Chapter XXVII. The Beautiful and Damned.
XXVII.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED.
LOS ANGELES.
On a warm Thursday evening in October, I put on a pretty dress, a rarity for me, and head over to Brentwood to scoop up my mistress.
Anouk had spent two weeks in Paris for the shows and a couple of photo shoots, and in her absence, I had found myself wanting.
It was not enough to be an attentive mother and doting wife.
It was not enough to attempt to fill my waking hours at the studio editing audio clips and working on both On Beauty and three pieces for a group show for Khalil’s gallery.
An exploration of the duality of identity titled American(?) Teeth—how I saw myself, how others saw me.
I was distracted. I was lonely. I was becoming attached.
She called me late one night, the previous week, her voice gravelly. The sun was just rising, she said.
“You should be here. I miss you.”
“The feeling is mutual.”
“It’s autumn. The leaves are changing. People are wearing sweaters and blazers. Next time you must come with me.”
“Okay,” I whispered. Francois was sleeping, and so I slipped out the sliding doors into the courtyard. The frogs trilling. The filter in the plunge pool further muffling our conversation. Or so I hoped.
“Let’s go away. For my birthday. Some place far.”
“I’d like that.”
“I’ll choose,” she said.
When I slipped back into my marital bed, Francois stirred. I’d awoken him. “Who were you talking to?”
“Anouk.”
“So late?”
“She’s in Paris.”
“Mmm,” he trailed off, his breathing eventually slowing, rhythmic.
I had just started to fade when he said, clear as day, “Why did you go outside to talk to her and not just the other room?” And because I didn’t have a good answer, I feigned sleep.
And so, as reluctant as I am to admit it, I’ve been counting down the minutes to our reunion.
We’ve been invited to a private chamber concert at the home of Hayden Altschul, Minnie’s friend from the lunch in Malibu.
Former PR girl married to an übersuccessful producer.
Hayden’s cello instructor (evidently a serious hobby of hers) had assembled a piano quintet, friends of his from the classical music world, and Hayden was delighted to have them play in the “salon” at her Bel Air home, which apparently had outstanding acoustics.
I opt to wait for Anouk in her driveway, not wanting to risk another awkward run-in with Sacha. And every minute feels like fifteen.
Earlier in the day, when I told her I’d pick her up after collecting the kids from their various activities and preparing them dinner, she laughed and said that’s what her driver and her chef were for.
She could not recall when last she’d cooked an actual supper.
And so I knew whatever was keeping her was likely not mothering duties.
Eventually she emerges, ravishing in an orange wrap dress. Her hair, wavy, loose, tucked behind one ear, barely brushing her shoulders. A python clutch in one hand, and in the other, a small gift bag.
“I have something for you.” She smiles, slipping into the passenger side of the car. The side that had nearly killed her.
“For me?”
“For us.” She places a box in my hands. Peacock blue, a thin grosgrain bow.
“Are we celebrating something?”
“Do we have to be?” She watches me as I fiddle with the ribbon, open the box.
Inside are two silk pouches, each fastened with a mother-of-pearl button.
“Two gifts?”
“One is for me,” she says.
“Which one?”
“You’ll see.”
I take my time unbuttoning the first pouch. In it is a sleek lariat necklace. On one end, an elegant brushed-gold fishhook, at the other a faceted pear-shaped smoky-quartz stone set in gold. The necklace itself formed with a cord of waxed brown cotton. It is exquisite, expensive.
“Oh, Anouk. It’s breathtaking.”
She is quiet, watching me as I set about opening the second pouch. Inside is an identical piece. There is something deeply sensual about them. Dark, enigmatic.
“I found them in Paris,” she says. “The designer gets her stones in India. She makes them by hand. I thought they suited us.”
“I love it. I love them. I love us.”
She loops one around my neck, leaning into me as she tucks the fishhook into the knot at my throat. Inhaling me. I do the same for her. I don’t know if anyone is watching us from her contemporary-art museum of a home. I don’t care.
This thing, the two of us, matching, feels both playful and indecent.
Like something girlfriends would do in middle school, and at the same time, a bold announcement.
My gem hits me midway down my breastbone.
On an otherwise bare neck, it takes center stage.
She adjusts her knot lower, to set off the two delicate gold chains at her clavicle.
I love the expanse of her chest. The area between her breasts that is still smooth, unsullied. For a moment I reach out and place my palm there, feeling the heat from her skin. My hand slips beneath the silk material. She’s wearing a navy-colored bra, sheer. My fingers move over her.
“What are you doing?” She laughs, deep, raspy. “We have some place to be.”
“I just wanted to touch you.”
“In my driveway? With my husband and son inside?”
I nod. She tenses, her nipple hardening, her bare legs crossing and then uncrossing. And then, “Later. Promise. We’re going to be late.”
The Altschuls’ salon in their neoclassical manse just off Bellagio Road is an elegant, traditionally decorated room overlooking a verdant backdrop and views to Century City.
A well-appointed wet bar in an adjacent alcove lends a certain golden-age-of-Hollywood charm.
“This was originally the library back when the house was built in the thirties,” Hayden explained upon our arrival, handing us coupes of Perrier-Jouet.
“I like to imagine Cecil B. DeMille and Orson Welles just dropping in and having a finger of whiskey and a cigar.” She laughed.
“When we bought the house, it was listed as a family room, but I prefer the idea of a salon so much more. It’s just grander, don’t you think? ”
I note the de Kooning and the Rothko on opposing walls.
Both oil and charcoal. The former in shades of shell and mustard green.
The latter pomegranate and pine. “Aren’t they lovely?
” Hayden continued. “I like to think they’re in conversation.
The de Kooning is a study on marshes, from 1946, and the Rothko is from his Multiforms series in ’47.
For both there’s this postwar release and the idea of freedom, but still slightly turbulent.
Like not entirely at ease. Also one is spring, the other fall. ”
Three dozen Chiavari chairs fill the space.
And at the front, situated before the oversized bay windows, a pianist, accompanied by a violinist, a violist, a cellist, and a double bass.
The crowd is mixed. In age and gender, but not so much in race or ethnicity.
Or tax bracket. And once again I am reminded that no matter how unremarkably middle class my youth was in Kingston and the less tony parts of Westchester, or Francois’s in his parents’ place in Bordeaux, we were now fully ensconced in the 1 percent bubble. The standards of normalcy had changed.
We mill around beforehand, sipping champagne and making small talk.
Kennedy and Brooke (who’s done something questionable to her eyes) and their respective husbands are there, although Minnie is missing in action.
And for the first time, I’m aware of Anouk and me standing out as a twosome.
Anouk said Frederick did not like such things, and Fran’s hours were unpredictable, so I assumed she and I would go together.
I’d pictured it as a girls’ night out, but standing there, in this group of bon vivants, I feel my husband’s absence.
At some point, we all file into our seats, Hayden introduces her instructor and his fellow musicians, and the concert begins. Schubert’s “Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667.”
From the first movement, I am captivated.
It’s an evocative, rousing piece full of rising arpeggios and abrupt harmonic shifts.
The instruments converse, intertwine, duet, duel.
Oddly I am reminded of my extended family crowded around a dinner table.
The aunties’ melodious voices rising and falling, taking turns, occasionally overlapping, going off on different riffs and then returning to an original thought.
My uncles providing the nuanced bass. The younger ones’ laughter like rising triplets, mellifluous and light.
Themes changing, repeating, complementing.
And even in this formal room, with its imagined history of powerful old white men, I feel a little intoxicated.
The excitement of the orchestration, the opulence of the space, Anouk’s scent.
And then it hits me. This type of arrangement—instruments overlapping in conversation, rising, both separately and in unison—is precisely what I need to accompany the visuals in On Beauty.
Instead of long recorded interviews with my subjects, the cacophony of splicing sound bites, a thought here, a sentence there.
The audio, discordant and elliptical, enthralling in a dark space. I am giddy at the revelation, inspired.
Art is a peculiar thing. The elation when it all comes together, the ease with which it can all fall apart.
At some point, we break for a brief intermission.
The guests spilling through the main foyer and out onto the back patio.
The sky a deep orchid blue, a hazy layer hovering in the basin below.
Tray-passed negihama rolls, tiny blinis with sour cream and smoked salmon, and more champagne.
Anouk and I navigate toward the middle of the lawn, away from the assemblage on the patio.
“What are you so excited about?” she asks, sipping from her coupe.
“Art. Beauty in art. In music. In dance. In extraordinary talent. How sometimes you almost feel as if you can touch it.”
She stares at me for a moment, lips parted, not speaking.
“What?”