Eric is blown through the window of the Emporio Armani boutique across the street.
Dean’s body is spun onto a spiked railing that separates the sidewalk from the boulevard and hangs there, jackknifed.
Shrapnel spreads out in all directions, hitting a middle-aged woman sitting inside the café, spraying into her neck, face and chest, killing her within moments.
A Japanese woman who had been sitting next to Brad’s table stumbles, dazed, out of the smoke, both arms blown off at the elbow, before collapsing into the debris on the sidewalk.
A young Armenian lies half on the street, half on the sidewalk, his head blown apart, his moped still between his legs.
A severed arm dangles from the edge of the white overhang and large clumps of flesh are splattered across the Café Flore sign.
From behind the cameras on rooftops and inside various vans so much of it is the usual: bleeding people running out of thick black smoke, the screams of the wounded and dying, a man crawling along the boulevard vomiting blood, gasping for air, charred bodies hanging out of cars that happened to pass by Café Flore in the instant the bombs went off, shopping bags standing in blood outside the entrance. The shock, the sirens, a hundred wounded—it’s all so familiar. The director is relying on a top-notch editor to put the footage together and he tells the crew it’s time to move on. As the Range Rover drives quickly past the scene, crossing in front of the black Citroën, Bentley briefly notices a woman lying on the sidewalk screaming, her thigh torn open, and while lighting a cigarette he tells the director, “Take me back to Les Bains, s’il vous plaît,” where he listens to Jeanne Tripplehorn blab away about the cheese puffs at Taillevent for an hour and Bentley tells her he disapproves of interracial relationships.
34
People leaving. Bobby this morning, Tammy to Jacques Levy’s for the weekend, Bruce to check out the floor plans of the terminals at Orly airport, Bentley on vacation, “perhaps Greece, perhaps not,” which leaves me escorting Jamie to the Carita salon on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where Jamie has—in no particular order—her hair colored, a massage, aromatherapy and antistress treatments, an energy-balanced magnetic manipulation session, and then she’s guided by a New Age adviser (eighteen, gorgeous) to a “beach of calm” complete with the sounds of prerecorded shellfish cavorting somewhere on a large, craggy rock. I’m waiting with the bodyguards and the bodyguards are waiting because of Brazilian millionaires, an empress or two, the Princess of Monaco, Judith Godreche, and we’re all sipping a 1992 Château de Bellet and I’m on Xanax while the film crew shoots me flipping glumly through a photography book about ’60s movie magazines until the boom operator knocks one of the bodyguards in the head and the director gets bored and the crew moves on to an early dinner and the next setup.
At the Opéra Garnier feelings are mixed about the Japanese libretto but we’re really there for the paparazzi waiting at the bottom of the stairs while Jamie and I are standing at the top of the stairs. And Christiana Brandolini is there and Sao Schlumberger loses a contact lens and Irene Amic hisses “You’re stepping on my hem” but when she turns and sees my face, panicked and caught in the glow of a chandelier, she relents and smiles, whispering something about how beautiful I am, and then Candy Spelling’s waving to Jamie, and Amira Casar and Astrid Kohl tell me about a party a week ago at Les Bains that I wasn’t invited to.
I spot the Christian Bale look-alike I first saw on Bond Street in London, now wearing a tuxedo and nodding slowly when he notices me staring over at him transfixed. Jamie and I decide to leave during the first intermission.
A black Citroën takes us to the Buddha Bar and after we sit at a table, shaken, saying nothing, just staring hopelessly at each other, Jamie reaches into her Prada bag and calls Hôtel Costes and since she knows Jean Louis and Gilbert a room is waiting by the time we arrive at 239 Rue Saint-Honoré. The first assistant director glances at a call sheet and tells both of us to be on the main set by 9:00 tomorrow. It’s midnight and Jamie rushes into the lobby, hugging herself in a Helmut Lang ponyskin coat, and then it’s my turn to follow her.
The door to our room closes behind me and Jamie and I fall on the bed while I’m kissing her mouth and her arms are wrapped around my shoulders and after I’m naked I’m shaking so hard that she has to pull back. Then someone knocks on the door.
Jamie stands up, also naked, pulls on the Helmut Lang overcoat, lazily strides over to the door. She opens it without asking who it is.
A film crew I haven’t seen before enters the room. A large Panavision camera is wheeled in, lights are positioned. The first AD tells me where to lie on the bed while Jamie confers with the director and the script supervisor. The propmaster opens a bottle of champagne, pours two glasses. A joint—not a prop—is introduced into the scene and then Jamie’s lying next to me and I’m lighting the joint. Someone rumples the blankets on the bed and the director calls “Playback” and Jane Birkin starts sighing “Je T’Aime” on a CD and the film crew is just a shadow behind the lights and it’s so cold in the room steam keeps pouring out of our mouths.
Jamie lies on her back and dreamily inhales on the joint I hand her, holding smoke in until she slowly breathes it out—a cue for her to start speaking in a halting, deliberate tone, her voice breathy and lost, her eyes half-closed.
“Bobby … strolled … into Superstudio Industria .… It was a shoot that had gone late … was it for an Anne Klein campaign? … I can’t remember .… People were making a hundred thousand dollars a day and it seemed worth it … and it was maybe ten-thirty or eleven and … in December 1990 … four years ago? … five? … and there had been a power failure of some kind … this blackout … and candles were being lit but you still couldn’t see anything and it was freezing …. It had gotten so cold … in just a matter of minutes …. I had goose bumps all over my body at Industria that night … and there was this shape moving in the darkness … a figure … tall … kept getting closer to where I was standing alone … and then it started … circling me … a mass … this shape … and it was whistling a song … which sounded familiar …. ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street,’ it kept singing … and then I noticed the camera crew … following him at a discreet distance … but they had no lights … and they were still filming this … this shape, this thing … and when he lit a cigarette … in that instant I saw his face and recognized him immediately .… He took me to the VIP room at that Club Xerox … and somewhere in the background was the film crew … and somewhere beyond that the Who was playing .…
“I can’t tell you exactly … what I was motivated by .… I can’t really go into detail .… It had been an unhappy period in my life .… I hated my body … the way I looked …. I was taking pills, I was seeing shrinks, I went to the gym because I knew no one would like me otherwise …. I even thought about plastic surgery .… I was twenty-three …. My mother and father had just gone through a terrible divorce and my mother was having … some kind of nervous breakdown … and my dreams at night were just hours of black space … sometimes interrupted by bones and that song Bobby was whistling that night at Industria …. I had just completed a failed relationship with a famous photographer and had a brief affair with a boy from an Aerosmith video .… There were things I wanted …. I wanted to be on the cover of more magazines … I wanted to be beautiful … I wanted to be rich, I wanted to be famous …. I had been photographed by Lindbergh and Elgort and Demarchelier and … shows, I had done so many shows … but I was still mid-level .… My grief seemed endless .… I wanted something else … and then there was what Bobby wanted … and in our meeting I … evolved .… Bobby came in and saw how limited my world was … and he motivated me …. I never felt I was pretty enough and he made me … feel attractive .… He indulged me and I, in turn, became cheerful …. He told me that physically I was perfect … and I decided then that I would follow him … anywhere … so I spent a spring with him in Los Angeles and he introduced me to his friend … ‘the genius,’ a man named Mr
. Leisure … and Steven Meisel got involved and my career started taking off .… But you’ve got to know, Victor, that … I was notaware of what Bobby did … I hadn’t been told of his plans .… All I really knew was he wasn’t a morning person … and neither was I … and at an opening at MOCA … something called ‘The History of the Polka Dot’ … when—”
“I went to that.”
“—we were standing in a corner … he was so soft-spoken … and started telling me things … and midway through … I had to ask him to stop .…”
Jamie starts to cry silently. I relight the joint and hand it to her. Without sitting up she takes it, inhales, coughs a little.
“How did he recruit people? … It was only models … and famous Models .… He wasn’t interested in anyone else .… He would use the fact that as a model all you do all day is stand around and do what other people tell you to do .… He preyed on that … and we listened … and it was an analogy that made sense … in the end … when he asked … things of us … and it wasn’t hard to recruit people … everyone wanted to be around us … everyone wanted to be movie stars … and in the end, basically, everyone was a sociopath … and all the girls’ hair was chignoned … and the Who was always playing somewhere .…
“I remember very little about the beginning of that period …. After I had been inducted … there were so many long gray stretches … dieting … going to the gym, which was an obsession of Bobby’s … absences … giant spaces … so many things I blocked out .… It was such an aimless existence .… Everything we did was up-to-the-minute …. the restaurants we ate in … the hotels we stayed at … the people we hung out with …. In New York we joked about never staying at an address that wasn’t a 10021 zip code … chartered 737s flew us to weddings … waiters never rushed us … we were allowed to smoke cigarettes anywhere we wanted … people didn’t want to like us because we were young and rich and beautiful … and no one—I mean no one, Victor—was happy about my success … but that was—according to Bobby—‘human nature’ … but still, no one—and this is very important, Victor—no one was skeptical of us .…
“And we traveled … Palm Beach … Aspen … Nigeria … Christmases in St. Bart’s … a week at Armani’s home in Pantelleria … and Bobby made sure I started really getting work, and then it was Cindy Crawford and Paulina Porizkova and … and Claudia Schiffer … and Yasmeen Ghauri … Karen Mulder and Chloe Byrnes and Tammy Devol and Naomi and Linda and Elaine and … and Jamie Fields … and you had to know the codes to understand how things worked in this world … it was almost like sign language … and people learned how to behave in my presence … and girls were treating me differently now that I was dating Bobby Hughes … and then the dark patterns started appearing … and when I told Bobby ‘No one’s being themselves, everyone’s so phony,’ Bobby said ‘Shhh’ and then whispered ‘That is being themselves.’ …
“Bobby would try and educate me … make me understand … what he was doing … where he was going with this whole thing … and he told me ‘Baby, George Washington was a terrorist’ and I’d look into that face and see those eyes … those lips … and things would just start unraveling and I became educated …. He would tell me that you show the world things and in showing the world you teach it what you want .… He would give me E. M. Forster novels and I never understood them and for some reason … Bobby was relieved by this …. He told me things like ‘We are just reflections of our time’ and he never really got more precise than that …. I would ask him questions like ‘What does fin de siècle mean?’ and he would talk for an hour about the inherent evil … in rap music … and the Who was always playing in the background somewhere .…
“I knew Bobby wasn’t faithful .… He was sleeping with big models … famous socialites in good shape … the occasional guy or … underage girl—girls who attended Spence or Chapin or Sacred Heart—and if he got in trouble with their mothers he’d fuck them too .… He would weigh girls … you had to be a certain weight … and mostly but not all the time a certain height … in order to fuck Bobby Hughes .… If you got on that scale and passed, then he … fucked you .…”
My arms are falling asleep and I adjust my position, light another joint a crew member hands me.
“A lot of girls disappeared or … OD’d … or they ‘had accidents,’ and by this time I was breaking down on the Concorde when I would see the curvature of the earth and the clouds seemed hundreds of miles below us … and I’d freak out … even on large amounts of Xanax and at the height of my fame …. I was responsible for the increased suicide rate among … teenage girls and young women who realized they would never look like me …. I was told this in editorials … angry letters from overweight mothers … essays by women in NOW .… I was told I was destroying lives … but it didn’t touch me because no one we knew was real … people just seemed … fake and … Bobby liked that I felt this way .… It ‘helped,’ he said … and anyway, in the end I was too famous for him to get rid of .…”
Her voice quavers, regains its composure, then falters again and she just starts murmuring strings of words, how she moved into films, her first movie, Night of the Bottomless Pit, the arrangement of fake passports, soldiers of fortune from Thailand, Bosnia, Utah, new social security numbers, heads struck with such force they broke open as easily as soft-boiled eggs, a form of torture where the victim has to swallow a rope. “In Bombay … ,” and now she shudders, swallowing rapidly, eyes clamped shut, tears immediately pouring out of the slits. “In Bombay …” She refuses to follow through and then starts shrieking about a serial killer Bobby befriended in Berlin and I hop out of bed and tell the director “Hey, it’s over” and while they pack up to leave Jamie writhes on the bed, sobbing hysterically, clawing at the sheets, sometimes shouting out names in Arabic.
33
Outside the building in the 8th or 16th under a hazy sheen of floating mist the film crew waits after the director and Felix the cinematographer have set up a simple establishing shot that will be of the six of us walking “gaily” to a black Citroën waiting at the curb that will take us to a party at Natacha. But this crew doesn’t know that earlier this afternoon the film crew I was introduced to the other night at Hôtel Costes has been let into the house by Bobby and has spent the last three hours laying cable, setting up lights, filming sequences I’m not in, including a long unresolvable argument between Tammy and Bruce, a sex scene with Jamie and Bobby, another segment with Bruce, alone, playing a guitar, strumming the old Bread song “It Don’t Matter to Me,” and they now move quietly around the living room—electricians and a beautiful key grip and the black-bearded director—all conferring with a cinematographer who resembles Brad Pitt in Johnny Suede and upstairs in Bentley’s room the first AD keeps parting the Mary Bright blackout curtains, peering out at the other film crew in the street, offering updates over the muffled sounds of another fight between Tammy and Bruce—this one not filmed—concerning the actor playing the French premier’s son and predictably doors are slammed, voices are raised, doors are slammed again.
I’m wearing a Prada suit totally unaware of who helped me put it on and I’m positioned in one of the Dialogica chairs in the living room, playing with a lime-green tie someone chose for me. On the TV screen, with the sound off, reruns of “Cheers” followed by “Home Improvement” run endlessly on a tape someone stuck into the VCR. A PA hands me a book of notes that Bobby made, I’m told, especially for me. Continents are investigated, floor plans of the Ritz have been reproduced, an outline was printed from a computer of the TWA terminal at Charles de Gaulle, diagrams of the layout of Harry’s Bar in Venice, handwriting experts preoccupied with verifying signatures are interviewed, entries from a diary someone named Keith kept concerning a trip he made to Oklahoma City, pages about plastic explosives, the best wiring, the correct timer, the right container, the best detonator.
I’m reading “Semtex is made in Czechoslavakia.” I’m reading “Semtex is an odorless, colorless plastic explosive
.” I’m reading “Libya has tons of Semtex.” I’m reading “It takes 6 oz. of Semtex to blow up an airliner.” I’m reading a profile on a newly manufactured plastic explosive called Remform, which is made and distributed only “underground” in the U.S. and is still unavailable in Europe. I’m reading a list of Remform’s “pros and cons.” I’m reading the words Bobby has scrawled on the side of a page: More useful than Semtex? and then two words that I stare at until they move me to get up out of the Dialogica chair and walk purposefully into the kitchen to make myself a drink: “ … tests pending …”
On this much Xanax it’s remarkably easy to concentrate solely on the making of a Cosmopolitan. You think of nothing else while pouring cranberry juice, Cointreau and lemon citron into a shaker filled with ice that you yourself attacked with an ice pick and then you’re rolling a lime and slicing it open, squeezing the juice into the shaker, and then you’re pouring the cocktail through a strainer into a giant martini glass, and back in the living room Makeup fixes my hair and I can’t help but keep imagining what Jamie and Bobby are doing in their bedroom and I’m glancing up at the ceiling and while sipping the Cosmopolitan I zone out on the Paul McCartney and Wings sticker on the front of the notebook Bobby made for me.
“Didn’t we hang in Sérifos?” the hairdresser asks me.
“We didn’t hang out in Sérifos,” I say, and then, “Oh yeah.”
I attempt to read an interview in Le Figaro that Jamie gave on Wednesday but I’m unable to follow it, realizing midway through that I’m unable to speak or read French. I barely notice the hand grenade leaning against an automatic rifle on the table my drink is sitting on. Why this Paul McCartney and Wings sticker is on my notebook is a question easier to concentrate on. Crew members debate whether the latest U2 record really cuts it, until the director calls out for silence.