The Return (10 page)

I don’t have a spare room, Joannie, he said, so you choose:
my bed or the sofa.
Your bed, I said, with you.
Good, he said, let’s go.
He took
a bottle of tequila and we went to his bedroom.
I hadn’t seen such a messy room
for years.
Do you have an alarm clock?
I asked him.
No, Joannie, there are no
clocks in this house, he said.
Then he switched off the light, took off his
clothes and got into bed.
I stood there watching him, not moving.
Then I went to
the window and opened the curtains, hoping that the light of dawn would wake me
up.
When I got into bed, Jack seemed to be asleep, but he wasn’t, he drank
another shot of tequila and then he said something I couldn’t understand.
I put
my hand on his stomach and stroked it until he fell asleep.
Then I moved my hand
down a bit and touched his cock, which was big and cold like a python.
A few
hours later I woke up, took a shower, made breakfast, and I even had time to
tidy up the living room and the kitchen a bit.
We had breakfast in bed.
Jack
seemed happy that I was there, but all he had was coffee.
I said I’d come back
that evening, I told him to expect me, I wouldn’t be late this time, and he
said, I’ve got nothing to do Joannie, you can come whenever you like.
It was
almost like saying, It’s OK if you never come back, I knew that, but I decided
that Jack needed me and that I needed him too.
Who are you working with?
he
asked.
Shane Bogart, I said.
He’s a good kid, said Jack.
We worked together
once, I think it was when he was just starting out in the business; he’s
enthusiastic, and he doesn’t like to make trouble.
Yeah, he’s a good kid, I
said.
And where are you working?
In Venice?
Yeah, I said, in the same old house.
But you know old Adolfo got killed?
Of course I know, Jack, that was years ago.
I haven’t been working much lately, he said.
Then I gave him a kiss, a
schoolgirl’s kiss on his narrow, chapped lips, and I left.
The trip back was
much quicker; the sun was running with me, the California morning sun, which has
a metallic edge to it.
And from then on, after each day of shooting, I’d go to
Jack’s house or we’d go out together; Jack had an old station wagon and I rented
a two-seater Alfa Romeo, and we’d drive off into the mountains, to
Redlands, and then on Highway 10 to
Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Indio, until we got to the Salton Sea, which is a
lake, not a sea (and not a very pretty one either), where we ate macrobiotic
food, that’s what Jack was eating then, for his health, he said, and one day we
stepped on the gas in my Alfa and drove to Calipatria, to the southeast of the
Salton Sea, and went to see a friend of Jack’s who lived in a bungalow that was
even more run-down than the one Jack lived in, Graham Monroe was the guy’s name,
but his wife and Jack called him Mezcalito, I don’t know why, maybe because he
was partial to mescal, though all they drank while we were there was beer (I
didn’t have any—beer is fattening), and the three of them went and
sunbathed behind the bungalow and hosed each other down, and I put on my bikini
and watched them, I prefer not to get too much sun, my skin’s very fair and I
like to take care of it, but even though I stayed in the shade and didn’t let
them wet me with the hose, I was glad to be there, watching Jack, his legs were
much thinner than I remembered, and his chest seemed to have sunken in, only his
cock was the same, and his eyes too, but no, the only thing that hadn’t changed
was the great jackhammer, as the ads for his movies used to say, the ram that
battered Marilyn Chambers’ ass; the rest of him, including his eyes, was fading
as fast as my Alfa Romeo flying down the Aguanga Valley or across the Desert
State Park lit by the glow of a moribund Sunday.
I think we made love a couple
of times.
Jack had lost interest.
He said after so many movies he was worn out.
No one’s ever told me that before, I said.
I like watching TV, Joannie, and
reading mysteries.
You mean horror stories?
No, just mysteries, he said, with
detectives, especially the ones where the hero dies at the end.
But that never
happens, I said.
Of course it does, little sister, in old pulp novels you can
buy by the pound.
Actually, I didn’t see any books in his house, except for a
medical reference book and three of those pulp novels he’d mentioned, which he
must have read over and over again.
One night, maybe the second night I spent at
his house, or the third—Jack was as slow as a snail when it came to opening
up and telling secrets—while we were drinking wine by the pool, he said he
probably didn’t have long to live: You know how it is, Joannie, when your time’s
up, your time’s up.
I wanted to shout, Make love to me, let’s get married, let’s
have a kid or adopt an orphan or buy a pet and a trailer and go traveling
through California and Mexico—I guess I was tired and a bit drunk, it must
have been a hard day on the set—but I didn’t say anything, I just shifted
uneasily in my deck chair, looked at the lawn that I’d mowed myself, drank some
more wine, and waited for Jack to go on and say the words that had to come next,
but that was all he said.
We made love that night for the first time in so long.
It was very hard to get Jack going, his body wasn’t working anymore, only his
will was still working, but he insisted on wearing a condom, a condom for that
cock of his, as if any condom could hold it, at least it gave us a bit of a
laugh, and in the end, we both lay on our sides, and he put his long, thick,
flaccid cock between my legs, kissed me sweetly and fell asleep, but I stayed
awake for ages, with the strangest ideas passing through my mind; there were
moments when I felt sad and cried without making a sound so as not to wake him
up or break our embrace, and there were moments when I felt happy, and I cried
then too and hiccupped, not even trying to restrain myself, squeezing Jack’s
cock between my thighs and listening to his breathing, saying: Jack, I know
you’re pretending to be asleep, Jack, open your eyes and kiss me, but Jack went
on sleeping or pretending to sleep, and I went on watching the thoughts race
through my mind as if across a movie screen, flashing past, like a plow or a red
tractor going a hundred miles an hour, leaving me almost no time to think, not
that thinking was high on my list of priorities, and then there were moments
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.