Sacred Monster

Flashback 21

“And now, to present the award for Best Actor, Dori Lunsford!”

The band played. The audience applauded. The billions watching on television all around the world watched Dori Lunsford approach the lectern. A big-boned, good-looking blonde, Dori Lunsford was the sex symbol of the moment, a big girl whose stock in trade was giggly little-girl movements, as though she didn’t know she was voluptuous. Tonight she wore an extremely low-cut white gown, the hot television lights gleaming on the upper hemispheres of her breasts.

At the lectern, she bowed slightly, presenting those breasts to the world, or at least the half of the world watching her on television. The plain forgettable man from Price Waterhouse — rather like Michael O’Connor he was, in fact — came out and handed Dori Lunsford the envelope and went away again, immediately forgotten.

“Oh, I’m so excited!” Dori told the billions, and jiggled a little. (She was having her period, which always made her breasts swell.) Tearing open the envelope with a pleasing clumsiness, she said, “And the winner isssss...” She pulled the card most of the way from the envelope, and squealed. “EEEEEEEEEEEE!!! Jack Pine!”

In the audience, as it burst into applause, competing with the band’s breaking into the theme music of the film for which Jack was getting his award, Buddy poked at Jack, who was sound asleep in the aisle seat beside him. Knowing he was on television, Buddy did his poking with a good-natured grin on his lips, as though congratulating his pal rather than waking him, but his knuckles were hard and sharp, digging into Jack’s ribs, yanking him unpleasurably up from alcoholic stupor.

Jack roused himself, hearing the confused noises, seeing the lights, feeling Buddy’s sharp fists prod him up out of the seat and into the aisle. “Go on, Dad!” Buddy yelled, through the music and applause. “Go get it!”

Befuddled but moving, Jack made his way down the aisle. Like a rat in a maze, he was constricted to this route by the applauding hands and beaming faces on both sides. Sensing the urgency all around him, he broke into a shambling trot, found himself abruptly in front of steps, and ran up them only because the alternative would have been to sprawl across them in a painful heap.

At the top of the stairs, Jack hesitated for just a second, unsure what he was supposed to do next, having not the slightest idea what was going on. Several tuxedoed and gowned people behind a curtain, within his line of sight but out of camera range, stopped applauding to wave at him frantically to hang a left and get going. He hung a left. He got going.

And here was Dori Lunsford. And here was some sort of elbow-height piece of furniture to lean on. Feeling an intense need to lean on something, Jack approached that piece of furniture, but before he could get his body on it Dori Lunsford smiled like the sun in Bangkok and handed him something. Jack grasped at it, whatever it was, and Dori kissed his cheek, pressing her great globes against his arm and chest.

Jack weaved slightly, not leaning against anything. He looked at the shiny thing in his hands and recognized it, but didn’t quite yet dope out its meaning or implications. With a piteous look at Dori, begging for enlightenment, he said, “This is for me?”

The microphone on the lectern picked up the question, of course. The audience, which had quieted enough to hear what Jack might say, naturally thought it was meant to be a joke, and responded with good-natured laughter and more applause. Jack looked out toward the great hall, saw it full of people, and began to catch on. He looked back at Dori. He had it together now, and his trouper’s spirit took over.

The famous Jack Pine smile flashed. The famous Jack Pine voice spoke: “Well, thank you, Dori.”

At which point, Dori was supposed to leave, backing smiling away from the lectern to give the recipient of the award his opportunity to thank everybody on God’s green earth for having made this moment possible. Preparatory to this rearward departure, Dori did smile her farewell smile, but then something went wrong. Jack reached out his right hand — the left hand still clutching Oscar about the head, as though he were a bottle of Jack Daniel’s — dipped the hand into the open top of Dori’s dress, and grasped her right, or downstage, breast.

Dori gasped. The whole audience gasped, but Dori gasped on television. Dori started to pull away, to make her scheduled departure anyway, but then she realized — as her expression told the half of the world’s population watching — that she’d better not.

With his left hand clutching Oscar and his right hand clutching Dori’s breast, Jack turned toward an audience suddenly grown deathly still. “And thank all of you,” he said. “I mean it, honest to God I do.”

Dori stood frozen, a terrified smile on her face. She had no choice but to remain there throughout Jack’s acceptance speech, and in her panic she had clearly come to the conclusion that the best thing to do was look as happy and bubbly as possible, just as though nothing had gone terribly wrong, just as though her breast was not now in the tight and unrelenting grip of a madman.

Jack went on, addressing the audience, saying, “I really thank you all for this, uh, Tony, Emmy, what the hell is it?” He held up the statuette, studied it closely. “Oscar,” he decided. Lowering the statuette again, but still holding on to Dori, he looked out at the oil painting of an audience and said, “I thank you. And I want to thank everybody who made this moment possible. I want to thank every ass I ever had to kiss. I want to thank every prick who ever turned me down for a rotten picture so I was forced to do the good ones. I want to thank Marty Friedman, my director, that traffic cop, for staying the hell away from me and letting me get the job done. And I want to thank my co-star, Sandra Shaw, for doing such a tight-ass, piss-poor, lamebrain job of it that I had to look good in comparison. You notice she didn’t get a nomination. But mostly, I want to thank all those little people out there, all those little people out there, those little people, all those goddamn little people. There’s more of them around all the time, you know? I think they live in the plumbing.”

Finished, befuddled again, his mind full of lurking, crawling, slithering little people, Jack turned and walked offstage, leaving a stunned silence behind, but taking Dori Lunsford along by the breast.

“Six weeks later, I married that bitch.”

Michael O’Connor is at last surprised by something. “Dori Lunsford?” he says. “I didn’t know you were ever married to Dori Lunsford.”

A flaw in his impeccable research, eh? I smile at him in triumph — we keep our secrets, yes we do, when we want, large and small — and I say, “It didn’t last.”

“I guess it didn’t.”

I lean forward slightly, feeling extremely healthy, a sound body in a sound mind — no, that’s the other way around, isn’t it? Doesn’t matter — and I rest my elbows on my spread knees, and I gaze into the middle distance of time. “How different that was,” I say, “from my first wedding, even though they both took place in the same church.”

“Same church?” O’Connor echoes. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Very photogenic church,” I explain. “Great for the press. You fellas. Well, you know that. And this time, of course, we didn’t have to hire a crowd. We both had our fans, our agents, household staffs, attorneys, accountants, standins, hangers-on, the whole crowd. The media was out in force, a lot more so than when Marcia and I tied the knot. We all had to work our asses off to suppress those pictures, let me tell you.”

“Pictures?” O’Connor looks bewildered, poor fella; I’m surprised he doesn’t already know this part, being in the journalism racket and all. He says, “Suppress pictures? What pictures?”

“Of the wedding,” I tell him.

Which doesn’t seem to help him much. Shaking his head as though there’s a bee in his ear, he says, “Suppress pictures of the wedding. Your old wedding with Marcia, you mean? So people wouldn’t know it was the same church?”

“Oh, who cares about that?” I ask him. “One of the very few good qualities of the press is that it has no memory. No, it was the pictures of the wedding with Dori we had to suppress. And a hell of a job it was, too.”

“I don’t understand,” he confesses. “If the whole thing was meant to be a publicity stunt, why suppress the pictures?”

“Because things went a little bit wrong,” I explain.

“What things?”

“Well, we were both of us drinking pretty heavy then,” I tell him. “It was the only way we could put up with each other, or anything else, or get through the day. So, we handled the ceremony okay, but on the way back down the aisle — or is it back up the aisle? — anyway, on our way back from the altar, Dori’s drunk said something that irritated my drunk just a little.”