Passing Through the Flame (11 page)

But now Paul at least knew which way was out. The big room with the buffet and bar was just beyond the left-hand arch. He realized that he had developed an appetite. Then he remembered that Velva had wanted to eat an hour or more ago. And if she isn’t in there, no sweat, maybe I’ll run into Sandra Bayne at the bar.

The big room was somewhat more crowded than it had been earlier. People were piled four and five deep around the bar waiting to order drinks. There was a long line at the buffet table. A pall of cigarette smoke formed an artificial smog layer beneath the sky-blue ceiling, mingling subtly with the odors of liquor and food to form a slight miasma of staleness that hung in the air, the smell of the passage of party time. No one was dancing now, and the black jazz band was playing loose and disconnected riffs to itself; the musicians looked as if they had gotten into plenty of the stuff that was drifting through the back rooms.

The rock critics had disappeared from the bar, and Sandra Bayne was nowhere to be seen, but Paul spotted Velva waiting on the buffet line. She was talking to a guy in a fringed brown suede jacket and matching Australian slouch hat. His eyeballs were doing their best to crawl down the front of her dress.

“Paul! Over here!” She waved at him and gave him a glad-to-see-you smile. At least she didn’t seem pissed off at him for leaving her alone for so long.

“Jack, this is Paul Conrad, my date, the man I was telling you about,” Velva said, as Paul joined the line beside her amid some scowling from the people behind and an all-but-audible whoosh of deflation from the man in the slouch hat. “Paul, this is Jack Wilkes, he’s... what did you say you were, a fashion photographer?”

“Combat
photographer, fer chrissakes,” Wilkes said in a beery voice that somehow seemed to match his drooping brown mustache. On closer inspection, his eyes proved to be thoroughly glazed; he was drunk as a skunk.

“Ah... photographed any good combat lately?” Paul asked.

“Are you kiddin’? I seen so much fried meat and butchered babies in the past two years that I’ve been drunk for the last six weeks, and if I’m lucky, I’ll stay drunk till I soak every last memory of Viet-fucking-Nam out of my bleeding brain and maybe I come out the other end a fashion photographer or a rummy on skid row which is better than making a living, shooting puke pictures of barbecued dinks, let me tell you, buddy boy, you think this game is all glamor and red-hot gash....”

“Jack just came back from Vietnam,” Velva said.

“I’d gathered.”

Mercifully, their turn at the buffet table came before Wilkes could bring things down any further. Paul spooned rumaki, Chinese shrimp with vegetables, and spareribs onto his plate, while Velva tanked up on salad and a giant mound of black caviar. While Wilkes was shoveling everything in sight onto his plate, they managed to worm quickly through the crowd around the buffet, give him the slip, and disappear into the Oriental room. Even more people were scarfing up food now in the soft red light, and the four hookahs were going full blast again, assorted types sucking up free hashish between mouthfuls of free food and gulps of free booze. They managed to find two unoccupied cushions in one corner; only after they had seated themselves did Velva’s face shrivel into an angry pout.

“Where
were
you? I’ve had creeps like that drooling all over me for half an hour.”

“I got lost.”

“You got
lost?
At a
party?”

“It’s a real maze in there,” Paul said. “Besides, you weren’t where I left you. What happened?”

Velva loaded a lettuce leaf with caviar and popped it into her mouth. She chewed, grimaced, chewed a few more times, and gulped it down. “I tried to talk to Horst,” she said, “but all those horrible people were all over him, and I couldn’t even get him to notice me. Then some guy came in and told him that someone named Billy Lee was looking for him, and Horst turned kind of pale and left. I sat around waiting for you, and then a couple of those awful dope dealers came into the room and they actually started making deals for drugs right out in the open. So when you didn’t show up, I finally left that scene and wandered around for a while. A few guys tried to pick me up, but they were all losers, and I just wasn’t getting to meet anyone important. So I decided I might as well get something to eat.”

She took another bite of caviar and lettuce, a smaller one this time, which she got down with two quick chews and a gulp. “What were you doing all this time?”

Paul nibbled on a sparerib and decided that the truth—or at least most of the truth—would make her happiest, prevent this from turning into any kind of scene.

“I was getting an idea for a movie,” he said. “I was just walking around soaking up color and atmosphere and letting the idea get together in my mind. For a movie about a kind of weird party in a house something like this....”

Velva’s eyes lit up. “A movie? What’s it called? Do you think there might be a part in it for me, a good part? After all, remember, if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have gone to this party, and if the party gave you the idea for a movie—”

Paul laughed, shook his head ruefully. “Tell you what, Velva, as soon as I get the backing to make
any
feature film, I’ll cast you in it, okay? Does that make you happy?” Two can live as cheaply as one in a fairy castle in the air, he thought.

Velva leaned over, kissed him full on the mouth, opened his lips with the pressure of her own, and thrust her tongue deep inside, filling his mouth with the salty tang of caviar and the smell of fishy breath. He reeled for a moment, then kissed her politely back.

“Oh, Paul!” she cried in a delighted girlish voice.

“Take it easy, I haven’t run into that millionairess with warts on her tits yet. In fact, I don’t think there’s a warted tit in the house.”

“I’ve got faith in you, you’re a winner, I know you’re going to make it, and I’m just happy that we’re both gonna make it together.”

Paul was both touched and annoyed. If only I had that much confidence left in myself.... Hell, if I had that much confidence left in myself, I’d flip myself out, is all, because all the confidence in the world isn’t going to get me a million dollars to make a feature, and that’s what
The Man Upstairs
would have to cost, what with the complicated sets, and you’d have to have a lot of at least passable actors.... All I’ve got now is a concept and one talentless actress who believes in me because I’m a director who promised to put her in a feature, even though I’ve got no credits....

“Look, Velva—”

Paul stopped in mid-sentence. Conversation in the room suddenly halted. An instant scene stealer had appeared, framed like an icon in the archway leading from the main salon.

She wore a navy silk pants suit that seemed painted on her body from knees to neck, outlining her pubes in sheeny material, displaying the tight and well-defined musculature of her stomach, her high breasts, and erect nipples. From the knees down and from the elbows outward, the suit flared radically into huge belled cuffs, richly embroidered in bright red, gold, yellow, and green with dragons, birds of paradise, tropical fish, and flowers. Flung around her shoulders was a short cloak, also of navy, but entirely embroidered to match her cuffs, and lined with kelly-green silk. Long hair tumbled to her shoulders, black with a subtle overtone of red. Her eyes were huge and green, with some dark mystery shimmering in their depths.

He knew who she was immediately. Who wouldn’t? This was Star, Star of the Velvet Cloud, and in person, at least, she had the same kind of show-stopping total presence that had made stars of Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Mick Jagger. This was the “star quality” that Velva was forever talking about—the ability to walk out onto a stage or into a room and dominate it immediately and utterly without really doing a damned thing—but here it was for real!

Star walked through the room; a tall, angular man with long straight brown hair and a pinched look about his face followed a half-step behind. This would be Bill Horvath, her longtime lover and the creative intelligence behind the Velvet Cloud. She moved into the room, through it, and out the other archway behind a wave front of self-created silence, leaving it tingling with electricity and a sudden outbreak of altered conversation like an audience’s applause.

Lord, if
that
would come across on film, if I could
make
it come across on film.... Paul realized that he had risen and taken a step toward the archway through which Star and Horvath had disappeared.

“Where are you disappearing to now?” Velva said petulantly. “Chasing after that creature with your tongue hanging out?”

“The movie,” Paul said. “Can’t you see her in the movie? The impact, just the way she moves across a room....”

“I don’t see anything but an overdressed hippie.”

Instinct told Paul to follow Star’s trajectory through the party, to observe with a camera’s eye the effect of her persona on the reality sets she would pass through, to test his instantaneous perception against his cool director’s judgment. The knowledge of how much he could learn from this mingled with the mad lust to use her in a film, producing a terrible itch for a camera in his hands, right here, right now, for he knew that that was the only true test, that what the flesh felt did not always come across on film.

With Velva in tow, Paul ducked through the archway after Star. The next room was a conventional living room with couches, chairs, lamps, and tables, and Star and Horvath had already passed through it. Her wake was visible on the faces of the chic women in the room. The disdain veiled jealousy so thick Paul could all but feel the cats’ claws on his skin, hear the feline snarling. The eyes of all the men in the room were drawn to the far archway, glowing with black-light fluorescence. A quick two-hundred-and-seventy-degree pan across the faces of the men, faces in the room ending in a zoom-in on the ultraviolet vacuum of the archway would’ve painted the whole picture in about twenty seconds on film.

And... cut to a reverse shot, from inside the black-light room, looking back through the archway at the longing faces of the men, the cat faces of the women. Star sits on the edge of a couch, talking to a young long-haired musician, who cradles his guitar lightly on his lap. In the black light, her hair fluoresces a ghostly red, her eyes glow pale green like jewels, and her clinging suit ripples in sheets of electric blue light with every subtle movement. Horvath stands beside the couch staring at the huge day-glo poster of Jango Beck that fills one whole wall, his eyes slitted, his mouth a sardonic curve. Three young girls sit on the floor staring worshipfully at Horvath. A thirtyish-looking man in an elegantly sculptured haircut and Sy Devore Hollywood costume sits on another couch between a thin, androgynous girl with close-cropped hair and a hairy prophet type reminiscent of Charles Manson. Three men drift into the room from the place Star has just left and watch, trying to be supercool and not making it.

“—trying to get our shit together, Star, but...”

Star reaches into the stone bowl on the low table before her, picks up a big handful of assorted pills, and lets them dribble slowly through her fingers. The young musician smiles weakly.

“They’ll melt you till you run like sand through the fingers of your own life,” she says in a soft, throaty, powerful voice. “Yeah, well—”

She touches a finger to bis lips. “I know,” she says. “We’ve all been there, where you feel you have to drop something to turn on the energy or turn off the pain. But all you can do is borrow from yourself, and when you’ve borrowed all that you’ll ever have....”

She kisses him lightly on the lips. “You have to eat the emptiness and ride the pain, when that’s all that’s there. The way out is the way through, if you can dig it. Even if you can’t dig it.”

She puts her arm around him, kisses him again. “Make beautiful music,” she says. “Be beautiful music.”

Horvath, who has been staring impassively at the poster throughout all this, takes her hand as if by some imperceptible signal, and hand in hand they walk from the room.

Cut, Paul thought, to a close-up on the young musician. As his jaw relaxes, pulling his mouth open, as his eyes widen, and the muscles of his face soften like a wax mask just beginning to melt in the sun.

“—all an act—”

“—maybe, kid, but don’t you wish you could steal her schtick for your own—”

One of the girls on the floor takes a red pill and a white pill out of the stone bowl and swallows them down dry, the gesture of a kid eating M&M’s. The musician stares dead on into the wasted eyes of his groupies. He blinks, shudders, jerks his head.

“Cut,”
Paul muttered to himself, bleeding inside for not getting footage like that on film. If only I’d been gross enough to bring a camera! A moment of prime reality lost and gone forever! Bergman could write it, and Fellini could direct the actors while Lazio Kovacs shot it, and you could do twenty-seven takes, and you still couldn’t come up with those few moments.

Even Velva must be able to sense that Star has what she claims for herself, “star quality,” total charismatic presence, and the kind that
does
come across on film. Whoever named her “Star” captured a quantum of truth.

With Velva clinging to him, Paul followed Star into the next set, a ghost camera throbbing at his hand and eye. Once again, they were in the room where Velva had tried to sidle up to John Horst. Minor actors, actresses, directors, and writers were still there talking to each other, and rapping with the black hash dealer in the cream-colored suit. But now three thin brass hash pipes were going around and the air was thick with sweet smoke.

Star and Horvath stood together at the periphery of the group, hanging back and apart. His face was grim, somehow resentful, and in this moment seemed stronger than Star’s, for her eyes were unexpectedly slack. The contrast made Paul aware for the first time of the intelligence, the strength, in Horvath’s hard bright eyes. He no longer seemed like her appendage. This story, whatever it was, had levels Paul couldn’t guess at.

The people in the room obviously all knew who they were, but they were being supercool, passing the hash pipes, talking to each other, acknowledging Star’s presence only by covert sidelong glances.