SHE DID COME BACK WITH ME AROUND 3:00 AM, and she confirmed my hunch that the bottles of champagne that Esmée had sent were expensive, even more so than I’d guessed. We drank half of one bottle along with some of the cheese from the basket, then got up to some of that grudgefucking I’d been looking forward to. Afterward, lying on the floor naked, we polished off the rest of the bottle
“Doesn’t your husband object to these nights when you don’t come home?” I asked her.
“It’s not that kind of marriage.” She stretched out a long leg and stared down it as if down the barrel of a sniper’s rifle. “You be careful with that Esmée. I did a little checking up, and her marriage isn’t that kind.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning her husband is the kind who’d object strenuously if she strayed.”
“I don’t picture her as the type that strays.”
Marie-Laure snorted at me. “Don’t be a shit-for-brains. I saw the look she was giving you all night. So did Mathieu, who, I would remind you, works for her husband.”
“Mathieu’s his partner, strictly speaking.”
“Don’t be a dumbass. He’s pure front, a manager posing as an owner. All I’m saying is if you fuck her, you’d better be damned careful.”
“You hadn’t struck me as the jealous type before,” I said with my famous, teasing TV smirk.
“Don’t be fucking stupid, I don’t care who you fuck when I’m not around. I’m concerned as a friend and more importantly as a business associate with a professional stake in your remaining aboveground.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t be a moron. You know what I mean. I think moving into that apartment of hers is asking for trouble.”
“I’ll take it into consideration.”
• • •
Next morning over breakfast I decided it would be a good idea to break it off with Annick. Bruno had already given a violent demonstration of his jealousy, and since I was entering into a business arrangement with his stepmother I thought it best to simplify the relationship. Especially given the fact that said stepmother seemed to have some sort of hold over him that went beyond the usual stepmother/stepson oedipal crisis. Marie-Laure’s warning about Esmée seemed somehow more plausible in the light of the morning, and the memory of the previous night’s frolics made me wonder why I needed any woman besides Marie-Laure. Besides, it wasn’t as though there weren’t a thousand—ten thousand—other, equally attractive women in Paris who’d be delighted to sleep with a TV star.
In the early afternoon I packed my bags and checked out of the suite. Esmée was waiting for me with a car and driver, and in the backseat as we headed toward the Left Bank we talked about the movie.
“What’s my character like?”
“That’s an interesting question,” I said, and it was, since I hadn’t given it much thought other than that she should be pretty and have large breasts, neither of which would be much of a stretch for Esmée. “Fred and I are still hashing it out, really, so of course your input would be very helpful.”
“Really?” she said, pressing her palm to her sternum again in that familiar gesture of hers. “I’m so flattered.”
“Fred and I both find that it’s easier to write a character when you’ve already got an actor in mind.”
She seemed genuinely excited by the prospect of getting to design her own character. She touched the tips of her fingers to the bridge of her nose and squinted. “I’m wondering if maybe she starts out not as the love interest but as a villain. Then later on they fall in love.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” I said. It was better than nothing, anyway, and I pulled out my iPhone and started writing it down.
“What if she’s there to steal the arms for some megalomaniac art collector?”
“Huh,” I said, pretending to consider it, even though it made no sense. “What would an art collector want with just the arms?”
She shrugged. “He’s a megalomaniac billionaire. Who knows? I’m just saying, think about these big art heists. Somebody steals a Monet, he can’t exactly walk into the Maison Drouot and sell it, can he? So someone’s hired him to steal it.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t compute. Why hire someone to steal something you can’t turn around and sell? What’s the point?”
“The point is, you get to own something valuable and rare, and nobody else gets to have it.”
“I can’t believe there’s anybody like that, willing to spend that kind of dough just to be an asshole.”
She smiled a little bit, an enigmatic expression worthy of the Mona Lisa. “Believe it. When I know you better I’ll tell you some stories about the very rich.”
When we pulled up in front of the building, Esmée and I got out, and when I started for the trunk to get my bags she waved me off. “Denis will get the bags. Come on up, I’ll let you in and give you the tour.”
• • •
The place was huge and furnished with expensive new furniture, and for contrast on the walls were paintings ranging from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. At first glance I thought I identified a small Watteau and one of Degas’s last, small flower paintings, and though the collection had a sort of weird eclecticism to it, somehow the pieces all worked together to suggest a singular sensibility. I thought back to what she’d said about megalomaniac art collectors and got a little nervous about la Sûreté bursting in with guns drawn to retrieve them for their rightful owners while I slept.
Denis brought my bags inside, and Esmée, having forbidden me to hand him a gratuity on the grounds that I was her guest, told him to wait in the car. I’d slip him twenty at some later date, I told myself, when she wasn’t around.
“Now, my darling, would you like me to send him on his way?”
I raised an eyebrow. “I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Cut the shit. Do you want me to stay?”
“I’d love for you to. But I think with your husband as a potential backer for the movie we should be careful . . .”
“The hell with my husband. He’s in New York for five days.”
“Aren’t you afraid Denis will turn you in?”
“Denis works for me.”
It was all sounding really good. But I didn’t know enough about her husband, or about Denis, to blithely assume that they weren’t in league behind Esmée’s back.
And yet there she was before me, pouting slightly, moist red lips separating to reveal her tongue gliding between her barely separated upper and lower teeth, chest thrust forward to accentuate that lovely rack, eyes half shut in lustful anticipation. . . .
What the fuck. You only die once. “Yeah, send him on his way.”
• • •
Having slept with a lot of actresses—probably more of them, in fact, than women who weren’t—I can state unequivocally that there is no correlation between beauty and skill in the sack. Some of the homeliest women are mind-bendingly great in bed, and some of the most stunning beauties just lie there and act like they’re thinking about what’s on TV later that night. In fact I’d got to the point where I half-expected a bad lay from the real knockouts.
The joke was on me. Esmée knew tricks I’d never heard of, let alone tried. She explained to me exercises she did daily, similar to the ones pregnant women use to prepare for childbirth, tricks she’d learned from her yoga instructors, tips she’d paid to learn from thousand-euro-a-night call girls. Her cunt, her mouth, her asshole—the first entry into each was like the first time Adam fucked Eve (or, if you’re of a more secular bent, the first time some amphibian said, hey, instead of me ejaculating into the water after you lay the eggs, how about if I stick this thing into that pretty little cloaca of yours?).
Jesus H. Christ. Now that I knew what I knew, I wouldn’t blame her husband for killing me. Shit, if I were him, I’d kill me.