Mon amie américaine (3 page)

I wonder how your family can stand this waiting, these hours spent in your room at your side, with you so near yet so unreachable.

You would say that in order to better love your parents, you needed to be far away from them. That when you were with them, you felt yourself regressing, becoming a little girl again. And no matter how much I'd explain to you that every adult permanently remains her parents' child, you didn't seem convinced.

You were outraged at the dinner for your parents' fiftieth anniversary a few months ago when they lectured you for having given them too expensive a present. “They've always dreamed of going on a safari in Kenya, but when I give it to them, they're obsessed with how much I paid for it. They ought to be happy that I can afford it instead of supervising what I do with my money! In my family, we're always worrying instead of enjoying.” I explained to you that mine operated on the same model and that it was obvious that Holocaust survivors have a hard time putting any levity in their life, but you wouldn't calm down.

Your parents had scheduled their trip for next January. My poor Molly, I don't think they're about to go.

Your surgeon suggested to those close to you that they install a hotline to your bedside. Now there's a phone number your friends can call. It's connected to an answering machine that invites people to leave a message for you. A device regularly plays them out loud in your room, in the hope that you'll recognize these voices and that they'll help you resurface, return to where you lost consciousness.

A beautiful idea that made me enthusiastic on the spot. To talk to you, finally! After eight weeks of silence, what a relief! In principle, it was a great idea.

In reality it was another story. I hung up several times without leaving a message. I could not afford to sob as I spoke, or let myself be carried away with emotion, rage, grief. But how could I sound cheerful, like somebody doing well in the best of worlds? What could I say to you, aside from some banalities: “It's me, I miss you, thinking of
you, if you only knew how impatient I am to come and see you and hold you in my arms … OK, uh, well, kisses and see you soon, my darling ostrich, take care of yourself.” Pitiful …

It's not a question of leaving you any stressful messages. It's just a matter of sending you regards, in hopes that hearing those whose identity is associated with these voices in a dormant corner of your brain will make memory return. Or at least that some of these recollections are prodding you, because who knows what's become of your memory bank, your brain? How to lift that trapdoor, that leaden silence keeping you in this perverse state of sleep? Can our voices pull off a miracle like the one brought about by the kiss of Benoît's Prince Charming? Is there a secret formula that can put an end to your coma, Molly, and break this spell?

FOR LACK OF POSITIVE MESSAGES TO DELIVER TO YOU IN A TONE MORE OR LESS NATURAL
, we've had the idea of enlisting some people from your photos, those VIPs who were kind enough to ask for news of you to begin with. We've drawn up a list of your fifteen favorite personalities, the ones whose voices we think you'd be most likely to recognize, and we've supplied them with that magic telephone number that we were having more and more trouble dialing ourselves. The most famous blonde in French film has even left you a long message.

When I think that it's thanks to Tom Cruise that we met … I was working for a movie magazine, and you were a publicist. Tom Cruise was insisting on some absurd requirements in exchange for the sale of a series of photos of him that I urgently needed because we were finalizing the issue. You'd listened uncomplainingly to me defending
my point of view. Then, in a very calm voice, in contrast with my stridency, you'd said to me, “So I'm going to explain to him that you accept all his conditions and I'll give you access to the photos. Then, if he sees the magazine, he can blow a gasket about it all by himself because I'm quitting this gig in fifteen days. As a matter of fact, I agree with you: he's unmanageable.” A friendship was born.

Since that time, you've changed jobs, and so have I. I counted: we've both been doing the same work for ten years.

Do you remember that young intern last year who sent you a cover letter? You forwarded me a copy of it with the following comments: “He's cute. He thinks we live in the dark and watch masterpieces while we eat popcorn.” You'd underlined a sentence in which he explained, “I'm dreaming of spending entire days next to you in the dark.”

You ended up letting him come in so you could explain to him that you spent the lion's share of your days hunting down news items in order to find out about films that are being produced, watching stuff that was mostly a chore, and reading screenplays every day that were more often hard to
stomach than mind-blowing. That hadn't seemed to discourage him. So you dealt him the death blow by asking him if he liked gambling. Thinking he was giving the right answer, he'd answered that he hated it. That put an end to the interview.

You and I gamble all the time, for real. We take risks, put substantial sums on several projects. We bet on a story, a team whose job it is to tell it. And then the film is shot. We wait with our stomach in knots. When the betting is closed and the film is finished, when it has been released to theaters, the audience returns its verdict. It is only at that point that you know whether you've gambled well, whether you've won or lost. You call that having
the knack
. The trick, the mojo. But you need luck as well. It's the reason why you always wear a charm bracelet on your right wrist. I remember a tiny cube of dice, a miniature fish, a key, an imp. If you come out of this, I'll have a little four-leaf clover made for you. Me, the person who has never found one.

For many years, you've had your room at my place, and your habits. In Manhattan, you found me a hotel around the corner from your office. We're always together at film festivals, except at
night, because your messiness and my fussiness don't go hand in hand, and our jet lag is never in sync, so one of us would keep the other from sleeping. Most of the time you're ahead of me because of jet lag and the fact that you travel more often. As was the case in London recently, we spend ten or so days one-on-one, five or six times a year, a united front against the rest of the profession, seeing and discussing films. And now, I'm preparing to go without you to a festival where I'm going to feel lost, where everybody is going to ask me for news of you, and where I can't imagine not having you beside me.

I'm probably going to get to know that young assistant you just hired. (“Hallelujah! He's an ace backgammon player!” you'd said.)

Don't worry, I'm going to help him, enough so that he can stand in for you, but not too much, so that he won't imagine he could take your place.

While waiting to leave for London again, I ended up being taken along on a side trip for people from the film world to Saint Petersburg, a place I'd never been. You often went to the Moscow Film Festival, which takes place every year in July, but you didn't tell me anything about it,
except that year when you'd fallen in love with an actor who you said was young enough to be your son, which made you hold back.

I'm very uncomfortable here, despite the beauty of the city, and I think you would have felt the same. The younger jet set sends even more shivers down my spine in this country than it does elsewhere. The women have a heady beauty, but there's nothing relaxed about it. It seems to be a very concrete form of currency. What the men are thinking is written on their faces. Face and neck are squashed into a single severe mass, and there's a restrained violence that their tailored suits don't soften. Molly, don't be shocked, but at the point we've reached, I figure that it's time to have all religions start contributing. I managed to give the group the slip this morning, enough time to go and light a candle for you in a tiny, freezing cold, jam-packed Orthodox church.

The congregation was composed of old women whose religious fervor blew me away. The beauty of the chants, the intensity of the faces; it wasn't that different from Tarkovsky's films. Since you've been in that elsewhere I find inexplicable, I've thought more about Bergman, Fellini, Lynch,
Wenders, Huston, Visconti, and Truffaut than about more contemporary directors. Just as in literature, the classics are a better refuge, because of their crystal-clear lucidity and amused humanity.

A half hour went by, and I couldn't leave that church. I lingered on the steps by the entrance, caught by the beauty of the chants, intoxicated by the incense, bewitched by the sound of a bell hanging from a chain that a priest shook.

I've never gone with you to pray. Even to a synagogue. You've explained to me a hundred times that you're not a believer. That you don't succumb, as I do, to the beauty of the liturgical chants. But you turned on the waterworks when Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind” at Lady Di's funeral.

We were at the Toronto Film Festival that day, or rather that night. Because of the time difference, it was three in the morning when the broadcast began. A giant screen had been set up in the largest stadium in the city to show the ceremony, and you'd insisted on going. The crowd was unbelievable. Young people, old people, children in strollers, kids on their bikes. You'd brought sandwiches
and a thermos of coffee. It was like a kind of mourning festival. All the smells you'd associate with celebration: food, beer, people lying down and smoking grass. But the faces looked transfixed, frozen with grief. In the stadium, the sobbing spilled out in sheets, like a giant wave of tears. Your comments jumped from one subject to another, from the dignity of the two boys, so tiny behind their mother's casket, to the beauty of Nicole Kidman on the arm of Tom Cruise; from the noticeable absence of Stanley Kubrick, who'd been filming with them in the greatest secrecy for the last year, to the surprising appearance of Steven Spielberg, who'd made the trip. Only Elton John succeeded in interrupting your chatter. On the way back, you pointed out the windows that were still lit up. “You see, nobody is sleeping, everyone watched. It reminds me of when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I was seven, and it was the first time my parents had let me stay up that late.” You asked me if I would have let my children stay up all night to watch the funeral, and when the answer, “Of course not!” popped out of my mouth, you howled with laughter and called me a “French tight-ass.” You were right: if
it hadn't been for you, I would have missed that strange moment, suspended in time, that planetary communion.

Also in Toronto, I can remember an Indian summer a few years later that was especially mild, with a cloudless blue sky. We were having breakfast on a terrace. In the café, a television screen above the bar was playing. It was on mute and tuned to CNN. Suddenly a voice yelled from inside:
Holy shit!
And the sound was turned up full blast. Ten minutes later, you were spelling out that name for me that sounded like
Aladdin
— bin Laden. Your cell phone had lost its signal, as was the case for many devices dependent on a US transmitter, but mine, which used a French number, was still functioning. I was able to reach my office in Paris, and my assistant managed to call your parents at their home and let you speak to them. Thirty minutes later, nothing was working any more. We were cut off from the rest of the world. We felt as if we were in a film in which every image had been slowed down. Reality was distorted. Traffic was moving slowly. Every driver seemed to have succumbed to the same curse: they seemed dazed, their windows open, their radios at top volume. All of them
weren't listening to the same station, but for some strange reason the racket was reassuring. It produced an illusion of everyday normality.

Like all the New Yorkers, you hurried to rent a car. You left in the afternoon. I remember walking for a long time on sidewalks that were abnormally empty, passing stores that were closed, terraces that were deserted. Everyone was home, with their family. I spent the evening alone in my hotel room, sprawled in front of the television, thinking of my children. You waited in line all night to cross the border.

THIS MORNING CLARA ASKED ME WHY YOU AND I WERE FRIENDS
. I told her I couldn't explain it. But I spent the day asking myself that same question. Why do you, the American, the pragmatist, the businesswoman, the softhearted girl, occupy such a place in my life?

In no particular order:

Because you make me laugh, because you move me.

Because you're indefatigable.

Because you always bring me back a souvenir from the countries you go to without me.

Because you know how to give presents that are unbelievable. I'll never be without that ivory ball inside a black lacquered box that gives off a vanilla fragrance. I don't know where you came across it, nor how the idea came to you. You gave it to me “for inspiration,” and for the last fifteen
years I haven't written a single line without having it next to me.

Because you never forget a special occasion or a birthday.

Because you love soul music, like me, and really soft pillows, peonies, hot water bottles, and earrings.

Because at every film festival we attend together, you find the best Japanese, the best cappuccino, the best bookstore, and because you send updates every year.

Because you know how to fix my telephone and my computer.

Because at the bottom of your bag you always have tissues, batteries, candy, Advil, a nail file, a bookmark, and a packet of Tabasco sauce, because you think there's never enough in a Bloody Mary.

Because you know how to do card tricks.

Because you can put on nail polish in the back of a moving car without spilling it.

Because you have a good sense of direction.

Because you always read my horoscope when you read yours.

Because you never wear eye makeup but do put on lipstick, and I do the opposite.