“What did you show them?”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember everything. What difference does it make? Didn’t you hear what I said? We’re going to be in a movie.”
“You showed them the pictures you took of me that time. The ones you said you would never let anyone see.” She began to cry.
He rolled his eyes. “We’ll both be stuck working all day every day in the fucking tile company for the rest of our lives unless we do something. I’m trying to give us a future.”
“It’s a porn movie!”
“There’s a love scene. There’s one in just about every movie. It’s nothing we haven’t done a million times, and nothing I’d be ashamed to have anyone see.”
“Then do it yourself with somebody else.”
“They want us both, not one of us. Both. Look, just come with me. We go to a restaurant tomorrow night, have dinner with them, and hear what they have to say. That’s all. If you think it’s a bad idea, we’ll say, ‘No, thanks.’”
They met the two producers at a coffee shop in Reseda that wasn’t too far from the part of Van Nuys where Sylvie had grown up. The producers were a man in his forties named Eddie Durant with a beard so short it just looked as though he had forgotten to shave, and a woman named Cherie Will. They were sitting together in a booth near the back drinking coffee and looking over a stack of papers from an open briefcase.
When Sylvie and Mark approached their booth, Eddie Durant didn’t stand up or shake hands, but Cherie Will smiled and reached across the table to each of them. She didn’t seem exactly attractive to Sylvie, because she was twice Sylvie’s age, and there were some wrinkles on her forehead and, oddly, her upper lip. Instead, she seemed athletic, with tight bulbous young breasts that were too high on her chest. She said, “Hi, sweetie” to Sylvie and called Mark “dude.”
Sylvie was fascinated by Cherie Will. Cherie looked into Sylvie’s eyes when she spoke. “Why don’t you two order something to eat?”
Sylvie and Mark ordered and ate, but all the waitress seemed to bring Eddie and Cherie was more coffee. Eddie said, “The story is that you’re a young housewife who has an argument with her husband before work in the morning.”
“Is that Mark?” Sylvie asked.
“No. Not sure who it is yet. But it’s another guy about your age. You get mad. You both go to work. You work in an office, as a receptionist.”
“I do. I really do.”
“Then it’s not a big stretch. This delivery boy, played by Mark, comes in. He’s delivering a box of paper or something. You like the look of him, so you offer to show him where the storeroom is. You take him in there, close the door, and have sex. Then you’ve gotten back at your husband, and you’re not mad anymore.”
Cherie smiled. “It’s an old, simple story, but it always works. Men have fantasies that the pretty receptionist will fuck them in the storeroom, and women have fantasies of getting even with their husbands by fucking the pretty delivery boy, who will appreciate them. I’ve been in that story about forty times myself, in some variation or other.”
Mark Karsh said, “How much would the gig pay?”
Eddie Durant said, “A thousand dollars each for one day’s shooting.” He smiled. “If you find you like the work and you’re good at it, the pay goes up. There’s a lot of work for people who can do it. The Valley is the adult-cinema capital of the world. About eighty percent of the adult features shown anywhere are shot within four miles of here.”
Mark looked at Sylvie, tried to fathom what she was thinking, but failed. “I think we have to talk about it first.”
“Okay. We shoot day after tomorrow at eight A.M. sharp. Call me by noon tomorrow.” He held out his hand and Mark shook it. As he and Sylvie walked up the aisle toward the front entrance, two women in their early twenties came in and stood in the entry, blocking their way out while they craned their necks looking for someone. Sylvie couldn’t help feeling jealous for a second. She instinctively moved closer to Mark and put her hand on his, even though she was furious at him.
When she and Mark were outside, she turned back and looked in through the glass. She saw that the two girls had made their way back to the booth where Cherie Will and Eddie Durant sat. She could read Cherie Will’s lips as she said, “Hi, sweetie,” to both of them, and this time Eddie Durant half-rose to shake their hands.
Later on, Sylvie looked back through the years and realized that what had really caused her to make the decision she had was not anything that Mark had said to persuade her. She had been angry with him, and not inclined to do anything drastic to make him happy. It had not been what Eddie Durant or Cherie Will had said. It had been the two girls.
One of them had been short and blond, with blue eyes and a size-two figure with good breasts, a tiny waist, and a perfectly rounded bottom. Girls like that had always been cruel to Sylvie because she wasn’t like them. The other was tall and willowy like Sylvie, and that infuriated her, because that girl seemed to be competing for the same spot in the universe as Sylvie was. As Sylvie stared in the window of the diner, she realized that she had to have the job, simply because those two wanted it.
She tortured Mark for a couple of hours before she announced to him that she would do it. She could still see him, all these years later, looking as though he had struck it rich. He was sure that doing this one dirty movie would get him discovered. All he had to do was grit his teeth and smile through one day as a porn star, and then he would be a real star.
The next day, Sylvie and Mark arrived for work at seven-thirty. The studio was a small warehouse that Cherie and Eddie had insulated to cut the echoes and lit with floodlights. Cherie was already waiting “We’ve got to go get you tested.”
Sylvie thought Cherie meant a screen test. They got into Cherie’s car, a black Mercedes with dirty leather upholstery and signs of wear. Mark sat in the front beside Cherie, and Sylvie was in the back by herself. When Cherie stopped the car and they got out, Sylvie followed her into a small office that looked like a clinic. She asked, “What’s the test?”
“Blood test,” said Cherie. “You have to be checked for STDs every thirty days if you want to work in the industry.”
Sylvie dutifully sat in the chair while a nurse punctured a vein at the inside of her elbow, took several small vials of blood, then said enigmatically, “We’ll let you know.” When Mark had done the same, Cherie drove them back to the warehouse.
Sylvie entered as Eddie Durant finished shooting a scene for another movie. Somehow she had assumed there would be a couple of people in a closed room and maybe a cameraman. But there was no room, just a couch with a pair of fake walls held up by wooden struts. Men adjusted lights and camera angles, while others stood in small groups drinking coffee and talking, or making notes on scripts and schedules. Eddie Durant saw Cherie bring Mark and Sylvie in, and he took them off the set to see a man in his mid-thirties with hair so black that Sylvie thought it must be dyed. This was Bill. He wore a pair of jeans, T-shirt, and sandals. “Megan?” he called, and a woman in her early twenties wearing jeans and a huge Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt ambled over, smoking a cigarette.
Cherie said, “Now we have all the principals. Bill is Sylvie’s husband, and Megan is the husband’s girlfriend. We’re on a tight schedule, so we’ve got to move quickly. Eddie is going to shoot Bill and Megan’s scenes in here this morning. Rather than striking the set with the couch, we’ll re-dress it as Megan’s living room. I’ll shoot Sylvie and Mark’s scenes in the company office. When we’re done, we’ll come back in here and do the rest with the set for Bill and Sylvie’s house. Everybody got it?”
Cherie took Sylvie and Mark to a corner of the soundstage, where a harried woman with big hair put makeup on their faces, asked them what sizes they wore, and handed them two hangers with clothes on them. They followed Cherie to the company’s office, where a tall, thin man named Daryl had set up a big video camera on a tripod in the reception area, and had a big reflective hoop of white cloth just above frame height to diffuse the bright lamplight. Sylvie put on the receptionist outfit, a skirt that was made for a shorter woman and a blouse that was made for a bigger one. Sylvie managed to learn and repeat her lines while seated at the reception desk, even though the telephone rang twice and she had to answer it and hand the phone to Cherie. Her line was “Package?
