Sleeping Beauties (11 page)

“You been smoking dope again with Mimi?”

“No.”

“Come here.” He pulled off the towel and threw it onto the bed. He was naked, his legs bent at the knee. He took his penis in his hand.

“How long have we been married?” he asked. “Look, I’m insulated enough as it is. It’s one of the drawbacks of this business, but it’s a trade I’m happy to make. I can’t leave the fucking house. I get mobbed. My home is everything to me.”

“Don’t you mean isolated?”

He frowned.

“Not insulated. Walls are insulated,” she said.

“This an English class?”

“I am trying to understand exactly what you mean.” She looked away, ashamed by her lie. She realized for the first time that she was afraid of him.

“Look, I like having you with me. I actually can be around you. I knew it the first time we were together and I don’t know things very often.”

She smiled.

“I haven’t been around women too much,” he said, encouraged by her smile. He moved his penis idly in his hand. “You’re like a buddy, except not.”

“Perhaps I’ll go away for a little while,” she said quietly. “Not to Los Angeles. Would you mind that?”

He sighed loudly. “You don’t get it, do you? You’re coming with me to Morocco. It’s all arranged.” He put his arms over his head and stretched, showing her his erection.
“A deal is a deal.” He winked at her. “By the way, we’ve been married six months, babe.”

“Or, as you would say, a deal is sort of a deal.” She walked to the door.

“Whatever.” He stretched again and reached for the barbell.

For a moment, she wondered if he were going to lift it with his penis. She imagined the bar falling across him, falling against his throat and killing him. She was ashamed of her cowardice—not the cowardice of wishing his death, but the inability to say what it was that she meant, what it was that she wanted.

Mimi was very jealous. She had hoped to go on location, too, but Billy Michael had promised his wife a trip to Africa. “It isn’t even Africa,” Mimi said bitterly to Clio. “She thinks she’s going to see elephants and stuff. Lions. She’s not going to be very fucking happy when she realizes it’s not Africa.”

They were sitting by the pool. There had been brush fires in the hills and the air was heavy with smoke. Clio was reading a guidebook to Morocco and she held it up so that Mimi could see the continent on the cover.

“I mean not Africa-Africa!” Mimi said irritably. She was eating a taco. “You’ve never been, so you don’t know! Location is this really sexy summer camp, except there are no rules. You’re treated like a king. Sorry,” she said, “like kings and queens. It’s better than that other thing. You know, Nirvana.”

It was not only unlikely that new friends would continue to see each other once the movie was finished, Mimi explained, or that lovers would continue their luxuriant deceptions when they returned home, it was unappealing. Being on location was thrilling just because it was temporary.
It was a return to an imagined adolescence, except that you had money. There were no parents. Often, if you were lucky, there were no wives or husbands.

“Don’t tell Tommy that I’ve been seeing Billy Michael. Promise not to tell. On Tommy’s mother’s grave.”

Mimi had asked Tommy to take her to Morocco as his assistant and he had refused, so she especially did not want him to know about Billy. “Of course, he’s so fucking dim, he still wouldn’t figure it out,” she said to Clio. “He thinks I actually wanted to work for him.”

“This isn’t like you,” Clio said. “To care what Tommy thinks.” She sneezed.

“Well, it’s to protect you, so don’t complain.” Pieces of cheese and lettuce fell from the taco onto Mimi’s knees and she brushed the food onto the AstroTurf.

Clio was distracted for a moment by the beauty of color, the bright orange cheese on the plastic grass, and the pale green of a piece of lettuce lying across Mimi’s big toe, the nail painted fire-engine red. “Me? Well, thank you very much.”

“Haven’t you ever noticed what happens when your man discovers that your best girlfriend has a lover? He freaks. If you knew that Billy Michael was sleeping with someone, you wouldn’t assume that Tommy was going to rush out and find someone to fuck, right? But Tommy would start suspecting you if he knew that I was fucking Billy.”

“That makes sense.”

Mimi put down the taco. “How can you be so dumb? This is why they get nervous when women have lunch together.” She lowered her voice. “They’re convinced we’re talking about their dicks. They
wish
we were talking about their dicks.”

She put her legs in the pool. “See, I’m like Tommy. No family, thank you very much. Oh, I have a sister somewhere. Alaska, I think. My father was one of those
merchant-seaman Communists. He was in Malaysia or some fucking place and he was walking down this deserted beach and he heard someone calling from way up on a bluff. It was a man’s voice. ‘Do you speak English?’ the voice shouted and my father shouted back yes. Then the voice yelled, ‘Do you play bridge?’ My father stayed eight years. Meanwhile, I was sleeping on a pullout couch at my bad aunt’s in Detroit.”

“Do
you
play bridge?” Clio asked. “I’ve been looking for a fourth. Actually, for a second and third as well.”

Mimi kicked water at her. “You look like the type who would play bridge. How many times do I have to tell you? You have to be tough with men. My father had no one to boss him. You have to give them rules. You know, ‘Home by eleven.’ ‘Don’t desert your kids.’ It’s actually kind of amazing when you think of it, but ball-breaking works.”

“My brother, Dix, says that rules are meant to be broken. That’s why they’re called rules.”

“You sure he doesn’t mean balls? Look, you don’t know how to handle a man, Clio. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this.” Mimi wiggled her fingers in the direction of her margarita and Clio handed it to her. “You don’t even try to do it and that’s a big mistake.”

“Do what?”

“Look, I say to Billy when we’re in bed that he can only touch my legs. My legs and my ass and that’s it. And then I just lie there naked with my back to him and it drives him completely nuts.”

“Of course it would.”

“Clio! He likes it.”

Clio shook her head. “We have to deduce a general principle from Billy Michael’s behavior?”

“You ask Tommy. I give you permission. Only don’t say it’s me,” she quickly added. “Pretend you have this friend who told you. You’ll see.”

“I don’t want to ask Tommy.”

“You’re wrong, Clio. I know about these things. This is not your area.” She turned toward the house and yelled, “Is Tommy home?” She looked back at Clio. “They wrapped early today.” She called again. “Tommy!”

Tommy came out of the house. He was wearing a bathing suit and running shoes and wristbands. He had oil on his back and chest, and the definition of muscle on his chest and stomach made Clio think of the ridges in a steak platter. He looked very handsome and it made her smile.

“Hi, babe,” he said to her. “I was sort of looking for you. Do you think we can play tennis with this smoke?” He put out his palm as if testing for rain.

“We were talking about someone you know,” Mimi said quickly. “Remember that girl who was a friend of Judy’s?” she asked, turning to Clio.

Clio frowned, hoping to stop her.

Tommy flipped his racket restlessly from hand to hand. He was not very interested. A small towel was tucked into the waist of his bathing suit.

“Clio and I were just talking about her,” Mimi went on. “She has this boyfriend and she’s really strict with him, right? She’ll only let him touch her in certain places. On certain days. And she means it. Like Mondays he can only screw her from behind, or sometimes she’ll only let him use his mouth. She changes the rules all the time, but she’s strict. Sometimes she won’t let him kiss her, but he can do anything else. Anything.”

Tommy had the sheepish expression of a boy who is pleased but hopes not to show it. To Clio’s surprise, it made him interesting for a moment. She had an unexpected glimpse of his sexuality, a sexuality that Mimi would claim was predictable and a little too easily sated because he was a man. “Just remember,” Mimi had said many times to
Clio, “his orgasm means it’s over. Your orgasm means it’s beginning.”

“So, what do you think?” Mimi asked Tommy. She stood in the shallow end of the pool with her hands on her hips and looked at Clio triumphantly. “What would you do?”

He didn’t know what to say.

“Come on, Tommy, commit yourself for once,” Mimi said provocatively.

It was no pleasure for Clio to see him embarrassed. Mimi was trying to humiliate him, and to show Clio that she knew nothing about men. He looked at Clio with an expression that she had never seen before. She realized that it was beseechment.

“He’s going to play tennis with me,” she said. “But he is only permitted to use his left arm. And he has to take off one shoe. Actually, I’m going to remove it with my nose and put it in my underpants.”

She heard him release his breath.

“Sounds sort of great,” he said, spinning his racket again. “You want to watch?” he asked Mimi. Clio had given him the time that he needed and he was grateful. She glanced at him, unexpectedly shy. He winked at her.

“Maybe another day,” Mimi said, angrily taking off the top of her bikini and throwing it onto the deck.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Tommy grinned and reached out to pat Mimi on the head with his racket. “Billy will be at your apartment after rushes. Have the daiquiris made and the Jacuzzi on, he said.”

“Fuck you,” Mimi said, lowering herself into the water. She swam underwater across the pool.

“What’d I do?” he asked Clio.

Clio shook her head, unable to explain. “I’ll get my racket.”

“I liked that story about the girl,” he said.

I
n the Casablanca airport, the passengers on the plane from Los Angeles were detained by soldiers and taken to a small room. They were left to sit for hours. Clio was surprised that the soldiers did not care that Tommy was a famous American movie star, and Tommy was more surprised than anyone when the soldiers laughed at his demand to speak to the president of the country. They waited in the humid, stinking room and Tommy and Billy Michael worked on a few scenes that Tommy had always thought were underwritten. At the last minute, upon discovering that there would be no elephants, Mrs. Michael had decided not to go with them.

Clio paced back and forth, watching a man who sat both languidly and primly on top of a trunk. He was using the time to make sketches in a large notebook and he caught her glancing over his shoulder. He introduced himself. His name was Alecko Santos and he was a painter. He had a small, worn, delicate face. She was not sure, but she thought that he wore kohl around his eyes. She admired his deftness of application.

Mr. Santos invited Clio to call on him at his house in the Old City in Marrakech. Tommy came up to her as Mr. Santos was writing his name and address on a piece of
dark blue paper (Majorelle blue, he later instructed her, after the French painter who’d lived in Marrakech), and Tommy frowned when she took the paper and put it carefully in her pocket. He pulled her away, cutting her off as she began to introduce Mr. Santos. “Who’s the guy in the mascara?” he asked loudly.

She went to see Alecko Santos in Marrakech. He lived with a young man named Abdullah, who he said was his nephew “à la Jean Cocteau.” They taught her the history of the city and took her to the good shops in the medina, and Santos introduced her to writers and painters and some of the royal family who were staying at the old palace of the Glaoui. Abdullah patiently spent hours with her in the Medersa and the Bahia.

There is not that much to see in Marrakech, Clio wrote to Emma: “It is the last big oasis before the Sahara. A mysterious, rosy city, not Mediterranean and shabbily dissolute like Tangier or oriental and aristocratic like Fès. It is African, the last Berber outpost before the Atlas Mountains fall away into the hard, dangerous south.” As always, I have paid attention to my lessons, Clio thought as she read over her letter. What a good girl am I.

Santos took her to a
thé dansant
given by the minister of commerce. The minister had brought the Gipsy Kings from Marbella for the day. The Yugoslav ambassador was there, and some people from Yemen, all seemingly related. The Yemeni gentlemen were in beautiful English suits and striped dress shirts with white collars a little too pointed, a little too stiff. The women were so burdened with the weight of their afternoon jewels, and dresses encrusted with sequinned and beaded embroidery, that they had little strength to dance. One of the women, a sheika, sat next
to Clio on a narrow sofa. She had just come from Paris and she was astonished when Clio admitted that she’d never been to Paris.

The reception rooms of the minister’s palace were decorated in gold and white. “In the style of Versailles,” the minister whispered to Clio, as if it were a confidence. When the music began, His Excellency danced in turn with each of the women. On one of his graceful passes, he asked over the head of his partner if Clio had any plans to go on to Fès, where his mother lived. His mother would be happy, he said; honored, in fact, to welcome an American film star so famous as herself.

“But I am not a film star, Your Excellency,” Clio said in surprise when he stopped before her and lowered his exhausted partner into a small gilt armchair. Clio worried that the woman would not fit into the small chair. When the woman sat down, some of the sequins on her dress broke away and rolled across the marble floor.

The minister smiled at Clio knowingly. “My dear.” He rocked on his feet, his hands in his white cashmere jacket. “You are from Hollywood, no?”

The sheika smiled at him, and nodded her beautiful head.

“It’s my husband who is the movie star. Tommy Haywood.” Clio did not know if the minister were flirting with her by pretending not to believe her or whether he really did think that she was a movie star.

“You should have told me,” the sheika said to him with a pout. She turned to Clio. “Do you know Dirk Bogarde? I promise you, he is a very old friend of mine.”