“Aren’t you worried that he may come back and haunt you?”
I told her that he had disappeared, but she seemed to know that he was dead. She used the word “haunt.” How did she know? I said in a cold-fire voice. “He’s gone for good. He won’t come back. Ever.”
A WOMAN’S WORLD
PEARL
TWO DAYS HAD PASSED. I worked with Alessandra at her house in Topanga Canyon. Her attitude had changed. She was less cocky than when we first met, as if she had something to prove then, as if she had felt competitive with Alexandre in some way. Since that first day she stopped coming on to me or flirting. Thank God. We’d made huge headway with the script. She had a sharp sense of humor and managed to slip in a lot of great one-liners. They still hadn’t chosen her leading man—everything was up in the air while Sam awaited decisions from tough cookie agents and managers. Whatever, whoever, the actor would be a star. If this film was successful, I’d get a nice percentage of the box-office. It was a win-win situation for all of us.
I’d been so busy that I didn’t have a chance to speak to anyone about my nightmares.
When I get back to the hotel after a full day’s work, I called Daisy. I needed her sound advice. Getting older meant I had become more and more picky about whom I spent time with and in whom I confided. In my twenties I wore my heart on my sleeve, but had never associated the change in my attitude—bottling up my feelings—with that dreaded night. But when I thought about it, it was after that that everything changed . . . when I lost my trust in people. I had never put two and two together. Because I had not been aware of how it had affected me psychologically.
I now lay back on my deliciously comfortable hotel bed, leaning against the padded headrest, stretching out my legs. Daisy took a long time to pick up.
“Amy stop that,” she finally shouted into the receiver.
“Daisy?”
“Oh, hi, Pearl. Sorry, Amy’s being all needy right now. One sec. Amy, if you want my attention then you need to sit quietly with your coloring book for ten minutes and then we’ll choose your Halloween outfit together. Is that a deal? Ten minutes only, I promise, then I’m all yours.”
I could hear Amy’s willful voice soften and she said, “Okay Mommy, but just ten minutes. I’m watching the clock, you know.”
“Sorry about that, Pearl. Johnny’s away on a business trip so she’s being really demanding. He’s been away a lot lately.”
“I’ll try to squeeze everything I have to say in ten minutes,” I said jokingly.
“I know. Foolishly I taught her how to tell the time and now she’s got me on a tight leash. She doesn’t miss a trick.”
I lay bare to Daisy the details about my nightmares and how I’d been keeping their content a secret from Alexandre—bearing in mind, I let her know, about what she’d said about him being a “Latin man at heart.”
“Okay, Pearl, first off, since we had that conversation in my office? Things are not the same as I had previously imagined.”
I plumped another cushion behind my head. “What do you mean?” I asked, sure that whatever advice she gave me would be sound.
“Well, how you are describing the situation now colors things very differently. You’d always led me to believe that you had been totally up for that threesome with the two footballers, but you were so out of it, that later, you couldn’t remember what happened.”
“Yeah, well that’s still true. I mean, it’s only since these flashbacks . . . these nighmares, that I realize there was more to the whole story.”
“This is what you have to figure out—were these actual flashbacks or are they just dreams, figments of your imagination?”
“They’re so detailed, so in depth that I think it’s what went down that night.”
“When you confided in me years ago about this, I remember you saying that Brad found you alone in the boys’ room drunk as a skunk, naked in a stranger’s bed with used condoms strewn about and vomit all over the bedclothes. And he freaked out but took you home and then basically never spoke to you again and that was the end of your relationship.”
“That’s what I thought. I mean, yes, that’s what happened afterward, when he found me, but before that I can’t be sure what took place. At the time it was just a blank. I’d blacked-out.”
“So now it’s all coming back to you? What triggered the memory?”
“I don’t know . . . my upcoming marriage, all that talk we had about being honest with Alexandre and . . . this color . . . electric-blue. Rex was given an electric-blue collar and it must have just made something click. I remembered this skirt I had that was also electric-blue. I wore it that night. Something about remembering that color must have activated a part of my brain that had been shut off all that time.”
“So then what happened after the third guy came through the door?”
“That’s what I can’t remember.”
“You said your body was practically numb? Like a rag doll with no strength in your muscles?”
“Yes. I remember that clearly. I had no strength to move—I must have been really inebriated.”
“Sounds like a lot more than just tequila to me.”
“But I didn’t smoke any weed or anything. I wasn’t stoned.”
“Sounds to me as if you’d been slipped some Ecstasy or something, maybe even Rohypnol or Valium.”
“Ecstasy?”
“I took it once, twenty years ago. Big mistake. Well, a lot of people were doing it then, it was all the rage—I thought it would be a laugh. I remember being exactly like that, like a flopsy marionette. I couldn’t move a muscle. Everybody else was dancing all night, but with me it had the opposite effect. I spent the night with this guy who I thought was God’s gift to the human race, but when I woke up the next morning I was horrified. HORR. IF. IED.”
The way Daisy told me this, with her exaggerated British accent, made me chuckle. Comic relief from a serious subject.
“That’s why it’s called Ecstasy,” she went on. “People are convinced they’re madly in love. You see everything with rose-tinted glasses while you’re high. But actually, those bastards probably gave you Valium or something. These types of drugs affect everyone differently, but mixed with all those shots of tequila? You wouldn’t have stood a chance, Pearl.”
I twiddled my hair in thought, retracing my nightmare. “Maybe you’re right. In the dream one of them said something like . . . what was it? Like . . . ‘It’s really taking effect now.’ You think they spiked my drink?”
“Hey, it happens all the time at colleges and parties, that’s one of the reasons they call it ‘date rape.’ I bet they slipped something in your drink. It can cause retrograde amnesia, which is obviously what happened to you. I mean, it’s common for people to wake up the next morning without any memory of huge chunks of the night before. It’s really rife in Britain with all this binge drinking going on with young girls. There are so many cases of fake taxi drivers raping them . . . you know, they get into a car thinking they’re going home and end up being violated. Some even murdered. But I’m digressing—what happened to you was a classic case of date rape. Even if you had gone to the doctor for a test the next day, a lot of these date rape drugs don’t even show up in urine samples.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It was part of my training. Date rape is way more common than people think and it usually goes unreported, but often it’s revealed years later in therapy sessions. Like with incestual rape, people often don’t want to admit to themselves that they were abused, let alone confide in someone else—it can take years to resurface sometimes. Or like with you, the victim genuinely forgets about it, blocks it out, and something triggers the memory years later. It could be a smell, a word, a movie or book. In your case it was a color that was the trigger reminding you of that skirt and everything that followed.”
“The truth is, though, I asked for it, Daisy. I was dancing around in that little skirt, coming on to them, flirting like
crazy. And I agreed to go back to their place—they didn’t force me. I was even looking forward to having a threesome. At first it seemed like a great idea.”
“Oh so you think you asked to be basically, gang raped? This was not your fault, Pearl. This was not your fault. Do you hear me?”
“I felt so ashamed at the time, and I still feel ashamed even speaking about it now.”
“You and every other person who ever gets raped. It’s classic—the victim feels like somehow it was their fault and they were asking for it. Their lipstick was too bright, the skirt too short, they shouldn’t have worn high heels that evening, they should never have got into that car. The list goes on.”
“The worst thing is that I suddenly feel repelled by sex . . . the repulsive details are all flooding back, and I feel grossed out.”
“That’s why you need to tell Alexandre about what happened.”
“But you said—”
“Pearl, that’s when I thought this was about a fun, wild night out during your university years—something he really didn’t need to know about. But this? This is affecting your relationship. This is a whole different kettle of fish. It was rape. Just because it happened ages ago doesn’t make it any less serious.”
“He might think it was my fault.”
“I doubt it very much. We all have a past—we’ve all done crazy things. This was eighteen years ago, for fuck’s sake.”
“Just yesterday he said how he couldn’t imagine me ever having been promiscuous or wild–he thinks I was perfect.”
“Well, wakey, wakey, Alexandre Chevalier, you are engaged to be married to a mere mortal! Pearl, if he can’t stomach what happened to you, and if he can’t deal with it in an adult way then you really shouldn’t be marrying him anyway. Listen, Amy says my time is up and I don’t like breaking promises. Call me tomorrow and we’ll finish this conversation. It’s good you’re letting it all out, anyway.”
“Bye. Thanks, Daisy, thanks for listening. Say thank you to Amy for being so generous with her mom’s time.”
“Please, stop making yourself sound like a bore. Of course I’m listening, This shit is serious and you need to sort through it. We’ll talk tomorrow. Love you, and thank you for trusting me with all this, I know it’s painful.”
I got out my iPad and looked up the words online that Daisy mentioned, “retrograde amnesia.” I had always thought it was a nifty trick they used in soap operas, but never could have imagined it would happen to anyone in real life—to totally blank something out. At least, not unless you’d had some sort of physical head trauma from a car accident or something. Although, I understood now that it was trauma . . . only mental.
If I’d remembered the course of events at the time I could have defended myself, and Brad would have seen me in a different light, not as some complete slut with no morals at all. Not that having a threesome is wrong, no. But I had been going steady with him. The fact that he’d admitted he had slept with Alicia didn’t let me off the hook. I broke his heart. Broke his trust in me. We would have gotten married if he’d been able to forgive me. Maybe we would have stayed together.
I took a deep breath and tried to stop the self-blame flooding over me. It was true what Alexandre had said, that you have to accept your mistakes, the good and bad, because they define who you are as a person. Perhaps if that had never happened with the football players I wouldn’t have met Alexandre. Maybe I would have had children. Who knew which path would have been the “right” one? Are our lives destined by fate or does every single choice we make offer a gamut of possibilities like a CD with several different tracks? I chose that song, “All I Wanna Do Is Have Some Fun” . . . and that’s where it had led me that night.
I was mulling all this over and thinking about a light dinner in at the hotel restaurant, when my cell rang. It was Alessandra.
Her smoky voice sounded languid and rich. She didn’t even say ‘Hi, Pearl,’ but began, “All we ever do is work, you and I. I think we should just hang out this evening together.”
I was taken aback. “Well, I—”
Her voice was almost a whisper. “Actually, I’m cheating. I’m already here—down in the lobby—thought I’d take a chance.”
“Wow, Alessandra, what if I’d been busy?”
“I figured you’d be free. I’m on my way up to your room.”
When I opened the door a few minutes later, I was stunned. It was like action replay, except the seductive person standing before me uninvited was not Alexandre, but Alessandra. She stood there dressed in a clingy, silky dress—almost see-through—her nipples erect, her cascading, dark hair wild and untamed about her shoulders. She was holding a chilled bottle of Dom Pérignon, and some pink roses. Déjà-vu. Except, she also held a glass vase for the flowers.
It plopped out of my mouth, “You look pretty,” I said. My eyes fell on the roses. “These are for me?”
“No, they’re for your alter ego, the Pearl who takes work way too seriously, the Pearl who needs a little sweetening up.”
I tried to stifle a grin. It was true: we’d been working non-stop on the script and not spoken about anything else. “Come in, Alessandra . . . sorry, it’s a little messy, I was just choosing something to wear. I always end up rooting through every piece of clothing I have, never knowing what to put on. I thought I’d go downstairs and eat in the hotel restaurant—the food’s great here—join me if you like.”
“I love this place,” she said in her husky Italian accent –“so romantic. Let’s open the champagne while it’s still cold. Oh look, you have a balcony, how lovely.” She stepped onto the balcony and surveyed the ocean view. The breeze blew her dress revealing the outline of her thighs and ass. No underwear. Another thing she and Alexandre had in common. Oops, maybe we wouldn’t be dining downstairs after all; her dress was no better than a negligee. Unless I lent her a pair of my panties. No, far too intimate, perhaps room service is a better idea.
I filled up the vase Alessandra brought with water and placed the flowers inside and then grabbed a couple of flute glasses by the mini-bar. “Thanks so much for the roses, they’re beautiful.”
“The rule is, this evening we won’t mention the film, is that a deal?”
“It’s a deal,” I agreed. I looked at her, my eye like a camera, and knew that this woman was on her way to movie stardom. It was obvious. Her beauty was breathtaking. Her skin olive-colored but flawless—an advantage with high definition cameras showing up every blemish. Her eyes flicked up at the corners, and her dark lashes were like frames making the green even greener, the flecks of gold more pronounced.
She popped open the cork and some of the champagne bubbled over. She licked her fingers, her tongue slowly rimming her top lip. It was as if she and Alexandre were twins; their mannerisms were similar. Was I in the middle of a soap opera? First the retrograde amnesia business, and now this? Was I about to discover that Alexandre’s mother gave up one of her babies for adoption, and Alexandre and Alessandra were long-lost brother and sister? She and I had been working so hard on the script, I hadn’t had a moment to really observe the woman, but everything about her fascinated me, mostly because she reminded me of him.
We clinked glasses and made a toast to the success of the film but burst out laughing simultaneously when it occurred to us that we’d both broken our rule to not mention it this evening. She told me about her hybrid upbringing, that she was born in Chicago but then moved to Italy when she was six, raised in Florence by her single mom, who had at that point divorced her father, an American. She’d spent her summer vacations with her grandparents in Sicily. She returned to the States when she was sixteen and modeled in New York before landing a commercial and an agent. Little by little, she’d found her way into the theatre, although it was a slow progression. Finally, she’d gotten the part that won her the Tony Award, and things had been going skyward from there.
She took another sip of champagne. “The problem is I still have my Italian accent—it’s hard to
shake off one hundred percent.”
“But it hasn’t harmed your career up until now, has it? I mean, people love an accent, it makes you exotic.”
“So far I’ve been lucky, but I want to be in the same league as Charlize.”
Tough, I thought. Trying to compete with the best of the best. “Well, you can have elocution lessons. There must be so many voice coaches in LA. I like your accent, though. I think it would be a shame to lose it completely.”
She put her hand on my thigh. “You do?”
“Yes, I think European accents are sexy.”
“Well, I suppose you would, Pearl. Tell me about your husband-to-be. Is he really as hot as he looks?”
“I thought you were gay,” I replied with suspicion. Keep away from him, femme fatale!
“I am. But you know what turns me on? Lying in bed with my girlfriend and watching a man fuck a woman in a porno movie. Seeing a big, hard, thick cock stretch open up a sweet tender pussy and fuck her. Or even two guys together making out.”
I was feeling the effects of the champagne and I laughed.
“Why is that funny? Didn’t you know that that’s a lesbian fantasy? A lot of us still love to imagine big cocks, but we want to be once-removed from them, if you see what I mean.” Alessandra picked up the hotel phone and nonchalantly dialed room service. “Hi, can you bring us an ice-cold bottle of Dom Pérignon and some sandwiches? A mixture of snacks, I don’t care, a mixture of vegetarian and whatever. Thanks.”
My eyes widened. So cocky! She didn’t even ask me.
“It’s on me,” she let me know. “Now, where were we? Yes, big, huge, throbbing cocks—”
Cock . . . the word brought unwelcome images to my brain, and I felt my eyes well with tears. The needle-dick memories flashed back, and a recollection of that third guy who came into the room enveloped me like a blanket smothering me to suffocation. He was fat, sweaty, his penis repulsive; I remember him struggling with a condom. I covered my face with my hands in disgust . . . the twisting agony of what happened wrenching memories out of my body . . . I started hyperventilating again, my breath short. I tried to suck in a lungful of air.
Hooked Up: Book 2 Page 29
