by Karen Moline
It is a painting of their own frenzied creation, born of his insatiable desire.
I am sitting in the corner, watching them, unnoticed.
If she keeps talking she cannot listen to the thoughts running through her mind as wildly as her charcoals and brushes scream across the canvas, she cannot touch what she does not want to be feeling, this inexorable response to the primitive raw hunger that scares her so. She feels him, she sucks it in and transfers it in a wild passion, the fire of him is engulfing her arm and the fingers clamped around her charcoal stick, his potency is driving her brushes, forcing her paint this way, and not that, moving her feet in a fervent blaze across the sprung floor.
She sighs. Her hands drop to her side. “Sorry,” she says. “I need to take a break. Do you want some tea or a drink or something?”
I know why she has stopped. She is wavering. It is exhausting, fighting him.
She covers the portrait and moves over to the end of her work table, the dirty end she calls it, where all the mess of painting is contained in grime-encrusted tins and soup cans and bottles and bits and pieces, broken-down brushes, rags for wiping, screws and nails in glass baby-food jars, palette knives and razor blades, little tokens from friends, a shaky snowstorm with the Statue of Liberty in it. She fusses with the kettle, running her fingers through her hair. Nick stretches, a languid feral thing. I join him. He is patient. He is supremely patient. He is lurking in the high grass of the savannah, waiting, awaiting the precisely perfect moment before he will pounce.
We sit at the table of the hyacinths. Olivia brings a plate of cookies and a fat pot of tea, she pours it, we drink, she sits down, rolling her shoulders back and forth to relieve the strain making them taut with tension.
“Sorry,” she says again, picking at crumbs. “You’re here for such a short amount of time. I don’t usually need to stop. I don’t want to stop.” She yawns.
“Should I be flattered that I’m wearing you out?” Nick asks.
“Go ahead,” she says, smiling back. “I’m sure flattery is as necessary to you as eating.”
“Touché,” he says good-naturedly. She is relaxing, slowly, she thinks she can trust him not to be anything other than a sitter for a portrait, she is not pulling away, he is going to bide his time, he is going to wait as long as he has to, he is going to have her, she cannot repel this strength, he is too secure.
“We’ll come back,” he says.
We came back.
Chapter 5
Nick had laughed the first time he saw the motorcycle messengers in London, leather-clad clones, hunched over their bikes in thick black overalls and chunky black gloves, with stiff, scuffed knee-high boots and opaque black helmets hiding any trace of their own identity as they went weaving, fearlessly speeding, in and out of traffic on rain-slicked streets.
Darth Vaders on a Harley, he called them, sending me out to buy twin sets of gear far too heavy for the balmy evenings of riding in the Hollywood Hills but perfect disguise for quick rides during stolen moments on the set in London, Nick zooming off to clear his head, leaving a coughing furor in his wake, makeup and wardrobe and Jamie and the insurers screaming at him to come back, the bastard, and then screaming at me to get on my own bike and find him.
It was on one of the bikes that he sent me out to find the flat.
It would not be easy, because we have very particular requirements. Absolute privacy in an empty building. Up-to-date wiring, for lighting that would be discreet yet high enough to record. Walls thick enough to muffle noise, although not too thick to drill a hole wide enough for the lens of a camera.
It would not be easy because my presence is off-putting, especially to London real estate agents, and so I asked the girls in makeup to smooth some sort of putty on my face to make my scars less noticeable, not only so that I’d appear to be a proper American businessman, complete with bogus letterhead and impeccably bogus credentials thanks to the production assistants, but to protect Nick’s identity, as many in town had already seen us together, and he wanted no one to know where this flat, the solemn embodiment of his desire, would be.
None of these elaborate precautions mattered much in the end, really, although they diverted me from the daily chores and pleased Nick and kept him humming, and also pleased the crew, flattered beyond all reckoning to be privy to my secret mission, anything to help their superstar keep his sanity during the grueling months ahead, away from the girls standing shivering outside the Savoy, away from prying eyes, safe and cozy in his little hidey-hole, wherever it might be, the poor chap. None of it mattered, because money makes the most succinct dialogue, and the large quantity of loose pound notes I had packed in my briefcase made all negotiations a mere formality, just in case.
On days when Nick would be working too hard to need me I’d get on the bike in my messenger gear, and cruise slowly, perusing the real estate agents’ signs. You’ll know it when you find it, Nick said to me, it’ll just be there, and you’ll know.
I am riding slowly, mindlessly, content, icy wind whistling under the visor of my helmet, lost in curving streets with ever-changing names, past neat squares of prim brick row houses, indistinguishable save for the colors of their doors and the patterns on the shabby lace in the windows, past concrete blocks of council flats and the sordid smallness of High Street shops, bored teenagers lingering outside, smoking idly, or cramming french fries into their fat faces, a film of grease on their lips. Past the red Victorians behind Harrods, the color of dust in the desert at sunset, past solid white Edwardians, imposing order on smooth crescent streets, so unlike the bungalows and their parched cropped lawns in Los Angeles. There are no lawns in London, not where I am riding, only paved concrete terraces and pots of frozen geraniums.
I find the building one dark afternoon, just off Queensway. It was the name that attracted me at first, nearly straight across Kensington Gardens from Olivia’s studio in Queens Gate Mews, a silly coincidence that Nick would certainly see as symbolic. I find it around the corner from the Porchester Baths, the large FOR RENT OR SALE sign flapping, forlorn, and I remembered one of the grips talking about the baths, the steam rooms and the sauna, the shivering quick descent into the plunge pool, a massage in the heat of comfortable nakedness, to sit, sated, in the billows of mist, tangled thoughts and stress made liquid, melting into an unstoppable stream of sweat, at least for the moment.
The houses are four-storied and white, all the same, their pillars round and smooth like Olivia’s arms, like Olivia’s thighs, smooth and gleaming. The rows of these houses hug a curve in the road, all the same, only their numbers are different, Gloucester Terrace on one side, Porchester Square on the other.
Nick will be safe here. No one would ever think to look for him in this neighborhood, polyglot nationalities hurrying to do their shopping, arms laden with paper sacks from the Arab grocers, heads bent against the rain, drooping. It is wet, it is dark, movie stars do not belong here, with bags of shopping, or waiting in interminable lines for the bus to take them to work on the other side of the city. No one will ever notice us, a biker on an errand, a station wagon dropping off a passenger with a hat pulled low, and a woman walking with swift purpose, her hair hidden beneath a vibrantly colored shawl, hands thrust deep into her pockets, lost in thought.
Only the white of the pillars gleams, ghostly white in the dark, beckoning.
The real estate agent shows me the house, repressed eagerness giving a slight twitch to his right eye. His glasses need cleaning. “A diplomat’s house,” he says, “very well maintained, recently redecorated to a high standard, as you must see, oh yes, all the very best indeed.”
“Who lives here?” I ask him.
“No one, as yet,” he says, his eyes sliding away, “although we’ve had quite extraordinary interest. There are only five flats in it, one on each floor save the second, as I’ll show you.” He points to a large door
just off the staircase, and then a more modest one down the hall. “The previous owner wished to have a pied à terre here, and so he created this cozy flat. It’s only one room, with a very small kitchen area and bath, but quite comfortable.”
For his assignations, no doubt. “Docs it connect to the other flat?”
“Oh no, sir. Not in the slightest.”
He takes me into the larger flat first, opening into a lovely square room, the ceilings high, their moldings elaborately carved, the parquet floor polished amber, a kitchen off a narrow hall with sleek cupboards and a gray-green slate floor, the tub in the bathroom so long and deep even I could stretch out in it without bending my knees. But what cinched it was the small flat next door, compact, just big enough for what I needed to install in it, and myself. As if some unknown soul had designed it strictly for Nick’s purpose.
Nick will be very happy.
I rent the entire building, cash up front for six months with an option to renew, although Nick’s shoot will not go quite that long. The agent is ecstatically obsequious, especially after I slip him one thousand pounds and tell him we expect no problems and want to be left quite alone, thank you very much.
Nick and I go through the phone book one dreary afternoon, finding names to attach to the other buzzers to trick any visitors into thinking all the flats are occupied. Security, I tell the agent, who quickly attaches the names. Alderson, Andrews, Fairley, and Scott. The space next to Flat 2 says that only, #2. That’s how Nick wants it. No name. No indication of what awaits, a gilded wonderland, inside.
WHEN I am through, it is a beautiful room. I have struggled around the clock, freed by Nick from his demands for this more pressing matter, one that must be finished, created and embellished, before his portrait is. I hire only the best, dispensing thousands and thousands for the finest technicians and workmen, none knowing what the other is doing, their silence necessary, bought with large palmed payments, a momentary flash of greed flickering into their eyes and as quickly out, replaced by the terror only my reptilian smile could evoke. Even the maid is scared of me, the slender Dominican who says her name is Dulcie, and little else. She comes early in the morning, twice a week as I have asked, and I am always waiting, because I would never give her a key. I sit in the kitchen, reading, while she cleans the large room and the bathroom in silence, efficient, for there is little to do, and then trade places. Do not ever touch the mirrors, I have told her, I will do them myself, and she is obedient. When she is slipping on her coat I always give her two fifty-pound notes, which is far too much, and she nods her head and scurries off, slipping into the street below.
It is a room of enchantment, all gold and wood and cream, deceptively simple. I am proud of my handiwork, and the lovely things I have found, though not their purpose. It is meant to be a haven, latent with dreams, luxuriously calm, waiting expectant, so Olivia will never find out the worst of the secrets it is hiding.
When she first walks in she will see only the curved vase of Murano glass, wrought of red and golden hues so opalescent, as if the essence of Olivia’s hair had been captured between the artist’s unknowing lips and blown with serene delicacy into tangible glowing life, filled with peonies that I change as soon as they start drooping, more arriving at extravagant expense to the Savoy every other day from a hothouse in Holland. It sits atop a round mahogany table with lions’ heads for feet, and the two Regency chairs, upholstered in brocade, beside it. And then she will see the bed, the immensity of it, the fat creamy-colored comforter atop it scattered with dozens of soft, small down pillows, begging to be sunk into, and not that the bedposts are shaped into such graceful slender columns with the sculptured golden rings at the top and bottom, for she is not Nick, and does not share his impulses, and cannot imagine what might be attached to them in a frenzy of lust.
She will see the neatly folded, crisply ironed Irish linen and plump Turkish towels stacked in the vintage Vuitton trunk at the foot of the bed, and not the assortment of Nick’s custom-ordered toys and necessary objects, boxes of nasty surprises, hidden beneath a false bottom. She will toss off her shoes on the deeply piled carpet, remarking on its thick comfort, thumbing through the CDs near the small portable player, the piles of books and scripts strewn on it, not realizing how well this carpet muffles sound that might carry to the neighbors downstairs, although of course there are no neighbors, and no one will hear anything outside this room except me. She will admire the pale shimmering brocade of the heavy draperies, matching the chairs, caught back with several silken cords, cream and gold and silver, looping yards of braided cords backed with velvet, not knowing Nick prefers them above all other cords, because they do not chafe on sensitive wrists. She will hear the calm ticking of the ormolu clock on the pink marble mantel, the framed photograph of a Mapplethorpe lily above it, and regard her pale startled face in one of the two mirrors with their baroque filigree frames, flanking the fireplace, thinking she has stepped into a dream.
She cannot know how discreetly these mirrors hide the elaborate video equipment I have set up, cameras activated by a light switch, hidden in the dimmer, that can record even in candlelight. It is my own private network, just on the other side of their room, in the neighboring apartment, that quite comfortable small room just large enough for me to sit in an overstuffed chair and observe Nick’s activities in case he should go out of focus, that quite comfortable small room where I will sit, silently watching. Nick knowing, of course, that I am watching. He is not one to miss a moment.
He always needs an audience.
Chapter 6
Nick is in the shower of the small bathroom, washing off the grime from a night shoot gone overlong, cool needles stinging him into wakefulness, his desire for Olivia far more potent than his need for the oblivion of sleep.
I am standing in the hyacinths, wavering with fatigue.
“You read a lot, don’t you, Major?” Olivia says, coming to stand by me.
I nod yes.
“What’s this one?”
I turn it over to show her.
“Germinal,” she says. “I didn’t think you were one for Zola. Not that . . . I mean—”
I know what she means. It is a constant cause of tittering on the set, the Major’s classic taste in reading, as the crew sees me engrossed in Balzac, Trollope, and Dickens and wonders why. I have always been a reader, at first to save myself from all the downtime on sets, but then discovering how losing myself in the comfort of words, savoring them, alone and at peace, helped diminish the endless stretching hours of my solitary nights.
“You should write someday, Major,” Olivia says, covering her embarrassment.
I look at her, genuinely surprised. We had only really spoken to each other once before, at lunch. She smiles at my bewilderment.
“I mean it,” she says, “because you like to watch.”
“How do you know I like to watch?” A nervous tingle of dread starts to climb up my shins even as my face remains a blank.
“Because of how you talk, when you do talk.” She is teasing, and I relax imperceptibly. “And you look, yes, I’ve seen you. I told you this already, didn’t I? I’m sure I did. I meant to, anyway.”
Of course you did, I want to tell her, you told me in the restaurant when you said you liked my face and I didn’t believe you. I hear you speak, I listen, inhaling your words, and I remember everything you say.
“You look at people as I look at them,” Olivia is saying, “but you don’t imagine them as I like to, a fantasy sketch in my head, a few blobs of color, a myth or a fairy tale and a dream of a painting, of how I might try to capture their character.
“When you do talk,” she goes on, pausing to find the right words, and I realize that she has responded only to me, my behavior, not Nick’s, and I push the fear out of my body, “you have an uncanny knack for getting right to the heart of things. Maybe because you say so little. It’s wha
t I want to do when I paint, but it takes so long to come to me. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Do the scars make it painful to talk?”
They did, I want to tell her, no one asks me that, no one looks at me with an observant eye and such sweet concern as you do, they’d hurt unbearably, and for such a long time that I became accustomed to the silence of the disregarded.
“They’re not as bad as you think, you know,” she says.
I shake my head no. Not to me. “Not to Hollywood,” is all I can tell her.
“Is that why you’re so taciturn, then?”
How can I tell her the truth?
“You said I like to watch,” I finally say.
She pushes her hair back in that familiar gesture of impatience. “No, I’m serious,” she says. “I’m not asking just because you know more about Nick than anyone, and he’s closer to you—but because I’m curious. I can’t figure you out.”
“I’ve never much liked to talk about myself,” I manage, and then an image flashes into my head, of my mother, no it wasn’t my mother, I never knew my mother, it was some other woman, and there was something I wanted to tell her and she was smacking me with the metal beater from the Mixmaster she’d picked up out of the sink where she was washing it, and then the image flashes as quickly away, buried back with others long forgotten.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” Olivia says, turning away. “Forgive me for asking. It’s none of my business.”
