Carole Wilson - Video Games

Quickly, he sorted out the cassettes, putting those he deemed too daring for Gillian's mild taste in a separate pile; the rest he shuffled back into the white envelope. Then he got out of the car and with a wide grin on his face, threw the rejects in the garbage can.

With a smile of perversity, he jumped back in the car and headed home.

Gillian was in the back yard weeding the flower bed when he got home that afternoon.

"Hi, honey!" he called from the living room where the plate glass door was slid open, emitting the warmth of the July Sunday afternoon.

The kind of afternoon where everything seemed in slow motion, lazy and blissful.

"What have you been doing, Stephan?" Gillian tried to sound calm and relaxed to disguise the anger in her voice. Sundays had always been a day to be spent together and shared, but this morning Stephan had left the house, not even bothering to awaken her, and left a note. "Be back soon." No explanation, no phone number where he could be reached. He had to be up to something surreptitious.

"Oh, just went over to Frank's studio…" He took a long swallow of his cold beer, and that seemed to oil his throat muscles somewhat.

"Why don't you come out here so I can hear you?" Gillian pulled at an obdurate vine that would not loosen its hold around a bush. "Just a second." He waved his arm and then slipped off to his study where he put the envelope on top of the bookshelf. Obviously this was not the time to confront his wife with such matters. He could tell by her metallic voice that she was disturbed by his abrupt departure that morning.

"Any phone calls for me?" he asked boldly, offering her a cold beer which she gratefully accepted with a gloved hand.

"Just one from your partner, says you stood him up for golf. Sounded a little angry." She went back to trimming the rose vine, her beer can precariously perched on a fence post.

Stephan tilted his head back and took a healthy swallow of icy beer.

Christ! How am I going to tell her I'm leaving again tonight? I really would like to go back over there to the studio and catch a little of the action. I won't get involved, just sit there and watch. Gillian should be able to understand that I need to be around people in other fields than business. Christ, it gets to be a bore sometimes, listening to all that shop talk. It's time I start broadening my interests before I'm too old to enjoy such things as film-making.

"Gillian."

She lifted her head, her large-brimmed straw hat framing her angelic face, so innocent and trusting. With just a bit of flush in her cheeks she looked like the young eighteen-year-old in the photos, now safely tucked away in his office. For Gillian had the same rare, wide-eyed look.

"Gillian, I've decided to take some film-making classes," he began.

"I'm getting tired of reading nothing but Fortune and U.S. News and World Report, you know? Like you've got your garden," he said expansively, stretching his arms to encompass the small back yard scarcely larger than the living room-except for the swimming pool.

"But all I see all day is fat, paunchy businessmen. Frank has agreed to give me a few pointers and get me started." He looked down at his wife, waiting for her negative response, the same predictable response whenever Frank's name was mentioned.

But it didn't come.

"I'm going over there tonight to start. I met this guy who's got a film laboratory, you know, processing and editing animation, and he says he'll give me a real deal on any work I give him. Film-making is expensive, you know."

She stood up, took another swallow of her beer, and bent down to resume her weed pulling, her motions interrupted only once when she pulled off her right-hand glove to yank back a strand of blonde hair that had escaped her hair clip.

"Well…" he said expectantly.

"Well what? I think it's great, Stephan. It'll take your mind off dirty cheap pictures for a change."

She sat on her haunches, picking through the ground cover. Gillian felt a small sense of foreboding, as if there was something Stephan was not telling her, as if there was some other motive behind his sudden interest in movie films. She thought back to the previous evening, and to the films Stephan had taken of her-with her dress hiked up and her panties showing; thought back to how excited he had been, how obviously aroused by the sight of her posing so provocatively before the eye of the movie camera and in its sixty-second lasting capture of it. A small involuntary tremor coursed through her soft young body. She must never let Stephan do that again, take movie pictures of her naked like that; it was wrong and wicked and it had no place in a happy, fully consummated marriage such as theirs.

"Honey," he began, caution in his voice. "Let's go out to eat and then I'll bring you home before I go over to Frank's studio. There's a movie you can watch on T.V. tonight, supposed to be a real thriller." he added with a note of encouragement.

And judging from her response, it was a perfect idea.

They enjoyed a leisurely dinner at a well-known French restaurant not far from their suburban home, and Stephan managed to steer the conversation to many things of little consequence, so that Gillian would forget about last night, this morning, and what he was about to do that night. Her anger subsided with a full stomach and several glasses of excellent French wine. By the time they left the restaurant and went out to the car she was relaxed. The Mercedes swerved into the driveway and he kissed her, promising he would not be late. She whispered in return, "Come home early and fuck me tonight, Stephan darling." He promised he would, kissed her again, and said goodbye, feeling once more that odd mixture of guilt and mounting excitement as he backed the car out of the driveway.

All the way to his brother's studio and all during the time he was with his wife Stephan kept telling himself he wouldn't ask her to pose for any more of those films, concentrating instead on fantasies of what it would be like to be a movie director. It wasn't the actual movie, he reassured himself, that turned me on; if was the creative process of taking them. Or imagining a picture and watching it develop.

It was Basil who greeted him at the door of his brother's private movie studio.

"Hi, Stephan. Glad to see you could get away from the ol' wifey long enough to come play with us."

The richness of Stephan's dinner began a slow churning sensation as the unctuous sound of Basil's voice slurred on. It was obvious he'd been drinking all day, judging from the slap-happy way he repeatedly pawed at Stephan's shoulder and the way his feet kept getting in each other's way.

"Did you show them to her?" Basil's thin arm encircled Stephan's shoulder and Stephan could smell alcohol mixed with cigarette smoke.

"Show them? Oh, oh, no. Didn't have time." Stephan felt his face color.

"What? You mean you didn't show her any of them?"

Here we go again, back in the same embarrassed defensive position I was in this morning. God, but this guy is getting to be a pain in the ass …

"Naw. I don't think she'd be interested."

"She'll get into it. Jes' a matter of time. Seen a lot of women, shy as can be at having their naked tits and cunt in a movie, at first and after a little while, you can't hold 'em back. Tell you what, how 'bout I fix us each a drink and then we can go on with this man-to-man talk and I'll give you some more pointers."

Frank, having heard his brother's voice, came bounding through the doorway, a tripod in hand.

"Hello, there," he said, extending his hand, a big grin on his handsome tanned face. "Glad you could make it, with or without Gillian."

"What's up?" Stephan tried to appear casual, relaxed, but he couldn't find a comfortable place for his hands that seemed to get in the way of every gesture. Giving up, he finally plunged them into his pants pockets.