GINNY AND I BOTH GOT A LAUGH OUT OF THE article that accompanied the photo from the Pont de l’Alma the next day, which I translated aloud for her:
DR. CRANDALL TAYLOR AMOUREUX D’UNE STAR DE PORNO.
You can’t buy that kind of publicity. In fact, sometimes you have to pay people to avoid it. Love, hell; we liked each other well enough, certainly found one another more than reasonably attractive, but there was no more love in it than there was between a couple of ex–race horses being mated in honor of their respective track times. I was temporarily enthralled because she was a porn star, and she was happy to be fucking a television star. She made kind of a game of it, in fact; among my predecessors in her bed had been the bassist for a hair metal band, at least one billionaire CEO, any number of politicians, even a former president of the United States (and don’t be too quick to think you can guess which one; the answer would surprise you).
• • •
I got a call from Annick in the afternoon. I hadn’t heard from her in days, hadn’t, in fact, gotten around to breaking up with her, and she was a little petulant.
“Been keeping yourself busy?” she said.
“Reasonably.”
“I hear you and Bruno’s dad are fast friends.”
Really? “Sure we are.”
“How do you like Esmée? I hear she wants to be a star.”
“I think she’s got it in her.”
“So when I ask if I’ve got it in me to be a star you say, ‘Go to acting school,’ and when she says it you cast her in your movie.”
“You’re not married to someone who can finance the picture.”
“I want a part in it.”
Jesus. This was getting a little complicated. “Sure.”
“You’re patronizing me,” she said. “I don’t like that.”
She was making me nervous again. I pictured her slitting my throat in my sleep. “No, I’m serious. I’ll have Fred come up with a part. A small one, this time. A stepping stone.”
“All right,” she said, not entirely satisfied.
“Listen, Annick, I’ve been meaning to give you a shout. You know, with me being in business with Bruno’s dad and stepmother, I’m thinking maybe you and I ought to give it a rest for a while.”
A long silence on the other end of the line, followed by a deep sigh. “I knew it. You’re fucking Esmée, aren’t you?”
“Are you crazy?”
“You are. And don’t think I don’t know about your porn star, either. My mom saw it in the paper.”
“That’s a fabrication. She’s a cast mate, she used to be on the show before she did porn.”
“You know what? I don’t care. I just want to keep seeing you. Bruno doesn’t have to know about it.”
Jesus. Unsound as the whole idea was, I wanted to keep fucking her. There was something about her youth and enthusiasm that made me feel young, or at any rate reminded me of what being young had been like.
“All right,” I said. “But you can’t come to the apartment, there’s too much chance Esmée or Bruno will spot you.”
“Want to come to my dorm?”
• • •
Annick’s dormitory was a late-nineteenth-century building on the Boulevard St. Michel. I checked in at the desk in the cavernous lobby and asked for her. If the lady behind the desk recognized me she gave no sign of it, and while she buzzed for Annick I looked around the lobby. On one wall was an immense oil painting of a portly Edwardian lady in pearls and a diamond tiara, identified on the plaque below as the founder of the institution. A touch on my shoulder made me spin, and I found myself facing Annick.
“You like her?”
“She looks formidable, in the English sense of the word.”
“She haunts the place. Come on, you want the grand tour?”
• • •
She took me through a darkened cafeteria on the ground floor. “It’s not in use anymore, but the place used to furnish three meals a day for several hundred girls.”
“How come you have the keys to the place?” I asked. So far she’d unlocked three massive oaken doors in our progression through the largely disused ground floor.
“I’m an employee as well as a resident. Come on, there’s something I want to show you.”
She beckoned me, and I followed her down a rickety spiral staircase in the far corner of the cafeteria, behind the service bar. It was pitch black down there, and I had a distinct feeling of dread as we descended.
At the bottom we stood in darkness, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the light I saw that we were in a corner of what was once a large institutional kitchen. We pushed through into the next room, which was dimly illuminated at ceiling level by basement windows. Row after row of ancient cabinets receded into the distance, and I followed her through another door into a long, narrow room.
She flicked a light switch and a fluorescent tube overhead crackled slowly to life. Along the wall were cabinets containing old, unused flatware, and running along the floor on one side were bins; on the other, drawers. One of the bins had broken open to reveal its contents: sawdust.
“What’s the sawdust for?” I asked.
“Who knows? It’s before my time. Cleaning up vomit, maybe. Look at this, though.”
She opened one of the drawers, pulled out a butter knife, and handed it to me. “Check it out.”
It was heavy. “Real silver?”
“Tons of it, completely unused. It’s a miracle nobody’s ever bagged it all up and taken it to the flea market.”
There was definitely something not right in the air down there. “I don’t suppose this is where the old lady in the painting manifests herself?”
“No, she appears in the music room upstairs, and once in a while when there’s music in the cafeteria. Old-fashioned music, I mean; I don’t think she’s a big hip-hop fan. But I’ve worked with people who wouldn’t come down here by themselves. Supposedly there’s an old lady cook who won’t leave and doesn’t like having people down here.”
On the floor was linoleum of a type I’d never seen before, intricately patterned and, near the walls where the wear on it was less severe, still brightly colored.
“What’s in there?” I asked her, indicating a large door at the end of the hall with a steel locking mechanism.
“Just what it looks like,” she said. “A walk-in meat locker.”
I tried the handle, and with a loud, rusty squeal the door came unsealed. From inside came a musty smell of dust, grime, and stale air. Hanging from the ceiling was a single, ancient light bulb with a chain dangling from its socket. I pulled it and heard a click, but it failed to illuminate.
“Seems a shame no one’s doing anything with the space,” I said.
“Who said no one’s doing anything with it?” she said, and went down on one knee, unzipping my fly with a neat stroke as I leaned back against one of the counters in expectation of ecstasy.
Just as she hit her rhythm, though, there was a metallic crash outside the closed door, and her reaction was so startled I counted myself lucky she hadn’t bitten my dick off.
She stood and zipped me up, and we slowly opened the door and found that an old brass service tray had fallen from its spot on the wall.
“There’s your old lady cook,” I said.
“What do you say I sneak you into my room instead?” she said.
• • •
I don’t think I’d awakened in a dorm room since I was about twenty. The one into whose windows the setting sun’s rays shone was small but comfortable, with a ledge beneath said windows from which Annick sat watching me sleep.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It’s late. You fell asleep right after and I didn’t have the heart to wake you.”
“I did? That’s a new one.” And it was; usually I jump out of bed and into the shower and get out of there as quick as I can.
“Guess I sapped your precious bodily fluids.”
“There may be something to that.” I got up and headed for the sink and, as I didn’t care to brave the communal shower Annick had shown me on the way up, washed my dick in it.
Actually, she may have been right about those bodily fluids. To say I’ve never been the monogamous type would be to understate the matter. In fact, someone once told me I was a textbook case of satyriasis. But even for me it was unusual to be carrying on intensive affairs with four different, sexually demanding women. Maybe, to paraphrase Mick Jagger, I just didn’t have that much jam. Tonight, I vowed, oysters.
I decided to take Annick with me, as it seemed ungentlemanly to fuck and run in her case. Marie-Laure or Esmée would have understood, and Ginny would have expected it, but young as she was there were many experiences Annick still lacked, and it would be fun to take her out to the sort of restaurant I had in mind.
We went to a restaurant I used to love when I was a student, over by Les Halles. In those days it was a special treat to eat a half dozen oysters there, washed down with a glass of Alsatian wine, and so now I ordered a mixed dozen oysters apiece along with a bottle of Riesling, and Annick explained to me how she’d ended up with Bruno in the first place.
“We were both writing about John O’Hara. You know him?”
“I know he once beat up a midget in a bar fight.”
“That’s right. He also once said, ‘I have never in my life hit a woman, except in anger.’ Anyway, he couldn’t get through the reading.”
“He has a lot of trouble reading, particularly in English.”
“That would seem to be a handicap in a student of American literature.”
“I suppose so. Anyway, I ended up reading about half of his course load and describing the plots to him, and then I helped him write the paper.”
“That’s touching. He needed you.”
“It sounds sort of pathetic now, but there was something sweet about him. He did need me, it’s true, and I didn’t mind.”
“Something I don’t understand. I thought you told me you lived with Bruno?”
“He has an apartment; I live there about half the time. When I’m working at the foyer, though, I have to sleep there. It’s also nice to have a place to retreat to when he’s being an asshole. Which is a lot.”
We were seated in a banquette by the window, and it was difficult for the other diners to get a glimpse of us. I kind of missed the attention, but at the same time it allowed me to massage her thigh unmolested.
“So what do you know about Claude?” I asked.
“Bruno’s dad? He’s not around much, for one thing.”
“What exactly is his line of work? I don’t imagine investing in oddball nightclubs is what made his fortune.”
She looked a little uncomfortable. I always forget about that French reluctance to speak about money, even to discuss what one does for a living. In America it’s sex we don’t discuss. (Most of us don’t, anyway; I’d be short of things to say if I followed that particular cultural taboo.) But I pressed her; it was important, since he was theoretically going to be in business with me, and since I was banging his lovely wife.
“I was wondering if it was some sort of import-export business, since he travels so much.”
She looked down at the three oysters that remained. One of them was so big it looked like the giant gray tongue of a calf.
“Come on,” I said. “I thought you were planning to go to the States someday. You’ll have to get used to this kind of vulgar talk.”
“It’s not that,” she said, looking very uncomfortable. I realized for the first time that her eyes were not quite identical. One of them was blue, the other a sort of bluish green. “It’s just that it’s something Bruno told me in secret.”
“You can tell me,” I said, massaging that thigh, moving up the leg a bit toward her midsection.
She leaned forward and said in a loud stage whisper, “He sells weapons.”
That put a new spin on things. I tried to sound unimpressed. “Is that so? Guns and such?”
“Guns, missiles, artillery. Bruno thinks he might be dealing nukes with North Korea.”
No shit. I was fucking the wife of an arms dealer, the kind of guy for whom killing really meant nothing at all. Cool.
• • •
I dropped her off in a taxi on the Boulevard de Sébastopol and started walking toward the Left Bank. The occasional passerby stopped and called out to me, to which I returned a snappy salute, and at Châtelet one old lady stopped me to lecture me about my character’s love life.
“That pretty nurse, why do you treat her that way? She should be making you babies! There’s more to life than making love to strange women, doctor.”
I thanked her, promised to consider it, and was on my way.
• • •
I decided to walk along the river and descended to the Quai du Louvre. As I crossed beneath the Pont du Carousel I heard someone snicker from the shadows, followed by more snickering from several individuals, followed by a suggestion that some cocksucker be killed for his shit. Sensing that I was the cocksucker in question, I reached into my vest pocket and removed the tactical baton.
“Uh, ’scuse me, sir, you dropped something,” came a voice from behind me.
I spun and faced a guy in his twenties carrying a blade with no idea how to use it offensively. From beneath the bridge came four of his comrades, at least one of them a girl, judging from the giggling.
“All right, faggot, let’s see the wallet. And the watch, and that way you don’t get fucked up.”
“Goodness gracious me,” I said, the joyful adrenaline flowing through my veins and counteracting the pacifying effect of the oysters and wine in my belly. “Want my phone, too?”
“Fuck yeah, I want your fucking phone, bitch, hand it the fuck over.”
I flicked the baton under and over and hit his hand, and the knife went flying into the river with a satisfying, plosive splash. Before he’d fully processed its loss I cracked him across his teeth and kicked him hard in the balls, and he went down to the paving stones howling.
His friends hesitated, and then the girl said, “Are you gonna let that faggot kick René’s ass like that, bitch?”
At that one of them charged me, a large fellow with a stupid look on his face, at least as far as I could tell in the dim light of the quai. He was open for one of the real textbook moves in judo, so I de-telescoped the baton and, just before impact, replaced it in my jacket pocket. I bent down, stepped slightly aside and altered his trajectory over my shoulder and down the stones of the embankment and then down into the Seine to join his friend’s blade.
(I used to hear that if you fell into the Seine they automatically hospitalized you and gave you a serious, heavy-duty course of antibiotics. Is that still true, or was it ever? Or is it just one of those things they tell young American exchange students to discourage them from diving into the river?)
“Au suivant,” I yelled, and two of them turned and ran. The girl stumbled forward.
“Fucking faggots, afraid of some stupid fucking bitch. Come on, cunt, let’s get it on.”
She, too, had a knife, and like her friend she was holding it all wrong. The baton didn’t seem sporting fighting a girl, so I waited until she was close and starting to lunge, and then I planted my right fist in her belly as hard as I’d ever hit anyone, male or female.
Something about it felt wrong, though, and when she hit the ground I saw that she was pregnant. I took the knife, which had fallen from her hand, and threw it into the river, and then I climbed the steps to the bridge and crossed it. I walked some distance trying to find a pay phone (there’s the curse of the cell phone; never a pay phone around when you want to make a call that can’t be traced to you later) and finally found one by going the wrong direction, just off the Place St. Michel.
I called the SAMU and informed them that a young woman was lying unconscious beneath the Pont du Carousel and that she seemed to be pregnant, and then I hung up.
On the way home I heard the ambulance’s Klaxon honking and wished the girl well despite it all. Mostly I hoped I’d terminated that pregnancy, though inadvertently, if only for the sake of the kid himself. I grew up with a mother like that and buddy, that’s not any way you want to grow up.