by English, Ben
“Not your fault,” she wheezed. “Lucky I didn’t roll an ankle. Stupid, stupid!”
“Maybe,” he conceded. “But at least you know you can actually do it.” She looked up at him, confused. He smiled. “You can still dance, Caroline.”
*
Jack was different this time; quieter. Oh, he’d greeted her warmly enough yesterday at the airport, and during their cab ride into the city he’d been his usual talkative self, telling her the same jokes he’d been repeating since the day they met—but something was definitely amiss. If she hadn’t known him so well or so long, Carly wouldn’t have seen that his joviality and utterly normal composure was merely a veneer, a sheen Jack had decided to cast up between the world and whatever demons rode his soul.
“Well, so, Jack?” Carly slid into the seat across from him and swept the scripts into a tighter pile, smiling as she rearranged them. “Next time the waiter comes by, order me another cappuccino. Should keep me awake till I get on the plane.”
He nodded at the scripts. “Plenty of money sitting there, Carly, but I’m not sure. How many historical dramas are they planning on doing this year? Don’t take this the wrong way, but seems like everything you send me lately is either a remake of something that was already done right in the first place, or so morally bankrupt I can’t even ask my friends to watch it and still keep a straight face.” He stirred his chocolate absently, frowning. “I know its not your fault, but really, why all the junk lately?”
Carly spoke briefly with a waiter, then said, “Jack, you should see the garbage I don’t even show you. Any given week, I have to throw out maybe eighty percent of the stuff that comes into the office. Almost everything here is from other agents. There’s a couple you should look at, anyway.
“The one with the blue cover, the Celtic thing, is already in preproduction. Branaugh is lined up to direct, and Schramer’s going to edit it. I told them you’d come on–if you come on–in two weeks or so, now that Cyrano’s done over here.”
She held up another. “He knows you’re a big fan, and Dean Koontz called a few days ago about Lightning. You’re a few years young, but he wants you to play Stefan.” Carly smiled. “You shouldn’t have told him so much about your childhood. He asked me when you were going to have a phone installed over here.”
“Okay, those two are pretty good, but—you’re right, Carly, I’m being picky. My writing’s taking up too much time lately, and with Cyrano finishing up—”
“What are you writing about these days? I read your one about the guy coming back from the dead to protect his girlfriend.” Carly saw a glimmer of something--amusement, maybe?–across Jack’s countenance.
“Something along those lines. I don’t think I’m ever going to have a hardcover bestseller. My prose is too goofy. And I can’t help but slip in the action scenes.”
She picked up her white napkin and began rolling up an edge as she spoke. “I keep wondering how a nice guy like you knows so much about exotic poisons and military weapons and things like that.” She began rolling another edge of the napkin.
“It’s not that hard. I read a lot. The thing is—well, it’s the same with these scripts, Carly. I’m just—I have a tough time making myself believe the way all these stories wind up. So trite. I mean, can all the problems in life tie themselves up and get solved within a few chapters, a couple of hours? Everybody needs a break from reality now and then, but—”
Carly smiled and touched his hand. “You don’t need to explain it to me, we’ve been friends long enough. Look, you know how good this stuff is.” She tapped the stack of scripts. “Everybody back home knows I came over to try to get you back in the business in front of the camera instead of just as a writer, but that’s got to be up to you. You don’t just quit after five great movies in five good years, not counting that documentary that the Academy liked so much.” The waiter brought her a large cup crowned with froth, and Carly took a sip before continuing.
“I think it’s great that you're over here, that an Idaho boy is doing Cyrano in Paris–in Paris, for crying out loud–and you’ve got a book on the bestseller’s list, but Jack, enough of this business of reinventing yourself European. When are you going to come home?”
Jack pressed his hands hard into the tabletop. “Home?” An brittle slice of bitterness crept around the edges of his voice. “And where is that exactly, Caroline? Rodeo Drive? Hollywood and Vine? Do I even–ah, sorry.” He looked away. “This isn’t me. This isn’t the person I want to be. Sorry.”
Carly covered his hand again with hers. “Jack. Jack, I’m going to keep coming around. Don’t worry about me.”
He looked back at her, silent. Listening.
“I’m one of the people who owes you, whether you like it or not.”
Jack flinched a little around the eyes. “For Victoria’s sake.”
“No, not just for Toria—Lord, she married somebody as mulehead-stubborn as she was.” She signaled for the check. “Either of you get an idea in your head and forget to eat or sleep until you’ve made it real. Not that we ever had the money for food in those days.”
The haunted look in his eyes was quickened by a flicker of merriment. “I remember when you two were living on Gatorade and those checks sent by the phone company.”
“And you had to give blood so you could afford to take us to dinner!”
She watched him start to smile, but joy had no momentum within Jack, and the smile never quite came together. Carly gathered the scripts together and filed them into her leather bag. “I had copies of all these sent to your apartment. Take your time.” She sipped her cappuccino. “Call me if you find a project you like, Jack, but even if you don’t, call me. It never used to bother me when you’d disappear for a month or two, or when you’d take Toria with you wherever, but lately—” Her eyes, deep and liquid, filled with concern. “You seem like you’re looking for . . . trouble.”
He shifted in his chair. “Don’t worry, Carly. Thanks. I’ll be careful. And I’ll read some of these, too, I promise,” he added. “We’d better call a taxi, if you want to make your flight home.” Jack paused and considered her. “You’re a good friend, you know that?”
Carly smirked. “I’m a good agent, Jack. I’m a better friend.”
Jack used his phone to call for a cab as they stepped out. A brisk wind, a harbinger of the storm to come, snapped at the edges of their coats. Carly turned up her collar and threaded her arm through Jack’s. “What about that girl I heard you were with? The blond?”
Jack leaned close, the inconstant wind snatching at his words. “Isabelle? She just needed someone to listen to her while she worked out a few things. Last boyfriend was an idiot. There’s nothing between us—and seeing as how she was up for the part of Roxanne, we tried to avoid problems.”
Carly frowned slightly. “Jack, you’re still too much of a nice guy. Problems, hah!” Then she went softly serious. “It’s been more than a year since Toria, Jack. Don’t you ever, you know, miss having—a physical relationship?”
He thought for a minute. “I get invited to parties and make the rounds, but I have to admit, the old routine of meaningful glances and raised eyebrows across the crowded room—just doesn’t do it anymore. I was awfully naive before I met Victoria.”
She poked him playfully in the side. “I know.”
The taxicab pulled up, and she found herself hesitating.
Jack embraced her, slowly, then fiercely. “Thank you, Carly. Be safe. Oh, I almost forgot!” He pulled a small, brightly wrapped package from his pocket. “This is for Kelly’s collection. It’s from Istanbul. Tell her its two hundred years old; maybe she’ll take care of this one.”
“Oh, Jack, that girl has enough spoons. And you’re only spoiling her.”
He hugged her again. “I thought that’s what godfathers did. Take care, Carly. Call me when you’re home safe.”
There was only room for one more in the cab. Her overnight bag snug at her feet, Carly turned and watched Jac
k’s face as he lingered at the curb, and sighed. A kind of slippery depression was stealing over her. Her friend was seriously in trouble. She hadn’t broken through, she was sure.
He would read the scripts, smile at the article in Entertainment Weekly, and that would be about it. Jack needed to heal. He needed the kind of peace a woman could provide–Carly caught herself in the thought. Way too melodramatic, she thought. But what else could there be for Jack? He hadn’t retreated from his career, that was certain. In all honesty, his acting had improved, gained a bit of a desperate edge. The critics, unaware of his personal loss (Jack was so careful about that) had nearly enshrined him last week, despite his absence at the opening of And Caesar Whispered, for his performance as a young Douglas MacArthur. He could very well get another Oscar nomination, poor guy.
Jack could be so infuriating. He didn’t drink, except during a filming when his character required him to as part of a scene, and that was just apple juice. He didn’t smoke, except herbal cigarettes and the like, and again, that was only when the demands of a particular role called for it. During a shooting he didn’t hide in his trailer, argue dialogue and motivation with the director, or throw chairs and farm animals through windows. To the best of her knowledge, he’d never tried to fool around with any of the other cast members, not even his leading ladies in the name of “getting more realism into their on-screen romance.” If not for his disarming friendliness and reputation as a bit of an on-set practical joker, Jack would probably be the most peaceful, centered, boring person in Hollywood. But lately . . . Carly sighed again. What else could she do? He’d managed to graciously turn down the numbers of half-a-dozen good, expensive therapists since Toria died.
Since Victoria had died.
Carly leaned back in her seat, trying vainly to relax. Orly International Airport was more than half an hour away yet, in this traffic. She put Jack’s gift to her daughter in her overnight bag, and wondered.
What to do for Jack?
*
He watched the tail lights of the cab submerge into the thick, darkening maelstrom of Parisian traffic, then slowly began walking south toward the Seine.
The light had narrowed into a sullen, red finality to the west. Jack hunched his shoulders slightly in the cool breeze, sinking deeper into his long jacket. He was thinking consciously in French again, musing over Carly’s offer to stay with him. It seemed like only a few days ago they’d been at the hospital, she swearing like a sailor at the nurses while he scribbled at the paperwork, and him claiming vociferously that he was her husband and they better damn well let him in the delivery room. He smiled. Sometimes the line between acting and a boldfaced lie was a little too thin. Nonexistent, in fact.
Jack walked briskly, choosing the less-frequented alleys and byways in his haste to get back to his apartment on the Left Bank. If he hurried, he’d get home in time to write another chapter or two. He didn’t enjoy Paris at night as much as he once had.
It already seemed an entire life ago he’d wandered through the heart of the city with his wife, exploring every artery and vein it offered. One of their favorite places had been Chinatown; the portion located near the lower end of the 13th arrondissement. In fact, they’d once gotten lost in the triangle between the avenues de Choisy and Ivry, down to the boulevard Masséna. With the high buildings and clamor it could have been a housing development in Hong Kong or Manila, lacking only the thick smell of a harbor.
He and Toria used to sit for hours at random outdoor cafés, right at the edge of the street, and watch the tide of humanity sweep by. She loved making up stories about the people hurrying along under the ethereal, billowing canopy of light above the city.
Jack didn’t dare look up, not now. He kept his eyes at ground level. Better to ignore the great, vaulted emptiness overhead. Right about now, he thought, Carly’s no doubt mulling over ways to help poor, wretched Jack.
No, not poor Jack. Never poor Jack.
The wind tore at him, even in the narrower streets, pulling up the ancient smells of coming rain from the worn, blunted cobblestones. No moisture yet, but soon. All the more reason to get inside quickly. As he passed a narrow, greasy-black passage between two high blocks of apartments, the wind seemed to leave his shoulder and carom off into those depths, snatching and scrabbling at the curled husks of unswept leaves which littered the passageway. Their dry rasp echoed heavily in the confined space, and Jack was struck instantly by the image of a game of dice; of devils in some acrid corner of Hell throwing dice for men’s souls, casting them against some desiccated, chitinous wall that was terribly neither hot nor cold.
He took a quick turn down an alley and glanced back up his own path. The street was empty, soundless but for the wind. A sudden prickling twisted up the nape of his neck, and he increased his pace. This was what he disliked about the city, he thought. Not like the deep woods at all. Harder to tell if you were being hunted. In the forest, at least, impending violence could be heralded by utter silence. Nature’s alarm system. Here in the city it was harder to trust instinct. No wildlife other than the uncountable pigeons to give warning. Not even one damn cricket.
At that moment Jack desperately missed the wildness he’d known as a boy and then as a young man, the close connection with the inhuman and the untamable. Now, in a city that had been mankind’s bastion and refuge for two and a half millennia, he felt disarmed and defenseless.
A man-shaped cleft of lighter darkness resolved itself before him, and Jack involuntarily drew back, a challenge at his lips before he realized it was merely part of a stone figure, a weathered, crumbling gargoyle that had either fallen into the alley and lodged against the wall, or had been hauled there and left to disintegrate. It was still fearsome; though webbed with cracks its visage–that of a monstrous feline–had grown angular against the elements and assumed an enraged, almost frustrated aspect. It seemed to fix Jack with its eyes; bind him in its Gorgonian stare as he passed.
He looked behind himself again, then paused at the arched entrance to a longer section of alley. Jack knew he was being foolish, but he stared for a long moment into the gaping maw of the lane, his neck and shoulders crawling with dread. Nothing was there. At least, nothing he could see. The angle of the entranceway was off slightly; inset against the gray, crumbling mortar so that the diluted illumination from the streetlamp behind him did not penetrate. Jack paused before that complete, Stygian darkness, imagining within for a moment shapes and movements unhuman.
Something was stalking him, all right, running him down, closing in unstoppably from the inside out. Something in his own soul.
He stepped through the archway on cat’s feet.
It was one of those alleys leftover from before the time of Haussmann and Napoleon III, who’d both been so eager to lift Paris into the modern age of the 1850's by doing away with its tangled web of sidestreets and narrow, suffocating byways. A cobblestone gutter ran down the middle, and the high, barred window casements seemed to look down at odd angles. Scraps of papers and other unidentifiables littered the corners and clogged the bone-dry gutter. Jack stepped around the wooden shambles of what may have once been a piece of furniture, and walked softly down the alleyway. This zigzagging route was the quickest way to the river, and then his apartment. The best way to avoid the city crowds and steer clear of the humid mass of humanity.
But not all of them. He heard a dry, muted crackle, as if someone had stepped on a cardboard box. Jack froze, motionless, as a bulky shape crossed the alley not fifty feet before him, moving quickly, scuttling from shadow to shadow. Jack had the impression the man was large, though the shrouds of gloom obscured his actual size. The shadowed figure lurched into a doorway just barely within Jack’s field of view, a few steps down an intersecting lane. It wasn’t the man’s furtive movements that gave Jack pause, nor his silent, even stare back down the alley, toward voices that even now drew closer.
It was a dull glimmer, like off a shard of dirty ice, that reflected against the knife in
the man’s hand.
Jack eased closer, clinging to the wall nearest the thug. He was taller than Jack by a few inches under his porkpie hat, and considerably thicker; though his face was soft, he had the stance and posture of someone who spent considerable time with weights of one kind or another. A ratty-looking overcoat hung open at his chest, and Jack could see the man was shirtless. Some kind of winding tattoo down one shoulder and across his chest. The man even appeared to be holding his breath, intent as he was on the approaching voices. He sunk back into the contours of the doorway, until Jack could barely make out his profile. If he hadn’t known the man was already there–
He turned slightly, mindful to keep the whole of his body in the angle of darker gloom out of the thug’s view. A couple was strolling towards the intersection, the man gesturing rapidly at an unfolded length of paper–a map--and speaking in a frustrated tone to his companion, who suddenly detached herself from his arm. Americans, Jack thought, from the snatches of English that carried through the hot, still air.
The woman stopped, hands at her waist, and the man allowed his momentum to carry him a few steps farther before turning, exasperated. “Listen, Debbie, it’s not my fault this street isn’t on the map! You’re the one who wanted to get to Notre Dame fast.”
“Mike, you always put it back on me.” Her voice was soft, Jack thought, though strained by a day’s worth of walking and no doubt by more than a little irritation at finding herself straying so far askew from the Approved Tourist Version of Paris.
“Well, dear, I don’t see anybody else here to blame, do you? You and your midnight Mass! It’s going to be too dark to see the stained glass, anyway.”
“I just wish you hadn’t asked directions from that guy in the ugly hat,” she said.
The man sighed explosively. “You’re the one who’s always telling me I never ask directions enough as it is.”
