Chapter Two

In Southern California I had become accustomed to setting my own hours. It was an unwelcome surprise when Arla shook me awake my first morning at Aurora.

“Julie, it’s already six. We’re running late.”

“I’ll start tomorrow.” I burrowed down into the covers.

“You are on the schedule for today. I have to train you, it’s my job.” She emphasized the last word, a subtle reminder that even though I wasn’t going to be paid, this was still employment.

I rubbed my eyes and sat up. The room was cloaked in shadows. “I’m not having a shower,” I grumbled.

“I’ll meet you in the kitchen,” said Arla, scurrying off.

I stood up and stretched. My body ached from the spartan comfort of the futon. I thought of my fluffy, feminine bed back in Encino. It could not be possible that Doug would sleep alone in that bed. Solo, he would be afraid that all that pink satin would reflect negatively on his masculinity. Satin sheets, what a whorish affectation that had been. I felt a sudden rush of affection for these faded cotton sheets.

I put on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and sandals. No make-up. In L.A., I had worn makeup everywhere I went. I felt more vulnerable without my face on but at Aurora makeup would not be appropriate.

When I got to the kitchen, Arla had already begun the morning routine. “First you put the water on to boil,” she said. “And we cook the oats that have been soaking overnight.” She gestured to another pot on the stove.

The kitchen was cold and the sun was just starting to light the room. I yawned. The last time I had been up at this hour I had been coming at it from the opposite end, greeting the dawn after a long night of cocaine and festival-style fucking at a private club in San Bernardino.

“You add the tea, one full cup for a pot this size.” Arla opened a larger wooden box and I peered inside. Little brown twigs.

“This is tea?”

“Of course. It’s bancha.”

“Right, bancha.” I tried to remember what the book had said about bancha tea. It was related to the green tea they served in sushi places. Tea and oatmeal, not a bad start to a morning.

“Are those shoes comfortable?” Arla glanced down at my feet skeptically. My glossy painted toes in their little black slides looked like exotic creatures compared to Arla’s stolid Birkenstock-clad feet.

“These are my lowest shoes. I could run a marathon in these things.”

Arla stirred the oatmeal and then sniffed at the pot of boiling tea. After a few minutes, she pronounced it done and taught me how to strain it into the thermal pot that would be set on the long table in the hallway outside of the dining room. She put the enamel pot of oatmeal on a woven trivet and stuck a wooden serving spoon into the creamy slop.

“It’s time to ring the bell.” She began to clang the brass bell vigorously as we walked up and down the halls. “We ring the bell at each meal, up the staff hall and the guest quarters, too. At dinner, we also ring the bell in the back office.” The bell echoed in the halls. I checked my watch; it was barely six-thirty.

“Now we eat?” I had my doubts about the oatmeal, especially since macrobiotics forbade the use of sweeteners like honey and sugar, but I was starving.

“We have to do morning salutations first.”

Apparently, I had run away to a monastery. Right from the fleshpit to a monastic cell. Morning salutations were, I assumed, some Zen version of vespers.

Arla and I moved the low tables out of the dining room and laid out rows of flat cotton cushions. Two rows on each side of the room, facing each other, and in the center, two solitary cushions.

People from both ends of the hall began to file in. They slipped their shoes and slippers off outside the door and walked into the dining room barefoot. These people had the ugliest feet I had ever seen. My own perfect pedicure made me feel like a poodle fresh from the groomer.

I recognized Ethan from the night before, and John too. Ethan looked like he hated mornings. He was in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms and his hair frothed into unkempt swirls. John, on the other hand, was freshly showered and dressed in dark pants and a black T-shirt. Some other faces were new but I saw the gray-haired woman who I guessed was Carolyn come into the room and kneel on a cushion in the back row on the left hand side. For an older woman she was surprisingly flexible; her butt rested on her feet and her forehead touched the floor.

“Surviving your first morning?” Ethan put a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“So far, so good,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster. He filed past me and went into the room. Arla took off her shoes and went inside so I did the same. The staff lined up on one side of the room and the guests assembled on the other. On the staff side, were Ethan, John, Carolyn, Arla and I, but more mats were left open.

“How many people are on staff?” I whispered to Arla.

“Including you, eight. Plus, Hideo and Murata, the leaders. You’ll meet the rest later.”

I didn’t press her. I scrutinized the guests across the room, instantly envying the people who were there for a short time, taking cooking classes and enjoying a healthy retreat. I wondered if I would have come here for six months if I had visited for a weekend first. The guests seemed more familiar to me than the staff did. The women didn’t appear so forcibly unpretty and unfriendly.

When Hideo and Murata entered the room, a respectful quiet fell over all. Beatific smiles wreathed the faces of the staff and the guests. I smiled as well if only for fear that I might attract notice if I didn’t plaster a zombie grin on my face. Had I checked myself into a cult? Hideo and Murata seemed less like cult brainwashers and more like kindly Japanese grandparents. Nimble ones, they knelt on the floor with ease. Hideo’s hair was pure white, standing unruly on his head but his face was brown and creased. Murata looked, to my eyes, more traditionally Japanese, with pale skin and sleek dark hair caught up in a bun. Hideo’s clothes hung on his body but Murata’s small, squat body was stuffed into a long skirt and blouse.

They bowed to the guests. “Good morning, guests,” they said in unison. Then they bowed to the staff. “Good morning, staff.” We all bowed in return. Finally, they bowed to each other, stood up, and left the room. I tried not to let the bowing freak me out but I immediately equated it with genuflecting in church. For the first time in years, I felt the remnants of my childhood Catholic faith stirring inside me. I would not take on a new religion. I already had one, even though I hadn’t practiced in years.

Arla motioned to me and I stood up. The rest of the people began to file out so Arla and I stacked up the cushions in the corner. We moved the tables back into the dining room. My stomach grumbled and Arla looked over.

“Because we are staff, we eat last. You can get in at the end of the line.”

I dutifully stood in line behind Ethan and John. My mind wandered over the breakfasts of my past. The fried dough my mother made on winter Sundays, the college dorm hangover feasts, soy and strawberry smoothies at Juicy Lucy, —even imagining the pepperoni pizza Doug and I ate for breakfast while watching early morning Sunday NFL games was making me drool.

When I reached the front of the line, there was still plenty of oatmeal. I slopped some into a bowl and poured myself a cup of bancha tea. I took my oatmeal back to the dining room but Ethan and John took off in another direction. “Where are they going?” I asked Arla.

“To the staff kitchen,” she whispered. ‘We don’t always eat with the guests, but you should for the first few weeks.”

In the dining room, the guests were seated in cushions in front of the low ebony wood table. Arla and I grabbed cushions and sat down. I was grateful that she didn’t leave me to face the strangers alone.

We were the only two members of the staff sitting at the left end of the long table. The guests clustered at the other end looked at us eagerly as if we were gurus-in-training. If they only knew.

“Can I ask you a question?” said a brown-haired woman in her forties, turning to me with a wide smile.

“I guess,” I answered, happy that she would assume I had any knowledge at all but also relatively certain that I would have no idea how to answer her.

“How often do you defecate?” she asked with the same guileless smile.

I was startled into speechlessness but Arla came to my rescue. “Once a day is recommended. I am sure Murata told you about the macrobiotic smile. I find if I eat too much, I go more often, so I know my body is telling me to slow down.”

I decided I would have to be more careful about the questions I agreed to answer but the woman appeared pleased to have her answer and no one else seemed to think the conversation was a bit out of the ordinary. I took a bite of my oatmeal. This was not oatmeal. Oatmeal was the instant breakfast my mother had made. This flavorless mush bore little resemblance to the little packets of brown sugar or cinnamon-flavored oats that she added hot water to. Oatmeal was the stuff of cookies. I dragged my spoon through and took another bite. Something crunchy knocked against my tongue. I didn’t want to be rude but I wasn’t going to swallow a foreign substance either. I took it out of my mouth and examined it.

“That’s a piece of the hull, the outside of the grain. This is your first time eating steel-cut oats isn’t it?” Arla guessed, smiling at my displeased expression.

“Are we supposed to eat it without any sweetener at all?”

“It’s what Hideo recommends. Good for the digestion,” she exclaimed in a loud voice, smiling over at the guests. “Tomorrow, we will eat in the staff kitchen,” she said to me more softly. “We’ve got raisins and almonds over there.” She lingered over the words, making the simple foods sound like holy treasures.

After breakfast, Arla and I went back down the hall to our room. I really needed a shower. I wanted a decent meal too but I figured they couldn’t trap me in the building all the time. I could sneak a little break sooner or later and indulge in my usual breakfast, two squares of a Hershey bar, two cigarettes and a Diet Coke.

“Arla, what’s the macrobiotic smile?”

“You’re not a bit macro are you, Julie?” She opened the door to our room and we stepped inside. “What are you doing here?”

“Learning,” I answered. It seemed like a reasonable enough answer and the only one I could think of as I began to panic. Please let me stay, I prayed. “Do I have time for a shower?”

“There’s a cooking class now, which you can attend if you like, but we are scheduled for lunch set-up at noon.”

I opened my bag and got out my towel, my toiletry bag, and a fresh pair of underwear. I had passed the communal showers on my way to the kitchen in the morning. At least that was one thing I didn’t have to ask Arla for.

The showers were a series of stalls lined up together. I hung my towel on a peg and undressed. The water pressure in the shower was weak, and the water itself was barely lukewarm. I stuck my head under the water washed my hair vigorously using my favorite strawberry smash shampoo. Its sticky-sweet smell made me hungry. A bar of soap rested on the rack in the shower. It was round and gray, studded with brown bits of something. I sniffed it, oatmeal. I sighed and then rubbed the rough soap over me, frowning at the paucity of lather it produced. I realized I had left my razor in the other room. I had shaved my legs, my underarms and my bikini line every day back in Southern California. Could I go a day without? I would have to try—in this new life vanity was a liability. But if I had stayed with Doug, my trajectory was clear. I had heard the Linda Lovelace-style horror stories and knew that drug addiction and despair would be my inevitable future. As I soaped up and rinsed, I imagined myself washing away the past. I was halfway through the shower when I heard another shower start up.

“Who’s in here?” a feminine voice called.

“Julie.”

“Morning, Julie. Gina here. Enjoying your first day?”

“Sure.” Definitely the voice of the dark-haired woman, high and girlish. At least I had guessed one person right. I wondered if she washed her waist-length hair every day.

“Don’t worry, it will get better.”

“I don’t fit in here.” I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.

“That’s the magic of this place, none of us fit in anywhere.”

I rinsed off and dried myself, glad at least that I had brought my own soft pink towels. I didn’t know what to reply so I left the shower, as Gina hummed softly to herself. I should have asked her what the macrobiotic smile was but I decided not to show my ignorance to anyone else. I would look it up on my own time.

I slipped into jeans and a T-shirt again. I did miss my old wardrobe and my old routine. It hadn’t been all that bad being Jewel Cadeau, porn actress and stripper. I had liked having an alter ego; she was sexually voracious and fearless. For three years, she had been a part of me and she had been my shield. Without her and without my armor of stripper wear, I was only Julie Cooper.

I walked back down the hall. None of the rooms had any nametags or distinguishing marks on them. If I had thought this place would be like college, where everyone advertised their personalities on their dorm room doors, I was much mistaken. I ran into Arla coming out of one of the other rooms. She jumped back when she saw me.

“Arla, I’m going to take a quick walk around town.”

Arla gave me a nervous smile. “Have fun but don’t forget, lunch set up is at noon.” Whose room had she come out of and why?

I walked along the main street, carefully memorizing where I was and how long it had taken me to get there. I nearly wept with joy when I came to the drugstore. The aisles were full of riches: a refrigerator full of sodas, shelves of snacks, and cigarettes. I felt like a conquistador at El Dorado. My hands shook as I put my money on the counter, I couldn’t decide which item I wanted to tear into first.

I drank my Diet Coke and dipped into a bag of chocolate-chip cookies as I strolled back down the main street and through the park that spanned the swift-flowing river nearby. After making sure I was alone, I lit up a cigarette, inhaled quickly and nearly immediately blew the smoke back out. Perhaps it was a sacrilege to light up in the middle of nature, but I needed the security of my ciggie. It wasn’t even about the nicotine, my quick inhale/exhale technique guaranteed that I didn't get too much of that. “Cigarettes are wasted on you,” Doug used to say in the beginning, when we were saving every penny. Later he bought me as many packs as I wanted and an antique silver case to hold them in.

The smoking had always kept me occupied when I was on set, waiting for the endless arrangement of lighting and sound equipment. We worked in windowless studios that felt more like warehouses. Sometimes I used to imagine that if porn were filmed somewhere other than the flat and prefabricated San Fernando Valley, I might not feel so shamed.

“We should do locations,” I told Bruce, the director. “Somewhere exotic maybe.”

“You’re the landscape, kid,” he said, nudging me toward the makeshift bedroom in the center of the room.

I hated saying my lines. In some ways that was the more uncomfortable part—the pouty-mouthed come-ons and the exaggerated lip licking and eye rolling as I telegraphed my sexual availability to the men who would be my partners. Doing scenes like that with Doug was most difficult because I knew he no longer felt that panting, rock-hard lust for me anymore. With someone else it was easier to pretend I was desired.

On the bed, I could lose myself in the physicality. Porn sex bore as little relation to actual sex as sitcom families bore to real ones. I kept my eyes shut a lot of the time, the same way I did when I rode the rollercoaster as a child. Alex, Jim, Paulo even Doug—it didn’t matter whose cock was sliding in and out of me, slick with shiny lubricant. “Fuck me, baby,” I sighed, making sure to time my cadenced breathing to his pumping thrusts. If my attention wandered we would have to dub in the sounds of ecstasy later, costing time and money.

“Spread your legs wider,” Bruce called from behind the camera.

I obeyed, pointing my toes so that the line of my leg would appear longer. If I could not control what was being done to my body, I could control the way it appeared.

The rotating cycle of bodies continued. They had me with women too, although my sexuality wasn’t wired toward the female. Even Lisa, Doug’s secret lover, was required to perform with me. How I hated that, her deceitful tongue curled around my petal pink nipple. We kissed urgently, holding our mouths slightly apart so the camera could capture the activity of each roving tongue. I told myself I felt nothing but my traitorous body sometimes belied my indifference. I kept my orgasms to myself; no one wanted to see my real pleasure, only the expert fakery of my moans.

I always felt lonely when the man pulled out. But true believability relied on the visceral evidence, the arc of sperm, edited in over and over so that in the end, the orgasm looked as if it took minutes instead of seconds. Soon, I would be wrapped in comfort, wearing Doug’s old football T-shirt with the bear paw on it and smoking a cigarette. After filming scenes, I was always so cold. The adrenaline and the heat of the lights warmed me while I was on camera. Afterwards, I sat off to the side, shivering and discarded, while they moved other actors into position.

I continued along the riverbank reminding myself that I was safe here. No one here would ever associate me with my past. The river snaked through the trees, diverted in some places into quieter pools but rushing quickly in the center. A path hugged the riverbank and I ambled along, puffing contentedly on my cigarette, sending up a plume of smoke behind me. I hoped the air would keep the smoke smell from settling into my clothes and hair.

I came around a bend in the river and saw a man fly-fishing on the opposite side of the river, standing nearly hip high in one of the still pools. The graceful motion of his pole as he recast over the water intrigued me. He reminded me of the gymnasts in the Olympics who perform with ribbons. The pole became an extension of his body. I stopped for a moment to watch him. It looked like Hideo, same unruly shock of white hair and a faded flannel shirt. Hideo wasn’t alone. A dark-haired man was crouched on the riverbank talking to him. I wasn’t sure if I should wave but I knew I shouldn’t stare. I moved on, doubling back along the path, stubbing out my cigarette and hoping Hideo hadn’t seen me smoking.

When I got back to my room at Aurora, I wanted to ask Arla about Hideo, but there wasn’t time. “We have to set up for lunch,” she said sniffing the air around me. She went in the bathroom to wash her hands and I hid my cigarettes in the bottom of my pink backpack.

“Ready when you are.” I followed her back into the kitchen.