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“I could convert you,” Dianna says.
“Baby. You’re a star. We all know that,” Comstock says. “Right, Tanner?”
But Tanner isn’t listening. He’s staring at me intently and I remember why, after we split up, I climbed up a fire escape and broke into his apartment to have sex with him.
Without taking his eyes off me, Tanner says, “By the way, is anyone going to Saint Tropez? After this?”
There’s a full moon as I excuse myself, ostensibly to go to the bathroom. Instead, I hurry down the long marble staircase out to the manicured gravel walkway that leads to the pool. The summer she died, Amanda had decided to “get into the movie business,” and she came here with a middle-aged character actor who sent her home after she stayed out all night with an up-and-coming young screenwriter. It was just so Amanda to get everything wrong.
I veer off to the left and into a small enclosed garden with a fountain of turtles in the middle. I sit on a bench.
Sure enough, in about a minute Tanner shows up, fingering a joint. “You look like you could use this,” he says.
“Do I look that bad?”
“You just look like . . . you’re not having any fun.”
“I’m not.”
“How are you, baby?” he says, sitting with his legs open, delicately holding the joint between his thumb and forefinger as he inhales deeply. “I told you not to marry that poofster. Didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you he’d make you miserable? You should have run off with me when you had the chance.”
“That’s right,” I say miserably, thinking about how after Tanner and I had sex, we would both be ripped and slightly bloody. He grabs my wrist now and says, “I’m still hot for you, baby. Still very, very hot,” and I say, “Is this a compliment?” and he says, “It’s a reality,” and I say, “I have to get out of here.” I run back up the path, looking over my shoulder to see if he’s following and he isn’t and I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing, and I cross through the lobby and out the front door, where Dianna is standing in front of the hotel, shouting for the car.
And moments later we’re all drunk and stoned and fucked up and in the Mercedes again, driving back to the yacht in Cannes and there are people, men mostly, in the car whom I’ve never seen before and never want to see again.
This guy with spiky dark hair and a black T-shirt keeps leaning over me, chanting, “Where I have gone, I would not go back,” which is a line I think he read in a Bret Easton Ellis novel, but while I’m seriously wondering if he even can read, I respond, “I don’t know why I’m here, I guess because Dianna invited me.”
“I’m a big rucking STAR,” Dianna screams.
And then, I don’t know exactly how to describe it, I feel like the world is pulling away while at the same time becoming seriously claustrophic. I shout, “Stop the car,” and everybody turns and looks at me like I’m insane, but they sort of expect me to be insane anyway, and the car does come to a stop in the middle of Cannes and I do climb over three men and fumble desperately with the door handle, which finally releases and before anyone really knows what’s happened I’ve spilled out of the car and into a crowd of people on the sidewalk. I look back at the car and slide out of my high heels, grasping them in my hand as I begin running through the crowd toward the Majestic Hotel, where there’s a swarm of photographers and kleig lights. I veer onto a side street, passing a gay bar where there’s a man wearing a tutu, and I nearly run into the little girl with the red roses, who grabs my wrist and says, “Madame, come with me.”
And this time, I do.
* * *
In the early morning I am walking back to the yacht, feeling even MORE hungover and wasted than I ever have in my life, except maybe when I was younger and I first met Tanner and we would spend whole weekends snorting cocaine and drinking vodka. I would very often call in sick on Monday, but I never got in trouble because everyone knew I was seeing a big movie star and that was more important for the image of the gallery than having someone answer the phone. And it was especially useful when Tanner used to come into the gallery to pick me up. He was obsessed with me at first and would stop by the gallery quite often, just to make sure that some other man wasn’t trying to seduce me, and these incidents were usually faithfully recorded by the gossip columns (although they didn’t mention my name, because I wasn’t “somebody” then), providing free publicity for the gallery. Everyone treated me awfully well and seemed to really like me, but did they have a choice? Even back then I was being USED by other people for my ability to attract men. And I have never wondered about this before, but I do now: Would I be ANYTHING without a man?
A taxi pulls up in front of the yacht, and a tall, handsome man wearing a polo shirt and jeans gets out and turns toward me, and I realize it’s my husband.
The sun is shining; it must be later than I thought. The bustle of the harbor begins to fill my consciousness—the first mates hosing the decks, a young woman walking by with produce from the farmer’s market, people scurrying by with press passes—and as Hubert approaches, holding his beat-up leather valise, I see, for the first time, his prodigious blandness. How, underneath all the fuss about his family and his looks and his background, he is still, in the end, JUST SOME GUY.
“Hey,” he says. “What happened to you?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“You’re bleeding. You’ve got blood on your hands.” He looks down. “And on your feet. And ink stains. What happened to your shoes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, how are you, anyway? Did you get my message?”
“That you were coming?”
“About renting a speedboat. Hey, as long as I’m here, I thought it might be fun if we spent the day waterskiing.”
Waterskiing?
Hubert carries his bag onto the yacht. “Marc De Belond has a house here. I thought we might hook up with him.”
