the worst part is?”
She was looking directly at me now. Right in the eyes. It was a serious question that I was in no way able to answer. I just shrugged and shook my head.
“The worst part isn’t diseases or anything. Everyone’s so careful about that stuff these days. That’s not the problem. The problem is that a lot of men won’t touch you. They’ll jerk off to a picture of me, but if I ever came near them they’d run for the hills. The nice guys anyway.”
She sipped her wine and kept her eyes on me. I could see a glassy reflection in them. It was my own image, stretched and warped across the surface of her retina.
Then she said, “I guess it’s the fact that I’ve been with so many guys. Every man I meet knows I’ve been with someone bigger, or better, or whatever it is they think. They think that because I’m in porn I must have some completely fucked up idea about sex. But I think it’s everyone else whose ideas are fucked up. If there’s anyone who knows that love is about more than just sex, it’s gotta be someone like me, right?”
I couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t want to. I felt an urge come over me to protect her from the outcome of her own life, as though I could save her from herself, somehow. It was a ridiculous feeling, and I had no idea where it came from. But there it was, nonetheless.
I struggled to say something, but just as I did there was a scream from somewhere down the beach. Everyone on the deck turned to look. There was movement in the colored lights of the party—a rushing of bodies—but there was no more noise. Slowly, everyone went back to what they were doing.
Brianna smirked, the giggle returning to her voice and the humor glinting in her eyes. “Maybe someone had a heart attack over a plate of baked beans.”
Maybe so. As we left the restaurant and drove back to the city, a cluster of police cars and an ambulance were gathered out front of the houses along the narrow edge of the PCH. “I guess you were right,” I said. “Someone choked on a chicken wing.”
Brianna shrugged. “There are worse ways to go,” she said. “Like getting shot by the cops in your own house.”
Tuesday
November 5
XV
I almost missed it. I flipped through the paper without paying attention. I was distracted by the images of Brianna juxtaposed in my head. Her thoughtful, self-reflective face sitting across the table from me was interspersed in the video of her sweating, panting, and straining to brace herself against a fierce, sexual pounding. I had been awake half the night, watching her do things with other men right there in front of me. Things that she might have let me do, if only I had permitted them to happen.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not just because of Liz, but because of the desperation in her voice as she told me about her childhood. A childhood not that many years removed from the present.
Instead, I smelled her perfume all the way home. I marveled at the brightness of her eyes, felt the light brush of her shoulder against mine as we walked from the car to the bottom of the steps of the Vargas mansion. And then I stopped, holding myself back from following her inside. She looked up at me with a sweetness in her face that told me I was the first man in a long time who hadn’t come inside, and it only made her more willing to have me there. It made me one of the nice guys. But not one who was afraid to touch her. It wasn’t fear that restrained me, it was merely an unwillingness to do it. I simply couldn’t.
Instead, I drove home thinking of the hue of her skin in the lamplight. Instead, I sat in the darkness of the apartment, purchasing images of her, paying her to perform for me. Starting slow, watching still pictures of her nude on a bed, by the beach, in the shower, covered with bubbles. And then escalating to images of her masturbating, as I was, and then to watching her with another man, and another. Quickly moving on to videos of her being defiled by three and four men at a time, an erection in every orifice, one in each hand, everything undulating over and over and over in