Angels All Over Town (21 page)

Jason had risen and was smoking a black cigarette in the lobby when I returned. He wore a pale yellow silk shirt with a maroon foulard scarf knotted around his neck, and he wore sunglasses with very dark lenses. “
Eh, ça va?
” he said, standing to greet me.

“Say what?” I asked, kissing both his cheeks.

“How goes it, Una my love?”

“You said all that in three tiny syllables?”

A wave of the hand. “Inflection is
all
. Absolutely all. You can speak volumes in one sentence, if you only have the right tone.”

“Like on
Beyond
, when Beck looks at Delilah and says, ‘But
why
?’”

“Exactly.” Jason checked his black diver’s watch. “My mother’s French. I speak
la langue
fluently. Rustily, but fluently.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.” I marveled at the strangeness of not knowing very much about Jason’s family. We spent every day working together and were America’s favorite daytime couple, and I hadn’t known his mother was French. Was she still alive? Did she live in Paris? I wanted to ask, but Jason grabbed his buttery leather jacket and kissed my cheek.

“Listen, I’m off. You don’t mind if I desert you?”

“No, not at all.” Flustered, I had thought we could spend the afternoon together. I suddenly felt marooned and without options. “Oh, wait,” I called just before he went through the door. “Have you ever heard of ‘Palace’? I’m supposed to be going there with Balfour tonight.”

Jason took a step back and grinned, his foot planted dramatically on the marble floor. “How
chichi
. It’s a terrific nightclub called ‘Palace des Complines.’ Known to the cool people as ‘Palace.’ Impossible to get into unless you are with one of the greats. I’m going to Crazy Zebra, myself. It’s Crazy Horse for gays.”

“Well, have fun,” I said. I wanted to wait by the door, to see whom Jason would meet, but politeness prevented me. Crazy Horse? Palace? Whatever had happened to Le Moulin Rouge, Les Deux Magots, Les Folies Bérgères? All the great Paris haunts of legend and song? Of Hemingway, Lautrec, Colette, Scott and Zelda, Matisse, and Picasso? What did one wear to Palace? I ran upstairs to peruse my wardrobe.

When Emile Balfour rang my room at ten that night, I looked fabulous. I had gone to a fancy beauty salon and had my hair washed and twisted into a magnificent chignon. It was very severe and accented my sharp profile. I wore a gold satin tunic with a belt of twisted silk and brass baubles over skinny, straight-legged black pants. On my feet I wore pointed gold shoes, the toes slightly upturned, like Aladdin’s. My black stockings were sheer, flecked with gold. The entire ensemble brought out gold highlights in my auburn hair. I thought I looked very modish.

Taking the elevator to the lobby, I felt short of breath. I tried to rehearse what I would say to him. Should I call him Emile or Mr. Balfour? Would it be better to appear confident, as a colleague, and say “Hi, Emile,” or would it be better to show my awe, to act a bit subservient, and say, “How do you do, Mr. Balfour”? Or “Monsieur Balfour”? Movie directors adored adulation, but he had said on the telephone that he did not believe in formality. When the grand elevator doors slid open, and I was finally standing in the lobby, I was too muddled to do anything but beam when Emile Balfour, tall and wonderfully handsome in his tuxedo, came toward me, kissed both my cheeks, and said quietly into my ear, “Welcome to Paris.”

In America, where everyone recognizes movie and television stars, only the cognoscenti know the faces of directors. But everyone at the Crillon knew Emile Balfour. His bodyguard parted a path through the crowd for us. I had the impression of men in black tie and women in evening garb. Orchestra music. There was a ball at the hotel that night. We stepped quickly, blinking at the flashbulbs. When we were safely in the black limousine, Emile leaned close to me, smiling his famous down-turned smile, and said, “Tomorrow all the newspapers will be asking, ‘Who is she?’” He looked pleased.

I laughed gaily. This was going to be fun. I felt as though I had already passed my audition and was living the life of a Balfour leading lady. Through the car’s tinted windows the lighted fountains of the Place de la Concorde looked dim and green. We spun down the grand boulevards into the heart of Paris. “You know,” Emile said, pointing at another fountain, “if you want to impress someone, you pay the city some money, and they will turn on the fountain at a certain time. You synchronize your watches. Then you take your lady to the fountain, which is dry, and you say, ‘Our love is so deep, it makes rivers flow, fountains bubble…,’ and the water suddenly goes on, all lit up like magic. Then she will do anything for you.”

I laughed. What a charmer. A traffic jam caught us on a dark one-way street. Bums lurched toward the car from darkened doorways, but Emile was unperturbed. He looked impatiently at his watch, then tapped the glass partition and gestured for the driver to turn down an alleyway. We weaved through the slum, rousing bums who slept on grates and in front of building vents. But the driver never blew his horn; Emile told me it was against the laws of Paris to blow a car horn. The entire time, he spoke without facing me. Finally he glanced in my direction and said, “So, you won an award.”

I read his expression, watching for disdain. I had hoped he wouldn’t mention the show. It embarrassed me to discuss my soap opera with France’s great director. “Yes, I did,” I said. “We give our viewers what they seem to want.”

“Really? What is that?”

“We make them laugh, make them cry, and make them wait.”

“It amazes me that a man like Chance Schutz would condescend to an audience like that. It really is an insult.”

I felt heat spreading up my neck, into my face. I looked out the car window.

“I mean, I’m always telling Chance, ‘Get out of that stuff.’ He’s too talented to waste himself on crap. Your show has an appeal, certainly, of a campish sort. But apart from that…”

The driver stopped in front of a building. A line wound from the front door around the block. People pressed close to our car, to see who would emerge.

“Now, get ready,” Emile said, ducking his head and hurtling out of the car the instant our driver opened the door. I followed, and when I looked up we were in a darkened palace, with a rock beat pounding in our ears and a thousand men in black tie greeting us, leading us to the preferred table, bearing a complimentary (or perhaps Emile’s customary) bottle of champagne, while those who were not prominent enough lounged glumly in the ground-floor waiting room and craned their necks to see who passed. I knew that crowd: in New York I had gone to Area, to Kamikaze, to Limelight, and watched the famous be whisked by like prize cattle. Occasionally I was among them.

Emile waved the waiter away and opened the bottle of champagne himself. Very indolent, his cigarette dangling off his lower lip, the smoke curling into his eyelashes and making him squint, he twisted the bottle around the cork and allowed a thin stream to cascade onto the table. He poured the wine. A waiter arrived instantly with a white linen cloth and swabbed the puddle. Emile watched, then leaned back and surveyed the room. “To art,” he said, raising the delicate flute.

“To art,” I said, surprising myself by thinking of
Beyond the Bridge
.

Emile had the sharp bone structure and boyish expression of a French sailor. He wore a heavy chronometer on his wrist, an accessory that looked fantastically incongruous beside the trim cuffs of his dinner jacket. His tousled brown hair looked windblown, but I had smelled the lacquer sitting close to him in the car. When he reached the end of his filterless cigarette, he jabbed it with a gold toothpick and brought it to his sensual lips. “Okay,” he said. “What were we saying about Chance Schutz? Oh yes—that he had better find a new baby.”

“Baby?”

“Baby. Project. Get the hell out of soap operas. He sent me several tapes of your show, by the way. You are a good actress. You’ve got spark and talent. That’s why I want to try you out. I think you will work.”

A couple danced close to our table, and a bodyguard materialized out of nowhere to prod them away. I watched with indifference, as if it happened to me every day. “Can you tell me about the movie?”

“It is about a woman alone. Has no one. She lives on the wild shore. Yet she is lovely. What has happened to her? Who has she loved? What did that love do to her? The movie unfolds into her story. It is a compelling script. Flashbacks leading to a new love in the present. Confrontations. But still abstract, like
The Listener
. Totally different than anything I have done before—I’ll give you a script before you leave Paris.”

“Are you shooting it here?”

“No. I’m shooting my current picture here. Parts of it. I don’t like setting a film in the city. I need the ambiguities of nature, the message. The symbolism.”

“Yes, I know.” I thought of the black zone of shore. I knew precisely what he meant; it was one of the reasons I felt drawn to his work. My eyes sharp with the recognition of a kindred spirit, I smiled at him, but his eyes were scanning the crowd. My father had taught me to never look around a room, trying to see who was there. Let them look for me. I had thought that a man like Emile Balfour would have learned the same lesson. “Where will you shoot the new picture?”

“Corsica. Very wild, desolate.” A quick glance. “You could live for four months without the distractions of a city?”

“Of course.”

“I wonder about Chance Schutz’s great interest in you. Are you lovers?”

I blushed, even though everyone knows how direct the French are about adultery. “No, we’re not. I’m a close friend of his and Billy’s. How do you know him?”

“He produced one of my early films. Many years ago, before I was known.”

I hadn’t known that. I thought of Chance and wondered how many young artists he had taken under his wing. He had transformed me from a drama student into one of America’s favorite soap stars. Because of Chance I was drinking champagne with Emile Balfour at Palace. I felt terribly guilty for being ashamed of the show, and I straightened my spine, determined to act proud.

Emile looked vaguely bored; he gazed through the room at the writhing dancers, the dark tables around the perimeter, the waiters stationed like extra police at a parade. At his glance the waiters started toward our table, but Emile shook his head impatiently, and they stopped in their tracks. Statues.

A tuxedoed man approached us, and no one stopped him. By Emile’s expression I could see that this was the person he had been looking for. A slur of French, and then Emile motioned for him to sit down. Emile’s manner toward me changed drastically. Suddenly he was pressed beside me, one finger tracing the back of my hand on the table, his warm breath on the back of my ear.

“Arnaud, meet Una Cavan. The American actress.” He said “the American actress” as if I were in a class with Meryl Streep.

“
Enchanté,”
Arnaud said, grinning broadly. He had a shiny bald head and wore round wire glasses. “So delighted to make your acquaintance. Perhaps you will give me
le scoop
?” He whipped out a small cassette recorder, placed it on the table, and switched it on. For several seconds there was silence. Emile leaned over and gave me a long kiss, his tongue entering my mouth, his hand passing across my breasts.

“You ready?” he asked into my mouth.

By the time I had recovered from the kiss and divined that Arnaud was a reporter, Emile had started talking.

“I am trying to persuade Una to accept a role in my next film. As you know, it will be shot on Corsica, and that is all I can say. Una is used to the bright lights of New York. Can such a woman last on Corsica? She needs a lot of action, this one.” He kissed the top of my ear. A photographer darted around our table. Arnaud smiled unctuously.

I sat there, growing stiff. What was he doing? I continued to smile for the camera. I could not move; I was the Petrified Forest of rage. I thought of Sam, having dinner alone at the Ninigret Inn. At that precise moment he was probably hunched over a plate of steamed cod, reading an Agatha Christie paperback. Emile kissed my neck, and I flinched.

“What is your best work, Una?” Arnaud asked.

Before I could reply, Emile said, “No doubt about that. She is a cult figure on
Beyond the Bridge
. It is a daytime serial. Of a very different sort.”

A cult figure? Somehow I had never thought of my fans as a cult. I could not believe Emile’s approach—first call soap operas “crap” and tear down the people who work in them, then hype them up for the media and make them seem fashionable, cultish. I smiled weakly at Arnaud and the photographer, afraid of showing my true feelings. If I showed them how angry I felt, I would displease Emile, and I was not practiced in displeasing men. Emile began to speak in French. For fifteen minutes I stared at his gargantuan watch, willing the interview to end. Suddenly, without a word to me, Emile touched my hand and stood. He rushed toward the door, leaving me to run after him. On the way past our waiter, he signed his name to the bill.

In the back seat of the car, he faced me. His expression was blank. “I am sorry. I can see that you are upset. Aren’t you used to interviews?”

“Not…that kind,” I said in the strongest way I could. I could have said, “No,
I’m not
, you asshole.” Instead, I shrugged and looked apologetic, because I did not want to offend the man. He had too much power over my future for me to slug him. Emile reached around, patting my cheek tenderly. He turned my face toward his.

“Una, I am very sorry. But you understand publicity, don’t you? How reporters must be manipulated, how situations must be made to appear a certain way? You are watched by millions of American women, a market that I would very much like to reach with my films. You are my entrée to that market.”

Wasn’t that sort of the same as being a doormat? I thought. Emile’s voice was cool and soothing. If I had heard it about an hour earlier, I would not be in this state now. I stared at him, squinting with anger. Emile immediately turned away, fishing a cigarette from a leather pocket on the car door, and lit it.