Preternatural

Its Zen implications aside, Benn's Third Eye was a stroke of genius, a cosmetic appliance stuck on in the middle of Max Niemark's prematurely-furrowed brow (even in his bar mitzvah photo Max looked older than his years), which a clever makeup man named Vic Goldmann, who still did all of Max's makeup thirty years later, had designed to move and blink and crinkle at the corners and weep real tears, until there were times when it seemed more lifelike than Max's mismatched real eyes.

It was the odd-colored eyes, one brown, one green that, aside from his too-ethnic look, had made it difficult to cast Max as anything but heavies in the James Dean Fifties when he'd broken in. But it was also the mismatched eyes which had inspired Vic the makeup genius to make the Third Eye a startling Liz Taylor violet-blue, and several thousand fangirls - the fat ones, the unloved ones, the ninety-ninth percentile skanks with harlequin glasses and bad skin - swore that eye could look down into their very souls.

After nearly thirty years, Max swore the furrows in his brow had adapted themselves to the appliance, marking him for life. Carole kissed him there again, her fingers finding further body hair to tangle themselves in, tweaking. Max opened his odd-colored eyes.

"Hurry!" she whispered in his nearer ear, sliding on top of him, the sheets tenting over them both. "Before Sammy wakes up..."

His stepson was in his own room at the far end of the hall, but all eight-year olds were early risers, Max remembered from when his own were young. Pretty soon his grandkids would be that age. When he married Carole he'd offered to adopt Sammy, but the kid's father balked.

"Leave me a little dignity, will you?" Sam Senior had demanded gruffly, the very afternoon he'd shown up at Max's office on the lot practically begging for a role in the new SpaceSeekers film Max was directing. "You took my wife. Leave me the kid at least."

If he'd been twenty years younger, Max thought, he'd have called him out then and there regardless of what the tabloids made of it, because Sam had been so wrong. He'd known Carole since she was a kid, long before she'd even met Sam, never even touched her until his own marriage was ashes and she'd been separated from Sam for nearly a year. But Max was long past fistfights; he'd grown terribly mellow in sixty years.

"Sam..." He'd shrugged. "I'll tell you, tochis anf tisch, it's no skin off mine. I just thought it would make it easier on the kid not having to explain about the two last names. It's up to you."

Later he'd passed Sam's name on to the casting director, who just happened to be Carole. Sam had read for, and gotten, the role he wanted.

And Max had gotten Carole.

#

"Carole Somebody," Eddie Cochran, Tessa McGill's personal assistant, reported as he flapped around her bedroom in his dimestore zoris retrieving a week's worth of dirty lingerie before the cleaning woman arrived. A pair of ice-blue panties suspended from one index finger, he snapped the fingers of his other hand like a grammar school nun to click in the memory from the call the night before.

Hidden deep within the duvet so that only the curls on the top of her head showed, Tessa winced.

"From Warner's, I think she said." Eddie examined a pair of Cuban-heel pantyhose that had snagged on the carpet, dismissing them into the wastebasket beside the vanity. "Anyway, she called yesterday late, just after you'd left for the Limelight. The number's around here someplace. So I told her it was your birthday and you were doing dinner with friends and like that and what is it about these Hollywood types they can't ever get the time-zone thing right? So I said, listen, Miss McGill's not going to be back anytime while you're still on the lot, so why don't you call back tomorrow and -"

"Eddie -!" Tessa pleaded. She was so exhausted her eyelashes hurt. She'd never been this hungover even when she did drink. Was this what turning fifty-five did to you? She never had as much trouble with the decades as she did with the half-decades.