Sixfold Fiction Winter 2016
Page 9
#3—UNUSUAL BLEEDING OR DISCHARGE. So why did I aid and abet those abortions? Why did I strap and buckle and glue myself into ever more humiliating costumes? I suggest, my treasures, that you too would have surrendered to the wistful, menopausal splendor of the Ambassador’s delusions. Whose heart is so jaded it would not have been moved at the sight of my jowly, balding mate in his Francis Ford Copula outfit? At the way he paced the set, whispering commands in his Ivy League sotto voce, shirt open at the neck, black boots carrying him forward at a constant tilt, as if he were commiserating with his pinched toes?
Unfortunately, my trials went well beyond torturous costumes. How I girded myself, how I shuddered inwardly each time the Ambassador interrupted a take, each time he laid aside his clipboard and put both moist hands on my bare shoulders. “Sable,” he would say, “this is where I need your demure side.” He would look deeply, knowingly into my eyes. “Before she meets the Count, Isabel is a naive peasant. Your motivation here is hunger, not lust.”
Motivation! Imagine that doddering diplomat lecturing me on motivation—me, who made more than thirty movies while he was bowing from the waist and learning to say “due consideration” in five languages. But the man’s presumption knew no bounds, and once he actually grabbed me by the waist, changing places with me so that I could study his interpretation of a role. He struck my pose, repeated my line in a high-pitched whinny intended to be our heroine’s voice. “My Lord,” he recited, sounding like a walk-on in a grade-school play, “I am at your disposal, body and soul.”
Heaven knows from what literary trash heaps he retrieved those elaborately plotted, gruesomely written scenarios. But you can imagine the foreboding with which, at an age when most former femmes fatales are scrambling for character parts, I took on challenges like Destina, the story of an orphan who rises to corporate stardom by marketing her perfume and her body. Or Firebrand, a film that turned Annie Oakley into a nymphomaniac who threw herself with equal vigor at cowboys and cattle.