Chapter 9
Billy, Will, Guillaume
Within a week after his arrival from Los Angeles, he had established his morning routine. He liked to walk from the fourth-floor apartment on the tiny rue Tiquetonne that he had found through his friend Luca’s father, into the high-spirited commercial bustle of the rue Montorgueil, where he bought fresh fruit and yogurt, sometimes a croissant too, the best of his life, though he was trying to stick to a low-gluten diet, which was difficult because the bread was so good everywhere he went in Paris. After he did his shopping, he walked the few blocks from this cobblestone street of grocers and butchers and pastry makers to Les Halles and sat on a low wall near the big Brancusi sculpture of a man’s head. There by the enormous sideways head, across from one of the entrances to the church of Saint-Eustache, he would eat his breakfast, even when it was very cold outside. Most mornings he got out of bed a little before eight and brewed a small pot of coffee that he drank as he dressed himself, and then he stepped out into the Parisian morning, where a few million people he would never know were disappearing into the Metro or briskly walking toward the shops and schools and offices where they would spend their day. Will couldn’t have legally worked in France even if he had wanted to, at least not without the proper visa and a sponsoring employer or, perhaps, a French wife.
He had come to Paris to try on a new identity, to live a different life from the one he had in California. He thought that it might become permanent, but he did not have to decide anything now. The language, at least, was not a daunting mystery because he remembered some of his high school French, and he had started watching three or four French films a week when he decided after spending a day and a half in the hospital, recovering from a case of dehydration and heat exhaustion, that he needed to move away from Los Angeles and his parents, though he had never before wanted to do such a risky thing.
Seeing the worried faces of his mother and sister and the guilty face of his father while he was held captive in the small, sterile hospital bed at Huntington Memorial, he knew that his life would not change and he would never be happy if he stayed where he was. His father’s strange, remorseful behavior, the multiple apologies for nothing specific, had unnerved him, and when his father embraced him before leaving and accidentally dislodged the IV in his hand, Will thought that he had seen tears in his eyes, something he didn’t remember ever happening before. The tears had upset him more than the vague apologies, and when he talked them over later with his sister, she had said that their father was getting older and maybe was realizing how important his family was to him. Or maybe he felt sentimental because everything was going so well for him, even more so than usual—Bourbon at Dusk’s reviews and receipts had exceeded his expectations, and he was probably exhausted from interviewing people to staff the Hurricane Katrina foundation he was about to get off the ground. “And of course there’s Elise,” said Anna.
“What do you mean?” asked Will, wary. He hadn’t seen his father’s girlfriend in five long months, and hearing her name, he felt a stab of anxiety and longing. Jealousy too.
“I’m sure keeping up with her wears him out.” She paused. “She and Dad came over for dinner a couple of weeks ago. I invited a friend and grilled some salmon for the four of us. It was nice but a little awkward. Elise insisted on helping me with the dishes afterward because she said she couldn’t let me do everything. She kept complimenting me too—on my earrings, my furniture, the drawing of the two cats I did that’s hanging above the stereo. I think she feels a little weird that she’s younger than me.”
“Why didn’t you invite me?”
“Because it was just supposed to be Dad, my friend and me, but at the last minute he asked if he could bring Elise.”
“You still could have invited me.”
“Billy,” she said gently. “I know that you still have a crush on her. I didn’t think it’d be a good idea.”
He was silent. It would be useless to lie to her. Elise was still on his mind so often, and he did little to try to forget her. She had acted in six movies, and another that hadn’t yet been released, and he had watched all of the six at least as many times, including Bourbon at Dusk, which he didn’t regret working on, despite the rift it had caused between his father and himself. If it hadn’t been for Bourbon, he wouldn’t have met Elise, who had been attracted to him too; he knew that for sure, especially after the last time he had seen her, which had been the previous May, just before she left for the Cannes festival with his father. Now she would not return his e-mails and had changed her cell phone number. Because of his feelings for her, he had ruined a relationship with a different woman he knew that he should have been happy with. She was smart and patient with him and had her own small but successful business. She was also very pretty and shared his taste in movies and music. He had botched it badly with Danielle, but there seemed no remedy for this because he had fallen in love with someone else. The most unfortunate thing about all of it was that the woman he’d fallen for was his father’s girlfriend, an enormous taboo if ever there was one.
“Which friend did you have over?” he finally said. “Jill? Celestine?”
“No, a friend from the hospital.”
“A boyfriend?”
She shook her head, but she was smiling. “No.”
“Who?”
“One of the attending physicians I work with.”
“What? Are you guys allowed to socialize outside of the hospital? I thought you told me that the attendings are like your bosses.”
“I can’t socialize with my boss?”
“Is he married?”
She laughed in a harsh burst. “Billy, stop it. You sound like Mom.”
“Sorry. You can tell me. Are you seeing this guy? I won’t judge you.”
Anna looked at him for a moment before looking away, her face coloring. “I think I’m in love with him, and I think he feels the same way about me. And yes, he’s married.”
So both he and his sister were romantic fools. He would never have imagined that she would allow herself to get involved with a married man. “Does he have any kids?”
She nodded. “Two. One’s a senior in high school, the other’s a sophomore.”
“Almost the same age difference as you and me.”
“Yes, I guess that’s true.”
“Where do you think this is going?”
“I don’t know. Neither does he. We’re just taking it one day at a time.”
“Everyone says they’ll do that, but I don’t know anyone who actually does. Except maybe for Luca.” His friend, like himself, did not need to work at any kind of steady job because he lived on inherited money, and since graduating from college five years earlier, he had spent time in France with his father and then in Australia with his mother, with intermittent returns to L.A. His profession was girls and leisure, he had said to Will, only half joking, his blithe attitude about their privileged status very different from Will’s, who felt a mixture of guilt and relief that he didn’t need to work at some dull job with people he wouldn’t have chosen to be with otherwise, but he also felt shame that he had no real profession, no “calling,” a word that had once struck him as almost religious in its gravity, as if some supreme being were summoning people and telling them, Moses-on-Mount-Sinai style, what they must absolutely do with their lives.
“I am taking it one day at a time,” Anna insisted. “I couldn’t do anything else even if I wanted to.”
Now, in Paris, he was sending e-mails to Elise again, telling her where he was, asking her to join him if she was in Europe or had a reason to come to Europe. He was acting without scruples, he realized, with these ongoing attempts to woo away the girl his father seemed to love, though he doubted that Renn was being faithful to her. As far as Will could tell, his father hadn’t been faithful to any of the women he had made a public commitment to, and it seemed unlikely that he would ever change this behavior for good, despite how beautiful Elise was, or how remarkable her talents.
From what Will could tell, truly talented actors had the ability to forget their insecurities, to be shameless and joyful in front of a camera and crew, to risk with a stony will other people’s laughter or derision. They also had to have the feeling, whether they acknowledged it or not, that people wanted to look at them, and that these people wouldn’t be able to stop looking. Elise might have been a little shy in her personal interactions with friends and acquaintances, but Will knew that she had a streak of exhibitionism in her too, as did his father. If the age difference between them hadn’t been so egregious, Will might even have thought that they were a good match. And, as much as he disliked doing so, he had to admit that his father could offer her things that he could not, especially when it came to her career.
What he himself could offer her might not be as extraordinary as what his father could give her, but Will knew that without question, he would be committed to her. He could offer her sexual fidelity, which, based on all precedent, his father could not. Will also believed that he could offer her sanctuary from the world his father and she publicly inhabited, one that often had its tentacles in almost all aspects of their private lives too. Not being famous the way his father was, Will did not have paparazzi following him into restaurants and stores or waiting on the street outside his house. He did not have a cell phone that rang twenty-five times an hour. He was his own person in a way that his father was not.
And so he persisted. He had never done such a thing before, never tried to poach some other man’s girlfriend. Despite his adherence to talk therapy’s dictum that doctors not tell their patients what to do, the previous summer Will’s therapist, Dr. Shepherd, had bluntly said: “You need to direct your energies elsewhere. You’ll only make yourself unhappy if you keep pursuing her. If she wants you, she’ll come to you. But even if she does, you must still consider your father’s feelings.”
Paris, two-thousand-year-old glittering city of lights, the Louvre, and the lovelorn, was the trapdoor through which he had plunged, hoping to escape from his disapproving therapist, his parents, his disappointments and jealousies. That he had escaped from some but not all of these things was a relief, but the heaviest burdens had remained with him. Before he left, he had told no one that he was going to France—not his sister or parents or the few friends he saw regularly—because he would not have been able to say how long he planned to stay or why exactly he was going, and he imagined them asking, Won’t you be lonely, not knowing anyone there (except for Luca’s father, who was busy with his own life)? His father had friends in Paris, and Will knew a couple of people from college who lived there too, but no one well enough to call a friend. It seemed best not to think too long about his motives because this was the first time in years, aside from his pursuit of Elise, that he had done something with spontaneity and an almost giddy sense of adventure. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and Toklas, Josephine Baker, Alexander Calder—other adventurous souls had also escaped the sock garters and girdles and prudishness and fearful, unquestioning mediocrity of their hometowns for Paris’s salons and august boulevards, its verdant parks where art seemed to be created as effortlessly as California smog. He was not an artist, but it was possible that he would become one, or at least become something other than the floundering, directionless son of a famous man.
It startled him how easy it was too, once he set his plans in motion: he packed two suitcases, transferred money to an account he opened with the BNP, and gave away his houseplants to a neighbor. He had no pets and paid his monthly building assessments and utilities electronically. Luca was in L.A. when he left, but had put him in contact with his father, who had a friend willing to lease her apartment to him while she was away in Buenos Aires on diplomatic assignment. Will planned to return to L.A. in March for the marathon, but he would likely go right back to Paris afterward and run in the marathon there in April, running being the one activity that consistently filled him with a sense of elated contentment. During his runs, the near hopelessness of his feelings for Elise did not plague him. He didn’t know why he couldn’t simply force himself to stop wanting her, but his appointments with Dr. Shepherd had led him to the conclusion that he was a self-indulgent child. Also, that he was probably afraid of mature commitment, with the occasional sacrifices it required—it was safer to want someone you couldn’t have because you might fail to keep someone you could. Hence Danielle. Hence Sherrie and Luz and Melissa and Rian.
It was during his third week in Paris, at the end of January, that Elise acknowledged the two e-mails he had sent since arriving in France.
Dear Will,
I am happy for you. Paris is a beautiful city and I hope you’re doing well there. I’m sure you’ll be great in any of the marathons you run. I’m sorry you haven’t heard from me since we saw each other last May. I think you understand why it’s hard for me to be in touch with you. It would crush your father. Be well, Elise
P.S. If things were different, I would come to Paris and have dinner with you. I think I should tell you that your father proposed to me a couple of days ago. I haven’t said yes yet but I’m thinking about it.
P.P.S. Btw, thanks for your nice words about my Oscar nomination. I still can’t quite believe it. I know I’m not going to win, but I’m so excited to be nominated. One of us will win something though, I’m sure, with Bourbon getting eight (!) nominations. It feels like a dream sometimes. I wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night all the time now.
After reading her e-mail, which arrived just before midnight when he was about to go to bed, he put on his coat and went out into the quiet streets, where snow had started to fall, and walked across the city for three hours. It was a Tuesday night, and there were few people on the sidewalks and not many cars moving either. In his grief-stricken state, he still recognized that it might be dangerous to be out so late by himself in a city he didn’t know well, but he kept going and it made him feel better to be risking something, to be aware that his life might be taken from him if he didn’t care about it enough. He crossed the Seine and went southwest toward the locked gates of the Musée Rodin, then southeast to the tower in Montparnasse, before he turned north again and walked up through the crooked streets of the Latin Quarter, where more people were out than in the other neighborhoods he had passed through. He recrossed the Seine and walked to the Louvre, which at night looked especially like the impenetrable fortress-palace that it used to be, and then home again to rue Tiquetonne. He spoke to no one and felt his body’s strength and youthfulness and wondered why he could not stop wasting his life. He did not know why he couldn’t find anything that he wanted to do for a career, why his sister and mother both knew that they wanted to practice medicine or why his father had thought that he would be good and lucky enough to make a living as an actor. (And now he had those eight Oscar nominations. They weren’t a surprise, but Will had not felt very happy for his father when he found out about them, and his bitterness had bothered him more than the nominations themselves. How long would he and Renn be mired in this competitive struggle? It was horrible and pointless too—this was his father, not some grade-school classmate—but he did not know how or when it would end.)
Aside from a few months of thinking seriously about becoming a lawyer, and a number of business ventures since college that he had invested money and only a little time in, Will had never felt that he had been called to do anything in particular. If he were meant to be a playboy or a jet-setting dilettante, he thought that even these dubious callings would have made their appeals to him by now.
What he was most interested in doing, more than anything before, was running. Aside from the one bad day when he had ended up in the hospital, he had a knack for it. His body burned oxygen efficiently and surprised him with its endurance, and this corporeal fitness filled him with optimism and strength. He was using minimalist running shoes now too, ones that he had gradually introduced into his workouts; he had reconfigured his stride to put less stress on his joints and had read and studied books by expert runners. There were people, ordinary in most other ways, who ran hundred-mile races, people who routinely ran fifty miles in a day. Some of them looked like greyhounds, their faces lean and intense and inquiring. When he ran through the streets of Paris toward the Bois de Boulogne or in the opposite direction toward Pére Lachaise and the eastern reaches of the city, he felt that he was running toward some great happiness. This sense of well-being lasted for an hour or two after his runs, sometimes longer. While he was walking off Elise’s troubling e-mail he wished that he could run instead, but at night, it wasn’t a good idea. Many of the ancient streets were poorly lit, and if he tripped and fell, he might have injured himself badly enough that running wouldn’t be possible for weeks.
He slept until ten the morning after his snowy, lovesick wanderings. When he woke up, it felt like he was on the verge of catching a cold, but after he drank two cups of coffee and ate a croissant, he felt better. Sitting by the Brancusi head, a sculpture whose eerieness Will had seen make a small boy burst into noisy tears two days earlier, he realized how lucky he was, how lucky he’d always been. His good fortune burned in the pit of his stomach, its heat spreading upward until he felt his face turn warm. He had to stop thinking about Elise and find someone else to be with. He would reply to Elise’s e-mail and tell her that she would not be hearing from him again. That he was sorry he had been so pushy and ignored her request that he leave her alone after the day they had spent together in Santa Barbara, where he had met her for lunch and they had walked together on the beach for two hours, she letting him hold her hand and kiss her several times. He had written another poem (it was actually the fourth poem that he had written for her, but he had not sent the second and third, believing them to be terrible). He had sent this new poem to her after the one phone conversation they had had in late April, during which she had told him that he must stop trying to see her, but he sensed that she was ambivalent, that he might need only to keep trying a little longer and she would yield to his wish to see her again.
And then, at last, she had. The second poem he sent to her was a little longer than the first, and he had ended it with the final three lines from James Wright’s “A Blessing”:
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
She had called him after receiving the poem and said that she loved it. That she remembered the Wright poem from college, and it had been one of her favorites, and how had he known this? He hadn’t, he said, but it was one of his favorites too. Then she had started crying, and he felt both guilty and gratified. It seemed that she really did care about him, that she was confused and maybe a little disoriented, but they would probably be fine. Even if his father disinherited him, he would survive, and perhaps this was what needed to happen so that he would stop sleepwalking and finally find his place and purpose in life.
“I think about you too,” she said. “I don’t mean to, but I do.”
“I want to see you, as soon as we can arrange it.”
“I’ve never done this before. I’m not lying.”
“I know you’re not.”
Four days later, seeing her in Santa Barbara, an hour and a half up the coast from L.A., where they met because they weren’t as likely to run into his father or any of his and Elise’s friends, Will felt that he couldn’t take a normal breath for several minutes. She wore a straw hat and sunglasses and did not want to be recognized because now she was being recognized all the time. If someone snapped their picture and posted it on the Web, or worse, published it in some sleazy gossip rag, “Star Steps Out with Boyfriend’s Son,” it would be catastrophic for them both. It was he who took their picture—with his phone, several photos of them together on the beach that she felt wary about letting him take because, he assumed, she worried about his father somehow getting hold of his phone and finding the photos. Or worse, Will sending them to him, trying to force her hand.
He had rented a room at an inn in Ojai, but he didn’t tell her about it in advance. When he mentioned it to her after they had been walking on the beach for a while, his desire to be alone with her close to intolerable, she had stopped suddenly and withdrawn her hand from his. “I can’t,” she said.
“Yes, you can,” he said, heart sinking.
She shook her head. “If I do, I’m going to screw everything up.”
“No, you’re not,” he said desperately. “Everything will be fine.”
“I need to go home. I’m sorry, Will, but I do.”
“If you felt like you didn’t need my dad to help you with your career, would you go with me to Ojai?”
She looked at him. “Please don’t say things like that.”
“You don’t need him. You’re famous now. You’re going to Cannes in a week, and things will just keep getting better for you.” She was going to Cannes with his father, and it made him almost sick to bring it up, but he did not know how to change her mind about Ojai. The room was actually a small villa with its own kitchen and housekeeping staff. It cost more than a thousand dollars a night, and he could not bear the thought of her not seeing it. The thought of staying there by himself was even worse.
“He’s my boyfriend, Will,” she said. “Not someone I’m using to get ahead with my career.”
“Then why did you come up here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Because I wanted to.”
He had not been able to change her mind, even after she kissed him good-bye a final time next to her car, even after she saw that he was about to cry and had looked away. If he had been the type of person who liked romantic movies that did not end happily, he might have felt that his disappointment was almost something to cherish. But he had not particularly enjoyed The English Patient or Casablanca or Dr. Zhivago. He wanted the hero to get the girl and keep her. He wanted Cinderella and The Princess Bride and Sleeping Beauty. He wanted, he realized, a fairy tale.
Three days after the first e-mail from Elise in Paris and two days after his reply that he would not bother her anymore, she sent another message:
Dear Will,
I turned down your father’s proposal. I know that I’m not ready to get married. I’m only twenty-five, and I told your father that I think we should just keep dating for a while and see how it goes. He was disappointed, but he said that he would live with it if he had to. I didn’t tell him this, but I also think he’s been seeing someone else. Maybe it’s only my faulty sixth sense making trouble for me, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s preoccupied by something (or someone) that has nothing at all to do with his work or Life After the Storm.
Please keep all of this between you and me. I’m sure you will, but I thought I should say it anyway. Take good care over there in France, Elise
He read the message over and over, wondering what Elise was trying to tell him, if there was a subtext at all. His parents and sister knew that he was in Paris now, and he had talked to Anna in the past week, but she had said nothing about his father proposing to Elise. She probably didn’t know and wouldn’t know unless Will told her, because he could not see their father talking to her about it if his proposal had been rejected. Elise’s refusal was enough to make him call his father; Renn had left him a voice mail four days earlier, which Will had so far ignored. Just checking in, his father had said. Hope everything’s fine.
He tried his father’s cell phones, leaving a message on both, before he reached him when he tried calling a second time. “Is everything all right?” his father asked. “You sounded a little agitated in your messages.”
“Why didn’t you call me back after you listened to them?”
“I would have, but I’m at a shoot right now. It’s only eleven thirty in the morning here. What’s it over there? Six thirty?”
“Eight thirty.”
“Oh. Well, I would have called you in a couple of hours.”
His father sounded no different than usual. He even sounded a little buoyant. Had Elise changed her mind since e-mailing him and accepted the proposal? The thought made it harder to breathe. Maybe his father had seen his mistress, if he had one, which Will assumed he did. Elise was likely to be right about this. Women often seemed to be able to tell when something was going on; his mother had known too, though she had tried, often unsuccessfully, not to bring up her suspicions in front of Anna and him while still married to their father.
“Sorry that it’s taken me a few days to get back to you. I was just wondering how you were doing.”
“I’m fine,” his father said, a wary note in his voice now. “Everything’s fine.”
“That’s good.”
They both were silent until Renn said, “I hope you’re not overdoing it with your running.”
“I’m not,” said Will. “It’s harder to get overheated in the winter anyway.”
“But you could still overdo it.”
“I could, but I don’t.”
“Have you made any friends over there yet?”
“Dad, I’ve only been here a couple of weeks.”
“What do you do all day?”
“I go for runs. I shop for food and go to museums. I’m going to start taking a French class at the American School too.”
“Any more thoughts about law school?”
Will could hear someone talking in the background, then an eruption of laughter. He knew that his father would have to go in a minute, and they had said nothing at all to each other. But he didn’t know what he had expected—his father to confess to an affair? To admit that Elise didn’t want to marry him, at least not yet? Few people he knew, especially his father, were ever forthright about these sorts of things, unless they were being filmed for a reality show or calling in to Loveline.
“I’m still thinking about it,” said Will, “but I don’t know if I want to be a lawyer.”
“Billy,” said his father, almost soothingly. “Just try something. Take a leap and apply to Cordon Bleu if you’re planning to stay in Paris for a little while. Learn how to do magic tricks and work as a clown at kids’ parties. I don’t know. Just do something, and maybe it’ll stick.”
“Whatever I do, it’s going to be about running.”
“Running,” his father said slowly. “Running away. To Paris or Johannesburg or Riyadh or Warsaw.”
Will said nothing.
“Well, I hope you’re taking care of yourself. No girlfriend yet, I suppose.”
“No.”
“I’m sure it won’t take long.”
“What about you? Do you have a new girlfriend?”
His father hesitated. “No. I’m still with Elise.”
“Oh. Well, I guess you are.”
“What do you mean, you ‘guess’?”
“I don’t mean anything. I was just talking.”
“That’s the problem,” said his father, half under his breath. “All right. I have to run. Maybe we can talk more later.”
“Okay,” said Will. “I’ll be awake for a few more hours.”
His father did not call back that night or the next, but aside from his resenting Renn a little for his silence, it was a relief. He waited to reply to Elise’s e-mail too, not sure if he should respond at all because he had told her that he would leave her alone, and if he waited long enough, maybe she would e-mail him again. It would almost feel like he had the upper hand for an hour or two, but he wasn’t sure what that meant or what good it would do him to have it, especially considering that they were more than six thousand miles apart.
He had not been lying about the French class at the American School. He had stopped by there on one of his many long walks and signed up for a class that would meet on a Tuesday night for the first time, which was a few days after Elise’s e-mail and the phone call to his father. He did not have high hopes for the course, but when he walked through the door of the classroom and chose a seat two rows from the front and along the wall, he was pleased to see two pretty women there, one of them a student, the other their teacher, both probably not much older or younger than he was. He had not yet written Elise back. He had forced himself to wait until after the first French class, but he had spent more time than he should have staring at the printouts he had made of the photos he had taken of her during their afternoon in Santa Barbara. These were the second copies; the first he had handled so much over the past several months that they had become grimy and wrinkled.
One good thing since coming to Paris, aside from how it had cleared his head about a couple of things and made him feel less inert, was that he had gained back some more weight since he had been in the hospital. He was close to one fifty-five again, about six or seven pounds short of his normal weight. He had not intended to get as thin as he had before the October collapse, but his appetite had so often been poor, and even though he knew that he was losing too much weight and his mother was constantly harassing him about it, he had had trouble forcing himself to eat enough to make up for all of the calories he was burning. The chocolates and pastries and baguettes and croissants in Paris, along with the many good restaurants where actual French people rather than tourists ate, had restored the color to his face. An added benefit, related or not, was that he no longer seemed to be losing much hair, and the places where it was thinning did not seem to be as sparse as they had been in L.A. He wondered if he might be imagining this, but it didn’t seem like it.
The teacher was a blond woman named Camille Moreau (Madame Moreau, s’il vous plait, she said to her students). She was petite and trim with large dark eyes, and the night of the first class, she wore a flattering beige shirtdress cinched at the waist. Her heels were the same color as the dress, and she wore a double strand of pearls and small matching earrings. Will had trouble keeping his eyes off her, but if she noticed, she did not seem to mind. The only time he spoke directly to her, however, was when she asked for his name. “Comment vous appelez-vous, Monsieur?”
“Will,” he said, his voice breaking.
“Will?” she said, smiling slightly. “Ici nous avons les noms français. Maintenant vous vous appellez Guillaume. D’accord?”
“Yes.” His face burned. “I mean oui.”
“Bienvenue à la classe, Guillaume. Vous êtes américain?”
“Oui.” She spoke a little quickly, but he thought that he understood her. He was American, and it seemed he had a new name. Before now he had been Billy, then Will, and now in France, he had become the more complicated (all of those vowels, he thought) and possibly more distinguished Guillaume.
“Vous venez de quel état?”
He hesitated, working up the nerve to reply. He could feel his face reddening.
“Which state are you from,” someone a row away translated unnecessarily.
“I’m from California, from Los Angeles,” he said.
“Ah, très bien, Guillaume. Beaucoup de soleil là-bas, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui,” he said. “Beaucoup. We do get a lot of sun there.”
“En français, Guillaume! Alors, et vous, madame?” the teacher said, looking now at the other pretty woman in the class. “Votre nom?”
“Jorie,” she said. “Je viens de Boston.”
“Jorie,” said Madame Moreau. “Alors, c’est un nom assez français. Tres bien.”
Will glanced at Jorie, but she did not turn her face toward him, her head with its long black braid tilted slightly downward, but he could see her in profile, her cheeks pink, their teacher’s attention making her blush too.
The classroom had three overhead rows of fluorescent lights that were so bright Mme Moreau had turned off the middle row within a minute after entering the room, a book bag on her shoulder and a black wool coat thrown over one arm. No one complained about the dimmer lights, but Will did not think that anyone would, especially if the complaint had to be made in French. There were a dozen students all told; most of them close to his age, a few a little older. He felt contented in this uncluttered classroom, looking at his nicely dressed teacher, waiting to learn from her. He had not been a student for so long and felt hopeful and welcome sitting alongside his classmates: four Americans, three Koreans, three Canadians, and one Japanese couple, as if whatever he would learn over the next eight weeks would change his life.
Yet once the class ended, everyone quickly scattered into the cold night. He had hoped that someone might suggest a drink or a late dinner, but no one did, and he did not feel bold enough to suggest it himself. He was slow gathering his papers and putting on his coat, but when he saw that Mme Moreau was waiting for him to leave the room before she locked the door, he hurried to wrap his scarf around his neck. She nodded to him on their way out and said, “Bonne soiree, Guillaume. A jeudi.” Thursday seemed far away, but it would have to do. He couldn’t think of a question to ask to forestall her departure, especially one in French, and left the building feeling like a fool.
It was stupid to think that he could make friends in one evening, that his classmates would find space for him, unprompted and trusting, in their lives. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to go back to the class on Thursday, even if it was the only consistent social contact he could expect. “Aren’t you lonely in Paris?” his mother had asked the one time they had spoken since his arrival. Anna had asked too. “Who do you talk to? Cashiers?” He had talked to Luca’s father a few times, and they had met for dinner twice. Mr. DeGrassi had also told him that he should drop by his apartment any time that he wanted to. Maybe he would like to watch TV or play chess or read some of his magazines or books? He had many in English. But Will was reading a book of his own right now, his stepmother’s memoir of her marriage to his father.
In the window of a book and music store that took up close to an entire city block near the Seine, he had been startled to notice a display that featured both Melinda’s and his father’s faces. Beneath the photo were several stacked books, all identical, the French title more melancholy than the American: Quelques-uns de mes regrets. Some of her regrets, though Will wondered if the word would be more accurately translated as sorrows.
He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t bought Melinda’s book in L.A. right after it had been published, but he supposed that part of his reluctance was because he did not feel like reading about his father, even if much of what Melinda had written was undoubtedly critical, though he did wonder what she had written about Anna and himself, if anything. Anna hadn’t read the book either, as far as he knew.
That morning, however, he went into the Fnac to buy a copy but soon realized that they would only have the French translation. He asked the clerk for the English version anyway, but as he suspected, it wasn’t there. The clerk told him to try Shakespeare & Company across from Notre Dame, and after he rode the Metro east to this small, crowded store with its resident cats and laid-back sales-clerks, he quickly found This Isn’t Gold. They had three copies, all of them, to his surprise, signed by Melinda. Had she done a book tour? Apparently so, and he had missed her by only four days. He wondered if she was still in Paris but wasn’t sure how to contact her, and he also didn’t know if he wanted to. He hadn’t seen her in several years, not since his father had divorced her and she had retreated up the coast to Big Sur to nurse her wounds and allegedly to drink, which she had also done while she was married to Renn but not to the embarrassing extent, as far as Will knew, that a few particularly mean-spirited gossip columnists had accused her of.
As he remembered her, she had been kind to him and his sister, and often fun to be with. Despite their guilt over liking Melinda, which he and Anna knew upset their mother, they couldn’t help themselves after the first few months of trying to ignore Melinda’s attempts at friendship. Their young stepmother had known which rock bands they liked and seemed genuinely to like them too. She had let them eat pizza three nights in a row and have ice cream for lunch or breakfast when their father wasn’t home. She had not tried to make them talk when they didn’t feel like it, but when they did, she had told them tasteless, hilarious jokes and had given them surprise gag gifts like Silly String and a machine that made fart noises and Halloween masks at times of the year nowhere close to October 31. She had cooked them special meals and braided them friendship bracelets that their school friends had envied and wanted for themselves. She had told them about her childhood and what had seemed to her an interminable adolescence, the boys she’d had crushes on in high school who hadn’t noticed her, the sports she was too uncoordinated to play, the way her mother, off-kilter since Melinda’s father left when Melinda was seven, had sometimes made her give the dog and her little brother a bath together in a steel tub in the front yard on hot summer nights, something that had embarrassed her almost as much as it had delighted her.
The first sentence of her book saddened Will, but he had half expected this: Every little girl wants to grow up and marry a prince, and I guess that I was no exception. The whole book saddened him, and he felt like finding her and telling her that he’d had no idea that she had suffered as much as she had. No surprise that he hadn’t much noticed her misery though—he had been a teenager most of the time she’d been married to his father—but he still felt bad that she seemed to have lived through a hellish era of jealousy and self-doubt and emotional abuse, if her accounts of Renn’s treatment of her were to be believed. He had to assume that there was some, if not an inordinate, amount of truth to them. He remembered his father and her arguing several times and Melinda crying once or twice, but he knew that she had tried to hide their disagreements, had smiled after Renn had left the house in a huff, had told them they could go out to eat or she would teach them how to drive her car, which was a Jaguar and beautiful, even though they hadn’t yet gotten their learner’s permits. If their father had known about these lessons, he would have been angry.
What she wrote about Anna and him was generous: that she had thought they were sweet kids, well behaved for the most part, a few temper tantrums but that was to be expected. They had always remembered her birthday and had once baked her a banana cake, which was her favorite, and it had been a good cake too. (How had his mother felt, he wondered, reading this passage? He and Anna had never told her about the banana cake, and Will knew that she had read Melinda’s memoir, even though she had not wanted to discuss it with him, other than to say that some of it had surprised her. Some of it had upset her too, though she had anticipated as much.)
He wondered if Melinda regretted publishing the book now that it was out all over the world. If she regretted the fact that she would now never be able to reach Renn again, because in the rarefied realm where he lived, as she had put it in one section, “very few people had kitchen privileges.” She had probably made him an enemy for life, if he hadn’t felt that they already were enemies. All that his father had said to him about Melinda’s book was, “It’s out there and I have to live with it. Or rather, now I have to ignore it. It’ll die down though. After a few months, most books drop out of sight, especially the trashiest ones.”
“You hope,” Will had said.
His father had given him a considering look. “Yes,” he’d said, “but I’m ninety-eight percent sure I’m right.”
Will had allowed an entire week to pass without replying to Elise’s message about the proposal she had turned down. During his silence, she had not sent him another message. He went for his runs, did his shopping and eating, went to the Centre Pompidou twice to stare at the Basquiats, and attended his second French class on Thursday evening. He looked at his pretty French teacher and the pretty girl from Boston, and no one tried to talk to him either before or after class, other than one of the Korean students who had said hello to him and everyone else, nodding his head agreeably and laughing when one of the Canadians started to sing “Frère Jacques” before the teacher arrived. In these first two classes, Will had refreshed some of his school French, and could now ask with more confidence where a Metro station was or if he could have ice cubes with his Coca-Cola. He had already known how to ask these questions, or at least he had thought he did. Jorie spoke better French than he did; his accent was embarrassingly discordant to his ears, the trademark American honk that made Mme Moreau purse her lips as she tried to suppress a smile, or so it looked to Will. He could not get the soft, gliding vowels and consonants to flow from his mouth, though some of the vowels were surprisingly nasal. Mme Moreau had told the class on the first night that if they could master the vowels, they could master the language. There were thirteen French vowel sounds, and some of them were difficult, but with practice, they would be able to speak très bien, comme un Français. Right, thought Will. As if. As if I’ll be able to speak one word of French and pass myself off as a native.
The weekend after his second French class, he wrote to Elise.
Dear Elise,
I wasn’t sure what to say about your last note, and I also wasn’t sure if you’d want to hear from me again. I hope that you’re doing fine and that my father is too. You’re on my mind a lot. I know that this has to stop, especially because you’ve said it has to. I am having a good time in Paris, though I do wish that I knew a few more people.
One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately—I haven’t really understood why you’ve ever given me the time of day, from day one, but I think that maybe you sense that we’re alike in some ways. At least I think we are. You have a conflicted relationship with one of your parents, as do I. (I guess a lot of people do, but still. . . ) I think sometimes that we both worry we’ll never be happy. (Am I wrong about this? I don’t think I am—why else did you seek me out the few times that you did? You don’t seem like someone who likes making trouble for herself—if you did, I think we might already have slept together.)
I’ve grown up in Hollywood but have never been important there. You didn’t grow up there and are suddenly very important but you’re probably wondering how long it will last or if you deserve it. I don’t really like people looking at me, which is one of the reasons I never tried too hard to go into acting. I also didn’t want to compete with my father. It’s not like I could hope to do as well or better than he has either.
All right, I think I’ve probably said too much.
Love, Will
She did not reply the next day, nor did she write to him the day after that. He checked almost hourly except when he was running; he even checked in the middle of the night a few times, because he worried now that his assumptions had offended her. He wished that he could take back the message, his complacent attempts to psychoanalyze her, to impose his own shortcomings and hang-ups on her. Maybe she had changed her mind about the proposal too. Maybe she and his father had already set a date and she was busily making preparations for a June or July wedding in Monterey or Santa Barbara (the thought of a wedding in Santa Barbara made him feel ill)—buying an elaborate and expensive dress, scouting reception locations, going over the guest list (would he be invited? He had to assume that he would be—his father did not like controversy, at least not more than was necessary, and so of course he would invite both of his children and expect them to be prominently there).
He called Anna to find out what he could, but she didn’t answer and he didn’t feel like leaving a message. He thought about calling his mother too, but since his breakup with Danielle more than a year ago, things with her had been strained. He knew that his mother loved him very much, but sometimes she suffocated him with her affection and her desire for him to do something happily with his life that would also make her happy. He could say, however, that he was no longer unhappy, that Paris with its many architectural marvels, its well-dressed residents and their unabashed worship of beauty and pleasure, seemed to have a place for him, or at least it didn’t appear to mind another visitor, seeking who-knew-what. Inner peace? If you were at peace, Will thought, how could you fail to be at least a little happy?
Yet he had only been there for a month; how would he feel during the next month and the one after that? Would his solitariness, with the exception of his French classes and Mr. DeGrassi, weigh too heavily on him?
How lucky he was to have these problems. He could admit that. Out of the extraordinarily varied and astounding number of miseries that people suffered each day, he knew that his privileges were extreme, that his was by most, if not all accounts a charmed life.
His French class on Tuesday evening, the third meeting, was an unaccountably ebullient affair. Mme Moreau arrived with a silk rose tucked behind an ear and set about naming different types of common flowers, several of which she pulled from her handbag before proceeding to go over the words for the various articles of clothing she and the class were wearing. There seemed no order or reason to the lessons she had planned for them—if she had planned anything—but Will didn’t mind. Despite her refined appearance, he wondered if maybe she was a little kooky. The thought made him smile, which she noticed. “Pourquoi vous souriez, Guillaume?” she asked, fixing her dark eyes on him.
“Je ne sais pas,” he said, blushing. He really didn’t know why he was smiling. It was the only thing he could think of to say.
“Alors, vous êtes content? Avez-vous une raison pour votre bonheur à partager avec nous?”
He hesitated, groping for the correct words. He did feel happy, but again, he wasn’t sure why. “J’aime cette classe. C’est ça.”
“Moi aussi, j’aime bien cette classe.” She smiled, and her right eye twitched. He didn’t think she was winking at him but it almost looked like it.
He wanted to hide his face behind his scarf (une écharpe, they had just learned), it was burning so hotly now. But within a few minutes, after Mme Moreau had begun going over the names of various professions, she had another question for him. “Guillaume, qu’est-ce que vous faites dans la vie?”
What did he do (for a job, a vocation, an occupation, a career—what was his raison d’être)?
He could feel a stab of heat in his armpits. “Maintenant, je suis aux vacances. Pas de travail.” His life in Paris was a vacation. He wasn’t sure what else it could be called.
“Bien, mais après vos vacances, qu’est-ce que vous ferez?”
What would he do afterward? He really didn’t know. The question, like the one before it, lay between them like something dead. It had to be acknowledged, despite how much it bothered him to do so. “Je vais faire un film.”
There was an immediate, electric murmur of curiosity among his classmates. He would make a film? Oh f*ck. He wasn’t sure where that had come from. He was sweating now in earnest.
Mme Moreau was looking at him, wide-eyed and lovely, her face a study in surprised delight. “Vraiment? C’est extraordinaire. Comment ferez-vous un film?”
He wasn’t sure how, or if, he would do it, but there seemed no reason to admit this. “Mon père est Renn Ivins. Je travaille avec lui de temps en temps.” He had said it, the one thing that he had intended to keep from everyone he met in Paris. My father, the movie star. My father, the hero, which was also the name of a French film Will had seen as a kid. It was a dopey movie, one that his own father would not have been likely to sign on for if they had approached him for the American version instead of casting Gerard Depardieu again.
“Renn Ivins,” exclaimed Mme Moreau. “J’adore Renn Ivins! C’est votre père? C’est vrai?”
Will nodded. “Oui.” Weren’t Europeans supposed to be blasè about fame, at least compared to Americans? Apparently this did not apply to all of them.
More questions started coming, from the teacher and a few of his classmates, some in French, some in English. Was Renn Ivins also in Paris, and would he visit their class? Did he have a black belt in karate? Had he really carried an actual tarantula in his pocket in Death Valley by Nightfall? No, no, no. Did Will know Harrison Ford too? Brad Pitt? George Clooney? Scarlett Johanssen? Yes, sort of, sort of, no, but that’d be nice.
After several minutes, Mme Moreau finally held up her hand and said that they needed to move on, but perhaps Will would tell them more about Hollywood and his father in a future class. The atmosphere in their classroom had changed, probably permanently, the air altered by the introduction of something powerful—desire, curiosity, hope that their lives would somehow be transformed for the better because they were spending a couple of hours each week with a film star’s son. Will had not felt this atmospheric shift since college, when in a film class about the French New Wave a guy whose name he couldn’t remember kept sitting next to him but was often too shy to talk to him, though two weeks before the end of the semester, he had asked if Will might get his father’s autograph for him. He hadn’t done it. The request had annoyed and embarrassed him, although he realized later that his embarrassment was for this nervously smiling guy who thought that autographs actually meant something. What would he do with it besides stare at it from time to time? And what exactly was the point of that?
Girls had made the same request, and sometimes Will had brought them the autograph, especially if he wanted to get them into bed. For the first few years of college, and almost all of high school, he had used his father’s name to get pretty girls out of their clothes. He had slept with quite a few women, probably well over a hundred, though he had stopped keeping track after fifty. He had had sex with young actresses who hoped to get to his father through him; he had slept with the daughters of other actors, and some of his sister’s friends, including two of her closest—Jill and Celestine, who had sometimes come over and hung around his room when they knew that Anna wouldn’t be home. He had had sex with much older women too; a couple of them were actresses his father’s age who had made passes at him at parties or spotted him on the street and told him to get in, they would drive him home, but usually it was after they had taken him to their homes first. He had lost his virginity at fourteen to a twenty-three-year-old woman who acted on a soap but dropped out of sight two years later, lost to drugs and alcohol, he had heard. He had slept with her on five different occasions, until his father, not nearly as outraged as Will expected, caught wind of their affair and told him that it would ruin the actress’s career if word got out that she was f*cking a fourteen-year-old. Word did eventually get out, but only a little, and it didn’t matter very much—she was already an addict by then, as far as Will knew.
It wasn’t until he got back from a semester abroad in Scotland that his self-disgust became a force that he couldn’t ignore anymore, even when he was drunk. He decided to stop having sex until he found a girl who liked him, not just his father. Some of the girls he’d slept with had seemed to like him for who he was, but these were the older women and they were so busy, and he was only a puppy, one of them had said, and surely he would grow tired of her and then where would she be? It was best not to get too serious; he was so young and would meet so many women in his life. After he stopped the gratuitous f*cking his senior year in college, he eventually found real girlfriends, two of them women whose parents were in the movie business too, but few of his relationships lasted for more than three or four months, until Danielle, who had stayed with him for more than a year, but then, of course, he had fallen in love with Elise.
Now he was in Paris, living a monk’s life, and it wasn’t so bad, but all of that would change very soon if he wanted it to, he realized. After Mme Moreau dismissed them for the night, the Japanese couple and Jorie, the girl from Boston, stayed in the classroom until they could follow Will out, and when Jorie and the Japanese man both called his name, he knew that they would ask if he wanted to go out for dinner or a drink. When he turned around and looked at their smiling, flushed faces, he felt an unexpected surge of gratitude, no scorn or weariness at all.
“Yes,” he said, when they asked if he wanted to have dinner with them. “There’s an Italian place near here that I’ve wanted to try. Would that be all right?”
Yes, it would be. Jorie nodded, her blue eyes glowing. The Japanese woman, dressed in a pink down coat and matching hat, giggled and nodded too. Her boyfriend smiled and offered his hand. “Yoshi,” he said. “You might not remember from the first day. Yannick in our class.”
“I do remember,” said Will, smiling.
Outside it was snowing for the third time in six days and the city glistened, its streetlamps casting a muted golden light over the covered sidewalks, the air cold against their hopeful faces. Elise had still not replied to his e-mail. That was all right, at least for now. His classmates, he knew, would be happy to do whatever he wanted. It would all be so easy if he allowed it to be that way.