Picnic

Fiction by Brian Pera

It was cold for August and raining outside, so I spent half the morning watching myself on TV. Waiting for him to call, I played the second of my first two videos, the only two I still own. I watched the one with all of us at the piers or the docks or whatever the set was supposed to be, with the fog rolling in and background noise and the disco music and the dog barking in the background. Even now I think I was the best thing in the whole movie, even in the sailor hat and the bikini, with the dialogue they gave me, all that mumbo jumbo, words I would never in a million years use, I made it look right. I made it look so natural you can't even hear the guys directing us, whereas the others just kept giggling.

"Pretend you were out at sea," they told me, the guy behind the camera and the one who stood there watching everything with his eyes screwed up. "You haven't had sex in months." There was Viagra on the set and they had porn magazines out there too. You don't have to feel it, they said, just look like you do. The second they called action, I went off inside my head, to Figueres, to back when I was a kid Ñ me, my mom, and her mom, out on a picnic, like we used to do. A blanket spread out on the ground, red and white checkered. If you looked close enough, you could see tiny trails of ants looping over it like the embroidery on my sister's shawls. The fan these guys had going was the breeze, which ran through the branches overhead and made the leaves move and shimmer like sequins. The lights they aimed at us were hot like the sun and made us sweat, even with so little on. The muslin we kneeled on scratched my skin. The barking broke my concentration.

It was pandemonium on the set, with all the gawking and the chatter and the noise from the equipment they were using, that stupid dog, but in my head we were all together. I shut things off and barely took in the guys I was doing the scene with. I heard them giggling, but it was like something I was trying to remember from a dream the night before. They snickered like girls, like my mother and her sisters telling jokes out of my father's earshot. Even now, when I watch the scene, it takes me back. Not to that day and the set and the money I got and how I spent it almost as soon as I left the building, but to Figueres, just 10 years ago, laying my head in my mother's lap, looking up to the trees and through the branches to the sky, where the sun sparkled.

I was smoking a joint and I had some coke, too. I watched the scene over and over again, up to the part where the one had me bent over the crate and the other, the one with the lisp and the giraffe tattoo, was slapping my ass. I had it on rewind mostly, so we were all sped up and wavy. The fog tumbled back and forth across the screen like the cloud of smoke after a disappearing act. I was killing time, lost in thought, waiting for the American to call. He'd called the night before, to remind me again. Between one and two, he said, depending on when he got done with his meetings. He couldn't wait, he said. How long had it been? He'd booked a hotel on the Ramblas. A room with a view. He had it all planned out Ñ dinner, some shopping, some private time. The fog was just rolling into the dock again when he finally called. I paused the tape, and the scene hovered there.

I didn't want to tell him about the sore in my mouth but I knew I should say something, otherwise he'd want to kiss and tongue and expect me to go down on him and everything else. He sees a lot of people, but it wouldn't be too hard to narrow it down. If he got a sore himself, it would only be a few days later. He'd more than likely narrow it down to me, so I'd already decided it was best to let him know. I wished I was still in Figueres, not because I could have told my ma and her sisters or any of them about the sore or asked them what to do, tell or not tell, lie or not lie, but because I sometimes think I would never have gotten sores or anything else if I'd never left home.

It started out as two little white dots under my lip. You could barely see them but I'd had them before and knew to take them seriously. They were tender to the touch. If my teeth or my tongue brushed over them it was murder, but they were something new in my mouth, and I couldn't resist. Two days later they'd gotten bigger and burst and joined together and I could barely eat or drink. When I swallowed it was a gulp of glass going down. I was eating yogurt I'd stolen from the grocery store down the street. I was about to go out of my head. The coke kept the lid on. I called this guy I once did a movie with, the one who told me about a sore on his groin and the doctor his friend sent him to and the pain pills this doctor gave him. He said he didn't remember, I had the wrong guy, he didn't know what I was talking about. Did I know of any work?

Take a cab to the pastry shop on the Ramblas, the American told me. Grab my things and go he said so I did. Take a cab he said but at first it was hard to find one. I could have walked it was so close but the American gets impatient. He expects a lot for his money. He carts you around the city, he gives you a workout one way or another, it's best to get your rest and save your energy where you can. He was outside the shop when I got there, smiling, but I didn't smile back. Whenever I see a guy like him smiling I can't control my face anymore. I can't make it do anything. If they tell a joke I laugh without smiling. My jaw hurts from the strain. By the time they leave, my whole face smarts, from trying to get out from under this mask.

I'd decided, waiting for the cab: I was going to say I'd been to the dentist.

"I had my teeth drilled on," I told the American, right off the bat.

He was standing outside the shop under the stained-glass windows eyeing all the boys, screwing his mouth up at their tight jeans and tiny little waists. "I'll bet you have," he said, when I offered him my cheek instead of my mouth. "I'll just bet you've been getting drilled."

I bring back his boyhood, he says. He has a wife in the States and a boyfriend in England. He has a couple of boyfriends, he says, but none as nice as me. I never know what he means, exactly; whether he means nice polite or nice to look at. I never ask him, because that's not a very nice thing to ask. I think probably he means nice to look at, because he spends a lot of time looking and it never seems to bother him one way or another whether people are nice to him or not. He doesn't seem to notice either way. Nice polite means the person he sees when he looks at me isn't too far away from the person he'd like to be looking at. Like at a luxury hotel. You want a room with a view onto a lake or the ocean or the mountains, maybe. If you get a view to an air shaft, someone at the desk made things difficult. Someone at the desk was not so very nice. If you get a view to a wall of trees, you can picture whatever you want on the other side. The trees aren't the lake or the ocean or a mountain view Ñ but only the way the dock in my movie wasn't really a dock.

Nice polite, to the American, means the world runs the way he thinks it should. To me, a room is a room is a room. To the American, one room is always better than some other room. This hotel is preferable to that one. This car, this suit, this dinner, the room you end up in. He has tried, again and again, to tell me the difference between one thing and another, between this room and that, but it all looks the same to me. A bed, a desk, a phone, a few chairs, a wet bar, a TV with cable, a channel with the kind of movies I made Ñ except with women, and half the scenes taken out. You can pick up the phone in any one of these rooms and get the front desk, so, really, what's the difference? You can call anywhere you want and they charge it to the room. If you have the money there is no difference, because you never see the other side. I could call my mother and my sister if I wanted to and the American would never say anything about it. I did, once. I dialed Figueres. I heard my sister's voice, and someone laughing, and I hung up. I am not nice, in my mother's eyes. Nothing I can say will ever change that.

Each room is different and this hotel is better than that hotel, for the American. A nice day means getting one instead of the other. We have nice days together, driving around, shopping, eating lunch and dinner and snacks and little pastries from the pastry shop. Our little ritual, he calls it. The weather is nice if the sun is out. If there are clouds in the sky, it means someone hasn't been very nice to the American. Someone decided to wreck a perfectly good day, if it rains or there's traffic or the room he wanted is taken. Isn't this lovely? he says, when things are going the way they should, and I make my head nod. I'm almost always somewhere else. Each room is like every other, and I sit looking out the window, staring at the lake or the ocean or the mountains, imagining Figueres and a picnic with my mother and sister on the other side.

The gulls were giggling, out on the window ledge.

"I don't see why you can't kiss," the American told me, folding his arms across his chest, grumping. He covered his top lip with his bottom lip. He can make his face do almost anything he wants. He can really make things go his way.

Giggling too, he said:

"I don't see why you can't do the rest of it. I don't see why we can't enjoy ourselves. I think you're just pretending."

Brian Pera is the author of the novel Troublemaker and a frequent contributor to Lit.