“I hope you won’t consider this a reflection on you, Janet,” I said, smiling, “but I suddenly realize I need to be led to a bathroom. How about directing me?”
Janet smiled back, said she’d be glad to, and Castile, before getting out of the booth to let me by, suggested Janet show me to one of the rooms upstairs.
“You’re as snowbound as the rest of us,” he told me, “so you might as well go ahead and check into this hotel. Each of the rooms has its own private bath.”
I thanked him, and went with Janet, who led me across the central open area of the lodge, the snow-clogged skylight above us, to one of the stairways, where I followed her up to the second floor, into one of the rooms, its tan canvas shade already drawn.
The room was what I expected: the side barnwood walls were decorated with abstract paintings in brown and white in metallic frames; the facing wall consisted of quadruple windows, with the center ones sliding glass doors leading out to a shallow balcony, a pattern common to all the rooms, I’d noted from the outside, with a few exceptions (the sunken living room and the bar and a few other first floor rooms). The windows were frosted over and it was cold in the room, thanks partially to all this glass, but then it was cold everywhere in the building, except under and around the glaring lights required by the filming, and once the filming was done and the lights shut down, I assumed the heat in the place would finally be turned on. In the center of the room was a rust-color couch that would, I suspected, convert to a double bed, like the one in my loft at home. The wall to the right included a door that stood open to reveal the first non-barnwood room I’d seen in the lodge: a sparkling white bathroom. On the right of the door to the bathroom was another door, a closet probably, and on the left was a built-in dresser, pine drawers built right into the barnwood. The ceiling was rather high, open-beamed, and made the room seem larger than it really was.
She stood near the couch, leaning against it, fiddling with one of the arcs of brown hair that framed her pretty face.
“How will this do?” she said, ambiguously.
“Fine.”
“My room’s next door.”
“That’s fine, too.”
“Do you really have to…” And she gestured toward the john.
“Not any more. Seeing you turn up scared it out of me.”
She smiled a little. First real smile I’d seen from her today. “I’ll show you my room.”
She did. It was the same as mine, except the couch had already been converted to a bed. A sloppy, unmade bed, at the moment.
“I’m always something of a slob,” she said, “when I don’t have a roommate.”
She sat on the bed. So did I.
“Maybe I can do something about that,” I said.
She touched my face. Kissed me. Put her tongue in my mouth.
“You could sleep in here,” she said, after coming up for air, “if you’d like.”
“I’d like.”
“We’ve got some catching up to do. How long has it been? Two years?”
“About.”
“You know, I’ve thought about you, Jack. Often.”
Jack really was the first name she knew me by: it was the Murphy part of the name I was using here that made it phony to her.
“I think about you, too,” I said.
And I had, every time I played poker with her father, who had entrusted his daughter to me one evening, figuring I was a safe bet. I was, but he was betting the wrong way.
“I probably shouldn’t believe you,” she said, stroking my face, “but I think I will.”
“Well, why not? We did spend a… memorable evening together, after all.”
“Yes. Memorable. Yes. Mmmm.”
I’d just slid a hand under her sweater, touching a breast tentatively, its tip poking back at me, but I decided not to take the credit for that: the room was pretty cold.
But I was warming up, so I played with her breasts for a while and she talked.
“Are you really a writer, now? Is ‘Murphy’ a pseudonym? You can guess why I’m not using my real name. The experience is what I’m after, here, the chance to work with a director like Jerry Castile. He’s very good, you know, and getting well known, despite the subject matter of his work. Do that some more. Please. Anyway, this opportunity was just too good to pass up. Look. Let me take my glasses off. Yeah. There. Just put ’em over there, would you? Yeah. Thanks. Mmmm. Listen… my father didn’t find out about this, did he? He didn’t send you…”
I cupped her chin in one hand. “That’s not nice.”
“… what?”
“It’s not nice to put your tongue in my mouth and tell me how you think about me and let me play with you while you ask if your father sent me to spy on you.”
“I just thought…”
“Don’t think. Don’t bother. I wasn’t sent by your father to spy on you. I’m not about to tell him or anybody I saw you here.”
“Jack, I didn’t mean…”
“Sure you did. But never mind. You owe me nothing, except the courtesy of keeping my real name to yourself. I have my reasons for not wanting it spread around.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Good,” I said.
Of course she didn’t understand at all, but that probably hadn’t really occurred to her: she was just saying something to say something. And I hadn’t had time to make up an effective lie to cover my presence here, so I let it pass.
“Now,” I said. “You want your glasses back?”
“Not particularly.”
“Fine,” I said, and put my tongue in her mouth.
18
“Sorry I took so long,” I said, returning to my place across from Castile in the booth in the bar.
“I got talking to Janet. Interesting girl.”
“Well,” Castile said, with his practiced smile, “you must have the journalist’s knack for getting people to talk.”
“Oh?”
“Janet’s been very quiet, on and off the set. Also very efficient, very intelligent… but despite her efforts to seem unimpressed by all the naked flesh and sex-on-camera, I don’t believe she’s ever worked on anything like this before.”
“She admitted as much, when we talked,” I said.
“She certainly opened up to you in a way she hasn’t for any of us,” he said, and that was probably true. “Ah. Here she is now.”
Janet came over; looking cool and pretty, and stood with her hands clasped in front of her, fig-leaf style, and gave her report on the food situation.
“There are still plenty of cold cuts left,” she said. “And bread. And beer. But that’s it. There’s a pantry but it’s bare.”
“We’ve been having our lunches here,” Castile explained to me, “and then having a late supper at a place up the road a ways. Great food. Wilma’s Welcome Inn, it’s called. That chili there is something else.”
“Well,” the girl said, “it’ll be cold cuts tonight. And beer.”
“And bread,” Castile said, good-humoredly.
