“I don’t know,” Janey said slowly. “I guess I’ve always wanted to . . . write. Aleeka’s writing a novel. . . .”
“Why do you want to write?” he asked carefully.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel like . . . I’ve got so much inside me—so many things that nobody knows about—I observe people all the time, you know. They don’t know that I’m observing them, but I am.”
“Forget novels,” he said. “You should write a screenplay.”
After that, it was easy to fall into bed with him.
All during that first month of summer, Janey felt like calling up everyone she knew and announcing, “Hi, it’s Janey Wilcox. I’ve got my own house this summer and I’m writing a screenplay.” Indeed, when people did call her during the day at her little cottage in Bridgehampton, with the split-rail fence and espaliered roses, she often as not said, “D’you mind if I call you back? I’m right in the middle of a scene.”
Comstock told her that she had “vision.” He said he’d make her movie a hit. That he could promote the hell out of anything, that, hell, he could strong-arm an Oscar if he had to.
“I can do anything, Janey,” he said. “You’ve got to remember, I’m from Jersey and my father was a plumber.” He was lying in her bed naked, smoking a cigar. He wasn’t a big man, and he had (rather disconcertingly) skinny little legs, but he had a barrel chest and his voice was deep and impressive. It was a voice that Janey could listen to forever. “Being a successful movie producer is better than being president,” he said, twirling the tip of the cigar in his lips. “You have more impact on the lives of the people, and you—hey hey—have a hell of a lot more fun.” He winked at her leeringly.
“You naughty man!” Janey squealed, throwing herself on him. He grabbed her and twisted her around, kissing her face. “Who’s naughty?” he asked. “Who’s the naughty one?” His cigar fell to the floor as he spanked her bottom.
Mostly, though, they had serious discussions about life, with a capital “L.” Janey loved those evenings when he’d turn up at her house around midnight, after he’d been out at some business dinner. During the evening, Janey would usually be at some stupid party at a store, and she’d get a message from him: “Chicken, Chicken Little. It’s the Big Bad Wolf calling to huff and puff down your door—hey hey—your back door! See you later?” And Janey would make her excuses and rush home to greet him in lingerie. “Am I the luckiest guy in the world or what?” he said.
“You don’t know a thing about fairy tales.” Janey giggled. “It was the three little pigs who had their door huffed down.”
They almost always got around to sex, but not before they talked for a couple of hours. They would sit around her glass coffee table, snorting tiny amounts of cocaine and drinking neat vodka. It was not at all like Janey to snort cocaine, but then again, since she’d met Comstock, she felt like she was discovering parts of herself that she didn’t know existed. He was opening her up. To life. To sex. To the realities of her own possibilities.
It was dizzying.
They talked about his movies. “What did you think of that one?” he asked her again and again. “What’s your opinion?”
“I like the way you don’t think you’re too smart or too good to talk to anybody,” Janey said.
He told her about his success—how he’d imagined it, struggled for it, finally won it—and how it was important to do something that had meaning, not just for yourself but for others as well.
“You’re the only person who understands me,” Janey said. “Who doesn’t put me down for what I’m about and what I think.”
“It’s important for people to feel free even if they’re not free,” he said.
Then he’d lean over and put his hand under her shirt, pinching her nipples until she thought she would scream in agony.
He would watch her, his breathing getting heavier and heavier.
And then he would come at her from behind, spreading her cheeks and ramming her asshole with his penis.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” he’d say.
Luckily, it was small, so it didn’t hurt too much.
Even her sister was impressed.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew Comstock Dibble,” she squealed into the phone one morning at the beginning of summer.
“Why didn’t you ask?” Janey said. A light rain was falling, slowly darkening the dirt in the flower beds outside her door.
“Gosh, Janey. He’s only the man I want to meet most in the world.”
Janey couldn’t help rubbing it in a little. “Why?” she asked.
“Because I’m a producer? Because I want to make movies for him?”
Janey moved around her little house, plumping up the cushions on the couch. “But I thought you were a television producer,” she said. “Isn’t it . . . I mean, it’s my understanding that those two things are completely different animals.”