Men Read online

  The waitress came to take their orders. George gave the waitress the eye. The waitress laughed. She looked like Anne Hathaway. George’s agent suggested Anne Hathaway. Jessie’s agent boasted about one of his clients, Kelye, a little bit has-been. Eva Green would be better, said George’s agent. Three starlets in fake Versace sat down at the next table. At the end of the terrace, near the fountain, Kate Bosworth was drinking a smoothie. She called out hi to George. A role was hovering over Hollywood, a role with its little wings, its flimsy little dress, its little ‘where to land?’ look. Los Angeles was starting to buzz, to raise a fine golden dust on its crackleware back.

  The waitress moved off. The fish in the pond darted around and the men talked. An English girl? Keira Knightley? A clever and classy European girl? A French girl? Ted said the name Audrey Tautou four times. Jessie suggested Catherine Deneuve, young. Jessie’s agent said Julie Delpy. Ted said Audrey Tautou for the fifth time.

  Kouhouesso looked at her. She gave him her audition smile. He looked at her as he did often: his head slightly tilted, mildly worried, as if he was surprised she was there. Or else (the idea suddenly struck her) he, too, was trying to work it out. Since the beginning. Who she looked like. That face. Those eyes.

  He had tied back his dreadlocks. He was wearing a thin cashmere sweater, pale turquoise, nothing underneath, and a scarf of yellow linen. He seemed even taller and almost skinny, apart from the breadth of his shoulders under the mass of hair. Jessie suggested Kim Wilde. When she was young. He’d be happy to have young Kim Wilde for himself. Ted was sulking. Kouhouesso called the waitress for a second Eastern Standard (vodka-tonic cucumber-mint) and excused himself to go out for a cigarette. George took Solange by the elbow and led her out to the terrace, on the heels of Kouhouesso.

  A thick layer of red mist was lying over Los Angeles like blush. Kouhouesso was leaning against the guardrail, the smoke from his cigarette merging with the fog. Sunset Boulevard was spread out fifteen storeys below, as if, simply by extending his arms, Kouhouesso himself had thrown a spotlight on it.

  George said that she, Solange, would be perfect as the Intended. ‘She would no doubt be perfect,’ joked Kouhouesso, ‘but first I have to see her naked.’ Everyone gave a bit of a laugh. George raised his finger, a waitress appeared. He ordered champagne, but Kouhouesso, who steered clear of mixing his drinks, stuck with his Eastern Standard. The terrace was a raft floating on the fog.

  Then Kouhouesso started to tell a slightly strange story, in which he recounted that he hadn’t wanted to be tactless to a certain girl at a certain party, not knowing if she was with someone and possibly him, George, in any case not knowing if he wasn’t over-interpreting the signals he received, aware that he was experiencing a certain level of tension, by no means unpleasant (he smiled at the red fog) but anxious, first and foremost, not to come across as inappropriate, because, in this world where nothing is left unsaid, he made it a point of honour to leave each person to his, or her, private life: what did he know in fact about that girl? Nothing, and he would have rather been struck down by lightning that night than risk the slightest impropriety.

  It was as if he had wanted to communicate something to them, a secret, a declaration, but the message was lost. As for the Intended, the casting slipped back into limbo.

  There was a bit of a commotion inside. Jessie had spilled his drink down his Gucci suit and the waitresses were buzzing around him. Ted had gone, no one knew where. They were discussing Jessie’s role, which was now clearer: Kouhouesso had developed the character of the steamboat driver, only two pages in the novel, but probably the most racist pages. Jessie wouldn’t stop reading the description out loud, at the top of his voice, in Soho House: ‘an improved specimen’, ‘a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs’! Kouhouesso and he were having a good laugh. She and George gazed at the fish. ‘A fucking racist masterpiece!’ yelled Jessie. Kouhouesso, magnanimous and instructional, spoke about period and narrative: Marlow’s point of view on negroes, whereas these days George or Solange…‘A fucking racist masterpiece!’ Jessie repeated. The word negro reverberated like a bell in Solange’s already painful skull.

  They had to find a name for this cannibal: Kouhouesso put forward ‘Iyapo’, the name of his grandfather, Iyapo meaning ‘many troubles’. Everyone laughed. The pitfalls would be more numerous than the mosquitoes in the rainy season.

  So there was a grandfather. She wondered if everyone in the family had names ending in o. Did ‘Kouhouesso’ mean something? Her French teacher had taught her, around the time when the whole high school was wearing ‘SOS Racism’ badges, that it was impolite to ask the meaning of names. George means George. Solange doesn’t mean either Sol (‘soil’) or Ange (‘angel’), but comes from the Latin, solennis. Only white people would assume that savages have names that mean ‘little cloud in the wind’ or that sort of thing. Back then, she didn’t dare point out to her teacher that her second name, Oïhana, meant ‘forest’ in Basque. The Basque people are the Africans of Europe.

  The character of Iyapo-Jessie had to be stoking the boiler on the boat during the whole trip up the river. Which meant three weeks in the Congo for Jessie. He had taken off his stained jacket and undone the top buttons of his shirt. His agent suggested that he go back two or three times, but would that fit in with Angry Men 4? And what about the promotional tour for Return of Scissors? ‘Fuck the promotion,’ Jessie said loudly, and he lit up a joint right there on the terrace. Kouhouesso explained that you can’t just ‘go back two or three times’ to central Congo. The caves he had in mind for Kurtz’s station were only accessible by helicopter. ‘Does Ted know that?’ asked George. His own window of time was only a week; the dates for Sailor’s 13 were scheduled, as was the second film he was directing. Kouhouesso looked up to the sky: ‘Santa Rita, pray for me.’ A waitress brought Jessie an ashtray and apologised on behalf of the management: the person delivering the new suit was stuck in traffic. Jessie took off his shirt.

  His girlfriend had turned up. Her name was Alma—enormous breasts and about eighteen years old. Jessie read her the description of Iyapo, filed teeth and a piece of polished bone stuck through his lower lip. Alma ordered a room-temperature latte, not too hot, not too cold, easy enough, no? In the end, the role of Kurtz-George was the least problematic: it was crucial, but all concentrated at the end of the film. Except that his scene was supposed to be shot on site, at the caves, and the insurance was delaying things: George was worth a mint. The casting for Marlow was underway: they were waiting for an answer from Sean Penn. Jessie was tom-tomming on a bar stool; in a minute he was going to jump on a table and shout, naked and beating his chest. George was laughing. There were more cocktails on the house.

  Solange said she could make herself available at any time, including the Congo shoot, but no one seemed to hear her. Her cheeks were burning and her belly was tied in knots. Jessie-Iyapo launched into a southern nursery rhyme, Old MacDonald had a farm, ee i ee i oh…His suit had arrived; Alma was helping him put it on among a swarm of waitresses. The sun was plunging down over the city, red and flat like an ecstasy tablet.

  THE FREEDOM OF THE SAVANNAH

  It was a stifling December. Jessie was by the pool the whole time. By his pool. Alma was there, too. Otherwise, no one really knew where she lived. Inside her phone, apparently. Jessie told her off. It was a long-term educational undertaking: ‘It’s really bad manners to be on your phone when you’re with someone. If you were a man, you’d be a jerk. Which person are you prioritising? Think about it: the one who is absent, or the one who is physically present? Can you really count the time you spend on the phone as quality time? Do you consider that you are with the person to whom you are speaking at a distance? Do you really consider that you can call it time spent together when it’s on the phone?’

  In Solange’s opinion, he overused the interrogative. And when he kept going, making quotation mark signs with his fingers, she screwed up her eyes in pain. ‘
Don’t you think the physical presence is the most important part? You don’t speak to someone in the same way when their body is absent as you do when their body is present. Haven’t you ever felt the difference? I mean, physically? Politeness is not just words, politeness is what you owe to the physical presence of the other: you respect your own body, so when you’re on the phone it’s the same thing. Your priority should be the person who is present, in the full meaning of the word…’ He was a real proselytiser, and taught her, among other things, the meaning of the word proselytiser. The problem was that there was no pool without Jessie. For the moment, one went with the other. He was between shoots.

  The Mexican gardeners were busy spreading fresh bark mulch around the flowerbeds. Hummingbirds flitted from flower to flower, magically suspended in the air here and there. The rose bushes had all reflowered, in the middle of December, like an early or very late spring—no one knew anymore. They spoke about the weather; they spoke about the fact that they no longer spoke in the same way about the climate. They spoke about the end of the world, not scheduled by the Mayans but by our own irresponsible behaviour. The maid brought them grapefruit-vodka cocktails. Alma sent hers back, some temperature issue. Kouhouesso was still asleep. Or else he’d had his coffee but he had to be left alone. No sound came from upstairs. She wondered if he was correcting Wikipedia entries.

  They had learnt the day before that the key producer, who had signed on because of George’s name alone, had pulled out after reading the script. Coppola had done immense damage to Conrad: a legendary film, certainly, but above all a budgetary apocalypse. And no one wanted to insure George in the Congo. No one could imagine Jessie in the Congo. And no one wanted to do sound engineering in the Congo. In fact, no one wanted to hear the word Congo. That’s what Hollywood was there for, to reinvent the Congo—in the studio. As well as the boat. The BBC was said to be interested, but the idea of a real boat made them back off; they could already see Kouhouesso as Werner Herzog, drowning in a river of pounds sterling. And there was no news from Sean Penn. And Anne Hathaway was overbooked.

  Everything was foundering, like a steamboat without wood for fuel, a vessel that was all set up, designed, constructed, the river ahead and the enormous forest around, but whose crew, only just put together, had disappeared into thin air. Kouhouesso’s phone didn’t ring anymore. George was the only one encouraging him to refine his script while he had free time. It’s the freedom of the savannah, said Kouhouesso. I’m not free of anything.

  The only area in which he could still do something was in the casting. Marlow was on hold, nothing was being said about the Intended, but for the black actress he had a series of meetings with African-American women, Nigerian women from Hollywood, Caribbean women, and even the Surinamese woman from George’s party.

  ‘What Surinamese woman?’

  ‘The Surinamese woman from George’s party.’

  ‘Lola? The one who was in Lost? She’s not black.’

  ‘Of course she’s black.’

  Lola Behn. On her Wikipedia entry she was 71% European, 26% African, and 3% Orinico Delta Warao Indian from Venezuela. She had been part of the Roots DNA testing program. Twenty-six per cent, according to Kouhouesso, made her clearly a black person: ‘For white people, if you’re not completely white, you are black; for mixed-race people, that’s never the case.’

  She felt as if she was hearing the famous old stand-up joke on TV about washing powders that wash ‘whiter than white’ and ‘less white than white’. Didn’t he know it?

  No. He never spoke about his childhood. It was clear from his lack of connection with the others, from the signs of non-recognition, that he had not danced to Kim Wilde in his adolescence, not drunk Malibu pineapple cocktails, never had a skateboard or a Walkman, never watched MTV, and had no idea about the pop singers and TV hosts who were the idols of her youth.

  As soon as he left, he disappeared again. Two days, six days, ten days. She waited for him. And he came back. He always came back.

  She didn’t like the idea that he had meetings with all those black girls, each one more beautiful and younger than the one before.

  She had asked him for one word of certainty. But he wasn’t at a point in his life when he could commit. Because of the film. ‘Solange, the only commitments I know are the ones from people in this profession.’ One of the stories that made him laugh was the way Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson all pussyfooted around Coppola: by saying neither yes nor no when he was casting Apocalypse Now, they had driven him crazy.

  Solange. He had said her name: ‘Solange, the only commitments I know are the ones from people in this profession.’ Proper pronunciation, with the nasal –ange. It was the first time. When he wasn’t using ‘hey’ he called her ‘Sugar’ or ‘Babe’, cute, cheeky names, always in English. But: Solange. It was proof, if not of love, at least of affection. And he had kissed her, smack.

  Every night he went back to his script, not in order to de-Congolise it, but so that on the first day of shooting all his energy would be available for any unexpected events caused by the forest. And by Jessie, she wanted to add.

  The freedom of the savannah (she learned on the Internet) was what a slave was granted informally, without emancipation papers.

  CRASH TEST

  ‘He’s going round in circles,’ Jessie said to her, brooding. ‘Ever since you spoke to him about Godard, all he does is play tennis.’ Jessie, one on one, turned out to be so much shrewder than when he was with Alma. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, most men only revealed themselves properly when they were talking to her alone. Rose had always attested to this: there was something about her that allowed even the most difficult individuals to open up.

  Wearing white shorts, Kouhouesso crossed the path, heading to his car. The Mexican doorman opened the metal security gate for him. She stayed there. She didn’t dare go away: she never knew when she’d see him again. And she wasn’t absolutely certain that, with Alma around, Jessie would receive her.

  She arranged a dinner for him with Peter Maximovitch, a longstanding friend she had met through Chabrol. David Steinberg from The Sopranos was there, and Gaspar Melchior from HBO, and the guys from ClickStar, who might be interested. Kouhouesso announced that he would only accept money from television on the condition that he had total creative freedom, a ‘final cut’ clause set in stone, and Maximovitch, who was well acquainted with madness, looked at him with admiration, expert as he was in self-sabotage and deliberate scuttling. When Bob Evans arrived, very late and very old, on the arm of a very young nurse in a very short uniform, Solange looked at Kouhouesso expectantly: the Golden Age of Hollywood was there. He stayed silent. Peter told a story she already knew, about a joyride on the occasion of the launch of his first film: Coppola post–Godfather, in his enormous limousine, Friedkin post–The Exorcist, who was sticking his head out of the roof, and Peter, in his beaten-up Volvo, racing them on Sunset Boulevard and all of them yelling me me me—a classic competition to see who could piss the furthest.

  But weariness seemed to have caught up with Kouhouesso. The evening subsided into chatter about the weather: Bob was worried that the nurse was feeling the heat. Peter had never known such a sweltering December since he’d arrived in Los Angeles, the very first winter of the seventies.

  The winter I was born, thought Solange. In Clèves, a long way from here.

  Was it such a bad idea to have wanted to introduce him to the dinosaurs, to the witnesses of a time when Hollywood was one huge party? A cinephile like him should have been fascinated. Sure, his project was stalling, but they had all been through bad times, too. In the nineties, Maximovitch used to walk down Hollywood Boulevard with his starched mauve shirt and his bandana knotted in a floppy bowtie. Do you remember me? I was Peter Maximovitch. He would get himself photographed on exactly the spot where the statue of Shrek stands today. But he had lived on so long after his downfall that he had become a kind of idol. Personally, she wor
shipped him. He would have made a magnificent Kurtz, thin, lined, arrogant: more Kinski than Brando. If he’d survived Hollywood, the Congo wouldn’t be the end of him.

  She was joking around; she’d had too much to drink. Less than Kouhouesso, but too much. At this point in the conversation, he was sunk in his habitual silence, but the rest of the gang were all laughing; Peter, defying his age, was pretending to be Tarzan on an imaginary vine.

  Then Kouhouesso spoke, only a few words, unequivocally, with incongruous force, in a tone that was almost brutal: ‘George will play Kurtz.’

  ‘Has George signed anything?’ Gaspar asked out of interest.

  Kouhouesso stood up. She felt obliged to follow him out, excusing herself. Everything was spinning. As she hurried past, she said sorry, sorry to the walls, to the wait staff. When she replayed the evening in her mind, she felt ashamed; she wasn’t sure exactly of what, and that was even more unpleasant.

  She remembered the times when her father was intractable, simultaneously flamboyant and mute. Her mother’s ghastly smile. Now she found herself having to ‘form a buffer’, as her mother used to say. Between Kouhouesso and the world. But every single project in Hollywood had to undergo a dreadful blowtorch of criticism. Every director is interrogated, people have to see what they’re made of: it’s the mandatory crash test for every aspiring filmmaker.

  In the car on the way home, the silence was that of their unique weariness; like a third person in their duo, this weariness loaded up in the back of the car, weariness like a child, which could at any moment leap at them and cause them to tumble into a ravine of anguish and hatred—yes, of hatred, a silent and suppressed hatred, a weary hatred. ‘Talk to me,’ she begged. She was drunk at the wheel, but they were in Bel Air, not far from her place, which, in her state, was spinning less than Topanga. He was falling asleep. Their weariness was ebbing back towards the east, into the first rays of the dawn.