The Game

bathroom with the porn star, perhaps it didn’t have anything to do with the whiskey. My body was responding tothe lack of emotional foreplay: I neither cared about nor really desired her. And I’m sure she felt the same. It was just entertainment. Sex with Lisa was not entertainment. It was not about validation and ego-gratification, as with all those pickups I’d been so proud of. It was about creating a vacuum where nothing else existed except the two of us and our passion. It made the rest of existence seem like a distraction.
    And then, one afternoon, just when I’d forgotten all about her, Courtney returned. She pulled up to the house in a limo and leaped out, looking radiant in a blue dress and white shawl.
    “There’s blood flow to my pussy again!” was the first thing she exclaimed.
    “Did you land that director you were chasing?” I asked.
    “No. I got a new man in New York. And it’s going to be his fault for making me a slut, because now I want it all the time.”
    She danced toward me, light like a ballerina.
    “Well,” I said. “We had a bet about your director crush.”
    “That’s right. I guess I lost.”
    “So that means I get to choose the middle name of your next child.”
    She smiled and stared at me expectantly, as if I were supposed to just select one on the spot.
    I shuffled through a list of possible names in my head. “How about Style?” I finally decided. “I’m going to be retiring the name anyway, so I might as well pass it on.” I thought about the idea for a moment. It was really a stupid moniker. Then again, her daughter’s middle name is Bean.
    She squealed and gave me a bone-crushing hug. “You know, I’ve found you sexually intriguing these last few months,” she said.
    I swallowed and prepared to tell her about Lisa. Before I opened my mouth, however, she continued. “But I heard all about you and Lisa. I think that’s great. So some good came out of having me in the house after all?”
    “Yeah. For you too, I hope.”
    “I don’t even want to think about what went on in that house.”
    “Well, you look great. Getting laid has done wonders for your complexion.”
    “Well, that and rehab.”
    She winked at me and smiled. Her prayers had been answered. She was normal again.
    “I’m going to get out of your hair and live at the Argyle hotel until I getmy daughter back, which should be very soon,” she said. “I came by to give you the money I borrowed from Mystery.”
    She handed me a check and bounded back into the limo. As I watched her leave, she unrolled the window and yelled, “And this one won’t bounce.”
    I was really going to miss her.
    A few days later, Lisa and I went to the Scientology Celebrity Center. We hadn’t become Scientologists; we liked our income too much. Tom Cruise had kept his word and sent me an invitation to their annual gala. It was one of the most star-filled events I’d been to in Los Angeles.
    After dinner, Cruise, clean-shaven in a perfectly pressed black tuxedo, walked toward the table. His approach was hypnotic: There was no doubt in his walk, no effort in his smile, no intricacy in his intentions. I stood to shake his hand, and he clapped my shoulder forcefully. I kept my balance. Barely.
    “Is that your girlfriend?” he asked, looking Lisa up and down in a nonlecherous way. I couldn’t imagine him ever being lecherous. “You didn’t tell me how gorgeous she was.”
    “Thanks. I can’t remember ever feeling this fulfilled by someone.”
    “So you got tired of picking up women?”
    “Yeah, after a while it started to feel like filling a bucket with a hole in it.”
    “Exactly,” he exclaimed. “Cameron Crowe and I, when we were doing Vanilla Sky, would talk about what a one-night stand is and what a fuck buddy is. And when you kind of get down to it, those things are a false intimacy. And they’re unsatisfying. In a real relationship, sex means more. You just want to keep going, and you want to hang out all the time and talk about life. It’s very cool.”
    “Yes, but the problem is that I don’t want this to be the end of my journey in this subculture. It just reaffirms society’s message of monogamy and true love conquers everything and all those Hollywood happy endings. It seems so cheesy.”
    “Who says it’s cheesy?” Cruise asked, his eyes narrowing and his hands reaching out to attack me with a friendly gesture. “You know what? I got past that. Since when is it cheesy to be in