Everything Happened to Susan

by Malzberg, Barry

  Everything

  Happened

  To

  Susan

  Barry Malzberg

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title page

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Also Available

  Copyright

  CHAPTER I

  Susan permits the man to enter her, feels him squirm and inflate inside, the rising pressure, and then, as if from a great distance, the sting of his discharge. “Oh boy,” he gasps unprofessionally, obviously out of the role, and then he remembers his lines: “Screw you, lady,” he says, disengaging with a grimace, “that’s just to show you you don’t mean nothing to me. I don’t get involved with women.” He staggers to his feet, breathing heavily, a strange and absent look on his face, twitching under the lights. Then, “I don’t believe this,” he says. “I just can’t believe any of this.”

  “Cut!” the director screams, “cut, you screw-up!”

  Susan groans, knowing there will be a retake, and thinks about the pain of entrance. She is not quite sure how long they have been working, but she is sore all over …

  CHAPTER II

  Susan has answered an advertisement in a weekly sex newspaper calling for young actresses or models, one hundred dollars a day, honest work, no fooling around. No other details were offered. The answering service which took her call told her to report to an address on the upper West Side the following morning where she was subjected to an interview, which necessitated her undressing. Ten or fifteen girls had shown up but only three or four passed. Susan realized the advertiser was in the pornographic film business when she saw the script and was told she would have to pretty much work on her actor’s instinct to improvise dialogue.

  CHAPTER III

  The man conducting the interviews said his name was Phil and that he really had nothing to do with the owners, and did not, in fact, know who these owners were. “You got to face the facts,” Phil told her after she had put her clothes on and finished the biographical details, “there’s a big market for this kind of stuff, and, it can be done with taste and style. Potentially, skin flicks are a very good thing; we can reach all kinds of people who would otherwise have nothing to do with their messages and we can teach them something, if we only learn to sneak it in. What we want is a more intellectual kind of production: a little taste and skill along with the heavy stuff. There’s got to be plenty of plot to make it redeeming. But you don’t have to worry about nothing when you go to work for us; if you go good, there might even be legitimate opportunities for you. This is a growth situation.” Phil had added that he had absolutely no personal interest in the actors or actresses, a lot of these damn fly-by-nights were just using blue films as an excuse for sex or worse but he, Phil, was all business and had no intention of asking Susan for a date. On the other hand, if she wanted to have a cup of coffee with him after the session that was perfectly all right. He would like to get to know her a little better and discuss several interesting things. Right after the filming, he would look forward to it …

  CHAPTER IV

  In the script, Susan is playing a young girl who has come to New York to look for a legitimate break in show business but has instead been forced into the making of pornographic films to support herself. The girl she is playing has had some kind of unhappy affair with a naive man who thought her forward and accused her of making indecent advances to him out of the sacred bond of wedlock. Resultantly, she suffers from a deep sense of shame and now seeks to degrade herself. All of the characters in this film are seeking degradation. In the course of the role, then, she is to have intercourse three or four times, as well as much petting, and one incident of sado-masochism with a tall man holding a whip. “He won’t really hurt you but you’ve got to scream,” the director said, and when the whip comes down on her naked back, she feels cold terror moving through her and she screams so loudly that the whip-man backs off, trembling. “What’s this?” he says. “Why are you taking it so personally,” and the director says cut this, and that is another sequence that must be reshot.

  CHAPTER V

  Susan also came to New York several months ago to look for a legitimate break in show business, but, the fact is, she has very little talent and no luck and thus she has been forced into the making of pornographic films to support herself. Presently she is living with an unpublished writer named Timothy West who feels he is on the edge of a major breakthrough in style and technique but, at the present time, is an assistant supervisor for the New York City Department of Welfare at a salary of twelve thousand dollars per year. “You have no idea how doomed the welfare system in this country is,” Timothy has told her, “but you can make a very good living at it, and you can hardly call it work.” He’d met Susan at a singles bar five or six weeks before and had little difficulty in talking her into living with him after their first night together since she was two months overdue in her rent and her landlord was quite hostile. “I don’t know what to say, Susan,” he’d said to her when she’d explained to him that, on the following day, she was going to report for an interview for what she suspected was a role in a stag movie. “On the one hand, I think we’ve reached a point in our relationship where I very definitely don’t feel personally threatened by this kind of thing but, on the other, I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing you should be in, for your sake.

  “Of course the dirty movie is more or less a metaphor for the total corruption of human relationships which we’ve seen in the Assassination Age, the utter collapse of real feeling and connection but then again, maybe a new ethic will come out of these ashes, one built upon an acceptance of the body and all that it entails. It has to be your decision, doesn’t it? Whatever you do, I’m sure that it will be for the best.” And then he had suggested that, since they both had to get up early in the morning, they postpone having sex for just this one night so that they could be well rested and build up even more anticipation for the next night.

  “Of course,” he had said, clenching and unclenching his hands, a fine line of sweat appearing above his upper lip as he flexed his shoulders over his typewriter and shook his head, rereading a difficult paragraph, “of course, if you feel that this is a defense-mechanism of some sort and that I’m really avoiding sex or if you really want it, then, well, just say the word and we’ll go to it. I have a great deal of desire, it’s just that I think we shouldn’t take sex as a
matter of course. God, I can’t seem to make the metaphors in this scene work. If only I could do it, I could send it to the Hudson Review but for them the point of view has to be basically urbane.” She had to say no, that it was perfectly fine with her, that they certainly could let the sex go for this one night. Timothy said the trouble with the short-story market is that it seemed to be almost all gone even though the short story was the basic American form, but, if you could get something into one of the prestigious quarterlies which still carried them, editors and publishers all over New York would come to your door extending contracts and checks for your first novel.

  CHAPTER VI

  The actor with whom she has had most of her scenes had ejaculated early on, of course, and since then they have been simulating. It is very late in the day, however, and even simulation is becoming painful for him; the director has had to conceive certain camera angles to hide his genitals. “I don’t want you to think there’s anything wrong with me,” the actor whispers to her as he wedges against her thighs, seizes her breasts, begins to work on them for the twentieth time that day (she has long since lost all sensitivity there), “but I just had a real heavy session last night, not expecting today would be anything like this and there just isn’t too much left in me. Do you want to go out and have a cup of coffee afterward? I feel that we should establish some kind of relationship.” He says all of this as he is slobbering over her breasts, which causes some of the words to be mumbled so that she catches only half. She says thank you very much but she already has an appointment with someone. Amazingly, he has a sudden erection; it prods her enormously as the director gives an ah! of satisfaction, and the actor says he understands perfectly …

  CHAPTER VII

  There are five or six actors in the film Susan is making; she has no clear impression of any of them other than the boy she is with. From time to time, the script calls for group scenes but, for reasons best known to the director or the scriptwriter, she is to engage in sexual acts only with this one boy. The others pair off. While she is on the floor, underneath the heavy lights, she can hear the sounds of stroking and gasping around her; she has a sense of beams of light cutting through the scene and imagines that a panoramic technique is being invoked. Then too the light will cut off suddenly for seconds or minutes while she supposes the focus of the film swings to the other pairs of actors. In addition to what is directly involved in the film, there seem to be a whole series of films being made in this enormous loft. Down at its perimeter there are other groups of people, more cameras; in the exact center of the area, a more ambitious documentary seems to be in preparation with domestic animals posed around a couple on the floor and almost concealing them. This particular operation is a very large one, but perhaps a number of film companies are saving on expenses by using one common, huge space. Susan tries not to think about any of this too much. At the beginning of the shooting session she decided that a narrowing of perspective is the solution, a focusing of her responses to the immediate situation in which she is involved and leaving the larger implications of what life is all about to others.

  Early in her dramatic career, in a class called Intermediate Acting, she had been told by the university instructor that she seemed to do her best work when she was in a limited, concrete situation, and she had never forgotten this. “Try not to think of abstractions,” the instructor warned her, “most actors find these very confusing.” Susan has resultantly not thought of abstractions in many years although the instructor had turned out to be a compulsive adulterer who had had relations with most of the girls in his class and, in a fit of insanity, had married one of them as the only way of getting into bed with her.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Susan, now twenty-three, had not had intercourse until the age of seventeen, having come from a closely knit suburban family in northern Ohio where most of the opportunities offered her had been in the back seats of cars parked dangerously near the road. She had felt that there must be something more to life and its Ultimate Act than headlights, insects, and the whimpering of the male as he jammed a knee against the steering post trying to lean over the seat. She had been deflowered in a fraternity house during her freshman year at college, however, and had not had any problems with sex since. In her junior year she decided to limit her sexual activities to those boys with whom she had established a relationship of some sort and this cut down on the frequency, if not on the intensity, of her couplings. She had never had an orgasm but had not found anything objectionable so far in sex.

  After college she lived with three men before Timothy. Two of them had been vaguely artistic; the other had wanted to marry her after they had established a comfortable, continuing relationship of many years’ duration. Aside from one demented coupling with her roommate in their sophomore year of college (her roommate had offered to show her that orgasm was always the same no matter who the partner), Susan’s sex life had been thoroughly unremarkable up until this point. It was in no way a preparation for this branch of show business.

  CHAPTER IX

  They are told that the final scene will now be filmed. Susan was not sure; she has lost some fundamental sense of time. A large, sullen German Shepherd is brought into the working area and Susan is told that she will have to copulate with him, preferably in a rear-entry position as this is where he is most experienced. The point of the last scene, the director explains to give her motivation, is to illustrate the utter degradation of the character’s life and the depths to which indiscriminate sex can lead even a respectable person.

  The dog is half-dragged in on a long chain, the assistants concentrating on doing something with its rear legs. The beast eyes Susan with suspicion and the director says that there will be no trouble with the animal; it is the most docile and well-trained of all the dogs with whom he has worked and is so slightly built that Susan will not even feel entry. There have been troubles, he says vaguely, with certain dogs or actors in the past but not since they began using the kennel. For the first time, Susan protests, not because of the animal but because of what she calls an artistic revulsion; she asks if it would be possible to skip this scene or to assign it to someone else because she does not feel capable of doing it with conviction. The director repeats that the whole point of the film is to show the brutality and degradation of the character as she falls into fucking at random. The director is an old man, at least in relation to the principals in the room — forty-five or so with glasses that glint under the spotlights. And he has what seems to be a foreign accent but there is such a precision in his speech and gesture that Susan is unable to take him personally. He seems mostly to be another piece of equipment in the room, moving her in and out of position. The whole film has led up to this scene, the director goes on, to eliminate it would be to deny the movie its artistic integrity. He has been in this business for too long already and anyway time is important, too important for this nonsensical argumentation. The boy with whom she has been copulating giggles and tells Susan that there is nothing to worry about; he is rather experienced in this business and says he recognizes this dog and he has always behaved like a professional. Susan asks again if it would be possible to have another actress do the scene and the director replies that unless she completes her assignment, her pay will be withheld. For that matter, everyone’s pay will be withheld unless the movie is wrapped up now. The other actors circle around the director, but, instead of showing anger toward him, they give her baleful looks. “You can’t be a college girl all your life,” one of them says, which seems to Susan to be a harsh and unnecessarily cruel remark inasmuch as she has been out of college for two years.

  She sighs and says that she will do her best. She will try to go through with the performance. Then she allows herself to be placed in the appropriate position and closes her eyes, trying to imagine how the character she is playing would react to the situation. Remembering her theatrical training she forces herself deep into the role, thinking of herself as an inexperienced, rather stupid g
irl who, in a search for humiliation gravitates toward German Shepherds. She conceives herself to be in the back seat of a car, perhaps a 1961 Ford Falcon, moving on the stiff pins underneath the cushions as the driver looms over her, still looking for the gearshift. In less time than she might have thought, it is over and she decides that it has not been that bad.

  CHAPTER X

  The partial manuscript of Timothy’s novel-in-progress has been submitted to seven hardcover houses, three paperback firms and, for serial use, to seventeen magazines. None of the responses have been particularly encouraging although one of the quarterlies did return his manuscript with an offer of a reduced subscription to writers that would have enabled him to receive the next five years of their review for only a fraction of what he would have had to pay at his local newsstand. Timothy tore up the subscription blank and form letter, muttering something about the exploitation of writers but this was a mystery to Susan, who remarked that in making its offer the review was certainly acknowledging that he was a writer and this was a part of the recognition for which he had been struggling. Timothy became savage when she said this and called her a stupid cunt, but, later on, after they had made up with a brutal fuck, he said that he could see her point and that no outsider could ever understand the agony of the writer, which was a very private and terrible thing.

  CHAPTER XI

  Timothy lives in a walk-up apartment on the fourth floor of a building on the lower East Side of Manhattan; this building adjoins an all-night fruit stand and a bus terminal. Even in the early morning hours, Susan can look outside and see, through the fumes of buses accelerating their engines, the figures of old women leaning over the fruit stand, probing goods, their shopping bags over their arms. The clash of gears and the high shrieks of the women as the buses roar past them blowing clouds of pollutants, give her the feeling that for the first time in her life she is communicating with something real and basic. Timothy, however, has said that he cannot stand the location much longer and will have to look for something else in a quieter area, perhaps in the upper West Side where the streets are abandoned by midnight.