The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [79]
JANEY, MY FRIEND the video artist, called me and said she wanted to have coffee, so I met her at a rival caffeine establishment, Goodbye Blue Monday, that was more downtown Ann Arbor than we were at Jitters, out there at the mall. They had GBM decorated to look Eurochic, with posters on the wall of people wearing berets and Woody Allen in French and all that other Parisian high life everywhere. Janey was sitting at a back table reading the current issue of Bust magazine. She was all grown up but you could see where her pimples had once been when you approached her. When she smiled at me, it was wolfish. Untamed, though not in the good way. She had brown hair like a wolf. Some girls, it almost doesn’t matter if they wash their hair or not. Shampoo won’t help these ladies. I can be a bitch, I got to watch that tendency.
You just knew from the radar that she was a woman who dug other women physically but wouldn’t do anything about it, and she had spent her young life hemming and hawing, lighting cigarettes and putting them out in frustration. She had an inventory of failed gestures. Being modern, I’d slept with other girls once or twice myself but that was all over now that Oscar loved me and we’d have a life together. Janey, she was pretty in a predatory way, like that pianist, Liberace, but without the clothes he wore to keep you confused and off the scent. She just wore jeans and tee-shirts, like me. You could see by peering at her why she wanted to film porn all day. She stared with these dead-fish eyes at whatever was swimming by her. She was a hungry ghost, sucking people up in her karmic vacuum cleaner and storing them in the dustbag. Also, she chewed her fingernails. I hate that. Still, we were friends, maybe out of convenience or something.
Anyway, she was sitting there with the videotape on the table. She gave me a sort of bored wave of hello, like I was already a disappointment to her before our first words had been spoken, very Hollywood agent, and she flipped her head back with this girl-of-the-world shake, accompanied by her patented wolf smile, which looks better on guys than it does on her. “Hey, Barlow,” she said. Barlow is my last name. “Whassup?”
“Not much,” I said. “How ’bout you?”
She shook one of her hands like there was water on it. “Do you ever get bored with weather? The weather is so sobering around here.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I pretended to smile, which came out as a real smile. “I’m going to move to Seattle or somewhere where they have some goddamn actual weather. You know: real rain? Rain and heroin. As opposed to what we get here? Oh, and guess what. I’m discovering something,” she said, sipping her cappuccino. “Guess what I discovered.”
I leaned back. “No idea.”
“Try to guess.”
“Janey, I gotta be at work in a coupla hours. I don’t have time to guess.” She was staring at me like she wanted to dine out on me, and she flashed me a quick thing, an event-horizon thing lowering and happening on her face, and then it was gone, and she was normal again. “Why don’t you just tell me?”
“Okay,” she said. “The video we made? The one with you and Oscar, that I shot and directed? We’re not going to make any serious money out of it. In fact,” she said, “we’re not going to make any money at all, almost.”
“Like how much?”
She leaned back. “Like almost nothing. Like zilch.”
“Jeez.” I felt that punch in your arm you feel when you’re disappointed. I hadn’t minded Janey taping us doing our mating dance because I figured we’d get enough for a deposit on a better apartment. Besides, you could tell straight sex just bored her silly, when it was happening in front of her, and she wasn’t paying attention, except technically. “I was expecting a lot more,” I said. “Considering how easy it was, doing it.”
“Well it just goes to show. I guess it’s harder to break into the sex industry than I thought. They’re sort of going for the details, those guys. People are bored with what we served up. They want exotica. They didn’t say anything about exotica in the ad. But get this. They