by Jim Carrey
“Tell me I’m a good girl,” moaned Helena.
“That’s Mommy’s good girl,” Georgie said, holding her by the throat.
Carrey watched, marveling at the genius of it. Could the Hollywood Foreign Press, or the Academy, for that matter, ever grasp the fearlessness and brilliance with which he’d realized this role? Then a draft of Maoish paranoia: Charlie Kaufman would try to take all the credit; auteurs always pulled that shit. Should he even thank that ingrate from the Oscar stage? Protocol would demand it. But what was protocol to Mao? And what, at the end of it all, would Mao mean to Jim Carrey?
He would have lost himself to the existential tailspin but for Helena’s nipple in his mouth, washing all care from his mind.
He came with a whole-body squeal.
Afterward, they lay there in the bed, covered in one another’s sweat, breathing in common time, all happy with the encounter. But Helena’s happiness was greatest.
* * *
—
She’d grown up in the small town of Grand Lake, Colorado. Her stepfather was a violent drunk. After school, to avoid going home, she’d go to the town library and watch old movies on VHS, starting at random, soon tracing the American feminine from Doris Day to Norma Jean Baker, whose invented self, Marilyn Monroe, had stopped her cold. What an awesome power this woman had, this constant state of vulnerable arousal that reduced men to pliant things. She’d freeze and study frames. She memorized hours of dialogue.
At night she’d worked checkout at the Safeway. Once, during a late shift, it was snowing so hard out that when she caught her reflection in the big plate-glass windows the night became a scene from a classic film. And she was the star, perfectly framed, a small-town dreamer set inside a snow globe. There were countless theaters of viewers watching; she felt the warmth of their attention. She pushed out her bust, threw her head back, heard their applause and the whistles of soldiers as they fell under her sway. She knew, in this moment, that she was bound for greatness. On a brown-paper grocery bag, in sparkly purple ink, she wrote sacred declarations.
I WILL
Be successful actor beloved by the worldwide media—a fenomenon [sic]
Marry famous movie star have kids
Have TWO HOUSES and A HORSE STABLE!
And here, naked beside Jim Carrey, whose films she’d always loved, admiring Georgie’s blond-wood vanity piled with red Cartier boxes, she knew her dreams were coming true.
CHAPTER 9
Twice that next week, invited by Jim and Georgie, Helena had returned, parking her Hyundai outside the gates, wondering how long it would be until they gave her her own security code.
Georgie hadn’t planned to continue past the initial encounter, but upon consideration had sensed further opportunity. She’d be free of Jim’s increasingly Mao-sized sexual appetite, and young Helena, whoever she was, would have a fun thrill, a taste of magic in the canyons.
But she’d set two ironclad rules: Jim was never to see Helena without her permission. And Helena was only to pass through the Hummingbird gates as Marilyn: “I mean right down to that fucking wig.” This last part was critical, allowing Georgie to feel she was bringing a cartoon, and not a rival, into her bed.
With these terms agreed upon, the games continued to everyone’s pleasure. Sometimes Georgie played at porno director, commanding them through positions, feeding them both lines. After the third visit, an afternoon tryst, pitying Helena the task of wiping Mao’s mess from his stomach, Georgie left them to go sit in the steam room. Helena then lay on his chest, both of them bound in postcoital panting, their eyes playing across the panoramic landscape photo he’d hung over the fireplace: Hunanese peasants, Mao’s people, all crouched and farming a mist-covered valley.
“What’s the picture?”
“That’s my home.”
“Tell me what it’s like.”
“Well…” He studied the scene. “It’s misty? It’s an incredibly mist-rich place. And the people? They’re all mist farmers.”
“I’d like to go there with you.”
“I’ll take you there.”
“Promise?”
“Of course. For the spring Mist Festival. They’ll love you. We’ll go up the river together on my barge, they’ll receive you as a goddess, everyone waving, showering you with flower petals.”
“That’s so beautiful…,” she said.
They stared at each other for a long moment. And then, not breaking their gaze, he belched, a long and low-winded belch, with a look in his eye that said, What do you think of that!? She burst into laughter, appreciating the sudden gastric comedy which left her feeling that she’d glimpsed a special side of him—that they’d just shared a true and unguarded moment, and that, across the coming years, many more would follow. She was hungry for more of this intimacy, realizing, excitedly, that this would be the first time between just the two of them, without Georgie there. She grabbed him, whispering, “I want you. I want you without her here…” And then they were at it again, joined in this thrilling discovery, a gray area unforeseen by Georgie’s rules. This, she decided, was what it must feel like, the real thing that she’d never known.
Not just fucking, but something more.
* * *
—
And just as The Helena Show was getting old for Georgie, she answered her phone to hear a woman say, “Please hold for Quentin Tarantino.”
Their conversation at the party, he told her, had turned his noodlings into concepts. Those concepts had gotten together and “fucked without a condom,” giving birth to something beautiful.
A revenge story.
“Isn’t it about time a woman assassinated a president?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Oswald. Booth. Hinckley, almost. How come men get all the fun? I don’t mean a good president. I mean some twisted soulless fucker. Twenty, thirty years in the future. Some glutton asshole who stole the election and all the misogynistic lackeys who surround him are too corrupt to do anything about it. Until my girl decides she’s gonna storm the White House.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s fucking karma, man!” blurted Tarantino, manic. “She’s uncut estrogen with an attitude. She’s gonna even the score for women everywhere, incinerate the whole cabinet, then snap the pig fucker’s neck as payback for two million years of women, and I’m just gonna go out on a fuckin’ limb here and say it—everyone knows they’re smarter and tougher—having to suck and scrub for their male inferiors. She’s the wrath of motherfucking god and her name is Lilith, the first woman before Eve, okay? So we get the whole fucking Bible thing, which is public fucking domain, and if the censors get up in our shit we’ll tell ’em to go suck the devil’s fuckin’ dong!”
Georgie was stunned. She knew how he’d revived the career of John Travolta. How he’d elevated Uma Thurman, made Bruce Willis hip again. Was it really happening? she wondered. Her own moment of exaltation?
“I can’t talk about it on an unsecured line. We’ve already said some of the trigger words. Even ‘trigger’ is a trigger word. Fuck. I’m out in Palm Springs. Can you get here next week?”
“Of course.”
That night she watched Kill Bill and Jackie Brown, more in a dream than for research, attention shifting, often, from the images before her to the ones spawning in her mind, of herself as Lilith the Avenger, killing evil men with sprays of gunfire, snapping their necks without remorse.
That week she was on the treadmill before the sun came up and adopted a special ketogenic diet, shedding five pounds in six days. She practiced Krav Maga with Avi Ayalon, summoning ghosts of her past to fill her character’s beating heart with rage. She seethed at Mitchell Silvers, at Lucky Dealey, even at Carrey. All of her life had been preparation for this moment, she knew, and therefore all worthwhile.
It was per
fect.
But the day before she was due in Palm Springs, standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror—she saw a wrinkle.
A new wrinkle.
Just beneath her nose.
An offense to her beauty, a mark of decay, and one that, after twenty years in Hollywood, she knew exactly how to deal with. She visited Dr. Marcus Mendel, the chief preservationist for Hollywood’s elite, and arranged for the usual filler treatment.
“Just this one line,” she told him. “Fill it up. Give me the Restylane.”
“The Restylane’s gonna leave you red,” he said, then, as per his coaching from a recent pharmaceutical marketing seminar, launched into a pitch for a newly FDA-approved and significantly higher-margin product, Vividerm. “Your body processes Restylane as a foreign agent. Vividerm is totally natural. Made from real cultured human collagen.”
“Where do they get it?”
“I believe it started with a car-crash victim.” He paused, a moment of reverent silence. Then, casually, “Apparently the raw terror of collision lets loose a flood of magical hormones. The Swiss captured them all. We’re lucky to be living in these times.”
“Vivi-derm?”
“Ashton Kutcher was one of their first investors.”
He brushed his fingers across his forehead. It was strikingly smooth.
“I switched last week. There’s no more plastic look. See?”
He swung the examination-room magnifying glass in front of his own face, resulting, at once, in a macabre distortion—a great, leering globule of Marcus Mendel—and incontrovertible proof. It was like the plump thigh of an infant, Mendel’s middle-aged forehead. No redness. No swelling.
Not the faintest trace of a needle.
“It’s natural.”
“Natural?”
There weren’t even any pores.
“The body assimilates the Vividerm.”
Medical miracles happened. That Vividerm would arrive in this moment was luck beyond belief. Proof that her career resurrection, at Tarantino’s hands, was destined.
“Give me the Vividerm,” she said, with a shrug, like taking the latest iPhone over the model prior. Mendel sat her down, stuck his syringe into the wrinkle, pain-prick promising youth.
“What about the crow’s-feet?”
“I wasn’t going to, but okay.”
“And the forehead?”
“Just a tiny bit.”
That was it. In and out, Mendel giving no instructions for aftercare, because Vividerm, latest fruit of an age of wonder, required none. She was back at Hummingbird by early afternoon, packed her overnight bag, loaded it into the Porsche, and drove into the desert.
* * *
—
After she left, Carrey ate a lunch of two grilled sandwiches and a small bottle of ketchup.
Then he walked to his gym and climbed into his hyperbaric chamber with a tube of Pringles, the pressurized oxygen brightening his senses as his headphones played a recording of Mao reading from one of his famous speeches, People of the World, Unite and Defeat the U.S. Aggressors and All Their Running Dogs. Carrey knew it by heart now, he mouthed the Mandarin words in perfect time, almost like they were his own: “U.S. imperialism is slaughtering the white and black people in its own country. Nixon’s fascist atrocities have kindled the raging flames of the revolutionary mass movement in the United States…”
He was in there for an hour, rewinding and repeating; posturing and gesticulating so madly by the end that, viewed from outside, the nylon tent resembled a hatching cocoon as the Carrey-Mao crescendoed: “U.S. imperialism, which looks like a huge monster, is in essence a paper tiger, now in the throes of its deathbed struggle.”
He heard a buzzing at the front gate.
Twice more, staccato, impatient.
He fumbled from the hyperbaric chamber.
He plugged his nose, blew three times, depressurizing his skull as he passed through the kitchen. Again, the buzzing of the gate, now longer, demanding.
He feared it was the born agains, again, thought to call Avi Ayalon. Or what if it was Charlie Kaufman, returned from Taipei? What if the deal had fallen apart? Wink and Al were livid at him for blowing Play-Doh. They’d seize upon the crisis. They’d crowbar him into something even worse. Because they could. Because the actor, however exalted, is always labor, and if there was one thing he’d learned from being Mao in recent months, it was that capital preys on labor, fangs in the worker’s neck. He’d fight. He’d mount a revolution of his own, crush the corrupt system that had welcomed the money of bloody-fisted oligarchs who robbed their own people. He’d take the project to Soderbergh and they’d self-finance, break the town. Advanced sales to the Balkans alone would pay for the budget. And more. They’d start their own studio, finish what Redford started; they’d defend the integrity of working people everywhere. Maybe it was all the oxygen crammed into his brain by the hyperbaric chamber, maybe pure fervor, but he could smell it now, again, the sweat and ozone-scented air of the Titan Wheels factory, could feel the starving-child hunger that had never left him. Yeah, that was it. He and Soderbergh, or whoever, they’d restore the dream of Charlie fucking Chaplin.
The buzzing again, extended, demanding—
And it wasn’t Kaufman.
On the kitchen security monitors Carrey saw Helena San Vicente, come to surprise him in tight blue denim, a white blouse, Monroe from The Misfits. He’d told her there would be no visit this weekend, that Georgie was out of town. She stared expectantly into the street-facing security camera, eyes green in night vision, blond locks like magnesium flares. Why was she here, uninvited? What was that but at best a power grab—at worst a whiff of crazy? But to the powerful, madness is itself an aphrodisiac. Those tits. The sweet demon-green, night-vision tits. A mighty Lust Faction rose up in the Parliament of his Mind, shouting down all forces of caution, of reason. He had no choice.
The gates swung open.
* * *
—
Carrey slammed Helena against the foyer wall.
Unbuttoned her shirt.
Pulled down her jeans, her lavender panties, fumbling beneath his belly to free his erection, then he took her from behind. She climaxed, he followed.
“I want more,” she cooed.
He led her to the master bedroom; she walked just a pace behind him. Without him seeing, she wet her hand with both their cum and, spreading her fingers like a Balanchine dancer, dragged them along the walls, through the drapes, finally streaking across the glass panes of the French doors. Wanting to last all night, he took two Viagra from a bedside table where he kept his medicines, then made a request.
“Can we do the Marilyn from Some Like It Hot?”
“The only clothes I brought are lying in the foyer.” Her eyes wandered to Georgie’s closet. “Maybe Georgie has something?”
Carrey assented with silence.
She moved across the room, opened the door, suppressed a gasp. This closet was bigger than her bedroom in the apartment she shared with three others. Georgie had an apparent infinity of shoes, all lit like art on built-in shelves. Three long racks heavy with red-carpet dresses that screamed out to be touched, worn—appreciated. She parted the silks and chiffons, fully expecting to see, beyond them, a Polynesian beach.
“Ya findin’ it okay?”
“Yeah.”
She opened the drawers of the bureau, diving into an ocean of colorful silks, each a month of rent, not the knockoffs or the thrift-store buys that she owned. The black negligee flowed like a liquid over her body. She strapped on a pair of thousand-dollar heels. Were these things hers by right of fate? Always awaiting her arrival? She stepped out into the bedroom, transformed—but it wasn’t enough. Suddenly Carrey turned directorial, eyeing her like Hitchcock did Tippi Hedren in his games of cast and capture. He pointed her to Georgie’s vanity
, stood behind her there, staring in the mirror, eager, hungry.
She brushed on foundation, but it wasn’t what he wanted.
He took the pancake concealer, thick and greasy, and layered it across her face before painting her lips red and dotting on the famous mole. Then, on her forehead, he caught a shiny knot of scar tissue, a flaw he’d never seen before.
And as Monroe had no such thing, he dabbed at it with the concealer, wanting to erase the girl from the apparition. It was too thick. Whatever it was, it had healed badly. He dabbed again, soft but determined, allegro, and as he did Helena San Vicente returned to her twelfth birthday, her stepfather, drunk, his eyes darting to her friend’s growing chest. Afterward, when she summoned the courage to confront him, he threw her into the rough brick fireplace whose edge gashed her temple. Doctors would ask questions. So she got a Band-Aid, a mumbled half apology; she lived for a week with that throbbing pain in her head.
And now it returned, in phantom form. She felt a searing heat around the scar. Her pulse, now, it raced with traumatic memory. She dug her fingernails into her palms, hoping to ground herself with this other pain, to continue…
Helena winced as she lay on her stomach, her negligee hiked up, Carrey lapping at her from behind. It was no different from the foyer, but now it felt wrong. Her muscles tightened. Her limbs screamed to curl into a ball. She squirmed out from beneath him, retreating against the headboard.
“I don’t like it like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m Marilyn Monroe.”
“I know you’re not Marilyn.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, you’re Helena San Vicente.”
“I’m not her either.”
“Then who are you?”
Her voice faltered; he sensed that she was barely sure: “Celeste.”
“Celeste?”
