At dawn, he would finally come to bed; they would make love again. He fell asleep straight away. And went out into the yellow afternoons, into the emptiness of the sun at its zenith.
HOLLYWOOD DOOWYLLOH
She wouldn’t see him for ten days, then suddenly he’d turn up. Completely available for her. She started to think that he did exist after all, that he wouldn’t walk out of her life just like that. In silence, she endured his interludes of silence. Put all her efforts into keeping quiet about her empty days—more heartbroken than empty.
They usually saw each other at her place. He liked the layout, upstairs, the living room; he could work at night without disturbing her; at Jessie’s (that’s how he referred to his place) the bed was in the middle of the loft. But at Jessie’s, she argued, there was a pool, a really private pool, not like the one in her apartment block. She could go swimming naked. She liked that pool.
‘Come on, it’s lovely,’ she said, splashing around, her two small breasts like floats. ‘A real little fish,’ he said admiringly, before returning to the shade of the loft. She floated on her back, eyes open onto the Californian sun. Let herself be dazed by the glaring light and by the listless palms, in the blue oval of the world. She could stay there forever, him working inside, her floating outside, in a place of their own.
She started to dream about Christmas. She had planned to spend a few days in France; actually she already had her ticket, bought three months ahead of time, business class but a good deal. She didn’t dare enquire about his plans. All at once, it seemed vulgar. Anyway, was it an important date for him? Was he even Catholic?
She gave him a spare key and introduced him to the concierge. The concierge laughed and said that they had already met, thanks. And an astounding thing happened: Kouhouesso said some outlandish syllables and the other guy responded with similar extravagant sounds, and she stood there, gaping, like a fish out of water.
It was camfranglais. ‘How did you know you were from the same place?’ (She said ‘place’ the way you’d point out, with your finger, a white spot on an explorer’s map.) He laughed and replied that she, too, recognised her tribe, the many Basque people in Los Angeles. When he laughed like that, she lost heart. She was overcome by the particular weariness that seemed to be connected with their relationship.
He went away. Unmitigated waiting. Oh, she knew about waiting: waiting between films, between takes. But this waiting was different. She lived only for his approval. She waited for life to start up again.
She tried to remember what she had been like before, the way, when you’re sick, you try to remember being healthy: a state of being that you take for granted. She had been ambitious; she had crossed the ocean. Her agent was one of the best; she had been in major films, bit parts, for sure, but major films nonetheless. She had a project with Floria, quite another thing from the role as the Intended. And Soderbergh was sniffing around. Yes, she had waited, she had believed in her talent, she had kept her figure and looked after her body. She remembered all the time she spent choosing vegetables at the health shop, making her own smoothies, and doing her yoga with her teacher. And what else? She probably read, she waited for the delivery of her lunch, calorie-calculated by her dietician, she took elocution lessons, she called friends. In the evening she tried on clothes, she went to screenings, to opening nights, to dinners, occasionally to TV screenings. Buying her Bel Air home had monopolised her time and she had to work a lot to keep up the mortgage repayments. And, during all that time, he was in the city. And she didn’t know. What a surprise: she didn’t miss him. Before meeting him, she was fine without him. She wasn’t even aware of his magnetic field: she was completely, blissfully unaware of him.
From now on, the instant his car drove behind the Hotel Bel-Air, she stayed at the bay window as if a fish bowl had dropped on top of her. She fluttered around, gasping for air. The instant at the bay window was the beginning of emptiness, if emptiness is the form of a distraught urge, wanting so much to follow him and banging into the glass. On the other side: life.
After two days, she reached rock bottom, under a white, clinical light. It couldn’t have been clearer. She called; he didn’t pick up. She was familiar with the humiliation of texting without a response. Yes, he replied. He always ended up replying, but so long afterwards that it was not a reply: it was an event, a surprise, the sensational return of the hero.
One day he booked two tickets for the Cindy Sherman exhibition at MOCA. So he liked contemporary art? Cindy Sherman made up as a clown, Cindy Sherman disguised as a witch—she remembered that at her place, in the study, he had left a small poster of Cindy Sherman. He must have wanted to please her.
‘What a fabulous actress,’ he said. She was annoyed. Until now, he had not watched any of her films, except the first one. He had arrived one evening bursting with questions: how had Godard directed her? Did Godard give you the script beforehand? Did Godard make you redo scenes? Godard, Godard: she was eighteen when she’d acted for Jean-Luc; she didn’t have a clue who the guy with the Swiss accent was. ‘He was always ducking off to play tennis.’ Kouhouesso burst out laughing.
Did he think she was good, at least? Did he think she was so much younger?
At what pace did he want to go round the exhibition? Would he prefer to talk or stay quiet? Be alone, or share his impressions? Cindy Sherman in despair next to a telephone. Cindy Sherman as obese depressive. Cindy Sherman as granny with doggy. Cindy Sherman as blue-stained corpse. The dreadful impression of seeing her future unfolding.
He had stayed back. An old lady was talking to him. Elegant, French perhaps. Her eyelids, a delicate bluish tone, were wide open, her gaze fixed on him. Her chin raised, every part of her thin little body tense, it was like fate, the future, something missing. Eventually she rewarded Solange with four words: ‘You like Cindy Sherman?’ The subtext, factual and depressing, was ‘How lucky you are’.
Old women adored Kouhouesso. So did middle-aged women. And young women. Even little girls. Over the months to come, all those months swept along by the Big Idea, she would see countless little girls leap onto his knees, and countless old ladies, with the same naivety, force their way through crowds, come straight up to him, to ask if he liked contemporary art/the panpipe/rattan furniture/silkscreen painting.
Afterwards they went driving around Los Angeles. Driving for the sake of driving, for the city, for the night. She liked his car, a Mercedes Coupé from the eighties. It smelled of him. Incense and tobacco. It was like huddling inside his embrace. Assimilated. Integrated. With a solid chassis, her seatbelt tight, and the luxury of letting her hair blow in the wind. And if they missed a turn, they would die together.
The voice of the GPS spoke for them. Beverly Glen Boulevard. Mulholland Drive. Ventura Freeway. Pronouncing names, names of places for which they had crossed the world. The ghosts for which they had emigrated. The city, way down there, glittering like a sky. And the letters of HOLLYWOOD in one direction, DOOWYLLOH in the other. The further they drove, the further they went back in time. The Observatory from Rebel Without a Cause. Silhouettes in the mist, palm trees from the fifties against a sky from the fifties. In the glow from the lighthouses, the mist rolled back over and over, the night welcomed them with every spin of their wheels. They were sinking into the Californian dream, and it was inexhaustible.
She remembered the interview with Cassavetes, in black and white, right here on Mulholland. Cassavetes so cool and sexy in his convertible under the bright light, Cassavetes who wanted to film Crime and Punishment as a musical comedy, Cassavetes saying of this town, ‘People never meet here’, and ‘California Girls’ starts up on the radio, starts right at the moment when the camera is filming Cassavetes. Start there, in life itself, in the present, forever, the Beach Boys forever as a soundtrack to Cassavetes direct from Hollywood time.
She looked at him side-on, at the wheel, in the hills at night. Yes, you could see it…the resemblance…the same mouth, the same forehead. Cassavete
s as a black guy: without the dreadlocks, okay…but that irresistible feeling of déjà vu, that devastating motion blur where she kept on seeing faces she knew…The Cassavetes night had just fallen; Cassavetes was going home while they continued to drive, from that day to that night where she was here, in the canyons, with this man who looked so much like someone.
‘Crime and Punishment as a musical comedy?’ Kouhouesso shook his head. ‘What a stupid idea.’ According to him, it would have been a disaster: microphones in the fields, drunken actors, a hysterical Gena Rowlands, the place on Mulholland made up as a Russian log house. Once he had finished Heart of Darkness, he planned to shoot a musical—a serious project, about Miriam Makeba.
She assumed her knowing look. Fatigue hovered around them again; they would have to drive faster, leave behind this strange burden. He kept exceeding the speed limit (he hated automatic cars), he conceded that Cassavetes was probably brilliant, okay; but what about Polanski; what about Kubrick. Even Sydney Pollack. Professionals. Truly great filmmakers. The framework of cinema was a combination of genius and technical mastery. The New Wave had done a lot of damage to cinema.
She sniggered. ‘Sydney Pollack!’ He protested: he’d mentioned Polanski first. Cassavetes’ films were all over the shop, scraps of films, trial films. She praised the passion of his hysterical women, extolled the virtues of the unsuccessful films, films all the more brilliant for the flaws that illuminated them. He lit another cigarette, blew hard: he despised shoddy workmanship—the more he scorned the idea the more he rolled his rs—he would be the first filmmaker born in Africa to have the necessary resources, serious resources, professional resources!
She had never disagreed! The mist had dispersed. The night was sparkling, sharp and dry. He accelerated. Faster and faster, the GPS rattled off the list of places that were hastening her home. Wilshire, South Beverly Glen, Copa de Oro, Bellagio, end of the road. He parked in front of the metal gates of the apartment block, got out to open the door, but didn’t turn off the engine. He was tired.
She begged him. She didn’t want to go into her empty home by herself. No, he wasn’t in the mood. He gestured with his arm for her to let go of him.
IL FAUT BEAUCOUP AIMER LES HOMMES
She watched Dazzled again. She forced herself to open books. She came across a sentence that she texted to him: ‘We have to love men a lot. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot in order to love them. Otherwise it’s impossible; we couldn’t bear them. Marguerite Duras’
He didn’t reply. Not five minutes later. Not three days later. She complained to Rose that he lacked a sense of humour.
‘He’ll contact you,’ said Rose. She wanted to see a photo. Solange sent her an internet link: the clip of Dazzled that made her weak at the knees. Rose went into raptures over his good looks, compared him to George. One more handsome guy in Solange’s already thriving love-life. She didn’t push it too far.
Except that it wasn’t one more guy in her life; it was life itself.
She searched through her computer history. Her computer that he often borrowed at night. And indeed he had nothing to hide: he was studying actors’ record sheets and budgets, watching films, comparing cinematographers, investigating the feasibility of sound engineering in the forest, reading all he could about Conrad and the Congo, finding out about equatorial diseases, waterproof cameras, portable mosquito nets, drinking-water tanks, lightweight tents, plane tickets, film studios in Lagos and Capetown, the cost of an interpreter in places inhabited by the Baka people. ‘Gwyneth Paltrow naked’ was the one slightly jarring item in this coherent record. And also—lots of time spent correcting Wikipedia entries and discussing with other contributors, on the topic of Conrad or Makeba or even the catfish (with poisonous antennae) in the Ogooué River. He was the sole author of the entry ‘King of Ife’, in three languages. The length of the article demoralised her.
So that’s what he was doing at night, instead of coming to bed with her?
His screenplay was also there, in a folder called HOD. Heart of Darkness. She typed in ‘the Intended’, and found nothing; she typed in ‘Gwyneth’ and the role appeared. Short: three pages, three scenes, three minutes. Scarcely more than what she’d done with Damon. Gwyneth wouldn’t want it. Of course, there was George. And now Jessie. But even if Gwyneth had a gap in her schedule…three minutes for a first-time director?
She held her hair up in the mirror: an old-fashioned bun, a few loose strands. Very pale make-up. A dress with a corset, the bodice buttoned to the neck but fitted. ‘No one knew him so well as I! I had all his noble confidence. I knew him best.’ Softer, a whisper: ‘No one knows him so well as I! I have all his noble confidence. I know him best…’
It was striking how so little of the novel was devoted to women or to Africans (so what role was Jessie going to play?). She thought about possible improvements. Everything changed if the Intended accompanied Kurtz to the Congo. She then became a particular type of expatriate woman: dashing and rebellious, close to the black people, both timid and sensual, stricken with boredom and with wonder. They got married there, in a little evangelical chapel. And when her man left the colonial army, she followed him, of course, into the heart of darkness.
She was the heart of darkness: it was her, with her kindness, her big heart, shining a light on the infernal sorcery of colonialism.
It was a magnificent role, encompassing the whole film. The type of role where she would be on the poster with George, like Isabelle Huppert with Kristofferson in Heaven’s Gate. She sketched a few drafts of scenes and filed them in HOD-2.
A week had passed. She couldn’t decide whether to call him or not.
Time took hold of her again. She was time’s catfish, a fish from stagnant waters, a large fish from a slow river. She was decomposing. Lloyd had told her about a little role in ER but she wasn’t sure. She had left a polite message on Steven Soderbergh’s phone but he hadn’t called back. At a dinner she surprised herself by not listening to a thing, until the word Kinshasa hit her like an explosion—the guests were amazed by her Congological knowledge. Had they heard about the new adaptation of Heart of Darkness? The conversation drifted on to Coppola, his daughter, his vineyards, and she stopped listening.
Dazzled by Michael Mann. She remembered that Lloyd had mentioned it to her at the time, but she’d been on the set of Musette, so it wouldn’t have fitted in. A scene where the two cops burst into a French restaurant—she could have been the sexy waitress. Their paths would have crossed. Would she already have fallen for him? Or? Synchronicity: one of Kouhouesso’s words. A practical man, who thinks in terms of compatible schedules. But she knew that—at any time, in Clèves, in Paris, in Los Angeles—at any time, she would have followed him.
No. She had found him handsome, that black guy who played Hamlet, not Othello, at Bouffes du Nord Theatre, but she had not gone out of her way to get to know him. She was twenty-two. She had crossed paths with the prince; it was unintentional. Or perhaps he was too princely for the Solange of that period.
The waitress in Dazzled ends up sleeping with the white guy. She couldn’t remember a film, American or otherwise, in which a black guy and a white woman—a white guy and a black woman—sleep together without it being the subject itself of the drama. When a white guy and a black woman—a black guy and a white woman—get a bit too close, it’s as if an alarm goes off, the public stiffens, the producers have said stop, the scriptwriters have already sorted out the issue, the black actor knows that he will not seduce the white actress: or else we’re in another film, a morality tale, an affair, a problem.
She rewound…there…he’s going to do it, he’s going to turn towards the sea and the light stays with him, obscuring his expression, and he becomes the focus, becomes everything…That motion blur, that tiny degree of motion blur, like a photo stared at for too long…
Their world was tolerant. Hollywood, Paris, Manhattan: homosexual couples, threesome couples, couples where the man was older than the woman. A few
white-Asian couples. But Asians are white. And who did Rihanna and Beyoncé go out with? With black guys. And then there was Halle Berry, who went out with a white guy, but her skin was much paler than Kouhouesso’s. And she had seen photos of Lenny Kravitz with a Brazilian top model who, as white as she looked, was much darker than Solange.
Her head was starting to spin—like when you go through those wallpaper colour charts that look like giant phone directories of colours—from wondering if black is black. And she didn’t have a clue.
TOM-TOM AT SOHO HOUSE
He called. His name came up on her phone. Yes, come. Yes, ring the buzzer. The lock turned by itself, magic: he opened it with the key she had given him. She wrapped her arms around him, right there, straightaway. He asked for a glass of water first; he’d played tennis and had a headache. A fever? A spot of sunstroke? She didn’t know he played tennis. Or that he could get sunstroke. She put a wet cloth on his forehead. She kissed his eyelids gently. She fluttered her eyelashes against his cheeks, butterfly kisses, like her father used to give her when she was little. He fell asleep against her and she didn’t dare move.
He was worried. Gwyneth’s agent hadn’t called. A week passed before they were told that she had other commitments. Jessie suggested Scarlett Johansson. Too voluptuous. Ted could see Charlize in the role, with her aloofness. Too masculine, according to Kouhouesso.
They were at Soho House, at the edge of the square pond under the olive trees. Fifteen storeys below, the cars had discreetly hastened to make room for George and Jessie and their amazing vehicles. It was the first time she had been part of an HOD meeting. She didn’t know if she was with Kouhouesso as his girlfriend or as an actress. Or because of the group’s inertia? Or because, for George, she was obviously with them? Or because she was attractive? In the alcoholic languor of a late afternoon in Los Angeles, in the polluted heat, in the Californian pre-Christmas, she felt as beautiful and strong as a palm tree. The word Intended was whistling softly in her head.
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