Chapter XXIX. Tender Is the Night. #2
The waitstaff had cleared the main course and were handing out dessert menus when Jean-Luc clinked a fork against his margarita glass.
“A toast!” He stood, all six foot two and two hundred pounds of him, in a lavender linen shirt and dark jeans.
Without looking beneath the table, Cecilia knew he’d be wearing velvet Albert slippers to complete the ensemble.
“To this talented team,” he continued. “We shot some beautiful images today. Really special. Huge thank-you to Didier.”
“Cin cin!” Rafaella said. “So provocative, but tasteful, exactly what we wanted. And grazie mille to these incredible models who made it so sexy.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Bas said, winking. “We bring the sexy.”
“Is true,” Didier responded from the head of the table. “This is why I always say ‘no virgins on my set.’ You can look young, but you can’t be innocent, hein? This doesn’t interest me.”
Cecilia cringed. She had started working for Didier ten months before she’d met Lorry.
And while she was technically not a virgin then, her experience with the guy from the band had done little to boost her sexual confidence.
The memory of it now—the darkened suite at the Rihga Royal, the smell of Eternity on his T-shirt, the mixtape he played that started with Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones,” which she thought an odd choice for a hookup playlist, the shamrock tattoo near his hip—made her shudder.
Would that she’d done things differently.
“You never told me this,” Maren said.
“I tell you, ‘Don’t bring me fifteen-year-olds,’ unless they’re really really special.
Or I’m shooting something where the model is supposed to be young.
It’s hard enough to ask young girls to pretend to be women.
To expect them to be sexy when they don’t understand their own bodies and they’ve never had an orgasm and they don’t know the difference between fucking and making love, is like …
pffft.” He threw up his hands. “C’est fou. ”
There was a second of silence and then, “Whew. Well, glad I passed that test,” Bas said, laughing.
“Shut up, you.” Katrine smiled, elbowing him.
Cecilia turned to catch Marc’s attention, but his focus was somewhere deep at the bottom of his glass of Jose Cuervo.
“It’s not rocket science, what we do. It’s basic acting, isn’t it? If you give the talent directions, they should be able to follow,” Elliot said.
“Yes, but sometimes you don’t have the time or the patience to hold someone’s hand and teach them how to be in a moment,” Didier continued.
“You’re losing light or the light is shifting.
Some of the best moments, it’s not in a studio and you don’t control the elements.
So you need the subject to be ready. And if something is reading as uncertain on the model’s face, it’s going to show up in the lens.
It’s going to be on the film. Just like that you lose the moment, you lose the shot.
“I need my talent to be confident. To be fully aware of their strength and power. I don’t want someone with just a pretty face or beautiful lines. Yes, I can make that work, but it’s not as interesting. And it takes too much time.”
At the far end of the table, Rafaella flicked a cigarette, her arms crossed before her chest. Her hair was out that night, wild, full.
Like a lion, Cecilia thought. “But if you are shooting with someone new, Didier, how do you know it’s going to work?
You can’t say, ‘Sorry, I don’t work with virgins. ’”
“Didier would definitely say this.” Jean-Luc laughed.
Didier smiled, impish, and then shook his head of curls.
“No, I don’t say this. This is rude. But I can see it by the pictures in her book, or at the casting.
I don’t book a girl without meeting her first. Usually, it’s a feeling I get.
And if I’m not sure, I ask, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ This is enough.
Because models love to talk about their boyfriends.
Or girlfriends…” He sipped from his drink. “Sometimes they have girlfriends.”
“Which ones?” Emilio said. “You can tell us.”
“Yes. We are not taking notes.” Sandro laughed as he feigned pulling a notepad out of his shirt pocket.
“Sandro wants the phone and the fax,” Pietro said.
“Look, I don’t care which direction someone goes, as long as they are happy. You want to eat pussy instead of sucking dick, it’s your choice, you know. Just do it well. And make sure you enjoy it.”
Cecilia felt her face flush. Across the table, Katrine laughed nervously. Jaya rolled her eyes.
“Didier!” Sarah said.
Beatriz shook her head, part disapproving, part amused. “Oh, Didou. Not in front of the children.”
“They know this. What was the model? When we were in Mo’orea for the Certo Che Sì shoot. With … oh, I forget her name. La négresse blonde?”
“Astrid…”
“Astrid, oui. Swedish. Beautiful. Like a gazelle. With this huge mouth. She told us she liked girls. And I told her she needed someone like me to change her mind, and she said to me … you know what she said? She said, ‘I bet I eat pussy better than you, Didier.’”