by Karen Moline
In those days he was well-behaved. He knew enough not to blow his chances on indiscretions.
Once Nick became essential, with McAllister signing him with a flourish and the requisite cacophony of shrill and basically useless people surrounding him, clamoring eagerly to do his bidding, he had them arrange all the paperwork. One day he came to me, barely suppressing a smirk, and handed me an envelope: passport, driver’s license, bogus birth certificate made out to John Q. Major. He’d already done the same for himself years before, obtaining the necessary documentation through the mail after a large payoff to preserve his anonymity. Editors had already screamed loudly at their journalists in frustration, trying to find the truth behind his origins, and eventually gave up in despair. The tabloids and even some of the studios had hired private detectives, all in vain. We had covered our tracks deliberately, and so well that we were untraceable, orphans, sprouting like wild things from the sea, nameless, discarded, dredged from hell.
I ran away, was all Nick ever said, I can’t tell you what I ran from, I’ll let you imagine how hard it was, and how horrible. I never knew my parents, they died in a car wreck when I was a baby, and eventually I came with a friend to Los Angeles.
They learned not to push him: all the better to pin the mythical tale of the woebegone urchin onto the donkeylike fans, inventing a baroque history to exploit the pain of his life. Beset by devils and surrounded by despair, this little boy, nameless and unloved, had become the other, magnified in all his magnificence forty feet wide on a movie screen, the waif sprung phoenixlike from the ashes of an unknowable life, discovered at a gas station wiping windshields of the rich and infamous, transformed into the star triumphant, king of his world, ruler of his universe.
It played much better, this myth of Muncie. So much easier for them to see only the surface, the instant stir, not its aftermath. So much easier for Nick to deny the dangers of the public’s mirror, the falsehood and fickleness of its reflection. What remained after the spots had blinked off, the boom mikes were lowered, the cameras were dismantled, and the sets were struck? What was left for Nick Muncie, superstar—his films, finished and, for him, forgotten, unspooling, for others, in the dark? Or the light reflected off his eyes as he sat watching the preferred images of his choosing in his private movie theater, the one in the blue room of the pool house?
Every time Nick closed his eyes he could open them into another realm, recreated as anyone he chose to be, an invention entirely of self. How could he exist as anything other than the player he’d become?
Those who belittled Nick’s talent had no idea how skillfully he acted every waking moment.
ANY LIFE I had away from him, Nick knew about. It was subsumed into what had become the reality of our days together, and the simple rhythm of their hours. There was the real work, and Nick was unstinting with his energy during filming, no matter how bastardized the scripts became once he’d committed the requisite Muncie persona to these projects; and then there was the unreal: the adulation, the photo sessions, the workouts, the drugs, the dinners, the parties, the pliant bodies, not always in that order. Nothing else existed.
Any woman I had, and I didn’t have all that many, Nick wanted. I didn’t mind; I chose them for him. I needed them only for sex, for some mindless sort of physical release, and often not even for that.
Love was not something I ever thought about.
I had no wish to make others pay for my past unhappiness unless they tried to provoke me, but few did since my reputation had become more fearsome than my scars, magnified from a whisper to a sharp, keening scream. Don’t mess with the Major, they said, if you value your life.
Don’t mess with the Major.
But Nick, who could not allow himself to be daunted by the things that to other men were so daunting, loved to extract that payment. It was so easy when they came so willingly, offered themselves as slaves to the sacrifice, head down, arms outstretched, beseeching, but they paid such a terrible price, vexed with the memory of what he did to them, and worst of all they paid with their silence. They paid when they would awaken, still, months later, from the soundest of sleep with the remembrance of having been taken, used, and discarded disturbing their dreams. This forgotten terror plagued their muscles, twitching the very fibers like the legs of a dog lost in slumber, a scary sensation as taut as the silken cords that had bound their limbs to Nick’s vast, sculpted bedstead as they’d lain there, begging for mercy.
These lust-numbed ladies I met in my guise as the procurer, befogged with the power that is Nick Muncie, superstar, pretended my face and demeanor did not repel them. They acted as if they truly wanted me, wanted to fuck me, not simply as slender ruse to get close to Nick. There was the buzz, a whiff of possibility, strangely oblique, enticing enough to lure these girls with their firm proud bodies and sleek hair and capped white teeth into the murky shallows of hopefulness.
I knew how to select them, so it was quick, and simple, and I was cautious. I picked them up and drove them in the big black Range Rover with the windows tinted dark so prying eyes could not see in, drove them through the honking slow traffic up to the slow curves at the top of Mulholland where Nick’s compound was hidden behind an electric gate and wired hedges. They never saw the entrance anyway; the rule was they had to be blindfolded when they got into the car. Security, I said. No one ever protested, no, they shivered instead in the bliss of anticipation for a chance to be allowed into the proximity of Nick’s inner sanctum.
Once inside, I’d already said her name, many times, so that Nick knew what to call her, he knew what to say when he came into the room after he caught a glimpse of her through the hole he’d bored in the wall opposite his bed, hidden artfully just behind the edge of a seventeenth-century Gobelin he’d bought during the bankruptcy auction of McAllister’s expartner.
He looked at me, ready.
I hit my marks. I never missed.
No matter what I was doing to the woman in his bed, I would shift my position, turn her around, lie on my back, she astride me, facing my feet, facing the tapestry she could not see because the blindfold stayed on. She gladly acquiesced when I took her hands in mine and told her to do as I said. It was better for her not to see me, her revulsion masked behind black silk. It was easier for her to pretend I was Nick, she is in Nick’s house, perhaps this is Nick’s bed, she is touching his sheets, Nick is coming to her, to be with her, she is the chosen one, he will see her and sweep her breathless into his arms, murmuring words of desire. It is all she wants to hear, his voice, the longing for it pouring off her backside as I rake my nails across it and she barely shudders, oblivious. It is all she is yearning for even as I fuck her, fill her, she does not feel me, I am not real because I am not Nick.
She is moving slowly, I have been gentle, for me, she cannot see. She hears a voice, soft. It cannot be. It is. Nick. Her heart stops. It is Nick. Nick is here. She is trembling with giddy pleasure, she strains away from me, I no longer exist. She feels his hands on her breasts, she knows them, instinctively, those fingers, she is desperate to fling her arms around him but I am still holding them. She hears him murmur her name, murmur that she is so beautiful, she is dripping, disbelieving, she is delirious, she is desperately grateful even when Nick pushes himself rudely into her mouth, how eagerly her lips seek whatever Nick deigns to present to her, never had she welcomed me or any other man with such eagerness, never had she thought she would be blindfolded and gagging, still astride another, Nick Muncie, superstar, pushing himself deeper still as she starts to pull away, pull back, but she cannot, she is impaled on me, and she is starting to panic because she cannot move, she cannot breathe, her hands are jerked high above her head and bound together, she is struggling in earnest now, terrified, this cannot be Nick, not he, not this demon choking her, she cannot move, she cannot breathe, and that is exactly what Nick wants.
Nick pulls away suddenly and caresses her cheeks,
wiping away her tears. There are always tears, shock and pain loosened and made liquid. Darling, he says, darling, you are so beautiful, thank you, thank you for doing that to me, so sweet, my darling. He kisses the tears away. She is relaxing again, I can feel the stiffness melting back into the magma of desire. She is turned around, gently, so I won’t slip out, I am still hard because Nick wants me to be, and she sits, captive, facing me, and I am rocking her imperceptibly back and forth, back and forth, Nick’s lips in her hair, murmuring, always murmuring, the fantasy fulfilled of his voice, her name, it is Nick, really Nick, touching her, sweet, even as her hands are lowered, bound and helpless. Nick’s hands cup her breasts, he holds her close, whispering of delights to come in her ear, trailing his famous slim fingers down her back, down where she wants to be touched, she is moaning, his fingers swirling, my movements small, rocking, back and forth, near imperceptible, she is screaming for him to stop, she can’t help herself, she is coming in waves, she is engulfed in a rush of pleasure so intense she is sure she will faint, she cannot bear it, please, stop, she says over and over, she is begging for Nick to stop please stop, she is begging for Nick.
She is still begging when he slaps a gag on her pleading. There is nothing he likes more than a muffled moan, there is nothing more deeply satisfying than reaching for the whip stashed under the bed and bringing it down with a thin high whistle before it smacks full on her behind, one straight red welt rising thin on each cheek, nothing better than the surprised confusion he can feel as he pushes her down as I slide backward, still holding her arms, her head on my chest, she could hear my heart beating if the roaring were not so loud in her head.
It happens so quickly it always takes a few seconds for the most primal panic to register in her befuddled senses. She who has been so suffused with pleasure only seconds before cannot voice her fear, she cannot believe the same creature who made her come with such rapture is pounding viciously inside her, oblivious to her distress even as he feeds off it.
Her tears stream out from under the blindfold and fall, rolling sideways off my chest into the sodden sheets.
Nick knows when she’s had enough, he always knows, he slows down, he pulls out, he caresses her body with his famous slim fingers, he is whispering again in her ear, kissing her cheeks, the pulse thudding wildly in her neck, thanking her, thanking her for making him happy, she is so beautiful he couldn’t help himself, she gives him so much pleasure, he wants her, he wants her to be happy, he wants her very much, his hands caressing, does she want him, will you be mine.
Yes, she is trying to say behind the gag, yes of course I’m yours, she tries to say because she does not know what she is saying, she cannot think anything more real than the fantasy she has nurtured to be lying where she is now, burning yet senseless, deluded yet delirious, violated, take me, she wants to say, take me like that again if it pleases you, take me I’ll do anything you want as long as you do it to me.
She is no longer crying.
Nick turns her over gently, and I slip away, unnoticed and no longer needed. Her ass is on fire, stingingly sore, her mouth on fire but she no longer feels it because Nick has yanked off the gag with a sudden loud rip, and he is kissing her, she is a limp rag doll, he does crave her, he wants her, he is kissing her deep, sweet, he says, so sweet, my beautiful darling, she will be his, be helpless once more as waves of pleasure snake through her body, rippling when Nick pulls her close and takes whatever else he desires.
He always makes them come, those silly girls, desperately eager, powerless, exposed, spread-eagled, bound and blind, pleading, dazed, sandwiched between two men who could just as easily break their necks as stroke their thighs, not knowing if each further second will bring pleasure or pain, the kiss or the whip, the caress or the teeth, biting, not caring how they are turned and twisted because it doesn’t really matter, Nick has his arms around them.
And so they never breathe a word, these initiates thrust so carelessly into Nick’s realm and scarred by his rituals, once he said how magnificent they were after he’d come violently inside them, once, more if they particularly pleased him, their thighs strong and waxed smooth, their ripe asses firm from dreary months on the Stairmaster, ripe for welts crisscrossing the tan lines of the bikinis they flaunted on the beach at Malibu. He left them with a lingering long kiss on their lips, at the nape of their necks, between their legs, deep, sweet, please they said, stop please stop.
They do not dare breathe. Instead, they shiver.
They are stunned into silence, dazed, they think they are dreaming, a bizarre nightmare of cruel sex and whispers of their beauty. When Nick signals to me I dress them, sling them over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, then ease them down, meek and pliant, into the backseat of the black Rover, driving out through the gates that slide back silently, driving them home, or back to their cars in the parking lot where they’d left them, unwinding the blindfold, pulling them up, and out.
The sight of my face brings them back to earth with a harsh jolt. Do you want to see Nick again, I ask, he likes you very much, he thinks you are beautiful and very sweet. Yes, they nod mutely, still in shock, unable to meet my eyes. Don’t worry, I say, we know where you live. At the threat implied in my calmly bland voice they pale, all of them, poor trembling birds, even through their numbed, dazed stupor they can recognize the chilling voice of terror.
That’s why none dared speak of what I did to them, what Nick did to them. Not one ever saw Nick again, of course, not that way, and even if they did see him out, laughing with Belinda over vodka martinis, or walking out of a screening, or on the TV, beaming, or on the screen, intense, soulful, and magnificent, they never said a word to anyone. They knew I would find them, and then they would never again have anything truly useful to say to the world.
IN HOLLYWOOD, everyone wants to direct, they say. Not Nick, not on a real movie. He was content with this scenario, surveyed from the hole bored behind the Gobelin, the hole just wide enough for the lens of his state-of-the-art camcorder. He’d written this script, filmed and recorded it, rewound the tapes, then settled in his crimson velvet dressing gown from Sulka, lounging comfortably on his favorite overstuffed sofa in the blue room of the pool house, and dimmed the lights, hitting Play on the remote with a soft sigh of anticipation. The watching was as much a ritual as the act itself, perhaps even more intense because Nick could see himself, admire the relentlessness of his smooth, vicious thrusts, feel once more the supple body straining against him, pleading.
The script and camera angles never changed. Only the duration, the shapes of the bodies, the texture of the hair clenched in his fists, their murmured names. All else was the same, an endless repetition of his variation on a theme, the melody heard only by Nick, the whining fluted whistle of a whip that so swiftly raised the straight narrow pinkness meant to be caressed under his famous slim fingers, the muffled oboe of a woman’s voice, the basso profundo of Nick, whispering sweet lies in a sweeping cadenza.
Nick heard this melody.
Whenever he was feeling particularly engaged, he made me watch. Instead, I watched him engrossed in his listening, his breathing slow and even, a toying smile at the corner of his lips.
I never made a sound.
I could have told Olivia. I could have spared her.
The price for that cowardice is incalculable.
Chapter 3
At first it was no more than a game, his interest piqued by Olivia’s physical peculiarities and obvious disdain, a simple distraction from rehearsals and the tedium of London fans, waiting patiently for him on the Strand, shooed away from the Savoy by impatient doormen, their photographs and felt-tip pens poised for the satisfaction only his scrawled signature on an 8x10 glossy could buy.
Anything to get close to Nick.
As days flew by, weary days of costume fittings and dialogue coaching, the unfamiliarity of true hard work with thought behind it, the repeated mutt
ering of lines bored into memory, the delving into a complex character with a depth and passion that Nick worried, secretly, he did not possess, hiding his fears of inadequacy under a nonchalant facade, he chose to fixate on a woman he’d briefly encountered, by sheer coincidence. Some small part of me admired his calm determination to plow forward, his refusal to share the burden of his anxiety with the only person he trusted, smothering his apprehension instead with dreams of a woman who’d scorned him, a woman who loved another, if only to prove that his seductive powers, as natural to him as breathing, had not deserted him.
NICK’S CHARM, when he meant it to be, was as unforced as it was devastating. Such a talent is inexplicable, you think you will be impervious to its creeping insidious power even as it invades your pores, irresistibly magnetic. It worked on Annette, less invulnerable to his charisma than Olivia, he tells himself, or perhaps she was simply a businesswoman astute enough to have arranged this lunch. Or rather, Nick figured out how to arrange it through Annette, plotting, beguiling, and determined.
I try to imagine what Annette said to entice Olivia here today.
But I was wrong. It wasn’t Annette’s cajoling that would bring her to this lunch, no, it was Olivier, her fiancé. She will be here because Olivier laughed. She heard his laughter over the phone from his hotel room in Hong Kong when she told him that Nick Muncie, superstar, was pestering her for a portrait, heard him laugh at her stiff indignation, heard him laugh at the prospect of how she could paint him, how she could demystify the icon, transfer the image so beloved by millions into the myth of her own design. “Do it,” Olivier said, “it will be good for you.”
