•••
Having slept with a lot of actresses—probably more of them, in fact, than women who weren’t—I can state unequivocally that there is no correlation between beauty and skill in the sack. Some of the homeliest women are mind-bendingly great in bed, and some of the most stunning beauties just lie there and act like they’re thinking about what’s on TV later that night. In fact I’d got to the point where I half-expected a bad lay from the real knockouts.
The joke was on me. Esmée knew tricks I’d never heard of, let alone tried. She explained to me exercises she did daily, similar to the ones pregnant women use to prepare for childbirth, tricks she’d learned from her yoga instructors, tips she’d paid to learn from thousand-euro-a-night call girls. Her cunt, her mouth, her asshole—the first entry into each was like the first time Adam fucked Eve (or, if you’re of a more secular bent, the first time some amphibian said, hey, instead of me ejaculating into the water after you lay the eggs, how about if I stick this thing into that pretty little cloaca of yours?).
Jesus H. Christ. Now that I knew what I knew, I wouldn’t blame her husband for killing me. Shit, if I were him, I’d kill me.
LUNDI, NEUF MAI
ONCE AGAIN, THE CROSSWORD EDITOR WAS fucking with me. It was only Monday, theoretically the week’s easiest puzzle, but this one was driving me nuts. The crux of the problem was 17 Across, “Christ at Emmaus forger.” Eleven letters and the last one was an n. I could have Googled “Christ at Emmaus” and “forgery” on the iPhone, but that was a move I reserved for desperation. Meanwhile the bottom half of the puzzle was mostly filled in, the morning was pleasant, and the crowd on the sidewalk perfect: Passersby waved, smiled, jostled one another at the sight of me, and several of them took pictures, but they all respected the fact that I was sitting there, drinking my coffee and working the crossword puzzle.
I wasn’t quite finished when Fred joined me—17 Across was still unanswered, though I had a v at the beginning and a g in the middle. Fred ordered coffee and a pain au chocolat and inquired as to my well-being.
“Superb, my friend, just superb.” I took a sip of my coffee, noted that it was almost too cool to drink, and swigged it down. I felt so good I was compelled to share the secret. “I fucked our leading lady yesterday.”
“Is that wise?” he asked.
“No, probably not. But I’m not sorry. That woman is amazing, and it has nothing to do with her looks.”
He looked skeptical on that last point.
“All right, partially her looks, but damn, she’s got some skills that would put Venus herself to shame. To hew to our story’s theme, if you like.”
“What about her rich husband? He hasn’t even agreed to do this yet, and you’re doing things that are going to make him pull the plug.”
“If he finds out about it, it won’t be a question of pulling the plug, more like pulling the trigger. Both barrels aimed at me.”
“Great. No budget and a dead star.”
The waiter came and gloomy Fred ripped off an end of the bread. It looked so good, the chocolate so moist, that I asked the waiter to bring one for me along with another double espresso.
“Say, Fred, who forged Christ at Emmaus? Starts with a v, ends with an n. Eleven letters.”
“Van Meegeren.”
I counted out the letters and they fit. “Thank you, sir. You’re a gentleman and a scholar. What’s Christ at Emmaus, anyway?”
“It’s a biblical scene. He painted it as a Vermeer, and he had such a success with it he painted a bunch more. They all looked like shit, if you ask me.”
“Maybe we should put a forger into the script.”
I had annoyed him. He sighed and looked down the street, exasperated. “To what end?”
“I don’t know. Just throwing ideas out there.” He didn’t look placated, so I changed the subject. “Say, how’d you do with Marie-Laure’s assistant the other night?”
“Nothing happened. I’m ten years older than she is, anyway.”
“Who cares? Listen, you need to get laid soon. It’ll change your outlook on life.”
“Did you ever read Notes from Underground? Dostoyevsky?”
“A long time ago. That’s a book, it’s no way to live. Feeling sorry for yourself is bullshit.”
We didn’t get much more accomplished that morning, and I was afraid that unless Fred started getting some pussy in his diet he was going to sink further and further into moroseness and become useless to me. I didn’t want to break in another writer, and I was confident Fred and I could hash out something decent.
•••
A day later I got an e-mail from a friend in L.A. letting me know that Ginny DeKalb was on her way to Paris. He meant it as a warning, but I didn’t take it as such. As soon as I heard I logged on to her website, looked at some of her most recent pornos, and found her looking good indeed. She’d let our mutual friend know that she intended to look me up, and I certainly intended to let her do that.
“She’s getting wackier and wackier,” the e-mail read, “and that fuckup husband is causing her trouble right and left. So beware.”
I wrote him back: “The day I need to beware of a lady like Ginny, my friend, is the day they plant me in the ground.”
In that same batch was an e-mail from my agent, prevailing upon me in the most urgent terms to get my ass back to L.A. and do the guest shot on Blindsided. They really wanted me for it, and did I have any idea how fucking hard he’d worked to get it for me?
“Dear Bunny,” I replied, “Thanks so much for your efforts but I’m really committed to this French project.” Why in God’s name would I want to give up fame, virtually unlimited pussy, and a shot at a starring role in a feature to return to the United States for a guest shot in a series I’d never heard of? In the vague hope of a blowjob from its star? Or in hopes of landing a recurring second-banana gig? No. Forget it.
Finally, there was a message from someone named Clive.
“Dear sir,” he began, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am the head of the Paris chapter of the British Ventura County Appreciation Society. We gather together Saturday evenings for a regular two-and-a-half-hour session of that week’s V.C. episodes in English. When I heard that you were here in Paris on an extended stay, I was needless to say thrilled. I wonder if you would consider attending one of our meetings as a surprise for our members?”
Dear God, it sounded ghastly. I was prepared to respond with a polite refusal, but his next lines caught me off guard and awakened my sympathies:
“It would mean so much to our members, most of whom are quite elderly and, frankly, in many cases daft. It would give my own wife Deirdre (who, though of reasonably sound mind, is wheelchair-bound) something to live for.”
I responded in a friendly but noncommittal way, suspecting that in the end I would make the visit, beaming a bit of sunshine into their dreary, elderly ex-pat lives.
MARDI, DIX MAI
GINNY ARRIVED THREE DAYS LATER AND phoned me from her hotel. Would I be a dear and come get her for a night out on the town? Unfortunately I had a dinner scheduled with Esmée and her as-yet-unseen husband. What the hell, I thought, invite her along. There’s nothing like a porn star to liven up a dull business dinner. Plus, showing up with a date might serve to divert any suspicions he might have about me and his wife.
When I asked for Ginny at the reception they told me she had already left, and then I saw her standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel in a fur coat completely unsuited to the balmy evening and smoking a cigarette. She was such a magnificent, statuesque creature I couldn’t stop myself watching her for a minute. I was approaching to announce myself when another guest of the hotel, an American by the sound of her, stepped up to her.
“Excuse me,” the woman said. “Do you know how many animals died to make that coat?”
Unfazed, Ginny took a long, languid drag off of the cigarette. “Do you know how many guys I had to fuck to buy it?” she asked, and as the woman s
lunk off I laughed out loud.
“Hey, there he is,” she said. “Some fucking people, right?”
“Right,” I said, as the bell captain whistled for a taxi.
•••
When we got to the restaurant Esmée and her husband were already seated, and I was glad I hadn’t shown up stag. His name was Claude and he didn’t appear happy to be there. It looked to me as if he had one hand on Esmée’s knee under the table, and not in an affectionate or erotic way; more like he wanted to make sure nobody else’s hand touched her there.
Claude asked how I was enjoying the use of their apartment. “I like the neighborhood and it affords a little more privacy than the hotel did.”
“What’s the idea behind this film of yours?”
I explained the premise briefly, and he asked whether it was a comedy. “It has comedic elements,” I told him, and when I expanded on the idea of the megalomaniac art collector he seemed unamused.
“Where did you get that idea?”
“It was your wife’s,” I said, and he arched an eyebrow and let out a laugh.
“What’s her role?”
She was the love interest, obviously. Why else cast a woman of her great beauty? But I had a sense that was the wrong answer, so I came up with something else. “She’s the hero’s antagonist. A rival archaeologist.”
He snorted. “Is that right? Seems like if I’m putting up a good chunk of the budget in order for her to star, she ought to be the female lead. What’s the matter, this archaeologist doesn’t like girls?”
“Well, see, they start out as bitter rivals and end up in love.”
He nodded. “That sounds more like it.” He nodded at Ginny. “Where’d you find her?”
“She used to be on the show.”
“What show?” he asked. They really hadn’t filled him in on any of this.
“It’s called Ventura County, sort of a soap opera. It’s on every night at seven.”
“And you wrote this show?”
“No, I was the star.”
He was taken aback. “Thought you were writing this thing.”
“I’m co-writing it with Frédéric LaForge.”
“Am I supposed to know this character?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Here’s another thing. I want a job for my son on this picture.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged.” I hoped Bruno had gotten over his desire to do me harm, but I wasn’t terrifically worried about it.
“He’s a bright kid, but he hasn’t found his direction in life. And he can’t get over wanting to fuck his stepmother here.” He slapped Esmée’s thigh and she jumped a little, engaged as she was in a quiet conversation with Ginny, probably trading vaginal-tightening tips or favorite brands of edible spermicidal creams.
•••
Ginny and I decided to walk back to her hotel after dinner. We were crossing the Pont de l’Alma when a man stepped up to us with his hands behind his back. For a second I tensed, thinking we were about to be mugged, but what he whipped around and pointed in our direction was a camera. The flash went off, and he checked the image on the finder.
“Beautiful,” he said, and turned to hurry away.
“Which paper?” I yelled after him, and he turned back to me, still moving away from us at a fast clip.
“All of them,” he said, and then disappeared into the crowd.
•••
It was nearly three in the morning when I got back to my building. Outside the building a sextet of young drunks were gathered outside the nightclub next door, laughing and yelling and shoving one another in what must have been an attempt to grab the attention of the female company they’d failed to attract inside the club. One of them recognized me and shouted, “Hey, Doc!”
I keyed in the code and pushed the door open into the lobby, and before it shut another tenant followed me inside. Late twenties, clothing expensive but self-consciously casual, hair carefully cut into an intentionally disheveled mess, a nasty smirk on his unshaven lip. He was swaying back and forth, propping himself against the wall with one hand and giggling. He was no tenant; the son of a bitch was one of the drunks from the disco next door.
“Salut,” he slurred.
I ignored him. It was bad form, having let in a stranger and a drunken one at that, but I didn’t really care. No one had seen me do it.
“Hey,” he said. “I know you, don’t I?”
I ignored him.
“Hey,” he said, a little louder. “I’m talking to you.”
I continued to pretend he wasn’t there, though the desire to chuck him out the front door was mounting.
“I’m scaring you, aren’t I?” he said with a snicker.
Here’s something about being in the public eye: Sometimes you have to be a badass, or else word gets around that you can be manipulated. I liked this neighborhood and I didn’t want to have to be looking over my shoulder worrying about the denizens of the club.
So I grabbed the glib bastard by the back of his collar and smashed his face against the marble wall of the foyer. There was a hollow, wooden thunk, but that wasn’t the sound I was looking for. I took hold of his ears and pushed him forward again and was rewarded with the satisfying crack of a breaking nose. Then I took hold of his collar again with my right hand and stuck two fingers through the belt loop at the back of his pants, frog-marched him to the front door, opened it, and kicked him square in the ass. He went face-first down the steps to the sidewalk, and as he lay there I had to resist the temptation to give him a swift kick to the belly. He rose with some difficulty and moaned as his comrades from the club watched, no longer laughing. I stared one of them down until he looked away; two of them went back inside the club while another walked away, and two of them resumed their conversation, much more quietly.
Finally the drunk got up and looked around. Nose and upper lip bloody, he stumbled away into the night, and I went upstairs to get some sleep.
•••
Dealing with the drunk had got my adrenaline flowing to a degree it wouldn’t have back in the day, though, and sleep wasn’t coming, so I put in a DVD of Full Metal Jacket and watched the first half of it, the bootcamp section. I’ve read criticism of the film suggesting that Kubrick intended the bootcamp scenes to underscore the dehumanization necessary for young men to go to war and kill, but I disagree; in embracing the sort of structured violence that allows one to prepare for the unstructured kind—for example, my earlier encounter with the drunk—we become closer to our atavistic selves, connecting our civilized to our pre-civilized natures. At least that’s how it was for me. The military turned me from an unformed, unmotivated punk with no discipline and no future into a man, capable of devoting his life to the study of art and the contemplation of beauty and truth and at the same time obligated to take no shit from anyone or anything.
Around the time Private Pyle kills R. Lee Ermey and then himself, I felt sleep closing in, and I switched the set off and bagged it for the night.
MERCREDI, ONZE MAI
GINNY AND I BOTH GOT A LAUGH OUT OF THE article that accompanied the photo from the Pont de l’Alma the next day, which I translated aloud for her:
DR. CRANDALL TAYLOR AMOUREUX D’UNE STAR DE PORNO.
You can’t buy that kind of publicity. In fact, sometimes you have to pay people to avoid it. Love, hell; we liked each other well enough, certainly found one another more than reasonably attractive, but there was no more love in it than there was between a couple of ex–race horses being mated in honor of their respective track times. I was temporarily enthralled because she was a porn star, and she was happy to be fucking a television star. She made kind of a game of it, in fact; among my predecessors in her bed had been the bassist for a hair metal band, at least one billionaire CEO, any number of politicians, even a former president of the United States (and don’t be too quick to think you can guess which one; the answer would surprise you).
•••
I
got a call from Annick in the afternoon. I hadn’t heard from her in days, hadn’t, in fact, gotten around to breaking up with her, and she was a little petulant.
“Been keeping yourself busy?” she said.
“Reasonably.”
“I hear you and Bruno’s dad are fast friends.”
Really? “Sure we are.”
“How do you like Esmée? I hear she wants to be a star.”
“I think she’s got it in her.”
“So when I ask if I’ve got it in me to be a star you say, ‘Go to acting school,’ and when she says it you cast her in your movie.”
“You’re not married to someone who can finance the picture.”
“I want a part in it.”
Jesus. This was getting a little complicated. “Sure.”
“You’re patronizing me,” she said. “I don’t like that.”
She was making me nervous again. I pictured her slitting my throat in my sleep. “No, I’m serious. I’ll have Fred come up with a part. A small one, this time. A stepping stone.”
“All right,” she said, not entirely satisfied.
“Listen, Annick, I’ve been meaning to give you a shout. You know, with me being in business with Bruno’s dad and stepmother, I’m thinking maybe you and I ought to give it a rest for a while.”
A long silence on the other end of the line, followed by a deep sigh. “I knew it. You’re fucking Esmée, aren’t you?”
“Are you crazy?”
“You are. And don’t think I don’t know about your porn star, either. My mom saw it in the paper.”
“That’s a fabrication. She’s a cast mate, she used to be on the show before she did porn.”
“You know what? I don’t care. I just want to keep seeing you. Bruno doesn’t have to know about it.”
Jesus. Unsound as the whole idea was, I wanted to keep fucking her. There was something about her youth and enthusiasm that made me feel young, or at any rate reminded me of what being young had been like.
“All right,” I said. “But you can’t come to the apartment, there’s too much chance Esmée or Bruno will spot you.”
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