ONCE AGAIN, THE CROSSWORD EDITOR WAS fucking with me. It was only Monday, theoretically the week’s easiest puzzle, but this one was driving me nuts. The crux of the problem was 17 Across, “Christ at Emmaus forger.” Eleven letters and the last one was an n. I could have Googled “Christ at Emmaus” and “forgery” on the iPhone, but that was a move I reserved for desperation. Meanwhile the bottom half of the puzzle was mostly filled in, the morning was pleasant, and the crowd on the sidewalk perfect: Passersby waved, smiled, jostled one another at the sight of me, and several of them took pictures, but they all respected the fact that I was sitting there, drinking my coffee and working the crossword puzzle.
I wasn’t quite finished when Fred joined me—17 Across was still unanswered, though I had a v at the beginning and a g in the middle. Fred ordered coffee and a pain au chocolat and inquired as to my well-being.
“Superb, my friend, just superb.” I took a sip of my coffee, noted that it was almost too cool to drink, and swigged it down. I felt so good I was compelled to share the secret. “I fucked our leading lady yesterday.”
“Is that wise?” he asked.
“No, probably not. But I’m not sorry. That woman is amazing, and it has nothing to do with her looks.”
He looked skeptical on that last point.
“All right, partially her looks, but damn, she’s got some skills that would put Venus herself to shame. To hew to our story’s theme, if you like.”
“What about her rich husband? He hasn’t even agreed to do this yet, and you’re doing things that are going to make him pull the plug.”
“If he finds out about it, it won’t be a question of pulling the plug, more like pulling the trigger. Both barrels aimed at me.”
“Great. No budget and a dead star.”
The waiter came and gloomy Fred ripped off an end of the bread. It looked so good, the chocolate so moist, that I asked the waiter to bring one for me along with another double espresso.
“Say, Fred, who forged Christ at Emmaus? Starts with a v, ends with an n. Eleven letters.”
“Van Meegeren.”
I counted out the letters and they fit. “Thank you, sir. You’re a gentleman and a scholar. What’s Christ at Emmaus, anyway?”
“It’s a biblical scene. He painted it as a Vermeer, and he had such a success with it he painted a bunch more. They all looked like shit, if you ask me.”
“Maybe we should put a forger into the script.”
I had annoyed him. He sighed and looked down the street, exasperated. “To what end?”
“I don’t know. Just throwing ideas out there.” He didn’t look placated, so I changed the subject. “Say, how’d you do with Marie-Laure’s assistant the other night?”
“Nothing happened. I’m ten years older than she is, anyway.”
“Who cares? Listen, you need to get laid soon. It’ll change your outlook on life.”
“Did you ever read Notes from Underground? Dostoyevsky?”
“A long time ago. That’s a book, it’s no way to live. Feeling sorry for yourself is bullshit.”
We didn’t get much more accomplished that morning, and I was afraid that unless Fred started getting some pussy in his diet he was going to sink further and further into moroseness and become useless to me. I didn’t want to break in another writer, and I was confident Fred and I could hash out something decent.
• • •
A day later I got an e-mail from a friend in L.A. letting me know that Ginny DeKalb was on her way to Paris. He meant it as a warning, but I didn’t take it as such. As soon as I heard I logged on to her website, looked at some of her most recent pornos, and found her looking good indeed. She’d let our mutual friend know that she intended to look me up, and I certainly intended to let her do that.
“She’s getting wackier and wackier,” the e-mail read, “and that fuckup husband is causing her trouble right and left. So beware.”
I wrote him back: “The day I need to beware of a lady like Ginny, my friend, is the day they plant me in the ground.”
In that same batch was an e-mail from my agent, prevailing upon me in the most urgent terms to get my ass back to L.A. and do the guest shot on Blindsided. They really wanted me for it, and did I have any idea how fucking hard he’d worked to get it for me?
“Dear Bunny,” I replied, “Thanks so much for your efforts but I’m really committed to this French project.” Why in God’s name would I want to give up fame, virtually unlimited pussy, and a shot at a starring role in a feature to return to the United States for a guest shot in a series I’d never heard of? In the vague hope of a blowjob from its star? Or in hopes of landing a recurring second-banana gig? No. Forget it.
Finally, there was a message from someone named Clive.
“Dear sir,” he began, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am the head of the Paris chapter of the British Ventura County Appreciation Society. We gather together Saturday evenings for a regular two-and-a-half-hour session of that week’s V.C. episodes in English. When I heard that you were here in Paris on an extended stay, I was needless to say thrilled. I wonder if you would consider attending one of our meetings as a surprise for our members?”
Dear God, it sounded ghastly. I was prepared to respond with a polite refusal, but his next lines caught me off guard and awakened my sympathies:
“It would mean so much to our members, most of whom are quite elderly and, frankly, in many cases daft. It would give my own wife Deirdre (who, though of reasonably sound mind, is wheelchair-bound) something to live for.”
I responded in a friendly but noncommittal way, suspecting that in the end I would make the visit, beaming a bit of sunshine into their dreary, elderly ex-pat lives.