SISTERS THEY INDEED TURNED OUT TO BE, and they didn’t leave my suite until after eleven in the morning, after a rather sumptuous room service breakfast, American style with scrambled eggs and bacon. I had always fantasized about doing a pair of sisters (preferably twins; you can’t have everything), and like so many fantasies, the real thing was a bit of a letdown. I won’t deny that it was fun, but no more so than going to bed with any other pair of women.
When they were gone I checked my e-mails and found only one I cared to open, from some misguided soul who wanted to write a biographical piece on me for an encyclopedia of American television actors. Though I suspected it to be a prank, I sat down and wrote a wholly fictional autobiographical sketch that suited the image I wished to project:
Born July 19—, Newport, R.I. Graduated magna cum laude from Exeter. Graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in literary criticism, followed by a PhD from MIT in particle physics. Widowed at the age of twenty-seven in a car wreck on honeymoon, never recovered emotionally, turned to acting as a form of therapy.
I sent it off and wondered what my fans’ reaction would be if they knew the truth. Would they be able to reconcile the suave, seductive, intellectual man of medicine with the low-born hell-raiser of my youth? Hell, they’d probably eat it up; people love a hint of scandal, particularly when it involves obstacles overcome. But they weren’t going to find out about it.
• • •
Late in the afternoon I took a stroll through the Tuileries to clear my head and perhaps come up with a workable idea. Approaching the Grand Bassin I crossed paths with a pretty, dark-haired girl in her early twenties, dressed in clothes too bulky to say what her body looked like but whose saucy expression made me stop. She pulled a small camera from her purse and dangled it from its strap.
“Do you mind?” she asked in English. “No one’s going to believe I saw you.”
“I don’t mind at all,” I answered in French, and I gave her the sexiest, most insouciant smirk I could manage (and the sexy, insouciant smirk is my trademark). When she was done taking the pictures I pointed out that it was the cocktail hour, and I wondered where she was off to in such a hurry.
“Going to meet my boyfriend for a movie.”
“Could I interest you in postponing that movie and joining me for a drink?”
She pretended to consider it, then pulled out her cell phone to call the boyfriend and lie about an exam she had to study for. Three minutes later we grabbed a taxi on the rue de Rivoli and headed for my hotel’s bar.
• • •
Her name was Annick, she was a graduate student in American literature, and she was working on a visa application for a year’s study in the USA. I offered any help I could provide and spoke of my own youthful experiences in Paris, without mentioning how many years ago that had been (suffice it to say that the lovely Annick hadn’t been born yet).
We went over all this in the bar over glasses of wine, and it took only two apiece to convince her that my suite would be a better place to consume a third.
There’s a contagious aspect to the thrill some women get from having sex with someone famous, and Annick was as wide-eyed as a marmoset at the prospect. What she lacked in experience she made up for with the flawless body of a twenty-three-year-old, and though her orgasms were faked they were well faked.
“You’re very pretty,” I told her afterward.
“Pretty? Try beautiful, you’ll get further,” she said, and laughed.
“It’s true, you do cross that line from pretty to beautiful.” I looked her over, trying to decide exactly where that line was. I decided it was a certain ruthlessness in her eyes, a sense that with the right amount of prodding she’d be up for just about anything.
“Do you think I’m pretty enough to be on television?”
“More than pretty enough. But it takes more than looks. Those summers I spent here as a student, I was attending plays, doing workshops, memorizing speeches in a language I didn’t know that well yet. And then there were years of repertory theater and bit roles before I got famous. But you’re still young, certainly young enough to start.”
When she challenged me on the point I asked her how quickly I could get a job at the Sorbonne teaching literature.
“That’s completely different,” she said. “You can’t just walk into a university and demand to teach.”
I could have continued arguing, but I thought I’d like to see her again sometime, so I conceded the point, and in a little while she went off on her way.
I got dressed and walked out of the hotel, headed in the general direction of the Louvre and thinking I might try to re-create the museum experience of my student days, and then I remembered it was a Monday, the museum closed. Tomorrow would have to do.