Fred Kapper looked around the bare room and said, “Shit! They used to have a little couch here.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ll have to make do. Get your clothes off sweetheart. The dubbing crew’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
Jill stared at him a moment, feeling like a whore, and she loathed him. But she did not let it show. She had tried it her way and had failed. Now she was going to do it their way. She took off her dress and pants. Kapper did not bother undressing. He merely opened his zipper and took out his tumescent penis. He looked at Jill and grinned. “That’s a beautiful ass. Bend over.”
Jill looked around for something to lean against. In front of her was the laugh machine, a console on wheels, filled with laugh-track loops controlled by buttons on the outside.
“Come on, bend over.”
Jill hesitated a moment, then leaned forward, propping herself up by her hands, Kapper moved in back of her and Jill felt his fingers spreading her cheeks. An instant later she felt the tip of his penis pressing against her anus. “Wait!” Jill said. “Not there! I—I can’t—”
“Scream for me, baby!” and he plunged his organ inside her, ripping her with a terrible pain. With each scream, he thrust deeper and harder. She tried frantically to get away, but he was grabbing her hips, shoving himself in and out, holding her fast. She was off balance now. As she reached out to get leverage, her fingers touched the buttons of the laugh machine, and instantly the room was filled with maniacal laughter. As Jill squirmed in a burning agony, her hands pounded the machine, and a woman tittered and a small crowd guffawed and a girl giggled and a hundred voices cackled and chuckled and roared at some obscene, secret joke. The echoes bounced hysterically around the walls as Jill cried out with pain.
Suddenly she felt a series of quick shudders and a moment later the alien piece of flesh inside her was withdrawn, and slowly the laughter in the room died away. Jill stayed still, her eyes shut, fighting the pain. When finally she was able to straighten up and turn around, Fred Kapper was zipping up his fly.
“You were sensational, sweetheart. That screaming really turns me on.”
And Jill wondered what kind of an animal he would be when he was nineteen.
He saw that she was bleeding. “Get yourself cleaned up and come over to Stage Twelve. You start working this afternoon.”
After that first experience, the rest was easy. Jill began to work regularly at all the studios: Warner Brothers, Paramount, MGM, Universal, Columbia, Fox. Everywhere, in fact, except at Disney, where sex did not exist.
The role that Jill created in bed was a fantasy, and she acted it out with skill, preparing herself as though she were playing a part. She read books on Oriental erotica and bought philters and stimulants from a sex shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. She had a lotion that an airline stewardess brought her from the Orient, with the faintest touch of wintergreen in it. She learned to massage her lovers slowly and sensuously. “Lie there and think about what I’m doing to your body,” she whispered. She rubbed the lotion across the man’s chest and down his stomach toward his groin, making gentle, circling motions. “Close your eyes and enjoy it.”
Her fingers were as light as butterfly wings, moving down his body, caressing him. When he began to have an erection, Jill would take his growing penis in her hand and softly stroke it, moving her tongue down between his legs until he was squirming with pleasure, then continuing down slowly, all the way to his toes. Then Jill would turn him over, and it all began again. When a man’s organ was limp, she put the head of it just inside the lips of her vagina, and slowly drew him inside her, feeling it grow hard and stiff. She taught the men the waterfall, and how to peak and stop just before an orgasm and then build again and peak again, so that when they finally came, it was an ecstatic explosion. They had their pleasure and got dressed and left. No one ever stayed long enough to give her the loveliest five minutes in sex, the quiet holding afterward, the peaceful oasis of a lover’s arms.
Providing Jill with acting parts was a small price to pay for the pleasure she gave the casting men, the assistant directors, the directors and the producers. She became known around town as a “red-hot piece of ass,” and everyone was eager for his share. And Jill gave it. Each time she did, there was that much less self-respect and love in her, and that much more hatred and bitterness.
She did not know how, or when, but she knew that one day this town would pay for what it had done to her.
During the next few years, Jill appeared in dozens of movies and television shows and commercials. She was the secretary who said, “Good morning, Mr. Stevens,” and the baby-sitter who said, “Don’t worry now, you two have a good evening. I’ll put the children to bed,” and the elevator operator who announced, “Sixth floor next,” and the girl in the ski outfit who confided, “All my girlfriends use Dainties.” But nothing ever happened. She was a nameless face in the crowd. She was in the Business, and yet she was not, and she could not bear the thought of spending the rest of her life like this.
In 1966 Jill’s mother died and Jill drove to Odessa for the funeral. It was late afternoon and there were fewer than a dozen people at the services, none of them the women her mother had worked for all those years. Some of the churchgoers were there, the doom-saying revivalists. Jill remembered how terrified she had been at those meetings. But her mother had found some sort of solace in them, the exorcising of whatever demons had tormented her.
A familiar voice said quietly, “Hello, Josephine.” She turned and he was standing at her side and she looked into his eyes and it was as though they had never been apart, as though they still belonged to each other. The years had stamped a maturity on his face, added a sprinkling of gray to his sideburns. But he had not changed, he was still David, her David. Yet they were strangers.