Max Collins - Quarry's cut

The blond kid brought two beers.

“It’s the same with Richie here,” Harry said. “He works for the same agency I work for. He’s a gaffer.”

“Gaffer?”

“You know, electrician, does the lights and stuff. Sit down, Richie.’’

Richie sat down, on the same side of the booth as Harry, who said, “You wouldn’t want your name used in no article, would you, Richie?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind.”

“You’d catch hell if they found out at the agency.”

“Fuck the agency.” Richie’s voice was too young and highpitched for his words to convey any force. “I’d rather do real films, anyway.”

“Shit. You call this crap real films?”

“Jerry Castile is a real director.”

I decided to get back in the conversation. I said, “I understand this is Castile’s last hardcore picture.”

“That’s right,” Richie said “He’s going to be doing some very big things.”

Harry shrugged, said, “That’s what he’s doing now, is filming big things,” and he swallowed some beer.

Castile came back, looking irritated.

“The phone’s out,” he said. “Goddamn storm’s worse than I thought.”

He sat in the booth, on my side. Just us four boys, in one cozy booth.

“I’ll be honest with you, Jack,” he said. “I was trying to call the Oui offices, to check you out.”

I’d guessed as much.

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“Since I can’t get through, I’ll just have to assume you’re for real. But if you aren’t… if you’re with the police, and God knows we’re breaking various nonsensical bluenose local laws in shooting our film… you had best show me your warrant now, and be forewarned that anything you have done or do from here on out is going to constitute entrapment.”

“Mr. Castile, I…”

“Jerry. Please.”

“Jerry. I’m just a writer. Not a cop. Not even close.”

“Good. I’m just trying to be as up front with you as I possibly can. Now. Do you have a tape recorder with you or what? You don’t have a pad, I see.”

“I’m not going to do any formal interviewing.”

“Oh, what is it, then? A reaction piece? Your personal reactions to seeing what goes on on set of a porno flick, that sort of thing?”

“Right. Behind-the-scenes look and all that.”

“You didn’t bring a camera?”

“I’m no photographer. Just a writer. I was hoping you’d be able to provide some stills.”

“I can do that.”

“Fine. You see, Mr. Castile… Jerry… this was very last minute. I got the call late this morning and just started out driving. By the time I got here the snow was getting out of hand, and I guess I’m stuck here like the rest of you.”

Harry belched irritably. The blond kid, Richie, looked at Harry in a weird combination of admiration and embarrassment.

Castile didn’t mind or anyway didn’t acknowledge Harry’s editorial comment. Instead he looked at me and said, “I don’t mean to hassle you, Jack, but I do need to be sure of you.”

“I can understand that. I know about the pressures on people in your business these days.”

“The fuck film business, you mean. Yes. Which is part of why I’m getting out. Going aboveground.”

“Why is that?”

“Hey, fuck films are a dead-end street. Artistically, commercially, every way. And it looks like we’re heading into a repressive period again, and people involved in making films like this are maybe going to be tossed in jail. So I’ve taken an offer from a major studio, and I’ll soon be into safer, more rewarding work. More rewarding in every sense of the word.”

As he was saying this, the dark-haired young woman who had been hunched over the tape recorder in the adjacent room approached the booth and I got my first good look at her.

She was wearing a dark blue long-sleeve sweater that was somewhat loose but clung nicely to her breasts, which were not large, but were there, bobbling provocatively; jeans clung nicely to the rest of her trim but shapely figure. She wore wire-frame glasses with huge round lenses that dwarfed her small, delicately featured face, giving her a little girl look. Her eyes were large and brown as her hair.

She wasn’t as sexy as Castile’s wife, but she’d do.

“I couldn’t help but overhear,” she said, “that we’re going to be stuck here overnight.”

“Afraid so,” Castile said. “Would you call me a chauvinist if I asked you to check out the food situation?”

The girl said, “Yes, but I’ll do it,” and smiled, and looked at me for the first time, and her smile fell.

She’d just realized something that I had realized a few seconds before, when I got that first good look at her.

We knew each other.

Her name was Janet Katz. Her father was Robert Katz, a dentist from Chicago, actually Elmhurst, and he kept a cottage at Twin Lakes, not far from my A-frame at Paradise Lake. Bob Katz was in his mid-fifties and, during the summer, was one of the group of men I occasionally played poker with. As far as he knew, I was a salesman, and on the road a lot. He knew me by the name I used at Paradise Lake, and so did his daughter. And she knew me another way, too.

We spent a night together, at my A-frame, a few years ago. She’d just graduated from the University of Iowa-her father’s alma mater-with a degree in TV and Film, and a n aive assumption she was going to make it big. She was going to direct movies, she said. She was just visiting her folks, at their lake place, on her way to move in with a friend (whose sex she never specified) in Chicago, where she’d landed a job as a receptionist at a TV station, her hope being to eventually get into the production area. And after a while she’d go out to California and make it big.

But she hadn’t gone to California yet, apparently. If she had, she certainly hadn’t made it big. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here, doing the sound for a porno film.

“This is Janet Stein,” Castile said. “Janet, this is Jack Murphy. He’s doing a story on the picture, for Oui magazine.”

We exchanged brief, glazed glances. I made a shrug with my eyes and she tightened her mouth into a sort of smile and it was an agreement not to mention, in front of these people, that the both of us were using phony names.

“Nice to meet you, Janet,” I said.

“Same here,” she said, weakly.

Weakly, that is, considering Janet Katz, no matter what name she was using, had a rich, baritone voice that wouldn’t sound weak on her death bed. It was one of those almost masculine voices that, paradoxically, can make a woman seem all the more feminine. Another woman I knew, named Lu, had a voice like that, and in the case of both women, I liked the effect.

“I hope you won’t consider this a reflection on you, Janet,” I said, smiling, “but I suddenly realize I need to be led to a bathroom. How about directing me?”

Janet smiled back, said she’d be glad to, and Castile, before getting out of the booth to let me by, suggested Janet show me to one of the rooms upstairs.

“You’re as snowbound as the rest of us,” he told me, “so you might as well go ahead and check into this hotel. Each of the rooms has its own private bath.”

I thanked him, and went with Janet, who led me across the central open area of the lodge, the snow-clogged skylight above us, to one of the stairways, where I followed her up to the second floor, into one of the rooms, its tan canvas shade already drawn.

The room was what I expected: the side barnwood walls were decorated with abstract paintings in brown and white in metallic frames; the facing wall consisted of quadruple windows, with the center ones sliding glass doors leading out to a shallow balcony, a pattern common to all the rooms, I’d noted from the outside, with a few exceptions (the sunken living room and the bar and a few other first floor rooms). The windows were frosted over and it was cold in the room, thanks partially to all this glass, but then it was cold everywhere in the building, except under and around the glaring lights required by the filming, and once the filming was done and the lights shut down, I assumed the heat in the place would finally be turned on. In the center of the room was a rust-color couch that would, I suspected, convert to a double bed, like the one in my loft at home. The wall to the right included a door that stood open to reveal the first non-barnwood room I’d seen in the lodge: a sparkling white bathroom. On the right of the door to the bathroom was another door, a closet probably, and on the left was a built-in dresser, pine drawers built right into the barnwood. The ceiling was rather high, open-beamed, and made the room seem larger than it really was.