‘Boxback.’
‘Boxback.’
The sun was dropping down over the shoulder of the building. He leafed through the twelve-page script of Crown Sugar. In his only scene, Xan was supposed to exchange some words with Charisma Trixxx and then watch her perform with Sir Dork Bogarde (as follows: ‘Blow. Doggy. Cowgirl. Reverse Cowgirl. Facial’). His lines were not difficult or numerous but he was surprised by the ease with which he got them by heart. He paused … Something is happening to me, he thought. He paused, he listened; there was inside him a great hope that he didn’t dare reach for; with it, or instead of it, might come pain and grief of the same size. The bright sky was torn by contrails in various stages of dissolution, some, way up, as solid-looking as pipecleaners, others like white stockings, discarded, flung in the air, or light bedding after beautysleep, others like breakers on an inconceivably distant shore. He went through his lines again, in his head. They were there.
‘Which brings us to the heart of it. This is just my view, of course, but I hold it for reasons less obvious than they may appear. Boxback. Ill-named, I think. And containing a serious structural flaw … Classic Boxback is simply premature ejaculation — inflicted by the woman. The more premature the better. Now it’s certainly very humiliating for the man, because he has to go again, much diminished. So: the shower, the pill, the wait, the headache, the hatefuck. But this new footage will precede the earlier ejaculation. Unlike Cockout, Boxback leaves no filmed evidence of its own achievement. And then there’s the question of the Facial.’
‘The Facial.’
‘The Facial. Even the most rigorous Hatefuck demands the Facial. Market force number one demands the Facial. And Boxback never even tried to do without it. So what kind of victory is that? Sending the grunt on his way with a sneer and a taunt when you’ve got his come all over your chin? The Facial is there, always, because the customer wants it to be there. What do men want? They want the Facial. And it’s the one sexual act that barely exists outside porno. A prostitute might do it, but a free woman, on her knees? That’s another good reason for calling the Facial what they call it: the Money Shot.
‘You know … They sometimes call it the Popshot. They don’t call it the Momshot. Because, at one remove or other, you get the feeling: it’s how Daddy would have liked it. Beauty and the Beast, innocence and its opposite. And the woman looks up, from her knees, at someone far more powerful than any lover …’
He drank half a bottle of wine, out on the balcony, with his early dinner. His equanimity now tired and wavered, and the evening clouds looked like wigs — toupees, perukes, the tawdry syrups of the sky. But then came Venus, with a pale aura, like a set of silver eyelashes, and simpering down at him. And then came the quarter-moon, seen at an unfamiliar angle, as if from somewhere behind, like a platonically perfect breast.
At nine o’clock there was a knock on the door.
‘Who is it?’
It was the hoary bellboy, who offered him a bouquet of the most hideous flowers he had ever seen: redface and yellowtongue. Who is it? Joseph Andrews.
Xan checked: yes: it was still what he wanted.
2. Sickout at Dolorosa Drive
During thirty months of activity the Sextown Sniper seemed to have evolved a set of rules, or restraints: no high-velocity bullets, no headshots or heartshots, no freeway hits causing extra traffic backups, no incursions into Tuxedo Terrace or Dolorosa Drive where core property values might be undermined, no sarcastic notes beginning ‘Grieve, blind worm’ or ‘I am God’ for the mayor and the SSVPD, no targeting of Meso-Americans, no targeting of help of any kind, no targeting of the very young, the very old. And if a pointy-bearded Director of Photography got grazed across the ankle, if a towel-boy or a makeup-girl lost a finger or two, if Charity Divine had her hairstyle scorched or Schlong Gielgud stopped one in the rump — who cared? Porno people cared, but no one cared about porno people and what porno people cared about.
Facing the U Hotel, at ten-fifteen the next morning, the sights of the sniper, moving, ranging, from face to face: this one, that one. The circular frame holding a rounded simulacrum, like a miniature kept in a locket — the faces of those that are loved and lost. In its crosshairs the face of a porter, the face of an arriving porno star, the face of Xan Meo, the face of the delivery-man with the potplant over his shoulder.
‘Sire, I crave a boon.’
‘Name it, plaything.’
But before all that he needed to be delivered to Dolorosa Drive, and he needed to climb out of the courtesy car, and enter the mansion (there was a different porno crew, from some earlier shift, coming the other way), and kiss Karla White, which proved difficult to do, with the telephonic mouthpiece round her neck like a chinguard … She wore a two-piece black business suit, which faintly sparkled as if with motes of coaldust, and black heels.
‘You’re fine,’ she said, in her warm, deep, accentless voice. ‘You don’t have to change. You’re fine. I was hoping you’d have lunch with me tomorrow at my house on the beach. I’ll send a car.’
‘So I don’t have to wear a crown or anything.’
‘You’re Rameses the Great,’ she said, ‘but you’re on a time-travel vacation from BC to LA. With some of your entourage. You’re fine … I apologise. Charisma Trixxx is keeping us waiting.’
‘They all do that,’ said the man in the white dressing-gown. ‘Ninety-nine point nine per cent out of a hundred of them do that. How come I don’t have one single line?’
‘Xan, say hello to Dork Bogarde. You don’t have any lines, Dork, because you’re a mute.’
‘Ah. Hence why …’
To Xan she went on, ‘In narrative terms this is what’s known as a side-fuck. It gives the seventeen-year-old a breather.’ Karla’s head registered a slight jolt and she walked away with a hand raised to her earphone, saying, ‘Charisma? Charisma … Am I? … Now why’s that? …’
Xan walked around the room. Such a scene was not unfamiliar to him: the half-dozen technicians and handymen and general noisemakers, the girl with the clipboard, the coffee-urn, the pretzel-bowl. On a white sofa beneath a window sat a young black man of impressive, even heroic appearance: representatively heroic. He stood up and introduced himself as Burl Rhody: Karla’s bodyguard.
‘Charisma’s a noshow,’ she now said.
‘A first-timer noshows?’ said Dork. ‘What nextly? They noshow their fuck-tests?’
‘The girls are calling it a herpes sickout,’ said Karla, ‘but what it amounts to is a three-day strike.’
‘Charisma! Hello?’ said Dork loudly into the air. ‘There are other people on the planet, Charisma! Hello? Hello?’
‘Who can we get?’ asked the girl with the clipboard.
Karla said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll do it.’