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I feigned a look of crest-fallen hurt. “Arrogant? Are you calling me arrogant?” My eyes became sad and injured.
“Yes,” the woman flared.
I shook my head. “Well I’m not,” I insisted. “I’m not arrogant at all.”
And then I smiled. It was my best smile – the one I reserved for special occasions. It started at the corners of my mouth and spread across my face until it glinted mischievously in my eyes. “I’m cocky.”
Connie almost smiled despite herself.
Almost…
I turned away, and as I did I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was well into the afternoon. Time for me to start drinking.
There was alcohol in the kitchen – a witch’s pantry of potions that could be mixed to induce anything from euphoria to a coma. I decided on euphoria and started splashing spirits randomly into a glass and then stopped suddenly and tilted my head quizzically to the side. “Connie, I just don’t get you,” I said suddenly. “I don’t understand where you’re coming from. Are you deeply religious?”
The woman twisted on the sofa so that she could watch me. She shook her head. “No, I’m not religious at all.”
I frowned as if the mystery had deepened. “Well, did you have a bad experience with a guy at some point in your life?”
The woman shook her head. “No.”
I dropped a handful of ice cubes into the hideous mixture before me and then swallowed the contents of the glass in a single gulp. I winced as the fumes scorched the back of my throat, and I felt my eyes water. I hunched over the counter for a moment and waited until my senses stopped reeling and I felt the first soft glow of a buzz beginning to spread through my body.
“Well what the hell do you have against sex?”
Connie stared blankly for a few moments, like maybe she was trying to decide what she had against sex, or maybe like she was trying to decide if she should tell me. I watched her with bright eyes, my interest detached with a clinical kind of fascination. Curiosity made me want to know what made this woman tick.
“I just happen to think that sex is not something that needs to be – or should be – captured on film and shown to millions of leering men for their seedy pleasure,” she said. “Sex to me can only come through a feeling of love, and a deep emotional need to share your body with another. But for you, Rick Cassidy, for you sex is nothing more than a cheap thrill. You treat the act like it’s a disposable item. You don’t value it,” and then her voice trailed away so that I barely heard her whisper, “and you don’t cherish it.”
I felt a bemused laugh leap into my throat. I choked it down and shook my head sadly.
“It’s sex!” I said. “Don’t complicate it. Don’t analyze it. And don’t tarnish it.”
“Tarnish it?”
“That’s right,” I pointed an accusing finger. “Sex is pure – it’s an instinctive urge. It’s as old as time itself – the coming together of a man and a woman to fulfill a basic and essential need. At least that’s what it was before society burdened it with words like ‘love’ and the fucking church made the world feel guilty,” I said.
The woman stared at me, her face blank, but something moved behind her eyes, like a cloud shadowing over a deep green lake.
“That’s an interesting way of looking at things,” she said cautiously, as if to concede the point somehow made her complicit.
“That’s how I look at it,” I said. “Sex is raw. Sex is real. Lust is an emotion we all feel. It shouldn’t be demonized, it should be a celebrated part of life.”
For a moment Connie’s expression became ferocious and her dazzling green eyes snapped with a spark of electricity. She pushed herself off the sofa so that she was standing, facing me. “What about God?” she asked. “What about love and marriage?”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe in any of them.”
She paused for a moment, as though shocked or surprised. She arched an eyebrow and propped one hand on her hip. “Well what do you believe in then? What’s left to believe in?”
“I told you,” I said. “I believe in sex. It’s the purest expression of who we are as people. Strip away religion and love, and what you have left is the only thing that matters – the only thing that truly inspires the best – and the worst in all of us.”
Connie smiled but there was no humor in her face. The smile was bleak and merciless. “And what do you represent?” she asked me, becoming intrigued, almost challenging. “The best… or the worst?”
I hung a confident smile from the corner of my mouth. “Oh, I’m the best,” I assured her, “In the most wicked, erotic way you could ever imagine.”
Chapter 3.
Connie sat back down, the tension seeming to gradually seep away from her body. She settled herself on the sofa and when I looked next she had a notepad in her lap and a pen poised ready.
“So how do you want to do this?” I asked.
“This?”
I nodded. “How do you intend on conducting this interview? I mean do you have a list of prepared questions? Is that how you normally get your information and write your stories?”
Connie hesitated and then inclined her head just a fraction. “Normally…” her voice sounded almost self-conscious.
“Normally? Are you saying that I’m not a normal interview subject?”
She shook her head. There was the barest trace of a smile at the corner of her lips. “No,” she said. “What I’m actually trying to say is that in normal circumstances, I would have a list of prepared questions to work from – but as I mentioned earlier, these circumstances aren’t normal.”
“Meaning you haven’t had time to prepare and do your research, right?”
She nodded again as if to concede the point somehow diminished her. “That’s right.”
There was a big leather recliner chair in a corner of the room. I sat down so that we were facing each other, with just an oriental rug on the floor between us. I waved one hand in the air in a casual gesture. “No problem,” I said. “Can’t you just ask me questions today based on what you already know of me, and maybe some of my films you’ve seen? You can always do some research tonight and prepare questions, can’t you?”
Connie shifted on the sofa with a kind of awkward agitation. I sensed her eyes become restless and remote.
“There’s a problem with that,” she said softly and I could tell by the tone of her voice that the words were an understatement.
I leaned forward. “A problem with what, exactly?”
Connie’s face flushed and she swallowed hard. “I… I wasn’t lying,” she confessed. “I honestly didn’t know who you were before yesterday when I was given this assignment… and I have never watched pornographic films.”
I blinked in surprise, recoiled so that I slumped dramatically back into the chair.
“You’ve never watched a porn movie?”
The woman shook her head vehemently.
“Not even a glimpse – a scene or two?”
“No,” she said. “Never.”
I felt a sudden rush of indignation, my ire rising as I stared across the room and the woman held my gaze with a mixture of defiance and uncertainty. I stood up slowly.
“You arrive here with your puritanical standards about porn films and sex, and yet you’ve never sat down and tried to understand the thing you protest and complain about?”
