Permission

by Saskia Vogel

  ‘I bet you’re getting booked for pin-up-type jobs now, huh?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said.

  At the next intersection we idled at a red light, and heat built up inside the car. The smell of oiled leather made me feel sick. When the light changed, the car beside us beat us across the large, empty intersection. The road was clear and Van sped up to fifty, giving me a knowing smile. When he slowed to turn a corner, the engine’s gruff rumble gave way to percussive pops. I’ve always loved the sound of an air-cooled flat six.

  My dad would tell me that, back in the day, there was nothing else like the 930 Turbo, and the 911 was only ever a tribute to that supercar. The 911’s still as hot as Madonna, I remember him saying, but unlike Madonna, it’s not the only turbocharged thing on the road anymore. I felt protective of my pop idol when he talked about her like that, as though what she was doing was for him and not for me. Protective and jealous, and with jealousy came shame, the sense that something was out of place. Was what we wanted from her the same? But Madonna did not need my protection. She was a woman in control, generous with her body, the spectacle of it, the idea of it in dialogue with other bodies, mine. I imagined she didn’t think about sex in terms of men or women, but grace, strength, and beauty. I wanted to be part of this. I don’t think this is what my father wanted. His desire was clear and common. Mine had a syntax I had yet to discover. And I had to look carefully to see it.

  What Dad meant when he talked about those cars was that he wasn’t into faddish consumption. He had his Karmann Ghia, and those were wheels you held on to. You don’t trade in your first love just because there’s a newer model. The three of us took his car up to Monterey. Not every year, but often, me in the back, knees to chin. How hot it could be, even at the coast. My dad always booked the same hotel because my mother never got over how it was owned by her favourite girlhood actor, a cowboy who made her believe that the Wild West in her German books about the Apache warrior Winnetou was at least as real as Never-land. She was so happy on the porch of the ranch house, watching sheep roam the hillside, being somewhere she recognized. June was when he took vacation. June was now gone.

  Van squeezed the steering wheel with his right hand, then his left. His gaze wandered up my legs, over a silk slip dress I bought at a consignment store. A timeless wardrobe staple I could hardly afford even then, when I was living off savings from a commercial for a cellular carrier and spent a good part of that year covered in blood or submerged in water in low-budget direct-to-video movies from a production company most famous for always turning a profit. I’d bought the dress because I knew it would serve me well.

  ‘Yup,’ he said, running his teeth over his lower lip. ‘Too bad Martini already has Lola LaForce.’

  He winked. I relaxed. He could see what I was good for.

  On a dimly lit street off Sunset we pulled up to a valet stand outside a shoebox building with no windows.

  The restaurant was lit like a moonless night. Dark walls and moleskin chairs, electric candles, crocodile tabletops. I ran my thumb along the groove of a scale, waiting as the waiter pulled out my chair. Black napkins, cutlery gleaming.

  A man in a suit stepped into a mist of light and said, ‘Mr. Waldron, always a pleasure.’ A firm handshake. ‘Miss,’ he nodded at me and smiled so kindly I wished he would feed me under the table.

  A waiter filled our champagne flutes.

  Soon the small plates started coming: one bite each. ‘I took the liberty of ordering,’ Van said, and we began eating in silence. I ate slowly, as if the food consumed me. I waited for him to notice. The way I held my fork and knife, not the American way, not the European way, but a hybrid of my parents’. My dad’s grip all fist, no matter how he arranged his fingers, my mother surgical. It was never appropriate to ask why my way of eating fascinated the men who took me out on dates, and they never offered an explanation, but their attention made me aware of my power. So I perfected it.

  I held my fork in my right hand to cut and to eat. I pushed small bites onto the back of the tines, a lick, a taste of everything. He watched me guide the fork to my mouth. Charred squid, a smear of red pepper salsa, crisp honey-cured bacon. As soon as it was in my mouth, I looked at him. I waited.

  ‘I love watching you eat,’ he said.

  I smiled as if I had no idea what he was talking about. This was essential: to deny knowledge of my powers. Only then would he feel that finding me was an achievement.

  ‘You’re not allergic to anything, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no. It’s all wonderful.’ I said. Scallops kind of grossed me out. Something about the texture. But my father loved them. He would eat them in one bite, wanting all the flavors at once, and chewing slowly. I swirled the fatty creature in the foam and put it in that small mouth.

  Van refilled my glass as I chewed.

  We were each given a plate of Tournedos Rossini. I hadn’t eaten beef since the last time a man took me to dinner.

  ‘Did you know the Savoy created this dish for Rossini himself?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know him.’

  ‘The composer. Barber of Seville?’

  ‘I stay at Claridge’s when I’m in London.’

  ‘But you know Rossini. Remember the singing frog: Figaro qua, Figaro la, Figaro su…’

  Van smiled. ‘You’re a funny girl.’

  ‘It’s a funny song.’

  I cut into the medallion and the pink juice mingled with the sauce, the glistening crouton, the musky black truffle. I was hungry and considered eating the foie gras, but I pushed it to the side of my plate instead.

  He said, ‘Yeah, you probably shouldn’t eat that now you’ve got that model body.’

  I pinched my thigh under the table. Had grief made me thin? I could never get a read on my body.

  ‘I’m still an actress,’ I said.

  He waved his hand. ‘Right, right. But be careful with what you put away. You’ve never had a weight problem, but you’re not getting any younger. What are you, twenty-four?’

  I remembered the age I gave Jake. ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘You watch out for twenty-seven… Girls in this town.’ He gestured around his hips. He told me about the agency he had started, the advances he’d been rejecting. He initiated a game of Fuck Marry Kill, which we’d played before, and I stared at my steak. My juicy steak. I wanted to eat it all, but I was afraid he’d think I didn’t care about my figure, those three make-or-break pounds, and I wanted him to know that I did care and I had what it took to get on his books, even if this was turning out to be some sort of date. The medallion was about as wide as a tennis ball. I was as hungry as when we arrived. I rolled the wine around the glass.

  ‘Nice legs,’ I said, trying to figure out what was the least amount I could eat to show him that I appreciated the food and cared about my figure, and also feel full. He took this as a cue to order a second bottle. I was already tipsy. If I was feeling tipsy, I was probably drunker than I thought I was. I didn’t want to be drunk with him. I decided to eat half of the medallion.

  When I finished, I put my cutlery down, metal to porcelain, soundless. Pointing the blade of the knife at my dinner companion, always hoping my dinner companion would interpret this as a wink, a gesture of intent.

  He said, ‘I’m glad you reached out. You’re a cool girl. Different.’

  I smiled as if no one else had ever told me this. I was still trying to figure out how to get the leftover steak home with me. I looked around the restaurant. It was open-plan and although it was dark, I couldn’t talk to a waiter without his noticing, or sneak out a doggie bag. What if I called Orly. Orly. The thought of her confused me.

  ‘What’s up, babe?’

  Suddenly: babe.

  I shook my head and gave him a sleepy smile. ‘Just,’ I said, touching my hair and looking at the room. ‘This.’

  He took my foie gras, shoved it in his mouth and filled my glass. ‘So you like it, huh? They used my interiors guy.’
>
  Dessert arrived. He looked especially pleased.

  ‘It’s lavender crème brûlée.’

  The waiter walked backwards away from the table.

  Van cracked the caramelized crust with his spoon, smashing the flowers into the silky custard. I considered picking up my spoon. I didn’t.

  ‘Oh no, babe,’ Van said. ‘Are you sore about what I said? Look, you might not be a leading lady, but you’re pretty. You’re the kind of pretty that’ll stick. Even when you’re twenty-seven.’

  I stared at him and smiled, not showing my teeth.

  ‘Go on, you can cheat with me. I won’t tell. I like a naughty girl.’

  He scooped up a heaping mouthful of crème brûlée and reached it over to me.

  ‘Open up.’

  His arms were short, and the hand holding the spoon hovered above my glass. Some lavender dropped into my wine. It sank.

  I shut my eyes and closed my mouth over the mound of cream. My lipstick left a red smear on the silver.

  VAN CAME BACK FROM his kitchen with two frosty glasses filled with viscous liquor. ‘Marty’ had taught him how to make them, he said, and I acted impressed. He didn’t seem to remember I’d been at that party, too. He had told me to make myself at home, and was now repeating that I should make myself at home. I took off my shoes and tucked my feet under me on the sofa, a tufted leather platform next to a picture window, a gas fireplace, and a small stack of unopened LPS. It was a picturesque place to sit, and I sat up straight, not reaching for the glass, but receiving it. As I drank, I noticed an unboxed record player in the corner.

  ‘My guy at Helix sent it over. We can set it up another day. You seem like a vinyl kind of girl.’

  He gazed into my eyes.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. His face seemed strained, and it made him look old.

  ‘You, you’re spectacular, you know that?’ he said with a bashful smile. ‘You and me. We could really be something.’

  I sipped the drink, unsure of what to say. The old hope came creeping, that something would come of our meeting, that maybe him thinking I was spectacular meant everyone else would too. After all, the Seven Sisters only became stars because Orion was pursuing them.

  Out the window, the houses and apartment buildings seemed to be propped up on the sloping road, half-hidden by bushy trees, and beyond their crowns, a sea of light.

  ‘It’s good, right? As soon as I saw that view, I knew I wasn’t walking away.’

  ‘You see what you want and you take it,’ I said.

  ‘Always,’ he said, and it was meant to be flirtatious, but it annoyed me. If he was so decisive, why did he insist on ambiguity here? Or was I being stupid? Was he revealing himself to me? I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t about me. It was about my career. Or about finding comfort in the familiar, and together we’d enter into oblivion. Hope was a sort of eclipse. And in its shadow, I would feel my way to orgasm.

  ‘And there’s a cherry on top. The pilot for Asphalt Knights was written here!’

  ‘I loved Asphalt Knights as a kid. Every time I turn my headlights on at sunset, I pretend I’m in the title sequence.’

  ‘You and everyone else. That show is iconic,’ he said.

  The way the ceiling light was hitting him, I could see the gel in his hair was flaking. And he’d had too much sun, which he couldn’t pull off the way Krit did. It jarred with the condo and his pressed shirt. His skin made me think he didn’t quite know how to take care of himself. My mother used to show me pictures of bronzed women with skin like a dry lake bed and say, Sunscreen, as if it were a command. Her chest would always burn when she lay outside. I never burned. Not even with Orly. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that the lack in his appearance wasn’t a lack at all, but the beginnings of him not having to care anymore because he was a man on the rise.

  ‘When I sell this place, they’re going to say, “Van Waldron lived here,”’ he said. ‘I know it.’ And he went on to tell me about his neighbours, how relieved he was that the streets at the foot of the hill were starting to clean up. The undesirable element. Property value. Location.

  ‘Sounds like you invested wisely,’ I said.

  ‘I’m doing all right. It’s all about the exit plan.’

  The ice rattled in the cocktail shaker as he stirred up another round of drinks. I stared at a star. It seemed too bright for this sky, fat and gleaming. I waited for it to move.

  He stepped in the way of my view, with a glass in each hand and his penis hovering near my nose. It was sticking out of his fly. As he moved, it bobbed.

  ‘Suck me,’ he said.

  I’d been here before.

  ‘I want you to taste me,’ he said.

  Van stepped closer, it jabbed me under my nose.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said as if it had been my idea. ‘Taste me.’

  He lifted up his shirt and showed off his thick torso. Of all that was speeding through me, my mind rested here: his choice to be hairless was regrettable.

  I felt cornered, so I opened my mouth and gave it a suck. A reflex parallel to inaction. The thought that follows: it’s already done. Pre-cum on my tongue. I salivated to wash my mouth out. He liked that too.

  Van looked over his shoulder at his reflection in the window as he unbuttoned his shirt. I pulled my dress over my head. I’d spent the holiday season wrapping lingerie at a boutique on Melrose where I worked in part because of the discount. Male shoppers stared freely at my breasts as we figured out their lovers’ sizes. I wouldn’t let them leave without a gift receipt. I was wearing a semi-sheer basque with a matching thong. He buried his face in my cleavage.

  I took it as a good sign that I didn’t have to ask him to use a condom. It was out and then it was on. The gesture made me want to believe he was a good person deep down, respectful and conscientious. As affable as the person I’d met manning my ex-agent’s desk. Part of the effect of hope’s eclipse was a tendency toward kind interpretation, but my insistence on looking for the good in people had never served me well. It meant I would bend myself to fit in with them, without considering how I actually wanted to be. Tonight I needed to be spectacular.

  Van started to undo his pants, but I told him to keep them on. He liked my assertiveness. As I manipulated him through the fly and fabric, I could see he liked watching me work within my limitations. ‘You like that?’ I asked again and again; the words were warming him up, the steady climb. I liked watching him cede control and then his will was mine. I pushed my thong to the side. I engulfed him.

  The sofa had been cleared of its pillows by the time we were done. Our sweat had begun to irritate his newly waxed skin. His fingers danced on my hips as he whispered baby baby baby. I tickled him with my long hair. Careful to hold the condom at its base, I dismounted. He gasped and laughed. I liked him like this. Maybe we could be something, I thought. I could be a vinyl kind of girl. Funny, cool, different. Spectacular. His. I could start fresh. I’d work my bra size into the conversation so he wouldn’t have any trouble buying me lingerie. I was forever wishing that what I’d lost would come find me. He could be my daddy.

  Watery blood had pooled in the folds of the condom. I couldn’t remember my last period or having bought tampons in the weeks, months I’d been alone with my mother in my parents’ house. How long had it been? I thought what I always thought even though I was careful with protection: another bullet dodged. He reached out to help with the condom.

  ‘Careful,’ I said.

  He sat up and his latex-wrapped penis flopped on his pale trousers.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, rubbing at the spot. ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Hey, Van, hey,’ I said. ‘I can get that out for you. Easy.’ My mother had made me watch when she trained Blanca, so I knew how to get anything clean.

  ‘Oh, you can? How about not putting your shit on my new pants in the first place.’

  He didn’t push me off him exactly, but when he stood up my shin knocked the heavy coffee table. He didn’t c
are.

  ‘Fuckin’…’

  We looked each other in the eye. We both knew that whatever he said next, he wouldn’t be able to take back. I’m not sure he minded the blood so much as the stain. No one likes having their new things ruined. I felt ashamed and angry that I felt ashamed because the body will do what it does. But I suppose this evening had never been about our bodies.

  He turned and stormed up the stairs to the mezzanine where I could see his bed through the railing. A door slammed. The shower started running. I couldn’t find another bathroom. In the kitchen, I cleaned myself up with a wet paper towel and threw it away in the trash can under the sink. I tore off another couple of sheets, folded one and stuffed it between my legs. The other, I wanted to put in my clutch just in case, but I couldn’t get a handle on the clasp. It fell from my shaking hands, and the crash of hard resin and its clatter against the tiles made me feel jagged. I didn’t want to wait around for him to call me a cab. It was wishful thinking that he would.

  I COULDN’T GET CELL reception outside of Van’s house, so I started making my way to the main road. Waving searchlights from the boulevard lit up the clouds. My feet on solid ground.

  The hilly neighbourhood looked so much like home – no sidewalks or streetlights, insulated by wealth. Cypress trees. Shrubs. Cracked streets. Old villas with red-tiled roofs. Ornate garage doors. Rusted pick-up overhung with angel’s trumpets. And that was it. I was in a cul-de-sac. I turned around and tried another street.

  A flight of stairs ran between the houses, and I thought it might be a shortcut. At the landing, there was a white gate. Beyond the gate, a slope. At its foot, headlights glided around the bend. The gate was locked. Impossible to squeeze through or jump. And then I felt foolish for wanting to. It was pitch-dark down there. Dark and silent. I remembered every dead woman I had ever seen on film. Every horror story. I tried to remember the name of the girl who was taken into police custody up in Topanga and released at night without a ride home. She disappeared. Lost in the canyons. A year went by, she was assumed dead, but her father went on the news and pleaded with us to remember her name, to remind us that she was a person, not a story, and she was still missing. I took off my shoes, as if a soundless footfall would protect me. Sprinted up the stairs. Jogged along another road, hoping it would get me off this hill, but it was a dead end, too.