Feelings of Fear (3 page)

Hazel was Susan's sister. She lived a half-hour away in Sherman Oaks. She and Susan had always been especially close, right to the point of choosing the same color dress to wear on the same day and finishing each other's sentences.

He put down the phone. Beside it stood a large framed photograph of himself and Susan that had been taken last summer on the beach at Cancun, in Mexico. Susan had her arms around his waist and she was laughing. Look at her, he thought. How could I have hit her?

They say that people always fall in love with themselves, and that was certainly true of Jeff and Susan. They were both tall, both very slim, and they had a chiseled look about their faces which occasionally led people to think that they were brother and sister. But while Jeff was dark-haired and brown-eyed, Susan had a mass of soft blonde curls and eyes as green as crushed emeralds. In the photograph she was wearing a peacock-blue one-piece swimsuit which showed off her figure – full-breasted, slim-waisted, with long, long legs.

He had been captivated by Susan the day he had first met her, when she was an extra in some surfing movie and he was assistant script-editor. Well, more like assistant to the assistant script-editor's assistant. But Susan had thought that he was somebody important, and so she had agreed to go out with him. He had practically emptied his bank account taking her to The Palm in West Hollywood. They had made love the same night; and again the next day; and by the time Susan realized that he wasn't much more than a glorified gofer, she liked him too much to care.

He sat alone with his head in his hands and thought that he should have remembered those days, when love was more important than ambition.

She didn't go to see Hazel. Instead she went to the Café del Rey on
Admiralty Way in Venice Beach for no other reason except that she and Jeff used to go there almost every week when they were first dating, and there was a bar where singles could eat or drink alone. She ordered a Chardonnay spritzer and sat looking out at the lights of the marina. She didn't know if her cheek was still red but she untied her hair and drew it across her face so that nobody could see.

The barman had a huge black quiff and looked like Frankie Avalon from one of those 1950s beach-party movies. “You want to eat?” he asked her. “We have ikura caviare with spicy miso vinaigrette. Or maybe you'd care for the black pepper hamachi carpaccio.”

Susan shook her head. “I've had enough of food for one lifetime,” she said.

“You look upset if you don't mind my saying so.”

“Do I? I think my marriage just finished and I don't really know why.”

“Come on. You know what Scarlett O'Hara said.”

Susan pushed her glass across the counter. She felt bruised and miserable and she didn't really want to get drunk but she didn't know what else to do. In the corner a woman cellist with long swinging hair was playing an absurdly mournful version of “Yesterday”. She felt like crying but she knew that if she started she wouldn't be able to stop, and what could be more embarrassing than a woman sitting on her own with a flaming red cheek and tears pouring into her drink?

The barman passed over her spritzer and said, “There you go. It's on the house.”

She had taken only one sip before she became aware that a man was standing close to her elbow. He was huge, the size of a wall, and he was darkly suntanned, with improbably blond hair. He was wearing a white linen suit and a bright turquoise shirt.

“You looking for some company, ma'am?” he asked her.

Susan shook her head. “I'm sorry. Not right now.”

“Well, that sure is a pity. Mr Amberson wants to know if you'd like to join him tonight.”

“What?” asked Susan. She turned around on her stool. There – on the opposite side of the restaurant, flanked by two more enormous bodyguards – sat a short, stocky man in a wildly patterned Hawaiian shirt. His head was rather too large for his body, but he was handsome
in a raddled, worn-out way, with devilish eyebrows and an equally devilish grin. He raised his glass to her and called out, “
Salut
!”

“Is that Jack Amberson the movie actor?” she asked.

“You'd better believe it, ma'am. And he'd really like to make your acquaintance. In fact, he insists.”

“I don't know,” said Susan. “I haven't had a good day. Will you tell him I'm very flattered, but no thanks.”

The man bit his lip. “Listen, I can't tell him that.”

“What do you mean, you can't tell him that?”

“Mr Amberson isn't the kind of man who takes no thanks for an answer, ma'am. Especially when it comes to his favorite.”

“His favorite?”

“Tall blondes, ma'am. Just like you. Especially when they're taller than him.”

“Well, I'm sorry,” said Susan. She glanced back toward Jack Amberson's table. He was beckoning to her and mouthing the words, “C'mon over here.”

She hesitated. It was so strange, seeing him sitting there in the flesh. She had seen him in so many movies that she felt as if she knew him already. He always played wolfish men with bad reputations, although he usually managed to convey a sense of little-boyish vulnerability, too. He mouthed “C'mon, come here,” for a second time, and she thought to herself: why not? We're in a public restaurant, what harm can it do? Think of the story I'll have to tell Hazel tomorrow. She's absolutely crazy about Jack Amberson.

And besides, at least it shows that some men appreciate me for what I am.

She said, “All right, then,” and slipped off her barstool. The big blond bodyguard led her by the elbow to Jack Amberson's table. He stood up, and grinned, and kissed her on the wrist. For a man who played laborers and cowhands and oil-rig workers, his hand was unexpectedly soft.

“Why don't you let me buy you a drink?” he asked her. “They do great frozen daiquiris here. Or maybe a tequila slammer?”

“A glass of wine will do fine, thanks.”

Jack clapped his hands and called, “Champagne, please, barkeep! A bottle of your Dom Perignon, and some of those Parmesan nibbles!”

He turned conspiratorially to Susan and said, “I can't resist their Parmesan nibbles. I mean that's the way I'd like to die. Making love to a tall blonde woman and choking on a Parmesan nibble.”

“Your friend here said you had a thing for tall blonde women.”

Jack Amberson frowned at her as if he didn't understand what she meant. “My
friend
?” Then suddenly he turned to the big blond bodyguard and laughed. “Christopher isn't my
friend
! He's simply a hired lump of meat. Anyhow, I don't have any friends. Only enemies and lovers.”

“But I'm neither of those things. Why did you want to talk to me?”

“In the hope that you might become one before you become the other.”

“Well, you obviously have a pretty high opinion of yourself. I'm already married.”

“I know you are. You're too badly dressed to be single.”

“Thanks for the compliment. You sure know how to make a woman feel on top of the world.”

Jack Amberson laid his hand on top of hers, and when she tried to draw it away he pressed it harder against the tablecloth so that she couldn't. His eyes looked like two gray mismatched stones, and he had the screen actor's trick of never blinking.

“You're also too beautiful to be single. Women as beautiful as you never stay unmarried for long. The men in their lives think that if they're married, that'll keep the wolf-pack at bay. In my experience, of course, that almost never happens. A beautiful woman is still a beautiful woman, even if she's wearing ten wedding-bands and a chastity belt with a Bramah lock.”

Their champagne arrived, along with a large glass dish of Parmesan pastries. Jack Amberson crammed a huge handful into his mouth and sat smiling and munching and staring at Susan and never once blinking his eyes.

“I'll give you a toast,” he said, when he had swallowed the last of the pastries. He raised his glass and clinked it with hers. “Here's to simultaneous orgasm.”

She didn't know exactly when she decided to sleep with him. But after
he had turned the Dom Perignon bottle upside-down in the ice-bucket he said, “I've got plenty more champagne at home,” and she knew that she was going to go back with him, and what it would mean if she did.

They left the restaurant shortly after one o'clock, surrounded by a human barricade. Two girls screamed and called out, “Jack! We love you!” but when they tried to approach him they were pushed forcefully away. A glossy black Lincoln slid up to the curb and they climbed inside, where it smelled of leather upholstery and very expensive perfume. Then the door was closed and they were swept behind darkly tinted windows into the night.

“What kind of a guy is your husband?” asked Jack.

“Jeff? He's a TV producer. Very hard-working.
Too
hard-working.”

“Is that why he slapped you?”

Susan blushed and said, “How did you know that?”

“A beautiful married blonde sits alone in a bar at eleven o'clock at night with a red mark on her cheek and her mascara all blotchy – what conclusion do you draw?”

Susan hesitated for a moment. Then she said, “He was late home. His supper was ruined. I'd been working all afternoon to make it special.”

“You should humiliate him. A guy like that needs to be humiliated.”

“I don't want to humiliate him. I just want him to pay me more attention. Everything centers around
him,
and what he's doing. I could have been a good actress if he'd let me. Tony Scott said I was one of the most promising young personalities he'd seen for years.”

Jack laid his hand on her knee. “And I agree with him. And that's all the more reason that you should make your husband feel small. Do you know what you should do?”

“Tell me.”

“You should come to bed with me, and then, when you go back home, you should tell this Jeff of yours exactly what happened, in every microscopic detail. Tell him how big my schlong is. Tell him how you screamed when you came.”

She said nothing. She had already decided that she wanted to go bed
with him. But she knew that she would never tell anybody, ever – not even Hazel. She wasn't out to make Jeff feel bad. She was looking for reassurance that other men found her sexy and arousing and interesting, and that six years of marriage hadn't washed all of her personality out of her, like ink out of a handkerchief.

They turned into a steeply-sloping driveway in Bel Air. Automatic wrought-iron gates opened, and they drove inside. On top of the hill ahead of them, surrounded by flowering shrubs, stood a huge white Italianate house with a red-tiled roof. Lights shone from every window.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” said Jack, and gave Susan's thigh the lightest of strokes.

He was waiting for her on the bed when she came out of the bathroom. He was wearing nothing but black silk pajama bottoms and a black bandana. He was watching one of his own movies on a television the size of a small building.

“I switched it on and there it was,” he told her.
“The Cloud Riders.
It must be an omen.”

She was wrapped in his black silk bathrobe. She approached the bed and knelt beside him, watching him. The bedroom was all white: white carpets, white drapes, white lilies in white vases on top of white-painted tables. A large original oil-painting hung on the wall opposite the bed – a white-skinned girl with bone-white hair. Her thighs were wide apart and the only color in the room was a single brushstroke of fuchsia pink.

Jack switched off the television's sound but not its picture. On the screen he was riding a horse across the spine of a mountain-range in Montana. On the bed he reached up with his left hand and unfastened the loose silk tie around Susan's waist. Then he sat up and slid the robe off her shoulders, so that she was completely naked.

Her skin was almost as pale as the girl in the painting, apart from the blue tracery of veins in her breasts and her nipples the color of fallen rose-petals in a rainswept garden. Her blonde curls shone in the lamplight.

Jack pulled her down beside him and kissed her. It had been so long since she had been kissed by another man that she found it deeply
disturbing, but electrifying, too, and she could feel that she had almost immediately become wet. Jack turned her on to her back and knelt beside her, taking his erect penis out of his black silk pajamas. It was enormous, much bigger than Jeff's, with a swollen purplish head and a hole that gaped at her like a landed trout.

He took his penis in his hand and massaged it against her nipples, around and around, until they stiffened. Then he guided it into her armpits, and around her shoulders and her neck. Teasingly, he ran it across her lips, so quickly that she hardly had time to lick it. But then he lifted himself up higher, so that he was straddling her. He opened her mouth with both thumbs and forced his penis down her throat, so that she couldn't help gagging.

“How do you like that?” he said, looking down at her triumphantly. “Now you can tell Jeff that you almost choked on Jack Amberson's dick.”

For some reason, his roughness excited her even more. When he tried to take his penis out of her mouth, she took hold of it and pushed it even further down her throat, even though it was so huge and hard that it almost suffocated her. When he tried to take it out, she sank her teeth into it, until he yelped in pain.

He grew even more aroused. He knelt over her face and rammed himself into her mouth, again and again. She took hold of his black silk pajamas and tore them open, tore them down to the knees. Then she gave his penis one last ferocious suck and started to bite and suck at his balls, almost as if she were determined to wrench them off. She bit his thighs and clawed with her fingernails at the cheeks of his ass, until they bled. Then she thrust two sharp index fingers into his anus.