I closed my eyes. Her fingers moved slowly. She was going to enjoy this, play it for all it was worth, because she knew just how much the director had worn me down, and just how badly I needed her help.
This time she had me at the end of my goddamn rope.
Her words tickled over my neck as she whispered the incantation. “The bottle uncorked by the man who corked it. Thirty years in the cellar, thirty years in the ground. The juice of the grape and the seed of the man. The seed of the man and the juice of the grape…” It went on from there. Then her grip tightened, and her sharp little teeth closed on my earlobe.
Skyrockets, if you want a cliche. In this case, it’s no exaggeration.
When I opened my eyes, the bottle was corked once more and wore a new lead capsule. The dead vintner lay on the floor, withered in his moldy suit. Whatever had been left in him was now gone.
But there was wine on his grinning lips, and Layla knelt at his side. The tiniest of smiles crossed her face as she rose. Her white fingers swam toward me in the darkness, and her red lips parted. Her tongue did a coy little dance over her teeth and she laughed.
She’d seen the look of horror on my face. She’d gotten a little bit of what she wanted, and I’d lost a little bit of what I needed.
A piece of me that I could never get back.
I turned away, bloody Zinfandel roiling in my gut, and hurried up the stone corridor, trying to convince myself that Layla hadn’t pulled me out of a grave, that I was still alive and breathing.
You see, she’d touched me once, and once was enough.
It was the only time I ever let her touch me.
I wrapped a big red ribbon around the bottle of wine and gave it to the director. He eased off after that. I don’t know what did the trick: Layla’s enchanted Zin or the insane deadline the studio had imposed. Either way, the sly old puppeteer didn’t have another word to say about me until the first reviews appeared.
Layla wouldn’t go to the premiere, of course. She said it wouldn’t be good for me to be seen in the company of an older woman who earned her living showing monster movies to a TV audience of slobbering teenagers. She selected a starlet who’d caught her eye, even bought a corsage for the girl. I picked her up at Layla’s bungalow in Hollywood.
Big night. Starlet and Spyder and me. Little pistons pounded in my skull, so steadily that I could hardly watch the picture. I had choke fever real bad; I couldn’t even bring myself to take the starlet’s hand for fear she’d reject me and storm out of the place in search of a real celebrity.
The movie plodded along. My face seemed to hang on the screen for minutes at a time, so huge, but like I said, flat and somehow unreal. And then the last scene finally came, all tears and shadows on the big screen. My own voice wailed at me while I made promises to a sick man who was supposed to be my father.
Eyes closed, I tried to picture it as it had happened — the director whispering instructions in my ear, the bright lights, the camera drinking it all in, the old actor lying on a phony deathbed. But I couldn’t hold the images in my head. The pounding pistons crushed them, and I was left with a single vision.
All I could see was the dead vintner lying on the stone floor, a trickle of dark wine staining his withered grin. A dead grin, but a grin unsatisfied.
All I could hear was Layla’s mocking laughter.
I was the toast of the town for a little while. Parties. Meetings. Dinners. Then a new picture came out, and it was someone else’s turn.
For the first time I saw the nasty hook hidden in the game. Every morning I picked up the newspaper and flipped to the movie section. And every morning my sense of security shrank a little more, in direct proportion to the size of the movie ad. First my photo disappeared. Then the director’s name vanished, followed by the names of the supporting actors. Finally, my name went. All that was left was the name of the picture, along with a note that it was IN COLOR and the theatre was AIR-CONDITIONED.
Pretty soon I was the second half of a double-bill.
One morning I ran into Layla at a coffee shop. She looked up from the paper and said, “You’re not here at all.”
“It’s over,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It’s time to start again.”
She was smiling, but her words hit me with the finality of a curse.
The columnist lived in one of those suicidal houses that teeter on the side of a steep hill. Places like that are all sparkling glass and architectural majesty on a sunny day, but they invariably surrender to melancholy and jump to their deaths when gloomy storms blow hard off the Pacific and mud-slide season begins.
Normally, such a breathtaking combination of design and location would have left me with a fullblown case of vertigo, but the fog was in pretty solid on the night of my visit. I was brave enough, and drunk enough, to play with the weirder possibilities of the stage with which the columnist’s overpaid architect had provided me, because I was intent on giving the self-important scribbler the thrill of her life.
And giving Layla a bit of the knife.
The scribbler was actually nervous. It was almost as if she’d never done anything like this before, and I knew that wasn’t the case. I couldn’t figure out why she was jittery, until I got close to the window and glimpsed my reflection.
As per Layla’s instructions, I’d dressed for the part — engineer boots, jeans, tight white T-shirt, red windbreaker. I had to laugh. I really did look like a teenager.
“Normally, there’s a wonderful view of the city lights,” the columnist said.
We weren’t far apart. I let out a sigh, just heavy enough so that my breath tickled her bare shoulder. I didn’t touch her, but I got a little closer and held her gaze. Then, as soon as she opened her mouth to speak, I said, “I guess that works both ways.”
She smiled, but I knew she didn’t have idea one.
I worked up an embarrassed grin. “The view, I mean. We can’t see the city. The city can’t see us.”
She laughed, sipped her drink, and started looking for a place to set the glass. Slowly, I moved behind her. I brushed the back of her hand, took the glass. She didn’t care where it went. I knew that, because I could see her face reflected in the window, and her eyes were like a couple of glowing coals.
“Someone might see us,” she said. “There’s a house below this one, closer than you might think — ”
My hands went to her hips and I pulled her to me.
She did a slow, easy grind against my jeans.
End of discussion.
The fabric of her dress was so damn light, like it wasn’t there at all. I let my hands drift beneath it. My fingers traveled her thighs, her smooth, nyloned flesh. My tongue darted over her neck, and I tore away what I found under her dress.
She planted her hands against the window, pressing so hard that I was sure the glass would shatter. Slashed wrists hanging through a gaping hole, me wiping down everything for fingerprints and sweating — I could picture the whole awful scene.
But it didn’t happen that way. Her eyes were closed now. And she certainly wasn’t worried about the neighbors.
I watched her reflection. I watched the fog.
And there was Layla. Her generous breasts pressed against the other side of the window, and her hands covered the same spots that the columnist’s covered, but Layla’s fingers were longer, slimmer. She held the hem of her black dress between white teeth.
Layla in the fog. Hips moving hungrily, sex glistening.
I couldn’t hold back any longer. With one hand, I pulled the columnist against me and held her still. The fingers of my other hand coiled in her hair.