Budayeen Nights: Stories

Slow, Slow Burn

ALL RIGHT, THIS IS THE WAY I PICTURE IT: WE’RE IN a busy midtown brass and fern bar, okay? Maybe at a table on the sidewalk, under an umbrella says Cinzano on it, we’ll see. Two women poking at salads, glasses of white wine. They’re dressed very nice, expensive but not flashy, they pay attention to details, they accessorize, you know what I mean? Maybe a bag or something in the shot with a very exclusive name on it, sets these women up as fashion-conscious, upscale, the best taste in everything. One’s older, see, she’s the younger woman’s mother, though there’s no real noticeable age difference. They could be sisters. Make ‘em both blondes. The older one’s got kind of a suit on, she’s the dynamic woman-on-the-go. The daughter sort of mirrors that, a subtle thing, she’s got a nice blouse or shirt on with a jacket that says she’s shopping the right stores and she’s never more than fifteen minutes out of style. Whatever these women talk about, the people at home are gonna know they could make their own croissants from scratch if they felt like it, and they don’t live in no trailer park, either. This is like ‘Beauty Hints of the Idle Rich’ or something. The older woman smiles and says something like, ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the villa. I knew you and Ramon would find it pleasant.’

“So the girl is toying with her radicchio, see, and she puts her fork down and goes, ‘Mother, may I ask you a personal question?’

“Mom says, ‘Of course, darling.’

“Daughter looks down at her plate, she’s just a little bit embarrassed. That’s good, that makes her human. Audience will relate to that. She looks back up and goes, ‘Mother, have you ever used — ‘pause for effect’ — modular marital aids?’

“Big smile from the understanding old bitch. Maybe she, you know, reaches out and pats the kid’s hand. Like: There, there. She says, ‘Let me tell you a secret, dear. Your father and I have the biggest collection of sex moddies in the diocese.’ She laughs. The daughter laughs. Then Mom reaches into her bag, see, and what do you think she takes out? Take a guess.”

Two account executives have flown all the way from America to talk with Honey Pilar, who everyone agrees is the most desirable woman in the world. Even account executives want her, though their motives are mixed, and that’s why these two anxious men have come from New York to Honey’s walled estate in the south of France. She is sitting at a long table made of polished limba, an exotic hardwood from the Congo Basin that not even the architectural magazines know about yet. Beside her is her husband, Kit, who likes to think of himself as her manager. One of the admen is speaking; his throat is very dry because he is desperate that Honey Pilar likes his proposal, yet he is too self-conscious to sip from the fluted glass of Perrier-Jouet in front of him. He glances quickly at his associate, but it is easy to see that he can expect no help from that quarter.

Kit stares at the account executive, but he’s not going to say anything. The silence goes on and on. The hopeful smile the adman is wearing begins to vanish. He looks at his associate, who is still no help whatsoever.

“On the phone, I think we discussed the kids’ market,” says Kit wearily. He purses his lips and turns to Honey, who is sipping Campari and soda through a straw. “She doesn’t like it. I don’t like it. Come back with something else.”

The adman lays his sweating hands on the beautiful, glossy tabletop. “Miss Pilar?” he says hopelessly.

“Kit like doing business,” she says, and shrugs. When she smiles, both account executives are inspired with possible new approaches. The sound of her voice, they tell themselves, is enough reward for their failed labor. The opportunity to meet with her again will motivate them to find just the pitch she and Kit are looking for. “You have nice flight,” she says.

Kit is in the control room watching his wife on the bed with a seventeen-year-old Italian boy. Kit watches them through the grimy glass, wishing he’d worn a shirt because he is sweating heavily in the hot, stale air of the studio, and his naked back is sticking to the black vinyl padding of the chair. He peels himself away and leans forward, checking meters and digital readouts that don’t really need checking. Honey is a consummate performer. It’s as if she has an accurate internal clock ticking behind her forehead, cuing her: 00:00 initiate encounter, 00:30 initiate foreplay with passionate kiss, 00:45 experience preliminary arousal…. They are seven minutes, ten seconds into the thirty-minute recording. By the outline on Kit’s clipboard, Honey is supposed to begin oral stimulation at 07:15, and goddamn if she isn’t already sliding down the boy’s tanned body. No cue cards, she doesn’t even need hand signals. Kit pretends to check the levels again, then turns away from the big glass window.

Kit had his own brain wired long before he met Honey Pilar. If he wanted, he could jack into a socket on the board and feel just what the Italian boy is feeling, or he could jack into another socket and eavesdrop on Honey. Kit doesn’t need to peek on the boy’s responses because he’s been married to Honey for five years, and she’s every bit as good live-in-person as she is on a module. Honey Pilar is still, at the age of forty-five, the most desired woman in the world. One out of every eight moddies — of all kinds — sold through the big modshop chains is a Honey Pilar sex moddy. Kit has never been her partner on any of them.

At 14:20, Honey and the boy curl together on their sides. Honey’s eyes are closed, her face flushed. She is only wearing some kind of white cotton peasant-looking blouse and rope sandals. The boy is naked except for a pair of black matte-finish sunglasses. Drops of sweat glisten on his hairless chest. Kit stands up and turns away again. He leaves the control room, sure that nothing out of the ordinary will happen. He wanders down the long hall. He kicks off his deck shoes and feels the pile carpet warm on the soles of his feet. There is the strong odor of stale beer in the hall, as if several cans had soaked the floor recently and no one had cared to do anything about it. None of the windows are open, and it is even hotter in the hall than in the control room. Kit pushes open the scarred blond wood door at the end of the hall. He is in another control room. He chases a green lizard the size of his hand from the padded chair and sits behind the board. He stares at meters and digital readouts. They are all flickering at safe levels.

Beyond the glass, a young woman in a torn T-shirt and a bikini bottom sits at a microphone, clutching a sheaf of printed pages. Kit knows that she works for some revolutionary organization, but there are too many even to begin to guess which one. She reads the pages in a slow, husky voice. Kit thinks her voice is pretty damn sexy. He likes everything about this girl, what little he knows. He likes her bikini bottom, her torn shirt, her rumpled black hair, and the way she talks. After a moment, Kit hears what she is reading. “Achtung, Achtung,” she says. Her voice has no accent, neither German nor otherwise. She herself has brown skin, pale full lips, and Oriental eyes. “Achtung, drei hundert neun-und-siebzig. Fiinf-und-zwanzig.” Then she begins reading a list of five-digit numbers. “39502, 95372, 01814, 66589.” She reads twenty-five groups of digits, meaningful only to the certain audience listening to her frequency, reading the key to her code. “Ende,” she says. A moment later, after shifting to another frequency, she begins again in Spanish. “Atencion, atencion.” More numbers, more signals. Kit would like to buy the brown-skinned girl a drink, look into her black eyes, ask her if she herself knows who might be listening to her broadcast.

Kit leaves her control room. She has never looked up, never known for an instant that he was there. Kit walks back down the stifling hallway. As he enters the small room, he sees Honey Pilar astride the Italian boy. Kit checks the clock on the board, checks the script. The recording is still precisely on schedule. He hasn’t been missed. Just as the girl at the microphone did not know he was there, Honey does not know he has been gone.

Kit sits in the black vinyl chair. He takes a moddy from a stack on the control board. He doesn’t care which moddy it is. He reaches up and chips it in. There is a moment of disorientation, and then Kit’s vision clears. He is Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest, suave, well-dressed, and certainly in command of his feelings. He allows himself a moment of sadness for Honey Pilar, whose life could never be as interesting as his. After all, he is Cary Grant. His future will be better than good: It will be amusing.

“Twenty-six years ago, I was a young feature reporter for EuroUrban Holo on my first assignment, to interview Honey Pilar. I was sitting cross-legged on the rough wooden pier down the hill and across the beach from her walled estate. The sparkling Mediterranean waves lapped rhythmically at the pilings. I remember the bright morning sun making me squint a little into the camera. The ragged cries of sea birds punctuated my lead-in. ‘Here in her palatial estate,’ I said, ‘Honey Pilar reigns as the superstar of the sex moddies. In five years she has risen from talented newcomer to both critical acclaim and commercial supremacy. Let’s take a quick look behind the scenes and find out what Honey Pilar is like in her unguarded moments.’ My cameraman and I went to the main gate but we were not allowed in, although my news service had confirmed our appointment for that morning. Honey had changed her mind.

“Fifteen years later I was working for Visions/Rumelia, and once again I stood by the high, gilded gate. ‘What secrets does this young beauty know,’ I said on that occasion, ‘that maintain her position as the world’s premier moddy star?’ My story didn’t go on to reveal any actual secrets, of course. Honey Pilar never tells her secrets. But she did make a rare personal appearance and answered some mild questions about her favorite foods and her thoughts on the world situation. She was tanned and smiling and, well, perfect. A week before that interview, a poll had announced that sixty-eight percent of the seven billion people on earth could identify her face. Eighteen percent could identify her naked, unaugmented breasts.

“Today, Rio Home Data has asked me to begin this series it calls Honey Pilar: A Quarter Century of Fascination. Never in the history of the personality module industry has one performer so dominated the charts. Since her now-classic first moddy, A Life in Lace, she has turned out thirty-eight full-length recordings and nine of the ‘quickies’ that ABT experimented with and then abandoned. Her total sales top one hundred and twenty million units, and every one of her recordings remains in print. As of last week, she has eight titles on the Brainwaves Hot 100 Chart, with two in the Top Ten.

“The question always arises, what has this remarkable success cost the young woman who became Honey Pilar? A Life in Lace was recorded when she was only fourteen years old. Has her career been at the expense of her happiness? She’s been married four times, and she lives a private, almost reclusive existence. She rarely grants interviews, and in keeping with that, she refused to appear with us on Rio Home Data. Her legions of fans want to know: Just what kind of woman invites the whole world to listen in on her private sexual experiences? Is Honey Pilar providing surrogate passion to millions of people dissatisfied with their own love lives, or is she merely pandering to an emerging taste for high-tech titillation? We can only speculate, of course, but next time, in a highly personal way, I’ll tell you how this reporter sees it.”

Kit and Honey are having dinner in a small, dimly lighted cafe near the ocean. There is a tall white taper burning on their table and, shining through their wineglasses, it is casting soft burgundy shimmers on the linen tablecloth. Across the narrow room there is a stage made of scuffed green tiles. Lively North African music, distorted and shrill, is playing too loudly through invisible speakers; hovering just an inch or two above the stage is the holographic figure of a demure-eyed, big-hipped belly dancer. There are streaks and scratches on the woman’s face and body, as if this recording has been played many times over many years.

Honey Pilar sips some of the wine and makes a little grimace. “How are you thinking?” she asks in a soft voice.

“It was all right,” says Kit. He looks down at his broiled fish. “What do you want me to say? It’s always all right. It’ll sell a million; you outdid yourself. Your climaxes made the dials go crazy. Okay?”

“I never know you telling me truth.” She frowns at him, then picks up a delicate forkful of couscous and eats it thoughtfully.

Kit tears a chunk of the flat bread and puts it in his mouth, then takes a gulp of wine. Communion, he thinks, I’m absolved. Time for new sins. “You don’t believe me when I tell you it was all right? You don’t take my word for it? If you didn’t believe me a minute ago, what can I say or do that will make you believe me now?”

Honey looks hurt. She puts her fork down carefully beside her plate. Kit wishes the shrieking Arab music would die away forever. The cafe smells of cinnamon, as if teams of bakers have been making sweet rolls all day long and then hidden them away, because nothing on their plates or on the menu contains the least hint of cinnamon. Kit knows that Honey wants desperately to go back to the house in Provence. She’s not comfortable in strange places.

Kit finishes his glass of wine. He reaches for the bottle, tops up Honey’s glass, then fills his own. He takes out a beige pill case from his shirt pocket, finds four yellow Paxium, and drinks them down with a Chateau L’Angelus that deserves better. “What next?” he says.

“What next now?” asks Honey. “What next tonight, what next tomorrow, or what next we make another moddy?”

Kit squeezes his eyes shut and lets his head fall back. He opens his eyes and sees black beams made of structural plastic crossing the space overhead. He wishes that something, anything, with Honey Pilar could be simple, even dinner, even conversation. So she’s the most desirable woman in the world, he thinks. So she makes more money in one year than the CEOs of any ten major corporations you’d care to name. So what. His private opinion is that she has the intelligence of three sticks and a stone. He lowers his gaze and forces himself to smile back at her. “What do you want to do, sweetheart? Stay here, go back home, take a trip? You’ve earned a vacation, baby. We’ve got your next blockbuster in the can. The world is at your feet. You name it, chiquita. Someplace exotic. Someplace you’ve always wanted to go.”

He knows, as well as he knows anything in the world, exactly what she will say next.

She says it. “I rather only go home.”

“Home,” he repeats quietly. He finishes the wine in one long swallow, and signals the waiter.

“Kit,” she says, “I was in happy mood. You always do that. You always make me feel I choose wrong.”

I was in a happy mood, thinks Kit. Then I woke up, and we were married. But don’t let me kid you, sweetie. It’s been great.

“It is very early in the morning, and the haggard winter sun is rising over the red-tiled roofs of Santa Coloma. Wrapped in scarves, packaged in parkas, slapping their mittened hands together to fend off frostbite, Fawn and Dawn huddle against the fogged plate-glass window of the Instant Memories Modshop on Bridger Parkway. Fawn and Dawn are standing in a long line of people waiting for the manager to open the store. They’ve been waiting all night in the cold and wind and sleet, because today’s the day Honey Pilar’s new moddy, Slow, Slow Burn, goes on sale. Fawn and Dawn want to be the first in their neighborhood to own the new Honey Pilar. They want to get it as soon as the shop opens, and take it to school with them. Fawn and Dawn are in the ninth grade; these days in Santa Coloma, ninth graders all have their skulls amped, except for the trolls and feebs.

My God,’ mutters Fawn, shivering, ‘I haven’t felt my toes since midnight’

“‘I haven’t felt my lips,’ says Dawn. ‘Or my nose, or my ears, or my fingers.’

But if we leave now, I’m going to feel like a total fool.’

“‘We can’t leave now. These jerk-offs behind us will get our place.’

“Fawn makes a face. ‘If only the wind would stop blowing.’

“‘Oh, sure, the wind. If only the wind stopped blowing, it would still be, like, ten degrees below zero or something.’

“Fawn rubs her cheeks. ‘Hey!’ she cries. She points through the display window. ‘Here he comes!’

“‘Let us in now,’ Dawn prays to the store manager, ‘and you can have me right on top of the cash register.’

“The manager is, in fact, opening the front door. He’s smiling in anticipation; the store is going to make a fortune today. Slow, Slow Burn is stacked up four feet high in the front window, piled up beside every register, and loaded into cardboard dumps scattered all around the selling floor. You can’t turn around inside the store without staring into the liquid green eyes of Honey herself. Her holographic likeness is more than just inviting; if the mythical sirens had looked like Honey Pilar, they wouldn’t have needed to sing.

“When the door opens, of course, what disappears is any respect for the length of time Fawn and Dawn have been waiting in the freezing night air. They are pushed aside by the jerk-offs behind them, and by the jerk-offs behind them. Fawn and Dawn are cast aside by the charging throng of people. They announce that this is truly unfair and rude, that they’d stood in line longer, that they are going to complain, but no one listens. The flood of bakebrains shoves the two girls this way and that, until they are afraid of being trampled. At last, however, first Fawn and then Dawn are pitched up like driftwood at the front cash register, each with credit card in one hand, moddy in the other.

Wow,’ says Fawn, as she clutches her package and fights her way out of the shop.

“On the street again, with the air so cold it shocks nose and throat, the two girls wait for the bus to take them to school. ‘Are you and Adam going to use it tonight?’ asks Dawn.

“Fawn’s eyes open wider and she smiles. She taps the crown of her head, the corymbic plug invisible now beneath her hair. I’ve got it all down on this moddy,’ she says, her smile becoming sly. ‘Who needs him anymore?’

“Think what study period will be like, to be Honey Pilar in the throes of ecstasy, instead of Fawn and Dawn in the grip of homework.”

The two account executives sit on a couch in the north parlor. “Nice, huh?” says one of the admen. Kit thinks that “nervous” doesn’t begin to do the man’s condition justice.

“I think —” says Honey.

“She doesn’t like it, either,” says Kit. He has to be tough, and quick, or else she’ll say something and these Madison Avenue guys will think they’re doing her a favor. And then it will make it that much harder to deal with them the next time. Kit wonders why Honey hasn’t learned this by now.

“I think it work fine,” says Honey.

Kit gives her a stern glance, but she ignores it.

“Good,” says the adman, tremendously relieved. “We think we’ve put together a nice spot here.”

“I’m not sure,” says Kit. He doesn’t want these men to get too self-congratulatory.

“Kit,” says Honey, “be quiet. I like it. It’s for my moddy, I like it.”

Kit realizes that he’s going to have to have a serious talk with Miss Honey Pilar, International Star. He doesn’t tell her how to do her job, he doesn’t want her telling him how to do his.

“The girls, they pretty,” she says.

The account executive’s smile grows wider. “My daughters,” he says in a proud voice.

Later that evening, after the account executives have had dinner and gone back to their hotel, Kit watches what he has come to call Moodswing by Candlelight.

Honey Pilar marches, dressed in tight zebraskin pants — not zebra-stripe, but the genuine pelt of a former zebra, which is becoming less obtainable all the time — and a gauzy moire tunic created by the actual hands of Lenci Urban of Prague - not by one of his underling designers but by Lenci himself, making the item even dearer than the zebraskin - back and forth in front of the long, high picture window. Kit watches her eclipse first the lighthouse beyond, then the strings of lights marking the marina, then the sallow moon maundering over the ocean. Honey reaches the far end of the room and turns, blocking out the moon again. In the air is the heavy scent of incense, church incense, the fragrance Honey Pilar loves best because she thinks it reminds her of her childhood, but she’s not sure. Tonight Kit hates it, and he’s panting in shallow breaths, feeling an obscure panic begin. In a corner of the room is the largest commercial datalink money can buy, where Honey can keep an eye on it while she’s stalking first east and then west. Kit sits at the keyboard and calls up the first reactions to Slow, Slow Burn. Honey watches it indict her.

Total sales for the first seven hours of release: 825,000 units.

“Eight hundred thousand,” says Honey Pilar. She is carrying half a melon in one hand, hacking at it with a knife she holds in the other, and flicking seeds across the dusty rose carpet.

“Eight hundred thousand,” says Kit noncommittally.

“In one day, I sell eight hundred thousand. Eight hundred thousand people come out of their house all over the world, they just to get the new moddy. You don’t know what can be happening, the rain, the bombs in the airport, the police, all these people come out to pay money for me.”

Kit presses a key and columns of figures begin to scroll up the screen. “Sales are up in Provence and Aragon,” he says. “They love you here.”

“I see that, I see,” says Honey. She tosses the bulk of the melon into a corner of the white-on-white brocade couch. “I see also I have no million sales today, first day. I thought a million sales. You told me a million sales, so I don’t worry.”

Kit glances up at the ceiling, hoping for courage. “A million sales, eight hundred thousand, what difference does it make?”

“Sales up at home,” she says, turning her back on him, looking out the window. Far below, the crisp thin line of surf wrinkles toward the beach. “Sales down in England, Burgundy, Catalonia. That list get longer.” She faces the screen again, and the sales reports are like the incessant waves, each one weak by itself, but in their sum they are victorious, devastating. “Turn it off,” she pleads.

Kit is glad to kill the data. He watches Honey Pilar misplace her manic energy. How quickly she is drained and empty. She will not pace for another day, perhaps longer if this is a bad spell. Kit feels a peculiar thrill, knowing that none of the eight hundred thousand who have bought the new moddy could even imagine their dream lover in such a mood, that he alone is privileged with this intimacy. She lowers herself into a black leather chair and draws her small feet up on the cushion. She hugs her knees. Kit knows that she wants him to tell her the sales figures mean nothing; he does not say anything. He knows she wants him to come over and rub her neck and shoulders. She always does. He will not. It is a way for him to assert himself, to establish that he, too, has a life and an identity. He watches her massage her temples with trembling fingers. On the first day of sales, Honey Pilar’s latest moddy has sold eight hundred twenty-five thousand copies. Her previous moddy, on its first day, sold nine hundred seventy-two thousand. The one before that, one million, two hundred thousand. Is this a trend?

Goddamn right, it’s a trend, Kit thinks. If it weren’t, why have computers track the numbers? Honey and Kit respond differently, however. Kit doesn’t see any practical point in mourning a hundred thousand sales one way or the other.

Still, Honey Pilar weeps quietly. In the silence, in the candlelight, in the cloud of burning incense, there is a peculiarly supplicatory feeling in the house. Honey herself seems wrapped in a fragile innocence. Kit thinks that, for him, this was once one of her chief attractions.

“This is Jerome Nkoro for New York Comm Net Morning Magazine, and have I got a moddy for you. Today I’m going to be talking about Slow, Slow Burn, Honey Pilar’s new moddy from ABT.

“In these days, when, thanks to surgical and biological wonders we’ve all come to take for granted, men and women routinely maintain their youthful looks well past their seventieth or eightieth birthdays, it probably shouldn’t be too unusual that our number one fantasy girl has just celebrated her forty-fifth. Honey Pilar is forty-five. Does that make you feel old? It makes me feel like the last of the dinosaurs.

“I can remember having holos of Honey Pilar in my bedroom when I was twelve, alongside my Death to Argentina football and my scale model of the Mars colony. My first sexual experience was a dream in which Honey Pilar couldn’t remember her locker combination. And now they tell me this is her thirty-ninth moddy, and she’s old enough to be a grandmother.

“But don’t get me wrong, I still think Honey Pilar is the most exciting woman in the world. I’ve left word with my secretary that, if Honey calls, she can have my home phone number anytime. The problem with Slow, Slow Burn is not Honey, or the fact that she’s no pouting teenager anymore. The problem is that my moddy library has two full shelves devoted to her, and I’m beginning to ask myself, ‘Do I really need another Honey Pilar moddy?’

“I’ve never had a complaint yet from anyone when I’ve suggested we use one of Honey’s moddies. My partners agree with me that they’re likely to get more pleasure from Honey than from anyone else’s moddy (or from me, either, for that matter. Sometimes, when we explore the limits of the bizarre, we do it with no moddies chipped in, with our own unembellished brains. I don’t recommend this to you beginners out there). I use the moddies myself now and then, to see what it’s like from the Honey Pilar point of view, and it’s always an incendiary experience. So whether the moddy is turning my partner into a hungry, writhing Honey Pilar, or consuming me in one of Honey’s recorded sexual firestorms, there’s never any chance that she will fail to perform.

“The question is simply this: How will she continue to keep our interest? Her partner on Slow, Slow Burn is an uncredited seventeen-year-old. As she gets older, must her partners get younger? I am horrified by the vision of Honey Pilar offering the kids ten-speed bikes to entice them. And doesn’t a lifelong relationship with three-dozen plastic moddies begin to resemble (I hate to suggest this) a marriage? I mean, if for the sake of variety you decide not to use the Honey Pilar moddy tonight, what are you left with? You’re left with the person whose sexual performance led you to use the moddy in the first place.

“I realize that so far I haven’t said anything terribly cogent about Slow, Slow Burn itself. I’m not being fair to Honey Pilar, because her new moddy is right up to the standard she’s set throughout her long and dazzling career. I guess it’s just that after all these years, I’m beginning to realize that although I’ve been to bed with Honey Pilar a million times, I’m never actually going to have her, not in any real sense at all. All I’m going to have is two shelves of plastic with her name on it, and an exquisitely detailed knowledge of what she’s like in the sack.

“I wonder what Honey Pilar likes to talk about afterward. I guess I’m getting wistful in my old age. But don’t mind me, go out and buy Slow, Slow Bum. Like always, it does what it’s supposed to do.”

Kit and Honey are throwing a party in their hotel suite. This was the night of the annual Pammie Awards, and Honey is still clutching the special Lifetime Achievement statuette she was given. It has been a wonderful, satisfying evening for Honey Pilar. Reporters and fans and fellow artists come up to her and tell her again and again that the honor is long overdue. Honey knew well in advance that the Association was presenting her with the Lifetime Achievement, so her acceptance speech was gracious and tearful and as nearly grammatically correct as she could manage. She looks beautiful in her silver Lenci sheath.

Kit stands looking out across a city that seems to live for the night, toward a black harbor streaked with the pale green lights of bridges. He imagines that he’s on board one of the slowly moving ships creasing the dark water, going away, sailing off toward some useful existence. Beyond the window the world seems cold and clean. People are hurrying according to unknown but vital reasons, they are not…wandering. The stars are hard, white, not dimmed and hazy with smoke. Kit turns and gazes at the room, at the men and women talking and laughing. The hotel has catered this party, and the champagne is cheap and sweet. Kit sets his plastic champagne glass on the holoset for the maid to clear away. He looks for Honey.

He finds her in a corner, talking with her agent and a representative from ABT. He brings her a fresh glass of the awful champagne. Honey looks up quickly and smiles at him. Her eye makeup looks terrible. The agent indicates the Lifetime Achievement Award in her hand. “They wouldn’t have given that to you if they didn’t love you, you know,” he says.

“I owe you, too,” says Honey. Kit thinks that he wound her up too much earlier in the evening, and now she just can’t stop being gracious.

The agent smiles. “You did all the work, Honey.”

Kit thinks of the seventeen-year-old boy from the beach.

The woman from ABT swallows the last of her potato salad. “Are you giving any thought yet to retiring?” she asks.

The agent glares at her. Honey’s eyes open wide, and then she runs across the room. Kit follows her. He hears the agent say, “There isn’t any air in here anymore.”

Half an hour later the party is over. Kit and the agent are trying to make Honey feel better. “That woman was a fool,” says the agent.

Honey shakes her head. “They give me the Lifetime Award. They do when your career is over.”

“That’s not what it meant at all,” says the agent. “They were telling you that you’re the best, that you’ve always been the best.”

Kit takes a deep breath and lets it out. “I think we’d better call it a night,” he says.

The agent stands up. “Well, anyway, it’s time for me to run. Thanks for all the free drinks.” He bends to kiss Honey on the cheek. “Congratulations, baby,” he says. “Don’t worry about that ABT woman. She’ll be out of a job tomorrow.”

When they’re alone, Honey puts her head on Kit’s shoulder and sobs. He pushes her away. “Don’t start that on me now,” he says. “Don’t get into this sad and insecure business again. I don’t want to put up with it right now, I’m too tired.”

Honey stares at him. “How do you talk to me like that?”

Kit turns away. “It’s easy,” he says. “We have this same conversation about three times a week. I’ve learned my part. You’re still trying to get it right because in your line of work you don’t have to worry about learning lines.”

Honey turns him around and slaps his face. Kit gives her a thin smile. “You want me to pat your shoulder for you, is that it? You want me to tell you that you’re not getting old?”

Honey slams her fist into his chest. He flinches, but says nothing. “I tell you I hate you like this,” she says, tears falling down her lovely cheeks. She runs into their bedroom and slams the door behind her.

Kit stares after her. “You’re still my wife, you know,” he calls after her. “Get undressed, and get ready.” He knows that will make her even angrier.

This is the only part of their relationship that is all his, that exists only between the two of them. As long as there is this small domain that no one else shares, he will stay with her. Kit becomes aroused at last. “I want you,” he says.

She opens the bedroom door and looks at him blankly.

“I want you,” he says. “But tonight I want you to use this.” He offers her a pink plastic moddy. He’s never asked her to be anyone else before.

Her eyes narrow. She looks at the moddy. “But this is me,” she says, not understanding.

He laughs. “Yes, it’s you. Only younger.” Kit wants to make love to her tonight. He will hold her in his arms and let himself be carried away by her passion, but already he is thinking of someone else, a young woman with Oriental eyes, leaning close to a microphone and murmuring cryptic messages in other languages.

“Here on Venezia Affascinante tonight, we’re going to get you excited, and we’re going to tell you everything there is to tell about the people you love and the people you’d rather hate.

“There are a billion people in this world right now who don’t like Honey Pilar, and there are a billion people who don’t care. The other five billion, though, absolutely adore her, and we’re wondering tonight how they’ll take the news that her fourth marriage has come to a shattering, devastating conclusion. Shattering and devastating to her fourth husband, Kit, because after you’ve been married to Honey Pilar, the rest of the women in the world must suddenly look a little on the drab side. And poor Kit will be hearing a lot of cheeky questions from his friends from now on, like, ‘Say, Kit, how could you have screwed up such a fantastic situation? What’s wrong with you?’

“Venezia Affascinante conducted its own scientific poll of Honey Pilar admirers, and then compared the results with Kit’s own personal reactions, which we gathered via an exclusive long-distance interview. Our question to one hundred average moddy users was this: ‘Which aspect of their relationship will Kit miss the most, now that, thanks to his own stupidity, he’s been abruptly shown the way out of Honey Pilar’s life?’ The most popular reply was her quick starts, low maintenance, and high performance, if you take our meaning. The second most popular answer was Honey’s bank account, because, after all, a good deal of her irresistible attraction lies in her wealth, her extravagant lifestyle, and her association with the most stimulating celebrities in the world. The third answer was, unaccountably, her nose, which we must admit is certainly cute enough.

“It took us several hours to get in touch with Honey’s most recent ex-husband. When he finally accepted our call, we put our question to him for his definitive reply. He said, and this is a direct quote, ‘You can goddamn go to hell!’ And you’ll hear that nowhere else but Venezia Affascinante.

“Some unanswered questions remain: How long will it be before Honey Pilar marries again? Does she already have a candidate in mind? Could this be what led to the divorce? No one particularly cares what happens to Kit, of course, but every detail of Honey’s personal life is of absorbing interest to her vast army of fans. Will she continue to record new moddies, or does this alteration in her life signal a desire to make a fundamental change in her professional career as well? And if she does continue to turn out award-winning moddies, will she take over the reins of her huge financial empire, or will she look for a new business manager as well? Will that business manager be her new husband, or did her experience with Kit teach her a sad lesson about combining her emotional and business interests in one person?

“Whatever she decides, it will be impossible for Honey Pilar to keep her feelings secret for long. Not while Venezia Affascinante is on the job to bring you twenty-four-hour-a-day coverage of the world you like best, the world you wished you lived in. We’ll be back after this word.”

The two account executives are sitting in the smaller of the two dining rooms in Honey Pilar’s home in Provence. They’ve finished lunch and are sipping brandy and beaming down at Honey at the far end of the long table. Both men feel very good, first because the meal they’ve just enjoyed was one of the finest in their memory, and second because this is the only time they’ve come to the walled estate with any real confidence that they’d be able to bring their business to a satisfactory conclusion.

“That was truly marvelous, Miss Pilar,” says the first adman.

“Was good, no?” Honey smiles with innocent pleasure. “Kit gone now, I have what I like to eat. Hire new cook.”

“Well,” says the account executive, letting his expression become gradually more serious. “Perhaps it’s time to turn our attention to business.”

“Go ahead,” says Honey. “You shoot.”

“Yes, well…Slow, Slow Burn has been in the stores now for a little more than six months. I trust you’ve had the chance to look over the compilation of figures we sent you.”

“Yes, I see them.”

“And I suppose you’d like me to go over them with you. They’re a little difficult to understand, even after you’ve been in the business as long as I have.”

“No, okay, I understand them fine.”

The adman frowns. “That is, I know you’ve been without a business manager ever since, uh — “

Honey gives him a reassuring smile. “Ever since I kick Kit his ass for him.”

The man from the agency looks a little uncomfortable. “And since then, as I say, you’ve been without a business manager. Well, we want you to know that we value your account very highly. We’ve represented you for almost twenty years. I’ve been sent to tell you that you may continue to rely on us during these troubled months.”

“No trouble,” says Honey.

The adman opens his briefcase and takes out a report. “We’ve taken the liberty of drawing up a plan for you, a preliminary schedule of promotional opportunities for Slow, Slow Burn and a suggested scenario for your next personality module. Slow, Slow Burn is doing rather well, although, of course, it doesn’t appear to be as great a success as we hoped at first. Our consultants have made some valuable suggestions relevant to regaining the market support you enjoyed on some of your previous releases.”

Honey gives him her brightest smile. The account executive smiles back. “May I have?” she asks, holding out her slender hand for the report.

“Certainly,” says the adman. “I’ll be happy to — “

Honey rips the papers in half while she looks directly into the man’s eyes. Her smile never wavers. “I tell you what I do — if I do promotion, and when I make new moddy.”

“Miss Pilar,” says the adman unhappily, “we have some of the best market analysts in the business studying current trends in the personality module industry, and your own standing as a recording artist. While your reputation is greater now than ever, your impact at what we call point-of-sale seems to be softening somewhat. Our proposals are designed to make the best use of what our agency considers your chief strengths — “

“In twenty years,” says Honey Pilar, “I earn much money for your agency, no?”

“Why, yes, of course.”

“We call New York. We tell your boss to do it my way. Your boss is good friend. He do what I tell him, you do what he tell you.”

The man takes out a handkerchief and mops at the perspiration on his upper lip. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” he says. “We’ll simply go back and give them your views. Later, if you should find that handling your career on your own is too much for you, we can always — “

“I handle my career thirty years,” Honey says. “Husbands, managers, or no. I handle my career. I think you go now.”

The two men from New York glance at each other nervously and stand up. “As always, Miss Pilar,” says the first adman, “it’s been a pleasure.”

“You bet,” she says.

As the men are retreating from her home, the second account executive pauses to murmur something to her. This is the first time he’s actually summoned the nerve to speak. “Miss Pilar,” he says, looking down at the tiled floor, “I was wondering if I might invite you to dinner tonight.”

Honey laughs. “You Americans!” she says, truly amused. “No, Kit was American too, and next husband will be tall blond, Swedish maybe, Dutch.”

The second adman is terribly disappointed. He hurries after his colleague, not even looking back at their client. Honey watches them for a moment, then closes the door. She is still holding the ad agency’s torn report. She goes back into the house, where she can find a wastebasket.