeshift webs from one corner of the ceiling to the next. On the monitor intercut with Network Vs. broadcasts was an ongoing montage of
Metropolis
and
Vampyr
and
Kiss Me Deadly
, Louise Brooks and Val Lewton movies, outtakes from
White Whisper
and selected blasts from the Cinema of Hysteria; and in the center of the room, on a low glass table, burned a huge candle, which was actually the once-melted, twisted mutation of many candles. By Halloween night we had turned the whole Bunker into a maze, confiscating the bulbs from the light fixtures and throwing the corridors into blackness, extending the winding passages into the loft so that if people took one turn they wound up on the main level and if they took another they wound up on the upper platform looking down. Not intelligent enough to become truly confused, the first person actually to make it all the way through to the end of the maze was the dim little eighteen-year-old half of the Chinese lesbian couple. Three minutes of social intercourse confirmed she had the vocabulary of a parrot and enough brains to fill a shot glass. The other lesbian was lost somewhere on the Bunker’s second floor; all night we heard her distant screams. “You’re getting closer!” someone would shout into the passage every now and then, just for the sheer hell of it.

People arrived in baffled, agitated bursts, spewed from the Bunker’s concrete aqueducts in general states of dishevelment. It was hugely entertaining to watch them tumble in on top of each other, snapping and snarling like trapped dogs. The women were in varying degrees of nakedness, costumed as leopards or birds or in nothing more than a striking shade of blue or white champagne and glitter. Some of the more brazen men wore only cod pieces while a few were in evening attire, escorting nymphs on their arms. Viv was resplendent in nothing but white stockings and white shoes; I wore my black boxer shorts with the dancing orange skulls and a green D’Artagnan hat with a purple feather. In his hat and boots the only thing different about Ventura’s usual appearance was the look on his face that said, Now will somebody please explain to me what the fuck I’m doing here? Per my plan, the only completely naked man was Niles, arriving as bare as the day he was born. Dangling obliviously, and eagerly scanning the room for Amy Brown, he didn’t have the sense to be mortified; rather he had about him the air of someone who couldn’t believe the dumb luck of all these women that there should be one singularly naked man for them and it was him.

One of Jasper’s thighs was blurting across the monitor when she arrived in person. Taking her cue from Viv’s drawing on the invitation, and perhaps recognizing the inspiration of her own breasts, she came as the genie herself, completely bare in a deep bronze tint with a huge phallus strapped to her that waved wildly from her pubic hair, which was dyed white like the hair on her head. Her eyes were made up to accentuate their light, and her lips were a metallic blue. Behind her was a guy in a loincloth and turban whose ankles were bound by chains and who lugged behind him, on another chain, a huge papier-mâché lamp from which a genie presumably could emerge. I have no idea how they got the lamp up through the Bunker corridors. I couldn’t help wondering if this was the guy who wound up bound to his bed the night Jasper went barhopping, assuming Jasper’s story at the Feverish was true or that she had ever really been there at all; he had on his face the look of a man who has been down at the bottom of a deep amniotic shaft so long and is so dazed and dithering from the experience that the only thing he can imagine anymore is returning there. At any rate, the entrance made a big impression. Where Jasper stopped in the middle of the room the temperature rocketed twenty degrees, and everyone stared, not knowing whether to swarm over her like Bolivian jungle ants or back away cowering from her as some kind of unholy vision of sex. Instead they rushed to the refrigerator and gulped down the pitchers of tequila I had laced with cognac.

After this the only two things that could happen to the ball was that everyone would clear out altogether or explode in a drunken frenzy, and since people were too transfixed by Jasper to navigate their way back down through the Bunker, and we could still hear the cries and thuds of the other Chinese lesbian trying to grope her way toward us, a drunken frenzy it was. The party became a night-long din of breaking glass and shattering lights and ripping fabric and bodies hurtling from the overhanging loft. Several times in all the blind inebriated confusion I considered weaving my way over to Niles and giving him a good kick in the nuts. At one point someone got the idea of hauling the huge centerpiece candle up to the rooftop and casting it to the street below, and so the whole party became a caravan staggering its way up through the Bunkers pitch-black arteries to the overhanging night, from where we could see in the distance the freeway bonfires and dark Magritte ocean slowly rolling in toward the city. Off the side of the building went the candle in a streak of fire, its flame flickering valiantly all the way to the bottom, where it smashed and erupted in a white rain of wax.

I turned from the rooftops edge to look right into Jaspers eyes as she stood behind me. In the moonlight her hair and lips and eyes and phallus glimmered, and she took my hand to lead me with the others back down through the Bunker to Viv’s loft. When she pulled me past Viv’s doorway, deeper into the black halls toward the bottom of the building, I tried to pull back: “Wait,” I said, because I didn’t want to go without Viv, especially with Jasper. But she fastened her grip on me. I couldn’t see her or anyone or anything else before or behind me. At the bottom of the building the door opened and we emerged onto the street where I found, to my mystification, that it was not Jasper attached to my hand but Viv—“What …?” was all I could start to say; I looked over my shoulder to see that Jasper had somehow wound up behind me. Her slave was nowhere in sight, having tangled his chains on a drainpipe up on the roof. Let’s go to my place, Jasper suggested. Let’s go, Viv agreed. We could still hear from the third floor of the Bunker the noise of the party along with the stray cries of the lost Chinese lesbian who, on our way up and down, must have passed through us like a ghost.