Cut!
Lill and I and Mrs Price did the editing for the sex scenes up at Mrs Price's house, and like the first time we went up there it was a bit of a shock. I mean you expect teachers to be reasonably conventional people (even though of course really we knew Mrs Price wasn't) and also teachers don't make much money so I expected her to have a small house and like a husband and kids and stuff (except she'd occasionally referred to 'my partner' so I had sussed that she wasn't living with her husband). So it's a bit out of town and Mrs Price gives us a lift out so we won't get lost that first time, and we go up into the woods and there's this gate and we go in and there's this neat gravel parking place and we get out and look around and - no house - and Mrs Price laughs and leads us down these steps like we're going underground and there's this door and we go in through this like super-modern kitchen and come out in this living room which is like vast.
It's all white walls and wood floor and wood roof with like no ceiling and the south wall's all glass like with no frames or anything and I realise the house is like cantilevered out of the slope of a hill. It's amazingly uncluttered - just one leather couch and two leather chairs and a sheepskin rug in front of a big fireplace, and then like space.
Over the fireplace was the largest photographic print I've ever seen. It was a larger than life-size picture of an infeasibly cool slender languid imperious Nordic blond woman lying on her left side on a grey rock in a very blue sea. She's propped up on her left elbow and her head is erect, looking straight into the camera with bored but untroubled arrogance. Her right leg is propped up to show the hips of an extremely dark and glossy black guy with his thick cock plunged to the root into her cunt. The quality of the print was so good that you seemed to be able to see distinctly every strand of her hair.
Lillith and I stared at it dumb-struck for a long moment.
"Nice, isn't it?" said Mrs Price. "My partner particularly likes that one. Come on through to the office."
We went through another door and came into an architect's office, also spartan and Scandinavian in style, with linen blinds drawn over the big south windows. A woman uncoiled from a stool at a drafting table across the room and came over to us languidly. She was more than life-size, infeasibly cool and slender and imperious. She wore a sheer silk blouse, tight leather jeans, and - I'm fairly certain - nothing else at all. She looked only slightly older and no less challenging than in the photograph.
"Hi, Sharon, darling" she drawled, stooping from her six foot two inch height to kiss Mrs Price. "these are your students?"
"Lillith, Kyle, this is my partner Bretta. Bretta, this is Kyle, who's done most of the direction of our movie, and this is Lillith who's been responsible for a lot of the script and most of the costume design."
I should have been at least a little bit prepared. I should have noticed the careful lack of prepositions in what Mrs Price had been saying. After all, I'd played a very similar trick on my own father. The idea that Mrs Price might be gay just had not occurred to me.
Bretta looked down on us. "Welcome to our house," she drawled. "Sharon has told me a lot about you." And then suddenly, unexpectedly, she grinned. "Did you like my portrait?"
"Very much," I said, striving for equilibrium. "Like, when I saw it and didn't know it was you I thought it was awesomely cool to hang it over the fireplace like that. Now I know it is you I'm like breath taken. That is just so, like, stylish."
"I'm glad you like it. Come, I'll show you the computer I've set up for you."
As we worked there on and off over the next two weeks, Bretta was like this prowling, pantherous presence in the background. She moved quietly. When on the phone (which during the afternoon was quite often) she'd stalk about, listening and drawling. When working, either at her drafting table or at her computer, she was silent, and fairly often you'd look up and notice she wasn't there. And then, of course, she'd stalk up behind us, coolly observing us as we struggled with the pacing and cutting of this scene or that. Sometimes she would make comments and suggestions in her arrogant drawl. Her suggestions were analytical and incisive (and led us to be more daring in a whole lot of places), but it was always as if she knew how to create an image to turn other people on, not as though she was herself in any way moved or aroused.
