American Geisha

Carol Wolper cracks open the modern career girl to reveal the geisha hiding within. In her ultra-slick sex-you-up debut bimbook “The Cigarette Girl,” screenwriter Wolper flexes her “outlaw sexual muscle” and spits at retro marriage pressures and the infamous dating guidebook, “The Rules.” “The Cigarette Girl” is the story of feisty biker-booted protagonist Elizabeth West, action film screenwriter and Hollywood native. Flying in the face of all obsessed spermtrappers and careful blushing brides-to-be, Wolper makes a case for happily single gals who simply get pleasure from pleasuring men.

Elizabeth, her ‘90s woman, makes good money writing films with big shoot-’em-up deaths and in her private life skillfully dispenses “little deaths” to willing males. Wolper invokes Wilhelm Reich--the controversial orgone theorist and consensus crackpot--to help Elizabeth equate no-strings-attached orgasm with personal fulfillment. In the book’s thin plot, this equation will prove climactic.

When the story opens, Elizabeth has just entered what she calls “the zone”--not the diet, but the years between 28 and 35 when women are supposed to find mates. “Before my twenty-eighth birthday hit, I was perfectly happy to live my single life. Work. Work out. And sex. . . . Maybe that’s a little on the shallow side, but I live in Los Angeles. Shallow is politically correct here.” Note the last line. Wolper is dodging accusations of shallowness before the reader can say boo--a trick she will use throughout the book. Despite “the zone,” Elizabeth, a self-proclaimed “domestaphobic,” is not so sure that she wants a Mr. Right. She sets her sights on a Mr. Maybe instead.

Early on, she walks through a gallery and notices a painting called “Green Light.” Depicting a rare optical phenomenon in which the sky flashes green just as the sun sets, the painting captures Elizabeth’s attention--for a moment. Then her cell phone rings “like a parody of superficiality.” Again, Wolper is playing tricks. If she says the cell phone is a parody of superficiality, then she is in on the joke. In a novel not given to metaphors or flights of language other than funny additions to dating lingo, this brief moment of almost-contemplation stands out. Because we are in the hands of a capable screenwriter-novelist, we know it foreshadows something. Is it a metaphor for the film biz Holy Grail--a go-ahead on a project? A reference to Gatsby? A green herring?

We follow Elizabeth as she beds unavailable and jerky men, loves bad-boy director Jake from a distance while he chases nubile bimbettes, shops and eats, chats with gal pals, shops some more, attends Oscar parties, a Santa Barbara wedding, a weekend in Palm Springs, a movie premiere. The structure is baggy, but the book reads fast. Hyper-glibness and plot pyrotechnics are knit together by the machine gun rat-a-tat-tat of witty lines and comebacks. In her scripts, Elizabeth writes the requisite explosions; in the book, the explosions are the orgasms that occur off-page.

More Mae than Nathanael West, Elizabeth is a modern woman, reveling in her own appetites and lust. “Getting naked is easy. Or at least it’s easy in comparison to getting vulnerable.” Unlike a “Rules” girl, Elizabeth craves her own surrender. How full a surrender, though, is never made clear. Throughout the book, we are teased with hints of Elizabeth’s possibly perverse sexual habits--a taste for teeth marks, the urge for a good slap. Yet we are never privy to what goes on with her sexually. Does she desire degradation? Is she a closet masochist? Everything remains on the surface. Elizabeth’s character is at times simply too coy. About drugs, there are hints that certain “fine pharmaceuticals” help her stay “in touch with the stuff that really matters,” but there’s never any description of Elizabeth even ingesting them, let alone having a habit--other than sex. In a book that praises unfettered sexuality, Wolper’s reserve in these areas feels like cheating.

When Elizabeth finally sleeps with Jake, the sex is, as she predicted using Reichian terms, transformative. “Call me an American geisha. I love the exhilaration that comes from surrendering to a man I respect but don’t need. . . . I guess the ideal is a man to whom you can surrender who also happens to be a Mr. Maybe. Not easy when you’re attracted to bad boys.” The reader, however, is not convinced of this transformative power. Wolper’s breezy style works best in the world of trendy restaurants and designer salads; when it is called upon to provide textual resonance, it cannot. And so, when Elizabeth says “the zone” has vanished in the wake of sleeping with Jake, the reader is nonplused. When Elizabeth agrees to continue an affair with Jake--even though he’s living with a bimbette pregnant with his child--the news is not shocking but merely reinforces the sense that this character was, is and forever shall be shallow.

To celebrate her “transformation,” Elizabeth goes to Malibu, where, as the sun hits the water, “it was as if a horizontal band of green light was drawn across the horizon.” Bingo: metaphor payoff. Fitzgerald saw it this way: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” Whether Elizabeth sees the elusive green flash or just a near-mirage, Wolper most certainly fixes on the orgastic. But not the future; in Wolper’s worship of the juicy, all-consuming here and now, the future and all its implications are ignored. None of which detracts from the guilty pleasure of this book.