Popcorn

Chapter Fourteen

The first thing that struck Brooke as Bruce ushered her into the lounge of his fabulous Hollywood home was how designed it looked. It was beautiful but completely impersonal with its vast white couches, glass and steel tables and shelves sparsely decorated with extremely costly objets d’art. Like an enormous and incredibly expensive hotel. Brooke loved it.

The truth was that in the previous three or four years Bruce’s workload had been so high and his ascendance so meteoric that he had had no time at all to arrange his personal life. He still owned his old apartment off Melrose Avenue, and in it were all his old framed movie posters and stuff like his Star Wars space gun. But it was just gathering dust. Perhaps one day he would move it all and repersonalize his world, but for the time being he was happy simply to decide upon a price and purchase a lifestyle appropriate to his rising status. Farrah, his nearly exwife, who had previously provided Bruce with the semblance of a private life, had long since tired of being married to a workaholic movie nut. She had retreated from his world, taking most of their stuff (which was hers anyway) and their daughter with him.

Bruce had never been very interested in personal lifestyle. Even as a student he had been famous for owning only one pair of jeans and one saucepan. He had always put all his huge creative energies into his work. There was none to spare for picking out cushion covers or visiting kitchenware shops. All Bruce required from a home was somewhere to wash and sleep. Of course, the more luxurious it was the better, and with his current abode he had pretty much reached the pinnacle of luxury. As far as he was concerned, he would be happy to stay exactly where he was for ever.

He was not going to get the chance.

The first thing he should have noticed as he followed Brooke into the room was a pair of pink Doc Martens boots lying on the carpet, boots that had not been there when he had left the house that morning. He should have spotted them instantly; there should have been a fast zoom to a closeup on the boots, and a sinister musical sting to inform him that things were terribly and dangerously amiss. But there was no sting and no closeup. Bruce scarcely registered the boots and remained oblivious of the fact that their presence indicated he was in very big trouble.

In the brief moment of thought he gave them, he imagined that they must be the property of his fourteen-yearold daughter, left under a couch on some past visit and only now dislodged by the cleaner. He kicked them back out of sight. The last thing a man wants in midseduction is to be reminded that the object of his lust is only a few years older than his own child.

Midseduction? Hardly. He hadn’t even started yet and the sun was already up. He would have to get a move on.

A boyish grin, a nervous halfsmile.

Extreme closeup on girl’s lips.

Lips part slightly, revealing white teeth teased by tip of tongue.

Fuck music plays. Bang, they are at it like rabbits on E.

Not quite. Even Oscarwinning directors can’t edit reality. The dull presex preamble had to be gone through, and there was not a great deal of time to do it in. It was Bruce’s own fault that they were so late. It was he who had suggested that they watch Ordinary Americans, a twohour picture, and they had sat through the whole thing.

It had been worth it, though, there was no doubt about that, a real ego buzz. There is nothing quite like having a gorgeous girl gasp at your masterpiece. Brooke had loved his film, or at least she had professed to – and done so with sufficient conviction to satisfy Bruce. It had been a very curious sensation, sitting beside this girl, all wound up to make a move on her but not wanting to disturb her enjoyment of his great work. Which would be more exciting, hearing her gasp at his powers as a director or at his powers as a lover? Every time he had got himself ready to chance brushing a gentle kiss along her delectable bare shoulders, those same shoulders shook with mirth at one of the many dazzlingly witty ironic juxtapositions of image and dialogue with which the movie was peppered. Every time he was ready to slide an arm round her or ‘accidentally’ lay his hand on top of hers, the movie arrived at another of his favourite bits and he had to stop to let her concentrate.

Bruce had lots of favourite bits and vanity had been stronger than desire. He had let her watch the whole movie unmolested. Hence the lateness of the hour, the coldness of the approaching dawn and the fact that he was not even at the proverbial first base. He cursed himself for not having made a shorter film. He had always thought about cutting the discotheque sequence; after all seventies kitsch had been done and doubledone. On the other hand, it was such a funny scene, the way the guy kept getting more and more stains on his white Travolta suit, 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 Premiere.

‘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 Nine and a Half Weeks? Jesus, you only had to tap that woman on the shoulder and she had an orgasm. Why can’t the sex be convincing? Convincing is sexy. Girls wear pantyhose, you know, not stockings. When they get laid they have to take off their tights. I never saw a girl take off pantyhose in a movie.’

‘That, I’m afraid my dear, is because pantyhose is not sexy. It is impossible to remove pantyhose in a sexy manner.’ Bruce rather regretted the ‘my dear’. It was verging on rude and Brooke was, after all, his guest. But really! Trying to tell him how to make movie.

Brooke snorted up the last of the lines and stared at Bruce for a moment. He wondered if she was going to ask him to call a cab. Instead she got up off the couch, stood before him and, to his astonishment, began to dance. The music was sexy and the lights were low and she was dancing. In fact it was more an undulation than a dance, a kind of slow shiver that seemed to go up her body from her toes to her head and then slowly down again.

‘Wow,’ said Bruce.

The standard of his conversation was actually deteriorating, but Brooke no longer seemed to care. She was into her own agenda. Her hands were on her thighs now, slowly massaging the exquisite creamy material of her dress, her long fingers gently clawing at the cloth, ruffling it up against her legs before letting it fall back into place. Except it did not fall quite back because she retained a little of the dress beneath the palms of her hands, pressed as they were against the splendid outline of her thighs. Bruce realized that bit by bit, a centimetre or two at a time, Brooke was drawing up the long skirt of her dress, very slowly revealing her legs. And such legs. Bruce was entranced as shapely ankle gave way to shapely calf, then delightful knees and on, up past her equally exquisite thighs. It must have taken her more than five minutes to bring the skirt up to her panty line. Somehow she contrived to collect the folds of the material about her hips in a bouquetlike cluster, and it looked for a moment as if she was wearing a rara skirt, or a rather flamboyant tutu. Then in one quick movement, almost a jerk, she brought the handfuls of cloth right up high, pulling the folds of skirt to just under her breasts, revealing all of her pantyhose and some of her bare midriff besides. Her hose was, of course, of finest quality. No ladders or frayed gussets here. Highwaisted, covering Brooke’s whole stomach (such as there was of it), ending a few inches below her ribs in a wide black, delicately embroidered waistband. Her whole lower body was now on show, from diaphragm, down past her navel to the shadowy halfhidden panties, her long legs and on down to the silver stilettos she wore. All encased in sheer black nylon splendour. Above all of which she held her dress in great silky folds. Not necessarily a very elegant pose, but undeniably sexy. The look on her face was slightly sullen, almost indifferent. Her legs were foursquare, feet about nine inches apart. She seemed to be saying, ‘This is what I’ve got. Do you want it?’ A bad little girl showing you hers.

Now she had her thumbs under the waistband of her hose and was pulling the material slightly away from her soft skin. Still contriving to hold up her dress, she began slowly, fold by fold, to wind her pantyhose downwards, not pulling, or tugging, but neatly peeling them floorwards, with elegant thumb and finger, one fold over another. The whiteness of her belly appeared first, followed by more black, the black of her panties, then white again as the very tops of her legs appeared, and then more perfect skin as the hose descended.

She stopped for a moment.

‘Go on, please!’ croaked Bruce. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything so erotic.

Brooke raised one glorious limb and put her foot on the glass table. This caused the hose, which were now pulled down to a few inches below her crutch, to stretch out taut between her thighs, lending the tiniest suggestion of bondage and constraint to her sultry pose.

Her stiletto heel made a sharp tap on the table top. ‘Unbuckle it,’ she instructed Bruce. Her voice was cold and firm: it was an order. Bruce leant forward, his stomach pushing down on the top of his frankly spectacular erection, and did as he was bidden. The movement brought him so close to the partly revealed tops of Brooke’s thighs, crowned as they were by the bouquet of her dress, that he wondered for a moment about kissing the exposed flesh. He resisted the urge. She was in control. She would tell him what to do. Brooke brought the unbuckled shoe back to the ground, and with equal balance and elegance raised her other leg.

‘Again,’ she snapped. Again he obeyed.

She kicked off her silver stilettos and stood for a moment on the rug, holding her dress and the folded top of her pantyhose before folding the latter a little bit further towards her knees. Her arms were now at full stretch, so she could lower her hose no further by this method.

She sat down. In one athletic movement, she lowered herself to the floor, simultaneously pulling her tights down to her knees. As her bottom touched the soft carpet she continued her movement, rolling over on to her back, and bringing her knees up to her chest. Keeping her thumbs in the band of the tights all the while, she released her dress, letting its folds fall back on to her and on to the floor around her. Her backside pointed straight at Bruce like the centre of a silk flower. For fully fifteen seconds she let him stare at the triangle of black panties that separated the flesh of her rear upper thighs from the flesh of the small of her back as it curled down into the folds of her dress on the carpet.

Then the endgame. Still lying on her back, and keeping her knees close to her chest, she rolled the tights down past her calves to her ankles and along her feet until they covered only her toes, which pointed seductively at Bruce above the eye magnet of her knickercovered bottom. One final push on the tights and they fell down past her backside and lay crumpled on the carpet beneath the black triangle. In the same movement her long white legs shot upwards until they pointed straight and true towards the ceiling. Still lying on her back Brook gently parted her legs to make a glorious upright V through which, by raising her head, she could see Bruce.

She smiled, lowered her legs and, picking up the tights, got to her feet. Her toes clenched at the luxury of the carpet. She took a step towards Bruce and dropped the stillwarm hose into his lap.

‘So?’

Bruce did his best to say something cool and classy. ‘So I hope you don’t expect me to be that good with my socks.’

It was certainly better than might have been expected on the basis of his previous form.

Bruce drew Brooke towards him on to the couch and they drifted into an embrace. Within moments all the pentup sexual tension of the evening seemed to explode. Their mouths writhed against each other. Cool seduction was replaced by hot, lustful passion.

Then Brooke broke away. ‘Let me get some protection.’

She reached down to her handbag and for a moment Bruce imagined himself in love. What a woman! He had just been wondering, himself, how to bring up the subject of protection, and here she was, all ready and prepared, doing it for him.

However, when her hand emerged from the chic little bag it was holding not a packet of condoms but a small hand gun.