YOU KNOW ME, OR MORE PRECISELY YOU have the distinct impression that you know me; it probably amounts to the same thing, from your point of view at least. For five years I played Dr. Crandall Taylor, dissolute, randy, ne’er-do-well bastard son of Senator Harwood Taylor on an American soap opera called Ventura County. No one paid the show any attention at all back home, where it ran five days a week at eleven in the morning, watched only by the loneliest and horniest of housewives and the laziest of college students. In Europe, though, they had the bright idea of running us in the evening, right at the start of prime time, and to everyone’s surprise we turned into a massive hit. With each one-hour episode cut in half, our five-year run will last ten over here, and though the show’s been out of production for three years, we’re still a success in most of Europe, with several years’ worth of episodes still to run.
And I was the star of the thing. I can’t cross the street in Paris without somebody doing a double-take and calling out “Hey, Crandall,” or have dinner in a nice restaurant without having to interrupt my conversation and chat with some well-meaning, star-struck viewer.
This is the point in the story where you’ll be expecting the usual celebrity whine about loss of privacy, intrusive fans, and how much I wish I had my anonymity back. You’re thinking how happy you’d be, how if you were wallowing in money and pussy and adulation from complete strangers, if you could just walk right into some club with a line stretching down the sidewalk, if the chef always wanted to send you something a little extra just for doing him the favor of showing up at his restaurant, if people were scrambling to get you to make a CD or a new TV show and pay you even more money and make you even more famous, well, that’d be just fine with you.
So I’m going to surprise you right here and leave out the bitching. Sure, sometimes it’s a drag when someone interrupts a meal, but so fucking what? I’m an actor. What exactly did I think I was signing up for here? It’s great, getting treated like something special. Free stuff, brazen women—especially women who are normally demure but who get sexually aggressive when they see a celebrity—preferred seating everywhere I go: yeah, this is pretty much the life you imagine it is. And it’s great.
• • •
For example: Not long ago I was spending a pleasant evening in a nightclub off the Étoile. The bouncer let me in without paying, management sent over a complimentary bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and as I scanned the crowd for some woman who might want to come back to my suite, an attractive lady came over to my table, leaned down to whisper in my ear, and then casually suggested I might want to fuck her while her husband watched. She was in her early thirties, wearing a blue minidress and high-heeled shoes that in the dim light of the club seemed to match it. Her face promised something wild, with a sharp little nose and a crooked smile and big, round doe eyes that didn’t ever seem to blink. Her hair was cut razor-close at the sides, and as she spoke to me she was making little rotating motions with her pelvis as though she were already gearing up for it, and I thought what the hell?
So the three of us headed for their apartment in the sixteenth, with hubby driving while I fingerbanged milady in the backseat. I was a little disappointed that she wasn’t wearing underwear, since one of my favorite moments when fucking a girl for the first time is that moment when your fingers cross that elastic Maginot Line of her panties. She was making a hell of a lot of noise while I did it, and our driver drove without betraying any reaction whatsoever. I suppose that was part of the thrill of it for the poor bastard.
Their apartment was furnished like the palace at Versailles, all really old stuff, and quality, too. The paintings on the wall dated from about the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth and ranged from portraiture to landscapes executed in an academic style. (Did I mention I had a master’s degree in theater arts from Southwest Minnesota State University? And here you were thinking that actors were dolts.) The nanny came out to greet us, a British girl of twenty with zits and thick glasses who I could tell was going to be a knockout in about five years once the adolescence drained out of her. She recognized me immediately and blushed, and without commenting on my presence gave my hosts a report on the evening’s activities. Their children had behaved admirably, and apparently the youngest had taken several steps unassisted.
Once the girl was dismissed I followed the couple back to their bedroom. The wife instructed the husband in rather stern terms to sit in what looked to me like a genuine Louis XV fauteuil and not say a word. Then she went down on me for a minute or two, and when I was erect she leapt onto the bed, on all fours, and said, “Give me what my husband can’t.”
As I fucked her in various and sundry positions she verbally abused her husband in the third person, excoriating his manhood, his potency, his decency as a human being, and I found myself wondering how these two had managed to find each other, and whether the whole routine had started out as his thing or hers. In any case, I didn’t mind being watched, and when at length I finished I looked over at him. He’d shot a load onto the ceiling, which seemed to disprove his wife’s claims of impotence.
“My God, you must think I’m the world’s worst hostess, I haven’t even offered you anything to drink,” she said, slipping her dress back on as her husband mopped up his mess with a tissue. We moved into the salon and she rang for a maid in the sort of uniform I didn’t think housemaids really wore any more.
“Fetch monsieur a whisky,” my hostess said, and the maid, whose uniform, I noted, was a bit too short to be really practical, scooted out of the room. I supposed that part of her duties involved some other pedestrian sexual fantasy: spanking the maid, or some sort of infantilism. Perhaps she did double duty as a naughty nurse. “I’m Marie-France,” the wife said, “and this is my husband, Gérard.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, without bothering to pretend they didn’t already know me.
“What brings you to Paris?” the happily cuckolded Gérard said.
“Trying to get a film set up.”
“How exciting,” Marie-France said.
This was true, more or less. I had a couple of contacts who’d expressed interest in trying to raise money for a feature. So far, though, they were full of hot air and not one of them had the wherewithal to get a movie made. One of them even suggested that I commission a screenplay myself, after which he’d help me get it made. No thanks, asshole.
“I hope we’ll see you again. Perhaps we can visit the set when you’re filming,” she said after the maid had brought me my whisky.
“That would be fine with me.” I produced a carte de visite and handed it to her. She made a point of having her fingertips linger on mine, as though we’d just met and were flirting. It was kind of charming, but the number on the carte was from a different hotel and a previous visit, and I didn’t imagine I’d be seeing them again.