A Vomitorium in the House of Love

Electra tapped her brush against her left wrist before using a small piece of plastic to shield Julien’s eyelashes from her matte powder. Sometimes it got into his eyelashes and made his face look wide and washed out. She gave him brown mascara for a ‘doe-eyed effect’ and reddened his nose to make it appear as though he had been exerting himself. Julien hated this part; he had worked hard all year to lose thirty-six pounds and look like less of a ruddy alcoholic for his gladiator role.

“Could we do a little less blush today, Electra?” he asked. “I look like a damn travesty.”

Electra didn’t know what that word meant. She gave him a condescending grin that cracked her patchy lipstick and adjusted her apron, heavy with tools that overflowed from their narrow pockets. She refastened the apron strings around her small, flat waist and started going to work on his faint eyebrows.

“Stop scrunching your eyelids, Jules,” Electra whispered into his ear as she mixed purple, green, and yellow pigments on the back of her hand. It took her twelve minutes to finish the fake shiner on his left eye. He held a pack of makeup wipes on his lap to hide his erection. Julien was an athletic young French Jew with impressive calves, shy brown eyes, and boyish curly hair. He grew up playing the bullied, loyal, and fat token white friend on a long-running BET sitcom. After losing the weight, he won three awards for playing a 19th century syphilitic cross-dressing spy and was now lamenting the influx of period roles his agent kept bringing him. He was sick of the plastic shields and powdered wigs.

Julien was first on the call sheet for the latest sword-and-sandal by Orpheus Peet. In the nineties, the director was an actor himself, usually starring as the blonde-blue gay boy who befriended the protagonist’s sons in order to rob their houses. In his youth, the director was slender, sinister, and often shirtless. After he started working behind the camera, he started to balloon, and the bigger he got, the longer his films became. Every fifty pounds he gained added half an hour to his runtime. His latest was predicted to pass the four-hour mark.

Julien had fallen in love with Electra after being forced to sit in her pheromones with his eyes closed, barely breathing as to not blow the powders around, oxygen deprived, crazy for her. He lost his mind when on the twelfth day of filming, he came to his makeup chair early just to find it straining under the weight of Orpheus, who Electra was struggling to mount like an assisted dip machine.

Julien stopped going to the gym the next day. He gave crafty three thousand dollars in cash to bring him all the cheese and fruit platters they could carry. He procured six bottles of wine and demanded the bag of shake he found in a teamster’s cup holder.

He stacked the trays on his bed, opened a bottle of wine and his laptop, and turned the webcam onto himself.

“I will sit in my trailer and eat until Electra takes me back,” he explained to his live audience of eighty thousand. He lifted an orange Home Depot bucket to the camera to show that he was serious. He started with a sprig of concord grapes, enjoyed some tastefully small cubes of cheese, and teased the marbling of his deli meat in front of the camera. Even though he relished every bite of his food, letting out little moans and exclamations, he barely chewed. Tongue to throat. Toothless. At some points, after the sixth hour, he started to feel despair, hopeless that he would never reach the grandiosity of Orpheus Peet. His PAs, the set medic, and DA came knocking on his trailer. He shooed them away and barricaded his door.

He cracked open his window to let Pamela from crafty feed a sub sandwich through the vent. He left it open after she left, hoping the fresh air would help with his nausea. He stared right into the eye of the webcam and started crying. His mascara started to run. He started dry heaving, saying Electra’s name over and over again until he finally puked on his keyboard.

A few minutes later, four long, garishly painted acrylics scratched at the windowpane. One of Electra’s nails broke off as she hoisted her body through the window and fell onto Julien’s cot. She took a makeup wipe out of her apron to clean the vomit off his cheek and fix the mascara pooling under his eyes. He held his breath and stopped crying.

Electra put her kit away and removed the apron from her waist. She let it thud on the floor, spilling brushes and compacts all over the linoleum without a care. She sat down and took Julien’s chin in her claws to check her work before diving into everything he had eaten around on the fruit and cheese platters. She closed his laptop and kicked it into the trash. They drank wine from the bottle, ate brie by the handful, and wiped their oily hands on the bedspread as they devoured each other. They finished the cheese platters down to every sprig of parsley.

“By the time I’m done with you,” Julien moaned, “you won’t be able to fit through that window.”

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Anna Krivolapova lives on the East Coast, and is the author of Incurable Graphomania via Apocalypse Confidential Press.