The Cutting Room by Laurence Klavan

a lark.
    “Well, it’s a difficult profession,” he said compassionately. “Still, they always need exotics. And if you can speak English, that’s a plus.”
    “I’m an educated girl,” Erendira told him proudly. “And not exotic. Just normal.”
    It just kept getting better. She ate pasta from the table, and told him why it wasn’t well done, and what they could do to improve it. Erendira was educated, not serious about show business—she’d asked nothing from him, despite the fact that he’d offered, in his own way—and she could cook! Plus, that shape—she curled around like a canyon road at night—she was dark skinned, that was why he made the connection. How could he resist?
    Ben knew that he’d promised Rosie—and himself. After the last one, he’d said it was out of his system. He had to be more careful—that Annie Chin had turned out to be such a betrayer, bringing that musclebound freak so close to his house. (And those rumors weren’t true—Rosie was all-gal! The affairs were
his
fault, not hers!)
    Actually, now that he thought about it, it would have been
Annie’s
fault; she probably would have done it whether she was sleeping with him or not. And “sleeping with him”—once!
    (He had to make a note to himself: His relationship with Annie Chin was like Welles’s with Rita Hayworth. Hadn’t she been crazy, too? Or did she just end up with Alzheimer’s? He would get that new girl, that Beth Brenner, to look it up. Actually, that Beth was cute and
didn’t
seem crazy, but it was too risky for that, forget it.)
    So he had no intention of cheating again, and so soon. But when Erendira—to prove her point about the pasta—said, “See?” and placed a fork of it into his mouth, waited until he’d swallowed, and then said, “Mine tastes so much better,” he knew he had to have her, right then and there.
    “I think we’re through for the day,” he told the director, who thought that was a good idea.
             
    He didn’t want to rush her. Erendira was a bright girl, a good girl—and that Latina thing, the church and all, who knew how fast she would go? The last thing he wanted, he thought with a laugh, was a family of big brothers coming after him with machetes. It was scary enough dealing with that kid who had brought Roy there, from the gangs or whatnot! It was scary that night he had a bunch of those kids up to his house for a little private fun.
    Anyway, he drove her home, to—get this—an Evangeline Home for Girls in South Central. Very protective, for girls from out of town, no boys allowed in the room. This only served to get Ben more charged.
    It tickled the two of them to be sitting outside that run-down place, in Ben’s black Porsche! They laughed so hard about it that Ben had to cap it with a kiss.
    What a kiss it was. Like slipping hot liquor into his mouth! Sitting outside in his car, she used her tongue like an artist—like a pro, Ben actually thought, and this made him even crazier.
    Where had she learned it? Not from the nuns, that was for sure!
    “Where I come from,” she told him, “everything about love is perfectly natural.”
    Kindness and cooking, innocence and experience. Plus, a foreign accent. Plus, she wasn’t ambitious. Erendira made Ben forget every disastrous affair he had had, made him forget he was even married to Rosie. For a minute, anyway.
    “I have a little place up in the Malibu hills,” he said. “I’d like you to see it sometime.”
    I’d like you to see it tonight, he thought. I’d like you to see it right now.
    “I’d like to see it right now,” she said.
             
    Ben had to admit it, he had not been suspicious. Sure, she was going pretty fast, seeming to do—and be—everything he had ever wanted. But who could blame him for going along?
    With her that night, right on the couch where Roy was sitting now, he felt like some fabulous peasant to whom, yes, “everything is perfectly natural.” This was no