Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [9]
What I remember next of that night was opening her door without knocking, just as I had been told, and seeing Vivian sitting naked in her bed, casually smoking a cigarette and cradling the teddy bear between her legs as though it were a child, Edith Piaf crooning softly in the background like a sad ghost trying to exorcise her own memory, and the lingering flying carpet of marijuana exhaust floating over her head as I closed the door behind me. It was an opium den with a naked girl and a stuffed bear, both of them waiting just for me. A night, in short, for the record books, and when I drove out before dawn, the guard was asleep in the chair in his booth and a thick fog filled the space between earth and sky, but not nearly so thick as the fog in my mind.
And now here I was again, not really believing it. Everything came back a little at a time, like the pages of a diary thrown into a fire, then retrieved from the ashes. I went over to the shelf with the stereo and television and slipped in the videotape. I was aware of the element of self-torture involved with what I was doing, aware that I was having my buttons pushed and pushed hard, aware of the yacht silent and white in the sunlight, aware of the money, aware that I was being foolish. I switched on the television and the VCR, then sat back in a yellow beanbag chair that absorbed me like a giant sponge.
Several times I was forced to turn away from what I saw. There were no trailers to sit through, certainly no cartoons, only a brief, ragged fence of static that morphed into the view of the room. Matson and Vivian sitting at a table in what looked like a hotel room, judging by the generic furniture. They were talking, smoking cigarettes, and there were glasses and two bottles of red wine. I turned down the volume. For some reason hearing her voice was worse than seeing her face.
Then a second man entered the frame, and I jumped as though he had burst in on me. I didn’t know him. He was well tanned, well groomed, dark-haired, handsome in that perfect way. He seemed to be in his late thirties, a medium-size man in a beige sports jacket and black slacks. He had a military-style crew cut. He walked over to the camera and leaned down and placed his face close to its lens and grinned like an idiot. Then he went over to the table and poured himself a glass of wine and sat down across from Vivian and Matson. Matson held up a hundred-dollar bill to the camera and winked devilishly; then he rolled it into a tube. Each of them did a line of coke off a mirror laid flat on the table.
After a while they got into it. Vivian slipped off a periwinkle-colored silk dress, and the men began taking off their clothing. Vivian and Matson kept up their chatter as she removed her bra and panties, but the other man looked nervous and uncertain. The cameraman, whoever he was, panned in on his face so that I could see him sweating. Vivian’s eyes looked glazed, and I gave in to the merciful thought that she had to be on something.
Matson went first. He was tall, rangy, with a hawk nose and a shock of straight black hair that made him look like a rock star. I remembered the times I had trained him, taught him a little tai chi and tried to get him off the coke. He had the arms I had given him, but also the puffed-out gut of a skinny, full-time drinker he had given himself. I watched him and tried to understand that he was dead.
He was very thorough with her, as was she with him. Then the other man came over, looking shy and tentative and trying to hide it with the fake smile of a man who would rather be elsewhere. Matson went and sat down and drank his wine while his pal took his turn. The other man was trying extra hard to look lustful, but all he managed to do was look sad and pitiful, like a man who has reached some previously unexplored limit