Her glance passed sightlessly over Perry and back to the matter at hand. Her concentration, when she directed, was absolute, equal to that of a submarine commander preparing to launch torpedoes, the world's immensity condensed to a target bobbing in the periscope sights. At such moments she was relentless, she was temperamental, she wasn't taking calls, outside communications were filtered through the only two individuals who could or would dare to speak to her during production: her personal assistant, Elsie, a smaller, compacter, darker version of Freya who seemed instinctively to dislike everybody, and Rags, her husband, a spectral presence in leather pants and stainless steel glasses ("Nazi goggles," Freya called them), his large bony nose the subject of the usual jokes, the odious peat-bog aroma of his ever-present black cigarette enhancing the general aura of disquieting omniscience with which he distanced fans and followers. A dispenser and receiver of secrets, Rags confided only in his wife and his assistant, Eric, an ambitious toady of indeterminate loyalties whom Perry avoided whenever possible. The home life of this exotic group was impervious to the probes of the imagination, at least to one so obviously inadequate as Perry's. He could, however, easily envision Freya alone, either alone in the privacy of her quarters or alone with him.
The man beside Perry, an eerie ringer for his grandfather, turned away from quietly observing the action to confess in a mild voice, "I want to be goo."
Perry stared politely, waiting, as if an explanation would be helpful.
"I see myself as an enveloping disease whose sexual interaction consists of surrounding, penetrating, assimilating the submissive partner. Freya thinks it's a grand idea. She's going to coat me in purple Jell-O."
Freya called for quiet. The monster on the bed was at length and satisfactorily deflowered, though by the end Ms. Mohawk was so deeply engaged in her role she had to be commanded twice to cease with the pistoning. After apologizing to Tony, she said, "Wish I'd had this nasty about two years ago, it's just what my ex needed."
"It's what they all need," Freya proclaimed, "a taste of Thor's hammer." She noticed Perry and smiled. "You look exceptionally well tonight. Your fetch is quite strong. Dancing like a boxer. Very aggressive. Very
here.
What have you been up to today? Have you been a good boy?"
"Angelic." Too many sets of open ears, too many tuned-in consciousnesses. He felt embarrassed.
"Did you know I was assaulted once by the fetch of an enemy? An enemy I was unaware I had, always the worst sort. Yes, and today that person is stone blind." The smile had altered in neither size nor shape, shining persistently before him in enigmatic challenge.
"My proté
g
é
," she announced to the curious. "You'll be hearing more from Perry Foyle. What have you got for me today?"
He handed over the cassettes. "Double feature. A comedy, a tragedy, a full evening's worth of fine theatrical entertainment."
Elsie granted him a look devoid of human aspect, the light coming off her dark irises like the shine on an insect's shell.
"Fryska flokks,"
said Freya. "Let's go get pulsed."
Freya's office, a trendy arrangement of leather, chrome, track lighting, and mirrors -- how many of them two-way glass, like the silvered panel concealing Perry's peephole back at the Fuck House? -- bore an obvious resemblance to an athletic club, as did the playrooms, the video sets, the spacious den with the stationary bikes and the ceiling-suspended basket harnesses, testimony to one immigrant's prompt mastery of current marketing trends. Wicked get-down dirty sex portrayed in an atmosphere of wholesome hygienic athleticism was a combination calculated to tease beyond enduring the national cleft. "The aerobics instructor of the boudoir," proclaimed
Playboy,
to whom Freya remarked, "I am she who is due."
Floor-to-ceiling shelves were stocked with cassette copies of every Cool Cat Production. Walls were enlivened with the framed posters of several films
(Hot Honeyed Nuts
,
Stair Lay to Heaven,
etc.) she had starred in during her early acting years, autographed glossies of the tanned and the toned and the culturally coddled, her friends, her clients. Her desk top was littered with odd bits of wood and rock which the curious hands-on visitor quickly discovered were ancient carvings in human shapes phallic and vaginal, their mystic power entering into you at a touch, guaranteeing what Freya called laughingly "an itchy day."
She slipped one of Perry's tapes into the VCR; the television, largest he had ever seen, swarmed into imagery, gray figures struggled together on a rumpled bed in a grainy, airless, bottom-of-the-sea world.
Freya was impressed. "I love the look of your stuff. Combat footage."
Pleased Perry nodded shyly. He watched her watching the screen, the infinite versions of her she seemed to shed without strain or consciousness, each discarded copy an object of contemplative beauty, perpetually replenishing herself in the instant so that she was perpetually new. There should be an invisible custodian trailing behind to collect these ghost moltings of a life not the minutest particle of which should be lost.
Her eyes. He could hardly tolerate their attention.
"Tell me, my little 007, exactly what is the nice gentleman doing with those Mutant Ninja dolls?"
He hadn't a clue. "Visual aids?" he offered tentatively.
Freya wrinkled up her nose. "Observe, please. The girl's face. Is she experiencing joy? Is she learning anything new? No, she is simply enduring the reiteration of one old sad lesson: men are pigs. I'm afraid to ask, is this the comedy or the tragedy?"
"I laughed," he admitted, shrugging his shoulders, helpless, base, contemptible, yes, me too. "A couple times."
"Yes, which means your average dickhead will be rolling about the floor, holding his sides, and this tape could be a monster hit that would make me a bag of money despite the alarming number of flea bites Mr. Studsicle there appears to have on his big white ass. Might I inquire as to the nature of the other cassette, the tragedy?"
"Uh, handcuffs, and, uh. . . other stuff."
"I'll save it for later." She switched off the set. "Don't misunderstand me, Perry. I very much appreciate the privileged window you provide on certain anthropological aspects of the sexual life of modern savages, but frankly, I'm beginning to worry about deleterious effects. You Americans, already so coarse, dearly love to be coarsened further. So much education is required here, so much more work to be done. I've often wondered, what if, in order to function in intercourse, it were necessary that a man's organ become, not hard, but soft -- mushy, squishy, yucky soft. Think about it. The actual shape of the world would be radically altered. As in radical, getting back to the root."
"But I'm not directing the damn things," Perry argued. "I bring you the best, and there's not a particularly extensive choice."
"I know, I know" -- when she touched his bare arm, the tissue glowed -- "no personal criticisms intended. But the specific brand of eroticism you are repeatedly exposed to over there in your house of horrors is not conducive to developing sound attitudes."
"But my wallet is pumped."
"Oh yes, the great American fatality -- damage others, damage yourself, what does it matter as long as the bank account grows fat? Bottom line, bottom line, it's all I hear, put your bottom on the bottom line. And so here we are in the one business where you can literally do just that. Do you remember, Perry, the first time you visited me?"
How could he forget? He had been driven out to The Rainbow Bridge as a joke by Eric, Rags's assistant, whom he met at the wedding of two individuals neither man actually knew, ushered into the sanctum sanctorum here to be greeted by a majestic woman in a sweeping fur cape sewn apparently from the white pelts of these abundantly underfoot cats. ("My little darlings!" she exclaimed later, shocked by the suspicion. "Why would I do something as vulgar as that?") She was the absolute personification of blondness, even her hair so theatrically pale it appeared as if the skin on her head had, under pressure, exploded outward into dramatic fibers that had been fashionably teased and moussed.
He stood before her like a private on parade.
"Are you a good sexer?" she asked.
He failed to comprehend. She repeated the question.
"Oh. . . uh, yeah. . . sure, I guess."
"Yes, you look like a good sexer."
"No complaints," he lied, dutifully.
"Take off your pants."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm afraid, Perry, I can only go on repeating myself for so long before I become bored, bored, bored. I don't wish to get unpleasant. I sense you want to remove your pants for me, so please, please do."
Even her eyebrows were blond. Perry did as he was told, inwardly cringing before the unembarrassed boldness of her stare. He hadn't known women possessed such weapons in their arsenals.
After a distressingly extended study, judgment was pronounced.
"Yes, you're someone we might be able to use, you look ordinary enough."
He was intrigued, he was broke, he was agreeable to busting his thespian cherry on a current production titled
Waiting for the Cable
Guy, but under the lights his brio wilted. A few days later he approached Freya with his candid camcorder proposal, she admired the depraved ingenuity, and every Friday for the past nine months he had been delivering the results of his "field project" to her bustling door.
Freya was a remarkable woman, her singular genius to realize the extraordinary transformative power of the video camera, "the most effective erotic toy yet devised," and its potential as a weapon of liberation. The official Cool Cat T-shirts displayed a picture of a camcorder above the motto IN HOC SIGNO VINCES
.
Her amazing success was based upon the methodically earned appreciation of an increasingly substantial portion of democracy's heroes, plain folks, your average jane and joe (may these referents be so forever inverted), who cheered her shimmy up the greased pole of the "business" from "anonymous hole" -- typical remark of your typical wienie cameraman -- in an early motel-room cumfest to the reigning years as headlined superstar of the highest-grossing series in the history of the adult video industry. (Perry, of course, owned a complete set in the latex-bound collector's edition.) So when she retired from active performing, she possessed a following of sufficient numbers that production money was easily available for the launch of her own videos, hot fun from "a woman's point of view," designed specifically for couples, men and women together, not just the usual bearded half of the sexual equation. Her goal of eliminating from the field stereotypical sex for arrested stereotypical men developed into a celebration of ordinary people, her fans, who were encouraged to buy, rent, borrow the equipment, and tape themselves, tape their friends, liberate the bedroom, liberate the block, for here was sex not only in the style your neighbors performed it, but sex as actually performed by your neighbors -- the guerrilla punk aesthetic translated into the skin game -- the cream of the amateur endeavor becoming enshrined in Freya's lucrative Home Spices line, a cavalcade of body types from the buffed to the porky, sexual attributes in every size and shape, a true portrait of America at play.
Of course, a smattering of these so-called "hand jobs" were ringers, scenes Freya had staged and shot as clandestine lessons in the Freya-approved joy-sharing method of equitable sex. Distribute the seeds and allow mimetic desire to take its course. The novice discovered, after an initial period of apprehension and embarrassment, that playing to the camera, to the spectator within a spectator within a spectator, that built-in audience inside every media child's head, released unexpected possibilities of delight. In the distorting mirror of the camcorder everyone was a star. See yourself as image, become the image you want to see. The inherent aphrodisiacal properties of technology had never been so robustly endorsed. Techniques improved, sexual and video. Testimony arrived from couples who claimed to be unable to make love without a camera present, others who were becoming aroused in electronics stores. Something momentous appeared to be happening behind the bedroom walls of the nation, something socially historic, was it any wonder young Perry wanted to hitch a ride on this stretch limo dash to the magic kingdom? The batch of sordid tapes he dropped like fresh kill at Freya's feet was his admission ticket to the enveloping nimbus of her fame and a gesture he knew, despite occasional criticisms, she prized, whether his offerings were processed into commercial fodder or stored upright in her private library of pleasures, these solid surrounding shelves of kissing, licking, moaning, and sighing -- her gift to the marvelous country that had granted her adolescent winter dreams.
She regarded Perry with the look of a horsewoman sniffing a riding crop. "I want you behind a camera for me tonight. There's to be an event. Do you know Carl Dyne?"
No, he did not, and her description failed to distinguish him in Perry's mind from the pack of "lovable eccentrics" who swarmed over the property like confused lemmings.
"Tonight, my dear, Mr. Dyne's lifelong fantasy becomes, with our aid, realized in fact. We're crucifying him to the old oak out back."
"Real nails?"
"Oh, Perry, you're so evil. No, my little demon, he wishes to be secured by leather thongs, in the original manner, of course, and he wants the mean Roman centurions replaced by a nubile tribe of disrobed maidens, one of whom is required, during his prolonged agony, to be blowing him."
"Sounds like Mr. Dyne has too much time on his hands."
"No one has too much time, Perry, but then you're too bedewed to understand that yet. What there is too much of is boredom. And in boredom dwell the psychic mites." She showed him the sweet sickle of her smile, the one that opened him up from sternum to groin. "Don't let the icky mites get on you."
He mumbled out some adequate reply, she kept on speaking, the words barely registering on the vibrating cells of his mind as she guided him gracefully toward the door, her elegant hand brushing ever so delicately across his burning back, skin to skin, the intervening material of his shirt having cleverly dissolved, then the hand reached out for the gleaming doorknob and they were buried in a convulsive blast of party racket.