AS A YOUNG MAN I CARRIED AROUND A GREAT deal of anger, and I used to be a brawler. Not the kind I am now, where somebody else starts the thing and I finish it, but the kind who looks for trouble and starts it when there’s none to be found. When I was seventeen years old I got into a fight over a girl and put the other guy into the hospital with a broken clavicle. When I came before the judge for sentencing he offered me a choice, much like the choice the army gave me later on: I could go to jail for a year and a half, or I could enlist. What the hell, I thought, the army sounded like a good way to bust some heads, and I joined up. I did so well in Basic Training they kicked me upstairs, and I kept on acing every test they gave me until I got into U.S. Army Special Forces. The Green Berets.
Once in, I continued to outperform all my peers intellectually and physically. I’d finally found something I was good at, better than anybody else around me. I was born to be a warrior.
The trouble was, I kept that anger coiled in me like a spring, and all the training was doing was wrapping that spring tighter and tighter. I hadn’t found a way to let it out, and then one day, having been taught a couple of dozen ways to kill a man with my bare hands, an opportunity for release presented itself while I was buying a six-pack of beer.
A young enlisted man was shopping with his doughy, sad-looking wife and two kids. Despite the wear and tear visible on her face, she was no more than twenty-five and retained sad vestiges of a genuine beauty lost to disappointment, early motherhood, and life on an army base. One of the few advantages for family men in the armed services is the base PX, where prices are a fraction of what they are in civilian grocery stores, but this guy wasn’t happy about the bargains to be had; he was bitching and moaning to his wife about the amount of food she was loading into their cart. One of the kids, a boy of about six with a blond crewcut bleached by the sun, grabbed a package of potato chips from the shelf and tore it open. The dad, a corporal, saw this and yanked his son by the arm and, while the kid was still in midair, smacked him across the face.
There’s a protocol to be followed in these cases. You alert the MPs, you get witnesses, you deal with it through the proper channels. What you don’t do is go all kung fu on the poor unsuspecting bastard, break both his arms and legs and put a crack in his skull so hard he’ll never quite think right again. All of which, without really considering the consequences or the logic of it, is what I did to that poor cracker son of a bitch, right there in front of his wife and kids, who looked upon me not as their rescuer but as an assailant, a turn of events which, though predictable and quite understandable, made me sad.
In the brig I had some time to think it over. I was more than a little bit frightened by what I’d done, particularly by the speed with which my rage had overtaken me, and after some words with my commanding officer and with an army shrink I came to the conclusion that maybe a little bit of psychiatric work might be in order. My CO was a standup guy, and though he couldn’t pull enough strings to keep me in the unit (this was during peacetime—there’s no way today’s U.S. military would have kicked me out), he did manage to get me the option of a discharge instead of prison time.
Once out, I thought about pursuing therapy, but instead I managed to lie my way through the application process well enough to find myself accepted into Southwest Minnesota State University, where I promptly signed up for a theater course on the assumption that this would be where the good-looking girls were.
And the assumption wasn’t wrong. The thing was, though, I discovered that there was something else I was really good at. Before long I was the star of the department, was stringing along a half-dozen nubile beauties, and had discovered that acting was for me a means of controlling my anger as well as a path to self-knowledge. Since that time, I have never instigated a fight (though I’ve never run from one, either).
• • •
I had an interview and photo shoot scheduled with Télérama at eleven o’clock at the Musée Rodin. I had a reputation in the press for being an intellectual, at least by the standards of television actors, and the editors thought it would be a good visual joke to get me posing beneath The Thinker. The joke was probably on me—God knows, a few years of covering television would have made me hate the medium and everyone involved in it—but press was press, and I had a good working relationship with the reporter. We spent half an hour on the photos and then hunkered down in the restaurant in the garden for the interview.
Here I was at a loss: to mention the movie or not? Bad luck to talk about a project too early, certainly, but Télérama has a lot of readers, including no small number in the industry, and a casual allusion to the thing might cause some ears to prick up. And of course the film was about a piece of sculpture, and here we were amidst one of the great sculpture collections of the world.
“So what brings you back to Paris? Just a vacation, promoting the show?” my interlocutor asked.
“A little of both,” I said, cagey. Then I thought, what the hell. Let’s make this thing happen. “Truth to tell, I’m in the early stages of a film project, a Franco-American coproduction.”
“You don’t say. Who’s attached?”
“There’s a brilliant script by a young French novelist named Frédéric LaForge, he wrote a terrific book called Squirm, Baby, Squirm, and we’ve been working on getting the deals finalized.”
“What’s it about?”
“All I can say is that it’s about an archaeologist who makes an incredible discovery.” It sounded lame and incomplete as I said it, but Henri seemed very interested.
“That’s great. Is the network involved?”
“It’s not official yet, so don’t quote me, but it’s looking good.”
• • •
If I’m going to be talking up Fred’s book, I thought, I’d better read the damned thing, so I spent a good chunk of the afternoon absorbing it in the day room of the suite. It was well written—the kid could sling a phrase with the best of them, no question—but it was beyond the pale in terms of content. The main character, Jim, is so promiscuous and amoral that it was hard for me to picture my soft-spoken, mild-mannered new friend and collaborator as his creator. In the book’s Thai section, for example, Jim fucks eighteen prostitutes, nine of them underage and four of them boys. Each of the prostitutes is described in detail, along with those of Jim’s couplings with him or her, and by the end of that part of the book he’s actively seeking those who show the most advanced signs of disease:
The pathetic wraith struggling beneath me, her breath stinking of her own impending demise, wheezed and rattled as though the withered flesh on her meager frame were insufficient to keep her dried bones from cracking together with each thrust; by the time old Thanatos finally arrived to claim his due from her I would be back in France, an enthusiastic vessel of her contagion.
When he leaves Thailand and returns to France he lives a life of outward bourgeois respectability, faithfully attending mass as an almost daily communicant and reveling in the blasphemy of receiving the host under false pretenses, his confessions consisting of trivial lies. He tends to his family’s business and maintains an air of conservative respectability, all the while diligently attempting to infect his sister with a lethal venereal disease (the novel is set in the 1990s, before the medicinal cocktails that have prolonged so many lives in the West). The high point of his depravity comes when he blackmails a pharmacist friend into confecting a placebo pill in the shape and color of his sister’s birth control pills, which he then substitutes for the real thing.
The replacement of the changeling pills into their circular dispenser was a more complicated and time-consuming affair than I’d imagined, but the task was completed before Valerie returned from her ballet lesson. My extensive readings on the subject notwithstanding, and despite my intimate familiarity with the timing of her menses, I couldn’t determine her precise date of ovulation without arousing suspicion, and so I determined to make love to her every day until such time as I could be certain I’d infected her with an additional unwelcome passenger to accompany the first.
My God. I’d assumed I was working with an eccentric, because let’s face it, the guy was a writer and they’re all a little goofy, but this one was out of his fucking mind. Shaking hands with him the next time we met would be fraught with bacteriological worries.
Still, I couldn’t deny that the book had a certain narrative pull to it, and not simply because of the ghastliness of its subject matter and the appalling depravity of its central character. Marie-Laure was right, Fred really did have the knack for structure and character and all the other things that make a screenplay filmable. And of course I’d be there to make sure the archaeologist didn’t end up fucking his sister or some mummy he dug up in the desert, so where was the harm?
There was a knock at the door and I put the book down, unsure of whether I’d have the stomach to pick it up later. Outside stood a bellman with a large gift basket from Fouquet’s wrapped in cellophane. After he put it on the coffee table I signed for it, tipped him ten euros, and closed the door. In the basket was an assortment of fine cheeses and two bottles of champagne, themselves wrapped in orange cellophane: Louis Roederer Cristal Brut, ’99. I didn’t recognize the label, but I had a strong sensation that it wasn’t cheap.
The card attached read simply
FROM ESMÉE
LOOK FORWARD TO WORKING WITH YOU
Mixed feelings abounded. Spectacular creature that Esmée was, I had high hopes for her husband’s money, and any entanglements would have to proceed with the greatest of delicacy and tact. Not that the gift of a couple of bottles of expensive booze necessarily indicated any inclinations toward adultery, but I couldn’t help noticing that the basket also contained two champagne flutes, not one.