I worked my way through the Harlow collection, hungering for her crumpled little expression, lusting after her pale, ever-braless form. Dinner at Eight led me to George Cukor; Cukor led me to Ernst Lubitsch, who led me to Preston Sturges, who led me to John Sturges, who led to me John Ford, on to Hitchcock and Huston, David Lean and Frank Capra, Tod Browning and James Whale. And through the filmmakers I met some new dead friends: Jimmy Stewart, Robert Donat, Gene Tierney, Donna Reed, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Jean Simmons, Glenn Ford, Ann Savage, Veronica Lake, Boris Karloff, Fay Wray.
Who knew these creaky old grinders would be so filled with wit and beauty and humour and tension and revelation? Who knew that a film could be more than a barrage of flash-cut imagery, digital animation, and DTS explosions?
Maybe you did, but I didn’t.
I know, I’m sounding like some old fart film instructor who can’t let go of a past that’s practically been buried alive, but it’s true. I don’t mean to preach here - I really don’t - but I was born again. I guess I’d only seen the old shit. I didn’t find the jewels. That would be like judging today’s movies by the latest Adam Sandler.
The best of the old stuff was elegant and smart and breezy and entertaining and, well, engaging. And the worst of it was...well, the worst of it was like most of the movies today. Bankrupt and boring.
I got it.
* * * *
Bleary-eyed and exhausted, but also wonderfully recharged after a dozen weeks of nonstop watching, I turned off the set. I’d forgotten the world was in colour, and it startled me. The cleaning lady had vacuumed around me for the last couple of months, and thrown out all the food delivery cartons, but the place was still a litter of videos and detritus. As I stood, my head reeled. My eyes had stared at a fixed focus for so long that they found it difficult to hone in on anything else. My hair was a couple inches longer, and I had the semblance of a Fu Manchu beard tickling my chin.
I slid the glass door to the balcony open and stepped out onto the cusp of the real world, and let it breathe on me. It was noisy and argumentative and its breath stank. I liked the movies better. Reality bathed me in ugliness, and I shivered. It reeled around me and my mind drifted away to beauty.
I remembered what brought this on in the first place. I opened up my wallet, and pulled out her card. It didn’t have a name on it, just a number. I dialled it, got the system’s nervous beep-beep-beep, punched in my number and waited. This time, as I looked out into the vast Pacific, I couldn’t discern the turds floating out there. Maybe they cleaned them out again; maybe they were just hiding. But the sea was as blue as the veins on Cher’s forehead. If only the sky matched. Instead, it was congealing into a disgusting mauve solidity.
Her call booted me out of my coastal reverie. She knew who it was from just my ‘hello’. She was good. I needed to see her. I wanted to share what I had found with her, and needed to siphon some of it off of her, so I invited her over. She came.
By the time she called up from the lobby, I was showered and shaved and reborn. My eyes could focus near and far again, and my breath was kissing sweet. My expectant erection tugged me like a divining rod to the door at the sound of her gentle rap. Oh, my lovely embodiment of the past, my alabaster testimony to all that once was beautiful and elegant and witty and desirable. My link to another, better world, the only world that mattered, a world without corruption or darkness or despair.
My Jean.
I pulled the door open...and wanted to cry.
This was not my Jean. This was that girl in the Jeans and the T-shirt and the Reeboks and the backwards Nike cap, fresh from the gym. This was all the girls I’d read and dated and sampled and discarded and been discarded by. This was now, and I wanted - needed - then.
She saw it and knew. She lifted a shopping bag from Trader Joe’s and pulled out a bottle of wine. ‘I brought wine.’ I tried not to look so let down, and she dug deeper in the bag. ‘And Jean.’
She held up the peach satin gown with a twinkling little smile that did its best to win me over. ‘Which way to the bathroom?’
Unable to speak, I merely pointed, and she scurried through the condo and locked herself in. No matter what she looked like when she emerged, I had seen behind the facade. I knew it was fake now, and that it wasn’t going to work. It was so perfect, that night at the Cinemateque, until the fateful morning after. I wouldn’t see Jean any more, merely the actor playing her. It wasn’t the same thing.
Still, when she emerged, the gown clinging to her like hot breath, she was stunning. The lips were sanguine, the hips unfettered, the breasts at full attention. But now, having experienced the real Jean Harlow in every one of her films - even the one with Laurel and Hardy - I realised she didn’t really look all that much like Harlow. Beautiful, desirable, yes. Harlow, no.
‘Forget about that girl at the door,’ she told me. ‘I sent her away. I want you all to myself.’ She gave me a sharp little bite on the lip. I tasted my own blood.
She stepped into the middle of the living room and appraised the place, knowing I would appraise her in the light of the picture windows. The room basically consisted of open space, the giant TV system and a view of the murky Marina. And now, her. She startled me with a sudden squeal of delight. ‘Look!’ she said as she knelt at the pile of silver discs littering the floor. ‘You’ve got all my movies! Let’s watch one!’ She picked up a copy of Red Dust and held it out to me in front of the stack of electronic hardware. Then, in a baby-doll voice: ‘How do you work this thing?’
I popped the disc into the machine and fired up the monitor, filling it with the true Harlow and Clark Gable.
‘Do you have any popcorn, Clark?’ she asked me. I had to disappoint her, but she was goodnatured about it all and pulled me into a pile of pillows with her. It was a strange experience looking from the screen to the siren curled in my lap. She mouthed all the dialogue that Harlow spoke as the sun outside sank into the Marina.
As the movie continued, she slid up against me like a cat, and the contact was all warm and comfy and even arousing...but that’s not what I wanted. I wanted the woman on the screen. The Jean in my lap started to purr, her engine ignited and accelerating. She pushed me back into the pillows and climbed atop me, I drowned in her body.
Her skin as smooth as the discarded satin gown, she flowed against me like butter on a frying pan, melting on me. Her talents spread throughout her body, but mine resisted. I tried closing my eyes, but could not keep the girl at the door out of my home. She drew me into her and we coupled ferociously, but it was nothing like that night. And I know it wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t help but focus on the tiny red pimple sprouting on her chin. The real Harlow would never be so blemished. We united wetly and energetically, and our mutual release finally jettisoned enough unspilled juice to cramp my sphincter. But I was not satisfied, and she knew it.
‘You know, I try my best to be her for you, but I can’t really be her.’
I couldn’t say anything. I was spent and sweating, and just couldn’t come up with an answer. I felt like the king of movie geeks, pining for a movie star who died before my parents were even conceived. What a fucking goober.
She just watched me, her mind working, and I felt like a twelve-year-old. My heart had been broken by an image on television. Her gaze just embarrassed me. Mama, make it stop. She just kept looking at me, judging me, shrinking me with her eyes. Meanwhile, the movie had come to an end.
Without saying anything, she walked across the room, still spectacularly naked, and picked up the phone. Her eyes still pinning me to the floor like a butterfly specimen, she started dialling and walked into the kitchen. I heard her dulcet, off-screen voice, but not the words. I heard her sign off before she re-entered the room and cradled the phone, shameless in her sheath of flawless ivory flesh. She gently took me by the hand and took me to the glass doors overlooking the water. She stared out for long silent minutes before speaking.
‘How much would you pay to spend the night
with Harlow?’
I figured it was time to pay up. I guess fifteen hundred wasn’t a lot to pay to discover what a retard I was.
‘I’ll get your money.’
I went to the desk and brought her the cash.
‘I didn’t mean me,’ she said as she took the bills and folded them into her dainty Bakelite purse. ‘I meant Harlow.’
‘I think you’re as close as I’m ever going to get.’
That made her laugh. ‘I’m not.’
I was sick of her laughing at me. Think again about me casting you in anything, I thought.
‘I mean Harlow, Jean Harlow, exactly who we were watching on the screen.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t want to play this game.
‘What would you pay for a night of connubial bliss with Jean Harlow?’
‘The real Jean Harlow? If it were possible?’
‘If it were possible.’
‘I don’t know. I can’t go that far into the abstract.’
‘Come on, think about it. If you could have one night with her, how much would it be worth to you?’
I thought about it. ‘Fifteen hundred?’ I thought it would compliment her.
‘Shit, you can get me for fifteen hundred. Come on, for real. An entire night with Jean Harlow, exactly as you’ve seen her in the movies. How much?’
‘I don’t know...ten thousand dollars?’
‘Cheapskate.’
‘Twenty.’
‘Jesus.’
I gave up ‘Then let’s stop doing this. I couldn’t fuck Jean Harlow for all the money in the world, so let’s just stop this. She’s been rotting since 1937.’
She just smiled sweetly and shook her marcelled little head. ‘I don’t think so...’
Where the fuck was this going? ‘Well, if she’s a hundred years old and living in Argentina or something, I don’t think I want a piece of her.’
That fucking smile again.
‘Would you pay a hundred grand to spend the night with the Jean Harlow of your dreams? The 1937 Jean Harlow? If you could. For real.’
Just for the hell of it, I thought about it. Would I? The decision was a bit more difficult in the wake of the powerful orgasm I’d just experienced minutes ago. But with the Gramercy and Miramax deals set in hard copies, I had some disposable income. Is that how I’d dispose it? A hundred grand? Hell, I could spec out a script in a month for double that. So that’s like two weeks’ pay. Of course, you can’t crank out a dozen scripts a year, but Jesus, even if it’s a couple months’ pay...would it be worth it? I didn’t have a wife or kids or anything: just me and my TT. I’d pay a hundred thousand dollars to sleep with Harlow.
If it were possible.
So I said yeah.
And she said really? And I said yeah, I think I would. And she said that was interesting and slid into her jeans and that fucking T-shirt again, kissed me goodbye, and fluttered away.
* * * *
It was another week before she called me back. I was immersed in Saratoga when the machine picked up. I never answer the phone, especially not when I’m viewing, and especially not when it’s Jean onscreen. But it was her voice: ‘Are you there? It’s Jean.’
The voice, I had to admit, was perfect. I picked up. ‘Hi.’
She giggled, sounding like New York in the thirties. ‘Go to the bank,’ she whispered.
‘What for?’
‘It’s time.’
‘Time for what?’
‘You know. Hundred-thousand-dollar time. Cash or traveller’s cheques.’
Well, you and I both know what that meant. But what it meant was impossible. I didn’t know how to respond to her, and just sat there with that porcelain face basting my brain, probably breathing fanny.
‘Are you still there?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Can you get to the bank today? And meet me at Union Station tonight at eleven?’
I didn’t understand. ‘I don’t understand,’ I told her.
‘Like heck you don’t.’ And then, with another tinkling little titter, she hung up, as the real Jean smiled at me from my 62-inch Pioneer, enhanced for sixteen-by-nine.
* * * *
I’d spent a couple of nights sharing skin with this phenomenal creature, reaching a Nirvana Kurt Cobain never dreamed of, but what did I really know about her? That she could set me to palpitating was a given...but what kind of idiot would go to the bank, pull out a hundred grand, and meet this angel in the middle of the night at a train station in the cesspool of downtown Los Angeles? Surely this was a set-up; obviously this, well, I’ll say it, this prostitute had found a malleable mark, a sucker just dying to toss off his ill-gotten gains. She and her pierced and tattooed cohorts would beat me up and take my cash. You would never have gone for a crack-brained scenario like this one, and I would never have dared writing such a silly plotline. If I’d turned it in to Sid Fields, I’d have flunked Screenwriting 101.
But, you know, I did have a hundred grand. It was pretty much all I had at the moment, but, you know, I had more coming in. And I was unburdened by investments. What was the worst that could happen to me? Other than having my money stolen and my throat slashed, what did I have to lose? My soul? Yeah...that’s worth a lot.
Was it really that preposterous to think that I might be able to have .. . Jean?
Well, the answer was obvious, but I sped down to Washington Mutual anyway.
* * * *
Still grand but ageing and missing a few teeth, Union Station reached coldly into the scuffed, blue-brown night sky. Mine was the only car in the desolate lot and I parked as far as I could from the three creased, ruddy faces sharing hits off a bottle of violet rotgut. The sound of their retching was a perfect contemporary counterpoint to the timeless architectural elegance that reached out to embrace me. I was, as usual, anally punctual. Eleven distant chimes hung sweating in the muggy night air.
As I stepped into the empty vastness of the old dowager, it was like stepping into an evacuated Capra epic. I could imagine the post-war homecomings, the reunited sweethearts spotting one another through the teeming masses of humanity, the brass-band sendoffs to the senator’s last hurrah. But the monochrome crowd evaporated and the cracked leather seats and the gang-gouged woodwork brought me back home. It was an empty Art Deco barn strangling on its memories. I would be one of them.
Then the tip-tap tip-tap of high heels echoed around me, and I turned just as an unmistakable silhouette rounded the corner. She stepped into a shaft of light, and its reflection off of her platinum hair ignited the room in yellow fire. She stood there, letting the spotlight caress her perfection. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi back.’
I walked to her, my heart suddenly racing in anticipation, the cash in a shoulder bag, suddenly weighing a hundred pounds. What the fuck was I doing here?
‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ I asked her.
‘Dreaming. Give me your keys.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Heaven.’
I followed her out of the cavernous, empty building and back to my car, unable to pull my eyes from the lift and ripple of the perfect globes of her rear as she walked.
* * * *
The thick summer night laid on us like an oil change, even with the top down. She caromed through the dank darkness, the empty downtown Los Angeles streets choking on their past. Broadway was a desiccated corpse, the klieg lights of the grand Million Dollar, United Artists, and Los Angeles Theaters long extinguished. A handful of zombies lumbered like cancerous cells through her clogged artery. We were on our own Fantastic Voyage through Innerspace when Jean suddenly pulled off behind the old Times Mirror building and guided us down a long, dark, seemingly endless alley.
That alley led to the decaying backside of a once-grand edifice, a cracked granite frown slowly settling into the sinking subway horizon. She pulled us into its gaping, festering maw, and kept driving like a drill into the ground. The corkscrew drive was seemingl
y Hellhound as it dug us deeper into a quakephobe’s sweatiest nightmare. But as we plunged down beneath the city, lit only by headlights and the dim, browning sconces that studded the concrete wall, the temperature grew much cooler.
In moments, my grinning little TT peered into a grand open lobby, its flawless white-veined black marble gleaming in the shine of its headlights. A giant stone Thinker sat contemplating us in the middle of the vast room as Jean killed the engine and tip-tapped across the gleaming mirror of marble floor to the centre pair of sculptured brass doors. The elegance of the lobby was impressive, and of another world: overstuffed leather and cherry sofas and chairs, vast WPA murals of noble working people on the job, a heavy walnut reception desk the size of a Beverly Center screen. It had all of the chi-chi quiet snootery of a Beverly Hills face-tightening clinic.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 51
