Rake (9 page)
Authors: Scott Phillips
“I’ll take it into consideration.”
•
•
•
Next morning over breakfast I decided it would be a good idea to break it off with Annick. Bruno had already given a violent demonstration of his jealousy, and since I was entering into a business arrangement with his stepmother I thought it best to simplify the relationship. Especially given the fact that said stepmother seemed to have some sort of hold over him that went beyond the usual stepmother/stepson oedipal crisis. Marie-Laure’s warning about Esmée seemed somehow more plausible in the light of the morning, and the memory of the previous night’s frolics made me wonder why I needed any woman besides Marie-Laure. Besides, it wasn’t as though there weren’t a thousand—ten thousand—other, equally attractive women in Paris who’d be delighted to sleep with a TV star.
•
•
•
In the early afternoon I packed my bags and checked out of the suite. Esmée was waiting for me with a car and driver, and in the backseat as we headed toward the Left Bank we talked about the movie.
“What’s my character like?”
“That’s an interesting question,” I said, and it was, since I hadn’t given it much thought other than that she should be pretty and have large breasts, neither of which would be much of a stretch for Esmée. “Fred and I are still hashing it out, really, so of course your input would be very helpful.”
“Really?” she said, pressing her palm to her sternum again in that familiar gesture of hers. “I’m so flattered.”
“Fred and I both find that it’s easier to write a character when you’ve already got an actor in mind.”
She seemed genuinely excited by the prospect of getting to design her own character. She touched the tips of her fingers to the bridge of her nose and squinted. “I’m wondering if maybe she starts out not as the love interest but as a villain. Then later on they fall in love.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” I said. It was better than nothing, anyway, and I pulled out my iPhone and started writing it down.
“What if she’s there to steal the arms for some megalomaniac art collector?”
“Huh,” I said, pretending to consider it, even though it made no sense. “What would an art collector want with just the arms?”
She shrugged. “He’s a megalomaniac billionaire. Who knows? I’m just saying, think about these big art heists. Somebody steals a Monet, he can’t exactly walk into the Maison Drouot and sell it, can he? So someone’s hired him to steal it.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t compute. Why hire someone to steal something you can’t turn around and sell? What’s the point?”
“The point is, you get to own something valuable and rare, and nobody else gets to have it.”
“I can’t believe there’s anybody like that, willing to spend that kind of dough just to be an asshole.”
She smiled a little bit, an enigmatic expression worthy of the
Mona Lisa
. “Believe it. When I know you better I’ll tell you some stories about the very rich.”
When we pulled up in front of the building, Esmée and I got out, and when I started for the trunk to get my bags she waved me off. “Denis will get the bags. Come on up, I’ll let you in and give you the tour.”
•
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•
The place was huge and furnished with expensive new furniture, and for contrast on the walls were paintings ranging from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. At first glance I thought I identified a small Watteau and one of Degas’s last, small flower paintings, and though the collection had a sort of weird eclecticism to it, somehow the pieces all worked together to suggest a singular sensibility. I thought back to what she’d said about megalomaniac art collectors and got a little nervous about la Sûreté bursting in with guns drawn to retrieve them for their rightful owners while I slept.
Denis brought my bags inside, and Esmée, having forbidden me to hand him a gratuity on the grounds that I was her guest, told him to wait in the car. I’d slip him twenty at some later date, I told myself, when she wasn’t around.
“Now, my darling, would you like me to send him on his way?”
I raised an eyebrow. “I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Cut the shit. Do you want me to stay?”
“I’d love for you to. But I think with your husband as a potential backer for the movie we should be careful . . .”
“The hell with my husband. He’s in New York for five days.”
“Aren’t you afraid Denis will turn you in?”
“Denis works for me.”
It was all sounding really good. But I didn’t know enough about her husband, or about Denis, to blithely assume that they weren’t in league behind Esmée’s back.
And yet there she was before me, pouting slightly, moist red lips separating to reveal her tongue gliding between her barely separated upper and lower teeth, chest thrust forward to accentuate that lovely rack, eyes half shut in lustful anticipation. . . .
What the fuck. You only die once. “Yeah, send him on his way.”
•
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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.
O
NCE 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.
•
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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.
G
INNY 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 slunk off I laughed out loud.