Do Not Become Alarmed(14)

The trees were hung with parasitic vines that would eventually pull the trees down, to be food for the tiny shoots that would grow up and take their place. She thought of Werner Herzog’s Bavarian voice, talking about the overwhelming misery and fornication of the jungle—something like that. If you stood here long enough you could watch the plants grow. Weird insects buzzed.

She’d never been unfaithful to Raymond, even now that it had started to feel like they had a business partnership, raising children, managing his career. She’d always understood that she was the lucky one. She was an ordinary person, and he was in movies. He could have had anyone. He used to pick her up at her terrible apartment in Los Feliz, or at the public school where she’d worked with kids with learning disabilities. The kids went nuts when they saw him. He was black and famous. He signed autographs and gave dap and they loved him.

She used to cut her own hair, back then, and wore jeans and sneakers to work. When she started seeing Raymond, she began to be photographed in public, and his fans had opinions about her hair and her body. She spent money on haircuts and got a stylist to help her buy clothes. She’d lost the weight instantly after both pregnancies, out of sheer terror of the judgment and nastiness.

She had come to think that actors, the best ones, were not like other people. They were vessels to be filled up with other lives, for the purpose of art. But to be a perfect vessel you had to be empty to begin with. When she saw a child actor at work, Nora thought of human sacrifice, the emptying out of one small soul for the purpose of entertainment. She hated it when agents and casting directors gave her children an appraising eye, admiring the shape of their faces, the warm color of their skin, the length of their limbs. She wanted to tell those vultures to back the fuck off.

She liked to think that Raymond was not a truly great actor, that he was handsome and photogenic and smart and skilled, so he would continue to work, but he would never be one of the uncanny, dissociated ones.

But still—the business did something to a person. There was so much attention, and so much pressure to be young and flawless. Raymond had joked about wanting the dumb reducing treatment in the spa, but she knew he really did want it. She thought she would’ve minded less if he’d been tempted by the Brazilian trainer, and not by the seaweed wrap and the electrodes. At least then the temptation would be about someone else. There was nothing sexy about incipient narcissism.

After June was born, Raymond had asked if she was having an affair, and Nora had realized that she was, in a way, because all of her emotional energy had gone to her children. She was infatuated with them, besotted. But that wasn’t the real reason she wasn’t that into sex anymore. Her therapist said that their situation was pretty normal, for a stable long-term couple in an equitable relationship. Power imbalances were erotically generative. So were fights. Her therapist said she should initiate sex more, maybe think of it like exercise. You didn’t really want to do it beforehand, but it felt good afterward. It raised serotonin levels. It was supposed to be good for your skin.

But Nora always had about twelve other things she wanted or needed to do, at any given time.

She and Pedro were deep in the trees, talking about birds, and he was standing very close to her. She didn’t move away. She felt like she was sixteen. Then he was kissing her against a tree, and she didn’t pull away.

After a minute, he slipped a hand inside her white shorts, and she was embarrassed by the slide, by how wet she was already. There was no fumbling and hunting for the right spot. He made her come so quickly and expertly it took her breath away. It seemed to take about thirty seconds from the moment his hand pushed aside the silky nylon of her shorts. Her whole body was trembling, her legs weak, but he held her up with his other arm. With Raymond she had to really concentrate these days, and she had to be lying down. Was this hotter because it was all so strange and taboo? Or did Pedro have secret powers? He didn’t seem surprised or disappointed by the speed of it. Everything seemed to be going according to his plan: He knew where the switch was, and he knew how to flip it. He did it again, and she found herself gasping, shaking as he held her upright.

She recovered, the world coming back into focus, with a hint of the remorse to come. “What about you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “No condom. No sexo.”

“Oh.” She realized she hadn’t actually thought there would be sexo. In her teenage fog, she had reverted to the assumption that sexo itself was off the table. Actual intercourse was something grown-ups did.

“You have condom?” Pedro asked.

“No.” She thought of her daypack full of cheese sticks and crackers. She thought of Raymond’s vasectomy. Raymond out golfing. She shrank away from the guide a little. “No condom.”

“So no sexo,” Pedro said, shrugging. Then he brought himself off in the same quick, expert way he had worked on her, with no shame, convulsing at the end, in broad daylight, while she watched. She noted that his penis—what she could see of it, inside his shorts—was smaller than Raymond’s, but he was smaller than Raymond in every way. He was built on a different scale. She noted it without judgment or even a sense of involvement.

Pedro wiped his hand off on a flat leaf and grinned at her. She’d had spa massages that were more emotionally compromising. It was as if she’d been to the car wash. Just the basic, thanks. No wax. “One more?” he asked.