The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (15 page)

MARK takes a drag and glances at his watch.

WARDEN opens small chrome Miele refrigerator atop credenza and peers in.

In slow motion, WARDEN fills two highball glasses halfway with ice and Stoly, shakes then pops a can of hazelnut Sustacal, shakes and pops a strawberry Ensure, pours simultaneously—a can in each hand—not quite filling the glasses, and then tops off each drink with more vodka, and stirs with
New Jersey State Penitentiary at Princeton—Capital Punishment Administrative Segregation Unit
swizzle sticks.

As she serves him his drink, she reaches down and gives his dick an affectionate squeeze.

He ejaculates again, this time on the sixteenth-century Kashan silk carpet.

MARK chugs entire hazelnut Sustacal and vodka, smashes glass against wall, and then takes a shard of broken glass and carves into his forearm the words “Satan,” “I Love Satan,” “Jews for Satan,” “Satan Rocks My World,” “Hey Satan, You’re So Fine, You’re So Fine You Blow My Mind, Hey Satan!” “Destroying Everything That’s Good and Beautiful Is, Like, Funny;” “Committing Suicide on Your Birthday in Your Parents’ Bed Is Excellent,” “I Support a Woman’s Right to Breed Babies for the Sole Purpose of Ritually Sacrificing and Eating Them,” and “Buy
Only
Procter & Gamble Products.”

MARK takes pair of Rollerblades, tied together at the laces, from credenza and swings them wildly at the WARDEN’S head.

WARDEN ducks, kicks MARK in the solar plexus, grabs Roller Blades, and—wielding them like nunchakus—twirls them in blurred arcs over her head and behind her back before delivering, in rapid succession, two precise and devastating blows to MARK’s forehead.

Repeat sequence, this time:
REVERSE ANGLE—in slow motion—
WARDEN ducks—kicks MARK in solar plexus—grabs
Roller Blades—twirls them like nunchakus ambidextrously in blurred arcs over her head and behind her back—then delivers two concussive blows to MARK’s forehead.

EXTREME CLOSE-UP of MARK as—in
super
slow motion—we again see the Roller Blades impact his head, driving it first to the right and then to the left of the frame.

FADE TO BLACK

INT. WARDEN’S OFFICE

RACK FOCUS to MARK slumped on couch.
WARDEN is bringing him to with smelling salts.

WE HEAR dark, hip-hop ambient-techno mix of “A Whole New World (Aladdin’s Theme).”

And then, WE HEAR the following original lyrics written and performed by the WARDEN to the melody of “I Will Always Love You” from
The Bodyguard
.

FLASH CUT TO

Computer-extrapolation sequence of Waxman climaxing—from the scurrilous PBS “rockumentary”
Sex Lives of the Anti-Tobacco Zealots
.

OVER-THE-SHOULDER SHOT of WARDEN

WARDEN stands, and extends her arms, entreating MARK to dance.

MARK demurs, tapping his temples and rolling his eyes, as if to say: thanks to the drugs and blows to the head, my equilibrium is, like, completely fucked.

WARDEN smiles at him tenderly, takes his hands in hers, and gently pulls him to his feet.

The WARDEN stands in back of MARK, her right hand raised above MARK’s head with the index finger pointed downward. MARK grasps her finger with his right hand. The WARDEN’s left hand is held forward to the left side of MARK with his left hand resting on it. MARK does a sous-sus to the fifth position on pointe, takes his right foot to retiré and executes a développé croisé devant. From this position he pushes from the WARDEN’S left hand, executes a fouetté rond de jambe en tournant, and continues turning with a series of pirouettes, still holding the WARDEN’S index finger. At the completion of the pirouettes he stops himself by quickly grasping the WARDEN’S left hand.

They gaze deeply into each other’s eyes and sing together.

Blood from gash in forehead trickles down MARK’s face and drips onto rug.

WARDEN reaches behind her back, unzips her dress, and lets it fall to the floor. She steps out of her panties and stands naked in front of MARK.

Now the notorious and achingly beautiful CUNNILINGUS SCENE.

The scene is notorious because of its extraordinary length—over three and a half hours; the scene is extraordinarily long for several reasons.

There are a few brief intervals when it all just clicks, and the clitoral stimulation is perfect—inadvertent perhaps, but perfect—and MARK is this precocious, humming champion, and the WARDEN whimpers and yelps and nearly growls with pleasure.

But there are more frequent and more protracted periods during which MARK earnestly endeavors but, because of his relative inexperience, endeavors to no discernible effect. The WARDEN, never turning tetchy or disagreeable, maintains as positive and encouraging a tone as you could ever hope for—and this from a woman who brooks neither ineptitude nor carelessness from her subordinates. But sometimes her attention does wander.

In fact, there are stretches where, as MARK heedlessly works away, his head bobbing incessantly at her crotch, the WARDEN catches up on neglected paperwork.

During one infamous 95-minute span, amid an endless variety of loud sucking and slurping sounds, with his fingers in her vagina, and a finger in her anus, and his tongue darting and lapping everywhere at once—the clit, the labia, the perineum—in a blind, unmodulated fury of licking and trilling and swirling and churning, with frenzied, accelerating oscillations of his entire head, the WARDEN is on the phone calmly negotiating the end to a potentially deadly hostage crisis in Cell Block D.

Later, in a similar 12-minute episode, as MARK lavishes her pussy with the frenetic diligence of an insect colony servicing its queen, the WARDEN impassively eats a pretzel.

The scene’s aching beauty derives primarily from the fact that for over three and a half hours, MARK’s face never leaves the vulva of the WARDEN, no matter what she is doing. When she’s splayed across the couch, MARK ministers to her from his knees on the floor. When she’s seated at her desk working, MARK is under that desk, gripping the steel arm-supports of her chair so as not to be shaken from her pudendum as she swivels one way to attend to a stack of documents and then suddenly swivels in the opposite direction to shuffle through another. And as she grimly paces her office, this naked virago, phone to her ear, struggling to save the lives of several veteran guards being held by a gang of ax- and icepick-wielding psychopaths, MARK at first scrambles crablike between her legs, in an inverted crawl on his feet and palms, and then, finding this too ungainly, he actually dons her in-line skates so his feet can roll across the floor, an arm wrapped around each of her thighs, his mouth pinioned to her genitals.

To achieve maximum aching beauty:
Include frequent CLOSE-UPS of the WARDEN’S LABIAL KEY RING—a double-strand gold coil pierced through her upper left labium—dangling from which are the front and back door keys to her condo, the ignition and trunk keys to her Mazda RX-7 rotary twin turbo, the key to a summer house in Belmar, New Jersey, that she shares with two other wardens and the director of a juvenile detention center, and mailbox and safe-deposit-box keys.

Anyone who’s seen the infamous video of Richard Speck—pendulous, hormone-spawned breasts swaying back and forth, snorting coke, threshing hundred-dollar bills and getting a blow job from one of his degenerate jailhouse paramours—has to be astonished by the capacity of human beings to enjoy themselves in seemingly infernal circumstances. This is not to say that it would be appropriate in
this
movie to feature a mass murderer sporting a pair of mutant tits, snorting coke as he’s fellated by transvestite convicts. (This isn’t Joyce Carol Oates, for god’s sake.) I’m just trying to locate a certain cinematic
tone
.

In a recent issue of
Harper’s Bazaar
, Liz Tilberis writes in her “Editors Note”: “In an issue like this, it becomes clear that we at
Bazaar
set almost unreachably high standards for ourselves. There may be times when we present images and ideas that you are not instantly comfortable with; the idea isn’t to shock, but to bring you along with us to the cutting edge of fashion, photography, design, and the arts.”

With this scene, you want to position yourself—in terms of cinematic tone—somewhere between the Speck video and
Harper’s Bazaar
. As Tilberis says, you want to “set almost unreachably high standards” for yourself. And if a 13-year-old boy, whose father has just survived execution by lethal injection, going down on a warden whose car keys are jingling from a ring in her pussy lips, as she attempts to end a siege by Jheri-Curled homicidal maniacs with ice-picks pressed into the temples of their hostages, as Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti sing “White Riot” isn’t “the cutting edge of fashion, photography, design, and the arts,” then I don’t what is.