Jace. “Best one I’ve had in LA. It’s a definite must for late night after This Show Sucks.”
Did Jace want to be my pal? I didn’t need a pal. Maybe he just felt sorry for me, seeing me once again in my inferior position, the assistant, “the help.” Our power differential was fucking with his Ohio value system. He had to pretend we were on equal footing, that we really had something in common. And it seemed the thing he thought we had in common was beef.
“I found it rather intriguing that he came to your desk,” said Ana at teatime. “It’s interested behavior.”
I couldn’t tell if she was fucking with me. Her words had become confusing. She’d started gossiping to me again, but I felt paranoid that the things she said had a double edge—as though they were also directed at me. When she called Kayla “fat and blundering,” I wasn’t sure if she was really talking about Kayla or about me. Sometimes I felt like she was laughing at me right to my face, like she and herself had become the “us” and I was the “them,” and the joke was that I didn’t know who was who. I figured that her comment was some kind of setup. She was trying to get me excited so she could deflate me again.
“He’s an actor,” I said. “He always looks interested.”
“Well, why wouldn’t he be interested in you?” she asked, giving me a gentle knock on my shoulder and giggling. “You’re interesting.”
The giggle was ambiguous. She could just as easily be showing girly camaraderie as making fun of me. But the shoulder knock was sportsmanlike: celebratory and chummy. It made me feel like we were on the same team. She seemed to earnestly be commending me. But for what exactly?
Ana always made it appear like she looked down on actors, the whole Hollywood scene. She earned money working in the industry, but otherwise declared that she was far above it intellectually. She may have been idealistic long ago, but when her husband left her, she’d abandoned any investment in Hollywood mythology so she could write the whole thing off as “stupid.”
I hadn’t considered that underneath her bravado was a feeling of weakness, loss, the fear that she was less than. I never imagined she might still be secretly smitten with celebrity. She was rejecting that world before it rejected her again. But that didn’t mean she didn’t secretly want to live there.
CHAPTER 41
After work, I had no energy for the gym. I chewed two pieces of nicotine gum at once and went anyway. When I changed into my workout clothes, I discovered that my spandex shorts were now so tight they gave me cameltoe—chronic cameltoe. Every time I fixed the toe, it emerged again, somehow deeper.
On the elliptical machine, I let the shorts rub against me, feeling horny. It was some new kind of horniness, or maybe a very old kind, raw lust, like when I first discovered masturbation and indulged in it daily. The horniness felt like hunger itself. I was fully famished, and I didn’t know whether it was food or sex I wanted. Maybe I wanted both. All of this eating seemed to have made me more sexually charged, awake. But what was waking up, exactly: my pussy or my soul? I was scared of my soul. What if my soul was monstrous? If a person had a monstrous soul, should she still follow it?
I switched to the stationary bike. As I pedaled, my pussy rubbed against the black leather seat, and I felt a delicious warmth spread throughout my pelvis. The front of the bike seat was horn-shaped. It poked out in front of me like a cock. I took to this right away, having my own thick cock. I wanted to make the cock come alive, to say a blessing over it—Frankencock!—a bike-seat dick. I began reciting quietly any Hebrew I could remember.
“Nun, gimmel, hay, shin, nun, gimmel, hay, shin,” I whispered, intoning the letters on the dreidel to the rhythm of my pedaling.
“Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu,” I sang to myself, using the old tune I knew. But I felt guilty using my grandmother’s favorite song to animate a penis.
Etz chayim hi lamachazikim ba, vetomecheha me’ushar! I crooned internally, delivering a captivating performance of the tree of life song.
Suddenly, I felt incredibly powerful—as though my cock were really coming alive. I imagined, as I pedaled, that Ana was sucking me. For the