The wedding at Hollywood Presbyterian was enormous and star-studded. Well, TV-star studded, but that counts on Access Hollywood. The rest of her coven was there, as well as low-level WB and UPN celebrities and dignitaries. Press agents called to get their Survivor loser clients on the guest list, Sam Rubin had an exclusive KTLA wedding party interview, and the swarms of bottom-feeding entertainment media piddled in our pool and drank our champagne. A couple of members of O Town kind of sang, and teenage girls thronged the perimeter of the church, hoping to grope - or at least glimpse - a Fifteen-Minute-Famer. It was noisy and cheerful, and nothing really went wrong. The Princess’s mother beamed, at forty-two a wonderfully prescient reflection of how beautifully the Princess herself would ripen. When she hugged me after the ceremony, I felt her visibly sizable peek-a-boo nipples harden under the braless silk blouse, and she actually sneaked me a little tongue. I couldn’t keep from getting an erection, but I gave her nothing back. I mean, I’m a happily married man. Not that I expected to remain so, Hollywood marriages being what they are, but this was new, fresh and respectable.
The Princess herself, however, never was more glorious. Her face glowed, luminous in the lightest application of very natural make-up. Even swollen with child, her beauty was almost ethereal, resplendent in a custom-made Rei Kawakubo gown that allowed her protruding baby belly to be seen, even highlighted. Somehow, her pregnancy made her even more desirable. She was due to pop the pup in a month or so, so there was no secret about her condition. Most of the wedding presents were really baby presents, which pissed me off a little, but I got over it.
Our honeymoon was spent at the Four Seasons Sayan in Bali, a gift from Aaron Spelling, the generous producer who owned the Princess. The night we arrived, despite the jetlag and exhaustion, the spectacular sunset views of the Ayung River from our outdoor rock bathtub lit a fire within us. I had been afraid of pregnant sex since the swell of the baby’s presence had become overt. I mean, I didn’t want to put out its little eye or anything, though I knew I was being foolish. But then she stood over me, dripping wet and blissfully bare, her belly swollen with baby and her breasts with milk, and a curtain lifted. She’d long ago removed the nipple-skulls so that there would be minimal milk leakage, and stood completely naked, mind and body, her flesh like French vanilla ice cream, her butterfat skin shining and hairless. The new heft of her breasts was irresistible, so I reached up and slid my hands up her body to them. My face followed, and soon I was tasting warm mother’s milk as I nursed it from her. It was my favourite meal of the trip.
She gripped my hairless head in her hands and eased it lower. I slid my face along the tight, round tummy and found succour in the smooth valley below, where she had celebrated the marriage with a ritual casting-away of lock and key. I dined on her physical magnificence for a while before she eased my head back up to her stomach. She wanted to rest it there, wanted me to listen to our child. I could hear its little heart beating from her womb, a tiny tattoo nearly drowned out by the tom-tom beat of her own. And then, a surprisingly brisk little kick tapped my face through her belly. She held my head there, and something happened. For a moment, I went blind.
Everything went black, but the sounds got louder: new and different sounds, not of Balinese monkeys and birds, but of a thudding, rushing heartbeat. It was a deafening, repeating, 5.1 surround whoosh. As my eyes got used to the darkness, I saw that there was colour forming in the black: red, of course. Blood-red, with a sparkle of gold. I could see inside through my baby’s eyes. Tiny, incomplete fingers flexed clumsily before my face in the placental sac. Peering through the dim light, I could make out perfect little baby toes, even down to their little toenails. In the dim glow through the amniotic fluid, I could make out a pretty good-sized little pecker for a kid his age. We’d had all the tests done, of course, and knew it was a boy, but I was proud that my son was well-endowed.
Then the veil of darkness lifted and I was back on our private stone balcony overlooking the cliffside jungles and rice terraces, a glamorous and beautifully voluptuous young starlet dripping wet and breathing hard as she held my head against her bare skin. I climbed from the pool, lifted her up in my arms and laid her on her side on the bed, ignoring the water. I spooned against her back, hands pressed tight to her stomach and entered her from behind. As I pounded into her uncontrollably, animal instinct ruling the rooster, she threw her arms behind and gripped my ass, pulling me in deeper and faster.
And then, again, that same something happened. Heft my head and entered junior’s … while I was entering and reentering his mother. I could see the length of my erection stretching and penetrating the Princess from within, the repeated plunging rhythm hypnotic in the dim, red-gold-black light. As the Princess was caught up in spasmic paroxysms of what I hoped was delight and fulfilment, I helplessly spat my seed into her and watched its milky mist creep slowly into the baby’s amniotic bath. As I withdrew from her hallowed cave, I also withdrew from this link to an unformed mind and back into the monkey chants and damp, purpling sky of the Balinese evening.
Stunned, I stared at my beautiful wife (wife!), stupored by what had just happened. She saw immediately that something was up.
‘What’s the matter?’
What could I say? What did I know? I’d seen through the eyes of my unborn son while I was fucking his mother? That’s exactly what I told her. And bless her little tattooed heart, she thought that was beautiful.
Well, it scared the shit out of me. And it kept happening, at unexpected and disorienting times. We’d be sitting in an ancient Ubud temple, watching the villagers monkey-chant for tourists, when suddenly I’d be pre-born, the sound outside muffled and drowned out by the Princess’s pounding heartbeat. It was a sensation of floating in space, of womb scuba-diving, staring through the cloudy, not yet fully formed eyes of a pre-infant. Tiny fingers weakly flexed and explored, reaching out and touching the womb, the toes, the little baby weenie. Everything else in my brain evaporated as I slid back into sensory prehistory, brain activity sliding to a nearly complete halt, running on instinct, not intellect, resting, easing myself free of the world outside. I was at peace.
Peace.
My mind had not been at rest … well, ever. Until now. It was like letting go. Being free. Cutting the cord. Free fall.
And then I woke up.
The loud, rhythmic, atonal chatter of the chanters drove spikes into my newly sensitive ears, jangled me, threw me violently back into my own body in the real world. I hated it, and ran outside for some semblance of quiet.
As I stood smoking out in the sultry Indonesian night, the chanting a distant dissonance, the far-off wailing of priests curling through the night sky like smoke, I tried to catch my breath. The rushing of the Ayung River calmed me, took me back to the womb. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was more than ten thousand miles away from Hollywood. I had moved to another planet.
On this planet, there were no avaricious agents, no numbskull network executives, no call sheets, no rush-hour freeway parking lots, no tap-dance meetings on movies you wouldn’t even watch, no Monday boxoffice reports, no cheering the failure of another over-budget creatively bankrupt celluloid stinker, no lunches at gilt-priced snooty see-me emporia where everyone is watching the mirrors out of the corners of their eyes, no taking it up the ass from ferocious ego monsters driving huge Jaguars to mask the incapacity of their penises, no style-monster fashionistas dictating what must be worn and how, no unavoidable advertising spoiling every vista, no hip-hop pounding mercilessly in your head, no seven-act structure, no broadcast standards, no MPM, no Tom Shales, no artifice, no knife-in-teeth competition, no keeping up with the Joneses. Hell, no Joneses at all.
No, on this planet there was earth, sky and water. There was the Princess. There was our son. And I was with them. We had been reduced to the Elements. My heart swelled as it dawned on me that I truly loved them. They filled me, they expanded me. They were a part of me. We were linked, chemically and spiritually. Someon
e once described love as caring more about the one you love than about yourself. I had never imagined that plausible, even possible. Not until now. My marriage, fatherhood: they had seemed so abstract, so distant until now. But I woke up. My love had sprouted, grown wings, lifted me. The Princess and my son opened up a brand new chamber in my heart. This chamber was not protected by a wall of cynicism, was lacking in irony, was startlingly open and sincere. It’s a chamber open to pain … but worth the pain. To my amazement, I was truly in love.
I turned to see the Princess, following her tight, round tummy out of the temple and into the fragrant night, and I smiled at her. She approached me, asked me if I was okay, and I pulled her into my arms and enveloped her. I held her head in my hands and kissed her softly, all over her face. When I told her ‘I love you’ over and over, it made her laugh and cry at the same time.
So this is that feeling that everybody writes about, sings about, makes movies about. The Princess had reached out to me from within, and I had never even been aware. As I looked into and past her eyes, I was in her thrall. Being reduced to the beginning of life, she and our son became meaningful; I’d been chasing the Bitch Hollywood, when what was important was here, right here in the jungle. Right here in my arms. Our connection had been made on a corporeal, carnal level, but existed beyond that somehow. I felt older, deeper, wiser. And it kind of hurt.
We silently held hands as we peered out over the vast valley of rice terraces, a jewel-box of diamonds strewn across the coal-black sky. Curls of smoke rose like thoughts from the farms. And we kissed like Brad and Jennifer. No. Like us. Nobody else has ever kissed like us.
We left the villa wide open to the night sky as we coupled that night. It was as carnal as ever, but deeper, meaningful, evocative as body met body and minds melted away into instinct. Butterflies fluttered into the room, floating over us and lighting on our wet, sticky bodies as we linked, rocked, plundered in abandonment. She fiercely grabbed me by the scalp and pulled my head back so our eyes would be locked when we both erupted into a violent, mutual orgasm that wouldn’t end. She exploded in repeated shuddering waves of almost frightening fulfilment as I kept spurting and spurting into her.
We fell asleep linked, uncovered, pretzelled. It was the first night I had fallen asleep without Scotch or Ambien or even a Tylenol PM in a couple of years.
What a great honeymoon.
On the flight home, I spent most of my time in the womb, my adult face sleeping against the curve of mother’s belly, floating mindlessly, wordlessly in the balm of amniotic fluid, a sensory deprivation tank that worked internally as well as on the other senses. I was unborn, gearing up for Independence Day, but in no hurry. I could feel everything tuning up, completing, making ready. I could feel the baby’s hand stroke curiously and calmingly against the wall that separated him from me. He let me know he loved me in his silent, unborn-baby way.
As we approached LAX, I woke to find the Princess sound asleep, her head on my shoulder, drooling, her eyes rolled back in her head. I thought she looked adorable, and couldn’t keep from gently kissing her forehead. I was relaxed and comfortable in my own body, rested and happy. I looked out the window as we made our way through the crust of muddy smog that covered die basin like a flu, the ant farm of freeways choked to stagnation. It looked brown and dry and uninviting, a corpse laid out on its pyre, ready to be ignited to set its spirit free. Princess Charming awoke with a kiss as the 747 dropped to enter the dead body of Los Angeles.
Home.
Studio City had changed in the two weeks since we left: noisier, more crowded, browner, drier, smellier, brighter, less polite, meaner, more selfish. The answering machine was flashing ‘99’ over and over; it was full. The cleaning lady had left the mail piled on the dining room table, a tower of babble that meant nothing. You could throw it all out and never notice the difference. After all, the business manager got all the cheques. We were home, but we didn’t feel we belonged there. It had changed too much.
The truth, of course, was that we had changed. In Bali, we had become a family.
We cocooned. Spinning a web of solitude around us, we turned inwards indulging ourselves in each other. Yeah, we linked sexually, but it went way beyond that. It was hypnosis, infatuation, adoration, obsession. And I couldn’t keep from kissing the mound of her stomach, silently and psychically communing with my offspring. It was a disgustingly Hollywood idyll, ordering out from Chin Chin and Mexicali and filling the new nursery with all the finest from Baby Town Online while we waited for Junior to be born. We were too focused to miss Bali’s dissipating hold on us, too wrapped in anticipation to notice that California began to take us over again. Everything changes; everything wears off. And you don’t even notice as it happens to you.
The baby was due on May 25th. I was born on May 25th, 1977, the same day Star Wars opened. In fact, my mother went into labour as she waited in line at the Chinese Theatre for the first show. It practically killed my father that he had to take her to the hospital and miss the movie after waiting in line for over two hours. He came back for the midnight show that night. To this day, my mother has never seen Star Wars or any of its sequels, won’t even have the videos in the house. It’s her own private little protest, and perhaps fuelled my fire to make movies in the first place. Nothing like a little repression to provoke a little rebellion.
Baby Day drew nearer. The Princess’s belly looked like an overripe peach about to burst from its skin. Every night after we made love, I drifted into the mind of the little boy in her womb, floating and forming, the rest of the planet at bay, moving more, seeing more. We were getting ready to break water, hit the lights, roll sound and camera, and call for action.
May 25th. 3:20 am. I woke screaming, my eyes wide but blind, wrapped in blackness, a spike of pain shattering my skull from within, detached, terrified, in a sudden jolt of agony that I could not cast off. I could feel the Princess’s hand gripping my own, but I couldn’t see her. Her nails dug painfully into my hand, surely drawing blood, but I was inside her, blind, screaming.
Dying.
Just as quickly, the pain ended. I opened my eyes, and there was my wife, eyes rolled back in her head, panting, pale, perspiring. She clutched me tightly, and now it hurt. She managed to look at me with red-laced eyes, speaking between agonised breaths: ‘Something’s wrong. Call 911.’
I broke out in a sweat of terror, fumbled for the phone in the predawn moonlight, and managed to hit 911. I held her close, whispering over and over how everything was going to be okay, how I loved her so much, as we waited for the cavalry.
The ambulance raced us to Cedars Sinai, where her obstetrician screeched up in his Testarossa at precisely the same moment. He called all the shots, taking charge and rushing her into emergency. But despite his handsome, Robert Redford strength, the hustle of the best medical technicians and facilities money can buy, it was to no avail. Here, in this town, at this price, we were as hopeless as the homeless on Skid Row.
Our baby was born dead.
In the movies, your baby doesn’t die. You laugh together and make home movies and go to Disneyland and Yosemite and keep a family album and mark his growth on the kitchen wall and save for his college and cry at his wedding. In the movies, love is enough. In the movies, faith saves the day.
No, in the movies your baby doesn’t die. Neither does your baby sister, or your brother, or your father. But especially not your baby.
That only happens in real life.
Movies are better.
I had linked with our little boy in a connection no other parent has ever shared with his child, actually lived in his little head. But I had no idea that his head was so malformed, that the brain extruded through the open spot at the top of his little skull. By the time he was ready for his close-up, it was too late. After a brief flash of intolerable agony, he was gone.
And so was the Princess. When she was awake, she was crying, deep, racking sobs, wailing that ripped through the house with grief. Whe
n she wasn’t crying, she was unconscious, knocked out by sedatives, sleeping pills, anti-depressants and vodka. I cried with her, held onto her, tried to ease her grief, but I was grieving too deeply to be of any help. I tried to be strong for her, but she didn’t want my strength, and pushed me away. All I could do was sit on the balcony, tears coursing down my cheeks as I listened to her anguished, jungle wail behind die closed bedroom door, throwing and shattering things and screaming at God.
I held onto her, tight, not letting her pull away. She beat on my chest with her fists, but I wouldn’t let her go. She collapsed into me, exhausted, then fell asleep in my arms.
My pain was deadened by hers. She was in such excruciating agony, draped in a smothering cowl of death, that I felt useless, responsible.
For three solid months, she cried and I drank and cried. Her mother came by, but the Princess wouldn’t come out of her room to see her. Friends from the show came to see her, to try to bring some light into her darkness, but the door remained locked. The rest of the coven tried to pull her out for lunch, but she didn’t do food any more.
Without wearing her celebrity, her face clean of make-up, dressed only in sweats, eyes red and swollen, her face under a constant river of tears, she looked like a miserable little girl, an orphan in the storm, a helpless, hopeless little fawn abandoned in the forest. Bambi after the fire had killed her mother.
She surely blamed me, as she couldn’t bear to look at me. I could see the immolating look in her eyes before she turned away, and I couldn’t blame her. It had to have been my fault. She was right. After three months of this life of the living dead, she asked me to move out so that her mother could come and be with her. I had finally experienced the revelation of love, and it chewed me up and spit me out. Love is pain. I tried to fight her, to hold her, to keep us together, but all I reminded her of was the baby we lost. She lost. The baby I didn’t want in the first place. But the baby only I had shared a psychic link with. She had never been in his brain, and resented me for it. And for everything else. The baby made me real, and the real hurt.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 62
