Little Known Facts: A Novel (29 page)

Yet he had only been there for a month; how would he feel during the next month and the one after that? Would his solitariness, with the exception of his French classes and Mr. DeGrassi, weigh too heavily on him?

How lucky he was to have these problems. He could admit that. Out of the extraordinarily varied and astounding number of miseries that people suffered each day, he knew that his privileges were extreme, that his was by most, if not all accounts a charmed life.

His French class on Tuesday evening, the third meeting, was an unaccountably ebullient affair. Mme Moreau arrived with a silk rose tucked behind an ear and set about naming different types of common flowers, several of which she pulled from her handbag before proceeding to go over the words for the various articles of clothing she and the class were wearing. There seemed no order or reason to the lessons she had planned for them—if she had planned anything—but Will didn’t mind. Despite her refined appearance, he wondered if maybe she was a little kooky. The thought made him smile, which she noticed. “Pourquoi vous souriez, Guillaume?” she asked, fixing her dark eyes on him.

“Je ne sais pas,” he said, blushing. He really didn’t know why he was smiling. It was the only thing he could think of to say.

“Alors, vous êtes content? Avez-vous une raison pour votre bonheur à partager avec nous?”

He hesitated, groping for the correct words. He did feel happy, but again, he wasn’t sure why. “J’aime cette classe. C’est ça.”

“Moi aussi, j’aime bien cette classe.” She smiled, and her right eye twitched. He didn’t think she was winking at him but it almost looked like it.

He wanted to hide his face behind his scarf (
une écharpe,
they had just learned), it was burning so hotly now. But within a few minutes, after Mme Moreau had begun going over the names of various professions, she had another question for him. “Guillaume, qu’est-ce que vous faites dans la vie?”

What did he do (for a job, a vocation, an occupation, a career—what was his
raison d’être)
?

He could feel a stab of heat in his armpits. “Maintenant, je suis aux vacances. Pas de travail.” His life in Paris
was
a vacation. He wasn’t sure what else it could be called.

“Bien, mais après vos vacances, qu’est-ce que vous ferez?”

What would he do afterward? He really didn’t know. The question, like the one before it, lay between them like something dead. It had to be acknowledged, despite how much it bothered him to do so. “Je vais faire un film.”

There was an immediate, electric murmur of curiosity among his classmates. He would make a film? Oh fuck. He wasn’t sure where that had come from. He was sweating now in earnest.

Mme Moreau was looking at him, wide-eyed and lovely, her face a study in surprised delight. “Vraiment? C’est extraordinaire. Comment ferez-vous un film?”

He wasn’t sure how, or if, he would do it, but there seemed no reason to admit this. “Mon père est Renn Ivins. Je travaille avec lui de temps en temps.” He had said it, the one thing that he had intended to keep from everyone he met in Paris. My father, the movie star. My father, the hero, which was also the name of a French film Will had seen as a kid. It was a dopey movie, one that his own father would not have been likely to sign on for if they had approached him for the American version instead of casting Gerard Depardieu again.

“Renn Ivins,” exclaimed Mme Moreau. “J’adore Renn Ivins! C’est votre père? C’est vrai?”

Will nodded. “Oui.” Weren’t Europeans supposed to be blasè about fame, at least compared to Americans? Apparently this did not apply to all of them.

More questions started coming, from the teacher and a few of his classmates, some in French, some in English. Was Renn Ivins also in Paris, and would he visit their class? Did he have a black belt in karate? Had he really carried an actual tarantula in his pocket in
Death Valley by Nightfall?
No, no, no. Did Will know Harrison Ford too? Brad Pitt? George Clooney? Scarlett Johanssen? Yes, sort of, sort of, no, but that’d be nice.

After several minutes, Mme Moreau finally held up her hand and said that they needed to move on, but perhaps Will would tell them more about Hollywood and his father in a future class. The atmosphere in their classroom had changed, probably permanently, the air altered by the introduction of something powerful—desire, curiosity, hope that their lives would somehow be transformed for the better because they were spending a couple of hours each week with a film star’s son. Will had not felt this atmospheric shift since college, when in a film class about the French New Wave a guy whose name he couldn’t remember kept sitting next to him but was often too shy to talk to him, though two weeks before the end of the semester, he had asked if Will might get his father’s autograph for him. He hadn’t done it. The request had annoyed and embarrassed him, although he realized later that his embarrassment was for this nervously smiling guy who thought that autographs actually meant something. What would he do with it besides stare at it from time to time? And what exactly was the point of that?

Girls had made the same request, and sometimes Will had brought them the autograph, especially if he wanted to get them into bed. For the first few years of college, and almost all of high school, he had used his father’s name to get pretty girls out of their clothes. He had slept with quite a few women, probably well over a hundred, though he had stopped keeping track after fifty. He had had sex with young actresses who hoped to get to his father through him; he had slept with the daughters of other actors, and some of his sister’s friends, including two of her closest—Jill and Celestine, who had sometimes come over and hung around his room when they knew that Anna wouldn’t be home. He had had sex with much older women too; a couple of them were actresses his father’s age who had made passes at him at parties or spotted him on the street and told him to get in, they would drive him home, but usually it was after they had taken him to their homes first. He had lost his virginity at fourteen to a twenty-three-year-old woman who acted on a soap but dropped out of sight two years later, lost to drugs and alcohol, he had heard. He had slept with her on five different occasions, until his father, not nearly as outraged as Will expected, caught wind of their affair and told him that it would ruin the actress’s career if word got out that she was fucking a fourteen-year-old. Word did eventually get out, but only a little, and it didn’t matter very much—she was already an addict by then, as far as Will knew.

It wasn’t until he got back from a semester abroad in Scotland that his self-disgust became a force that he couldn’t ignore anymore, even when he was drunk. He decided to stop having sex until he found a girl who liked him, not just his father. Some of the girls he’d slept with had seemed to like him for who he was, but these were the older women and they were so busy, and he was only a puppy, one of them had said, and surely he would grow tired of her and then where would she be? It was best not to get too serious; he was so young and would meet so many women in his life. After he stopped the gratuitous fucking his senior year in college, he eventually found real girlfriends, two of them women whose parents were in the movie business too, but few of his relationships lasted for more than three or four months, until Danielle, who had stayed with him for more than a year, but then, of course, he had fallen in love with Elise.

Now he was in Paris, living a monk’s life, and it wasn’t so bad, but all of that would change very soon if he wanted it to, he realized. After Mme Moreau dismissed them for the night, the Japanese couple and Jorie, the girl from Boston, stayed in the classroom until they could follow Will out, and when Jorie and the Japanese man both called his name, he knew that they would ask if he wanted to go out for dinner or a drink. When he turned around and looked at their smiling, flushed faces, he felt an unexpected surge of gratitude, no scorn or weariness at all.

“Yes,” he said, when they asked if he wanted to have dinner with them. “There’s an Italian place near here that I’ve wanted to try. Would that be all right?”

Yes, it would be. Jorie nodded, her blue eyes glowing. The Japanese woman, dressed in a pink down coat and matching hat, giggled and nodded too. Her boyfriend smiled and offered his hand. “Yoshi,” he said. “You might not remember from the first day. Yannick in our class.”

“I do remember,” said Will, smiling.

Outside it was snowing for the third time in six days and the city glistened, its streetlamps casting a muted golden light over the covered sidewalks, the air cold against their hopeful faces. Elise had still not replied to his e-mail. That was all right, at least for now. His classmates, he knew, would be happy to do whatever he wanted. It would all be so easy if he allowed it to be that way.

Mr. Greenbaum, a patient who had been admitted with a severe case of bronchitis during one of Anna’s recent internal medicine rotations, had grabbed her wrist while she was listening to his lungs and said, “On any given day, do you know how much time the average person spends worrying about things he can’t control?”

“No,” said Anna, startled but curious. “I don’t think I do.”

“Neither do I,” said the patient with a smile that featured a chipped front tooth, “but it has to be a lot. Half our lives, don’t you think?”

“I sure hope not,” she said.

“You’re still young,” he said. “You don’t worry that much right now, but it’ll catch up with you.”

After she left Mr. Greenbaum’s room, she kept thinking about his question. Was it an hour a day that the average person fruitlessly worried? Probably more, but she didn’t have much time for worrying during these last few months of her internship year at the UCLA medical center that had been named after Ronald Reagan, which she wasn’t thrilled about, having learned in childhood from her liberal parents that Reagan’s policies had done a lot to put the poor even further behind the rich. (Plenty to worry about there, she thought, wondering if Mr. Greenbaum or any of her other patients had made the same connection.) When she worried, she tried to do it early in the day because if she started to think about the problems in her life, or the potential for new problems, late at night, it sometimes kept her up for a while after she had turned off the bedside lamp, and she needed every minute of sleep that could be wrung out of her short nights. Rising at five thirty in the morning, sometimes at five, did not come naturally to her, and she rarely could get to bed before eleven, even when she left the hospital by seven thirty. On Sunday, the one day that she could sleep in, she did not wake up until well past nine unless the phone rang, but everyone she talked to regularly knew not to call before ten. Except for Tom Glass, who called whenever he wanted to because he was the one person she would willingly lose sleep for, and his free moments were unpredictable. She had been seeing him for close to seven months when Mr. Greenbaum asked his unanswerable question, and sometimes it was as if it were only the first month of their affair—she still felt giddy around him, and a little anxious. He was the one source of anxiety that she might take up at any hour of the day because she could not stop worrying that he would no longer want her if she said or did something foolish.

When they saw each other at the hospital, her desire to be close to him was sometimes unbearable—she wanted to touch his hair, the curls that had grown back from the previous summer’s severe pruning, and it was also difficult for her to stop looking at his mouth, the full lips that had kissed hers and so many inches of her body more times than she would have been able to count. Seven months of clandestine meetings, and he was now talking about moving in with her after she finished her internship year; he would leave his wife and sons for her, but he was certain that his sons would like her once they got to know her and would have little trouble adjusting to his less frequent presence in their lives because they weren’t home that much now anyway, one with his driver’s license and the other with friends who had driver’s licenses. His boys, Trevor and Nathan, would come and stay with them from time to time anyway, though Trevor was going to college in the fall, so it would only really be Nathan who stayed with them, but maybe Anna would ask her downstairs tenant to move out so that she could take over the whole house, if he did leave his wife?

If he left his wife. Despite being such a small word,
if
had a lot of power.

He was much calmer than she when they worked side by side, doing their daily rounds. It seemed that way to her, at least. He had sworn to her that she was the first and only intern he had ever been romantically involved with, but she continued to wonder if this was true. How was it that he did not feel more nervous when they were at work, especially because if she wanted to, she could have gone to the hospital administrators and made things uncomfortable for him? He must have been confident, however, that she would never do such a thing. And she wouldn’t. She loved him and couldn’t imagine doing him harm even if one day he told her that he didn’t want to see her anymore. People changed their minds; it happened all the time. And if he did dump her, she would
not
be so lame as to pine for someone who didn’t want to be with her.

From the beginning, however, he had made an effort to see her at least once a week, sometimes twice. He told her that he would have come to her every day if it had been possible, and sometimes when they were in her bed, he said that he had dreams about her at night and was afraid that he talked in his sleep, because on some mornings his wife would hardly speak to him and there was no other logical reason for her remoteness that he could think of.

“Other than the fact you’ve been married for nineteen years?” Anna teased.

“How could she possibly be tired of me?” He laughed, this Dr. Heart-of-Glass, as her friend Jill called him, this faithless wretch, this man she was witlessly crazy about. Her mother, having been left years ago for the other woman, did not know that he was married. Her mother wanted to meet him, having gotten wind of the fact, from Anna’s brother, Billy, that there was a new man in her life, Billy having blurted something about Tom over the phone from his possibly beautiful new life in Paris.