CRASH TEST

‘He’s going round in circles,’ Jessie said to her, brooding. ‘Ever since you spoke to him about Godard, all he does is play tennis.’ Jessie, one on one, turned out to be so much shrewder than when he was with Alma. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, most men only revealed themselves properly when they were talking to her alone. Rose had always attested to this: there was something about her that allowed even the most difficult individuals to open up.

Wearing white shorts, Kouhouesso crossed the path, heading to his car. The Mexican doorman opened the metal security gate for him. She stayed there. She didn’t dare go away: she never knew when she’d see him again. And she wasn’t absolutely certain that, with Alma around, Jessie would receive her.

She arranged a dinner for him with Peter Maximovitch, a longstanding friend she had met through Chabrol. David Steinberg from The Sopranos was there, and Gaspar Melchior from HBO, and the guys from ClickStar, who might be interested. Kouhouesso announced that he would only accept money from television on the condition that he had total creative freedom, a ‘final cut’ clause set in stone, and Maximovitch, who was well acquainted with madness, looked at him with admiration, expert as he was in self-sabotage and deliberate scuttling. When Bob Evans arrived, very late and very old, on the arm of a very young nurse in a very short uniform, Solange looked at Kouhouesso expectantly: the Golden Age of Hollywood was there. He stayed silent. Peter told a story she already knew, about a joyride on the occasion of the launch of his first film: Coppola post–Godfather, in his enormous limousine, Friedkin post–The Exorcist, who was sticking his head out of the roof, and Peter, in his beaten-up Volvo, racing them on Sunset Boulevard and all of them yelling me me me—a classic competition to see who could piss the furthest.

But weariness seemed to have caught up with Kouhouesso. The evening subsided into chatter about the weather: Bob was worried that the nurse was feeling the heat. Peter had never known such a sweltering December since he’d arrived in Los Angeles, the very first winter of the seventies.

The winter I was born, thought Solange. In Clèves, a long way from here.

Was it such a bad idea to have wanted to introduce him to the dinosaurs, to the witnesses of a time when Hollywood was one huge party? A cinephile like him should have been fascinated. Sure, his project was stalling, but they had all been through bad times, too. In the nineties, Maximovitch used to walk down Hollywood Boulevard with his starched mauve shirt and his bandana knotted in a floppy bowtie. Do you remember me? I was Peter Maximovitch. He would get himself photographed on exactly the spot where the statue of Shrek stands today. But he had lived on so long after his downfall that he had become a kind of idol. Personally, she worshipped him. He would have made a magnificent Kurtz, thin, lined, arrogant: more Kinski than Brando. If he’d survived Hollywood, the Congo wouldn’t be the end of him.

She was joking around; she’d had too much to drink. Less than Kouhouesso, but too much. At this point in the conversation, he was sunk in his habitual silence, but the rest of the gang were all laughing; Peter, defying his age, was pretending to be Tarzan on an imaginary vine.

Then Kouhouesso spoke, only a few words, unequivocally, with incongruous force, in a tone that was almost brutal: ‘George will play Kurtz.’

‘Has George signed anything?’ Gaspar asked out of interest.

Kouhouesso stood up. She felt obliged to follow him out, excusing herself. Everything was spinning. As she hurried past, she said sorry, sorry to the walls, to the wait staff. When she replayed the evening in her mind, she felt ashamed; she wasn’t sure exactly of what, and that was even more unpleasant.

She remembered the times when her father was intractable, simultaneously flamboyant and mute. Her mother’s ghastly smile. Now she found herself having to ‘form a buffer’, as her mother used to say. Between Kouhouesso and the world. But every single project in Hollywood had to undergo a dreadful blowtorch of criticism. Every director is interrogated, people have to see what they’re made of: it’s the mandatory crash test for every aspiring filmmaker.

In the car on the way home, the silence was that of their unique weariness; like a third person in their duo, this weariness loaded up in the back of the car, weariness like a child, which could at any moment leap at them and cause them to tumble into a ravine of anguish and hatred—yes, of hatred, a silent and suppressed hatred, a weary hatred. ‘Talk to me,’ she begged. She was drunk at the wheel, but they were in Bel Air, not far from her place, which, in her state, was spinning less than Topanga. He was falling asleep. Their weariness was ebbing back towards the east, into the first rays of the dawn.

When they arrived in front of the gate, he wanted to go home to his place. He shook his head. This was serious non-cooperation. She went round to the other side of the car and made him get out. She struggled against the weight of him, against gravity; she struggled against whatever force was holding him there, upright, unmoving, heavy, supported by the Earth and by hell, protesting in a language she didn’t understand; he was so much bigger than her, so much stronger than her. She heard sirens—how ridiculous, a breathalyser test right in front of her place? Blue and white lights flashing, spinning. Kouhouesso was pressed against the bonnet, the cops repeating the same question: ‘Is this man bothering you?’ She had no idea what was going on. Kouhouesso was yelling. She was terrified.

The concierge came to their rescue. He opened the gate, explained to the cops that the two of them were together and went back to his cupboard for the keys.

At two in the afternoon of their morning after, Kouhouesso woke up with a ‘hey’. On the television, thirty-nine high-school students had been killed with heavy weapons. By a boy: it was never by a girl. She wanted to get on a plane, put some space between her and America. She stroked his shoulder, but Kouhouesso shook himself, unhooked her hand as if it were an insect.

In an apocalyptic sunset, she took the car and fled to Olga’s. They talked all night long, girl talk. The next day she drove aimlessly around Los Angeles. Her tears flowed over the intensely blue sky, into the dust of that month of December. Her tears flowed over the hills, over their savannah dryness and the strip of green, the lush edge of the gardens. She drove to the sea. In tears, she handed her keys to a Venice Beach parking valet. She sat on the low wall in front of the stupid, sloshing, dirty-grey ocean. Surfers were settled on the surface like seagulls. Choking sobs rose and fell in her throat. There was a pop pop sound coming from behind her: the pelota players were hard at it, whacking their ball against the graffitied walls. It was like being in Biarritz in the off-season, when she was fifteen with no future. Except that life had moved on, and come to a stop here, on the edge of the Pacific.

She drove towards Topanga. The door opened: he was there. He had looked for her—where had she gone? Ted had called on behalf of George. A budget had been released to finance the storyboard. She guessed that George had footed the bill.

He took her out for dinner. They had lobster, baked oysters, Chablis, Saint-Julien. He was smiling again. He told her that she and he were tarred with the same brush: they thought only of themselves. Of their own personal advantage. It was all about being a black man and a white woman, not just a man and a woman: she had to get used to it; neither he nor she was to blame. The problem dated back to the round-ups in the forests. He thought her friends were unbearable. Hollywood legends, my arse. They were members of a club and they would never let him join. His experience proved to him that, because of their history, their cultural fluency, their sharp minds, Jews were definitely not the most racist among white people…She objected. He stopped her, she was too French, locked into her own prejudices, let him finish. As usual during those dinners, he found it difficult to single out one particular sentence that was truly racist—well, he had a hunch, but let’s not go there—it was everything, and it was done on purpose: you can never pass sentence on your enemy, he’s caught up inside his whole worldview, his top-dog/underdog ideology of dominance. It was the obstacle that wore him down, the wall they erected without even realising, their world that they took to be the universe. Universal Pictures presents! He knew it by heart. And if they’d added a white guy, whether he was Jewish or not, who cares, and if they’d added another fucking Hollywood legend or a fucking young producer, the wall would have grown higher, expanded, exponentially. He needed Jessie. He needed Favour. Favour Adebukola Moon: the black actress who stood out from the crowd. He needed George and he needed her, too; but—he laughed—he was wary. He was wary of everyone. Even Favour. He laughed again. She paid the bill.