“That was sweet,” the movie star said. He seemed pleased with himself. “Your daughter is adorable. You really haven’t heard of me?”
Marie shook her head, grinning.
“Sorry,” she said.
Eli Longworth named a list of films he had been in. Seven films in four years. Marie had heard of none of them.
“Where have you been?” he said. “Hiding under a rock?”
“Prison.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“I guess you didn’t get to watch many movies in jail?”
Marie shook her head. She had just had this same conversation with another so-called movie star. It occurred to Marie that famous people required people who were not famous to make them feel that way.
“I think some people did,” she said. “Not me.”
“What did you do?”
“Worked,” Marie said. “I worked in the laundry room. Kept my hands clean. I was on good behavior. Trying to get out early to be with her.”
Marie nodded at Caitlin. It was easier to feel affection for her again, now that she was asleep. Marie wondered what it would have been like, if someone actually had been waiting for her.
“You missed her?”
“So much it hurt.”
“Dude,” he said. “That’s heavy.”
“Did you call me dude?” Marie laughed. “Is that what you kids do today?”
Marie wondered if they were flirting. She thought maybe they were. She was already over Benoît Doniel. Just like that. She would not grieve for him. Not a single second.
“It was heavy, dude,” Marie said. She felt like she was a character in a movie. She could be whoever she wanted to be for this movie star. The dried vomit on her shirt sleeve did not matter. The movie star had noticed her breasts. “I did a lot of reflection while I was locked up. Came out a better person.”
“A beautiful person.”
“Thank you,” Marie said, nodding.
“You could be in movies, Marie,” he said. “You’ve got the cheekbones.”
Marie could begin to see it, the movie star’s appeal, his smooth approach.
“Where’s her father?”
“Dead. He killed himself after we were arrested. We’d made a suicide pact, but I couldn’t go through with it, not after I found out I was pregnant.”
“No shit.”
“No shit. We had some bad timing, me and her father.”
“Like Romeo and Juliet.”
“I guess so.”
It was lovely, to think of it like that, Marie and Juan José, star-crossed lovers. Marie put her finger in the hole in the right knee of the movie star’s expensive jeans. “You were really nominated for an Oscar?”
“You don’t make up shit like that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too easy to check.”
“In case you’re lying.”
“You’re making me blush, Marie. I’m not lying to you. I can’t believe this. You think I’m lying.”
Marie smiled, pleased with the way the conversation had turned, that she had a beautiful young man trying to impress her. Benoît Doniel had lied to her about Virginie at Sea, but Marie did not see how the young man in front of her could be anything but a movie star.
“I just wrapped a new film,” he said. “We shot in Paris, all over the city. It was awesome. Paris is fucking gorgeous, don’t you think? I shot my final scene this morning, and I had this amazing brainwave. Why rush home? I’m going to chill on the beach. The French-fucking-Riviera. I have never been there before.”
Marie nodded, only half-listening. The French-fucking-Riviera. That was where she was going. It was not a place she had ever thought of visiting before. She also wondered how she could get the movie star to talk more quietly. He would wake up Caitlin.
“Have you heard of Lili Gaudet?” she asked him.
The movie star looked at Marie blankly.
“Who?” he asked.
“An actress,” she said. “A French one. She claims to be a movie star, too.”
“You’re tough,” the movie star said. “I haven’t heard of her, but I don’t know much about French movies. I just met Audrey Tautou. She’s a real sweetheart. She’s probably the most famous French actress there is. Have you heard of her?”
Marie shook her head, smiling. The movie star smiled back. His teeth were perfect. They were gleaming. He couldn’t have been twenty-five. When Marie was twenty-five, she learned how to fold clothes. There was some technique to it. At the end of six years in the laundry, Marie’s manual dexterity had increased enormously. If she had worked in an actual place of business, she would have demanded a raise.
Marie looked out the train window. It was black outside, the middle of the night. There was nothing to see.
“I gave birth to Caitlin while I was in prison,” Marie said. “I had a friend take care of her until I got out. I didn’t want Caitlin to know me like that, you know? A prisoner. I wanted her first memories to be of a happy place.”
“That’s intense,” the movie star said.
Marie had forgotten the movie star’s name. She traced a circle with her finger on his knee. An actual movie star. She wished she could confirm this information with someone else. Besides Duck Soup, the last movie she had seen was about the vengeful babysitter with the knife. Marie had forgotten about that film. She never got to see how it ended.
“Her hair is so blond,” the movie star said, meaning Caitlin.
Marie’s hair, of course, was dark.
She would hear this again, she realized, if she did not return Caitlin to her mother. She could dye Caitlin’s hair. That, however, seemed wrong. It was not Caitlin’s fault that she was so fair. Marie would dye her own hair. She liked the idea, becoming blond.
A new, improved Marie. Maybe in Nice.
“So you are going to the beach?” Marie asked, glad for the fact that her finger was where it was, on the movie star’s knee. She moved it an inch or so beneath the fabric, hinting at the possibility of upward movement. The movie star had posed a tricky question, asking about Caitlin’s hair, but he didn’t seem suspicious. “Is that your plan?”
“Yeah. It is. I’m going to lie on the beach and get drunk. You want to come?”
“Sure,” Marie said. “Yes.”
“You could hang with me. I’m heading to this supposedly big fucking house my producer loaned to me. I’m not allowed to say whose it is. Because of privacy.”
“I want to come.”
“Awesome.”
The movie star, however, looked slightly confused, now that Marie had accepted his offer so quickly. Maybe she was not supposed to have said yes, but Marie was pleased. She had tomorrow taken care of, and maybe the day after, the day after that.
“Do they sell champagne on these trains?” Marie asked.
Marie’s mood had turned celebratory. Caitlin was asleep. The French policeman had not tried to arrest her. She was on her way to a villa in the French Riviera with an Academy Award–nominated movie star. Even Ellen’s mother had never thought such glory would be possible. Not for Marie.
“That’s a good question. Why don’t I check it out?”
Marie smiled.
Caitlin rolled over in her seat.
“She’ll need some milk,” Marie said. “And maybe a snack, when she wakes up. She likes baguette sandwiches.”
“I guess I can do that.”
“Because you’re a movie star,” Marie said.
“You stop that.” The movie star shook his finger at Marie.
“Champagne,” Marie repeated, watching him go.
He would, of course, pay for everything.
Marie looked at Caitlin, sleeping. With every second, she was getting farther and farther from Paris, from Benoît Doniel, and from Ellen, who was certainly looking for her, carrying a lifetime of barely contained wrath. But Marie was going to the sea, to stay in a villa. Out the window, Marie could see stars,
French stars, lighting the sky. She smiled, feeling a gratitude bordering on love when the movie star reentered the train car, returning Marie’s smile.
“I got it all,” he said.
Six miniature bottles of champagne, three baguette sandwiches, a jug of milk for Caitlin, and three plastic containers of chocolate mousse.
“I didn’t know,” Marie said, as the movie star poured the contents of a mini champagne bottle into plastic champagne flutes, “that you could get champagne this way.”
Life kept on surprising her.
The beach in Nice was not what Marie had imagined it would be. She expected the paradise she had discovered in Mexico: crystal clear blue water, smooth white sand. Here, there was no sand. The coast was rocky; it was all rocks. This was the beach where Virginie had walked out to her own death.
Walking along the rocks was not easy to do. Caitlin fell, not once, but twice, and after that she refused to go farther, sitting down on the rocky beach and putting her thumb in her mouth. The movie star had chosen not to join them for the afternoon. He was getting a haircut in town.
“What if I carry you?” Marie said to Caitlin.
Caitlin agreed.
“I carry you all the time now,” Marie said.
Caitlin was starting to remind Marie more and more of her mother, of Ellen. Marie could not hold that against Caitlin, but somehow, she did. They were on the beach, in Nice. It had been Marie’s brilliant idea, and she decided to embrace it, being there.
“Look at us,” Marie said.
After six years in prison, she was vacationing with the world’s rich and famous. Staying in the French Riviera, in a borrowed villa, rooming with a movie star. In the morning, a chef would cook her breakfast. Ruby Hart wouldn’t believe it. She had worried about Marie during her final days, had said repeatedly that Marie wasn’t ready for the real world. Marie walked into the sea, and dangled Caitlin over the incoming surf, dipping only her bare feet into the cold water.
“It’s cold,” Caitlin said.
Marie couldn’t adjust the water temperature like a bathtub. She hoisted Caitlin way up into the sky and then lowered her down, Caitlin’s feet touching the water, again, barely, and then Marie raised her back high.
“Up,” Marie said. “Down.”
And then up and then down.
“Wild ride,” Marie said. “Caitlin going fast. Up and then down and then up and then down and then up. Then down. Then spinning around and around.”
Caitlin laughed. Marie could still make her laugh. “This is the biggest bathtub that you have ever been in.”
“It’s not a bathtub,” Caitlin said.
“It’s the biggest bathtub,” Marie said.
“No,” Caitlin said.
“Yes,” Marie said.
She spun Caitlin around until Caitlin stopped disagreeing with her. Still, Marie could not get herself to like France. It was not what she thought that it would be. Caitlin was clean, wearing a fresh diaper and the new clothes that the movie star had paid for earlier that day at an expensive children’s clothing store on the Promenade des Anglais, but Marie could not quite shake the panicked feeling she had had in Paris, in the bathroom of the McDonald’s, her hands covered in runny green shit.
The escargot did not disappoint.
They were served six to a plate at the restaurant inside the Famous Palace Hotel, each snail swimming in a pool of melted butter and garlic.
They had been seated, Marie and Caitlin and her movie star, beneath a chandelier in the center of the dining room. Marie wore the new clothes the movie star had bought her, a black halter top from Chanel, new jeans without holes in the knees, a pair of high-heeled sandals. Marie hadn’t felt the specific need for new clothes, but he had made the offer when they were shopping for Caitlin, and Marie accepted.
“Do you want to try one?” Marie asked Eli Longworth, ridiculously pleased with her food. She was surprised by her impulse to share when she knew, instinctively, that she wanted every escargot for herself, and then, even more.
Eli Longworth shook his head.
“I dig France,” he said. “But not snails. They are like sea bugs. Gross. But you enjoy.”
Marie thought of the French actress. Dégoûtant, that was what she had said about Americans eating hot dogs. Lili Gaudet could keep her Benoît Doniel. They could rot together in their shared grief. Marie smiled at her movie star; he did not seem particularly smart. She ate another escargot. She broke off a piece of French bread and dipped it into the sauce.
It was a delicious dinner, one of her very best. Marie had also ordered the lobster bisque and the hanger steak, which was still to come. A tuxedoed waiter regularly refilled her glass of champagne. Marie gazed at the beautiful people in the restaurant. Marie was one of the beautiful people. She smiled at a roving photographer who passed by. She ran her hand through Caitlin’s white-blond hair.
“I love them,” Marie said. “Escargot. I do.”
“Order more,” the movie star said. “This restaurant is awesome. You look awesome.”
Marie wondered, idly, what it would be like, having sex with Eli Longworth, with his long legs and his perfect teeth. Marie also wished she had not ordered an entrée. Her thoughts had drifted, already, to dessert, to the chocolate mousse that would end the meal.
“Hi Caitlin.”
“Hi Marie.”
“Hi Kit Kat.”
“Hi Marie.”
“Hi Caty Bean.”
“Hi,” the movie star said, amused, “hello,” but really he had nothing worth contributing to the conversation.
“Soon we are going to have chocolate mousse,” Marie told Caitlin. “You love chocolate mousse.”
“I love chocolate moose,” Caitlin said.
Caitlin clapped her hands. She was grinning, swinging her chubby legs, bouncing them off her thick wooden chair.
This was how it was supposed to be, Caitlin and Marie, happy, pleased with each other, with the food before them, with whatever life offered next.
“You need to try the crème brûlée,” the movie star said. He ordered that, too.
Marie did like the crème brûlée, though not nearly as much as the chocolate mousse. She happily ate both desserts, drinking champagne between every bite. It was not much of a sacrifice. Marie returned her fingers to Caitlin’s hair, closing her eyes, content.
“We are having fun,” Marie said.
This was what tomorrow looked like.
Back at the villa, the movie star did not want to have sex with Marie.
“I am engaged,” he told her.
Eli Longworth told Marie the name of the woman he was engaged to. Marie shook her head.
“You haven’t heard of her, either?”
Marie had not.
The movie star said that he would be all right with a blow job. “That’s generous of you.” Marie was sitting on his bed, watching as he took off his expensive ripped jeans. The villa the producer had loaned him was impressive. It was old, made of stone, had a green lawn in front, a vegetable garden in the back, and a view from the master bedroom of the Mediterranean. Marie looked out the window, at the rolling sea. “But no.”
Marie remembered her negotiations with Ellen, when she said that she would not clean or do laundry. She had not expected to have negotiations with the movie star. Even before the escargot, when they were still on the train, Marie had assumed that sex was an unspoken agreement. She was staying in his villa. He was paying for everything, which had seemed only right, considering that he was the movie star and he was also staying there for free.
Truthfully, Marie would have liked to put out; it wasn’t the equivalent of vacuuming and making beds. Having sex with a movie star would have felt like an accomplishment. Later in life, she could have told people: I had sex with Eli Longworth in a villa in France, and that would have been a good thing, because someone, somewhere, must have heard of him. Marie wanted to have accomplishments she could be proud of, like having finally seen a Marx
Brothers movie or eating an escargot. She remembered once, before prison, going to a party and admitting to an older man that she had never seen a Marx Brothers movie. He had looked at her with less interest when he learned this.
“Are you sure you don’t want to?” The movie star’s voice was plaintive.
Marie was not a prostitute. She did not provide services. She looked at the movie star’s knees. Tufts of dark hair grew from a surprisingly skinny leg. He would need to work out, she thought, if he wanted to get truly famous. Marie could no longer touch it, his knee, now that the movie star was no longer wearing pants. Staring at that one specific part of his body, Marie could see nothing attractive about it.
“I find that request insulting,” Marie said.
“I get you. I totally do. That was insensitive of me. I sound like a selfish dick. I thought I would have no problem cheating. When I met you on the train, I thought we could have a good time together, but then I just talked to Jess. She is the sweetest person, you know. She is an angel.”
“I believe you.”
“A real angel.”
“I believe you,” Marie repeated.
Benoît Doniel had loved his wife.
The movie star’s fiancée was an angel.
Sometimes Marie felt like she was the only person alive with any integrity.
The roving photographer at the Famous Palace Hotel, where Marie had tried her first escargot, was a paparazzo. By morning, the pictures he had taken were making the rounds on the Internet. There was speculation that Caitlin was Eli Longworth’s secret love child, that his engagement to the famous actress Marie had never heard of was over. The movie star had been alerted to this photo by his publicist in Los Angeles. Now, he wanted Marie and Caitlin to leave. He had rescinded his offer.
“Really?” Marie said.
Marie was wearing a pair of black silk pajamas she had found in the villa. Caitlin was thrilled with her new pink nightgown, which had purple lace flowers delicately stitched onto the edges. Marie had woken up hungry, still expecting a world-class chef to prepare her a fancy breakfast. Marie wanted an omelet with runny French cheese and sausage.
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