Rake (2 page)

Their apartment was furnished like the palace at Versailles, all really old stuff, and quality, too. The paintings on the wall dated from about the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth and ranged from portraiture to landscapes executed in an academic style. (Did I mention I had a master’s degree in theater arts from Southwest Minnesota State University? And here you were thinking that actors were dolts.) The nanny came out to greet us, a British girl of twenty with zits and thick glasses who I could tell was going to be a knockout in about five years once the adolescence drained out of her. She recognized me immediately and blushed, and without commenting on my presence gave my hosts a report on the evening’s activities. Their children had behaved admirably, and apparently the youngest had taken several steps unassisted.

Once the girl was dismissed I followed the couple back to their bedroom. The wife instructed the husband in rather stern terms to sit in what looked to me like a genuine Louis XV fauteuil and
not say a word. Then she went down on me for a minute or two, and when I was erect she leapt onto the bed, on all fours, and said, “Give me what my husband can’t.”

As I fucked her in various and sundry positions she verbally abused her husband in the third person, excoriating his manhood, his potency, his decency as a human being, and I found myself wondering how these two had managed to find each other, and whether the whole routine had started out as his thing or hers. In any case, I didn’t mind being watched, and when at length I finished I looked over at him. He’d shot a load onto the ceiling, which seemed to disprove his wife’s claims of impotence.

“My God, you must think I’m the world’s worst hostess, I haven’t even offered you anything to drink,” she said, slipping her dress back on as her husband mopped up his mess with a tissue. We moved into the salon and she rang for a maid in the sort of uniform I didn’t think housemaids really wore any more.

“Fetch monsieur a whisky,” my hostess said, and the maid, whose uniform, I noted, was a bit too short to be really practical, scooted out of the room. I supposed that part of her duties involved some other pedestrian sexual fantasy: spanking the maid, or some sort of infantilism. Perhaps she did double duty as a naughty nurse. “I’m Marie-France,” the wife said, “and this is my husband, Gérard.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, without bothering to pretend they didn’t already know me.

“What brings you to Paris?” the happily cuckolded Gérard said.

“Trying to get a film set up.”

“How exciting,” Marie-France said.

This was true, more or less. I had a couple of contacts who’d expressed interest in trying to raise money for a feature. So far, though, they were full of hot air and not one of them had the wherewithal to get a movie made. One of them even suggested
that I commission a screenplay myself, after which he’d help me get it made. No thanks, asshole.

“I hope we’ll see you again. Perhaps we can visit the set when you’re filming,” she said after the maid had brought me my whisky.

“That would be fine with me.” I produced a
carte de visite
and handed it to her. She made a point of having her fingertips linger on mine, as though we’d just met and were flirting. It was kind of charming, but the number on the
carte
was from a different hotel and a previous visit, and I didn’t imagine I’d be seeing them again.

VENDREDI, VINGT-NEUF AVRIL

N
EXT MORNING I GOT UP EARLY AND HAD coffee and a croissant on the terrace of a café down the avenue from the hotel. It was a Friday, the sidewalk was crowded, and I enjoyed the expressions of surprise on the passersby as they registered my presence. One sweet-looking woman of eighty or so stopped, excused herself, and asked whether I was or was not, in fact, Dr. Crandall Taylor.

“I play him on television,” I replied.

“I thought that was you. I have a bone to pick with you, young man.”

“What’s that?”

She drew herself up straight, took a deep breath, and cocked her head at an angle that suggested a stinging lecture was about to be delivered. I suspected she’d been a schoolteacher once.

“You’ve made a terrible, foolish mistake,” she said. “That young woman was the love of your life, and you let her go over
a foolish dalliance with that other doctor. A dalliance that you provoked, may I add, by your own repeated infidelities.”

I toyed with the idea of trying to explain the difference between myself and the character I played, but the old dear was clearly out of her mind. I merely nodded, trying to remember what happened after Constance had her affair with Dr. Corby. Had Taylor taken her back immediately, or had there been a marriage or three in between? It was a bit of a blur at this remove.

“You’re absolutely right, madame,” I said. “Constance means everything to me. I will try to act on your advice.”

She squinted. “You sound funny. Like an American.”

“Everybody sounds different on television.”

She nodded her acceptance of the theory, then rolled up the left sleeve of her sweater. “What do you make of that?” she asked, pointing to a purplish splotch that looked remarkably like the other purplish splotches in its vicinity, as well as those on her face, neck, and hands.

I squinted and frowned, brought my forefinger to my lips to invoke the diagnostic process. I might not have had it in me to be a real doctor, but I would have had a kick-ass bedside manner. Real doctors have told me this, and a young allergist I once consulted told me he’d been such a fan of the show in med school that he’d modeled some of his gestures and tics after my own. That was one of my proudest moments as an actor.

“How long have you had this?” I asked, my tone midway between concern and reassurance.

“I don’t know,” she said. “A while.”

“I’d like you to see your regular doctor as soon as possible. He knows your history better than I do. And once he’s examined it, you come back here and let me know what he says.”

“Here? To the café?”

“I’m here most mornings.”

She nodded in a grave manner and proceeded on her way.

This wasn’t the first time I’d received such advice from a stranger. Constance, the love of the good doctor’s turbulent life, was incarnated on the TV screen by the lovely Tasha Coltrane, and I always thought one reason the viewers had so much emotion invested in that romance was that Tasha and I were fast friends off the set. A great number of those viewers assumed that we were actually lovers offscreen, which might have happened if not for the impediment of Tasha’s lesbianism; I guess part of our rapport must have been based on our ability to sit around for hours and talk about pussy.

One actress I did fuck off and on over the show’s years in production was Becky Tremaine, who played Dr. Taylor’s half-sister Vanessa. I have discovered that fans of the show don’t take well to this knowledge; they react to the news as though we were actual siblings, and so I made it a point never to travel with her. (I don’t even want to think about what would happen if they found out I’d also fucked Frances Lannigan, who played Dr. Taylor’s mother. In fact, I was pretty careful to keep Becky in the dark about that one.) Becky’s own mother was Lucy Tremaine, a television star of the sixties whose name is better known in the States than here, and her stepfather directed half the sitcoms ever aired.

Off the top of my head, here are the other cast members I slept with: Alicia Bertoldi, who played Senator Taylor’s third wife; Sally Collins, who intermittently played a biker chick for two or three seasons and, though she was in reality a nice Catholic girl, ended up killing herself for reasons never clear to me; Serena Hopp, who played the dual roles of Senator Taylor’s fourth wife and her twin sister; Annette Dillingsworth, who played the hospital’s chief administrator and who, at fifteen years my senior, could drink and coke me under the table and who once gave me a black eye during a bout of unusually rambunctious sexual experimentation.

And then there was Ginny De Kalb, a former Miss Missouri who did a couple of years on the show as Trina Vail, the polymorphously perverse owner of a horse farm. Ginny was crushed when her role was recast, but she should have seen it coming—her character’s story line involved a sex change, and though there are any number of actresses who could have played Trina in her post-op incarnation as Buck Vail, Ginny was not one of them. She surprised all of us when she turned to online erotica and made a fortune starring in and promoting a series of downloadable adult entertainments. She even did one video that played on the Trina/Buck sex change in which she, in a manner of speaking, went and fucked herself. Though it’s doubtful that there was much of an intersection between her soap opera fans and the admirers of her pornographic oeuvre, I for one was amused and aroused by the video, so much so that I looked her up and carried on a reasonably torrid affair with her for a year or so.

•
     
•
     
•

Anyway, those are the ones that come to me off the top of my head. Looking back, it was a hell of a fun show to work on. Two seasons in I nearly lost the role when sweet, Catholic Sally Collins’s husband walked in on us in her dressing room. I was fucking her from behind and she was shouting about what a dirty, dirty girl she was, and he grabbed the tennis racket she kept by the door and came swinging at me. I broke his arm and his collarbone before Sally’s screaming stopped me.

It could have been argued that he was provoked into violence by the sight of his wife (who was pregnant at the time, though not, as far as I could tell, by me) being fucked by another man, and that indeed was the line the producers of the show took with my poor, long-suffering agent, threatening to fire me.

I was already a fan favorite, though, and we settled with Sally’s husband out of court; I put up a hundred grand and the production company came up with two hundred and fifty. At the insistence of the Legal Department I took six months of anger management classes, which provided me with some interesting insights into my sometimes violent personal history. When I boasted that it had been more than fifteen years since my last arrest for assault and battery, the rest of my group laughed along with the instructor-counselor, and for a moment I was baffled and hurt, until I understood that they thought I was joking. Hell, I wasn’t angry, hadn’t been for years. All I’d done was defend myself against an attacker—too zealously, perhaps, but justifiably.

As for the irate husband, he disappeared into the woodwork, leaving Sally to raise their child alone. As a good Catholic girl, she took the divorce hard; after that she tended to avoid me away from the set, but I believe the drama of our off-camera story had an incendiary effect on our subsequent scenes together, lending a distraught quality to her performance that her modest, inborn level of talent couldn’t have provided. Now that I think of her I can’t help wondering what happened to that kid of hers.

SAMEDI, TRENTE AVRIL

T
HE NEXT NIGHT THE NETWORK LIAISON—Jean-Pierre by name—took me to a play at a small theater starring Nicolas Aurel, my vocal doppelganger on
Ventura County
.

Accompanying us was a certain Marie-Laure Vasquès, one of Jean-Pierre’s bosses at the network. Well into her forties, with long legs and black hair cut in a Louise Brooks bob, she affected delight at meeting me and chain-smoked in the car on the way to the theater. She had one of those faces that are hard to classify at first—she was either an idiosyncratic beauty or a little funny looking, with a nose that was at once rather long for her face and unusually slim, and eyes set wider apart than she probably would have preferred. Given her position at the network I made sure to casually mention my mission in France of getting a movie made, insinuating that it was practically a done deal and resisting the temptation to suggest overtly that there was still time for the network to invest in it.

She was very interested in the activities of my fellow cast members since the show had wrapped. Why she gave a shit I don’t know; I was the only one who spoke French, the one who came over and did publicity every year and without their having to hire an interpreter. But I filled her in on the retirements (three), the moves to other soaps (most of them), the sitcom role (Alicia), the three movie roles (including a big one for Becky), and the untimely death (poor Sally).

She told me she’d worked in L.A. a few years back for our overseas syndicator and claimed some responsibility for the show’s having been picked up in prime time here.

“I have you to thank, then,” I said and regretted not having paid more attention when Jean-Pierre had introduced us outside the hotel. What was her official title?

She smiled, a radiant, genuine expression that made her suddenly even more attractive than before, and noting the ring on her left hand, I wondered how hard it would be to get her into bed, and whether or not that would be a good idea, business-wise. “You’re really a very good actor,” she said, cementing my desire. “I saw you in that Garry Marshall movie last year.”

“Oh,” I said, and Jean-Pierre, who knows me well enough to poke a little fun, smirked at the mention of it.

“Don’t misunderstand me, the picture was a piece of shit,” she said, “but you were quite good.”

“You’re too kind.”

“Not at all. Have you got anything lined up here? Besides your own film, I mean?”

Feeling foolish, I tried to downplay my entirely conjectural film project. “It’s really in the embryonic stages at the moment. And, no, I don’t have anything else lined up.”