Rake (10 page)

“Hey, there he is,” she said. “Some fucking people, right?”

“Right,” I said, as the bell captain whistled for a taxi.

•
     
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•

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.

•
     
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•

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.

•
     
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•

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.

•
     
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•

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

G
INNY 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).

•
     
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•

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.”

“Want to come to my dorm?”

•
     
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•

Annick’s dormitory was a late-nineteenth-century building on the Boulevard St. Michel. I checked in at the desk in the cavernous lobby and asked for her. If the lady behind the desk recognized me she gave no sign of it, and while she buzzed for Annick I looked around the lobby. On one wall was an immense oil painting of a portly Edwardian lady in pearls and a diamond tiara, identified on the plaque below as the founder of the institution. A touch on my shoulder made me spin, and I found myself facing Annick.

“You like her?”

“She looks formidable, in the English sense of the word.”

“She haunts the place. Come on, you want the grand tour?”

•
     
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•

She took me through a darkened cafeteria on the ground floor. “It’s not in use anymore, but the place used to furnish three meals a day for several hundred girls.”

“How come you have the keys to the place?” I asked. So far she’d unlocked three massive oaken doors in our progression through the largely disused ground floor.

“I’m an employee as well as a resident. Come on, there’s something I want to show you.”

She beckoned me, and I followed her down a rickety spiral staircase in the far corner of the cafeteria, behind the service bar. It was pitch black down there, and I had a distinct feeling of dread as we descended.

At the bottom we stood in darkness, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the light I saw that we were in a corner of what was once a large institutional kitchen. We pushed through into the next room, which was dimly illuminated at ceiling level by basement windows. Row after row of ancient cabinets receded into the distance, and I followed her through another door into a long, narrow room.

She flicked a light switch and a fluorescent tube overhead crackled slowly to life. Along the wall were cabinets containing old, unused flatware, and running along the floor on one side were bins; on the other, drawers. One of the bins had broken open to reveal its contents: sawdust.

“What’s the sawdust for?” I asked.

“Who knows? It’s before my time. Cleaning up vomit, maybe. Look at this, though.”

She opened one of the drawers, pulled out a butter knife, and handed it to me. “Check it out.”

It was heavy. “Real silver?”

“Tons of it, completely unused. It’s a miracle nobody’s ever bagged it all up and taken it to the flea market.”

There was definitely something not right in the air down there. “I don’t suppose this is where the old lady in the painting manifests herself?”

“No, she appears in the music room upstairs, and once in a while when there’s music in the cafeteria. Old-fashioned music, I
mean; I don’t think she’s a big hip-hop fan. But I’ve worked with people who wouldn’t come down here by themselves. Supposedly there’s an old lady cook who won’t leave and doesn’t like having people down here.”