F4: Tuesday's Choice

Still, it was good sex. It was great sex. It laid to rest for me—I don't know if it did for Roslyn as well—the specter I had carried around for a year of the reality of the sex with her not being up to par with the illusion of the sex scene we had shared.

Afterward, with me sitting at the foot of the bed, my legs open and reaching down to the floor of the compartment and Roslyn sitting yoga style against where the head of the bed met the compartment outer wall, facing the side of me, smoking a cigarette, and practicing Bette Davis expressions, for the first time she focused on me. The air was permeated with the distinctive jasmine scent from her heated body.

"The fuck was good, dear boy, but I sensed some discomfort in you."

"Well, it came as a surprise."

"You surprised me too. What are you doing on this train, dressed like a waiter and a porter? Research for a film role?"

"There are no more film roles for me. I'm headed back to Georgia. Defeated. Marcia's Week was my one and only featured part. And that wasn't featured much."

"It featured with me," she said, blowing a ring of smoke to the ceiling of the compartment. "It's the only divine thing I remember from that film. I wanted the cameras and the G-strings to go away and for us to climb to heaven."

"So did I."

"And this was good. But it still wasn't as good as the illusion."

I pondered for a while on whether I should say it. I knew why it wasn't as good. But she was completely out of my class. And I had failed and was going home. So why bother?

"What," she said, her eyes boring into me, obviously aware that I could say something if I wanted to.

What the hell, I thought. Hollywood was the past for me. Maybe Roslyn needed to hear it. "In the movie scene . . ." I started, but, thinking better of it, stopped.

"What? Tell me," she insisted in her "to be obeyed" voice.

"In the movie scene," I continued, "the illusion was that I was fucking you. In reality, it's always been you fucking me. You calling the shots."

"That's it? You should be fucking me?"

"That's it," I said. I started to rise. "I guess I'd better—"

"No. You're not leaving. I may be a prima donna, but no one in this business has ever said I couldn't take direction. Now we do it your way."

And my way we did it. Only giving her time to stub out her cigarette, I grasped her ankle and pulled her down the bed. Turning and rising over her as I did, I pressed my thighs between hers, encircled her waist in an arm, pulling her hips off the bed. Thrusting inside her, I gave her all she could take and held there as she panted and dug her nails into my shoulders, demanding that I fuck her, pleading that I begin to pump, screeching her nails down my back, whimpering for me to move my hips, begging me not to hold her trapped so she couldn't move hers, and, to her great surprise letting loose with her first orgasm of that fuck. But not her last.

"Good girl. And now we fuck," I muttered.

I started to pump. She arched her back, let her arms dangle at her sides and groaned the depth and thickness of my assault. Unable to resist those breast that were so famous and she had spent so much money on, I lowered my mouth to the nipples of one, and then the other, as I pumped her to a shared orgasm and ejaculation.

She made me take her in two more positions, although ones of my choice, before she begged a halt, declaring that she was exhausted. So was I, milked to the point of aching balls. Given the spontaneity of the couplings I controlled, I hadn't been sheathed, and neither one of us mentioned it or cared. Together we had soaked the blanket and sheets on the bed with the evidence of our pleasure.

Back in the positions on the bed we'd been in before I asserted control, and after she assured me that I wasn't missing preparing the breakfast service—that she had bought me out all of the way to Chicago, where she was leaving the train to do a movie there—she shocked me with a question.

"My name is James. Jim Canon," I answered. She had asked me my name. After more than a year and how fully we knew each other's bodies now, she was asking me my name.

"Not the best movie name," she said. "Cliff, I think. We'll change your name to Cliff."

"Excuse me?"

"You don't really want to go to Atlanta, and you don't really want to leave the movies," she said. "I can mentor you."

"Like Mae West mentored so many male stars?" I asked. I meant it as a flippant joke, but she didn't take it that way.

"Precisely. For starters you can be my personal assistant on this film in Chicago. There's an unfilled position in my contract. Then when we return to LA . . ."

In the next half hour, before I fucked her again, she had laid out a whole new career for me. My head was spinning. It was only when, late in the afternoon and both of us exhausted from fucking, and she said that I would sit with her in the dining car for supper, that I balked.

"I took on a responsibility," I said. "I wouldn't be comfortable sitting at a table at dinner. The diners will have remembered me. If I'm sitting among them—with you—they will know. They will know I'm fucking you. That would be too embarrassing. I will do the supper service, as a waiter, as normal."

"And then you will come back to the compartment for the night?"

"Yes," I said. I was willing to carry independence only so far with this voluptuous woman. She may be twice my age but she had the pussy jaws—the deep cavern that, once entered, seized and milked all of the life out of a man—that never would let me forget that I was in thrall to her.

"I think I like the assertive you," she cooed, knowing that I was just posturing—that I was an idiot if I really thought I was in charge here. I hadn't just signed to do the supper service tonight. I'd signed to do it all the way to Atlanta. But the next stop in the life that Roslyn Rogan had mapped out for me was Chicago, not Atlanta.

* * * *

"Ellen!"

"Yes, Ellen. Surprised to see me? You shouldn't be."

"Of course I am. You weren't . . ." I didn't know what to say. I was performing my last duty in the Chicago train station—as a porter, helping passengers on and off. I was standing on the steps up into one of the carriages. Ellen Nash was standing in front of me, with a suitcase in her hand, smiling up at me.

"But what are you doing here? You shouldn't be . . . I sent you an e-mail. You should be in Toronto."

"Yes you did, you mushy romantic. You sent me a 'Midnight Train to Georgia' e-mail and then cut off all access to you. And I was in Toronto. But Toronto isn't far from Chicago. And I didn't have any trouble having my shoots rearranged to be here today and off for several weeks."

"I'm sorry. I know an e-mail was the coward's way. I just couldn't . . . you knew to be here today?"

"Of course I knew to be here today. You drew me a map with that e-mail. It's a good thing I've been with you and loved you long enough to understand that your heart is frequently ahead of your mind. And I must say you look the real hunk in that porter's uniform. I bet all of the cougars on the train were on the prowl for you. But why the uniform? Researching for a part?"

I blushed and couldn't help looking distressed. She had skewered me on several fronts. She immediately saw that I was upset and stepped onto the lower step leading up into the train carriage, put her hands on either side of my head, pulled my face down to hers, and gave me a long, lingering kiss.

That sure cleared a lot of cobwebs out of my thinking and indecision. This, despite the fact that Roslyn Rogan had picked just that moment to strut her way past us toward the station lobby. I had arranged to meet her there after my duties here were finished. She once again was in the tight silk suit with the mink stole shrugged over her shoulder and was followed by a huffing porter, struggling with an overloaded luggage cart.

Even as Ellen and I still were kissing, I caught a glimpse of Roslyn passing on the platform below. She had her eyes on Ellen and me, and, to my surprise, her expression was more amused than either surprised or angry. She paused there for a moment—Ellen wasn't all that interested in coming out of the kiss, so neither was I. Then with a little shrug and an inclining of her head in a salute, Roslyn turned and continued her saunter down the platform. My last view of her—forever—was her full, swinging hips that I so recently had been using for target practice, and the rhythmic swaying of the tail end of her mink stole.

I could have brushed past Ellen and followed Roslyn. The expression on the woman's face had clearly offered that, but conditionally. Roslyn's conditions. She had promised me the world of the movies. A second chance on what I thought I wanted—under her control. But that kiss Ellen and I were locked in. I was understanding better now what I wanted, what was important to me. My heart was catching up with my head.

"I'm sorry. I didn't realize," Ellen said, as we came out of the kiss. "You had to sign on to work on the train to have train fare, didn't you?"

"Yes," I admitted, still embarrassed.

"I was such an bitch," she said. "So excited about my roles that were coming so easily that I lost track of how you were doing—financially as well as emotionally. I'll not make that mistake with you again."

Wouldn't make that mistake again. Her words were screaming in my brain. What was she saying? That it wasn't over as far as she was concerned, despite my crass way of trying to end it? "How did you know to be here today?" I blurted, repeating the question she hadn't answered.

"Your e-mail, silly. You laid out your itinerary for me. The train schedule. Where the trains would change. Even the hours of travel. Your heart was telling me what your brain was too proud to say. And the song, 'Midnight Train to Georgia.' You used the lyrics of the song to cite your feeling of defeat by LA—by Hollywood—and your need to change your world to something more manageable. But your mind didn't take the whole song in. Your heart did, though, I know. You just didn't want to upset me."

"I don't understand."

"The song goes on, you dope. The song isn't about you, really. It is a message to me—telling me what I have to do to keep hold of what I hold dearest."

And then when I just stood there, stunned, she continued. "Later verses. It changes from being about you, the man, to being about me, the man's woman. 'My world, his world, our world, mine and his alone . . . I got to go . . . I got to go' to Georgia, with him. With you, my man, if I want to keep the world I want. 'My world, his world, my man, his girl.' Let your mind catch up to your heart, Jim. You didn't pick that song by accident."

"But your career. The movies. The movie in Toronto."

"That's the point, Jim. I'm filming a movie in Toronto. Not in Hollywood. They film movies everywhere. Movies have down time. Movie people are living all over now, not just in LA. I'm not doing bit parts now. They accommodate the needs of those in supporting roles. We have things called airplanes and trains now to get you quickly from one town to another. I can live in Atlanta as easily as I can live in LA. I don't even like LA. I like Atlanta. Atlanta is where my lover is going to be."

"Ellen."

"I thought maybe Buckhead."

"I can't afford Buckhead," I said in a strangled voice. "I never will be able to afford it."

Once again she saw where the delicate edge of this was and backed off immediately. I couldn't afford Buckhead, but now, with her movie success, she could.

"Not Buckhead. I meant someplace eclectic like Decatur. Quaint and quirky."

I took her in my arms and kissed the top of her head. I didn't want to let her see my tears. She was doing everything she could to keep me.

Teaching drama at a high school in the Atlanta suburbs was just fine with me. Acting wasn't the most important thing in my life anyway.