BLACK LIKE ME

Jessie lent them his bungalow at Malibu: an eight-room villa on the beach. The storyboard guy came every day; they locked themselves away to sketch out, frame by frame, the film Kouhouesso envisioned. Once the guy left, late at night, Kouhouesso would open bottles of wine and sit in front of the laptop he’d just bought himself. She would go to bed alone. She ended up missing Jessie’s garrulous proselytism. Lloyd didn’t understand why she’d turned down ER. She didn’t dare tell him that she was waiting for the dates of an unlikely role in a dangerous film in an impossible country. In the Congo.

The rest of the time, Kouhouesso sat under the sunshade, facing the ocean, iPod in his ears or mobile phone on his knees. The film remained in the realm of the virtual; the storyboard drawings were more to reassure potential producers than to plan actual shots. She went walking along the beach at low tide; she would look at him, a seated figure behind the guardrail, stuck in a dream house, in his very own Congo, with a woman who was waiting only for him.

What’s he like, a man waiting? His head bent, heavy with alcohol and impatience. Consumed by the film shoot in his mind, by the images on paper. Rubbing his eyes with the flat of his hand, drawing on his immense weariness. She would hold out her hand, but he wouldn’t take it. It was never the right time. Or rather it was always just when she was finally thinking about something else, or getting ready to swim, walk, read, that he would come up to her and put his arms around her. And afterwards he never said much. She complained about his moods. He accused her of calling what wasn’t her business a mood: ‘If I stop believing in it, who will believe in it for me?’

‘George,’ she replied.

She went down to the beach every day, for the pleasure of the beach, right there below the house. If it weren’t for this film, this obsession, they would have been happy. She had begun cooking. She would have liked to have a dog to walk. She had got to know some of the locals in the area. You couldn’t really call the strip of luxury villas between the sea and the highway a neighbourhood. A lot of them had dogs (even though it was illegal), a lot of them smoked (ditto), and they were easy to talk to. There was a Ukrainian guy and a Chinese woman who had met in a psychiatric hospital and loved to talk about it; a bodysurfing grandmother who was always trying to get her granddaughters minded; a depressive architect who couldn’t stand his clients anymore; a mysterious Greek woman who sermonised in the dunes. The impoverished, who lived almost on the beach, and the super-wealthy, who also lived there, but differently.

A French couple recognised her, despite her hat and sunglasses. They had landed there for their retirement, on stilts, like herons. They were keen to invite her over for dinner; she smiled politely. She imagined Kouhouesso in their exquisite decor—in the end, only she could put up with him.

On the weekend the beach turned democratic: more people, more families, including the servants of the surrounding houses. As well as those venturing from the east side of the city, who had driven since morning in order to spend Sunday at Malibu. Black families armed with enormous rubber rings, Fritos, beach umbrellas, and grandmothers sitting on folding chairs. The boys (like Jessie but very different from Jessie) went swimming without taking off their gold chains, and most of the time without knowing how to swim, which made the lifeguards in their sentry box nervous. Without much of an idea how to, she wanted to make friends with these people. She complimented the grandmothers on their grandchildren. She shared chips with them and chatted about the weather, often unable to grasp their accent, whereas she understood Jessie and Kouhouesso, and Favour the Nigerian girl, and Lola from Suriname.

Being separated from Kouhouesso, even for a few hours, gave her the illusion, while she was with the black families, of somehow being with him. Yes, the familiarity was surprising. But perhaps it was not so much connected with Kouhouesso as with a déjà vu of her memories of the Basque Country, of her own adolescence. The fat grandmothers and the folding chairs. The ugly swimsuits, the towels that were not proper large beach towels but old rags from the bathroom cupboard. She remembered those occasional beach days, an hour’s drive away, with her, say, boyfriend at the time, whom she was ashamed of, and the other girls on the beach, the—she thought about it, the white girls—the girls from Paris, the wealthy tourist girls; when she thought she was too fat and badly dressed, whereas—she knew now—she was the prettiest, the real princess. And she liked these girls at Malibu—a day out at Malibu—speaking too loudly to feel uncomfortable, with their ten-dollar Target swimsuits that were bad copies of expensive labels, and the enormous ice boxes, and the strollers in the sand. And the babies.

She had never held a black baby in her arms (‘a little prune’, her mother used to say if she saw one on the TV). She had never chatted about sunscreens with black girls, or even imagined that they, too, used protection against UV radiation. But she, too, had owned one good T-shirt that she kept for special occasions. Far from here, two oceans away.

Some older adolescents came to ask her if she was an actress. They flirted with her. It would never have happened in her previous life. Unimaginable. Until now, she had never spoken, either in Paris or Los Angeles, with one of those tall guys in hoodies. But she was no longer frightened. Anyway, she was old enough to be their mother.

In 1960, scarcely ten years before the heyday of Friedkin and Coppola, the journalist John H. Griffin, disguised as a black man for his memoir, Black Like Me, had been warned by his black friends: never look at a white woman, even a woman on a film poster. Asking for trouble. In California, the last lynching had taken place in 1947. The fellow had been caught on a ranch near Gazelle, and hanged in front of the only school in the area, in Callahan.