Chapter 78: Who Deserves What

Tuesday, January 7, 1986

We spent much of the day enjoying the lower-difficulty trails — both ones we’d already tried and some we hadn’t. We actually wiped out more today, but everyone knew how to fall and it just made for laughter (and the occasional awkward attempt to get back up), not injuries.

Skiing burns a lot of calories. Meals were hearty, and we had a great time talking and catching up.

Jess had ideas. That hardly surprised me. She was the sort of person who would. Perhaps some sort of historical drama, if she got lucky to find the right part? A rom-com or two? Something where she played a professional?

She wanted to diversify her roles as quickly as possible, and had plans to do so. ‘After School Special’ (or whatever that disaster had been called — I might have forgotten) would have probably been a major misstep, but we all knew it would be hard to turn down that first starring role when it came.

Well, if it came, but we all felt that it was just a matter of time. She had too much going for her.

Jas pulled me aside briefly at the bottom of a slope. We were the last two down, and the other three were already making their way to the lifts. We did, too, but slower, so she could talk.

“Two things, really quick,” she said. “Don’t want Jess to realize I told you.”

“Surprises,” I said, chuckling.

“First: we had a serious talk about it. Long story short: she has a latex waiver.”

“Interesting,” I said.

She giggled.

“I know that’s better for you. Believe me, it’s better for us, too!”

“I believe that. Too many testimonials.”

“Second: I’m pretty certain that what works on me and Paige will go over very well. And ... well. There’s an obvious connection.”

“There is,” I said, chuckling.

“Not sure what will happen or when, but rock her world.”

“I will do my best!”

“Love you, fiancé!”

“Love you, fiancée!”

We picked up the acting conversation in the hot tub, with Angie and me obliquely referring to various options coming up. Very obliquely, really, since we weren’t mentioning directors, stars, or specific plots. For better or worse, it turned into ‘Well, there are rom-coms, historical dramas, regular comedies, action movies, and more all coming up.’

Duh.

All of that brought up the elephant in the room. Unless a movie was truly career-defining for someone, and unless we felt like that other actress truly deserved the role at a bedrock level, what point was there in warning Jess off of it? This universe wasn’t either of ours. Jess was ‘from here.’ She ‘deserved’ things at the same level anyone else did. Jas, Paige, and Jess again insisted Angie and I were truly also ‘from here,’ because we hadn’t asked to be here and had no way of being anywhere else. Any success we made for ourselves, fairly and ethically, was ours.

That meant letting go, for the most part. I thought we might still warn her about something like ‘Pretty Woman’. As good as Jess was, Julia Roberts ‘deserved’ that role. Jess was already warning herself off any romantic lead role in a Michael J. Fox movie until he found a wife. Angie and I added to that by being pretty sure he and his wife-to-be had starred together in a movie we weren’t going to name.

Meg Ryan might have ‘deserved’ a couple of her roles, too, and the list went on beyond that. And — not that it would have suited Jess, though she could have knocked it out of the park — ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ was out, for instance. How could you displace Jodie Foster? So were ‘Beetlejuice’ and ‘Heathers’. Winona Ryder deserved those.

Not that we got specific, but, broadly, we put up some metaphorical caution tape over high school dark comedies, horror comedies, thrillers, and (a bit more specific, obviously) rom-coms playing a hooker. Just ‘rom-coms’ was too broad, so we mostly hoped Meg would be fine.

The point was: Jess just needed to make her own decisions and ask us only if she was concerned about ‘displacing’ someone. The problem we were all seeing was simple: suppose Jess auditioned in good faith and got a role, only to find out we had second thoughts. Withdrawing might hurt her, and it also might not mean the ‘original’ actress would get the part.

Heck, even Jess not auditioning for a role might not result in the original results. It was a different universe. For all we knew, some of those people might not exist. Jodie Foster did, certainly. Did Winona Ryder? How would we know? Meg Ryan existed, but we couldn’t even be sure Tracy Pollan did. Maybe if we’d watched ‘Family Ties’ more than the time Jess was on we would know, but we hadn’t.

Not only that, but Jess merely being in Hollywood changed things. What if a director saw her in something else, said ‘I want her!’, and Jess declined to audition. Would the director move on to the actress we ‘knew,’ or would they look for someone who looked as much like Jess as possible?

The usual intractable problems of ‘future knowledge’: we knew less than we thought we did, sometimes, and our presence and the resulting ripples muddied the water even further. It still felt like the big picture was the same, but was it? Or had we already squashed some essential butterflies, resulting in enormous changes we would find out about in due time?

Would some of the movies we were worried about even exist? How could we know? Some of them were good enough that we might perhaps try to write them after their due date was long past. Some, we had no hope of writing.

Hard to believe many people got into discussions like this while naked in a hot tub with people they loved and lusted after, but maybe they did. We did, anyway.

The naked, amazingly adorable cheerleader wiggled herself between Jas and me tonight.

“Miss me?” she said.

“We survived last night,” Jas said, grinning. “But we wouldn’t want to miss you too many nights.”

“Sharing is very good, though,” I said.

“It is!” Jess said. “And I’d like to do some sharing, if you two feel like.”

Jas and I grinned and groped Jess just a bit.

“I think we very much feel like it,” Jas said, lightly pinching a boob.

“It feels wonderful,” I said, giving her thigh a little squeeze.

“Oooh!”

Angie and Paige looked at each other.

“I guess we’ll just have to make love to each other, wife-to-be,” Angie said.

“How tragic, wife-to-be,” Paige said, giggling.

“Sugar ... overdose...” Jess said, grinning.

“You missed us calling each other ‘fiancée’ earlier,” I said.

“Dying ... insulin ... stat!”

With everyone laughing, we got out of the tub, dried off, hugged, and went our separate ways.

Once in the bedroom, Jas and I trapped Jess between us, me behind her and Jas facing her.

“Thanks,” Jas said.

“For ... letting you give me a semester’s worth of orgasms?” Jess said, giggling. “That probably goes the other way!”