The Desert Rose Page 7

  So she made the three hundred and went back the next week and made another for doing practically the same thing, just more posing in her underwear, though she did dance a few steps that time. Fritz, the other male model, refused to come that time or ever again, not that Mel wanted him—very definitely Fritz’s vanity had suffered a blow. Buddy came but Mel sort of politely indicated he didn’t really need to get undressed, it was basically just going to be a session involving Pepper although of course Mel was very grateful to Buddy for having made the introduction, and Buddy was welcome to whatever drugs might interest him.

  So Buddy did a little coke and then got bored with it all and went out and sat in the car and played tapes until she came out. Then he threw a big fit because Mel hadn’t paid him. Pepper said why should he you didn’t do anything, and Buddy got so furious he was stopped for going 85 in a 45 on the way home. Of course Victor would fix the ticket so that didn’t matter, but Buddy’s behavior was still pretty irritating. He told her he was thinking about revenge of some kind, like maybe leaking the news socially that Mel was making kiddie porn or something, basically Buddy just couldn’t stand rejection and got very bitter if it happened. She told him that if he said one word to anybody that was it, he would never touch her again, so of course he backed down within five minutes.

  By the time she had been to Mel’s three or four times she got the feeling she was sort of into something, it just happened to be something a little weird. Buddy never went again, she would just borrow his Mustang and go by herself and it didn’t worry her, Mel was about the last person you could be afraid of. Often she would stay for quite a few hours, Mel would say do you want to go swimming or he would ask her if she wanted a sandwich or something to eat, which usually she did, mainly it was after her lessons that she went to Mel’s. He would just have his servants bring out whatever she wanted, once she was starving and they brought a steak, it was delicious like everything else the servants brought out.

  When Mel found out she had an appetite it became a thing, she would model a while and then they would have dinner, usually out by the pool. He had a very expensive telescope set up out there, forty thousand dollars he told her it cost, and he showed her a few things about the stars which weren’t too interesting, they still just looked like stars, but the moon was a different matter, the moon was wonderful through the telescope. It delighted Mel that he had been able to show her something she liked and he always made a point of getting her over if the moon was full or anything spectacular was likely to happen in the heavens.

  He never stopped loving to take movies of her, to Pepper it was a sign of appreciation. Mel definitely loved her looks but the photography wasn’t something he had to do every time, sometimes she would just get to eat some wonderful meal and they would sit outside and talk. Mel had been all over the world and had plenty of stories to tell.

  Then one day he told her one of his secrets. He had once been a fashion photographer and as a result had become a lingerie collector, he had a whole closet plus drawers and drawers full of antique lingerie, would she try some of it on and model in that? Pepper had no objection, she had always liked to try on just about any kind of clothes, so they spent about twenty minutes in the closet picking out old bras and panties for her to try on. He had them in several colors, black and pink and white and light blue, it was a pretty amazing collection of lingerie. They experimented for a while and Mel discovered that what he liked her most in was lingerie from the early 30s, he had slips and half-slips and stuff she had never expected to see, much less wear. She could tell that Mel loved the way she looked in the old lingerie. He chewed Chiclets constantly and when he got turned on he chewed real fast, it was a little off-putting at first but then everybody had bad habits and otherwise Mel was so sweet and polite, unlike just about every male she had ever known except Gary, he was very polite too.

  Meanwhile there was a problem with Buddy, who was growing sort of madly jealous. At first he had been jealous of Madonna who he was convinced was a dyke, he wouldn’t let go of that one although Pepper told him he was an asshole and a prick and didn’t know what he was talking about, Madonna had two children who lived in France. Anyway, what business was it of Buddy’s? Then he got sort of insane about Mel, he was convinced things were going on she had never told him about, he had seen some of the movies Mel had taken of other girls and they had involved not merely toplessness, but also spread shots and a lot of disgusting stuff, or so Buddy claimed. Naturally Buddy believed she was exhibiting her cunt, he couldn’t be convinced that all she was doing was modeling a few panties and bras plus eating excellent meals and getting the use of Mel’s pool and his telescope and anything else she wanted. Pepper told him to stop being an asshole, she wasn’t doing anything but he didn’t believe her and it was becoming more and more of a problem.

  Plus another problem, kind of a strange one, was that money was sort of piling up. Mel always insisted on paying her no matter what if she got there too late and they just ate dinner, he assured her he could afford it and got upset if she even tried not to take it. So she was raking in some six hundred a week, maybe more if she felt like going more often. Mel said anytime, Pepper, anytime, she could probably have gone every day if she’d wanted to, Mel was always there. He never seemed to leave his house. Of course he had a beautiful house, plus a satellite dish out back so he could get just about any TV program in the world, and naturally he had thousands of tapes and records and a great sound system, there was probably not a lot he needed to go out for.

  Still, the money was piling up, more than she could possibly spend on outfits. In no time she had quite a few thousand hidden in her bedroom, if her mother found it she would probably die of shock, not that it was likely. Her mother hardly ever did anything except sit in the backyard feeding the peacocks, either that or she was in bed with some horrible man like Denny. It had been a big relief when Denny checked out, the car had been a small price to pay, in her view, she hated the way he looked at her, about all she could do was treat him with the utmost scorn.

  Besides being a prick and an asshole, he had one thing on her, which was that he had seen her let Joaquin out of the backyard. Joaquin was always pecking her ankles, one day he did it once too often and she just opened the yard gate and drove him right out. Okay, Joaquin, go get eaten by a coyote she said, which was exactly what happened, but Denny was always turning up just when you didn’t want him to and he turned up then, he had been in the shower and he came out on the back steps just in his Levi’s, drying his hair and grinning that grin. Of course he didn’t bother to get his shoes on and go bring the stupid peacock back, he just grinned and dried his fucking hair and let the peacock go off to get eaten, probably he hated Joaquin too. Myrtle had this theory that the peacocks were the main reason her mother couldn’t keep boyfriends very long, she doted on the birds so much the men got jealous.

  “What about Maude?” Pepper asked. “Isn’t Wendell jealous of Maude?”

  “No, ’cause he ain’t got the brains to be,” Myrtle said. “Anyway, all Wendell wants is to get in my pants, he ain’t got time to be jealous.”

  The thought of Wendell and Myrtle fucking was a total yuk, Myrtle was old and dried up and Wendell had a belly like a tub. She had never fucked Woods sort of for the same reason, he was quite fat and she just couldn’t see it, he was great to talk to and it was sort of fun to hit an arcade with him, he was definitely a hero to the arcade freaks, but to get in bed with him, un-uh. She was very spoiled when it came to looks but she didn’t see any reason not to be, after all Buddy was extremely good-looking even if he wasn’t ideal in other respects.

  She hadn’t thought all that much of Mel’s looks when she first started doing the posing, but they were sort of growing on her. He was small and delicate and had very curly black hair, he wasn’t bad-looking at all. The sort of interesting thing about him was that it was hard to tell what he was thinking, unlike Buddy, who told you every thought in his head about ninety times and there we
ren’t that many of them anyway. But Mel, it was curious, there was no doubt that he loved her, it was just hard to figure where it was supposed to go, it couldn’t just consist entirely of her walking around in the underwear, sooner or later he was going to want to see her topless, or bottomless, or fuck, or something, but he was so delicate about it all that she got a little bored waiting for the pace to change. Finally one day when they were looking at the lingerie, trying to come up with a new combination she got the feeling he might enjoy it if she kind of took it further. After all he was always very respectful of her choice of clothes, she never arrived at the house without Mel complimenting her on her outfit.

  So maybe that was it, maybe he wanted her to run the show, so she said “Hey, Mel, what if I just wear the half-slip and no bra?” He said goodness, would you like to do that and speeded up with the Chiclets, so Pepper just took her top off, she thought he was probably going to fall down when he saw her breasts for the first time, it was like he had never suspected such beauty. They did a real long session, she went all over the house, which of course was surrounded by a wall, no danger of getting seen. Then after they had dinner he gave her five hundred dollars, although she said hey, you don’t have to pay me so much. She was used to being looked at but the truth was there was something a little exciting about what she was into with Mel, he was not just your gawky guy, he was a very smart man and had wonderful taste, just about perfect in fact, so it was kind of flattering that he thought her looks were so great. She definitely liked it and felt some turn-on, once in a while he would sort of touch her arm or maybe brush against it, she would feel him shiver when that happened and it made her feel extremely confident, it was more interesting than the money in the long run. If she needed money she could always just steal it out of Buddy’s billfold, she had done that a few times and he hadn’t even noticed.

  Then she got worried about having so much money around the house, she had about four thousand and Denny was a natural criminal. One day she dug it all out and asked Woods if he would keep it for her, Woods’s father was a lawyer and things around his house were very orderly, there were no criminals like Denny to worry about. Woods was perfectly agreeable, he was totally in her power, as he often mentioned, only he was curious about where she got it so she told him about Mel and it turned out Mel was his godfather. It didn’t seem to surprise Woods greatly that his godfather had given her over four thousand dollars to walk around in old underwear, Woods was basically a lot cooler about such things than Buddy. He took the money and said keep me informed, and after that she gave him three or four hundred a week to hold for her, she even offered to pay him for acting as her banker but of course Woods declined.

  The only thing that worried her was Buddy, he was becoming so jealous he was apt to do anything. Usually she let him pick her up after her dance lesson which didn’t wow Madonna exactly, when they drove away Pepper would see Madonna looking down at them from the window of the studio, Madonna didn’t say anything but it was plain she thought Buddy was a yuk. Even if she went straight from the dance lesson to Buddy’s house and fucked him it didn’t really help matters, by the time she had taken a shower and borrowed the Mustang to go to Mel’s Buddy would be sulking again. Pepper was beginning to decide she didn’t need it, he wasn’t the only good-looking guy in the world, in fact she would have gone for Mel in a minute if she could have got him to make a move. But Mel was complicated, she could stand a foot away from him topless and he wouldn’t make the move.

  Then one night he asked her if she wanted to see any of the films. “You mean of me?” she asked, and he nodded, he had a little screening room out by his pool and they went out and did a little coke and she got to see herself on the screen for an hour. It was sort of fascinating, she had seen lots of pictures of herself but never one of herself moving before, much less shots of herself in old underwear. The old underwear looked weird but she was amazed anyway, Mel knew what he was doing with the camera, she really liked the way he made her look. Also she could sense that the film was a big turn-on for Mel, the atmosphere had a kind of turned-on quality. She thought here comes the move, but instead when the films stopped running Mel sat there a minute chewing Chiclets and looking sort of depressed and then asked her to marry him.

  Pepper had to admit that one was a total surprise, Buddy was always asking her to marry him, he would have dearly loved to have her legally his, but it was nothing she had expected to hear from Mel, after all it was weird, not even a kiss had happened. He hadn’t even asked her to pose naked, which she would have done happily, not only had he spent thousands but there was something definitely exciting about the posing, it was a far cry from modeling at Neiman’s or Goldwater’s. It was such a surprise she thought maybe he was drunk or high or something, but nope, he wasn’t even shaking, he just wanted to marry her.

  “Please don’t say no,” he said. “Just go home now and we’ll talk about it next week.”

  “Are you serious?” she asked, knowing perfectly well he was.

  Mel just nodded. He was funny, he might be odd but he could put things in a way you respected. It seemed definitely weird and yet Mel was not just some flaky weirdo, in his way he was an extremely together kind of man. At times, when they were laughing about the underwear, she would forget that he was a lot older. The simplest thing was just to do exactly as he said, go home and not ask any questions or make any moves. Somehow he commanded respect, much more so than Buddy, who could make fifty moves a week and still be hard to take seriously except at the level of looks.

  Then two days later Bonventre showed up at the dance studio and sort of leaned against a wall and watched her, not saying a word to Madonna or anyone else. It was no secret who he was, everyone in the studio knew Bonventre had suddenly appeared, it was about as surprising as if the President had just walked in. A lot of the other dancers got immediately shook but not Pepper, she felt very confident and just went on with her class lesson.

  Finally when the lesson was over Bonventre went up to Madonna and they had a few words. Madonna looked a little strained, didn’t seem too happy that the great producer had walked in, but then she sort of nodded at Pepper and Pepper went over.

  “Hi, Pepper,” Bonventre said, giving her a grin out of the corner of his mouth. “Jackie Bonventre. I like your dancing.”

  Then without so much as mentioning her mother, who had worked for him since before she was even born, he told her his lead dancer might be leaving in a few weeks, would she like to audition as her understudy?

  That was the second big surprise of the week, Pepper had to glance at Madonna to see what was going on, but Madonna sort of deserted her, she was looking away as if her mind was elsewhere though Pepper could tell it wasn’t.

  Bonventre could be a little nerve-racking, his grin came from so far out of the corner of his mouth that he might have been grinning at somebody behind him. Of course it was pretty flattering that he would pick her of all the young dancers in Las Vegas, to understudy for the lead, flattering and sort of scary at the same time, she had only heard about five thousand stories about what a mean guy he was. But she didn’t just kneel down and kiss his ass, after watching her mother be a pincushion for any man that came along all her life, if she knew anything it was that that wasn’t going to be her style. People that looked at her like Bonventre was looking got treated with total scorn, so she just said, “Well, thanks, I’d like to think about it, I’m engaged you know,” thinking how handy it was that Mel had made his offer just in time for her to use it.

  That definitely took Bonventre aback, probably he wasn’t used to young dancers not kissing his ass. He sort of gave her a look and switched the grin from one corner of his mouth to the other, and then all he said was, “Well, Pepper, could you let me know, we’ve got to get an understudy.”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “Just let me think about it for a day or two,” maybe it struck him as an amusing novelty or something because he got real friendly and told the story about stealing a
car to take the driver’s test. She decided he was not that bad, he was kind of attractive in a fat sort of way. On Woods it didn’t work but on Bonventre it sort of did, it went with his meanness or something.

  Then for some reason Madonna suddenly blew up and started yelling at him in French, and he said, “Well, you’ve got an ass like a prune, enjoy yourself,” and slammed out. Madonna burst into tears, which annoyed Pepper, after all so what if he produced a show, it was just a tits and ass show in Las Vegas, it was not as if he were Balanchine. Madonna should have hit him or something instead of letting him make her cry.

  Then it turned out part of the reason Madonna got so upset was because she thought she had got engaged to Buddy, of course it was a reasonable thought since she knew nothing about Mel, but still off the mark, like shit she would get engaged to Buddy.

  “It’s an older guy, you don’t know him,” Pepper said. “He’s sweet and he’s very rich. Anyway, I lied, I’m not engaged, but he did ask me.”

  Madonna was wiping her eyes, she was still beautiful even if her hair was half gray, but it didn’t help her to cry. The news about the older guy definitely came as a surprise.

  “I didn’t know about this man,” she said, sort of in a possessive tone, as if Pepper should tell her everything instantly. Then she sighed, as if Pepper had broken a promise or something. It was pretty annoying that she would get so possessive, even if she was almost like another mother it didn’t mean she got told everything.