“Oh!” she said. “Oh,” he said, “your hair was stuck.”
Then he didn’t touch her again, not for weeks.
He got her phone number from the host. Motherfuckers have their ways. It took only one lie and he left with those ten numbers, one dash, and two parentheses tucked with care inside his shirt pocket.
At home, he put in a call to crazy Heddie from Butte. He asked her a half hour of penetrating questions and then tried to have phone sex but found he couldn’t really muster up the gusto. His mind was elsewhere. The next day, he called the starlet and asked her to dinner.
She laughed. She sounded even prettier on the phone. “Aren’t you afraid of me?” she asked. “After all, I am a movie star.” He said no, he wasn’t afraid of her, he thought of her as an interesting, attractive woman who happened to have a very public job. She said that was sure a new way to put it. They set a date to meet at an Italian bistro on Vermont, and there she signed twelve autographs and he asked about how what she did as an actress and what he did as an emotional ventriloquist were similar, but she said they were in a restaurant and it was too distracting so they should talk about something light while they were there. “Maybe you’re afraid of me,” he said. She looked closer, eyes green and piercing. “Maybe I am,” she said, and the rest of the dinner was quiet. The waiter asked for an autograph on a napkin, and by the time they left, it was already hung up by the host’s podium with a red thumbtack, next to some signed black-and-white photographs of other stars, many of whom by now were regular people or else dead.
The motherfucker recognized one of the mothers he’d fucked at a table to the right and waved while exiting but the mother didn’t acknowledge him because she was jealous and also starlets made her nervous.
The starlet found the motherfucker trustworthy so she invited him back to her new house in the dark curves of the Hollywood hills, the wood floors brown and shining, the pillows sentimental, the magazines unread. They sat and had a good talk on her thousands-of-dollars couch. He mentioned his train trip and she said her father had been a conductor for years. They discussed depots. At the door he did not kiss or hug her but just said he’d had a terrific time, and she closed the door behind him, pensive. She paced a little and then watched some TV. She saw herself on the news.
The motherfucker went home and rented one of her latest movies and watched it closely, and even though it was a comedy, he looked at the smile on her face and decided she was possibly the saddest person he had ever met or pursued.
He didn’t touch her even when they went to lunch and she cried about her empty house. About how she had known all along with her husband but never would say it was true to herself. He didn’t touch her even when she raised limpid movie eyes up to him and gave him the look that meant Kiss Me to film fans from all over the world. He let his other mothers call and call but he didn’t pick up or call back. He invited the starlet to the ballet and during act two, he picked up her hand, and while the stage was full of people as flowers and birds, trying with all available muscles to be lighter than air, their hands learned each other, fingers over fingers, palm on back, palm on palm, edge to wrist, watchbands clinking because both of them liked to know what time it was at all times.
He dropped her off, said he couldn’t come in. She was disappointed. She dreamed he was making love to her in a hamper.
Heddie from Butte called. Heddie’s father was mad at her about something that had happened four Christmases ago and Heddie was upset. The motherfucker talked to her for a while but he couldn’t concentrate and said he had to go write his graduate-school paper on the relationship between sadness, mime, and Ping-Pong. “Why, I didn’t know you were in school,” said Heddie. “I wish you would talk more about yourself.” The motherfucker pretended he had call waiting. His goodbye was rude.
He asked the starlet to dinner again. She was pleased. “He treats me,” she told her friend, the other hot new starlet, “like a regular person.” “Why on earth,” said her friend, the other starlet, “would you want that? What’s the point,” said the other starlet, “of being a starlet in the first place?” Our starlet put her hand on her cheek. Her blush was the color of a coral reef, but smooth. “I think it has to do with getting emotions thrown on you,” she said.
This dinner they shared a bottle of wine and no one stopped to get an autograph. (She was wearing a hat.) She said he could come back to her house again, maybe they could have some tea. They played the hand game under the table and this time the volume was twice as high. His whole body was taut for her. “George is asleep,” she said, meaning her son. They drove back and she paid the babysitter, a huge tip to get her out as soon as possible, and she went to the kitchen to put the kettle on, and the moment of the first kiss was prolonged, longer, prolonged; she offered tea, she offered wine, she went to the bathroom and he pictured her in there, looking down at the toilet paper which was not yellow but clear with other liquid, and she returned, sat next to him on the couch, picked up a magazine, stood, sat, stood, sat, and he thought: It has been a while since this woman has been with a man who wants to be with women. And so he just sat there first and thought of women, thought of what he loved about women, thought of the slopes and the jewelry, the lines and the circles, breasts of all sizes, emotion, opening, contraction.
He watched her. She put her head on her own shoulder-coy, twitchy.
“I think about you,” he said.
“What do you think about?” she asked. She ran through the movie scenes in her head. They all were very pretty options. He said, “I think about how nervous you are.”
Her face fell. “What?”
“No,” he said, flustered, “it’s great that you’re nervous.” His expression, for once, was open and earnest. She kept her eyes on him, and laughed once then, the laugh that stole the hearts of a million moviegoers, that fed the wallets of a fat handful of studio executives, and he said, “Wait.”
“What?” she said.
He took a step away, and looked at her. She made a wry little joke about directors. Then put her face nearer, ready to kiss him, to prove herself unnervous, how bold, how witty, but he didn’t move forward. “Hang on,” he said.
She grew bolder, interrupted, said- “Hey. Let’s go outside. There are bushes out there.” The motherfucker paused and smiled, said no. She twisted and said- “Come with me, let’s go to the bathroom counter.” She’d had movie sex scenes on the bathroom counter and in the bushes, both. Audiences had liked those a lot. He shook his head, no. “Let’s do it on a cliff under a tree!” she sang, and he said no. “I want to make love to you in a bed” is what he said.
This made her feel completely out of control.
He stepped closer. For some reason, his hands were shaking. Using his finger as a pointer, he drew an invisible line around her. He said, “Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.”
“It’s not a very big house, is it,” she said.
“Don’t smile,” he said. She pulled in her lips.
“Don’t smile,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be big at all. It should be the closest it can to being your actual size.”
She could feel it brimming on her lips, that superstar smile, the bow shape, the teeth long and solid tombstones. She knew just what she looked like.