Rake (3 page)
Authors: Scott Phillips
“Is there a script?”
“I’m collaborating on one with a young French screenwriter.”
She crossed her legs and nodded. “Bring him in for a meeting, maybe we can make something happen. In the meantime there’s a role on one of our cop shows that would be perfect for you. It was written for an Englishman but it could easily be an American.”
“I can play British, of course,” I said, bristling, as we stopped in front of the theater.
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I’d met Nicolas a few times and had always been impressed by his talents as a voice artist, but this was the first time I’d seen him act. He was a handsome young fellow with terrific stage presence, hulking and with a real sense of physical menace, even though he wasn’t really very large. My real-life tendencies as a brawler besides, I’ve been in my share of fights onstage and pride myself on being able to spot a poorly faked one; there was a moment in a third-act fight scene, though, when I thought he’d really broken his cast mate’s jaw.
The play was mediocre but the actors were good, and afterward we went out for a bite with Nicolas, his wife, and a couple of the actresses, both of whom paid me a great deal of attention over several platters of oysters. As one of the actresses howled in exaggerated laughter at an anecdote I’d just told, Nicolas nudged me and whispered that if I were to take the young lady in question home with me I wouldn’t be disappointed. I reserved my most solicitous attentions for Marie-Laure, however, and began considering at what point it would be politically wise to invite her up to my suite, tonight or some other evening after dinner.
As it happened, when Jean-Pierre dropped me off at the hotel she told him she wanted a cocktail with me and would catch a cab home. The almost predatory look on her face as we walked arm in arm to the hotel bar sent a little chill down my spine and excited me even more than before.
I
WAS STUCK. I NEEDED A STORY FOR A MOVIE, and I needed to find a French screenwriter for Marie-Laure’s meeting. And I needed one who wouldn’t be asking for money up front, which precluded my doing it through an agent. It occurred to me that I might be able to adapt a book myself, lifting the dialogue verbatim and transferring the descriptive action from the past to the present tense (this is how John Huston adapted
The Maltese Falcon
, or rather how his secretary did it; before leaving town for the weekend, he gave her the novel and told her to type it up in screenplay format, and upon his return he found the result perfectly filmable).
But I needed to find a book, a title obscure enough that its author would accept a minimal option or none at all on the promise of a later payday. And I did have every reason to believe that there would be a payoff at some later date.
I wandered off from the hotel with the idea of a walk. I circled the courtyard of the Louvre and the Tuileries and headed across
the rue de Rivoli to the arcade and walked along, acknowledging in my amiable but unapproachable manner the cries of recognition from my fellow flaneurs. I passed two English-language booksellers I knew well, but I’d need the book to be in French to start with, as an adaptation and translation together would take me twice the time.
And then I stumbled upon a small bookstore, one that had obviously been around for decades but which had somehow escaped my notice in the past. Noting with satisfaction that the only person inside was the clerk, which would give me the chance to peruse the shelves unmolested by fans, I stepped inside. With a nod to the clerk I began browsing through the fiction section and then the crime section, with the idea that genre books were likely simpler and therefore easier to adapt. My problem was that I didn’t know which ones had already been made into films, which ones had been optioned, which ones were unsuitable for adaptation. Judging by the covers alone, they all looked the same.
“Are you interested in books in English?” the bookseller asked me in my native language.
Mildly insulted, I responded in French. “Actually I’m looking for a film property. Do you know offhand whether any of these have been filmed?”
He shook his head. He was a little jug-eared guy with a tendency to move and speak very quickly, and he speed-walked to the back of the store. “No idea. They usually change the titles for the cinema, and they don’t always put out a movie edition.” He pulled a book from a table. “Here, I’m going to make you a gift of this one.”
He opened the book up and, whipping a fountain pen out of his shirt pocket, signed the title page and handed it to me.
“Thanks very much,” I said, puzzled and a bit nonplussed at his willingness to hand over store property to a stranger.
“I’m the author,” he said, and upon examination of the back flap I found a photographic portrait of the small, bespectacled man before me. Frédéric LaForge, according to the title page.
“What sort of book is it?” I asked, thinking I might have found my source material.
“It’s the story of a sexual tourist who travels to Thailand, deliberately gets infected with AIDS, and comes back to France and with equal deliberation infects everyone he can talk into bed, including—especially—his own twin sister.”
“His twin sister.”
“Right. It’s the guilt from their incestuous affair that leads him to seek out prostitutes.”
“I imagine it would.” I turned to a page in the middle of the book and read a paragraph at random:
She came to her usual quick, effortless orgasm, that chipmunk-like yelp I had loved hearing since adolescence, and I gave some thought to delivering her death sentence just at that moment. But something in her eyes as she looked into mine—call it love, call it nostalgia, call it an unconscious plea for a reprieve—made me withdraw and shoot my viscous poison harmlessly onto her belly instead
.
Sadly, this seemed exactly like the kind of art-house movie I had no interest in making. But that didn’t mean that my new friend didn’t have it in him to write a decent popcorn movie. “Is this your first novel?” I asked.
“It is. I have another I’m two-thirds of the way through, about a brother and sister who murder their parents and have to struggle to be reunited after the juvenile justice system separates them.”
Someday I’ll have to meet this guy’s sister, I thought, she must be a real firecracker. “Have you ever written for the cinema?” I asked.
“No. I’m a prose artist, strictly.”
“That’s too bad, because thumbing through here I can see that you have a way with dialogue, and I’m looking for a collaborator on a film project.”
He shrugged and frowned, eyes on the hardwood floor of the bookshop. “I suppose screenwriting is a craft like any other sort of writing . . .”
I handed him the hotel’s card and wrote on the back the name I was staying under. “Give me a call in a day or two and we’ll knock some ideas around,” I said.
•
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That night I dined alone in a restaurant near the Palais Royal, an old favorite of mine on a narrow side street connecting the rue de Richelieu and the rue Montpensier. The food was excellent, the service attentive without being obsequious—which is sometimes a problem for the famous—and over a sumptuous cassoulet I was taken back to my college days and the two summers I spent here, during which this restaurant was a weekly indulgence, an escape from dormitory food. The place was under different management now, and I wondered what had become of the couple who once ran it—the wife was one of those women one sees only in France, plain to the point of being nearly homely, and yet possessed of an erotic energy that attracted me back Wednesday after Wednesday as much as the food itself.
I got into a fight in that neighborhood once, during one of those university summers. One of my countrymen had had a few too many beers and was making a spectacle of himself and, in my youthful opinion, was casting a bad light on Americans in general. Having downed a few myself, I told him to shut the fuck up. He and his friends approached me, sneering, and I brought him to his knees with a quick left-right combination, upon which I
shoved his two comrades together head-first, then brought them to the ground with a pair of uppercuts.
Was I proud as I strode off that night? I wasn’t. I felt I’d just proven that I’d learned nothing from my unfortunate experience in the military, that my supposed commitment to pacifism was just a veneer that might be lifted at any moment when I saw an opportunity for violence.
Now, years later, dining tranquilly in that same neighborhood, I felt a calm and a sense of well-being. It had taken time, but I had learned those lessons. The days of my striking first were behind me.
•
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•
Seated at a table across the dining room was a pair of women who looked like they might be sisters, whispering to one another and occasionally sneaking a glance in my direction and giggling. They were attractive, in their late twenties and stylishly dressed, and they finished eating at the same time as I did, so I invited them back to my hotel for a nightcap. They accepted.
S
ISTERS THEY INDEED TURNED OUT TO BE, and they didn’t leave my suite until after eleven in the morning, after a rather sumptuous room service breakfast, American style with scrambled eggs and bacon. I had always fantasized about doing a pair of sisters (preferably twins; you can’t have everything), and like so many fantasies, the real thing was a bit of a letdown. I won’t deny that it was fun, but no more so than going to bed with any other pair of women.
When they were gone I checked my e-mails and found only one I cared to open, from some misguided soul who wanted to write a biographical piece on me for an encyclopedia of American television actors. Though I suspected it to be a prank, I sat down and wrote a wholly fictional autobiographical sketch that suited the image I wished to project:
Born July 19—, Newport, R.I. Graduated magna cum laude from Exeter. Graduated from Harvard University with a
Bachelor of Arts in literary criticism, followed by a PhD from MIT in particle physics. Widowed at the age of twenty-seven in a car wreck on honeymoon, never recovered emotionally, turned to acting as a form of therapy
.
I sent it off and wondered what my fans’ reaction would be if they knew the truth. Would they be able to reconcile the suave, seductive, intellectual man of medicine with the low-born hell-raiser of my youth? Hell, they’d probably eat it up; people love a hint of scandal, particularly when it involves obstacles overcome. But they weren’t going to find out about it.
•
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Late in the afternoon I took a stroll through the Tuileries to clear my head and perhaps come up with a workable idea. Approaching the Grand Bassin I crossed paths with a pretty, dark-haired girl in her early twenties, dressed in clothes too bulky to say what her body looked like but whose saucy expression made me stop. She pulled a small camera from her purse and dangled it from its strap.
“Do you mind?” she asked in English. “No one’s going to believe I saw you.”
“I don’t mind at all,” I answered in French, and I gave her the sexiest, most insouciant smirk I could manage (and the sexy, insouciant smirk is my trademark). When she was done taking the pictures I pointed out that it was the cocktail hour, and I wondered where she was off to in such a hurry.
“Going to meet my boyfriend for a movie.”
“Could I interest you in postponing that movie and joining me for a drink?”
She pretended to consider it, then pulled out her cell phone to call the boyfriend and lie about an exam she had to study for.
Three minutes later we grabbed a taxi on the rue de Rivoli and headed for my hotel’s bar.
•
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•
Her name was Annick, she was a graduate student in American literature, and she was working on a visa application for a year’s study in the USA. I offered any help I could provide and spoke of my own youthful experiences in Paris, without mentioning how many years ago that had been (suffice it to say that the lovely Annick hadn’t been born yet).
We went over all this in the bar over glasses of wine, and it took only two apiece to convince her that my suite would be a better place to consume a third.
There’s a contagious aspect to the thrill some women get from having sex with someone famous, and Annick was as wide-eyed as a marmoset at the prospect. What she lacked in experience she made up for with the flawless body of a twenty-three-year-old, and though her orgasms were faked they were well faked.
“You’re very pretty,” I told her afterward.
“Pretty? Try beautiful, you’ll get further,” she said, and laughed.
“It’s true, you do cross that line from pretty to beautiful.” I looked her over, trying to decide exactly where that line was. I decided it was a certain ruthlessness in her eyes, a sense that with the right amount of prodding she’d be up for just about anything.
“Do you think I’m pretty enough to be on television?”
“More than pretty enough. But it takes more than looks. Those summers I spent here as a student, I was attending plays, doing workshops, memorizing speeches in a language I didn’t know that well yet. And then there were years of repertory theater and bit roles before I got famous. But you’re still young, certainly young enough to start.”