by Saskia Vogel
Orly was in her car when I came out and asked if I could take her around the scenic route. She gave me the keys.
‘There’s nothing around here,’ I said as we pulled out onto the main road. ‘It’s pretty and quiet, that’s about it.’
‘It’s how I like it,’ she said. ‘So do my clients. One of them nicknamed my house “The Resort.”’
‘That’s accurate,’ I said. ‘But resort life isn’t life.’
‘One of them told me he feels good coming somewhere nice. It makes him feel like what we do isn’t a dirty secret.’
The way she looked at me made me laugh.
I decided to ask her: ‘Are all your clients in love with you? Or just – ’ I hadn’t said his name out loud yet ‘ – Piggy?’
‘I’m handling it. He’s a romantic, and can get needy. Give him time to adjust.’
‘OK.’
‘Will you trust me on this?’
I took my eyes off the road to look at her. I would.
We talked as I drove us along the road made bumpy by the constant landslide, up the winding road that led to the top of one of the hills and down again, through canyons thick with eucalyptus trees. The road led past the Moradi house. I couldn’t help it. I stopped. Seeing it again, the bitter nostalgia. I unbuckled my seat belt. The pressure of it across my chest and gut was too much. I opened the window a crack and checked the locks. It was a sweet house, ranch-style like the one next door, like something out of a sitcom. It seemed impossible that anything bad could have ever happened here, and it seemed impossible that everyone’s experience of it wouldn’t be the same. All you needed to do was smile at your neighbour and wave.
‘Weird comparison,’ Orly said.
‘What?’
‘Treating TV as if it were the ultimate reality.’
‘But those dreams are the blueprint for this place, not the other way around. It’s the same idea as your resort.’
‘My sanctuary.’
‘Right,’ I said, smiling. ‘But every house here is an island. Neighbours are just a suggestion. Isn’t that why you moved here?’
She reached across the parking brake and took my hand. ‘Sure, yes. But how does that explain you?’
The way she was looking at me made me blush, and I pulled away. In front of this house, her touch made me nervous.
The lights in the Moradi house were on. No car was in the driveway, but he’d parked in the garage, at least when Ana and I were younger. It was innocent then. Ana and me hiding between the stools under the kitchen counter, listening to her mother chatter with her friends until we got bored and hid out in the garage and talked, sitting on the hood of his car. Sometimes it was still hot and clicking. Mrs. Moradi, Joyce, had a pair of velvet slippers she’d left out there, and I was scandalized that she let something so delicate and beautiful go to waste among the old boxes and oil stains, the decadence of her disregard. But she was the same with the sculptures she made at the art centre. After they’d been fired, she left them to the moss in the garden, but in the flower beds along the perimeter of the house there were no sculptures to be seen, no bending torsos, no abstract assemblages. I wondered if he and Joyce were still married, if he was at the art centre trying to get closer to her. Orly and I sat in the car for a while and saw no one. The lights could have been on a timer.
‘Now what?’ Orly asked.
I told her what had happened. I told her about it all.
‘We could pee on his lawn,’ she said.
I laughed and shook my head. ‘What if he doesn’t live here anymore?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It could be a symbolic gesture. Let it out and let it go.’
‘What about the lawn?’
‘One pee isn’t going to ruin a lawn.’
I knew how wet the grass would be, the way the dark would feel, the sky and street. Being the only thing around that moved. I imagined squatting in it, trying not to get any on my shoes, my bare ass in view of the house. The windows of the house, eyes. I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t want his eyes on me ever again. I wish I could say I thought he didn’t deserve to look at me, but that’s something Orly would have said. I was afraid of what his eyes would do to me. I had thought of all the ways I could get revenge on him. I had thought about it then, back in high school, and now. Everything from confronting him with Ana, hand-in-hand, to simply telling him to go fuck himself if I happened to run into him at the mall. I knew where he parked, so I could key his car. But when I actually thought about doing it, it left me limp. Nothing I did would make a difference. If I keyed his car, if I peed on his lawn, it would just be another way in which I was doing wrong. I’d be the one who seemed unhinged, and he’d come out of it looking like the reasonable one, the upstanding citizen, a family man. And if I told anyone else what happened in the parking lot, it would be my word against his – all I wanted to do was forget the whole story and let it sink into the past.
‘You have every right to be angry,’ Orly said.
‘I’m not angry,’ I said.
She didn’t believe me. ‘But what if you were?’
THE DIRECTOR’S HOUSE was far. Way past the freeway exit for my apartment in the city.
She had explained everything, but I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I looked at her and she smiled at me, and then all I was worried about was disappointing her.
Is this what she’d wanted all along: a colleague? It was exactly the kind of thing I got wrong: confusing lust, intimacy, and attention. Colleague. The word seemed absurd in this context. Sidekick. Assistant. Maybe assistant was better. Assistants didn’t need to like the client, they just had to be supportive. I could do that. Would she take my hand again and hold me when it was over?
The dark hills rose around us on the freeway. Her hands were at ten and two on the steering wheel, her eyes darting between the mirrors and the road. I touched my blond wig and looked at hers. We were a striking pair. She trusted me to be here and that would have to be good enough.
I asked: ‘How did he choose his coffin?’
‘He’s got a guy,’ Orly said.
‘A coffin guy?’
‘I mean,’ she shrugged. ‘A guy. He’s got a guy for all the stuff he wants to keep from his assistant.’
Orly said that after his Halloween party last year, when everyone else was asleep, she was watching the lights in the pirate maze Pete had built in his yard with set pieces his guy rented from the same prop house used by the studio who made the Treasure Island blockbuster, and she saw a coyote stepping lightly between the candy wrappers and red plastic cups. It stopped to look at her, ribs visible through its fur.
‘Do you know why coyotes have to watch their backs?’ she asked.
I shook my head.
‘At first Coyote wanted death to be like sleep to spare us the grief, but Raven and the other scavengers were only thinking about feasting on fresh carcasses. They wanted death to be permanent, and made such a passionate case that Coyote gave in. Then Raven’s daughter died and Raven begged Coyote to change his mind, but Coyote said what’s done was done. Not a popular guy,’ she said. ‘But you learn a lot about people that way.’
She paused.
‘They say that’s why Coyote is always hungry. No one feels generously toward him because of the loss he caused.’
‘Poor Coyote,’ I said.
‘Right? People don’t understand mortality is also a gift.’
I thought about her story as we drove up the winding hill, passing one palatial home after the next. Maybe she was setting the tone. Everything about us felt gauzy and warm. I liked her loose way of telling stories, as though they were all true, and it didn’t really matter which story you told because you got to choose what you carried with you. Orly turned onto a green residential street that twisted up a hill. With her story in my head and the lights playing on the window glass, I couldn’t stop thinking how insubstantial these houses were. Houses like my parents’ house, glass and steel, p
aper-thin walls, doors you could muscle open. Set in darkness and silence, how vulnerable we all are. The thought was exhilarating. Maybe this night would be transformative. Maybe it would be weird or boring. Whatever it would be, it would be with her and being with her felt urgent.
As soon as the Director opened the door, I was sure we knew each other from before, other than by reputation. Maybe we had gone to high school together. He laughed off the question, took our matching trench coats, and showed us through the living room, sunken with a cocktail bar. A wall of windows opened out onto a sprawling, manicured garden and a swimming pool. Everything was monochrome but the Technicolor movie posters. The walls were dappled with artificial shadows, their source a light covered with a gobo. In a bell jar on the table was a striped propeller hat, and then it clicked. I was about to tell the Director that I remembered where I knew him from, but Orly gripped my arm. She put her finger to her lips and shook her head. Be cool.
‘The Director’ was in fact little Petey Sandross. Everyone used to know him as Wendell, the sass-mouthed neighbour kid who wore that propeller hat in a popular family sitcom from the 1980s. His little-boy face – the famous cheesy grin, those grey eyes and jet-black hair belonging to the wise-beyond-his-years troublemaker – fought through the stubble and deep lines the sun and smoke and drink had given him. (Tabloid photos of him on the beach with women who towered over him, rumours of alcoholism, the cigarette that had seemed like a crutch in his teens now a fixture.) He was even smoking right then; his yellow teeth repulsive if he’d been anyone else. But this was Petey Sandross. He wouldn’t be Petey Sandross, former child star, without that cigarette. I, we, everyone was invested in it. At least, until he’d dropped off the radar. I hadn’t thought about him since I was a teen. But he was a person who didn’t want to be reminded of his childhood stardom, even though it had afforded him all this. It was as though the early fame had stunted his growth and his very cells were clinging to those charmed years. However much he wanted to, he couldn’t escape it, not even with a new career and a new name, not Petey but Peter J. Sandross, director.
Orly made a point of chatting with him about his last picture – another creature feature that might launch the career of another bombshell. The conversation was pointed. This is how we do it, she was suggesting.
‘People must tell you all the time that you could be an actress,’ Pete said to me. ‘You’ve got It. Ever try it out?’
Orly’s expression made me say, ‘Try what out?’
‘Acting.’
‘Oh,’ I said with practiced surprise. ‘No, never. I leave that to the professionals.’ I gestured to a scream queen on the wall. But there was that flutter. Maybe it wasn’t a line.
‘Don’t be so modest,’ Orly said. ‘She’d be wonderful, Pete. Perfect against that creature…oh, what was it, again? I can never keep track of all your monsters.’
‘The creature of Midnight Bay.’
He took his index finger and lifted up my chin. I gave him my best starlet eyes.
‘I’m never wrong about these things.’
He studied me, moved my head left and then right, and grunted in agreement with his assessment.
‘I turned Lola LaForce into a star, you know.’
I didn’t.
‘She wasn’t getting anywhere as Elaine. Elaine Forcht. What is that: forked?’ he said, taking a step back and a drag from his cigarette. The smoke streamed through his nostrils. In a singsong voice, he wondered: ‘What will we call you?’
‘Careful, darling,’ Orly said. ‘You’re dropping names.’
‘Whoopsadaisy,’ he said, stubbing out his cigarette in a mirrored ashtray attached to a stuffed crow. The crow’s head was bent, looking for its reflection beyond the ash.
On a credenza was a rubber chicken. He swept the prop into one drawer and opened another.
‘You girls ever have trouble sleeping?’ the Director asked.
‘Oh, sure,’ Orly said, earnest, afflicted.
‘I’ve got just the thing,’ he said. ‘It comes in capsule form…’ We watched him take out one, two, three bullets, placing them on the white-veined marble.
He waved his hand over them like a magician. Orly put one hand to her chest in horror and with the other she reached for me.
‘…and should be administered…’
Our attention was rapt; it pleased him.
He turned to face us, casually waving a gun, heavy and silver.
‘With my handy contraption,’ he said. It didn’t look like a prop.
My dead body, he probably had a guy who could take care of that too. But something about the scenario felt familiar. I had seen it before, on an old TV show. Something by a master of horror. Hitchcock. The pastiche made me think the director was harmless. Interested in mimicry, not inventive enough to be diabolical.
Orly took my arm.
‘You’ll frighten the girl to death before we even get started. And I’ll never be able to find you another blond at this time of night.’
Beyond the lawn where the pirate maze must have stood, the moon was a ravel in the carob trees. Orly and I made our way down the terraces. Fennel, nightshade, and sage. She said, ‘Don’t worry about noise. The neighbours can’t hear a thing.’
A corona of light rose from behind the mountain ridges, all the lives I would not know. A burst of yelps and shrieks clattered in the canyon.
We came to a clearing: manicured lawn, rows of cutouts made to look like tombstones. There were path-lights, enough to create a glow. It might have been dust, but I liked to think the air was misty. It was cool down the hill. I could hear water flowing, but I wasn’t sure from where. A broken sprinkler, perhaps. A filtration system mid-cycle, Jacuzzi water spilling into the pool. Waterfall. And there was the coffin. Large and black. Silver handles glinting in the moonlight. Beside it an open grave. Had it been dug by his assistant? Did it ever get filled in?
The script we were working with said we were damsels cutting through a graveyard on our way to a party.
‘Don’t be afraid. Vampires aren’t real,’ Orly said to me, loud enough for someone inside the dark box to hear. We were supposed to let curiosity get the better of us and pause at the coffin. The lid swung open, narrowly missing my face, and the Director sat up straight, arms folded across his chest. Pale as chalk. We screamed. I screamed and screamed, and he chased us around the graveyard as we screamed. When he finally caught me – It was always going to be me who was caught first, before he was slain and buried – he pinned me against the tree and his pointy teeth pressed into my skin. The weight of Dr. Moradi, the hard shell of the car. The Director hinting he could make me a star. An open casket, a missing body. I lost it. I grabbed the prop crucifix and started stabbing him. I kept stabbing, even as he staggered away from me across the grass toward the gaping hole. I wasn’t playing at fear anymore. I remember watching him fall into her arms, like it was in slow motion. How pathetic he was, his mouth open and surprised. The crucifix fell from my hand. My skin was wet, tears and sweat. I was very, very cold. Orly lay the Director’s body on the grass. She shut his eyes and whispered something to him. I didn’t want to come any closer. She waved me over to help her roll him into the hole. I stared at the man’s body in his shallow grave, knowing he was not vanquished, knowing he would rise. I hated him, and to feel it all felt good. The space Orly had given me was a gift, too. I wanted to return to it.
When we were back in the car, after Pete had paid us, Orly asked me: ‘Where did you go?’
AFTER THAT, ORLY’S HOUSE became the house of my imagination, awash with men.
They arrived with fantasies, most of which only made sense in action. This is what we were doing today: the client had fallen in a crowded nightclub and all the women were so busy grooving in their high heels they didn’t notice. They thought he was the floor. Orly and I were all the women.
I struggled to keep my balance; she held my hands. I pressed into the balls of my feet, straining to stay on tiptoe for balan
ce and bounce, shimmy, bounce. Each beat, we winded him. Each beat was a struggle to stand on his loose flesh, my soles stuttering across bone. The barrel of his chest. My ankle gave, and I slipped. The stiletto slid down his shoulder, and I found my footing on the hardwood floor. I could have broken his neck. Ended him. Ruined everything for her.
Blood rose from the abrasion and rolled down his white skin. He didn’t seem to notice. Orly helped me back up, but I couldn’t move. The give of his body, the give of his bones, as I struggled to be steady, careful to avoid his spine, but all I could see was a dead man, mouth ajar, fat red cheeks squished to the floor. He was so still. I couldn’t keep dancing.
‘You’re bleeding,’ I said.
One blue eye opened, and he shuddered when he whispered: ‘Just. Keep. Going.’
Orly and I read their introductory letters, their questionnaires. She listened to them on the phone, noting the details of the woman they had in mind. What had Fumiko said? We accentuate the parts we find pleasing. We drew them with broad strokes. The lipstick. The pencil skirt. The glasses. The suggestion of threat. The corseted waist and elongated leg. We focused on the parts they found pleasing, let pleasure render the perfect whole. Sometimes words led them only so far.
‘I want to submit to you.’
‘What does that mean to you?’
‘I want you to be in control.’
‘What would you like me to do?’
‘Show me how inferior I am to you. Defile me.’
Orly needed specifics. When she couldn’t push through, she’d hold their heads in her lap and rock them into a space of surrender, a gentle hypnosis, asking them to remember the first time they’d felt the desire to submit. To whom did they want to submit? What had that person made them do? What had they wanted the person to do? Often they’d wanted something that was impossible for them to say, but once they said it, everything was simple because we knew what to do. Sometimes they wanted to be watched while Orly worked on them, and I saw them go still, saw their breathing change. Their faces in ecstasy, a threshold crossed. Beyond fits of self-loathing or laughter. Beyond their pleas to Mommy or Daddy. Where did they trust her to take them when they allowed themselves to let go?
