Chapter IV. There You Are.
IV.
THERE YOU ARE.
LOS ANGELES.
I felt it that night at dinner. The glass doors were cracked only slightly, but the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine had already begun to permeate the air.
Sweet and heavy with promise. The children were buzzing about at the table.
Full of adolescent energy and zeal. Their angular bodies popping up and down and up again.
Make-Your-Own-Taco Night, because when in California …
“You know, we’re supposed to do this on Tuesdays.”
“Do what?”
“Tacos. Taco Tuesdays. That’s how they do it here,” Lucie says, ever the fount of anthropological information.
I watch her assembling grilled chicken and salsa verde and cilantro sprigs onto her corn tortilla.
Her dainty wrists, her fuzzy bun, her favorite sweatshirt from a family trip to Oxford.
She was still wearing her ballet gear underneath.
She was built like a dancer. No breasts, no hips.
Puberty had yet to have its way with her.
“I did not know that. No.”
“What number is that?” She turns to her brother, a goofy grin on her elfin face.
“Sixty-three.” Julien barely looks up from his plate. His stack is far more complex. A burrito, perhaps? There’s a pimple on his right cheek that I desperately want to pop. Unruly curls. Braces. Ah, thirteen.
“Ohhhh, Cecilia. You are not doing so good.” Francois smirks.
My family was keeping tabs. Ways that I had not prepared them for living in America.
Minuscule details that I’d forgotten to mention before the big move that for some reason or another they found essential.
No licorice chewing gum. School notebooks with lined, not graphed, paper.
The absence of curlicues at the bottom of the number nine.
And now apparently, the fact that tacos should be consumed exclusively on Tuesdays. I had failed them.
To be fair, I’d never intended to move back to the States.
Life was good in Paris. Full. But I hadn’t intended to make a life in France either.
The decision was made on a whim. January 1997.
The incident with Didier. The breakup with the boy from Connecticut.
The pressure of my parents and law school.
I registered for a class at ENSBA. Landed a stagiaire position with renowned photographer Philippe LeRoi, and never looked back.
Francois showed up for an interview at the studio some two years later.
Fresh-faced and all of twenty-six. I liked them younger.
Blue jeans, a thrift-store sports jacket, a cashmere scarf, and a motorcycle helmet.
A weathered camera case slung across his narrow frame.
Inside, a vintage Hasselblad. Both hand-me-downs from his grandfather, he would eventually reveal. I found it charming.
Francois started at the bottom rung of interns, running errands and sweeping floors.
But he took his responsibilities seriously, showed up early, left late, and watched every one of Philippe’s moves like a hawk.
In four months’ time, when Gabriele, the second assistant, left to work in Milan, Francois stepped into his position. And we clicked.
Philippe liked quiet, and so Fran and I created our own sign language of sorts.
A shorthand for lights, lenses, stands, and scrims. We figured out a way to move around each other, beside each other, never disturbing the subjects or the camera.
Like a dance. And at the end of the day, we would head to the café at the corner and I would drink Lillet or red wine depending on the season, and he would drink pastis and we would talk about photography and art and film.
Gordon Parks and Godard and Varda. And Philippe’s work, which was both commercial and fine art.
Exquisite portraits: subversive, unexpected, often controversial.
Philippe wasn’t afraid to make things ugly. We both liked that.
And then one day he invited me back to his walk-up in the eighteenth to see a short film he’d been working on, and I said yes.
Fifteen years later, he sits beside me constructing Mexican street food with our children in a multimillion-dollar California tree house being paid for by the production.
Our cat, Leelou, seeking warmth by my feet.
“Maybe Taco Tuesdays is a new thing.” I shrug, trying to deflect. “Maybe it’s West Coast.”
Fran stares at me for a moment. His eyes narrowing, the side of his mouth quirking.
The hint of a smile. “Even I know that tacos aren’t just West Coast.” He’s teasing, which he often does when he’s in a good mood.
He’s had a stellar day in preproduction.
They’ve locked down an important location in Calgary.
One of several dozen they were scouting.
Everything has been going his way. Everything always goes his way.
On Sunday, Francois had attended a couple of Oscar parties with one of his agents, having just returned from a quick jaunt to Paris.
His most recent film, Salut, Bordeaux!, a smart action thriller that had become an international hit, had been nominated for a handful of César Awards.
He had hoped I’d attend the ceremony and accompanying festivities with him, but my concussion thwarted that plan.
In the end it was likely for the best. The film came away with two technical awards only, and I did not risk bumping into anyone I did not want to see.
“Did something come for me in the mail?” Julien asks mid-bite. There’s black beans and salsa on his cheek. He still eats like a four-year-old. Yet another way I’d failed him. To the chagrin of French and Jamaican moms alike.
“I don’t recall seeing anything. What were you expecting?”
“An invitation to Olivia Goodman’s bat mitzvah.”
Lucie’s eyes widen. “A girl? You’re going to parties with girls now?” She turns to me. “You’re allowing this?”
“Calme-toi. It’s not a big deal. It’s, like, the whole class is invited. It’s at some fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills.”
Francois and I exchange a look.
Julien catches it. “What?”
“Nothing. We’ll keep an eye out for it.
“So guess what I did today? I went over to see Anouk Ferrand.”
Francois looks up from where he’s swilling from his beer. “Vraiment? Over where? Her house? You went to her house? You just showed up at the door? T’es folle!”
I smile. Maybe I am crazy. Maybe it’s my concussed brain. “I gave her a gift. She was very nice. We talked.”
Francois shakes his head in wonder. He does not know me to be this bold. I don’t know me to be this bold. He was the one, after all, who had to coax me to engage in scheduled rendezvous at various hotels in Paris. Until we both became too recognizable. Things had changed since then.
“Did she remember you? From Mexico?” he asks.
“Not really, no.”
“Did you ask her if you could shoot her for your project?”
“No. She’s an icon, Francois. That’s like you playing golf with Brad Pitt, accidentally hitting him in the head with your club, and then asking him to star in your movie.”
He smiles, drinks. “Things that would never happen, because I don’t play golf.
“Is Brad Pitt even relevant anymore?”
“Brad Pitt is always relevant.”
“Who’s Brad Pitt?” Lucie asks.
“I think he’s the guy who’s married to Maleficent,” Julien says.
“Your mother’s old crush.…”
My eyes jump from one child to the other.
But for the height and size and gender difference, they are a perfect match.
Caramel-colored, amber-eyed, full-lipped, thick heads of curls.
I envy them their fluid identity. How they move seamlessly between worlds.
Assured, accepted. They could be anything, anyone.
Once upon a time, they were striking stroller mates.
Now one of them squeaked when he spoke, and the other prided herself on knowing everything. Well, mostly everything.
“Brad Pitt is one of the great American movie stars of my generation,” I explain to my daughter.
“He was your crush?” she asks.
“One of them,” my husband volunteers.
Lucie gives me a withering side-eye. I don’t think it’s dawned on her that I’ve loved people besides her father. That sometimes I can’t let go.
“Like a little crush, or a serious crush? I mean, would you have married him?”
I laugh at that. “I’ve never met him, Lu. And even so, probably not. Fame makes people messy. Too much drama.”
“You and Papa are kind of famous.”
“Not famous like that.”
“So not so messy?” she asks.
At that I smile. “Just messy enough.”
Later that night, I am sprawled on the floor of our bedroom in flannel pajama pants and a faded Yale T-shirt, poring over contact sheets.
Images I’d taken on the Sunset Strip before the accident.
The light is crap in here, and I’ve left my loupe in the office, but I can’t be bothered to get it.
And so I’m squinting over shots of billboards, fragrance campaigns, underwear ads. Beauty, and our consumption of it.
“So how long did it take? For our kid to be invited to a Beverly Hills party?” Francois asks, exiting the bathroom. He is delicately patting the crown of his head, a telltale sign that he’s just applied his hair-growth treatment. He doesn’t need it. Yet. “Forty days?”
“Not even.”
“Wasn’t this the thing you feared?”
“One of many.”
“Them becoming Hollywood. Entitled. Privileged. Superficial. Name-dropping. Qu’est-ce que j’ai oublié?”
I look over to him. “Rude. American. Killed.”
“Tu exagères,” he says, throwing back the duvet and climbing in.
“Am I?”
“Come to bed.”
I stare at him for a moment. Smug in his new position, in his new life.
Despite having lost the Best Director prize, because there would now almost certainly be a next time.
Aware that he’s asking me to step away from my work, and everything that entails.
But it’s been a long day, and my head hurts, so I give in.
“What did the house look like?” he asks, moments later, in the dark, his arm wrapped around my torso, his body cocooning mine.