A runway has been set up over the downstairs swimming pool for a fashion show by a famous Japanese designer just out of rehab and the show opens with a video of the designer’s boyfriend’s last trip to Greenland, a voice-over blah-blahs about his communion with nature and then the sounds of cold, icy winds are whooshing behind us, melding into Yo La Tengo, and as all the lights become very white the models, led by Jamie, start strolling barefoot down the catwalk toward a giant gray screen and I’m watching her on a small video monitor backstage along with Frédéric Sanchez and Fred Bladou, who produced the music for the show, and to communicate my appreciation I’m tapping a foot. They don’t notice.
At the party afterwards I’m posing for the paparazzi—as instructed—with Johnny Depp and then Elle Macpherson and then Desmond Richardson and Michelle Montagne and then I’m sandwiched between Stella Tennant and Ellen Von Unwerth, a strained goofy expression lining my features. I even give a brief interview to MTV Taipei but the smell of shit is causing my eyes to water, a black stench filling my nose, and I have to break away from the photo ops to down another glass of champagne, and when my vision returns to normal and I’m able to breathe calmly through my mouth I spot the actor playing the French premier’s son.
He’s lighting a cigar with a very long match, waving away a fly while chatting with Lyle Lovett and Meg Ryan, and without really even trying I find myself approaching him, suddenly aware of just how completely tired I am. One brief movement—I reach out and touch his shoulder, quickly withdrawing the hand.
He turns laughing, in the middle of a joke he’s telling, the smile turning hard when he sees it’s me.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“I need to talk to you,” I say quietly, trying to smile.
“No you don’t.” He turns away, starts gesturing.
“Yeah man, I do,” I say, touching his shoulder again. “I think it’s important that we talk.”
“Get out of here,” he says impatiently. Having lost Lyle and Meg to their own conversation, he says something harsh in French.
“I think you’re in danger,” I say quietly. “I think if you keep seeing Tammy Devol you will be in danger. I think you’re already in danger—”
“I think you are an idiot,” he says. “And I think you are in danger if you don’t leave here now.”
“Please—” I reach out to touch him again.
“Hey,” he exclaims, finally facing me.
“You’ve got to stay away from them—”
“What? Did Bruce send you?” He sneers. “How pathetic. Tell Bruce Rhinebeck to be a man and talk to me himself—”
“It’s not Bruce,” I’m saying, leaning into him. “It’s all of them—”
“Get the fuck away from me,” he says.
“I’m trying to help you—”
“Hey, did you hear me?” he spits. “Is anybody there?” He taps a finger rudely against my temple with such force that my eyes flutter and I have to lean up against a column for support.
“Just fuck off,” he says. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Suddenly Jamie grabs my arm and pulls me away from the actor, hissing into my ear “That was stupid, Victor” as we move through the crowd.
“Au revoir, dude,” the actor calls out, mimicking the clichéd accent of a young American.
“That was so stupid,” Jamie hisses again, keeps repeating it as she pulls me through the crowd, stopping three, four, eleven times to pose for photos.
Outside the Ritz the Christian Bale guy is at the base of the verdi-grised column in the Place Vendome but I don’t say anything to Jamie, just nod sadly at him as he glares at us. I follow Jamie as we walk along the iron gate leading to the Cour Vendome. A policeman says something to Jamie and she nods and we turn along the south edge of the plaza. She’s cursing, unable to get to our car, and I’m trailing behind her, swallowing constantly, eyes tearing up, my chest sore and constricted. The Christian Bale guy is no longer at the base of the column. Finally Jamie leans into the window of a nondescript black BMW that brought us here and lets it go.
Bobby left this morning holding a boarding pass for a British Airways Paris-to-London shuttle. Our instructions: arrive at the Ritz, appear in fashion show, poison pool with LiDVl96# caplets, let our photos be taken, order drinks in the Ritz bar, wait twenty minutes, leave laughing. Gossip that Jamie Fields might be dating Victor Ward while Bobby Hughes is away might be—as per Bobby’s notes—“an excellent distraction.”
A montage of Jamie and Victor walking along Quai de la Tournelle, staring up at the turrets of Notre Dame, looking out at barge traffic on the Seine, Jamie trying to calm me down as I freak out, clawing at my face, hyperventilating, wailing “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die,” and she maneuvers us to a walled-off area somewhere on Boulevard Saint-Michel and we end up shooting my breakdown again, near Quai de Montebello, where I’m fed more Xanax. Then a cab takes us to Boulevard Saint-Germain and we’re sitting at a sidewalk table at Les Deux Magots, where I concede, “I’m just wearing uncomfortable socks I bought at the Gap.” I blow my nose, laughing miserably.
“It’ll be okay,” she says, handing me another Kleenex.
“Don’t you want me, baby?” I’m asking.
Jamie nods. “Even though I think you tipped that cabdriver a hundred dollars?” Pause. “Sure.”
“No wonder he whistled at me.”
At the room we always share in Hôtel Costes our bed is already turned down and sprinkled lightly with confetti and I place a .25-caliber Walther automatic on the nightstand and while I’m fucking Jamie she positions herself so that it’s easier for me to look at the videos flashing by on the TV screen, to which with both hands she keeps directing my attention, because even with her eyes closed, Jamie says, she can sense my yearning, can feel the need radiating out of my eyes, the unbearableness of it. She might have felt a spark, she might have wept. I might have said “I love you.”
Afterwards, slouching in a chair across from the bed, naked, smoking a cigarette, I ask her, “What was Bertrand talking to you about?”
“Where?” she asks without pausing. “Who?”
“At Natacha the other night,” I say, exhaling. “Bertrand. He said something to you. You pushed him away.”
“I did?” she says, lighting a cigarette dreamily. “Nothing. Forget about it.”
“Do you remember him from Camden?” I ask.
“I think so,” she answers carefully. “Camden?”
“He was Sean Bateman’s roommate—”
“Baby, please,” she says, her breath steaming. “Yes. Bertrand from Camden. Yes. At Natacha. Okay.”
After I put out the cigarette, washing another Xanax down with a glass of champagne, I ask, “Is Bertrand involved?”
“Is Bertrand involved?” she asks, repeating the question slowly, writhing on the bed, her long tan legs kicking at the sheets.
“Is Bertrand involved in the ‘Band on the Run’ project?” I ask.
“No,” she says clearly. And then, “That’s Bobby’s game.”
“Jamie, I—”
“Victor, why were you in London?” she asks, still staring away from me. “What were you doing there?” Then, after a long pause, closing her eyes, just the word “Please?”
Breathing in, answering without hesitation, I say, “I was sent to look for you.”
A long pause, during which she stops kicking at the sheets. “By who, Victor?”
“By a man who said your parents were looking for you.”
Jamie sits up, covering her breasts with a towel. “What did you say?” With a trembling hand she puts out the cigarette.
I breathe in. “A man named Palakon offered me money to come and find—”
“Why?” she asks, suddenly alert, gazing at me maybe for the first time since we entered the hotel room.
“So I could bring you back to the States,” I sigh.
“This—” She stops, checks herself. “This was in the script? This Palakon
was in the script?”
“I don’t know anymore,” I say. “I’ve lost touch with him.”
“He … told you my parents were looking for me?” she asks, sitting up, panicking. “My parents? That’s crazy, Victor. Oh god, Victor—”
“He offered me money to find you,” I sigh.
“To find me?” she asks, clutching herself. “To find me? Why did you do it? What are you talking about?”
“I had to get out of town, I had to—”
“Victor, what happened?”
“I came on the QE2,” I say. “He offered me money to sail across the ocean to find a girl I went to school with. I wasn’t even going to come to London. I met a girl on the ship. I was going to Paris with her.” I stop, not knowing where to go with this.
“What happened?” Jamie asks. “Why didn’t you?”
“She … disappeared.” I suddenly can’t catch my breath and everything starts tumbling out of me: Marina’s disappearance, our scenes together, the photos of the boy who looked like me I found in the Prada bag, at the Wallflowers concert, at the Sky Bar, at the Brigitte Lancome photo shoot, the teeth embedded in the bathroom wall, the trace of blood behind the toilet, her name missing on the passenger manifest, the altered photographs of the dinner with the Wallaces.
Jamie’s not looking at me anymore. “What was the date?”
“The date of … what?”
Jamie clarifies. The night I met Marina in the fog. The night when we stumbled back to my room. The night when I was too drunk. The night the figure moved through my room opening drawers as I slowly passed out. I give her a date.
“What was her name, Victor?”
“What?” I’m suddenly lost, far away from Jamie.
“What was her name, Victor?” Jamie asks again.
“It was Marina,” I sigh. “What does it matter, Jamie?”
“Was her name …” Something in Jamie’s voice catches and she breathes in and finishes the sentence: “Marina Cannon?”
Thinking about it, hearing someone else say her name, clarifies something for me. “No. It wasn’t Cannon.”
“What was it?” she asks, fear vibes spreading out.
Which causes me to answer, enunciating clearly, “Her name was Marina Gibson.”
Jamie suddenly holds out a hand and turns her head away, a gesture we haven’t rehearsed. When I move unsurely toward the bed and gently pull her face to mine, an enormity in her expression causes me to reel back. Jamie scrambles out of bed and rushes into the bathroom, slamming the door. This is followed by the sounds of someone muffling screams with a towel. Empty spaces on the bed allow me to lie back and contemplate the ceiling, lights from a Bush video flashing across my face in the dark. Turning up the volume eliminates the noise coming from the bathroom.
30
Tammy and I sit on a bench outside the Louvre next to the glass pyramid at the main entrance where right now a line of Japanese students files by. From somewhere lounge music plays and we’re both wearing sunglasses and Tammy has on Isaac Mizrahi and I’m dressed in Prada black and while waiting for the director we light cigarettes and guardedly mention a trendy restaurant, a place where we drank Midori margaritas together. I’m on a lot of Xanax and Tammy’s hungover from the heroin she did last night and her hair’s peroxided and when someone from the crew asks me a question as we’re both handed steaming cups of cappuccino, I say, “I have no opinion on that.”
And then, trying to lighten Tammy’s mood, I tell her about the last time I did heroin, how I barely woke up the next morning, how when I drank a Coke and puked it up minutes later it was still carbonated, fizzing in the toilet water. She keeps muttering her lines, trying to remember hollow dialogue about our “relationship.” We have already shot this scene four times this morning but Tammy’s distracted and keeps forgetting what she’s supposed to do or say, putting a mournful spin on what should be innocuous line readings because she’s thinking about the French premier’s son and not Bruce Rhinebeck, who we’re supposed to be discussing in this scene. Plus the international crew speaks various languages so production meetings require interpreters, and the director keeps complaining that preproduction was rushed, that the script needs work. An acting coach has been hired and motivation is discussed, a sense-memory exercise is conducted, we practice breathing. Vacantly I notice that the fountains surrounding the pyramid aren’t working today.
The director kneels next to us, leaning in, his breath steaming in the cold morning air. “This scene is supposed to be played very, um, tenderly,” he explains, lowering his sunglasses. “You both like Bruce. You don’t want to hurt his feelings. Bruce is your fiancé, Tammy. Bruce is your best friend, Victor.” The director pauses gravely. “Yet your love, that overwhelming passion for each other, is just too strong. You can’t keep it a secret from Bruce any longer. I want that urgency—okay, darlings?”
Tammy nods mutely, her hands clutched into fists. I tell the director, “I’ll comply.”
“I know,” the director says. “That’s good.”
The director steps away, confers briefly with Felix the cinematographer. I turn to Tammy as someone says “Action.” A boom mike hangs over our heads.
I have to smile and reach out to touch Tammy’s hand. She has to smile back, which she accomplishes with some difficulty.
“It’s cold,” she says, shivering.
“Yes,” I’m saying. “You need to stay warm.”
“I suppose so,” she says abstractly. “I’m sorry about last night.”
“Where’s Bruce?” I ask. “What’s the story, baby?”
“Oh Victor, please don’t,” Tammy sighs. “He went to Athens. I don’t ever want him to come between us again. I’ll tell him everything when he gets back. Everything. I promise.”
“He already suspects,” I say. “It doesn’t matter.”
“If I could only turn back time,” she says, but not at all wistfully.
“Can I believe the magic in your sighs?” I lean in for a kiss.
“You know you can.” This is said too indifferently.
The director calls “Cut.” He walks over and kneels down next to Tammy again. “Baby?” he asks. “Are we all right?”
Tammy’s unable to even nod, just keeps scratching a point on her back that she can’t quite reach.
“It’s all about a light touch, baby,” he’s saying, lowering his sunglasses.
Tammy sniffs, says “I know” but she doesn’t and she’s shivering too hard for the scene to continue, so the director takes her aside and as they walk away from the crew Tammy keeps shaking her head, trying to pull away. Freezing, I light a cigarette, squint at the Seine, the smell of shit everywhere, the Louvre sitting behind us long and boring, then I imagine a Saab with a poodle in the passenger seat driving by. My foot has fallen asleep.
Tammy keeps looking back at me, making sure I’m aware of the schedule, but I’m already checking the face of the watch I was given last night by a member of the French film crew.
In digital numbers it reads 9:57.
Someone from the French film crew Rollerblades by, then slows down, making sure I notice him before he nods and glides off.
I stand up, flicking the cigarette away, and walk over to the director’s chair and pick up a black Prada backpack sitting beneath it.
“I have to use the rest room,” I tell a PA.
“Cool.” He shrugs, inspecting a tattoo, a staff of musical notes, emblazoned on his bicep. “It’s your life.”
I take the bag and wait at the museum’s entrance until the watch hits 10:00 exactly.
As instructed, I place the headphones of a Walkman over my ears, adjusting the volume while securing it to a clip attached to the belt I’m wearing.
I press Play.
The beginning of Ravel’s “Bolero” starts booming through the headphones.
I’m stepping onto an escalator.
The black Prada backpack must be placed next to one of three pay phones in the carouse
l at the bottom of the Allée de Rivoli escalator.
From the opening strains of “Bolero” until its final crashing cymbals: 12 minutes and 38 seconds.
At 10:01 the bomb is officially activated.
I’m unfolding a map directing me where to go.
At the bottom of the escalator six of the French film crew, including its director, are waiting, grim-faced, all in black.
The director nods encouragingly from behind the Steadicam operator. The director wants this sequence done in one continuous shot. The director motions for me to remove the sunglasses that I forgot to take off while I was moving down the escalator.
Walking slowly through the Hall Napoléon, “Bolero” blaring, gathering momentum, I try not to walk sporadically, keeping a steady rhythm by counting the steps I’m taking, by focusing my eyes on the floor, by making a wish.
At 10:04 I spot the phones.
At 10:05 I place the Prada bag at my feet. I pretend to make a call at the phone that takes credit cards.
I check my watch at 10:06.
I move away from the phone bank, the film crew walking alongside me.
I’m supposed to stop and buy a Coke from a concession stand, which I do, taking a single sip before dumping it in a nearby trash bin.
I’m moving back into the hall, the film crew walking alongside me, the Steadicam operator moving in front of me.
10:08. “Bolero” grows more insistent, moving at a faster pitch.
But suddenly the crew is slowing down, causing me to slow down also.
Glancing up, I notice their stunned faces.
The Steadicam operator stops moving, lifts his head away from the viewfinder.
Someone touches my arm.
I rip the Walkman off my head and whirl around, panicked. It’s a PA from the American film crew.