It was all about Cal being littler than Nicolene was, and thinner too. She was one of those former field hockey types, trim and toned and big. It intrigued her that in any actual physical contest she could likely overpower him. She found it alluring, in fact. It also didn’t hurt that he made ten times the money she did, or that there was an aura of semi-fame about him - in trade circles, at least. He was always being written about for winning this or that. His formula for success as a leader, he once told her, was that “if I am weak, others will be strong.” And when he said things like this he laughed that deft, sly laugh of his and she was electrified.
They both lived around Boston. But they saw each other thousands of miles away in other cities like Vancouver, places that were important to the advertising industry. Once they were eating gobs of Vancouver sushi after a long, mean day at the sound stage. He told her his battleaxe story and nearly made her choke laughing on a purple slab of maguro.
“All I’m doing,” he said, “is walking with my dog on a leash, and the dog wanders over to the battleaxe’s property. And not even her fucking property - the town grass that edges her sidewalk.
“So she comes running out to her precious rhododendron bushes yelling, ‘get him away from there.’
“So I reel in the leash and yell back, ‘it’s a SHE.’ And then the battleaxe screams, ‘well I don’t give a damn.’ And then I scream, ‘well I don’t either.’ And then she screams even louder, ‘you’re going to be reported.’”
She saw this as his unreal suburban side, the side that was totally unconvincing, almost as if he were making it up. Walking a big panting retriever, mowing a lawn, where did it fit? She had never observed those thin, hairy wrists lift anything heavier than a cigarette. Or a champagne flute.
He should have been gay. He had all of the markings. When Nicolene was taking film production at B.U. theater school, creatures like Cal were always camping it up on Symphony Road and Gainsborough Street, cruising the Fenway on balmy nights. They were pals of hers. She loved the patter and pomp. But there was something about Cal that was not that way. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was something she found accessible. She could almost smell it in his hair and taste it when he pecked her on the lips in that showbizzy way. On the set in Vancouver, during the tedium of pre-lighting, he flitted over and plopped himself in her lap. He sat there in his skinny black jeans and ate a Twizzler. He was a darling imp. It seemed utterly unreal that he was married.
Vancouver was typical. They were there for two weeks, scouting, casting and shooting. Then they went to Santa Monica for two more weeks of post production. They had down time and gorgeous weather the day before the Santa Monica flight. They made a quick visit to Stanley Park and watched the two Beluga whales, one male and one female.
“I hear they screw like maniacs,” he said. “The water sloshes everywhere.”
She watched his fox eyes for the innuendo, and it was there. But as usual he kissed it off into a not-serious-at-all work comment. “We need a condom account. We could go upscale and call it Beluga, the caviar of condoms. Tested at ten tons of pressure - a whale of a screw.” The way he said it, it sounded like junior high shock talk. Something he had read ina dirty comic book.
They walked farther and found a bridge over a chasm. One of those shaky hammock-like bridges you always see being blown up in Southeast Asia war movies. Tourists were picking their way across.
“You first,” he said, and she marched across, as fearlessly as she used to march across the field hockey grass. But he went out a third of the way and stopped dead in his tracks. “You’re the producer, save me,” he yelled, doing his best to be ironic. But she didn’t like the way he was clutching and swaying, and she ran out and grabbed his skinny elbow, not even aware of the wobbly slats and cables rocking underfoot. He was ashen and clammy as they hit terra firma. They sat close under a big tree for a half hour, dappled by light and shade. His head grazed her breast and she reached for the scruff of his neck and pulled him to her, as though his head were a buzz-cut kitten. Cal didn’t resist. Hardly. He leaned in and let her rub the bumps of his scalp. She was wearing a sleeveless top and it was hot out. There was a moment when she thought he was sneaking a sniff of her deodorant. She also thought she saw a bulge in his khaki shorts. She went with it and cradled his head even tighter. As usual when they got to that point, he pulled his rabbit move, shouting “shopping time,” and jumping up. They found their rental car and drove back downtown. According to protocol she drove and he was driven. She was merely the producer, a freelancer at that. He was the creative director. The Number One.
In Santa Monica they had an editor who was known in the feature film business. His girlfriend was a minor starlet, the kind that came from commercials and would soon go back. Cal took one look at the cut and threw it out. “Smart, smart, but too slow for us,” he said, in a voice that purred and snipped all at once. “It takes thirty seconds to get going. But honey, thirty seconds is all we have.” And the way he said “honey,” spinning his head so it was exactly mid-way between the editor’s eyes and Nicolene’s eyes, made the little sting of blame - and more -apply equally to both. The editor, of course, had been her recommendation.
To make amends, the editor’s rep took them to dinner at Chinois. Cal said he felt feverish and picked at his vegetable straws and purply lamb nuggets. Between bird bites he smoked and twirled his ebony chopsticks. The rep was a dime-a-dozen bodybuilder in a Versace mesh tee. Everything was sculpted, including the nose. He wrangled the food choices so that he and Nicolene were feeding off the same catfish. All through the catfish the rep couldn’t take his eyes off Nicolene and her breasts. And Nicolene couldn’t take her eyes off Cal and his feverish face. She watched the way he cooled himself with gin, pressing the frosted martini glass against his cheek. These little things he did - they knocked her out - and it was the littleness that did it more than the things. Cal was a bonsai person. Size-wise, the rep could have been the dad, Nicolene the mom and Cal the son. When the catfish got nibbled down to all bones, the rep and Nicolene went off in his Boxster to do what they would do. And Cal left his pile of lamb and straw vegetables and cabbed back to his room at Shutters On The Beach, sighing feverishly. Around this time in the Shutters lobby she caught that news story about some Japanese making a sculpture of a bull the size of a single blood cell. It stuck in her mind. She saw this project as very Cal, something he might well do with just a pair of chopsticks.
Before they flew out of L.A., she bought him a black silk shirt in Beverly Hills. Because she wanted to.
“What will your wife say?,” she said, buttoning his chest button.
“My wife,” he said, “Mmmm.” The sound came out wolfish and perturbed, a mixture of opposites in the exact same proportions, perfectly balanced. Nicolene offered up her American Express card at the sales desk. They both knew the purchase would slip into the shoot budget and be passed on to their rich, innocent client. But Nicolene did not know what Cal meant with his “Mmmm.”
On the United flight she coaxed him to show the wife pictures, half-hoping they would neither be with him nor even exist. But he produced this shot of a small skinny thing with buzz-cut hair, cute legs in rolled-up dungarees and subtle saucer breasts. Like Cal, she had straight lines and angles where Nicolene had circles and curves.
Like Cal, in fact, was the operative phrase. The wife could have been the girlish brother or the boyish sister. Nicolene looked down at the snapshot and up at Cal. She had a sense of impending triumph and held back the tease-question she wanted to ask - whether Mr. and Mrs. Cal both bought their duds in the Boys’ Department. She had to exercise caution, she was still the freelancer, slave to the per diem. Without the Number One’s initials on the P.O. she couldn’t step on a plane or bill a nickel.
“What size are you anyway - in suits?”
She flipped this out as they passed somewhere over upstate New York, co-browsing the Italian GQ she had stuffed in her bag at LAX.
“Size 6 in Chanel,” he said, batting his eyes in that way he had of letting you know he was but he wasn’t.
At Logan Airport they went their separate ways for two or three months - this was the customary cycle - until somebody came up with a budget again. New projects always began with an homage trip to his office, where he personally walked her through the approved storyboards, suggesting changes as fast as they flew into his head - “if I put in redwood trees what will it cost?”- whereupon she gave the appropriate maternal lecture about vendors, locations and fiscal realities. This ceremony was the true and authentic contract between them.
The walls of his office still looked as though he hadn’t even moved in yet. They were high and bare as blank sheets of giant paper. The only ornamentation was a simple slate gray table crammed with brassy, tacky statuettes, bowls and cubes, his arsenal of awards. He said it was his statement, his decorating philosophy - the Zen of Ego. This time she believed him in spite of the mocking tone, but the concept of his being the one and only excited her. In his blank walls she saw loneliness on an architectural scale. Thirty feet long and ten feet tall.
She also saw opportunity. He was, after all, wearing the black shirt. The Orlando shoot kicked off as pure farce. Afternoon Florida electrical storms pushed the Delta back to the Boston gate. The passengers stayed imprisoned so long the crew finally showed mercy and let people off with their boarding passes. The pilot himself told Nicolene she and Cal could venture beyond the gate area, things were so socked in. They went past security into the main terminal and ate tepid Legal Seafoods chowder, thick as Elmer’s Glue. They peed and returned to the gate, where they found the Delta had up and gone; no announcement, nothing. They whined and were put on a later plane, but at the carousel in Orlando they were told their luggage had come in on the earlier Delta, the one that had abandoned them. And when nobody claimed it, the luggage was re-loaded and sent back to Boston on the very same aircraft.
Squinting at his thin vintage watch - it took a womanish band to fit his wrist - Cal estimated the luggage had actually passed them in the air. They checked into the hotel, one of those tropical Hyatts, with zip, zero, not even a razor blade in their possession. It meant she could take him shopping on the client’s nickel- for everything from toothpaste to skinny underwear; and in the mall, at least, he let her have her way. At Saks she splashed sample cologne on his neck.
They had midnight get-acquainted drinks with the director and the A.D., a South African who was entitled to his sweaty safari shirt, having just copped a Golden Globe for a jungle movie. Cal made napkin sketches for the A.D. while the Hyatt parrot squawked in their ears. They adjourned, turned in, and five minutes later the A.D. was on Nicolene’s phone. She went to his room and he machine-fucked her right through the sunrise. “Roll credits,” she said, and limped back down the corridor, remembering she was supposed to wake Cal in forty eight minutes.
He got up with a backache which he said he felt all the way through to his stomach, left side and low. For two days she made him swallow green tea with his Motrin. She had a P.A. run out for liquid echinacea, said to be stronger and faster than the tablets, and in the Winnebago she rubbed his skinny vertebrae down to the tailbone.
This at least got them through the start of the shoot. Enough so the cast and crew had a sense of what The Number One wanted. On day three he couldn’t stand up without doubling over. She found him on a couch in the lobby and took him back to his room. He rolled onto his bed and lay there whimpering, knees pulled up like a jacknife blade towards his chin.
Nicolene would always remember the words the hotel doctor chose to describe this particular pain, calling it the closest a male can get to experiencing childbirth. The doctor addressed his diagnostic comments to her more than to Cal himself, assuming her presence in the room and on the edge of the bed meant she was the wife.
“This is codeine, not as strong as morphine,” he said, filling and jabbing in the hypodermic without breaking the cadence of his sentence. “I hope it gets him through the day. With a kidney stone you can’t predict.” To present his cheeks for the shot, Cal had had to pull down the underwear she had bought him. Nicolene, acting under her new authority as deputy wife, bent across the sheets to help. The waistband had left marks in the skin of his hips. Reddish tracks. Studying these marks, she felt as though she had somehow signed her name on him.
The doctor extracted the needle and applied an alcohol-soaked gauze pad. Nicolene pushed his hand away and took control of the compress. She was still holding it there, pressing and rubbing, as the doctor closed his bag and made his exit. The bum she was viewing for the first time was runty, built for speed. To her it looked half the size of her own.
“You’re drinking nothing but cranberry juice,” she said. “Quarts of it.”
“What if it never comes out?”
“What?”
“The stone. If it doesn’t pass, they might have to snag it with a wire. I think that’s what they do.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She couldn’t resist the opportunity. “What would Mrs. Cal say then?”
He was not too sick to pick up the ball. “Who’s Mrs. Cal?”
“You know who.”
“Mmmm,” he said, but the sound came out in the same cryptic way it had in his office, exactly. To Nicolene it was a signal, though no more readable than a white cloud in a gray sky.
He didn’t roll over on his back and neither of them pulled up his underpants, not even when he yawned under the rush of the codeine. She left him there with his tush, dozing, and wrote a “feel better” note on a yellow sticky, which she hung on the edge of the nightstand but considered affixing to his needled cheek. Then her pager went off and the panic hit, the panic of a $500,000 day that was half over. With Cal out of the picture the proverbial hot turd was in her pocket, and there was no one to pass it to. She raced off straight to the shoot and spent the whole lunch hour calming down the half-crazed client.
Cal phoned at twilight from his bed - the ailing Napoleon hectoring the troops. “I hope you covered my ass with them,” he said to her. This was no small shoot, and Nicolene did the rest of it all by herself, essentially. Cal checked out and flew back to Logan, shot up with a ton of codeine. He had her book him two first class seats, which he used as his mile-high hospital bed, sucking vodka and cranberry juice through a straw until he passed out.
Late in the post-production process he returned to the arena, ever the matador, and nailed the soundtrack in ways that made the picture twice as good.
When the next job came through - and this time it wasn’t for four months -the assignment was Tokyo, the very home of bonsai.
But like bonsai, the four months felt miniaturized. Stepping into his office she felt it had only been four days. Four days since Orlando. Four days since her last trip to his domain to let him walk her through the boards. Decoratively all was the same. Clean and bare, unfinished as ever. Walls the size of cinema screens - open to all possibilities. “I made one addition,” he said, with a juvenile cackle, like the cub scout who’s swallowed the worm. From the trophy heap on the slate gray table he plucked a slender stem of crystal, clear and empty, except for a tiny charcoal speck at the bottom. He held it up and gave her a loupe so she could examine it. Under magnification the speck was rough and sharp at the edges, like a chunk of mineral.
“It’s my stone,” he said beaming. “I pissed it out in a urinal at the Ritz.”
She did the obligatory “yuck” and mock-slapped his wrist. As she did she had the weirdest feeling someone else had just been here, someone she could sense but not see. The hotel doctor who had mistaken her for the wife. It was eerie - as if the doctor had just snapped his black bag, shut the door and left them alone. The echo of this feeling stayed with Nicolene all through the Tokyo shoot, occasionally rising to the surface, sometimes plunging to depths almost out of sight.
Tokyo was a film shoot that was like a film itself. The client was a Japanese electronics giant with buildings everywhere. Nicolene and Cal were taken from building to building like diplomats, whisked about in shiny black cars with white doilies on the headrests of their seats. When they weren’t shooting or client-stroking or fighting with the director, they went to tepanyaki bars and watched the live prawns wiggle and sizzle and die on the grill right under their eyes. Then they chewed and ate them. What went down Nicolene’s throat felt more like the remains of large prehistoric bugs than normal shrimp. And she had a sense of herself moving like a sea creature on an aimless, endless prowl.
The last shoot day was an all-nighter and then some. Nicolene and Cal dragged themselves through Narita and sank asleep on a couch in the first class lounge. They walked, when it was time, like two zombies drifting down the jetway. Ensconced in the front of the plane, they refused juice and nuts and curled up like snails in their side-by-side multi-position seats. They were out cold during taxi and takeoff: seemingly a pair of sleepwalkers who had just returned from a brief twilight-zone stroll, safely back in the bed they had just left.
Neither of them really became fully awake during their sixteen hour flight. They lay side by side, dreaming and tossing, asleep with each other if not sleeping with each other. When the plane pitched or dipped they would shift their positions under their respective blankets. Their knees and shoeless feet would bump and rub. Through the veil of a feral half-delirium Nicolene smelled Cal, his spice and his musk, heard him breathe, reached out to touch and arouse him. She dimly perceived that under his cover of sleep he was taking pre-conscious license, fumbling in his ever-adolescent way to do the same with her. As the plane flew high above the ocean it was as though they were deep beneath it, cavorting in a wavy, watery world where they were the only two people. And in this subterranean dimension the little man, at last, belonged to her.
So it was simply unacceptable for it all to end when they surfaced, came up to earth as the wheels touched the Logan runway. There had been too many days and nights and months, too many shared dilemmas and delights. Nicolene felt it had all built up to a dizzying point, as if her account with him contained more frequent flyer miles than she could ever use -but what she had earned, what she was owed, was far more than a trip to Tokyo and back.
In their own world, the bonsai world, they had become part of each other. The doctor in Orlando had seen it and reacted appropriately. But outside the terminal Cal stood on his toes and kissed her - and then he kissed her off. His exit line came courtesy of the car service: a placard with his name on it, misspelled. “My fan club,” he said, and chased after the bobbing sign and the rumpled driver in black who carried it. Nicolene held her hand to her face. It was the hand that had given him his wet dream, still dense with the odor of his prick. If things followed their normal cycle this would be it, period. It would be all she would have of him for three months or more. All the way home in the cab she thought about him standing on his toes at the airport, caged for a second in her arms. He was so much lighter than she was - and faster. It made her lick her lips like a big cat.
Nicolene lived with it for seven days and realized she could not live with it for seven more. She called Cal’s secretary, made up some story about a new digital imaging thing from Europe, and got on his calendar. She went there early and stalked the lobby until it was her turn, too itchy to sit with the Elles and Vogues and trade rags on the coffee table.
The secretary opened the office door and Nicolene passed through. She had expected to pounce on him the moment she saw him, but instead she spent a vast wordless spell not noticing him at all. It was because the once-blank walls now nearly pulled the eyeballs out of her head. The wide white spaces were plastered all over with photographs, huge blowups that looked like stills from a home videotape. Some of the shots were shaky-cam and out of frame to impart the required edgy feel, but the subjects were family-album vanilla: Picture upon picture of Young Mom holding her newborn at the hospital and at home. Now and then Cal the Dad was there too, beaming at the two beloveds.
Nicolene tottered on her dagger heels, the heels that had made the A.D. in Florida want to eat her calf muscles. The mom all over the walls had the same features as the buzz-cut android whose snapshots she had dissed on the plane. It was her indeed, the same person. But now there was this radiance thing, the whole crock, the glow, the suck-me, drink-me thing - and everything about the formerly boyish wife was oval, even the hair, everything had a sacred round ripeness to it. The biggest picture of all was a classic three-shot of mother and baby in a ladderback rocking chair, father peering proudly. Cal had the grin of a giddy simp. He held up a big cigar. He wore the checkered shirt you see in weed-whacker ads.
When she turned to him and talked the picture was so big and loud she could almost hear it, its color erasing her own voice.
“These weren’t here the last time I came.”
He shuffled two steps back. “Well, they are now.”
Nicolene looked at the dial of her watch. 11 .am.
“Let’s go get some lunch.”
“Lunch?”
“Let’s just get out of here.”
He wouldn’t budge, of course. He wouldn’t even let her get within three feet of him. He had the gall to burrow into his official corporate place of refuge, the seat behind the ebony desk, big as a concert piano. If Nicolene wanted to so much as touch him she would have had to make a scene, stretch herself across his plateau of papers. She was compelled to sit at the foot of the black fortress in the vendor’s chair. As the blood drained from her face she felt as though she were being stripped, not of clothes but of hard-won status, banished from her own life.
He let her sit there and play cat and mouse with him, because he knew he was uncatchable. She would have done it all day had she not seen something - first in the pictures of his face and then in his real face. It gradually gave her the sense she was looking at time-lapse photography, a computerized image of passages through adulthood. A droop, a long shadow had crept into the skin under his eyes. Overall he looked thicker and pudgier, even his quick wrist did- as though in the twelve days since she had been with him he had crossed some divide, a picket fence, and entered that place where small, confused men gratefully turn into nut-gathering squirrels.
Eventually Nicolene skulked off and ordered lunch alone. The moment the lunch came she asked for the check. Then she went to F.A.O. Schwarz, to the baby department, and found one of those bears they sell. All through the store they were playing that song of theirs. The one with the child voices, “Welcome to our World.” After she dealt with the bear - sending it to The Spouse with a note and smiley face - Nicolene left and crossed over to Saks. She was still hearing the F.A.O Schwarz song, “Welcome to our World.” The voices chimed and whined in her head like a holiday migraine.
At Saks Nicolene went to Chanel and picked out a black dress, size 6. She dropped her business card into the Saks box and told them to courier it to Cal’s office. To remind him who he was.