“I don’t care. It’s still exciting. I love going with you.”
She was telling the truth. Paul had changed her life in the way that she had imagined when she was a little girl that a man would. Her mother had usually been without a man in her life, but she had always been trying, flirting with men in grocery stores and at school events. She had invited men from work over for dinner. Sylvie could still remember sitting in awkward silence while her mother talked to one of these men, her conversation false and bright and quick, her voice more strained as time went on. After a time, the man would always find a way to leave. None of the men had seemed very promising to Sylvie, but she had observed at other times that her mother was not a stupid woman. If her mother was so desperate for a connection with a man, then they must have value.
When Sylvie had been dismissed from the world of ballet and grown into a healthier-looking girl, she began to share her mother’s interest, but she had some disappointing experiences with boys. She grew too tall at first. Boys she liked were a head shorter than she was. Once, when she was waiting at a dance for a boy to come up and ask her to dance, she saw two boys talking. The loud music drowned out their voices, but one of them mouthed the word “freak,” and they both looked at her. She did not have time to look away, and they saw her eyes focused on them. She experienced nothing but contempt from boys at school. But after school each day she worked as a stock girl at a big pharmacy on Sepulveda, and the men who came in saw her differently. They seemed to assume that she was much older and more sophisticated than she was. In the first month, two men in their twenties asked her out.
In her junior year, she met Mark. He was one of the few boys who was taller than she was, and he was so handsome that looking at him when he was unaware made her want to reach out and touch him. When he finally approached her in the hall near her locker at school, she was barely able to speak. She smiled and blushed and looked at her feet through much of the conversation, but she agreed to go to a movie with him. A week later, he invited her to a party.
The party was at the house of a friend of his whom she didn’t know, and she hated it and loved it at the same time. She loved being out, being Mark’s date. But at the party there was too-loud, pounding music that hurt her ears, a lot of drinking and clouds of resiny marijuana smoke that made her eyes water and seemed to stick to her hair. The girls at the party were from a clique of popular tenth graders, who in spite of being a year younger than Sylvie looked down on her. She could dance better than they did, but Mark didn’t like to dance, so she didn’t even get the chance to make them jealous.
But the party had a surprising aftereffect: She noticed within a week that her status had changed remarkably. Girls who had never talked to her suddenly appeared beside her in some class and complained about their boyfriends or their rivals, the only two pertinent topics of conversation. In physical education, she had always been one of the strivers who ran their laps on the sun-heated tarmac while the popular girls lingered in the shade and brushed each other’s hair. Now
She was overwhelmed with gratitude at the way Mark had transformed her life, but for the first time she was constantly worried and anxious, afraid that he would disappear and her life would instantly go back to the way it had been. One Friday night she waited until they were in his car and away from her house, then spoke. “Mark?” She tried to say more, but didn’t know what to say. She opened her purse so he could see inside. “While I was at work today I picked these up.” She had a box of condoms. “I mean, just in case we ever want to.”
He wanted to. They drove to a new street that had just been paved, in the northern edge of the Valley where it met the mountains. There were eight or nine skeletal frames of houses, their white-yellow two-by-fours gleaming in the moonlight, and stacks of plywood sheets and packs of shingles sat behind chain-link fences. Mark drove nearly to the end, then turned his car around so it was aimed outward toward the highway, and then they had sex.
Sylvie did not like it much. The back seat of Mark’s car was cramped and uncomfortable, and she had not expected that there would be pain. But Mark liked it very much, and so she decided that she had made a reasonably good decision. Mark would not leave her for someone else. She was set from now until graduation. As she sat in the seat beside Mark, watching him driving back toward Van Nuys, she was surprised at how easy it had been.
Things continued in a satisfactory way past graduation, and then through that final summer, when the classmates who were going to go off to colleges were slowly severing their ties with the ones who weren’t, and then for the year after that.
The day Mark got her into the movies and the relationship ended, he faded from her sight and her memory, just as her job at the tile factory did. Soon she was making four to six thousand dollars a week at Cherie Will’s studio, Ma Cherie Seductions. One of the other girls told her that she could make money by having a 1-900 telephone number and charging her fans to talk to her. She didn’t mind the calls. When her phone rang in the evening she would turn off the sound on her television set and watch the silent picture while she talked. After a couple of weeks she had the girl’s boyfriend come to her apartment and take three dozen pictures of her naked, then sold the prints to her callers over the phone.
A year later, a promoter left a message for her. She called him back and agreed to a meeting at a restaurant in Burbank. His name was Darren McKee. He wasn’t the type she had expected when she had talked to him on the telephone. He had sounded like a fifty-year-old truck driver she had known at the tile factory, but when she entered the restaurant, she found he was thirty-nine and attractive. He had reddish hair that seemed to be a single cowlick, and a boyish smile that she liked. He led her to a booth and they ordered drinks.
He said, “You just passed my test.”
“What’s your test?”
“It’s whether I’d pay to be in the same room with you.”
“What do you mean?” Sylvie was already on the edge of her seat, the strap of her purse in her hand, ready to leave.
“You look even better in person than on film. You’ve got a special quality that very few people have, and now you’re getting famous. You’ve got to find as many ways as possible to capitalize on the few years when you’re at your peak.”
“Oh, I’m doing pretty well.”
“Adult-film stars make a fairly good living for a limited period of time. But the minute they’re not getting better, it’s already over. Some of them, like Cherie Will, are able to do something afterward. She went off with Eddie Durant and started her own shop. That’s about as rare as race-car drivers starting their own car companies. Chances are, you’re not going to do that.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
“I remember working with her on the set years ago. After the director set up a shot with other actors, she’d get up off the bed naked and look through the camera lens. After getting fucked all day by four or five guys, she would go sit with the editors all evening to learn how to cut the scenes together.”
“Okay, she’s smarter than I am. So what are you trying to get me to do?”
“I’d like to arrange a twelve-city tour of the very best gentlemen’s clubs in the country.”
“Stripping? I’ve never done that, and I don’t want to.” She slid over another few inches and stood. “Thanks for the offer, though.”
“What if I guarantee ten thousand a night?”
She sat on the edge of the seat for a moment. “Just stripping? Nothing else?”
“That’s right. You’re not just a girl taking her clothes off, you’re a movie star, a celebrity. Even if they never heard of you, saying that makes all the difference.”
She stared at him and listened. The voice was still a mystery. He sounded like an old man who had smoked cigars all his life. She couldn’t make a decision about him, but she agreed to let him see what he could arrange, and then went home. When she found herself alone again in that small, partially furnished apartment, she wondered why she had not simply turned him down. She had no desire to go into strip clubs to take her clothes off. She liked money, but she wasn’t sure why she liked money. She did little more than buy the same kind of inexpensive clothes she always had, and leave the rest in bank accounts. But she was aware that the numbers were getting larger, and dollars were the only measure she had of the days that were passing or the life she was using up.
When she went in to work the next Monday, she talked to Cherie Will about Darren McKee. Cherie looked at her for a moment, then said, “I don’t know what to say. A lot of girls do the clubs. It’s a lot of extra money, and most of it is in cash. When I started to get offers like that, I took them for a year or two. I did three tours in that time. I hated the travel—which, by the way, is not first-class—and I hated the customers and the noise and the
