Silence

13

SYLVIE SLIPPED OUT of the airplane’s aisle into the window seat, then lifted the armrest up to open the space between her and Paul as he sat down and fastened his seat belt. Then she wiggled her hips once to establish contact with him. He looked down at her and smiled.

It was interesting to Sylvie to see Paul moving back and forth so easily between the extremes of his personality. Just an hour ago, he had been speaking with the boy in the car-rental office and smiling almost as warmly as he was now. He had said, “I really would appreciate your help in this situation. Jack is my oldest friend, and my wife’s brother. We’ve got to locate him just as soon as we can.”

The boy had not returned Paul’s beautiful smile. He had simply played at being a heartless bureaucrat. “I’m sorry, sir. But company rules prohibit us from using the locator on a car just because somebody asks.”

“But this is an emergency. My wife’s mother is very ill: Jack’s mother. We think this could be the end. She’s a dear old lady, and she’s asked for Jack. With the help of people from your company in Los Angeles we managed to trace him to Santa Barbara. We know he made it this far, and turned in the car. We need to know if he rented another car from you and is still in town, or if he got on a plane. I can’t even conceive of what harm it would do to tell us. I’ll pay you very well for your trouble.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“What’s a day’s pay for you? I’ll give you that just for a little help.”

“I don’t know, sir. I’m paid once a month.”

“All right. A week’s pay, in cash. Divide your paycheck by four.”

“I’m sorry, sir. Company rules.” The boy held his hands up in a shrug.

Paul’s long arm shot out, and before the boy could step backward, Paul had gripped his right wrist, spun him around, and had the arm twisted behind his back. Paul was as quick and graceful at jujitsu as he was at dancing. He held the boy’s arm with no apparent effort. The boy was bent over, his face almost to the counter, his eyes watering, then almost closed in pain. His body tilted to the side while Paul was steering him around the counter and into the open.

Paul said to Sylvie, “Would you please give him three hundred dollars?”

“Sure.” Sylvie opened her purse, took out the three bills, held them up like a magician’s assistant, folded them once, and placed them in the boy’s breast pocket.

Paul applied some more pressure, and the boy went to one knee. “I’ll do it. All right. Stop. Stop it.”

Paul released him and said, “Thank you.” He watched while the boy pushed on his knee with his good hand to raise himself. The hand that Paul had held was pressed to the boy’s stomach, as though held by an invisible sling. The boy went around the counter and Paul went with him. He used his uninjured hand to tap on the computer’s keys while Paul looked over his shoulder. Paul took a pen off the counter and wrote on a map the code number for the locator on Till’s car and the license number.

The boy said, “He’s got a white Cadillac DeVille. It’s in Las Vegas, parked at the MGM Grand Hotel.”

“Thank you.” Paul reached into his own wallet and added two more hundred-dollar bills to the boy’s breast pocket.

Now, as Sylvie sat beside him on the airplane, she leaned into the space between them and snuggled, then leaned back to wait for takeoff. “I like Las Vegas.”

“Me. too. Too bad it’s got to be for work.”

“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 one of the girls in the shade, and she sat under a tree while Charlotte McClellan made her a French braid.

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 smoke. I guess they probably can’t smoke in those places anymore. But the rest of it has to be the same—a few hundred horny, drunk guys drooling out there at the tables while you try to ignore them and hear the beat of the music over the noise. Do you even dance?”

Sylvie lied. “No,” she said, then wondered why.

“Well, you can learn as much as you need to, I guess. The key to this is to get the money in your hands and invest it. Buy a house. Start a retirement plan, if you haven’t already. Then keep putting the rest in stocks and bonds. That’s why I own a movie studio with Eddie Durant, and the girls from my day who were better looking and better actresses and better everything are, well, wherever they are. Just make sure I always know your schedule.”

Sylvie took everything Cherie said seriously, so she took this seriously, too. She had been saving her money, but now she began to invest it. At the end of the next week, McKee called her again. “Hello, baby,” he said in his strange raspy voice. “I got you booked. We do fifteen cities in three weeks.”

The first club was in San Diego. On her first night, she stood behind the curtain on the stage and looked out at the men in the bar while the lights were still up. She realized that they weren’t scary. They weren’t anything. They had nothing to do with her or what she was going to do up onstage. When she came out, the room was too dim to make out their features clearly. She began to dance. She was in a blue spotlight, and as she moved her body the dance was no more personal, no more Sylvie than it had been when she was assuming the classic poses of ballet.

At the end of each night, she was tired and covered with sweat, but the crowd of men had given her so many bills that each time her set was over, she had to gather the money and pile it in stacks in her dressing room. Darren McKee insisted on staying at her side and having one of the club bouncers take them to the hotel so she wouldn’t get robbed.

Darren was better to her than she had expected him to be. For the whole tour, he went with her so she wouldn’t have to make any travel arrangements or haggle with the management of the clubs. Sylvie formed the theory that there had been earlier girls who had arrived late or gotten lost, and that he was determined never to let it happen again. He talked to her while he drove her from city to city, telling her funny stories about people in the business, and about others he met in hotels. He ordered healthy food for her when they were in restaurants, and even gave her vitamins after meals. He booked hotel rooms adjoining hers, and made sure she turned off the television and switched off the lights in time to get eight hours of sleep every night. He was reliable and strong and in control, and she felt safe and protected.

After all these years, it seemed to Sylvie that what happened was partly her fault. She was on the tour because she had been in a couple dozen adult movies, and the reason she was on the tour was to take her clothes off onstage. It would have seemed idiotic to close doors and make a point of hiding herself from Darren. She would have been embarrassed to put on clothes just because he was around.

The part that was Darren’s fault was that he had effectively taken over her life. It had not occurred to her that at twenty she was almost exactly half his age. She didn’t think of him as being her mother’s age, and he didn’t look it. She just thought vaguely that he was older and wiser, and therefore it was logical that he was in charge. He was always walking from his room to hers and back, handling her clothes, her luggage, or something. It became so unsurprising after a few days that one time when he came in while she was coming out of the shower she didn’t bother to get dressed, and he began to make love to her. She accepted him without giving the change in their relationship as much thought as she might have a year earlier. She had become used to men, and used to Darren, and had figured that everything he did was good for her, and this probably was, too.

It made their relationship unambiguous, and now she knew how to behave: how to interpret his touch, how to respond to things that he said to her and did for her. They weren’t boss and employee, or star and manager, or dancer and agent. They were a man and a woman. She knew how to do that. She had never traveled with a man before, but she liked it. She liked living with someone who paid attention to her.

At the end of the tour, while they were driving toward Los Angeles, he said, “You made a lot of money this trip.”

“Yes,” she said. “More than I ever imagined I would.”

“I think the clubs aren’t good for you.”

“It’s not fun,” she said. “But I liked traveling with you, and it’s safer than working for Cherie and Eddie in the movie business. I’m not going to catch some disease and die from stripping.”

“I want you to quit the movie business, too. Especially that.”

She looked at him for a few seconds. “I don’t get it. Why do you have an opinion?”

“Because I love you. As soon as we get back home, I want you to marry me.”

Sylvie looked at Darren and considered his offer. Thinking about it meant allowing herself to acknowledge what she had decided not to feel—that she hated her life. There had been particular moments of humiliation and hurt and revulsion that she had known would make her want to die if she let them, so she simply hadn’t. As she sat in the car beside Darren McKee that day, she found herself remembering all of it. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll marry you.” As Sylvie considered that moment, all these years later, she realized it was the last big decision she had ever had to make.

The plane reached its apogee and the pilot began to mutter into the microphone in the cockpit. Sylvie looked at Paul, gave him a quick, perfunctory smile, squeezed his hand once, and looked out the window at the jagged brown rocks below. In a few minutes, they would be on the runway in Las Vegas. All they had to do was find Jack Till’s car and follow it to Wendy Harper. Once the woman was dead, maybe Sylvie could get Paul to spend a few days here.