first food, then wine, then puke and finally his own blood. Classic stuff. You couldn’t cut it; it would have been a crime. Still, it had added eight minutes to the movie. Eight minutes in which he could have been making love to his favourite ever Playboy centrefold.
The movie had finally come to an end, however, and they were back at his home. It was time to make a move.
‘It really is a wonderful picture,’ Brooke said.
She had said it a hundred times already. She knew it and he knew it. The awkward presex atmosphere had led them into one of those circular conversations in which nobody can think of anything to say and so instead, they continually retread ground already covered.
‘I can’t believe you sat and watched the whole thing on an editing machine. That shows real dedication.’ Bruce, too, had ploughed this furrow many times.
‘Well, you know, like I say, it’s such a wonderful movie,’ Brooke said again.
‘Well, I’m delighted you think so, but it still shows real dedication to have watched the whole thing like that… and on an editing machine.’
Brooke simply could not bring herself to comment further on the wonderfulness of the movie. They lapsed into silence.
Bruce looked at his watch. ‘Shit! It’s nearly four a.m.’ It wasn’t meant to come out like that, but he hadn’t realized it was quite so late. ‘I thought it was about two thirty.’
‘Is that a problem?’ Brooke enquired. ‘Did you have anything planned?’
‘I’m afraid so. My wife will be here at nine.’
This was disappointing news. Brooke had not been one hundred per cent sure what she wanted when she accepted Bruce’s invitation to come home, but meeting estranged spouses certainly wasn’t it.
‘I thought you said your divorce came through.’
It is true that Bruce had said this, in the car, as they left the Governor’s party. It hadn’t really been a lie. The whole world knew that he and his wife had parted irrevocably, and the thing really would be final in a day or two.
‘We are, practically. That’s why she’s coming round – money stuff.’
Brooke shrugged. ‘Oscar at night, alimony in the morning: life in the Hollywood fast lane.’
There was an uncomfortable pause. How could there not be? Two strangers already dealing with the difficult problems of whether to go to bed together and if so how to get to it, and now this. As chatup lines go, ‘My wife will be round in a couple of hours’ is only one step from ‘I am a regular druguser and I always share needles’.
‘Oh well…’ said Brooke. ‘It’s been a lovely night.’
He had not even offered her a seat. They were both still standing, looking at each other across a vast couch.
‘You really think so?’ Weak, so weak. He had meant it to sound boyishly anxious, nervous and attractive, but it hadn’t. How much better to have said, ‘It could get lovelier’ or ‘Not as lovely as you’ or even ‘Never mind that, how about a fuck?’ But no: ‘You really think so?’ Pathetic. For a moment Bruce recalled ‘I stand here on legs of fire’, and the erection that had been straining in his trousers for the previous three or four hours took a momentary dive.
Brooke was beginning to feel a little out of sorts herself. This big man, this Oscarwinning king of cool wearing pointy boots and Bogart’s tux was just standing there. What did he expect? Was she supposed to offer herself unasked? Was it a power thing? Maybe he thought a bit of polite smalltalk was beneath him. Maybe babes were expected just to climb aboard.
‘Yes, I do think so. It’s been a lovely night.’
This was absurd. She said something dumb, he said is that so? and she said yes, it was so. How long could they keep this up?
Brooke summoned up all her powers of imagination in an effort to advance the dialogue. ‘Kind of like a first date. You know, we had a dance, we saw a movie…’
‘That’s a nice thought. It’s been a long time since I had a first date.’
They were getting there.
‘Me neither,’ Brooke agreed, and then, after a tiny pause, she looked him in the eye and said, ‘Brings back the old firstdate question, doesn’t it? How far do you go on them?’ Well she couldn’t do any more than that. Not without actually taking off her clothes. Now it was up to him.
‘So… What’s the answer to that, then?’
She was annoyed. She certainly was not going to beg him to make a move on her. He had picked her up at the party, he had brought her to his home. He had to make some of the running, if only for form’s sake.
‘Well the rule in school was the boy gets a feel of the boobs but only from outside the bra.’ Her voice showed traces of the irritation she felt. ‘These days I tend to think the rule depends on the guy.’
She sat down. Bruce had still not offered her a seat but she sat anyway. Elegantly, beautifully, a vision. She crossed her legs and Bruce took a personal closeup on the slashed skirt of her dress falling either side of her knees.
‘Nice table,’ she said, studying her reflection in the shiny glass.
‘I like it.’
‘I can think of a good use for it,’ said Brooke.
‘Help yourself.’
She took some cocaine out of her bag and began to chop it up on the table. ‘Just to keep you bright and cheery for your wife,’ she said pointedly.
Belatedly Bruce recalled his duties as a host. He put on some music and fixed a couple of drinks. Now he was getting somewhere. He sat down beside her.
‘It’s so great that you liked my movie.’
Back on the damn movie. How the hell did that happen?
‘It really means a lot to me.’
He said it quickly, trying to coat his boring platitude in a cloak of sincerity. It sounded so lame. After all, he’d only known this woman for four or five hours and here he was trying to suggest that they had some kind of intellectual bond. ‘It really means a lot to me.’ Oh yeah? Why? He’d just won an Oscar, the entire industry had come together to honour him, and here he was trying to tell a nude model he’d picked up at the party that her opinion was of particular significance to him. Of course, Brooke knew he was bullshitting, and he knew she knew.
‘There was one thing I didn’t like about your movie,’ she said.
Bruce sighed to himself. He had provoked this gorgeous creature into feeling she had to justify herself intellectually. He’d told her that her opinions mattered to him and they both knew she’d had offered no opinion at all beyond ‘neat movie’. Now she was obliged to think one up. He would have to sit through some desperate, secondhand, pseudo artbabble about derivative imagery, or some such thing, culled from the cover of last month’s
‘Here it comes,’ said Bruce trying to affect good-humoured indulgence. ‘I knew your enthusiasm was too good to last. What’s the beef?’
‘I didn’t like the sex scene.’
That surprised him. ‘What are you, a nun? That was the sexiest scene I ever made. I edited it with a permanent erection.’
Brooke shrugged and took a sniff at one of the little white lines on the table. ‘Sure it was sexy, sort of. But it wasn’t true. Everything else in the movie was so real – the guns, the attitude, the blood all over everything, the guy’s skull exploding when that big statue of Mickey Mouse fell on his head…’
‘That’s my favourite scene, by the way, because it’s all about irony.’
Brooke handed Bruce the straw and he too took a sniff.
‘So why couldn’t the sex be real too?’ she asked. ‘The only place overacting is still encouraged is in sex scenes. Did you ever see
