Passing Through the Flame (16 page)

“Try me. What do you have to lose?”

Billy looked up, straight at Horst, those huge limpid bedroom eyes filled with tears. Something about those eyes stirred queasy churnings in Horst. He remembered the third or fourth girl he had ever had, the first he had really cared about. Those were her eyes after the first and only time they had made love. They were also the eyes of a boy he had known in camp when he was eleven; Teddy had played second base on the camp team, and he had played short. The closeness carried on off the field. The juxtaposition of memories recalled by the trigger of Billy Lee’s eyes was upsetting enough; the fact that he and Mildred had hardly made love at all in the past two months filled him with frustrated sexual energy that could be triggered these past few weeks by a well-turned doorknob.

“My problem is... is... is sex, Mr. Horst. I think about it all of the time.”

The words jolted Horst into the realization that he had an erection. He had an awful lot of erections these days because he hadn’t satisfied one for a long time. It would be medically unwise to make love to Mildred even if her grossly distended body were capable of arousing him. In his position, getting laid by any number of beautiful women would be no practical problem, but Horst found the moral problem insurmountable. He loved Mildred, this was a difficult pregnancy, and if she had to do without, so did he. They had a good marriage; he had never been unfaithful to her. Also, a studio executive who started screwing around with starlets ran the risk of becoming a caricature of himself. Not that the thought didn’t possess his mind ten or fifteen times a day.

“Don’t we all?” Horst said casually, for the moment not seeing Billy as either a twelve-year-old on the screen or a fifteen-year-old in the flesh, not knowing what he saw him as.

“But I’m a virgin, Mr Horst. I’m almost sixteen, and I’m a virgin. It’s driving me crazy. I want it so bad.”

The lust that glowed in those soft dark eyes, the agony of frustration in the full parted lips socked Horst in the gut with a mirror image of his own present horniness. But this kid had it worse. His body was at its sexual peak, and he had
never
had a girl. No wonder he was becoming hard to handle, no wonder he blew up every five minutes—the poor little bugger was going nuts for his first piece of ass!

“What’s your problem, Billy?” Horst said. “A good looking kid like you who just happens to be a movie star should be beating them off with a stick.”

“Don’t you understand,
everybody thinks I’m twelve years old!
No one’s young enough to be interested in sex with a twelve-year-old-boy.”

Horst’s brain began to whirl. Here he was, talking with a fifteen-year-old kid about his problem getting laid because everyone thought he was twelve, and at the same time he was feeling as horny as Billy was. He had an awful foreshadowing of what he was going to do. He was going to fix up his fifteen-year-old child star with some twenty-year-old starlet... or better yet, with Magda or Simone or some other forty-year-old actress who would bless him forever for bringing her a sixteen-year-old’s cherry, and a boy as fantastic looking as Billy Lee at that. He was going to do it, but he wouldn’t get
himself
a piece of ass because pimping actresses for a sixteen-year-old kid was moral, and cheating on your wife was not.

That’s the way I honestly feel, he realized, but it certainly seems strange.

“Well, Billy, there are plenty of older women around who would enjoy taking care of your problem even more than you’d enjoy having it taken care of,” Horst said. “I know it’s hard for you to meet women like that, but it might be possible to introduce you to—”

“Old women!
Arghh! Ooooh!” Billy’s face writhed in disgust, like that of a young girl suddenly confronted with a slug under a wet rock. “I couldn’t
stand
having sex with some old lady!”

Horst laughed. “The person I had in mind isn’t exactly old enough to be your grandmother,” he said. “In fact, most of the men in the world would just love to—”

“You don’t understand, Mr. Horst! I don’t want a
woman
at all.”

Billy leaned over so that his huge sultry eyes were inches away from Horst’s as he said this; through the blue denim of his tight jeans, Horst could see the sudden bulge in his crotch. Horst felt a treacherous surge in his own loins, followed by disgust, another twinge of lust, then fear. The room seemed to be whirling around the focus of those pleading brown eyes. A vein began to throb in Horst’s temple.

“Those swimming hole scenes I’m always doing...” the boy stammered. “They’re driving me crazy. I keep... I keep having these
feelings
... I... I can’t even face a locker room... all those naked bodies... I... I can’t keep from getting a hard-on.”

Jesus Christ, what’s going on here? What’s happening to me? Horst’s mind scrabbled for purchase and failed, found itself slipping, hanging by its thumbs from a rapidly eroding precipice. My top child star turns out to be a faggot. And he’s going crazy with horniness.

“I’ve got a hard-on right now, Mr. Horst,” Billy said softly, his lips plump and trembling, those eyes hot and moist, the eyes of Horst’s long-ago lover, the eyes of his eleven-year-old best friend. “Just talking about it... just thinking about it....”

Waves of nausea pulsed through Horst, fed by the waves of hot lust breaking against the shores of his psyche in their lees. He was so horny those eyes were so beautiful I remember what those eyes were like, God, God what’s happening to me....

“Billy, these feelings you’re having, they’re normal in a young boy, we all have them, I—”

(Skinny-dipping with Teddy, their bodies sparkling with river water in the sun, wrestling in the grass afterward.)

“—had them occasionally myself when I was a kid.”

“Did you really
, Mr. Horst?” The boy absently fingered the V of his jeans as he twisted his body into a sinuous curve on the desktop, his eyes making no mistake about what they were asking.

This kid is trying to seduce me, Horst realized. I am being seduced by a sixteen-year-old male virgin child star. His loins throbbed, his head whirled, and a nauseating vacuum ate at his entrails. What’s happening to me?

“They’re just vague feelings, right, Billy? Kind of formless sexual urges. You’re not really a homosexual, you’re just going through some normal adolescent sexual confusion. Once you get laid a few times.... You probably don’t even know how to express these... urges... you don’t even know exactly what you think you want....”

“Oh, no, Mr. Horst,” Billy whispered. “I know exactly what I want. I know exactly what I want you to do.”

The boy stood up and toyed with the buckle of his belt while keeping his eyes locked on Horst’s. Horst found that he could not move, he could not say anything. His mind was overloaded with contradictory impulses: fears, demands, guilts, and desires. He was paralyzed, like a rabbit before a swaying cobra.

Billy must have read his eyes. Slowly, never looking away from Horst, he undid his belt buckle, then the brass snap of his pants closure. He wormed the edge of his T-shirt out of the waistband of the jeans and let it hang loose. A deadly, horrible fear overcame Horst. What does he
want!
He could think of only four possible things that two men could do to each other, really only two, plus the question of who did what to whom... What am I thinking? Why am I afraid of what he wants? I’m not going to... I wouldn’t....

The boy pulled off his T-shirt. His chest was tanned, softly smooth, gently curved, and utterly hairless, like a woman’s. Like a young girl’s. Like a thirteen-year-old girl he had caught swimming naked in the lake when he was fourteen. The same tiny erect brown nipples on smooth, gently curved flat flesh. She had let him run his hands all over her chest and down between her silky-slim buttocks. And that was all. He had yearned to throw her down on the riverbank and satisfy himself in her achingly tender flesh, but he hadn’t dared. He hadn’t dared. He hadn’t dared.

“I want to take off all my clothes,” Billy said, reaching for the zipper of his fly. “And I want to lay down on my belly on the desk and... and... I can’t say it, I have to show you.”

He paused there like a statue, with the brass tab of his zipper between two delicate pink fingers. What power Horst felt in that frozen gesture! What dread, what fear of the awful moment that was coming with the inevitability of a guillotine blade falling through the air.

“Is it all right if I show you, Mr. Horst?” Billy said, and that dreadful moment was there. He had to say no now or he was saying yes. He knew what Billy wanted. His loins were aching with the desire to give it to him. His soul was filled with sickening guilt and self-loathing. He was paralyzed, unable to act, to make a conscious decision. But if he didn’t decide now, the decision would be already made for him.

John Horst sat behind his desk and said nothing.

Billy Lee smiled triumphantly and zipped open his fly. The sound seemed to reverberate in the room like an enormous gong. The boy stepped out of his jeans and shorts. His body was smooth, soft, and hairless except for tufts at the armpits and pubes, like a woman’s.

His lower lip trembled; he leaped onto the desk and spread-eagled himself face down across it. “Like a woman,” he cried hoarsely, wriggling and humping on the desk top. “Do it to me like you’d do it to a woman!”

Horst fumbled with his clothes and a red fog descended. Billy and his teen-age lover and Teddy somehow became the same softly mounded flesh. He buried himself in the world of total animal sensation that was his mind’s only release from the contemplation of what he was doing. As a consequence, it was the purest act of biological sex he had ever experienced. It, combined with his long-term frustration, gave him an orgasm that nearly rendered him unconscious.

Dr. Richter had explained all that to him afterward, why he had experienced an intensity with Billy that he had never felt before or since. A normal reaction to abnormal circumstances, he wasn’t some kind of faggot. Any more than the guilt he briefly felt at Mildred’s miscarriage was a rational or more than transitory reaction, more than a natural transference.

Afterward Billy had actually thanked him sincerely and profusely and had never used the incident against him, even when his film career evaporated entirely a few years later. He lost track of Billy, lost track of the memory of that moment....

Until three years ago, when Billy had surfaced as a gopher for Jango Beck. That was all: Billy had a position as a gopher for Beck. They never spoke to each other. They never met except briefly on rare business occasions. Beck never spoke of Billy in Horst’s presence, he seemed to regard him as no more than an item of furniture. Jango Beck just kept Billy Lee around. But even knowing that it was his own feelings projected onto the situation that created the effect, Horst could not help feeling a certain dread emanating from Billy’s presence in Beck’s entourage. Whether Beck had any inkling or not of what had happened between them, Billy Lee was one more quantum of the ominous atmosphere that Jango Beck moved in. In a way,
not
knowing whether Beck knew made things worse.

The elevator came to a stop and the door slid open. Billy Lee’s white-clad backside led him out into Jango Beck’s office. Beck was seated behind an immense round stone desk. The desk was an ancient Aztec sacrificial altar. There was a melon-sized depression in the center of the weathered gray stone for the reception of human hearts. A groove led from this receptable to the near rim of the desk; a blood runoff channel. Immediately in front of Beck, a semicircular section of the altar had been ground flat and inlaid with rosewood to form a conventional desktop surface. Two phones, a desk pad, a radio, a lamp, a clock, and several pens scattered around this area were a mad touch of the ordinary.

The circular tower room was paneled in rosewood, the ceiling was brocaded in royal blue velvet, and the floor was covered with an immense abstract Aztec-style rug, all angles, grotesque monster faces, and splashes of bright primary colors. Soft white light emanated from cornice fixtures, and a single rose-colored spot mounted in the center of the ceiling picked out the sinuous figure of Beck as he sat behind the altar stone smoking a thin brown cigar.

“Sit down, John,” Beck said, gesturing with his cigar. “That will be all, Billy.” Billy Lee smiled briefly at Horst before disappearing into the elevator. Horst lowered himself into a sling chair, feeling tired and heavy, already somehow at a psychological disadvantage.

“I suppose you know what I want to talk to you about,” Beck said.

“I assume the attempt by Taub to sell off the studio,” Horst said. “We don’t have any other business in common.” Thank God for that!

Beck nodded, his convoluted afro-ed hair bobbing and foaming like a rolling lion’s mane. “Mike Taub had a little talk with me tonight. He wants me to help him force you out or at any rate force the deal through.”

Jango Beck puffed reflectively on his cigar, blew out smoke, studied its glowing tip. Making me sweat, Horst thought. Okay, I’m sweating. This bastard just might have enough clout to break my hold on the board. God only knows how much EPI stock he has, if you trace it through all his holding companies.

“Mike has a neat little scheme,” Beck finally said. “The game is to mousetrap Eden into making one final giant turkey, a four-million-dollar bomb that will destroy your credibility and make it clear to the stockholders that the film operation is a permanent financial bummer.”

Horst felt some of the tension go out of him. “Taub isn’t that smart,” he said, “and I’m not that stupid.”

Beck laughed. “Right you are,” he said. “Mike is a prick. He had no idea of how to do such a thing, so he asked
me
to think of something. I can never say no, so I decided to oblige.”

“You’re leading up to something. Continue.”

Jango Beck nodded, and leaned forward on his elbows. His eyes flashed and glittered in the reddish light like two chips of obsidian. Horst felt that awful vacuum in his gut, the same vertigo of the soul he had felt that day long ago as Billy Lee touched the zipper of his fly.