Gorgeous East Read Free Page B

Vilhardouin—the famous singer, the bad boy of the chanson français , and one of its greatest practitioners. Hector was an icon—like Aznavour or Piaf or Jacques Brel—but more combative than these, loved and reviled until his death from a heroin overdose at age fifty-eight. During the sixties he scandalized France by reinventing himself, trading in his Gauloises Bleus cigarette, Sinatra-style Borsalino hat, and Bob le Flambeur trenchcoat for Nehru jacket, love beads, and marijuana. He then became a spokesman for a variety of radical causes, crossed the line to sing jazz and rock, hobnobbed with Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, Hendrix and Miles. It was a brilliant defection, shocking at first, that made him even more famous in the end. After his death from the overdose in the bed of one of his mistresses—the gory details covered for weeks in literally every organ of the French media—it came out that he’d fathered several illegitimate children with a variety of women kept quietly in separate establishments in Paris, like some kind of Oriental potentate or Picasso. His only legitimate daughter, Alphonsine Vilhardouin, a film actress well known in France—she’d been twice nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes—was just starting to get work in Hollywood.
    “Well, well!” Phillipe said. “Hector Vilhardouin! Is it true?”
    “Yes, it’s true.” Louise sniffed. “You can see this has made things difficult for me.”
    “Of course.” Phillipe stroked her hair.
    “They brought me a paper to sign when he died,” Louise continued. “I was to renounce the name of Vilhardouin for a certain sum of money. I refused. I threw that paper back in their face.”
    “Good for you.” Phillipe ran his hands over her breasts, along the curve of her hip. He was getting hard again.
    “Easy to say, but now there is no money at all, and I must work. But I can’t find anything I really like to do. I’ve been fired from four—no, five—jobs in the last two years. I’m not stupid, you know, I’m really quite intelligent.”
    “Yes, I see that.”
    “My problem is I don’t care about working. What’s the point of working just to get money? You work, you come home, you eat, shit, sleep, get up again to go to work and come home again and so on and so on and maybe you go to clubs on the weekend, and the cinema every now and then and maybe the beach in August and the years pass like that and then—voilà—you’re dead.”
    “That sounds about right.” Phillipe suppressed a smile. “You’ve definitely hit it on the head.”
    “But what I really want to do is learn, understand. Take Satie—tell me, why do I not know his music? Because there hasn’t been enough time for me to read all the books I want to read, to listen to all the music. To live.”
    Phillipe pulled her close and they made love again. Then, it became too late for sleep, or too early, and they put on their clothes—Louise wrapped herself in the American tourist’s enormous Chicago Bulls sweatshirt—and they went out arm in arm along the ancient battlements of the Mont. The sun rose to the east, over France, sparkling yellow off the receding tides. Phillipe spoke to her in a low voice, utterly assured, his mouth close to her ear, his hand on the small of her back. He told her what would happen next, tomorrow, in five years, in ten, and she listened, twitching faintly from time to time, like a moth stuck to a screen door.
    First, they would get married. He would install her in his château, which was not far from Honfleur up the coast. She would have all the time she needed to read, to listen, to learn, to garden, to raise dogs, to do whatever the hell she wanted to do. They might even have children, but at her age, she would have years to decide about that. He also had an address in Paris, a house, actually, near the Sixteenth Arrondissement; an apartment in the south, in Béziers, which was not as fashionable as Nice or Cap d’Antibes, but still a