“You can get dressed,” they said then. “Be here the day after tomorrow at ten o’clock. But make sure you get a good night’s sleep, don’t come back with those great dark rings under your eyes, they really show up on screen.” It was Mir who said that, and it was true, I did have rings under my eyes, I’d hardly slept a wink all night, thinking about the screen test. I was just leaving when the guy with the ponytail, who the others called Custardoy, called me back. “Hey,” he said, “just so there aren’t any surprises or problems and so that you don’t let us down at the last minute: you’ll have to do a bit of French, a bit of Cuban and a fuck, all right?” He turned to the tall man to confirm this: “She won’t have to do any Greek, will she?” “No, not with her, not seeing she’s a novice,” said Mir. The primate uncrossed his arms and crossed them again the other way round, annoyed, God, he looked a sight in his red trousers. I tried to remember quickly; I’d heard those terms, or seen them in sex ads in the paper, perhaps I’d even known what they meant, more or less. No Greek, they’d said, so that didn’t really matter, at least for now. French was obviously a blow job, but Cuban?
“What does Cuban mean?” I asked.
The short man looked at me disapprovingly.
“You know,” he said, and he raised his hands to his non-existent breasts. I wasn’t sure I quite understood, but I only dared ask one other question:
“Have you chosen my partner yet?” I felt like saying “my fellow actor”, but I thought they might think I was taking the piss.
“Yes, you’ll meet him the day after tomorrow. Don’t worry, he’s very experienced and he’ll take the lead.” That was the expression the short man used, as if he were describing a ballroom dance, when it still made sense to say: “I’ll lead.”
Now I was back again in the waiting room, waiting for filming to begin, waiting with my partner, to whom I’d just been introduced, he shook my hand. We’d sat down on the rather narrow sofa, so small that he, at once, moved to a matching armchair in order to be more comfortable. The tall guy and the short guy and the one with the ponytail and the technicians were filming with another couple (I hoped the sex maniac wouldn’t be there, he frightened me with his bulbous eyes, his flattened nose and his hideous trousers). In films, so I’ve heard, everything takes for ever and everything’s always running late, and so they told us to wait and get to know each other. That was absurd. “I don’t know this man from Adam and yet, in a few minutes from now, I’ll be sucking him off,” I thought and I couldn’t help thinking it in those precise words. “What’s the point of our getting to know each other a bit and having a chat.” I hardly dared look at him, I did so out of the corner of my eye, a rather unfortunate attack of modesty. When they introduced me to him, they had said: “This is Loren, your partner.” I would have preferred it if they’d called him my “co-star”, but I suppose that would have been a bit pretentious. He was about thirty, he was wearing trousers and a hat and cowboy boots, actors are always so Americanized, even if they only appear in porn movies. That’s how a lot of them start, he might make it big one day. He wasn’t at all bad-looking, despite appearances, an athletic sort, the type that goes to the gym a lot, he had a slightly hooked nose and grey eyes, calm and cold; he had a nice mouth, but that wasn’t perhaps what I would have to kiss, that nice mouth. He seemed completely unfazed, he was sitting with his legs crossed like a cowboy and was leafing through a newspaper, he didn’t take much notice of me. He had smiled at me when we were introduced, he had gaps between his teeth which gave his face a rather child-like look. He’d taken off his hat then, but had immediately put it back on again, perhaps he would keep it on during the filming. He offered me some liquorice sweets, but I declined, he sucked two at a time, perhaps it would be best if we didn’t kiss after all. On his wrist he wore a strap made out of leather or elephant skin, very tight. I wouldn’t call it a bracelet exactly. I suppose he looked modern, I felt suddenly very old-fashioned in my tight skirt, my black tights and my heels, I don’t know why the hell I put on the highest heels I’ve got, perhaps, if they noticed them, they’d want me to keep them on, a lot of men like to see women like that, naked and in high heels, it’s all a bit infantile that imagery, him with his hat on and me in my high heels. I realized that I was pulling my skirt down a bit, because it had ridden up while I was sitting, and that struck me as ludicrous. Not even my co-star was taking any notice of my thighs, and he was right, in a little while, there would be no skirt, no nothing.
“Excuse me,” I said then, “you’ve done this kind of work before, haven’t you?”
He looked up from the newspaper, but didn’t put it down, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to start a proper conversation, or, rather, as if he was sure that he didn’t.
“Yes,” he said, “but not that much, two, no, three times, a little while ago. But don’t worry, you forget about the camera straight away. They told me it was your first time.” I was grateful to him for putting it like that, rather than calling me a novice as tall, bald Mir had done. “Don’t get embarrassed, that’s fatal, just follow me and try and enjoy it as much as you can, and take no notice of the others.”
“Easier said than done,” I replied. “I hope they’re patient if I get nervous. I am a bit nervous.”
The actor Lorenzo gave me his gap-toothed smile. He was reading the sports pages. He seemed very sure of himself, because he said:
“Look, you won’t even notice that they’re filming. I’ll take care of that.” He said it more ingenuously than proudly, that wasn’t what was worrying me, but it did worry me that it didn’t even occur to him that it wouldn’t be the people watching who would be the main cause of my nervousness on the set.
“Right,” I said, not daring to doubt him, perhaps intimidated. “But there’ll be breaks won’t there? For the different takes and so on? And what happens then? What do you do in between?”
“Nothing, you can put on a dressing gown if you like and have a Coca-Cola. Don’t worry,” he said again. “There are worse things. And there’s bound to be a few lines of coke if you need it.”
“Oh, so there are worse things, are there?” I said a little irritated by his excessive lack of concern. “I obviously just haven’t come across them yet; go on tell me one.” He finally put the newspaper down and I added hastily: “I’m not saying that because of you. I didn’t mean you, you do understand that, don’t you? I’m just doing it for the money, but you’re not going to tell me that it’s still not a pretty awful thing to have to do. Well, I don’t know about you, but it is for me.”
Loren ignored my attempts not to offend him and focused on what I had said before. He looked at me with his calm eyes, but he seemed slightly irritated now, as if he had been provoked and as if he were someone who had no capacity for feeling provoked, and didn’t know what tone of voice to use. His grey eyes were slightly wide-set too, quite far from his hooked nose, that seemed to draw his lips upwards, the kind of nostrils that always look as if their owner has a cold.