The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  A cab to the airport, an hour long flight to Chicago, a two-hour stopover, seven and a half hours over the Atlantic: a sleepless night of coughing and sputtering, and I started to have that drowning sensation when the plane made its final approach. Once we were inside the terminal I staggered into a bathroom, bent over a toilet, and heaved up clumps of reddish phlegm. Then I threw some water on my face and headed off to Immigration—an experience I was dreading, just in case the cops at the commissariat de police in the Tenth had informed the frontier boys that I was an American whom France could easily do without.

  I approached the booth. The cop scanned my passport, glanced at his screen, and said, “Back again with us?”

  “I like it here.”

  “Are you working?”

  “I’m a writer. I work for myself. So I’m not holding down a job here.”

  “And how long will you be with us this time?”

  “A few weeks,” I lied. “No more.”

  Stamp, stamp. I was back in . . . with a new three-month visa.

  The clerk at the hotel on the rue du Dragon smiled and handed me the key as I came in.

  “Did your daughter recover?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Does it look good?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know what to say but ‘sorry.’ ”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “If you want to sleep now, the room’s ready.”

  “Please call me at four, in case I don’t get up.”

  I slept straight through the afternoon. I was out of the hotel by four thirty. I was outside Margit’s front door just at five. I stepped inside the parallel world. I climbed the stairs, she opened the door on the first knock. That’s when I slugged her, catching her with my fist right in the mouth. She fell backward onto the bed.

  “You fucking bitch . . . you punish me by trying to kill my daughter . . .”

  She stood up, holding her cheek.

  “You have no proof.”

  “Don’t fucking say that again,” I shouted and then caught her across the face with the back of my hand. She collapsed back on the bed again, but then turned up at me and smiled.

  “You forget, Harry—pain means nothing to me. But pain means everything to you. All you do is live in pain. And you know what you’ve just demonstrated? You’re like every man I’ve ever known. When you discover you’re powerless, you lash out . . . even though the act of punching a woman is nothing more than a testament to your complete pathetic impotency. But go on, Harry. Punch me again. Pull off my clothes and ravage me while you’re at it. Anything to make you feel better.”

  “The only thing that is going to make me feel better is if my daughter comes out of her coma and has a complete recovery with no lasting side effects.”

  “You ask a lot, Harry.”

  “You’ve got to help me—”

  “No, I’ve got to help her. But that can only happen if you play by the rules of the game. Here from five until eight every three days without fail. If you say yes now, and then don’t show up for our next rendezvous, your daughter will die. As soon as you are here—”

  “I promise I will be here.”

  Silence. She sat up.

  “That’s settled then. You can go now. We will start again at our next rendezvous as if this never happened. But do know that if you ever hit me again . . .”

  “I will never hit you again.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, Harry. Now go.”

  “Before I do, I need to know something. Are these rendezvous of ours going to go on indefinitely?”

  “Yes, they are. À bientôt . . .”

  En route back to the hotel, I stopped in a kiosk and rang Susan’s cell phone. When I explained that I was back in Paris, her reaction was angry.

  “That’s so damn typical of you, running away in the middle of a crisis . . .”

  “I had no choice. I have a job interview today, and you will be needing money to keep going . . .”

  “Don’t guilt trip me here, Harry.”

  “Why, why do you always think I’m attacking you when all I’m doing is—?”

  “Reminding me I have lost my goddamn job and am just praying that Blue Cross will cover these hospital bills. Otherwise, it’s bankruptcy and—”

  “Is there any change there? Any sign of improvement?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Did you get any rest?”

  “A bit, yeah.”

  “Please call me as soon as there’s any change.”

  “OK,” she said and hung up.

  A day went by. I ventured up to the hospital for a previously arranged appointment with the specialist. He ordered an X-ray and gave me a very hard time when he saw the state of my lungs.

  “You’ve been on a plane, haven’t you?”

  “My daughter is seriously unwell, and I had no choice but to—”

  “Try and kill yourself? I warned you, monsieur, about the tremendous dangers that pressurized environments cause. By choosing to ignore me, you have retarded your recovery completely. The reason you have blood in your phlegm is evident. Take another journey in a pressurized cabin and you might do yourself fatal damage. You are grounded for at least six months. Understood?”

  I returned to my room in the hotel. I counted out the cash I had left after paying for the ticket to the States. Around eighteen hundred dollars. Don’t think about it. Just take everything as it comes now. What else can you do?

  I stayed in the room, trying to read, trying to think about everything but Megan. Eventually, around ten that evening, I climbed into bed. Three hours later I was jolted awake by the ringing phone.

  “A call for you, monsieur,” said the night clerk. With a click he put it through. It was Susan. And the first words she said to me were, “She opened her eyes.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE SAME EVENING that she opened her eyes, Megan began to speak again. The next day she was able to be fed by spoon. Forty-eight hours later, she insisted on getting up out of bed to use the toilet. Despite having a cast on her left arm and leg she still managed to hobble there on crutches. The following morning, the police found the driver of the hit-and-run vehicle. It was a messy story—a recently divorced woman in her forties; a lawyer in a big-deal firm in Cleveland, with “alcohol issues.” On the morning of the accident, she had been drinking in her hotel room during breakfast. She was blotto and smashed into Megan around five minutes after leaving the hotel. She panicked and kept on driving, eventually checking into a motel near the Kentucky border, where the cops found her. She was heavily insured—and the lawyer now representing Megan threatened publicity if she and her law firm didn’t settle quickly.

  “The negotiation was very fast,” Susan told me in our daily transatlantic phone call. “Our guy was a complete sonofabitch and very shrewd. Megan will be getting a check for half a million dollars. So that’s her college education sorted out—and it will give us a little cushion until I find a new job.”

  I said, “The important thing is, she will have no lasting physical effects from the accident. The psychological scars, on the other hand—”

  “—will be added to the large amount of shit that her parents have already dumped into her lap . . . and the fact that her mother is a slut who slept her way back into a tenured position at the college by fucking a pedophile.”

  “I really think you should stop blaming yourself here—”

  “But I do. I do.”

  “Well, I blame myself too.”

  “You’re being magnanimous again . . . which is a way of making me feel bad.”

  “You think that, by being reconciliatory, I’m actually trying to get at you? I just feel very sorry for you . . .”

  Silence. I could hear her weeping into the phone.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .” she whispered. “I’ve messed up so badly. I’ve . . .”

  “Our daughter is alive and well. That’s the only thing that matters right now. And I do want
to speak with her again,” I said.

  “I did tell her you rushed over to be by her side. She seemed happy about that, but couldn’t understand why you had to hurry back so fast to Paris.”

  Because the dead woman who had put Megan in the path of that car demanded her twice-weekly “service.” If I had failed in this obligation, our daughter would have remained in her coma.

  “As I tried to explain to you in that phone call . . . I had a job interview . . .”

  “You could have told them your daughter was seriously injured,” she said at the time.

  “I did tell them that—and they were very understanding, but also said that they had to fill the post immediately. I have no money. Nor do you. So I really couldn’t tell them to wait—”

  “That’s right—rub it in again that I lost my job. Heighten my massive guilt about—”

  “Susan . . . stop.”

  “But if I stop, you won’t have to listen to the truth. And the truth is—”

  The truth is: these sorts of conversations are why I started hating this marriage . . .

  “The truth is . . .” I said, interrupting her, “I cannot travel anywhere now for the next six months.”

  “What?” she said, sounding outraged.

  I explained about being caught in a fire at the place where I was a night watchman (she had a hard time accepting that bit of information), and that I was told by the specialist who treated me that I couldn’t risk air travel now.

  “So do you want me to congratulate you on risking your life by flying to your daughter’s bedside?”

  “Susan, I honestly do not give a shit what you think. What I do know is that, when I got back here I was coughing up blood. The pulmonary specialist has grounded me until after Christmas. This is completely maddening, as where I want to be right now is with Megan. But go ahead and think the worst of me. You always have. You always will.”

  And I hung up.

  Several hours later, as I lay next to Margit in her bed, she said, “I liked the way you handled things today with Susan. Far more assertive than you used to be.”

  “How do you know how I used to be with her?”

  “I know everything about you. Just as I also knew you would do the honorable thing and be here today.”

  “You call ‘coercion’ honorable? I am only here because—”

  “If you want to carry on with the delusion that you have been trapped into this, be my guest. But you will spend the rest of your life enraged by my alleged ambush of you. Whereas if you are in any way canny, you will see all the benefits our arrangement can bring you. And since you are about to run out of money in two weeks, we need to get you that job.”

  “But I made that job up.”

  “So you say.”

  Three days later, while we were drinking our usual postcoital whisky, Margit said, “You need to go back to Lorraine L’Herbert’s salon this Sunday.”

  “There’s no chance of that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because as soon as Madame or her majordomo hears that it’s me asking for an invite, they’ll slam the door in my face.”

  “Poor Harry—always thinking that people actually care about him. You didn’t outrage Madame L’Herbert when you came bursting in on her, demanding to know if she knew me. Like all self-obsessives, she never muses for a great deal of time about other people, except in relation to herself. So your little scene in her apartment lasted about fifty-five seconds in her consciousness. Fear not—all she and her pimp are interested in is your twenty-euro admission fee. Call them tomorrow and be certain to be there on Sunday night. Then get yourself introduced to a gentleman named Laurence Coursen. He’s the head of the American Institute in Paris, and he’s been going to L’Herbert’s salon for years to pick up women, as he’s married to this very rich nightmare who weighs around one hundred and fifty kilos and spends much of her waking hours giving him a hard time. I know he’s in the market for someone to teach film at the Institute. Just put yourself in his path and be charming . . .”

  “Fat chance of that.”

  “But Harry, you are charming . . .”

  It was the first time Margit had ever paid me a compliment.

  I did as instructed. I called Henry Montgomery, “Madame L’Herbert’s assistant.” He didn’t verbally flinch when I said my name. He just gave me the door code and reminded me to arrive with twenty-five euros (“The price has gone up a bit”) in an envelope on Sunday night. This time it was an easy twenty-minute stroll from my hotel on the rue du Dragon to her apartment down the street from the Panthéon.

  When I arrived there at the appointed hour on Sunday night, the salon was in full swing. Henry Montgomery didn’t seem to recognize me. But he did relieve me of my envelope and glanced at my name (printed as instructed on the front) and then brought me over to Lorraine. As before, she was standing under one of her nude portraits, holding court. Montgomery whispered something in her ear. Immediately she was all effusive.

  “Harry, what a joy to see you again. It’s been . . . how long?”

  “Quite a few months.”

  “And still here. So Paris has taken hold of you.”

  “That it has,” I said.

  “Now you paint, right?”

  “I teach. Film studies. And I was wondering if Larry Coursen might be around tonight?”

  “Cruising for a job, are we?”

  “Actually, I am.”

  “American directness. Nothing like it, pardner. Larry! Larry!”

  She started yelling to a man in late middle age, dressed in an off-white suit that looked around twenty years old and was in need of a good pressing. He came over.

  “Larry, you must meet Harry. He’s a brilliant professor. Teaches . . . what was it again?”

  “Film studies.”

  “That a fact?” Larry said. “Where do you teach?”

  “Well, I used to teach at . . .”

  And the conversation was off and running. L’Herbert drifted off. Coursen and I must have talked for around half an hour—largely about the movies (he was a serious film nut), but also about the Institute of which he was the director. As he asked me a bit about the sort of courses I used to teach and my “professorial style,” it was evident that he was conducting an impromptu interview on the spot.

  “What exactly have you been doing in Paris?”

  “Trying to write a novel.”

  “Have you published before?”

  “Plenty of academic papers and the like . . .”

  “Really? Whereabouts?”

  I told him.

  “And do you have an apartment here?”

  “I did. I’m between them right now, staying at a hotel.”

  “Would you have the number on you?”

  I wrote it down for him.

  “I might be in touch in the next few days.”

  He started glancing around the room and then locked eyes with a woman around twenty. She gave him a small wave.

  “Nice to meet you, Harry,” he said.

  After Coursen had gone off with his very young friend, I drifted out onto the balcony. It had started to drizzle, so it was empty. I looked over at the spot where I first met Margit. Say I hadn’t come here that night? Say I hadn’t flirted with her and engaged in that mad embrace and taken her phone number and called her up? But I had done all that because I was lonely and sad and feeling unwanted and lost . . . and because I had so wanted to see her again.

  I came into your life because you needed me, Harry.

  Yes. I did. And now . . . we are together. In perpetuity.

  I turned and headed back into the salon. Lorraine was standing near the food table, talking to a Japanese woman dressed head to toe in tight black leather. Lorraine turned away from her as I approached.

  “I wanted to thank you for your hospitality,” I said.

  “Going so soon, hon?”

  I nodded.

  “Good conversation with Larry Coursen?”

  “Yes
. . . and I appreciate the introduction. We’ll see if anything comes of it.”

  “And I saw you out on the balcony. Still looking for your Hungarian?”

  “No. But I didn’t think you remembered me . . .”

  “Hon, you barging in—asking about a woman who came here once in 1980—was hard to forget. But want to hear something rather droll? After you left I did ask Henry about—what was her name?—Kadar? He actually remembered her rather well—because her husband, Zoltan, got talking with another woman the night they were here, and there was a scene out on the balcony with the Hungarian threatening to toss the other woman into rue Soufflot. Henry said he’d never seen such a jealous rage—and one that came out in whispers . . . a sure sign of insanity in my book. Hell, give me a proper screaming match any day. So consider yourself lucky you really didn’t meet her. That kind of crazy—when they get their claws into you—”

  “I really have to go now,” I said, cutting her off.

  “Hey, fear not. I won’t say a word to Larry Coursen about any of this. Don’t want to cost you a job or anything. And y’all come back here again, you hear?”

  L’Herbert was true to her word about not telling Coursen about my “girlfriend.” There was a message the next day at my hotel from his secretary. Could I present myself at his office at 3:00 PM tomorrow for an interview?

  The American Institute was out in Neuilly. A sprawling hôtel particulier refurbished with classrooms and offices and a large public lecture theater. Coursen was pleasant and businesslike. He had dug out all my professional details. He had googled some of my academic papers and journalistic pieces. As expected, he had read all about the scandal that had cost me my job.

  “I’d appreciate hearing the story from you,” he said.

  I took him through it, trying to be very honest about my errors in judgment and saying that, although Robson went public with the affair, I still felt great guilt about what happened to Shelley.

  After I finished, Coursen said, “I appreciate your directness. It’s damn unusual these days—and rather refreshing. I also did make a call to one of your former colleagues in your department: Douglas Stanley. He gave you a fantastic recommendation and also said that the entire business with the student wouldn’t have turned into the drama and tragedy that it became if Robson hadn’t fanned the flames. And hey, that’s one hell of a story about what happened to Robson, isn’t it? Kind of makes you believe there is some cosmic force out there that punishes bastards.”