“What?” says Vikar.
“Do you know who that is?” He’s looking at the two women on the other side of the room, the older blonde in the wide-brimmed fedora and sunglasses, and the younger one with dark curls in the long white coat. Vikar isn’t certain which one he means.
“Which one do you mean?”
“That one.”
Vikar believes Cooper Léon means the older blonde but he still isn’t certain.
“That, Monsieur Vicar, is Christine Jorgensen.”
A worrisome recollection flickers across Vikar’s mind.
“She is here for the Irving Rapper retrospective. Monsieur Rapper filmed the story of her life eight or nine years ago. You know of Christine Jorgensen, of course.”
Vikar doesn’t say anything. He looks back and forth from the older blonde to the younger woman in the white coat.
“You know of the story of her life. She was a man. She was an American soldier who—”
“I know the story.”
“—had herself, how would you say, altered surgically—”
“I know the story.” It has to be the older blonde.
“Allow me to introduce you.”
“No, thank you.”
“It is no trouble.”
“I believe my room is ready now.” Vikar stands up from the cocktail table.
“Are you sure you would not like to …?”
“I’m going to check on my room.”
“Very well,” says Cooper Léon, standing as well. The two men shake hands. “Felicitations again, Monsieur Vicar.”
“Yes.”
“I am very pleased to have seen you in Cannes,” he calls as Vikar rushes from the lounge.
208.
Forty-five minutes later, Vikar is in his small suite on the fourth floor of the Carlton. It’s eleven-thirty. From the small balcony onto which the suite’s French doors open, the Mediterranean is to the left; getting underway along the waterfront are the many parties of the festival’s closing night. Party yachts line the harbor. Vikar can’t see the fireworks but can hear them.
207.
He lies on the bed in his unbuttoned shirt watching the TV. He flicks around the channels; the news is in French so he doesn’t understand much. There’s a story about an Italian president or prime minister who appears to have been assassinated. Grace Kelly’s daughter is getting married; both are princesses now. The granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane has been sent to jail for being kidnapped, which Vikar didn’t realize was a crime. The coffin and body of Charlie Chaplin have been recovered, not far from where they were stolen; Vikar didn’t know they had been stolen. When were they stolen? Soon Vikar finds on the TV an old American black-and-white movie.
Vikar’s award sits in a furious ball of mangled parchment and red ribbon on a table next to a basket of fruit, cheese and red wine. The suite is all white and reminds him of the room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey that he saw his first afternoon in Los Angeles. In another corner of the all-white suite is a small writing table. Vikar is trying not to think about anything. When someone knocks at the door, he doesn’t answer because he assumes it’s Rondell and he doesn’t want to talk to him.
The knocking continues and Vikar ignores it, until finally the door opens and she walks in.
206.
The younger woman from the lounge, with the dark curls and the long white coat, closes the door behind her. In the light she appears in her early thirties; she’s tall, just under six feet. “Bonsoir, Vikar,” she says, slipping off her long white coat that falls to the matching floor, and except for her jewelry and high heels, she’s perfectly naked.
205.
Her face is pleasantly attractive, not beautiful, but her long body verges on the preposterous, the most extraordinary body Vikar has seen. He hasn’t seen many naked female bodies in person but he’s seen them in magazines and in the movies and he’s never seen one like this. When she drops the coat, she doesn’t pose. It barely occurs to him that she’s not simply being straightforward but making a point of getting his name right.
204.
She takes a plum from the fruit basket and bites into it, then puts it back. She wipes the juice on her chin precisely with a single finger and picks up the bottle of wine. “May I?” she says, holding up the corkscrew.
Vikar says, “I can open it for you.”
“Merci,” she says, bringing the bottle over to the bed. Two wine glasses dangle lightly by their stems from her other fingers. She sits on the edge of the bed looking around as he works the corkscrew; in her nakedness she’s entirely casual. “Do you like the hotel?”
Oh, mother, it has to have been the older blonde, Vikar assures himself. “Buñuel stayed here.”
“Oui, bien sûr. Cary Grant stays here, Orson Welles. Olivier, Sophia Loren, Alain Delon. Mussolini was thrown out, I believe before the First World War, when he was a journalist.”
“He slept on the floor as a revolutionary act.”
“Mussolini?”
“Buñuel.”
“Non, chéri,” the woman says, “Buñuel slept on the floor because the bed was not comfortable enough for him.” She looks around the suite. “It is a bit, what is the American? nose in the air,” and she brings her finger to the tip of her nose and pushes it up. “After the First World War, it was a hospital. Blaise Cendrars was a patient.”
“I like the poem about Little Jeanne and the train,” Vikar says, distracted, sweat on his brow.
“I am impressed. Almost no Americans know of this poem.”
“Is your name Christine?” Vikar blurts.
She shrugs. “Would you like it to be Christine?”
“No.”
“Who is your favorite French actress? You may call me that.” She looks at the TV.
“Falconetti,” he says.
She’s slightly taken aback. “I supposed you should say something predictable like Brigitte Bardot.”
“I like Brigitte Bardot,” he says.
“You are a man, you are allowed.” She watches the movie on the TV. “When they asked Simone Signoret how she felt about her husband Yves Montand fucking Marilyn Monroe, Signoret replied, ‘But it was Marilyn Monroe.’ So I might have said as well, had you said Brigitte Bardot. But I am content you did not.” She says to the movie on the TV, “I adore this part.”
203.
In the movie on the TV, Jean Harlow, who’s living in the jungle with Clark Gable, climbs out of a barrel of rain water.
“When they shot this,” the woman says, “Harlow came out of the barrel with nothing on. It was her idea. Immediately the director seized all the film so the frames of Harlow naked could be removed from the film and destroyed.”
“I saw where Jean Harlow is buried,” says Vikar.
“Her husband murdered her,” the woman says, “he was an associate of Irving Thalberg. He committed suicide while she was making this film. When he married Harlow he found he was impotent, perhaps he was impotent before but now he was married to the great, what would you say, sex god … sex goddess, and he was impotent. He beat her all the time and then …” she puts two fingers to her temple with her thumb as the trigger, “… boom, while she was making this picture with Gable who, bien sûr, was the great male sex god. Perhaps Harlow’s husband believed she and Gable were sleeping together. He might have said, ‘But it is Clark Gable’ … but men do not know how to think in such a way. In fact Gable and Harlow were not sleeping together at all, or not that anyone knows. She died four, five years later.”
“How did her husband murder her if he already killed himself?”