Harry and the Girl-Girl Scene

Christmas morning, a porn star was standing in Harry's kitchen. He'd won a contest, so here she was. Her name was Arlene, and she was drinking a glass of milk.

"Thanks," she said, taking care of the white mustache with the tip of her tongue. Then she smiled her most polite smile. She had naturally blonde hair that gel and a blow-dryer had provided lift and deck height so it flared out like a series of petticoats. She wore a green roll-neck sweater, which Harry guessed had to be real angora, a red vinyl skirt and tinsel earrings, which gave her a festive look. "Should I wash the glass out?"

Harry said, "That's okay."

"I should wash it." She looked around, her hair rotating like a gun turret. "Is there a sponge?"

Harry excused himself. He'd cleaned the whole house before she came over, and the sponge still rested, yellow and wet, in the corner of the bathroom. He pried away a tangle of hair. Returning to the kitchen, he handed her the sponge. He saw her smile again, slightly warmer now; they were becoming old friends just by doing chores together. He wished he owned a camera.

Given that he owned a video store, he could easily have had a fleet of camcorders. But in person Harry had never had much worth photographing. So here he was now, without a camera, in his own kitchen with his favorite actress, kicking himself.

"Thanks for the milk." Arlene squirted soap from the squeeze bottle. "I kind of have a stomachache. Sometimes a glass of cold milk does the trick."

Harry nodded. He leaned against the counter, shifting so that it didn't accentuate his love handles.

"So what did you do last night?" she asked.

"Oh, I visited friends." This was a lie. This year, like every year, Harry had stayed home on Christmas Eve, looking in the want ads for puppies at the local animal shelter. He had considered a little beagle they'd dressed up with a Santa hat, but he started to worry about how big it might get and whether it was really house-trained and why the previous owners had given up such a cute dog. Finally he felt so guilty for suspecting hidden defects and yet so convinced that there had to be something wrong with it, he went to sleep.

"Do you have a dish towel, Harry?"

He did: a souvenir. Harry's dish towel had a map of Nevada on it with little black dots for towns like Elgin. For Las Vegas it had a drawing of two showgirls. The girls had no tops on, which made him a little embarrassed right now. Arlene took it without noticing and started methodically drying the glass.

"So who'd you tell? You must have told a bunch of people I was coming over."

"No. Not really."

"Oh, come on," she teased.

He hadn't told anyone, not at the Yahoo discussion groups (adultvideostoreowners-I; adultreviewers-l; adultvideophiles-l), not his employees and certainly not his customers. He owned a general-interest video store, and porn was the crazy relative kept in the back room. Sure, he had imagined saying something in a chat room and then imagined the response, the good-natured, jealous-but-happy-for-him comments, the jokes about what he should say or what might happen. Maybe a lot of comments about what might happen. Then the day after, the question: "So did anything happen?"

He imagined typing No, of course not and then explaining how Arlene wasn't like that, how he wasn't like that, how it, the visit, hadn't been like that. He imagined standing up for her integrity. She might find out he'd done that. He'd tell her it was nothing. He would say something about his respect for her as an artist, and--he knew his imagination was skating on thin ice here--they would become friends for life. In the nursing home, 40 years on, rocking side by side on the porch and occasionally giving each other a fulfilled nod: We understand each other, always did.

And nervously, during his walks to the store, turning off the alarm, counting out the cash drawer, Harry tried in equal parts to imagine and not imagine--what if something did happen?

His eyes were fastened on the dish towel, which Arlene still threaded along the lip of the milk glass. His gaze unbuttoned from the towel and then fell to the soft skin of her bare arm. He said, "Telling people, telling guys, it's just----"

"Yeah?"

"I mean," he said, "I didn't want to look like a big shot."

"That's sweet. Most guys would brag to everyone. A couple of the girls and I were just saying that."

"Which girls?"

"Missy Katt. Jade Tung Katt."

"Oh. Them."

"What, you don't like them?"

"Their work is good," Harry admitted, "but----"

Arlene gave Harry a respectful, appraising nod. "You don't like their names, do you?"

"Well, as people, I hear they're great, but----"

"They're nice girls. Don't get me wrong." She hesitated, the way she always did in her films when she had to deliver bad news, like telling the plumber she didn't have any cash to pay him. "You know, Felicia Katt is such a legend. And these girls try to use her name like people will think they're her sister or something." She rolled her eyes. "That is so not respectful. No one could fake an orgasm like Felicia Katt."

Harry nodded as if he'd known that already, thinking suspiciously of Felicia's face while taking on the Rhodes brothers in All the Best Hookers IV, but not for too long because he didn't want to miss what Arlene was saying.

"Now," she continued, "I admit Laurie Partridge isn't the most original name in the world, but it was a business decision. Me and my manager, Kenny, we figure most guys who watch porn watched that show, and they all had secret crushes on Laurie Partridge. Did you have a secret crush on Laurie Partridge?"

"Sure," he blushed.

"Yeah, me too. And I always wanted to sing." Arlene sang, "Come on, world, it's a song that we're singing! C'mon, get hap-py!" She had a voice that was full and smooth and honeyed without seeming cloying. One hand on her hip, the other making a microphone, "C'mon, get hap-py!" She poked Harry in the side, causing him to giggle like the Pillsbury Doughboy. She bowed, and Harry clapped.

It was snowing outside. And through the snow Harry could see the blinking lights the neighbors had put up in the building next door, the five-pointed stars, the electric menorahs. Where Arlene's finger had touched him, it felt like it was still glowing.

"Did the milk help your stomach, Laurie?"

"Arlene." Now she put her palm on his arm. But she was famous for her open ways. The press said she was like a sister, the best sister you could imagine. "Wow!" She looked through the kitchen doorway and into the den. "That's some library."

Harry had a library of videos and DVDs in their original boxes, plus what he'd taped off cable or swapped on the Net. They filled custom-made shelves flanking his 42-inch flat-panel home theater. He had old CD-ROMs with interactive games and zip disks cataloged with images from AVS sites, web-cams and the sappho.nospam.binaries newsgroup. But he had started as a video guy and he owned a video store, so his video library had the shelves of honor. The weathered clamshell VHS boxes, back to belly, were as bright as cereal packages. The spines made a mosaic of grimaces, of tangled bodies resting on a bed of text promising in its accumulation that herein was the erotic extreme, the coarse and steely heights that could never be imagined; that to witness this nasty, unspeakably hot scenario, this perversity that was one centimeter away from ensuring jail time for everyone from the cameraman to the girls to the poor raccoon to the viewer himself, was to arouse and answer dreams you never knew you had; that to watch Tied and Tickled Nurses was to be taken to a mountaintop and shown the vast world around you, inspiring the high philosophical alchemy necessary to become the best of all selves. And on each box, fine print: Legal proof that the performers had reached the age of consent was available by written request sent to a post office box in Sherman Oaks, California.

Arlene looked hypnotized by how many videos he had. "All girl," she murmured. "Amateur. Anal. Asian. Caught on tape. And what are these--oh, compilations, and what else?" She skipped ahead several shelves. "Teens, trampling, up-skirt, and here's your S&M section. Naughty! And oh, classics. I love the classics."

"No one ever asks for them. They don't have flashy packaging, they don't ask for them." He found himself talking easily now. When it came to this, he had opinions.

"Some guys shoot on digital and pretend it's film," Arlene said mournfully. "I wish I'd worked when they shot on film all the time."

"The truth is, people don't care about the difference."

"People! If people were honest with themselves about what they really wanted, they'd be scared to death. Oh." Arlene folded her legs under her to sit on the carpet. She bent forward, and Harry could see one lacy white bra cup until he looked away. "Felicia Katt!" Arlene pulled tape after tape from the shelf, piling them in her lap. "I never saw this one." She was holding An Officer and a Well-Hung Man.

Harry said, "That's one of her best. You haven't seen it? She did it right before she left the business. She plays an Air Force nurse."

"Is that the one with the girl-girl scene in the cockpit?"

He smiled. "Everyone thinks that. No, that's from Big Guns. That's outtakes from what you're holding right there, which is a much rarer film."

"It is? Wow!"

"Yeah. When she retired they took the girl-girl scene off the cutting-room floor and repackaged it with other stuff." (continued on page 132)Harry(continued from page 88) "I hate doing those lame compilations. They have you sit in a room with the other girls, and you have to say, 'That reminds me of my cousin Angel,' and then they cut to something they shot five years ago. And they shoot you while they're setting up for the sex scenes so they get you in, like, five movies and pay for one. I so, so, so have to get Kenny to change my contract next year." She started filing the films back on the shelf, taking care that they remain alphabetical.

Harry was almost bouncing in place. She was great. This was great. He thought about showing her something from An Officer and a Well-Hung Man, just so she could see how much better it was than anything else today. He hoped it wouldn't be an insult. He imagined sitting with her, remote in hand, telling her what to look for, and he remembered the flash of her bra, and then, unexpectedly, as if surprised by a traffic light, he was brought up short. He hadn't watched a movie with anyone since his divorce.

That Christmas he'd gone alone to a Chinese restaurant and read the want ads at the table, thinking about the dogs. He kept looking across the restaurant, and as he was leaving, he touched the dark yellow roses he'd seen in a vase by the cash register. They were made of silk. And yet the vase had water in it.

As the seconds passed in silence, Arlene still on the floor, beginning to draw lazy designs in the carpeting with her frosted, snub-nosed fingernails, he felt like apologizing. For what, he couldn't quite say.

By the far wall next to a vertical stack of unsorted new tapes was a sparse and wobbling four-foot Christmas tree that had been flocked but not decorated. Harry had bought the tree the night before. He'd wrapped a couple of empty boxes, addressing them to himself with his left hand, and put them under the tree.

Now he felt sad and confused, as if by talking about the things they had in common he and Arlene had pushed on opposite sides of an invisible wall.

"Harry?"

"Yeah?"

"You haven't opened your presents yet."

He looked at the empty boxes disguised in festive wrapping. A yearning began to well up in him. He had a pang as real as a sore throat, a longing to admit something to her, something that any two humans alone together on Christmas Day would always remember. He thrust his arms out, meaning to include the tree, the presents, the whole apartment. He said, in the tone he thought a reasonable man would use, "You know, Christmas just doesn't mean that much to me."

•

In August, Harry had received a flier from Stroke Productions. Glossy, four-color, with a photo of Laurie Partridge standing on a stepladder, reaching high to put a crystal angel atop a Christmas tree already ecstatic with lights and ornaments and tinsel. She was wearing a Santa hat and a Santa suit cut to a kind of high and low oblivion. A pair of elves were placed just so, necks craned so you knew the kind of view they were getting. Her expression was delight frosted with innocence, as if she were saying, "I don't know why the elves are making me climb this ladder, but if they're happy, I'm happy." It was a look that a lot of people wanted to see.

The flier said, "This Christmas, let Laurie Partridge trim your tree--and rock your world'" There was a contest open to the owners of all independent video stores. The winner got to spend Christmas with her. All you had to do was explain in 50 words or less why you wanted to meet her.

Harry wasn't so sure he should enter. He wasn't sure he could explain what the point of meeting her was, and he was positive he would lose the contest anyway. He was accustomed to bad luck or, more accurately, no luck. He was doomed already to lope around with rounded shoulders, a belly he had done nothing to earn, mild halitosis and unimpressive hazel eyes trapped behind glasses as thick and scratched as a postal clerk's window.

But he was nice. Honestly, legitimately nice. To his surprise, on his 35th birthday he had married a really nice woman. They even got along, briefly. He had no problem admitting when he was wrong. But if challenged, he didn't mind admitting he was wrong even when he was right. Which turned out to be a problem.

Now, he was still convinced that his beliefs, his wants, his opinions amounted to a house of cards that anyone could knock over. Except when it came to hard-core pornography.

Harry knew the names of actors and all their pseudonyms and with whom they would and wouldn't work, what sex acts they performed in their own lives, what they had done for the first time on-set. He joined the girls' websites and expressed his opinions in guest books. ("No one, and I mean no one, ever surpassed Ravenna's cream-pie scenes.") He had a reputation, he thought, as someone who told it like it was but had a great deal of patience for people who knew no better. ("No, that was a sandwich scene, not a double penetration.")

He bid on eBay, winning oddities: cheerleader tapes shot in suburban backyards; hostage dramas staged, they said, in South America; husbands filming their wives seducing men at truck stops; debutantes French-inhaling cigarette smoke and rubbing their tired feet after the cotillion. He knew the difference between Japanese and Hong Kong pornography ('Japanese sapphofests are very rare and have mosaic censoring, which renders them disappointing. However, there are frequently excellent kissing scenes."), between Swedish and German, and the relentless quest for pornography shot in the Lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian archipelago. He wasn't afraid of researching gay porn, and good for him: Films such as Binding Nemo and The Little Spermaid turned a strong profit.

He wrote up index cards suggesting tapes to rent or avoid, and he posted them in his store's porn section, which was behind saloon-style doors, separated like an outlaw from the rest of the stock. Twenty-five percent of his gross came from there, in part because of his suggestions. Protecting his customers, his critical eye was like a brotherly wink, a lighthouse beacon for those otherwise lost at sea.

He began to recognize repeat customers in the neighborhood, buying roast chickens or walking their dogs or picking up their kids after school. He felt a secret continuity between himself and the rest of the world. Though they would never speak of it, teachers, clerks, underwriters, doctors, even an alderman, they all came to Harry's store to rent porn and then watched it at home, in the dark. So did Harry.

In every performance it was obvious: Laurie Partridge was also a nice person. She'd just won her third Smuttie for best actress in a dramatic role for her part as the conflicted Nazi nurse in Schindler's Lust. Harry thought she deserved it. When she was trying to convince the commandant to let the Jews go and words failed her and she said she would use the only weapon she had left, Harry was stunned by the depth of feeling she put into the resulting eight-minute fellatio scene. He really believed she was doing it for the Jews.

He felt so much admiration for her, he had no idea how to explain it. He was lonely, and on many nights she had made him feel good. He felt tenderly toward her. Which he suspected was the wrong response to win the contest.

He watched a scene from her very first video, Delta Sluts II: Sisters in Heat. After the big invitational dance, the most popular girl in Sigma Epsilon Xi (veteran Polly Munchen) comforted Laurie, who played a shy girl who couldn't get a boy to dance with her. Polly slow-danced with Laurie to a sad ballad with quiet flute solos until, overcome, Polly kissed Laurie, who was shocked. "But I've never been with a woman before," she said.

Polly said, "Then, sister"--an affectionate thing to say, as Laurie was still a pledge--"I will have to teach you so much." For Harry the line was always ruined by the unmistakable fact that Polly had played college girls for two decades. But, as when other porn scenes let him down, he tried to empathize, to focus on the good intentions. Of course when he thought about it he knew the flute music was actually a loop from a Casio database, the acting was ridiculous, the scenario idiotic. Did lesbians really have fingernails like that? That kind of question ruined everything. Harry knew every film broke its covenant, the promised revelatory heat, that trip to the mountaintop nothing but a girl looking straight into the camera while receiving a facial, smiling and yowling and yet signaling only her delight at paying off her Porsche Boxster. There was a point when Harry began to feel foolish, tired and more lonely than when he'd started. It was a feeling he forgot until the next time he took a film home.

But then there was Laurie Partridge in Delta Sluts II. After the required opening elements (the cowgirl position, the rancho deluxe, the tribadism) Laurie writhed in the same ecstasy he'd seen a thousand actresses simulate equally well. Laurie started grabbing Polly's head and pushing it and, out of nowhere, Laurie was arching her back in a clearly unscripted orgasm. The scene had taken only four minutes; industry standard for the girl-girl was 10. They hadn't even used the dildo, and it was right there on the bed with them.

Laurie kissed Polly full on the mouth, a gesture both sweet and unprofessional, as the movement surprised the older woman and threw them briefly into shadow before the cut to cheerleading practice.

Harry watched this frame by frame--not the sex, just that last motion, Laurie sitting up, dazed and grateful. The packaging here was stripped away, and instead of seeing what they wanted him to see, Harry had seen the flushed, tender face of a girl who had just been lifted by a stranger's blessing into a lighter and friendlier world. He felt like he shared a secret with Laurie. It was the last scene he and his wife had ever watched together.

"Though I have seen Laurie Partridge on-screen many times," he wrote to the Stroke contest, "Delta Sluts II tells me that she calls her parents every Sunday afternoon. Who wouldn't want to spend Christmas with a girl like that?"

•

As Christmas approached, Harry had prepared his house with a mixture of casualness and grave import. Hopelessly, he knew the best part of him was the part that wrote the index cards for his customers. Maybe there was some way to help Laurie with her website or with solid opinions about her fan base. She, the actress, and he, the connoisseur, spending a quiet day together, two professionals sharing the respect. That was the best he could hope for, nothing more. They would never sit side by side on a porch in 40 years, rocking together--he had to be realistic. Also he cologned himself, washed it away and put on and took off his best underwear so many times he felt humiliated.

They were blue silk boxers, and they had crept up above his trousers in the back. He could feel them as he and Arlene sat on bar stools on either side of the kitchen table. She was still feeling sick and had decided to eat one of the deli sandwiches Harry had in the refrigerator.

"The snow stopped," she said.

He looked out the window. He nodded because it had indeed stopped.

Then the radiator pipes clanged. Arlene said, "When I was a kid I used to think there was a guy in the basement with a big hammer and he was banging on the pipes like that to make 'em heat up." She took another sip of milk.

"Kids are funny." Harry drank egg-nog. He'd bought too much food and alcohol, as if packing the refrigerator might ignite a party. "So," he said, "do you update your website yourself?"

"I don't really follow that. I love having such great fans who sign up for it and support me, but there's this kid over at the university. He does it."

Harry began to explain how she could select the best vidcaps, and while he did she checked her pager to see if the photographer had called back. She was supposed to give Harry a special certificate and T-shirt. But it was getting late. The light would be gone soon.

"I bet Kenny forgot to tell him," Arlene said. "I have my camera. We could do it ourselves." She wiped off her fingers with an antibacterial towelette from her purse and stalked around his apartment, camera in hand.

She opened the living room blinds so that the snowdrifts outside reflected the cold afternoon light. She told him to stand by his videotapes.

"First, let's take off your glasses. Throw back your shoulders like you're in the Army. Show off the T-shirt. We'll make your tummy go away--pretend you're bracing for a punch. No, like this. Cool." She put the camera on self-timer and ran in, holding Harry around the waist and putting her lips by his ear, one stiletto heel in the air. Then she remembered the mistletoe. "Do this quickly," she said. "My stomach hurts."

She dangled the mistletoe like it was a bunch of grapes and leaned toward him, lips puckering. Harry felt like he was at an amusement park and he'd been strapped in for a Tilt-A-Whirl. Her arm was surprisingly strong by his side, and there was her smell, some essential oil she wore. And the sense of her lips by his ear. He had never been held so perfectly. When the flash went off, Harry was beaming. She ran to the bathroom.

She was in there for a very long time. Harry lingered by the shelves, hoping they might take more photographs. As the dazzle in his eyes faded, he felt a faint but persuasive tide of courage in his veins. She had held him and posed him and seen how to make him look a little bit handsome.

When she returned, she carried a small box. It was wrapped in paper with angels on it. It was addressed "From Arlene to Harry Merry Christmas!"

"Oh! Thank you," Harry said, realizing in horror that he hadn't bought her anything.

"Open it if you want to."

It was a CD called Autumn Leaves. The front was a soft-focus photograph of Arlene in a blue-sequined cocktail dress. He stared at it, thrown from his earlier determination to be brave. He had bought her nothing. He was terrible.

"It's a demo," she explained. "See, it's my real name."

"Yeah! Great!"

"I've met some music-industry people, so, you know, when I get out of the business."

"Great." He pretended to examine the song list. Was there anything in the apartment he could wrap quickly and give to her? He had a couple of scarves, which, like his videos, were still in their original boxes.

"So do you want to listen to music or anything?"

"Sure," Harry replied. "What do you want to hear?"

"I don't know. What do you want to hear?"

"Well," he frowned, "we could play the radio. Some of the stations have pretty good music on Christmas."

Harry fiddled with the radio, finding a pop station. He began to realize that just automatically giving her a present in response wasn't quite right, so he didn't make excuses to go look for a scarf. They sat on the couch instead.

She looked at him once or twice as if on the verge of saying something, but she said nothing. When she put her head down on her arm and closed her eyes, he knew she wasn't sleeping. He didn't know what to do with himself. Could he just relax like she did? He reflected now that he spent a good part of his year writing reviews and helping save people who didn't know any better. It made him feel good. And now Arlene occasionally looked toward him with a wan, end-of-the-bus-ride expression. He wondered if somehow he was helping her now, just by being with her. Maybe this was the lesson of the day, then: This late afternoon, with its fading winter sky, was the kind of place for people who were fast friends, and this was how it was for people comfortable with the silence between them.

•

An hour later, Arlene took her temperature: 103 degrees. She was perspiring. Her stomachache had taken over; she couldn't take in deep breaths without groaning. After another call to Kenny went to his voice mail, Arlene asked if Harry wouldn't mind calling her a cab so she could go to the hospital.

He wouldn't do that, of course. He put on his parka, warmed up the car and drove her to the emergency room himself.

They waited for over an hour by the huge Douglas fir decorated with ornaments made by children in the burn ward.

"Maybe it's that stomach flu," Harry said.

"I wish I knew where Kenny is." She rocked back and forth in her seat. Arms folded over her lap, she hummed to the music coming from the overhead speakers, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." Then she said, "I really want Kenny to come." Then, "I'll make it up to you, Harry. Maybe on New Year's I'll come over. I could bring another couple girls and we'll drink champagne and watch-- ow--TV and...." She rocked for a while.

"You don't have to...." Harry said.

He didn't want other girls to come over, though the invitation was very sweet of her.

"You want to know something, Harry? I do call my parents every week."

"You do? That's what I said."

She bit down on a fingernail. Her rocking was more pronounced. "Stroke-- ow--gave me 10 finalists to read, and I chose you because of that. I figured you'd be too nice to be whacked. It's like you knew a little secret about me. Ow."

She looked at him, and the strain on her face eased. Her famous brown eyes almost twinkled, but no, that was a grimace. Still, Harry was entranced. "Well, speaking of secrets, funny you should say that----"

"Ow! Only, I don't call them Sundays. I call them Friday after temple."

Harry's eyebrows hinged up. "You're Jewish?"

"Not practicing, but my parents are."

Harry nodded. "So anyway, I just wanted to tell you one thing about a scene you did? With Polly Munchen?"

"Yeah?" Arlene gasped. "Is that the doctor?"

The doctor, a pale, black-haired woman in her late 40s, walked into view behind the nurse's station, then disappeared.

"Should I tell the nurse to get her?"

"I'm okay."

"So that scene, from Delta Sluts? I always thought it was real. You know?" He looked toward her, courteous and careful, to see if she understood. He felt like he had started out on a tightrope and would walk from now on without support. Arlene was rocking, and the sense of unburdening his soul made him--as if swaying with the slack of his imaginary tightrope--rock a little himself. "It's the moment right afterward when you sat up and kissed her. I felt that you were showing ... well, showing a kind of, sort of side that----"

"I'm okay," she said again, and then she fainted.

•

She was in and out of consciousness while the orderlies moved her into a bed in the emergency room. Harry stood by the wall, sipping water from a paper cup while a nurse checked her vital signs. Harry couldn't answer any of the nurse's questions about medical history, which were personal and embarrassing.

When the doctor came in, the black-haired woman they'd seen across the room, Arlene was groggy but awake enough to smile.

"I'm Dr. Kilpatrick. Arlene, I have to ask you a few questions while I examine you. If you feel sick or if anything I do hurts, holler, okay?" She ran a stethoscope up and down Arlene's chest and stomach. She asked how long she'd been sick and if she'd been vomiting. "Any diarrhea?"

"No."

"Fever or chills?"

"Yeah. Both."

"Does it hurt when I press here?"

"Yes!"

"I'm sorry." Dr. Kilpatrick marked up the intake form. "Are you on any medications?"

Arlene closed her eyes. Harry reminded her, "You took aspirin at my house."

"Aspirin." She opened her eyes. "I did cocaine yesterday."

Harry's mouth gaped. He closed it.

"How much?" the doctor asked.

"A couple of lines...."

"You did a couple of lines?" Dr. Kilpatrick encouraged.

"A couple every couple hours, all day. And the day before."

"Okay. Do you usually do that?"

"No," she replied, and then, as if realizing she might have helpful information, "Oh, I also put some on my groin area."

"For intercourse?"

"I did nitrous, too. And pot. What else? Speed. Well, they said it was speed."

Harry was a deepening red, his hands opening and clenching as if looking for solid rails. Where was that hesitation Arlene used when delivering bad news? He hoped she would at least shrug at him with some melancholy glimmer in her eye to show she did things on Fridays besides call her parents after temple.

Dr. Kilpatrick wrote it all down without comment. "Have you ever been tested for HIV?"

"I'm clean."

"But have you been tested?"

"Yes," her response a kind of outraged pounce. She looked to Harry, who tried feebly to share her annoyance.

"What kind of birth control do you use?"

"I'm on the pill. We also use condoms."

"Have you had any new sex partners recently?"

"Yes."

Dr. Kilpatrick held pen to clipboard. "How many?"

"About . . . 350."

She wrote nothing down. She looked up at Arlene with new interest. "How many?"

"Three hundred fifty."

Dr. Kilpatrick turned her quiet gaze toward Harry, who shook his head in an involuntary declaration that he was not one of those 350. "Arlene, what's your line of work?"

She smiled. "Actress."

"In adult films?"

"Yes." It was a glorious Christmas-caroler smile.

"And these 350 men...."

"It's for Gangbangers," Arlene stated. The way she spoke now reminded Harry of the Stroke press releases. She was excited but also, until her voice devolved into a rasp, professional. "There's a world record," she explained, "and my manager, Kenneth Lambert, thinks it would advance my career to beat it. Only we realize there's no way to have so many guys in one day, right?" She swallowed. And her voice fast became rustier. "So we've been going day by day, a hundred guys a day, except yesterday we knocked off at noon, and we took today off, but we have 150 coming tomorrow----"

"Arlene----"

"And the day after." She was finished, the last words all out in a rush, and now she reclined, exhausted. She looked, to Harry, painfully sincere.

"Arlene, you have to cancel."

"But it's a world record," she explained.

"I understand, but the odds are you've got pelvic inflammatory disease or something worse. Everything between your ribs and your pelvis is very soft and isn't built to take so many guys."

"No, yeah, I know, I know--we're taking precautions."

"They didn't work."

"But we took today off."

"You're done."

The fluorescent examination lights were something awful; Arlene looked like a relative of the undead, and her expression was one Harry had never seen before, not in her films, not in the interviews or commentaries or even the behind-the-scenes footage. It was a coarse, steely petulance. "I know what I'm doing," she croaked.

"If one of those guys had chlamydia, you didn't."

"I want Kenny."

Dr. Kilpatrick looked at Harry again. "Your name?"

"I'm Harry."

"Are you the boyfriend?"

"No."

"Could you go to the waiting room? We need to do a physical. Arlene, can Harry call family for you?"

She fought back tears and lost, a wet sob escaping from far back in her throat. She handed her phone and pager to Harry. "When Kenny calls, tell him to come, okay?"

Harry had to swallow before the word sure came out.

•

He paced around the waiting room, shaking his head. He forgot himself and jammed his hands into his pockets. When his fingers collided against the pager he exclaimed like he'd touched a snake.

He paused by the doctors' in-boxes. Each was decorated. One had a scroll from a fortune cookie. "In your line of work, you attract interesting and cultured people." A Hello Kitty sticker was on Dr. Frances Kilpatrick's box.

He began to have a nagging thought. It made no sense. He put it away and thought instead about how calm the doctor had seemed as Arlene told her she used drugs and had sex with 350 men. An emergency room doctor has seen it all, but he was also led back to that other impossible thought: Dr. Frances Kilpatrick was Felicia Katt.

She was the right age. She looked like Felicia, but it had always been hard to tell under the makeup and the teased hair what Felicia's face had actually looked like. She had been a nurse in several films and even a doctor once in one of those films feminists made for the couples' market. He and his wife had watched it together. He couldn't remember its name, only that she hadn't liked it.

Maybe Felicia had taken all the money she'd made and put herself through medical school. And she'd left Los Angeles. And she never talked about her past but wasn't exactly ashamed. So she left little reminders, like the Hello Kitty sticker. Anyone who understood her would know enough not to say anything.

If anyone could improve herself, it was Felicia Katt, Harry thought.

Orderlies were wheeling Arlene down the hall. She was in a paper gown. Harry waved at her meekly. She didn't seem to see. He was thinking about how he'd seen her face so many times showing more satisfaction and gratitude than he'd seen from any other woman. He wanted to thank her for giving him that. When he and his wife were having problems but were still working on them, he brought home Delta Sluts II; he wanted to show her what he'd seen.

"You always like the girl-girl scenes," she said. It was a feigned complaint. Because later, in their bedroom, propped up under blankets, bodies angled so she and he could watch at the same time, light splashing across their faces like breaking waves, Harry and his wife made love for the last time. Harry's eyes stole from the screen to her face and he thought from her expression, a panicked surrender, that she understood what was happening on-screen, and Harry thought he'd saved his marriage as he too let go, closed his eyes, joined in.

After the divorce he thought there had to be some way to restore the beauty and purity of Arlene's first girl-girl, and all the sour feelings would be wiped away like tarnish off a silver plate. But now he knew that wouldn't happen. He felt sorry for Laurie. Her life was too complicated. He would continue to buy her movies, support her as an artist, but even if she insisted, even on New Year's Eve, he wouldn't let her back into his house.

Harry looked through the observation window. It was tinted light green. There was safety glass. Here's what he saw:

Dr. Kilpatrick was standing next to Arlene, talking to her, giving her shoulder a quick squeeze. Arlene took both the doctor's hands in her own and held on, mouth smiling but eyes wide in fear. It was the look a little girl might give her mother while being left for her second day of school, after all the bullies had discovered her the day before. The doctor said something to reassure her, and Arlene was wheeled off down the hall, away, somewhere else.

Harry went back to his seat. He checked his watch, thinking even before he saw the time that it was getting late.

As the emergency room began to fill with all the late Christmas tragedies, mostly domestic situations taken to a level of violence he could never imagine inflicting himself, Harry put the pager and the phone in Dr. Kilpatrick's box. He left the hospital, but he also left Arlene a note saying he wished her the best of health, because he believed that we were put on this earth, first and foremost, to help each other.

"This Christmas, let Laurie Partridge Trim your Tree--and Rock your World"

She'd just won her thud Smuttie for her role as the conflicted Nazi nurse in Schindler's Lust.