I nod and reach for my wineglass with my free hand. I am not ready to let go of hers.
“With my first husband it was a real problem,” she continues. “I was young, and for a long time I didn’t understand that I didn’t have to put up with this. That I deserved better. Marriage is a compromise, yes, but if you’re both playing by different sets of rules someone is going to get hurt. Someone always gets hurt.”
I am trying to recall the details of her first marriage, of her divorce. He was an actor, son of the legendary Emmanuel Laurent, an iconic star of French New Wave film. In the same breath as Belmondo and Delon. The son, Pascal, was a club kid–cum-model who’d followed in his father’s footsteps onto the big screen and achieved success in France quickly. He was not the actor his father was, but he had an indisputable magnetism, and a face the camera adored. In the late ’90s he became known as quite the lady-killer. He dated mostly models, a British pinup, an American socialite, and the heiress to an Italian car company. And then he crossed paths with Anouk. Their relationshipwas electric and served as constant tabloid fodder. There were stories of wild nights and yachts and drugs and threesomes and foursomes. And to me, the daughter of somewhat conservative Jamaicans, it sounded reckless and louche.
They eloped, she got pregnant, he continued his partying ways, and ultimately the flame fizzled. Or at least that’s what I’d garnered from the covers ofVoici,Oops!,andFrance Dimanche. So to hear her own version of it was revelatory.
“Pascal was in love with the idea of being in love. Or what he thought was love, which was definitely not. With Pascal, everything was a limerence.”
“A what?”
“Limerence. Like a romantic obsession or intense infatuation. But not real love. With Frederick, it’s different. It’s not perfect—no marriage is—but we make it work. We have an understanding.”
I want to ask her what exactly their understanding entails, but our waitress appears then with a bottle of champagne and two glasses.
“We didn’t order this,” Anouk says, letting loose my hand.
“It’s a gift from the two gentlemen near the window. They’re fans of your work.”
“Ah.” Anouk makes an expression that I am unable to read. And then she nods and smiles in the direction of the gifting table. “Please tell them that’s very kind. Thank you.”
“I thought you didn’t day drink,” I say, once our glasses are poured and the waitress departs.
“There are times when I feel like I don’t have a choice. Feelings get hurt. Especially with men. It’s not worth it.
“Alors…”She raises her glass then, first to the men across the room, then to me. “Santé!”
“So much for having an affair here in the middle of the day.” I smile at her.
“Yes.” She returns the favor. “So much for that.”
“What are you doing Thursday night?” she asks, once our first plates arrive and we are feasting on smoked-trout salad and mushroom toasts. “I have an extra ticket to Alvin Ailey at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and you strike me as someone who would appreciate it.”
I’d last seen Alvin Ailey perform at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paristhree years before, treating Lucie for her ninth birthday. For two and a half hours I had the unparalleled joy of witnessing her complete and utter glee. The fact that she shared my love for something I found so intensely beautiful was a gift. “I am definitely someone who would appreciate it.
“Frederick doesn’t want to go?”
“Frederick would go to amuse me. You would go and fall in love. I’d rather watch the latter.”
For a moment, I pause. Fork suspended en route to mouth. I am not certain how to play this game. And if ever I was, I am surely now out of practice. It strikes me then that perhaps it had all been leading to this. The wining and dining and saving the elephants. Perhaps she’d been wooing me all along. And perhaps I had been too awed by her to notice.
“I mean,” she says then, in French, “assuming you’re okay with that.”
I smile, step out on a limb. “Assume I’m okay with that.”
After, outside, at the valet stand, as Anouk is about to get into her Tesla, she leans into me, kisses both cheeks. “You know, regarding Élodie, I would not have pegged you as the kind of woman who would have stuck around after such a thing. French women, yes, because maybe we are more used to it. If not in reality, then at least in our popular culture. But you? I’d like to think you would take a few lovers of your own. And then burn it all down.”
And with that, she gets in her electric car and drives away.
XVI.REVELATIONS.
LOS ANGELES.
APRIL. 2015.
If Anouk’s intention that Thursday was to watch me fall in love, she succeeded. Our seats, in the sixth row, orchestra, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion rendered us a heart-stopping view of the dance troupe’s performance. All throughout the first and second acts, even duringRevelations, which I had seen twice before, I was besotted. The poetry, the grace, the lines, the art. Bodies sinuous and sublime, slicing through air, unbound by gravity. An utterly profound beauty. I wanted to be both of it and be witness to it at once. And it struck me then: the desire to create a work that would affect my viewer the same way.
“Did you dance when you were young?” she asks me later when we are in the back seat of a Mercedes-Maybach S-Class being driven home. Naturally, she has a driver. She has, I have learned since my initial visit to her Brentwood estate, an entire staff.
