“Would you like me to fuck you?”
“Oh, yes! I want you, David.”
Alan started to say something, then grinned. “Sure, baby. I want you, too. Come on.” He took Jill’s hand and lifted her off the bed. Jill felt as though she were flying.
They were in the hallway, then moving into the other bedroom.
“Okay,” Terraglio said as he saw them. “Keep the same setup. We’ve got some fresh blood coming in.”
“Do you want me to change the sheets?” one of the crew asked.
“What the fuck do you think we are, MGM?”
Jill was clinging to Alan. “David, there are people here.”
“They’ll leave,” Alan assured her. “Here.” He took out another pill and gave it to Jill. He put the bottle of vodka to her lips, and she swallowed the pill. From that point on, everything happened in a haze. David was undressing her and saying comforting things. Then she was on the bed with him. He moved his naked body close to her. A bright light came on, blinding her.
“Put this in your mouth,” he said, and it was David talking.
“Oh, yes.” She stroked it lovingly and started to put it in her mouth and someone in the room said something that Jill could not hear, and David moved away so that Jill was forced to turn her face into the light and squint in the glare. She felt herself being pushed down on her back and then David was inside her making love to her, and at the same time she had his penis in her mouth. She loved him so much. The lights bothered her and the talking in the background. She wanted to tell David to stop them, but she was in an ecstasy of delirium, having orgasm after orgasm until she thought that her body would tear itself apart. David loved her, not Cissy, and he had come back to her and they were married. They were having such a wonderful honeymoon.
“David…” she said. She opened her eyes and the Mexican was on top of her, moving his tongue down her body. She tried to ask him where David was, but she could not get the words out. She closed her eyes while the man did delicious things to her body. When Jill opened her eyes again, the man had somehow turned into a girl with long red hair and large bosoms trailing across Jill’s belly. Then the woman started doing something with her tongue and Jill closed her eyes and fell into unconsciousness.
The two men stood looking down at the figure on the bed.
“She gonna be all right?” Terraglio asked.
“Sure,” Alan said.
“You really come up with ’em,” Terraglio said admiringly. “She’s terrific. Best looker yet.”
“My pleasure.” He held out his hand.
Terraglio pulled a thick wad of bills out of his pocket and peeled off two of them. “Here y’are. Wanna drop by for a little Christmas dinner? Stella’d love to see you.”
“Can’t,” Alan said. “I’m spending Christmas with the wife and kids. I’m catching the next plane out to Florida.”
“We’re gonna have a hell of a picture here.” Terraglio nodded toward the unconscious girl. “What kind of billing should we give her?”
Alan grinned. “Why don’t you use her real name? It’s Josephine Czinski. When the picture plays in Odessa, it’ll give all her friends a real kick.”
23
They had lied. Time was not a friend that healed all wounds; it was the enemy that ravaged and murdered youth. The seasons came and went and each season brought a new crop of Product to Hollywood. The competition hitchhiked and came on motorcycles and trains and planes. They were all eighteen years old, as Jill had once been. They were long-legged and lithe, with fresh, eager young faces and bright smiles that did not need caps. And with each new crop that came in, Jill was one year older. One day she looked in the mirror and it was 1964 and she had become twenty-five years old.
At first, the experience of making the pornographic film had terrified her. She had lived in dread that some casting director would learn about it and blackball her. But as the weeks went by and then months, Jill gradually forgot her fears. But she had changed. Each succeeding year had left its mark upon her, a patina of hardness, like the annual rings on a tree. She began to hate all the people who would not give her a chance to act, the people who made promises they never kept.
She had embarked on an endless series of monotonous, thankless jobs. She was a secretary and a receptionist and a short-order cook and a baby-sitter and a model and a waitress and a telephone operator and a salesgirl. Just until she got The Call.
But The Call never came. And Jill’s bitterness grew. She did occasional walk-ons and one-liners, but they never led to anything. She looked in the mirror and received Time’s message: Hurry. Seeing her reflection was like looking back into layers of the past. There were still traces of the fresh young girl who had come to Hollywood seven endless years ago. But the fresh young girl had small wrinkles near the edges of her eyes and deeper lines that ran from the corners of her nose down to her chin, warning signals of time fleeting and success ungrasped, the souvenirs of all the countless, dreary little defeats. Hurry, Jill, hurry!
And so it was that when Fred Kapper, an eighteen-year-old assistant director at Fox, told Jill he had a good part for her if she would go to bed with him, she decided it was time to say yes.
She met Fred Kapper at the studio during his lunch hour.
“I only got half an hour,” he said. “Lemme think where we can have some privacy.” He stood there a moment, frowning in deep thought, then brightened. “The dubbing room. Come on.”
The dubbing room was a small soundproof projection chamber where all the sound tracks were combined on one reel.