Temperature rising as he flashed his badge and journeyed upstairs to the press conference. It was in a small room, with little sunlight and tight around the collar. The speaker's table was engulfed by a grotesque blob of lenses and flesh and cigars and cameras and elbows and underarms. In the middle of the frantic enterprise she appeared. Like a jelly donut atop an anthill. They swarmed.

He screamed. Black snakes crawled towards her with mouths wrapped in microphones. Her every breath was sucked down by the surging mob. She communicated in gibberish and lights flashed their response. Everything oozing as Cleopatra's heat wave burned inside him.

Fat.

That's all I heard for weeks afterwards.

"She was fat."

Sumptuous sounded more accurate to me. Powerful. "Cleopatra," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and "Reflections in a Golden Eye" where she takes a whip to Brando's face. There were times when she'd made us squirm, uncomfortable with the guts of her performance, shown us the violent capacity of human emotions.

SUMPTUOUS in her public persona as well. Husbands, husbands, husbands--no man could control her energy; not this Cleopatra. Diamonds, bigger diamonds, romances, affairs, riots and more adorned her every step. We knew all about it. Time, Newsweek, People, CBS, The National Enquirer and The New York Times had told us so. We listened to the vulgar details for the same reason we watched her on the screen. She is excess. She exploits extremes of love and hate and self-adornment. She articulates those feelings inside us and pushes them to their extremes. Intensity: we love it and we need it. And that need, vicarious or otherwise, is very real. Without the Elizabeth Taylor in us life certainly would be a lot duller.

Air. He needed air.

He got up off her elbow and moved to one side of the room. There for the first time that day the blur focused and he saw a young girl, beautiful and sad. She didn't belong there.

Maybe she'd like the river; the sunset would be nice. All that stood between them was her mother and a 35mm lens.