Show Business Kills by Iris Rainer Dart Read Free Book Online Page A

time, because now he repeated it. “I asked, which one of the men on this list makes your snatch get juicy?”
    Heat burned her face. Typical Bibberman, putting her in a spot where she ought to tell him to rephrase his juvenile question
     or she’d go get a job somewhere where men were men, not spoiled brats trying out the provocative words on the girls in the
     class. Her mind ran through the possible answers, but before she could speak, Bibberman added, gleeful at his own cuteness,
     “Or at your age, does your snatch still
get
juicy?”
    This wasn’t sexual harassment, this was just plain harassment. Get nasty and see if you can make the girl fall apart, lose
     it, be sorry she ever came into the locker room. Ellen fought to keep her stoic expression, took a deep breath, and said,
     “I’d go with Kevin Costner and some K-Y jelly.”
    Her joke got a tepid laugh from Richardson and Schatz-man as she stood. She had to get out of here.
    “Gentlemen,” she said, “and I use the term loosely, I have to go now. I have a pressing engagement.”
    “Get out the K-Y jelly,” Bibberman said. “Sounds like a hot date. Forget ‘women who run with the wolves,’ we have ‘woman who
     sleeps with cats.’ ”
    “It’s my son’s birthday,” Ellen said, and she realized she’d stopped herself from saying which birthday, since they all had
     young children.
    “Again?” Richardson joked. “Didn’t your son just have a birthday last year?”
    “My kids have all their birthday parties in a screening room downstairs,” Schatzman said.
    “See you tomorrow,” Ellen said, walking out the door ofthe conference room and down the hall, where she could hear Bibberman’s laughter at Schatzman’s comments about being so devoted
     to the job that he never left the studio, so his family had to move their lives there in order to see him. Wait until she
     told them she was leaving early Friday night, too, because it was Girls’ Night.
    She had to go to the bathroom so badly she knew she’d never make it out of the building and over to the bungalow to her own
     office, so she stopped in the employees ladies’ room near the elevator. “At your age.” Bibberman’s pointed words, the amusement
     dancing in his beady little eyes. Yes, she was getting to be what was perceived as old to have her job in this town, and she
     knew it. Most of the other women in top studio jobs, with the exception of Sherry Lansing, were in their thirties.
    “Now who could this harridan be?” Ellen thought, wondering if it was the fluorescent lights that were making her face look
     yellow in the mirror, or the new shade of auburn, the hair color Lizanne tried on her last month. God bless Lizanne, who always
     fit her in when those telltale gray hairs started sneaking in. Gray hair, tired eyes. I’ve got those just-looked-in-the-mirror-and-thought-I
     saw-my-mother-blues, Ellen thought, looking wearily at herself.
    Sometimes the young hairdresser at José Eber would stay in the salon until ten, long after the others were gone, just to fit
     Ellen in. Too bad she didn’t do pubic hair, too, Ellen thought, and then laughed a why-bother laugh at herself in the mirror
     at how dumb that thought was. No one saw her pubes anyway but the cats, and this coming Friday night in the hot tub, her buddies.
    Once at a Girls’ Night last year, while they were on God-knows-whatglass of champagne, someone, probably Rose, had asked “What’s the most narcissistic thing any of you have ever done?” Ellen
     remembered how Janny piped right up with a giggle, and then when she could get her words out, after the stream of laughter
     at herself, she confessed, “Put a mirror between my legs and tweezed out all the grays.”
    “How about the time after a good mammogram,” Marly said, “when I was so relieved that after the radiologist left the room,
     I kissed my own breasts.”
    “If I could only reach my breasts to kiss them,” Rose said, “I never would have