Read Online The Brutal Language of Love by Alicia Erian - Free Book Online Page B

equation, and occasionally fell into bed together under extenuating circumstances, like when Brigitte told Raoul about her bra-shopping trip. “Shit, man,” he had complained to her. He called everybody man. “You got me horny.”
    Afterward, in bed, Brigitte asked him if he would shoot 36C for her. “Two girls getting it on?” he said, lighting a cigarette. “No problem.” It had taken Brigitte a long time to figure out that even though everything that came out of Raoul’s mouth was sexist, he himself was not. This was confusing, though, and his attitude had lost him several female friends over the years. “You don’t understand, man,” he would say in his own defense. “I love women!” Something must have gotten lost in the translation was all Brigitte could think. As she understood it, Raoul’s suggestion that she publish in Penthouse Forum was really a testament to her storytelling abilities; his agreeing to film two girls getting it on meant lesbians were okay with him.
    Still, Raoul had a hard time believing that Brigitte herself might be gay. “Everybody loves Shirley Mayer,” he once told her. “Don’t take it so personally. Besides, you fuck like a maniac!”
    â€œMaybe I’m bi,” Brigitte said.
    â€œEverybody’s bi.”
    â€œYou’re bi?”
    He shrugged then. “Maybe. If I thought about it. I just don’t think about it. I prefer women, man. It’s easier that way.”
    Which pretty much summed up the problem with Raoul for Brigitte. He did whatever was easiest, no matter how much harder it might make things for him in the future. Not that he really was gay, or even bisexual. He wasn’t. But he was a halfway decent cinematographer who wasted his time serving beer for a living; a fitness freak who could not see the harm in a little pot.
    For Brigitte it was better to know the truth up front. If she was gay, so be it. If she wasn’t, she would sort her way through that mess, too. But she hoped she was. She hoped beyond hope that her problems were at last about to become interesting.

    Brigitte received an inordinate amount of help on her film from Jojo Mankowski. He worked part-time in a department store and lobbied one of his managers to let Brigitte shoot 36C in the lingerie department. “Just so you know, I told him it was about shoplifting,” Jojo informed her before the shoot. “I didn’t think he’d go in for all that homo shit.”
    Brigitte nodded. Now that she knew the entire class was making gay-themed films she felt safer with them—even people like Jojo and Davis Bonaire, who himself had offered to record sound for her, one of the least popular jobs on a film set. The two of them still had a tendency to sound foul when they spoke on sensitive topics, but Brigitte decided they probably suffered from an affliction similar to Raoul’s—one in which their mouths did not accurately represent their beliefs.
    They shot on two consecutive Sunday mornings, before the department store opened at noon. Paige Cox played the role of the young woman buying the bras, while her girlfriend, Andie Rivette, played the sales associate. Benny Parisi played the boyfriend who comes in and kisses the sales associate at the end, but would only agree to do so after Brigitte assured him Andie wasn’t butch. “It’s gotta look like I’m really kissing a girl,” he warned. “My parents are gonna see this.” And everyone enjoyed working with Raoul who, though no longer in the program, remained famous for a film about a nude woman who enlists a detective agency to help her find her clothes. It was shot almost entirely from the actors’ necks up, so there was no on-screen nudity—just heads bobbing along the bottom of the frame and crazy scenery filling the space above them.
    In the end Raoul proclaimed Brigitte’s shoot a success because Paige