Rake (4 page)

When she challenged me on the point I asked her how quickly I could get a job at the Sorbonne teaching literature.

“That’s completely different,” she said. “You can’t just walk into a university and demand to teach.”

I could have continued arguing, but I thought I’d like to see her again sometime, so I conceded the point, and in a little while she went off on her way.

I got dressed and walked out of the hotel, headed in the general direction of the Louvre and thinking I might try to re-create the museum experience of my student days, and then I remembered it was a Monday, the museum closed. Tomorrow would have to do.

MARDI, TROIS MAI

B
ESIDES THE OBVIOUS CHANGES, STARTING with that glass pyramid, one element of a Louvre visit that had changed was the experience of checking my overcoat: Upon recognizing me, a giddy coat-check lady called a friend in another department, and before long a swarm of museum employees, nearly all female, were lined up for autographs next to the counter, joined by a handful of visitors distracted from the disposition of their outer garments by my surprise presence. I spent the better part of forty-five minutes chatting with them and posing for pictures before the crowd finally dissipated; one plump, ruddy-faced lady, an employee of one of the gift shops, had burst into tears at the sight of me and was only now pulling herself together.

You may wonder why I bother indulging a group of complete strangers. Not all celebrities do, and it would be perfectly easy to blow the first of them off with a curt, phony smile and avoid the rest of them entirely; after all, they’ll very likely never run
into me again. But that’s precisely the point: It’s a one-time encounter, and they’ll remember it forever. And if I’m a sweetheart, they’ll tell everybody that Dr. Crandall Taylor from
Ventura County
is a sweetheart. Conversely, if I’m an asshole . . .

•
     
•
     
•

Once the duties of my station had been discharged, I started, as I always had, with David and Elizabeth Vigée-LeBrun. This was where I had started on my very first visit to the museum, lo, those many years ago, in the company of a woman I was deeply infatuated with and whose background in art history centered on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century French painting. Moving on to Courbet and then to Géricault, I spent a good ten minutes contemplating
The Raft of the Medusa
and nearly unaware of those museumgoers who were contemplating me at the same time. Then on to Ingres, to linger on his wonderfully anatomically incorrect
Odalisque
, she of the half-dozen extra vertebrae and tantalizing smile, a thousand times more beguiling than that of the
Mona Lisa
around the corner.

•
     
•
     
•

After an hour and a half I stopped for a coffee—offered to me without charge by a giggling
serveuse
for whom I’d already signed an autograph at the coat check—and was seized by the urge to see pregnant Gabrielle d’Estrées getting her nipple pinched by that cheeky sister of hers. On the way I stopped to admire the
Winged Nike of Samothrace
and, on a whim, made a quick detour to see the Venus de Milo.

At this point you may be wondering why I’m burdening you with this self-consciously nostalgic tour of the Louvre’s Greatest Hits. The point is this: Standing before the Venus de Milo and contemplating her charms as a piece of classical sculpture, as an
icon for the ages, I had a banal thought that has come to generations of art-benumbed museumgoers: I wondered what had happened to her arms.

At this point I would have moved on to Henri IV’s brazen mistress, but something kept me rooted to the spot. Something was suggesting itself to me, some opportunity trying to claw its way out of my unconscious.

And then some idiot called out, “Crandall!” and I once again found myself surrounded by a crowd suddenly freed by the shouter from their shyness. As I signed autograph after autograph I despaired for my lost spark of inspiration, until finally some bold soul asked me if I was at the Louvre preparing to shoot an episode of the show.

“Not the show,” I said, the idea blossoming in the pit of my stomach as I spoke. “A movie.”

I had found my subject. I had to get hold of Frédéric right away: We were going to make a movie about the guy who finds the arms of the Venus de Milo. The only question now: comedy or drama?

•
     
•
     
•

On my way to Fred’s bookstore I had a notion I was being followed. Not in the way I’d come to expect, but by someone who meant me harm. I kept turning around and saw no one whose mien was any angrier than normal, upon which I realized that any reasonably intelligent assailant would make a point of wearing as bland and distant an expression as possible. I stopped at a newsstand and bought a stack of papers—the
Guardian, le Monde, Libération
, the
Herald Tribune
—and affected an air of deep engagement as I sauntered over to an outdoor table at a café and sat.

The
Herald Tribune
’s crossword was unreasonably difficult for a Tuesday, and as I drank my coffee and concentrated on the puzzle, I’m moderately embarrassed to say that I forgot all about my absurd
notion about being followed. All I can say about that is that the prickly feeling on the back of my neck stopped, and by the time I got up and left, my mind was on other things (39 Down: McKinley assassin), and by the time I made it to Fred’s bookstore, I was back in the world of the Venus de Milo, raring to solve her mysteries.

Fred seemed happy to see me but a wariness remained. “Hadn’t called you yet,” he said. “I did buy a book on screen-writing, though.”

“That’s great,” I said. “So here’s what we call in Hollywood the ‘High Concept,’ if you’re ready to start.”

“Shouldn’t I be signing a contract first?”

“I don’t know, why would you need to do that?”

“I don’t even know how much you’re going to pay me.”

I shook my head. “This isn’t that kind of a deal, Fred.”

“Frédéric,” he said.

“Okay, listen. This is what we call a spec deal. You and I write the script, I get us some meetings, and someone else gives us the money for the script.”

“Us?”

“You and me. You’ll get the lion’s share of the script money, I’ll just take a story credit. And when it gets made you’ll be a producer and get a fee for that, too.”

“I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you just hire me to write the script?”

I shook my head again, hoping that Fred’s naïveté was a sign of his purity as an artist and not of his being a greedy pain in the ass. “In the film business you never shell out your own money. It’s unprofessional. Which doesn’t mean I won’t have a little money thrown your way in the meantime, it just means I don’t want to be your boss. I want to collaborate.”

He looked down at the floor, his mouth twisted into a petulant scowl. “It’s just that I was hoping I’d be able to quit this job in order to work on the script.”

“You’ll be quitting the job before you know it. Now listen. I’ll reimburse you for the screenwriting book, and I’ll buy you dinner tonight while I pitch you the story I’ve cooked up.”

“Sure,” he said, trying hard to be cheery.

“Stop by the hotel at eight-thirty. I’ll be in the bar.” As I put my hand on the door I remembered the half-finished crossword I carried under my arm. “Hey, you don’t happen to know who shot McKinley, do you?”

“The American president?”

“Yeah.”

“Leon Czolgosz,” he said, as if it were obvious.

“Spell it?” I said, pen poised over the grid. He did so, and the letters fit perfectly, providing me with a solid framework for finishing the puzzle once I got back to the hotel. “Thanks, pal.”

•
     
•
     
•

The lovely Annick was waiting for me in the lobby, thumbing through a copy of
The New York Review of Books
and looking like an impatient young queen awaiting an underling. I stopped by her chair and cleared my throat.

“Would Her Majesty care for a refreshment in the Presidential Suite?”

Her air of cool detachment, I was pleased to see, evaporated and she beamed at me. “Absolutely.”

Half an hour later she was pulling on her sweatpants and giggling about how mad her boyfriend was.

“Why, exactly, is he mad?”

“Fucking typical double standard, he wants to bang every girl he meets, but me, I’m supposed to keep myself monogamous. Fuck that.”

“And how, exactly, does he know you’ve been unfaithful?”

She looked puzzled. “I told him.”

I’ve never understood the compulsion to confess. To stray, of course, (this will come as no surprise to the reader at this point), but what’s the advantage in talking about it afterward? I said as much to Annick and she shrugged.

“The other day when I met you and skipped the movie Bruno went anyway, and because he was mad he picked up the girl selling tickets and took her back to our apartment. I got home and found them lying there in our bed asleep, and I told him I didn’t care because I’d just fucked Dr. Crandall from
Ventura County
. He didn’t believe me until I showed him your picture from the park.”

Jesus. “Sauce for the goose,” I said in English.

“My mom was thrilled when I told her.”

“You told your mother you slept with me?”

“I told her I met you. Bruno was the one who told her I slept with you. What are you doing tonight?”

“I’ve got a dinner meeting. Give me a call on the cell, though; it might end early.” By which I meant I might be bringing Marie-Laure back to the suite.

“All right. I’ll call. But I’d better not find out you’re out with some other girl,” she said with a smirk that might have signified anything from actual possessiveness to a wry acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of a twenty-three-year-old feeling such a thing toward a man my age. If it was some sort of possessiveness I’d have to watch myself; something in those eyes told me Annick was a girl capable of mayhem, if the circumstances were right.

•
     
•
     
•

Waiting downstairs for Fred, I talked for a while with the lobby bartender, who was hip enough not to let on that he knew I was an actor. I imagined a lot of celebrities came through the hotel, bigger ones than me, and there was a protocol to be followed.
Fawning was for squares, not professionals who dealt with the high and mighty on a regular basis.

He was a thickset young fellow with a brushy moustache and a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. Turned out he was an ex-boxer.

“I saw Tyson bite Holyfield’s ear,” I said.

“No shit? That was a sad moment for the sport.”

“It truly was.” I hadn’t seen it, actually, but I’d seen Tyson fight once, and Holyfield several times. It was just something to say to keep the conversation flowing, but it stopped anyway, and I ended up watching a good chunk of an episode of
Ventura County
on the television above the bar. It was funny as always hearing Nicolas’s voice coming out of my mouth, but as always I was impressed with his ability to capture my manner of speaking, my cadences and tones. In darker moments I believed he was better than me.

Onscreen Me was arguing with his half-sister, and based on Becky’s hairstyle—long and braided—I estimated that the episode dated back about seven years, to a period when we’d broken up over some insensitive remark I’d made deliberately just to piss her off, and there was a real fire to our scene together: Her very real anger toward the real me spilled helplessly over into her character’s anger with mine. I suddenly missed her, wished I had treated her better, wished we could spend a few weeks here together, but of course that was impossible given the number of entanglements I’d already entered into. Maybe Rome someday, where the show was reasonably popular but aired at a worse timeslot and where the general public hadn’t gone apeshit over it the way the French had. Or maybe London, where it aired during the day, same as in the States, and was enjoyed only by the most depressive of shut-ins and unemployables.

Fred’s arrival interrupted my reverie, and I shook his hand with unfeigned enthusiasm. With his skills as a writer and mine
as an idea man we would come up with a script that would be impossible to turn down.

He ordered a beer and the bartender put down a fresh bowl of
amuse-gueules
before us, and I set about pitching the movie.

“I’m an archaeologist, somewhere down in the Mediterranean.”

“So this is sort of an Indiana Jones thing?”

“No. I don’t know, maybe. Just listen. I’m on a dig and I find a chunk of marble.”

“Are you alone on the dig?”

“I don’t know. Sure. Or maybe I’ve got my girlfriend with me.”

“If you’ve already got a girlfriend then there’s no love interest later on.”

“True. No girlfriend then. Maybe just some students. I’m a professor.”

“Like Indiana Jones.”

“Or not. Maybe I’m sleeping with one of the students. Like a charming rogue.”

“Okay. Or maybe you’ve got a girlfriend who’s a bitch, and the audience wants you to find a different one.”