Maiden’s Prayer
by Chad Eagleton

Ella Dodge climbed out of the pool and he couldn’t help but remember the first time he saw her. Almost thirty years ago, he watched her sway out of the ocean, the night surf lapping at her ankles, and look up toward the cliff-side where headlights drifted off Highway 101. The sound of two car doors opening lost to the sea’s roar and then, only, the shadow of a gun cast large.

The average viewer, if they had even seen Maiden’s Prayer, remembered the winding car chase toward Santa Teresa, the rise and fall of the car engines, the high beam flicker and her eyes large in the rearview. The intellectuals spoke only of Haines’ use of color as overarching metaphor or stuck with the obvious significance of the religious imagery, particularly as it pertained to the two killers and the final scene. The plotters, on the other hand, acknowledged only the twist in the last act and the ambiguity of the final scene. But for him, it was always that first unbroken shot of her climbing from the water.

And now, here she was, padding over to him, leaving wet footprints on the marble. Smiling, she plucked the towel off her deckchair and lightly dried off before wrapping it around her waist.

“Have a nice swim?” He asked as she lay down in the deck chair.

“I did,” she said, closing her eyes. “You have a very nice house.”

“Thank you,” he said and stared at her. She was older now, but still beautiful. Her hair long and thick, a color one reviewer had called blond, but he considered brunette. Neither age nor current Hollywood standards had thinned the sweep and shape of her curves. “Dinner?”

He liked the little noise she made in the back of her throat, before she answered, “I can eat. Maybe a movie—after?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Have you seen The Sunset Squadron yet?”

“No,” he said, turning his gaze to the pool. “I hadn’t planned on it.”

She opened her right eye and squinted.
“What?” He asked.

“I think you must be the only one. Don’t you like Summer Blockbusters?”

“I don’t dislike Summer Blockbusters, but they’re not at the top of my to-see list. I don’t actually see too many movies.”

She turned her face and looked at him through slitted eyes. “But you’re in the business.”

“I’m connected to the business,” he said, adjusting the large umbrella.

Her eyes widened in the shade. “Do you even like movies?” She asked. “I dated a guy once who was in the business and didn’t even like movies.”

“A producer?”

“Yes.”

“Figures,” he said and she laughed as he added, “I love movies. That’s why I don’t see many of them.”

“So, you’re a critic then?”

He shrugged. “Bad scripts. Bad directing. And, anymore, most actors—let’s be frank, they do a workman like job at best. They arrive, hit their mark, and show off their memorization skills.”

“Is that why I don’t get work?” She sighed dramatically. “My…” she twisted her mouth and chewed the corners of her lip “…memorization skills…” her eyes rolled to the upper right “…aren’t that great.”

“No, you don’t get work because you’re an actress over thirty and somewhere along the way Hollywood decided to stop making anything that a fully-functioning adult would want to see.”

The deckchair creaked under her tensing weight. She pulled on her long, wet hair and looked down over the Hollywood Hills and away from him. “So, what do you do—exactly? Can I ask that? This is what—date three? Can I ask that now? I hope so. I feel a little like I’m in a Scorsese picture.”

“Don’t ask me about my business and all that?”

“Yes.”

“You worried?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“A little.”

“Then why did you ever agree to that first date?”

“My agent—“

“Will?”

“Yes. God, I don’t even call him Will. He said—when I asked him about you—that I could trust you. And he’s never been wrong before. Well, maybe about that Lifetime Original movie, but not when it mattered, not about people.”

“And the second?”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“I am.” He nodded. “I fix things.”

“Like parking tickets?”

“No,” he said. “Problems.”

She closed her eyes again and wiggled her way into a comfortable position. “What sort of problems?”

“Mistakes, indiscretions, and fuck-ups.” He said, then picked up his glass and walked to the bar where he tonged a sugar cube into his Old-Fashioned glass, sloshed in two splashes of bitters and a single splash of club soda.

“I’d imagine,” she said from the other side of the pool, “that being privy to all that dirt would make it hard to see movies.”

“Sometimes,” he said, crushing the sugar cube with a spoon.

“Is that why you don’t to see The Sunset Squadron?”

“It ruins the movie for me. My favorite films, my favorite scenes are the ones that capture a moment…I fill in all the rest.”

“And Sunset Squadron has been ruined for you?”

He filled the glass with bourbon, stirred it and began, “It was a year or so ago. Jack Prine was stumping for one of the presidential candidates in Indiana.”

“Which one?” She cranked her chair into a sitting position and put on her sunglasses.
He smiled. “He’s a young Hollywood actor, who do you think he was stumping for?”

“Of course,” she said.

“He gave a speech at Indiana University in Bloomington. After the speech, he was supposed to fly back to Los Angeles. Filming on Sunset Squadron was to begin in three days. When he wasn’t on his flight and hadn’t checked in, the producers called me.”

“Worried he wouldn’t make it back in time?”

“Yes. One hundred and fifty million dollars of worry.” He sipped his Old Fashioned and leaned against the bar. “But mostly they were concerned that he’d get himself into trouble. Prine likes girls and booze. Young girls and old booze.” He saw her face. “Not that young. Sixteen seems to be his cutoff.”

“Still,” she said.

He nodded. “Still.”

She swung her legs over her chair and picked up her own watery drink. “But how does that work?” She took a sip, searching for the flavor somewhere among the melted ice cubes. “How do you accomplish anything with cell phones, digital cameras, YouTube, Facebook—“

“And paparazzi?”

She crossed over to him and handed him her glass. “It seems like there’s not much that’s secret anymore.”

“It’s difficult, but I manage.” He raised her glass. “More of the same?”

She sat on a barstool and leaned on her elbows, small fists supporting her face. “Surprise me.”

He sat a fresh cocktail glass on the bar. She watched as he dropped cracked ice into the shaker. He added half ounces of orange and lemon juice, followed by Cointreau.
“What are you making?”
“It’s a surprise,” he said, topping it off with one and a half ounces of Gin before shaking and then pouring the mixture into her glass. “I give you—Maiden’s Prayer.”

She laughed. “You made that up.”

“No, I didn’t. It’s a real drink.”

She sipped it and smiled. “It’s good—and it’s called Maiden’s Prayer?”

“Absolutely.”

“You know I was in a movie called—“

“Maiden’s Prayer? I know.”

“Maybe you do like movies?”

“I like yours.”

“Flattery is a good delaying tactic, but I still want to know.”

“About?”

She rolled her eyes. “So, was he with some young college girl? A co-ed’s visiting high school sister?”

“You’re just like everyone else, aren’t you?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Addicted to dirt.”

“Do I read the scandal sheets? Yeah. Do I watch Entertainment Tonite until I just have to shut it off? Certainly. Do I occasionally keep the television turned to E! until my brain starts to mush? I do. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Everybody likes gossip. And maybe, well, probably, for me, there’s a bit of jealousy there too. I don’t get any scripts anymore and I don’t think anyone would take free pictures of me, let alone pay for a shot of my morning Starbucks.”

“Maybe that’s part of the problem?”

“What?”

“Gossip over art. Scandal over substance. Isn’t everyone entitled to some privacy?”

“Ah bullshit, if I’m bringing in Angelina Jolie bank I can put up with photographers following me.” She took another drink and said, through ice crunching teeth, “But you’re just delaying again.”

“I am.”

He sat an ashtray on the bar and lit a cigarette. She waited through the first four drags before starting to speak, only to be cut off as he said, “I pay people. People who monitor all that web traffic: Google, Facebook, YouTube, whatever. I have an arrangement with several paparazzi…among others. Certain things don’t see the light of day in exchange for things that do.” He circled his cigarette around the ashtray, rolling off the ash, before continuing, “It was a Facebook photo. Cell phone pic of Jack Prine drinking with a college student. Got the student’s name easy enough. A web search got me his campus address. Got the name of the bar, a place called Kilroy’s Sports.”

“Did you muscle the student?” She grinned.

“No,” he lied. “I paid him and threatened to bust him for the fake ID.”

“How’d you know he had a fake ID?”

“I guessed. You’re required to live on campus freshman and sophomore years. Twenty-one is the drinking age in Indiana. No way he was twenty-one and still living in a dorm.”

“So what’d he say?”

“Same thing the guys at the bar said—that our star left with a girl around two a.m. the night before.”

“And you found her?”

“Easy enough—she was the kid’s older sister.”

“What then?”

“I found him in bed with the girl. Erased everything on her cell phone. Checked her Mac. Paid her off. And escorted fun-boy back to Hollywood.”

“That easy?”

“That easy.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Did that really happen?”

“You’ll have to take my word for it.”

“Let’s go eat.” She slid her empty glass across the bar.

“What would you like?”

She slapped the bar and climbed off her stool. “I’m up for anything,” she said before walking to the outdoor shower. Standing underneath the green nozzle, she reached up and pulled the handle. As warm water cascaded down over her and she arched her neck, showing him her throat, he thought again of Maiden’s Prayer.

He played that scene, that first scene of her coming out of the water, that perfect scene over and over again in his head in an endless loop. Like all his favorite moments, he could play through it in slow-mo, pause, rewind, and zoom-in…

…until that first shot of Sunset Squadron and there was smiling Jack, a luminescent figure appearing out of the fiery nimbus of an early morning sun, walking straight into the foreground and the camera pulled back and everything was ruined…

…that dentist-wrought grin replaced by that slack-jawed look on the big boy’s face as he raised his head up from the single, big, fluffy pillow he shared with the girl while trying to find focus through still-drunk eyes.

He had smacked him—hard. Hard enough to knock him off the bed and onto the floor. Hard enough to sober him up. The girl hadn’t screamed. Just made a noise in her throat and pulled the sheet up over her naked body while bounding off the bed and cowering in the corner.

“You fucked up, Jack.”

The star nodded and rubbed his head, smoothing his mussed hair over the bald spot the public had never seen. “Fucking whiskey, man. Does it every time.”

“He didn’t fuck up,” she said. “He loves me.”

Prine laughed.

And the girl’s face…the girl’s face—he’d never be able to see another film with smiling Jack without seeing that look in her eyes as she ran across the bed, stumbling over the sheets; without remembering how her knees buckled and she dropped in front of Prine and pleaded with him, tears louder than her words; without hearing the sound Prine’s manhood made slapping against her wrist as he turned from her, grabbing his cigarettes off the nightstand and lighting one.

Then it had turned bad.

The girl grabbed Prine’s hair and pulled his head back, digging her fake nails into his face and raking them down his booze-blotchy skin. Prine screamed louder than she did and tried swatting her away. She stuck close. Scratching any bit of skin she could reach.

“Get her the fuck off me!”

He tased her.

“Holy fuck, man.”

He slapped Prine again. “Get your shit together. Wait in the front room. And try to remember everywhere you went.”

Prine nodded and he went to work on the girl’s computer and cell phone, before finally turning to her…

…“I liked it,” Ella Dodge said. “Was it an astonishing piece of cinema? No, definitely not. But it was worth twenty bucks. What did you think—are you okay.”

He clenched his fingers against the wheel of his BMW trying to forget the sound the needle made as it pierced the baby fat on her arm and the Marilyn cocktail surged into her blood. “Yeah,” he said, and turned to look at her face, remembering then the other reason he had called her for that first date.

He needed her; the image of Ella Dodge coming out of the water, that uncorrupted Maiden’s Prayer, to wipe away the one that had escaped from the girl’s lips as she slipped away into a quiet, twisted sheet death.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just fine.”

BIO: Most recently Chad's work has been found in Bad Things Magazine and the Pulp Pusher. When he's not writing, Chad is thinking about how much he'd like to be Alain Delon in Le Samourai.