Selling Out (18 page)

“Please,
now
—”

She was pulling him back from New York again, where he kept slipping off—the very act of trying not to think of it made him think of it—pulling the hair of his head, tugging him upward to be on her and in her—

“Inside, I want you inside me now—”

And he thrust himself there, stiff and throbbing, and pulled the upper part of his torso up on his elbows to gaze down at his beloved and begin the real rhythm of his love, when, from the living room of the suite, the phone rang.

“That's it!”

“Owww!”

He yanked himself up and out and was hurtling toward the living room with his right arm already reaching for the phone and his cock like a magic wand pointing the way to glory as Jane yelled from the bed, “Screw you and screw your goddam television show!”

“Hello? Archer? What happened?”

“Congrats,
amigo
,” the young executive's voice snapped smartly back, “You're a
series
.”

“Wa-hoo-hoo-hoo-yah!”

Ecstasy. At least for a whole second until, the triumph absorbed, the victor wondered at once the extent of the victory.

“How many?” he asked. “How many episodes did they order?”

“Three.”

Jane walked into the living room, nude.

“What?” Perry asked.

“
Tres
. A trio.”

Jane knelt down on the floor in front of Perry.

“That's
all?
”

“With script commitments for three more if the show catches on.”

Jane took Perry's cock in her hands.

“What the hell do you mean ‘catches on'? How can only three shows ‘catch on'? It's crazy!”

Perry firmly but gently tried to push Jane away but she held on to his cock and began licking it.

“Be cool,
compadre
,” Archer said. “From your point of view, this order is
ideal
.”

“How the hell can only three episodes be ‘ideal?'”

Jane now had his whole cock in her mouth and was sucking back and forth on it, making love to it. Perry was afraid he might shoot off right in the middle of a sentence with Archer Mellis and let out some kind of ungodly yell. He tried to concentrate now on television and forget about the sex. If it wasn't one thing it was another.

“We can produce those three hour episodes before the end of summer,” Archer explained. “You can serve as the real story consultant—not just in
absentia
, like we planned—and still be back for your classes in the fall.”

“I said I'd teach summer school. To make up for the spring semester.”

He looked down in fear that Jane might be getting upset by his even considering not going back for summer, might suddenly give him an angry bite, but
she
seemed to be succeeding in concentrating fully on what she was doing.

“Summer school,” Archer said, so you could almost hear the smile in his voice. “That's no big deal, is it?”

“That's not the point. It's a commitment.”

“You'll get twenty-five hundred dollars a week as story consultant,” Archer said. “Also, we'll want you to write a ‘bible' for the whole series. That's probably twenty grand. And I assume you'll want to write one of the episodes. Probably the first one, to set things up like you want them. Guild scale for an hour episode now is fourteen thousand three hundred and eighteen.”

Perry's mind was whirling with the numbers. Twenty grand for bible, fourteen for episode, twenty-five hundred a week as story consultant, that was about ten grand a month for two, or would it be three, months? He reached down and tried to wrest his cock away from Jane, managing to get it out of her mouth but not out of her hands. He tried turning away from her but she yanked him back. He screamed.

“Aggghhhh!”

“You don't like those numbers?” Archer asked. “Those are very good numbers, especially for a neophyte.”

“The numbers are fine,” Perry gasped. “It's just the change in plan; I wasn't intending to stay out here past the end of this month—”

“The other beauty of it is that you can choose the other writers, work with them yourself, train the ones you'd like to take over when you go back in the fall.”

“I'll have to talk to Jane,” Perry said.

He tapped her on the head, trying to get her attention, but she was absorbed with the cock, had got it back in her mouth.

“Of course you do!” Archer said. “And give her my congrats and my best. We'll all go break a little bread when I get back, schmooze all this over.”

“Great.”

Jane was pulling him down, pulling him by the cock.

“I've got to go now, Archer. Thanks for calling.”

“
Ciao, amigo
.”

Perry slung the phone receiver onto the cradle as he bent, slumping forward, onto Jane as she guided him by the cock, fitting it into her now as he cooperated, wanting to make her happy, wanting her to cooperate with
him
in agreeing to stay, they had to stay, there was no turning back, everything was coming together, love and money, it all was his, the moment was his, and he entered it fully, feeling the force that carried him now, the very thing Shakespeare meant when he said, “there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Oh yes, this was the one, and he wondered, wincing with ecstasy as he crested, if Shakespeare had ever heard of what California surfers called the perfect wave.

VII

She already knew. Jane saw it coming before Perry did. She knew he wouldn't want to go back to Vermont before the end of summer, and despite her own deep desire to return home—to literally “tend her own garden”—she agreed to stay on in Los Angeles another three months because it obviously meant so much to him.

On one condition.

“I need a home,” she said.

“We have one. Remember? Back in Vermont.”

“We're not living in it. I'm not the kind of person who can live my life in a hotel room.”

“It's not your whole life, it's just for the summer.”

“You forgot the late winter and the spring. We've been living in a hotel room since January.”

“It's not a room, it's a suite.”

“All right, two rooms.”

“Three, counting the kitchen, if you have to get technical.”

“Kitchen-
ette
, if you have to get technical.”

“And swimming pool. And maid service. Everything we need.”

“It may be all
you
need, fella.”

When she called him “fella” he knew she was really pissed. Maybe he was being an ass, after all. It was little enough she was asking, especially when he was rolling in dough. When he finally tallied up Archer's numbers, they came out to something over sixty-four grand for the summer's work. Of course he didn't have it yet, but it was all coming in. Rolling in.

“All right,” he said, “but I don't have time to go around looking at real estate.”

“I'll do the looking,” Jane said. “When I find it, all you have to do is come give it your blessing.”

“It's a deal.”

Perry could hardly be expected to take time out from the lofty work he was now absorbed in, which was nothing less than writing the bible for the series. Not even the original Creator got to write his own Bible, but Perry, as the author of a pilot and thus by definition creator of the series that developed from it, had the opportunity to do just that. Of course it wasn't a lengthy epic tome of spiritual and moral dimension, but rather a forty- or fifty-page handbook that served as background for writers who would be doing episodes of the show, explaining the original concept of it, history and brief biographies of the characters, so that such vital statistics as their dates of birth, high school and college graduation, marriage, and other important landmarks could be looked up if reference was needed to them, as well as their personality portraits, habits, strong and weak points, and anecdotes illustrating those things. Writing it was for Perry pure pleasure (to think he was getting paid twenty grand to do it!) as he filled in the full histories of these individuals he had conceived and brought to life. It made him feel more like a real creator, and he loved the sensation.

Maybe, he thought, Jane should find us a place to rent in that section of Hollywood that was actually called Mount Olympus!

The place she found that she thought was absolutely perfect was not on Mount Olympus, but in Topanga Canyon. That seemed awfully far from the studio, about an hour's drive, but Perry was learning that distances didn't mean anything to people in Los Angeles anyway. An hour and back to work was thought of as perfectly natural, and to question its convenience simply branded you as an inexperienced newcomer.

The place was quite far up a rural-looking, winding road, and certainly seemed far removed from the studio, in atmosphere as well as distance.

The house itself was quaint, a basic A-frame with wings added on each side, giving the effect of a small chalet. A hideaway. It sat on the top of a grassy hillside. From the edge of the property you could look down into the valley below, a picturesque spot with a stream running through it. The landscape looked oddly familiar—rocky and scrublike, with groves of trees—not the exotic palms of Southern California, but evergreens and oaks.

“Don't you just love it?” Jane asked, linking her arm in Perry's.

“It almost looks like New Hampshire,” he observed. “Maybe even Vermont.”

“I know! Isn't it amazing?” she asked, squeezing his arm.

Perry nodded.

“Amazing,” he said.

Eagerly, like a child who is showing her favorite playmate a newly discovered secret hideout, Jane led him back of the house, to show him what was to be one of its master attractions: the vegetable garden.

“I guess zucchini is everywhere,” Perry mused. “No matter where you go.”

“I can do our summer casseroles.”

“I bet there's zucchini growing in the goddam arctic. Even under the glaciers. The dinosaurs died out, but nothing could kill the zucchini.”

“The garden's not even the best thing of all,” Jane said.

“I should hope not.”

She took him by the hand toward a sort of woods that seemed to border the property on one side. Tucked away, almost out of sight in a clump of trees, was a tiny one-room shack. It was formerly a woodshed, converted to a kind of studio.

“I could use it as a darkroom!” Jane exulted. “There's running water, a sink, everything. Isn't it perfect?”

Perry shifted from foot to foot.

“Well, that is nice,” he had to admit.

Jane kissed him and took him back to the main house.

“Look, there's even a fireplace,” she said, leading him into the living room. “And it's all furnished. They'll even leave their linen behind. And silverware.”

Perry got out his pipe and packed the bowl.

“So,” Jane asked, “don't you think it's like home?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“What's wrong?”

Perry began to pace, feeling like a trapped animal. He lit up his pipe, sucking and drawing and puffing till great clouds of smoke were spewing forth, surrounding his head.

“Let's think about it,” he said.

In silence, they went back to the car. In silence, they started driving down the winding road.

“Negotiating this road at night,” said Perry, “with a little wine in the system, could be a little dicey.”

“What's really bugging you? Why don't you like it?”

“Look,” Perry said, trying for his most reasonable tone, “as long as we're out here, in Southern California, don't you think we might as well live in a place that's typical of the region, instead of trying to find an imitation of New England?”

“What would be ‘typical of the region'?”

“Well, I suppose a house with a pool.”

“A pool! You have to have your own private swimming pool now?”

“What's so weird about that? Lots of people out here have pools. It's no big deal, it's just part of the life-style.”

“The ‘life-style'! Oh, brother. Shall we stop off and buy our gold chains? Shall we score some coke on the way home?”

“I happen to like to swim. It's my favorite exercise.”

“Oh, come off it! You're really into the scene out here. You love the whole thing—admit it!”

“All right, for God sake, I'm guilty!
Mea culpa!
I even like what I'm doing!”

The house they finally rented for the summer was a compromise. Jane gave up her dream of the New Englandy chalet with the garden and land and countrified atmosphere—even the little studio she could have used as a darkroom. Perry did feel badly about that particular point, but he graciously offered to rent her darkroom space away from home. She said it wasn't that big a deal, she wasn't sure she was going to do that much photography work out here anyway. Somehow she couldn't get herself in the right mood. She planned to do a lot of reading.

Perry in turn surrendered his own fantasy of a house. He had fallen in love with a pink stucco Moorish job with a kidney-shaped purple tile swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills that Jane protested was outlandish in taste as well as in price at $5,000 a month. They settled on a little gray frame bungalow in the unfashionable flats of Hollywood, down from the hills, on a quiet little street below Santa Monica Boulevard, for only $2,700. The house was small but comfortable, and most importantly the little backyard not only had a genuine redwood hot tub for Perry, but also a small patch of scratch soil that Jane got permission to use as a garden. She put in tomato plants and the inevitable zucchini, and planted a border of nasturtiums along one side of the neck-high green picket fence that enclosed the yard.

Give a little, take a little. Fine. The compromise of living quarters was OK with Perry. What mattered was the work.