Jessup nodded sagely and opened his pouting lips to say, “You had this other girl you wanted to bang. Tell me who, Mr. Thorne. Did Emily know her? Was she another good friend of Emily’s? Did you fuck one of her friends?”
David wanted to punch him in the face, but he deserved this opprobrium no matter who it came from, even from this monster. For a moment he was unable to continue.
With his free hand, Jessup turned one of the ten photos to face David, but David couldn’t look at it and still finish his story.
“I had adapted a screenplay from my first novel. The film was in preproduction, almost ready to roll. I thought it was such a big deal. But it was just a movie. It wasn’t anything that mattered, not in the long run. Some of the actors wanted to talk to me about their roles. Sometimes, if the director is just a shooter, just interested in the visuals, the actors want to talk to the screenwriter. I was in and out of LA. Mainly it was the female lead. She was only a few years older than me, but she was a huge star, beautiful. She came on to me a little. Then more than a little. I knew . . . knew I could have her, be with her.”
By the intensity with which he listened, by the fierce tension in his shackled body, Jessup demanded eye contact. David met his stare as the big man said, “I know who she is, Dave. Since you and me become friends, I learned all about you, read up on you, your big career. I know the movie, the star. She’s hot. She a good girl? Were she slick when you was in her?”
David shuddered with revulsion. He took a few deep breaths to steady himself.
Jessup’s ripe mouth formed a lazy crescent, the smile of a demon dreaming, and he turned another of the photos so that Emily faced David.
Get it over with.
“Just before Emily got the call from Nina, the actress phoned to invite me to dinner the next evening at her home in Bel Air, to discuss the motivation of her character, maybe to slightly massage some dialogue. I told Emily the call was from the director, I needed to go to LA for a couple days, it was important to the picture, I couldn’t drive with her up to San Luis Obispo. Emily understood. She always understood. She was always supportive.”
Turning a third photo toward David, Jessup said, “She didn’t really understand, Dave. She didn’t understand how you was lying your ass off to her.”
David looked over Ronny Jessup’s head at a high window screened and barred even though it was out of reach. A white bird perched on the outer sill, peering in and down at them as though it must be an augury of some portentous event impending.
He said, “She went to Nina by herself, stayed four days, started home in the afternoon, and ran into worse weather than she was expecting. And then her car broke down. I never . . . I never saw her again.”
Jessup shook his head. “That don’t do it, Dave. You skipped the best part. You skipped the actress part. It weren’t just dinner. You stayed the night, I bet.”
“Two nights. All these years later, I still don’t understand myself, why I did it, what I was thinking. The fact that she was famous, that every man I knew would have envied me if they’d known? The glamour?” A short, bitter laugh escaped him. “It was about as glamorous as mud wrestling. She drank too much. So did I, though I never had before. She did cocaine, and I didn’t. She was beautiful, but not as beautiful as Emily. She was uninhibited, yeah, but to an extent that scared me, that sickened me, the things she wanted, and in spite of all that, she was boring, self-absorbed. No real wit, no great intelligence, no genuine warmth but plenty of the method-acting kind.”
“Tell me what you done with her and all, what sickened you,” Jessup said. “Tell me, Dave. You got to look me in the eyes, look me straight in the eyes, Dave, don’t shy away, and tell old Ronny . . . if then you want me to tell you.”
When you made a deal with the devil, you had to expect there was fine print that, in your eagerness to descend, you failed to read but by which you were obligated to abide.
They sat eye to eye through David’s disclosures. The longer he met Jessup’s cobra stare, the more he was spell-caught by it, unable to look away. An ineffable connection arose between them, a seeming psychic wire. Word by word, David sensed not that something vital might be draining from him, which the term psychic vampire could have predisposed him to feel, but instead that Ronny Jessup strove to transmit some essential part of himself into his visitor, as though, at the end of this, David would find himself shackled and trapped in Jessup’s body, while Jessup walked free as David Thorne.