The Age of Reinvention (7 page)

Samir watches her and instantly feels regret for having bedded so many other women, for having cheated on her whenever the opportunity has arisen, a slave to the irresistible urges of his nature, a hostage to his obsessions, to his own body which freely possesses/enjoys/desires whatever it wishes, sating his fantasies with a liberty that both distresses and impresses him. It is stronger than he is. The way he behaves toward women is offensive, he knows: ready to
do it
at the drop of a pair of panties, incapable of self-control; in public, in private, always on the alert, checking out every woman who enters a room, searching for that spark in their eyes. Sometimes he even spots them in a newspaper, on TV, and writes to them, inviting them to lunch—
I love your work
—novelists especially, looking at their photographs in the literary pages of
Vanity Fair
. “Doesn't it scare you?” Berman would ask, each time he discovered some compromising liaison. “Sure, of course it does. I'm scared all the time. Scared of losing my wife, my family. Scared of falling in love. Scared that one of these girls will pester me afterward, cry rape because I didn't call her back. I'm scared of catching a disease—I know, I know, you've told me before, it's crazy not to take precautions: it's irresponsible, inexcusable, I'm endangering my wife, my life . . . I might lose everything for ten minutes of pleasure. Ha, are you shocked? Well, let me shock you even more . . . sometimes it doesn't even last ten minutes. And I hate myself afterward. I'm filled with regret, with guilt. I'm terrified of what might happen. But don't you see? Desire is so much stronger than fear, so much bigger: fear just shrinks to nothing beside it. Every time, I tell myself not to do it again, to control myself, but it's stronger than me. As soon as I see a girl I like, a girl who excites me—and she doesn't have to be beautiful: she can be plain, common, coarse; sexual attraction has nothing to do with beauty—anyway, as soon as I see someone I desire, I dive right in. You think I'm addicted? Yeah, you're probably right. But what am I supposed to do about it? Suppress what I feel? It'll happen naturally as I get older, won't it?” Berman has already warned him about this several times: “In the U.S., you have to control yourself, you have to restrain yourself. Don't you understand that? You will, believe me. This isn't advice—it's an order. Do not covet your neighbor's wife. Don't even look at her. Avoid being alone with her. I don't care if she's sexy or if she comes on to you, you have to say no. Talk to a shrink. Talk to a friend. Talk to me. Take deep breaths. Take a tranquilizer. Take a cold shower. Whatever it takes. Never let desire get the better of your conscience, your morality, because in this country, morality rules everything. Your morality is what will determine your future in American society. Lose your morality and you'll lose your job, your wife, your kids' respect, everything. Does that shock you? Then live somewhere else. Go back to France, where people's private lives are private. François Mitterrand managed to lead a double life—two women, two families. You could do the same.” But this is impossible. Unthinkable. Tahar wants to stay in New York. His life is here, his career and family are here. He loves the life he leads here. He loves his job. And, in his own way, he loves his wife. But married life—with its strictly fenced-off codes and rules, its well-worn and signposted paths—is not for him. Life with Ruth is so calm and tranquil, but Samir needs adrenaline, danger, in order to feel alive. And this means limitless sex. Even age is not really a limit. Hearing this, his partner loses it. This is Samir's weakness: seventeen-year-old girls who look like they might be twenty-two, made up like inflatable dolls, teetering on five-inch heels borrowed from their mothers or bought cheap online, the girls saying they'll probably never wear them, and then, next day, wearing them out to a club. They want men to find them attractive. They want men to look at them and think:
Whoa! She's the sexiest girl I've ever seen!
Samir thinks this, and says it too. And generally it works. They have two or three drinks and a conversation that invariably revolves around what kind of music they like or which TV shows they've seen recently, and then they do whatever he wants. Tahar has a theory about this: a girl of fifteen or sixteen is just as mature as a girl of eighteen. Sometimes he even goes further: “No one wants to talk about this, but I'm going to tell you the truth,” he told Berman. “I'm in favor of lowering the age of consent.” “Thank God you're not running for office!” his partner replied. Tahar doesn't try to hide it: he likes ogling girls as they come out of high school, especially the French High School of New York. “I sit in a café and I watch them. I pick out the most sensual and mature ones—you can spot them right away—and I shoot an imaginary movie. I'm behind the camera and in front of it too. I see myself in action, seducing them, kissing them, fu—” “Tahar, shut your mouth! I don't want to listen to this shit! Even hearing it is a crime. So shut the fuck up or I'm out of here!” Berman yelled. But Tahar went on: “What's the big deal? How does it harm anyone, as long as they're consenting? That's all that matters: they
want
to do it! I'm not talking about raping them . . . They're not exactly shrinking violets, believe me! In fact, they're a lot more forward than most women my age. And yeah, I do sometimes fuck older women—but not often, because they're so damn complicated. Age makes them fragile: they want reassurance all the time, and I can't stand that. That's not why I'm there, you know? When I'm with a really young girl, I feel totally desired. They go overboard to prove they're women and they love it. I'm always quite moved by their little excesses. They don't understand that this is not how it's done, you see: they don't see anything artificial about framing their ass in a garter belt, for example—they don't even know how to wear it properly; they probably bought it on sale at Victoria's Secret with gift vouchers they got from their grandparents for their birthday. They're not embarrassed to wear glitzy accessories in flashy colors, and that's what I like about them: they haven't yet been perverted by the mechanics of sex, with all its codes and rules, its obsession with performance. They're separate from all that; they're like kids with their noses pressed to the store window, and I find that touching.” Hearing him talk like this, Berman called him a pedophile. “Do you really not understand what I'm saying, or are you just pretending not to understand? It's not a question of age—it's a question of sexual maturity.” He couldn't give up sex. He had tried suppressing his urges; he'd seen a shrink, who'd prescribed tranquilizers; he'd even seen a rabbi—yes, seriously—who had recommended that he be discreet, choose times and places that made it less likely he'd be caught, places far from home. Never in public. Never in daylight. One thing he never told Berman: once a month he dressed entirely in black and went to a cheap hotel full of whores, where he had sex with girls who called him Samir. He was not the kind of guy to pay a call girl a thousand bucks an hour—“Are you kidding? They're charging the same rate as me, and I did eight years of study!” He promised to be careful. In the United States, his partner had repeatedly warned him, you get a trace of your semen on a woman's dress, blouse, underwear, or T-shirt and you are socially dead. “In some ways, Bill Clinton paid for everyone's sins!” Tahar knows all this. But nothing can hold him back completely, and when, that night, he receives a text from Elisa Hanks
²
—a tall, voluptuous blonde who works for the New York prosecutor's office and whom he met during a trial—he can't resist. Now, having just taken off his pants, shirt, and shoes, he is standing on his vast terrace overlooking Central Park, a glass of vodka in his hand, a cold wind whipping his face. Leaning on the railing, he admires the skyscrapers rising into obscurity like control towers. The Hanks girl has sent him a text wishing him happy birthday; he thanks her and asks what she's up to—no woman sends a text as bland as that in the middle of the night unless she has something in mind—and, bingo, she replies immediately with a sexually loaded message that he has no trouble decoding. Then she asks if he's near his laptop because she wants to chat with him on Skype. He knows what she means, but he daren't go back to his office to switch on his computer so he can check out this girl as she undresses for him on-screen. What does she have to offer him, after all? Big tits—he's already noticed them. But what else? Long blond hair that she always wears in a bun . . . God, he'd like to see it let down. The vision of that girl naked, hair falling down over her breasts, excites him so much that he unties the belt of his monogrammed bathrobe, pulls it off his shoulders, and lets it fall to the floor. He has a sculpted body, ripped from all his athletic activity (he's proud to say he has the same private trainer as Al Gore), and his tanned skin contrasts with the whiteness of his expensive boxer shorts. Slowly he aims the camera on his cell phone at his boxer shorts, which are bulging with the proof of his excitement, then takes a picture. He sends it as an attachment, making certain that the addressee really is Elisa Hanks. Then he waits. His phone vibrates again. He waits for a moment, letting his excitement rise. Finally he reads the message he has just received. But, this time, the name on his screen is not the one he expected.

The message is from his mother.

1
. Marc Costanza, the security guard for building number 23 on Fifth Avenue, is forty-five years old, the son of an Italian immigrant. Born in Little Italy, in New York, he quit school very early to work in the family shoe repair store. Now he works as a night watchman and is taking acting classes. His ambition? “To be the next Al Pacino.”

2
. Elisa Hanks had not always wanted to be a lawyer. Until the age of seventeen, she had been destined for a career as a ballet dancer, but a car accident left her paralyzed for two years. So she gave up her dream and enrolled in a law degree program, on the advice of her father, the lawyer John Hanks, who was hoping she would take over his firm—which she did, without much enthusiasm, ten years later.

Article published in the
New York Times Magazine
, February 22, 2007:

Above the desk, on the wall of his sober, elegant office, are two Robert Mapplethorpe photographs: in the first, a naked woman in black leather gloves is aiming a revolver; in the second, a man shot in profile, tattooed and muscular, is wielding a knife. A taste for provocation? In the straight-and-narrow world of the law, Sam Tahar cuts a mysterious and slightly sulfurous figure. This olive-skinned man, who looks like he's just walked off a set of
The Godfather
, has a secretive nature bordering on paranoia. The first thing he says to me, with an enigmatic smile, is: “You won't find out anything about me.”

And yet, the story of his rise—from his birth in 1967 to parents who were literature professors—is undoubtedly intriguing. Arriving in the U.S. in the early 1990s, he has become, in less than fifteen years, one of the most high-profile lawyers on the East Coast. His critics would argue that his marriage in 2000 to Ruth Berg—daughter of Rahm Berg, one of the richest men in the country—is not unconnected to this fact . . . But after two hours of conversation during which he reveals himself to be, by turns, irresistibly seductive, brilliantly manipulative and thoroughly professional, it becomes clear that his rise cannot be reduced to that.

“My life has been marked by tragedy,” he admits in a rather grave voice. “I've had to fight to get where I am today.” Then he adds: “You won't make me say more than that.” His biography is revealed succinctly and somewhat reluctantly. In the course of the interview, he lets slip the fact that his parents died in a car accident when he was twenty. That he left for the U.S. shortly afterward to rebuild his life. That his real first name is Samuel. That his parents were North African Jews, secular and politicized, friends with the philosophers Benny Lévy and Emmanuel Levinas.

But the man himself, though perfectly polite and affable, clams up as soon as his personal life is mentioned: “I am my work,” he says. Then: “I like people for what they do, not what they are.” There are no personal photographs on his impeccably tidy desk, no objects that might betray a private life he is determined to keep private: “I don't like talking about myself, I don't like having my picture taken.” And you will find no trace of Sam Tahar on any social network: “I don't have time for that,” he says. “I prefer to read books. I love literature, politics. I love words generally.” Immediately he quotes a few lines from Martin Luther King's famous “I have a dream” speech: “ ‘No, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.' Damn, now I've said too much,” he jokes.

But is Sam Tahar really as discreet as he makes out? He did agree to appear on CNN, after all. “That was strictly professional,” he objects. “I didn't want to put myself forward, but my client refused to appear.” And who are his latest clients? The families of two young soldiers killed in Afghanistan, soldiers who have in a few days become symbols of heroism: “I don't know if I would have the courage to do what they did,” says Sam Tahar. To hear his version, his life has been completely unremarkable. His childhood was “uneventful” (meaning: a normal, middle-class upbringing), and he spent several years in London (which explains his almost perfect English—although he does have a slight, and very cute, French accent, a fact that only adds to his
je ne sais quoi
): “There's really not much to say about me,” he concludes, inscrutably. And yet, when you look into his dark eyes, flickering with intelligence and humor, that seems very hard to believe.