The Hollywood Guy (16 page)

“If I asked you to go out to LA for a couple of months, what would your answer be?”

“I’d say Desirée rules in LA.”

“I’d say its Cleo that I love.”

“I’d say you think you do.”

“We could rent a house wherever you want, Malibu even.”

“LA is not good for me.”

Pete kisses her neck. “You haven’t been there with me.”

“Hollywood wants you back?”

“Not going unless you come with me.”

She’s touched. ‘I love you Pete.” She kisses him. “Order the Chinese and bring it over, we’ll have more privacy.” Dicey follows her out.

Pete abandons the game as the Yankees score another run, calls in his order to the restaurant, pops a blue pill then jumps in the shower. He’s toweling off when the phone rings. This time he’s ready for David. “I’m passing.”

“Passing!”

“Is there an echo on this line?”

“Marcus Bergman is offering you a Showtime series.”

“David, after years of being fucked up, I have a meaningful life. Come and visit with your girlfriend, see for yourself. Oh, and tell Barbara that her daughter loves it here.”

David speaks slowly, calmly. “Pete, I know you’re probably high and still resentful, so what I’m going to do is call tomorrow first thing. Hopefully, after a good night’s sleep, you’ll be more lucid.”

“Don’t forget to pass the message on to my ex. P.S., I’m not stoned.” Pete powers off and goes to pick up the Chinese.

Cleo is delectable in her favorite boatneck, and she’s not wearing panties, always a plus. As she sets the table, Pete presents two steaming dishes. “You must be very proud of your bush,” he says admiringly.

“I am, shaving the vulva is a way men infantilize women. Hair is power. Men are afraid of getting lost in the forest.”

“Not this man.” When Pete was younger he often grew impatient with oral sex, in a hurry to move on to the main course. Samantha loved to watch him go down on her, loved to suck him, she didn’t need to fuck to get off. That was all Heidi would permit because the taste of semen made her gag. Barbara loved foreplay, endless kisses before letting Pete touch her; she enjoyed everything and withheld nothing.

“How are you with cold Chinese?” Cleo asks innocently.

“I’m good.” Actually he’s starving not having eaten since the Sabrett heart burner ten hours earlier.

“Start with Precious.”

Pete buries his face between Cleo’s legs, but from a high, wide angle surveillance point of view, it is Desirée squirming under his ministrations. What she wants is to be on top, in charge. He submits to her aggressive behavior but the theatricality of her lovemaking, the vocalizing, feel all too familiar. His mind wanders, flashing Samantha on the High Line, knowing that even with all that extra flesh, he could bring her to orgasm and know for a fact that she really came.

Is that Desirée grinding up and down pneumatically, squeezing him like a lemon, if so, what happened to Cleo? Whoever it is at any given moment, Pete, with the aid of the blue pill, will not be broken. He will go on and on until all three of them come.

During a quiet moment in this strange endless session, Jackson brings Annabeth home from rehearsal. As soon as she sees her father’s pickup she remembers her promise to cook dinner. She sits down on the porch feeling guilty. Jackson hovers near, wondering when he and the girl will finally get it on? He thought it would be tonight but she got her period and doesn’t want the first time to be messy.

Annabeth lost her virginity in junior high but was drunk when she did it and can’t remember much about the experience. It took awhile for sex to feel good and she still doesn’t enjoy it all the time. Maybe with Jackson it will be different; she certainly likes kissing him. As she relaxes in his arms the final movement of the sexual symphony being performed in Unit 15 begins. The sound carries beautifully in the cool night air, building to a crescendo. When Dicey starts to howl, Annabeth decides it’s time to bail.

“Do you have a rubber?”

“I thought you said?”

“I want to.”

Pete and Cleo eat Singapore chow fun and very spicy Szechuan bean curd. Was the action long enough, he wonders? How long is enough, especially if there are two women to satisfy? Sixty minutes? Was it that long?

In reality, Cleo does not mind a quickie. Men always try to impress women by fucking them to death. After being hammered by someone like Roy who had multiple orgasms but was never satisfied, slam-bam, thank you ma’am isn’t a bad way to go. Get in, get off and get on with it. Ten, fifteen minutes – done. She rolls a joint from her own stash.

Pete fills a bowl of water for Dicey. “Where did you get the grass?”

“Jamie scored for me.”

“You guys friends?”

“I like her and José and Jackson and even your daughter who hates me.”

“She only thinks she does.” Pete flips on the recorder. “Let’s talk about Carlos.”

“You said we were going to start writing.”

“Last interview.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Trust me. After this, we start, and when I start something, I won’t stop until we’re finished.”

“You promised”

“Please. I want to know more about the narco?”

Cleo lies back on the chaise and closes her eyes. “We lived in a walled compound outside Culliacan, but traveled constantly.”

“While he did business?”

“He trusted me.”

“I thought they don’t like outsiders.”

“I was initiated at a secret ceremony. That’s where I met Shorty.”

“Guzman!”

“Carlos told me Forbes Magazine listed Joaquin Guzman as the 701
st
richest person in the world. Shorty recruited him when he was thirteen. He was like a son to the boss. It was Shorty who officiated.” She takes a long hit off the joint. Her voice changes to Desirée’s. “Everyone handled Precious, but that was nothing. What I had never done before was get fucked by an animal.”

Pete tries to remain nonchalant. “An animal fucked you?”

“A goat, then Shorty slit its throat and covered me with blood.”

Pete is shocked. “That’s sick.”

“Why do you have a hard on?”

He’s embarrassed. “What was Carlos’ reaction?”

“When it was over, he purified me in a sacred spring, swore an oath to bring Joaquin Guzman’s heart to me on a plate.”

“He was going to kill the boss of the Sinaloa Cartel for you?”

“Some day, after the syndicate was set up.”

“Carlos didn’t have the stature to negotiate a truce between the cartels.”

“Not a truce, a business merger. Carlos had vision.”

“That’s why the CIA took him out?”

She nods.

“How did you get away?”

“Carlos’ body guards saved me. Don’t forget, I was like their priestess, they were sworn to protect me.”

“Shorty let you go?”

The voice changes to Cleo’s. “Everything happened very fast. Desirée disappeared before he knew she was gone.”

“What about the CIA?”

“They were looking for a blond.”

“Did she love Carlos?”

“Very much.”

“Was he a good lover?”

“Always back to the sex.”

“It’s an essential part of your story.”

“I loved Carlos, he was very charismatic but physically not my type.”

“Was he more Desirée’s type?”

“He liked her to fuck him with a dildo. Not my thing.”

Pete’s mind reels from all this graphic information. “What is your thing?”

Cleo is embarrassed. “Don’t laugh. I want to have a family.”

“Kids?”

“That’s what I want, I’m ready for a normal life.”

Pete turns off the recorder. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Go home Pete.”

Alone in bed, Pete tries to process his feelings for Cleo. Sexual intimacy is supposed to bring a man and a woman closer but for her it’s associated with work. After she comes, she disengages. The up side is that when she disengages she opens up creatively, not a bad trade off.

P
ete wakes up in the morning with a headache, feels dizzy when he gets out of bed, but all in all is in a good mood and ready to take a pass at Cleo’s thirty pages. He actually can’t wait to start writing, but first coffee. While it brews he peeks into Annabeth’s room: clothes are strewn everywhere, her computer is on, and a coffee encrusted Zabar’s mug sits beside an overflowing ashtray. How can his daughter think clearly in the midst of chaos? Then again, what does she think about? And where is she anyway? Whenever Barbara found Annabeth’s door open, it gave her license to clean the room, which led to a forensic investigation into the life of an adolescent girl growing up in Pacific Palisades. The disturbing bits, like the pill containers, Barbara shared with Pete who would have preferred to remain oblivious. Ultimately her research became the basis for a doctoral thesis that morphed into a best selling pop-psych book about teens. David made the deal of course.

Top Of The World
lies open on the bed; his dust jacket persona stares back at him - no gray in his unruly hair, no doubt in his eyes. Two years writing, several more revising, a couple more searching for an agent, then another revision, finding a publisher and working with an editor on the final draft. Eight years that ended in failure and left him devastated. What really hurt was how diminished he felt in Samantha’s eyes, how he had disappointed her. The day he left for LA he told her she made a mistake giving up on him and would regret it for the rest of her life. Samantha laughed, knowing she was going to marry a very rich man. He closes the book, leaves everything as is and shuts the door.

Taking his first sip of coffee, Pete opens the New York Times Sports Section. His Yanks beat the Twins 7-2, the bullpen combined for 2 1/3 innings of solid scoreless relief. The phone rings, David from LA. It rings a second time. “Fuck it.” Pete picks up.

“Pete?”

“Up early.”

“Staying ahead of the curve, you’re my first call, Marcus is my second. Let’s do the deal.”

A pair of squirrels zigzags from tree to tree. “As my representative you can tell Marcus Bergman I enjoyed our meeting, but regretfully pass on his project.”

“Pete, if this is a ploy to get your price up, you should tell me.”

“David, I’m not available, simple as that. This is the new me being honest and direct. I’m working on something that really interests me.”

A familiar voice chimes in. “He’s writing a tell-all with a porn queen.”

“Is that you, Barbara? This happens to be a private conversation between me and my agent, not me and your boyfriend. Where the fuck are you two anyway?”

“Home,” she answers.

“You guys are calling from our bedroom.” He’s getting irritated fast. “Do you have clothes on? Are you talking to me naked?”

“I had a conversation with your daughter last night,” Barbara replies calmly.

Pete’s voice rises. “Is Annabeth not from your womb?”

“Annabeth is our child.” Barbara’s response has a practiced therapeutic cadence. “She is very stressed out by your behavior.”

“Really?” Pete is fuming. “She doesn’t seem stressed to me, in fact her room looks normal, like LA.”

David retrieves the phone. “Hey I’m sure you both have lots of parenting to catch up on, but we have a business issue to resolve. I have an interesting solution to your problem, Pete. Do the Bergman series while I get you a monster advance on the book. By the time I’ve done the deal, you’re finished with the season. It’s a win-win situation.”

“Let me be perfectly clear, David. I don’t care about a chief of detectives and a sexy ambitious mayor. I don’t want to write make believe masquerading as reality. I’m working on a truly amazing story. That’s what I want to do.”

Barbara loses her professional cool. “Translation, he’s fucking a porn queen.”

Pete is insulted. “This is way beyond the physical.”

“You, beyond the physical? Typical OCD behavior, David, he’s had these episodes before.”

“Spare me the psychobabble.”

“Carrying on with a woman at least half your age.”

David recaptures the phone. “Pete, put your sexual compulsion aside for a moment, you’re making a tremendous mistake if you pass on this deal.”

“Speaking of sexual compulsion, does Barbara still like to get banged before breakfast?”

They hang up.

Unbelievable. “OCD behavior, like before,” she said. Sure, he had a gambling problem, but that’s over, even the womanizing is history. Pete, righteous and reborn, can’t wait to get to work.

He freshens the coffee in his favorite cup, the heavy one with the faded blue trim he bought on his honeymoon in Paris with Barbara. They were so in love in the city of lovers, surreptitiously jerking each other off at a Cinematheque screening of
Last Tango in Paris
. What is she doing in bed with his putz agent? If she’s trying to get his attention, she has it.

Annabeth returns home guiltily. “Sorry about last night, daddy.”

He plays it stupid. “What was last night?”

“I promised to cook dinner.”

“I had Chinese takeaway, it was fine.”

“I was like totally immersed, you know with rehearsal. The guys are all so great and, after, Jackson and me couldn’t stop talking so I crashed at his place.”

“Great to have that communication with someone.”

In the past she loved to share her infatuations with her father, not today. She takes a sip of Pete’s coffee. “Since you left, the blend at home sucks.”

“Know what I’m thinking? You and Jackson are so in tune, you should produce the demo.”

“Dad, Jackson is depending on you.” She sounds like her mother. “He’s in awe of what you know about music. We all are.”

Pete is flattered. “David and your mother think I’m crazy to pass on the series.”

“You did?” She’s surprised too.

“LA is over for me, I don’t want to go back. Woodstock is my home now.”

“We were a happy family, weren’t we, dad?” She’s suddenly emotional. “I know you and mom still love each other.”

“We did for a long time, now we don’t.”

“So love is like this powerful feeling that transfers from wife to girlfriend and so on and so forth as needed?”

“Your mother is with David Stone, I’m here.”