I WAS STUCK. I NEEDED A STORY FOR A MOVIE, and I needed to find a French screenwriter for Marie-Laure’s meeting. And I needed one who wouldn’t be asking for money up front, which precluded my doing it through an agent. It occurred to me that I might be able to adapt a book myself, lifting the dialogue verbatim and transferring the descriptive action from the past to the present tense (this is how John Huston adapted The Maltese Falcon, or rather how his secretary did it; before leaving town for the weekend, he gave her the novel and told her to type it up in screenplay format, and upon his return he found the result perfectly filmable).
But I needed to find a book, a title obscure enough that its author would accept a minimal option or none at all on the promise of a later payday. And I did have every reason to believe that there would be a payoff at some later date.
I wandered off from the hotel with the idea of a walk. I circled the courtyard of the Louvre and the Tuileries and headed across the rue de Rivoli to the arcade and walked along, acknowledging in my amiable but unapproachable manner the cries of recognition from my fellow flaneurs. I passed two English-language booksellers I knew well, but I’d need the book to be in French to start with, as an adaptation and translation together would take me twice the time.
And then I stumbled upon a small bookstore, one that had obviously been around for decades but which had somehow escaped my notice in the past. Noting with satisfaction that the only person inside was the clerk, which would give me the chance to peruse the shelves unmolested by fans, I stepped inside. With a nod to the clerk I began browsing through the fiction section and then the crime section, with the idea that genre books were likely simpler and therefore easier to adapt. My problem was that I didn’t know which ones had already been made into films, which ones had been optioned, which ones were unsuitable for adaptation. Judging by the covers alone, they all looked the same.
“Are you interested in books in English?” the bookseller asked me in my native language.
Mildly insulted, I responded in French. “Actually I’m looking for a film property. Do you know offhand whether any of these have been filmed?”
He shook his head. He was a little jug-eared guy with a tendency to move and speak very quickly, and he speed-walked to the back of the store. “No idea. They usually change the titles for the cinema, and they don’t always put out a movie edition.” He pulled a book from a table. “Here, I’m going to make you a gift of this one.”
He opened the book up and, whipping a fountain pen out of his shirt pocket, signed the title page and handed it to me.
“Thanks very much,” I said, puzzled and a bit nonplussed at his willingness to hand over store property to a stranger.
“I’m the author,” he said, and upon examination of the back flap I found a photographic portrait of the small, bespectacled man before me. Frédéric LaForge, according to the title page.
“What sort of book is it?” I asked, thinking I might have found my source material.
“It’s the story of a sexual tourist who travels to Thailand, deliberately gets infected with AIDS, and comes back to France and with equal deliberation infects everyone he can talk into bed, including—especially—his own twin sister.”
“His twin sister.”
“Right. It’s the guilt from their incestuous affair that leads him to seek out prostitutes.”
“I imagine it would.” I turned to a page in the middle of the book and read a paragraph at random:
She came to her usual quick, effortless orgasm, that chipmunk-like yelp I had loved hearing since adolescence, and I gave some thought to delivering her death sentence just at that moment. But something in her eyes as she looked into mine—call it love, call it nostalgia, call it an unconscious plea for a reprieve—made me withdraw and shoot my viscous poison harmlessly onto her belly instead.
Sadly, this seemed exactly like the kind of art-house movie I had no interest in making. But that didn’t mean that my new friend didn’t have it in him to write a decent popcorn movie. “Is this your first novel?” I asked.
“It is. I have another I’m two-thirds of the way through, about a brother and sister who murder their parents and have to struggle to be reunited after the juvenile justice system separates them.”
Someday I’ll have to meet this guy’s sister, I thought, she must be a real firecracker. “Have you ever written for the cinema?” I asked.
“No. I’m a prose artist, strictly.”
“That’s too bad, because thumbing through here I can see that you have a way with dialogue, and I’m looking for a collaborator on a film project.”
He shrugged and frowned, eyes on the hardwood floor of the bookshop. “I suppose screenwriting is a craft like any other sort of writing . . .”
I handed him the hotel’s card and wrote on the back the name I was staying under. “Give me a call in a day or two and we’ll knock some ideas around,” I said.
• • •
That night I dined alone in a restaurant near the Palais Royal, an old favorite of mine on a narrow side street connecting the rue de Richelieu and the rue Montpensier. The food was excellent, the service attentive without being obsequious—which is sometimes a problem for the famous—and over a sumptuous cassoulet I was taken back to my college days and the two summers I spent here, during which this restaurant was a weekly indulgence, an escape from dormitory food. The place was under different management now, and I wondered what had become of the couple who once ran it—the wife was one of those women one sees only in France, plain to the point of being nearly homely, and yet possessed of an erotic energy that attracted me back Wednesday after Wednesday as much as the food itself.
I got into a fight in that neighborhood once, during one of those university summers. One of my countrymen had had a few too many beers and was making a spectacle of himself and, in my youthful opinion, was casting a bad light on Americans in general. Having downed a few myself, I told him to shut the fuck up. He and his friends approached me, sneering, and I brought him to his knees with a quick left-right combination, upon which I shoved his two comrades together head-first, then brought them to the ground with a pair of uppercuts.
Was I proud as I strode off that night? I wasn’t. I felt I’d just proven that I’d learned nothing from my unfortunate experience in the military, that my supposed commitment to pacifism was just a veneer that might be lifted at any moment when I saw an opportunity for violence.
Now, years later, dining tranquilly in that same neighborhood, I felt a calm and a sense of well-being. It had taken time, but I had learned those lessons. The days of my striking first were behind me.
• • •
Seated at a table across the dining room was a pair of women who looked like they might be sisters, whispering to one another and occasionally sneaking a glance in my direction and giggling. They were attractive, in their late twenties and stylishly dressed, and they finished eating at the same time as I did, so I invited them back to my hotel for a nightcap. They accepted.