Homecoming 48

July, 2007

Jan came home for the mid-winter break from her junior year at university. Her younger brother, Danny, was off skiing with some friends, so it would be just her and her father for a while. Manny stood at the door watching when she drove up in her tiny Japanese sub-compact car, one of those gas-sipping two-seat death traps he figured were their revenge for Hiroshima.

It had snowed the night before and Manny had gotten up extra early to make sure the driveway was cleared for her. He came out on the porch as she climbed out of her car and told her to leave her bags, that he'd get them later. "Just come on in and warm up," he said.

But Jan was dressed in a comfortable tee shirt and jeans because the car had a better than average heater (and in the summer, an air conditioner that could make ice cubes on the dash board) and actually seemed to enjoy the cold air. She pushed her seat back forward and grabbed her duffel bag from the storage space behind it (where a real car would have a back seat) and walked with it to greet him.

She was taller than he, and thin, like her mother. Her hair was a wild cascade of gold that flowed around her shoulders like water. She had a million-dollar smile (thanks for the most part to the five-thousand-dollar braces she had worn from age thirteen to sixteen) and bright green eyes. Her skin was an even bronze, the same as it was in the summer when she practically lived at the beach. Manny couldn't get over how beautiful she was.

They hugged on the porch, and then went inside. He already had water simmering away for tea, and while she ran her bag upstairs to her room he readied the tea service and had it on the coffee table in the front room when she came down. He'd even brought out a box of her favorite cookies, which he'd bought the day he knew she'd be coming home.

Jan sat on the couch and Manny settled into his favorite recliner. Jan poured tea for them both, and ripped open the box of coconut macaroons. Her eyes rolled back in sheer delight as she ate the first one.

"God, these are so good!" she said, and she grabbed another from the box and sunk her sparkling white teeth into it. A very animal sound rumbled in her throat.

He'd seen that look on her face and heard that noise come out of her before, but not because of a lousy cookie. He sipped his tea, and asked her how her drive had been.

"It was pretty slick north of here," she confessed. "We got at least a half-foot more than you did down here."

He recalled the first time she referred to the campus rather than the house she had grown up in as her home. It was the first weekend of her freshman year. So much for that, he had supposed at the time.

"You look good," he told her.

"You do, too," she said.

They engaged in trivialities for the next few minutes while they finished their tea, and then Manny asked his daughter if she wanted to take a nap. "You must be tired from that drive."

She eyes him curiously. "Not really," she said. "Daddy, is there something the matter?"

His attitude had been off, somehow, since she walked in the door. He had seemed glad to have her home, but something else weighed on his mind. She could hear it in the clipped tones of his voice and see it in his tense shoulders. She immediately thought of health problems. He wasn't that old but he was at that age where things start to malfunction.

Manny asked her again if she didn't want to go upstairs and rest a bit. She said she was fine. "But, you obviously aren't," she added. "What's the matter?"

As an answer, Manny leaned forward and took up the TV remote that was on the table next to the tea service, and he flicked the set on and then activated the DVD player. The screen came to instant life and then Jan knew exactly what her father's problem was.

"Oh, Jesus, Daddy," she said, squirming uncomfortably on the couch. "I never thought you'd see that. How did you find it?"

He let the disc play. The main titles were crude renditions which didn't last long and the action started right off. Jan wasn't in the opening scene. Her bit came about ten minutes later.

"What are you doing with a movie like that anyway?"

It was as horrifying for Jan to know that her father watched porn movies as it was for Manny to have discovered his daughter acted in them. But, he wasn't about to be put on the defensive.

"You want to tell me about this?"

Jan couldn't make herself look at the TV. "It was two years ago, Daddy," she said. "I needed the money, bad."

College kids always need money for something. He could accept that.

"You could have come to me."

She hadn't even tried.

"It was right after the divorce," she told him. "Mom had just cleaned you out. I knew you didn't have it."

Manny nodded understandingly. "So, you just did it once for the money?" he asked.

"Yes."

He reached under the cushion of his recliner and brought out three more DVD cases, which he tossed onto the couch beside her one at a time. "Then, what about this?" he asked with the first one. "And this? And this?"

Jan was mortified. Her tanned face glowed red. This was one of those classic moments when people wish they could melt into a crack in the floor.

"Daddy, do you have any idea how much money they paid me to make those?"

"Is that all it was about? The money?"

"Dad, the scholarship ran out last year. My job only goes so far, and do you know what the rates are on student loans? By the time I graduate I'd be in debt for another ten years."

Manny sighed and sat back, and he glanced at the screen and saw it was just about time for his daughter to make her entrance as the maid who does more than windows. He turned away to face her again but pointed at the TV screen.

"I've seen my daughter do things," he said, "that I could never get her mother to even think about."

"Jesus, Daddy, you watched all these?"

"Every minute of them."

Jan held her face for a while, desperate to come up with a way to explain herself to her father.

"Daddy, none of it means anything," she said softly. "It's just acting."

"That's not acting," he said quickly. "Shakespeare is acting. This is fucking." She flinched at the word coming from her father. "This is fucking in front of a camera for money."

"Daddy, I could never make that kind of money..."

He wasn't ready to hear that.

"Where the hell did you learn half of that stuff? It certainly wasn't here!"

On the screen Jan had made her entrance and was in the process of sucking on the male lead's cock while the female lead fingered her from behind. In the other three discs Jan was the star.

"There's nothing to learn," she said, an air of surrender entering her voice. "It's just...sex."

"With strange men."

"Yes, Daddy."

"Two and three at a time."

She nodded. No sense denying it if he'd seen them.

"And women. Also two and three at a time."

Jan was helpless, pinned like a butterfly in an exhibit.

"What's next? Rex the Wonder Pup?"

"Daddy, please."

He stared at the TV screen and watched his daughter take a face-full of cum, licking it off her lips as if it were the most delicious substance on earth, almost the same reaction she had to the macaroon.

"I suggested that to your mother once," he said. "Thought she was gonna kill me."

Jan checked the screen to make sure she was seeing right. It was just a blowjob.

"You mean, Mom never...?"

"Your mother was a missionary position Baptist," he told her. "We were married a year before she let me leave the lights on."

Jan couldn't believe it. "So, you guys never...?"

Manny shook his head. "Honey, there's things you do to men in those movies I still haven't had done to me!"

He was in his mid-fifties. What the hell was he possibly referring to?

"Like what?"

"Never mind, like what," he told her. "Do you have any idea how it makes me feel, watching you do these things?"

Jan looked at the screen, where she was eating the female lead and the male lead was getting ready to take her in the ass. Then she looked at the three movies he'd tossed on the couch with her.

"You watched all four of them?" she asked, even though he'd already told her he had, every minute of them. "It couldn't have been that painful. There must have been something you liked," she said. "My God, that's, like, eight hours of it."

"And seventeen minutes," he corrected. "Eight hours and seventeen minutes of watching my daughter have the kind of sex I always dreamed of but never had, and now most likely never will."

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "You're still young," she said.

"I'm overweight (he was, slightly), gray (pepper-and-salt, she thought, but he still had a full head of thick hair), and I wear glasses (but they aren't welded to your head!). Who is going to want to do that sort of thing with me?"

The obvious answer almost fell out of her mouth before she could stop it.

"Have you tried?"

Her question stumped him. "What do you mean, tried?"

"Have you tried to get anyone to have sex with you since the divorce? My God, Dad, that was two whole year ago."

And a few months, he thought.

"Are you telling me you haven't been with anyone since?"

He didn't answer, and that just confirmed her worst fear. "What have you been doing? Sitting here watching movies and..." She couldn't make herself say the rest. The idea of her father masturbating nauseated her, not because she didn't ever think of him as sexual person. Far from it. But she couldn't stand the idea of him having no one for a companion but his own fucking hand.

"I haven't dated in almost thirty years," he said. "And things have changed. I don't know how to approach a woman any more and not wind up with a sexual harassment suit on my hands. And I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for it!"

"Jesus, Dad, you don't have to do that! You're a very attractive man. You shouldn't have any trouble at all. I bet any number of women at work have been waiting for their turn once they heard about the divorce."

He sat forward. On screen, she was getting fucked in the face by the male lead again, and in her pussy by the female lead wearing a strap-on. "Have you ever seen the women I work with?"

Factory women. Hardly Cosmo material. She abandoned that train of thought.

"But, still, there are other ways to meet people."

"Internet chat rooms?" He laughed derisively. "I tried that once. Wound up talking dirty with a fourteen year old boy pretending to be his thirty year old mother."

She needed to know how he found out the kid's truth but thought it best not to ask.

"That happens," she said. "You have to be careful online. Could be cops, too, you know?"

"I didn't know he was fourteen!"

She waved them off the subject of chat rooms.

"What about singles nights at bars?"

He looked away. "I feel stupid," he said. "Like a piece of meat on display. A cube steak surrounded by filet mignon."

"Stop it," she told him, and she reached for the remote and switched the TV off. "Your problem is, you have no self-confidence. Just because Mom left doesn't mean you aren't an attractive, sexy man."

He laughed again, briefly. "Right," he said.

Jan sat on the edge of the couch, stretched across the coffee table and took his hands.

"Daddy, really," she said, softly, comfortingly, as if their roles had somehow gotten mixed up and she was the adult trying to make everything better. "All my friends in high school thought you were cute," she said. "Mary Teasdale, especially. God, how many times did she tell me all the fantasies she had about you!"

Manny couldn't believe it. "Mary Teasdale?" he asked. "The little redhead that used to sleep over here on weekends?"

The little redhead he used to think about being just one wall away while he jerked off in the shower before bed.

"And she wasn't the only one," Jan said. "And you haven't changed much at all from then. It wasn't that long ago."

It was an eternity. That was a different man, then, that was her father. That was the father of a cute little teenaged daughter, not the father of a grown-up porn star.

"But that's not the point," he said, hoping to steer them back to the subject of her 'acting' career.

"It most certainly is," she told him, and squeezed his hands. Hers were so much smaller than his, her fingers thin and long while his were strong and wide. "All you need," she added before he could protest again," is a little confidence."

She pulled on his arms and dragged him to come sit beside her. She put the DVD cases on the coffee table and continued holding his hands, and she trapped his eyes with hers.

"Now, let's pretend," she said. "We're out on a date, having a good time, dinner, dancing, whatever. We're alone." And they were. "You want to kiss me. How do you go about letting me know?"

Manny stared at her, blushing. "I don't know," he said, and tried to turn away because he'd already had enough of this.

Jan pulled him back. "Try it," she said. "It's just me. Pretend I'm the girl of your dreams, and you are just dieing to kiss me."

He stared into her eyes, feeling her hands warm and soft on his own callused ones, and tried to see her as just a pretty young girl, not as his daughter. What his mind kept showing him, however, was the version of her he'd seen on the TV screen from her movies.

"That's right," she told him reassuringly. "That's the look. Now, what do you do?"

He stammered before trying an answer. "I...I tell you how lovely you look?"

"Good start," she said. "Nice opening. And then?"

And then he leaned his face in and kissed her.

And, damn if she didn't kiss back.

Manny snapped away from her, his eyes as wide as the saucers under their teacups.

"Its okay, Daddy," she said, soothingly. She still held his hands, and she drew him slowly into her and kissed him again.

Manny let the kiss linger far longer than he knew was proper and then he drew back slowly.

"Jan, this isn't right."

His daughter looked deeply into his eyes, trying to convey the turmoil that raged inside her like a hurricane.

"Daddy," she said after a while, "I don't know how this is gonna make you feel, but all those times with those people in the movies, the only way I got through them, the only way I could make any of it real, was to think of you."

He didn't understand. If anything, her thinking of her father and the way he would condemn what she was doing should have inhibited her, not inspired her.

Unless...

"I have wanted to be with you since I can remember," she told him. "You have no idea how many nights, when Mom would be out at her church meetings, I wanted to go to you, to be with you, to make you happy."

Manny's astonishment made breathing a conscious effort. He felt light-headed, unreal, as if he'd left his body somehow and was seated beside himself, watching this drama unfold with his daughter the same way he had detached and watched her in her movies.

"When Mom left I almost dropped out of school to come home and be with you," she said. "But I was so afraid you'd reject me."

Jan moved in closer to him, put her arms around him, and held him tightly. Her breasts pushed into his chest. Her nipples grazed his shirt. She was warm and soft and yielding and Manny forced her away from him and got up. He lifted the tea tray and walked to the kitchen.

"What do you thin you want for dinner?" he asked, as casually as if nothing unusual had transpired between them. "I thought maybe we'd call out for pizza." Jan heard dishes rattling in the sink. "My cooking isn't what it was anymore."

Jan excused herself to go upstairs and take that nap after all, but she didn't sleep. On the very same bed where she had spent all her nights growing up, where she had first masturbated, alone in the dark under the covers, where she and Tad Stewart had first pretended to be lovers when they were still in the sixth grade, where she had spent so many nights listening to the silence coming out of her parents' bedroom and knowing something was wrong and wishing she could be the one to make them right for her father again, she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling.

After a few hours she could stand no more and got up, having made the decision to head back to campus. Holidays be damned, she could not be in her father's house like this another minute.

She freshened up in the bathroom and went downstairs to tell her father her decision. Halfway down the stairs she saw him on the couch, watching the TV, and as she hit the last step she realized what he was watching.

One of her movies.

She walked in softly, coming up beside him, and she looked at the screen that had his attention so strongly transfixed.

It was one of her starring roles, the one that was what she actually considered the best work she'd ever done. At the moment she had one man up her ass and another in her pussy, and they were all about to climax together.

"At least you made them wear condoms," Manny said, as casually as if she'd been sitting with him all along having a discussion about her films.

"It's pretty standard procedure nowadays," she said. "Plays havoc with continuity," she added, and as if to illustrate her point on screen both men had slipped out of her body and were manipulating themselves as they ejaculated all over her belly and breasts. Miraculously, their condoms had vanished.

"About an hour passed between those shots," she said. "We had lunch, talkerd about the afternoon's shoot."

"So, you don't shoot these scenes in sequence?" he asked, and she sat beside him.

"Depends on the director," she said. "Some do, some don't. This lady..."

"A woman directed this?"

"Quite a few women direct porn," Jan said. "Even if the credits have male names, most of the time it's women."

Manny made a noise of incredulity. "I had no idea."

"It's a business, Dad," she told him. "Like any other entertainment. It's not just people getting together and..."

"Fucking," he finished for her when she hesitated.

"There's a lot of work involved, especially if you don't happen to like the people you're working with."

On screen, Jan was now in a shower with another woman, a slightly older woman with huge breasts that were so obviously fake they might as well have had Goodyear stamped on the sides.

"Does that happen a lot?" Manny asked. "Not liking your costars?"

"All the time. I hardly know any of them. It's not like we hang out or anything. We get called in to do a job, we do it, we get paid, and that's that."

Manny tilted his head as he considered the action on the screen. "Kinda takes all the fun out of it," he said.

"Sometimes," she told him. "I mean, sometimes it's..." But she couldn't get herself to tell him how wonderful it was sometimes, how real the orgasms were if she was with the right person, under the right circumstances. She'd just done her best to convince him it was just a job. Telling him now that sometimes it was great fun didn't seem appropriate.

After a while he looked at her sideways. "You might as well say whatever it was you were going to say," he said. "I've seen it all, apparently, you have no reason to be shy now."

She thought about how to word what she wanted to tell him.

"I mean," she finally said, "it's not like we don't have fun. The guys get off, obviously. Guys can't fake that. But sometimes..."

"You have orgasms with these people?"

That was basically what she wanted to say, so she nodded. "Yes." The real answer was 'magnificent orgasms, monstrous orgasms' but she let it go at that.

He went back to watching the screen. "So, you like doing this?"

The truth was yes and no. "I could be doing worse," she said. "A weekend's worth of work can net me five or six thousand dollars."

"Is that all it takes to make one of these? A weekend?"

"The actual shooting, yes, that's about it. Post production takes about a week and then it's ready for distribution."