Vintage (26 page)

Madeleine disentangled herself from Henri and went back into the house, claiming that she had a cold coming on and needed to blow her nose. Once inside, she gave way to the tears that had been building since Geoff announced that he was unable to help her clear Champagne Arsenault’s tax bill.

Every day the tax bill went unpaid, the amount Champagne Arsenault owed crept higher. The revenue wouldn’t wait to be paid. The grapes wouldn’t wait to be picked. The wine in the vats wouldn’t wait to be bottled. Madeleine sat on her bed with her head in her hands and wondered what price Mathieu Randon would give her.

M
athieu Randon may have been furious about Christina’s speech at the wine fair but it didn’t seem to have done her any harm. The day after a little article about her surprise denunciation of Domaine Randon appeared in the
Times,
Christina’s agent, Marisa, fielded a call from the editor of
Vanity Fair.
Their November issue was to be all about stars taking a stance against globalization. Would Christina consider giving a small interview regarding her decision to walk away from an extremely highly paid job and toward the moral high ground? She responded that she would be delighted.

“You see,” she said to Bill when they passed briefly in the corridor at the Manhattan apartment. “My ‘stupid stance,’ as you call it, may yet turn out to be the best move I ever made.
Vanity Fair
wants to interview me, Bill. That’s
Vanity Fair!”

Christina knew the
Vanity Fair
article would drive Bill crazy. He had yet to make the pages of the magazine except the odd appearance in their film review section, wherein his work was invariably panned. Each February, when the
March edition of the magazine—the traditional pre-Oscars “Hollywood edition”—hit the shelves, Bill would spend days brooding over why he never made the cut when his box-office figures rivaled those of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. That the editor of the magazine himself had called Christina directly and assured her he would devote at least four pages to her and her stupid causes sent Bill into something approaching clinical depression. Well, served Bill right, thought Christina. He was her husband. He was supposed to support her.

A week later, Christina flew from NYC to Napa Valley where she was photographed for the article on the grounds of the Villa Bacchante. She was dressed like a goddess, all flowing drapes and Roman-style sandals. A wind machine blew her long blond hair back from her perfect face. She was like Botticelli’s Venus in a vineyard instead of on the half shell.

Mathieu Randon heard all about Christina’s forthcoming appearance in
Vanity Fair
via the journalist who had written his profile for the same magazine. Randon had an unusual talent of inspiring loyalty in the journalists who came into contact with him. The female ones at least. This woman, an unmarried forty-something from Manhattan, would have done anything for the chance to bask in the beam of Randon’s Gallic smile for just a few more moments.

“Thank you,” he said, when she passed on the message. “You are very kind to let me know. I look forward to seeing you next time you are in Paris,” he added, not meaning a word. In Manhattan, the journalist immediately began searching the Internet for cheap flights to Europe.

Randon could just imagine how the article would be. Though just a couple of years previously he had been happy enough to pose for the magazine himself to illustrate
an article on the new establishment, Randon had little time for
Vanity Fair’s
thinly disguised celebrity puffs. To him, the magazine was on a par with
Hello!
Would it have featured ISACL’s campaign at all if someone altogether less photogenic had been fronting it? He was white-hot furious that, as yet, no one had called Domaine Randon’s office to get his side of the child-labor story.

Still, Randon wasn’t going to let some dozy supermodel and a lazy journalist undo years of hard work. It was time for a preemptive strike.

He dialed his assistant. “Bertille, will you get Jeremy Fraser on the phone?”

Fraser was a publicist specializing in “kiss and tell.”

“There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Randon told him.

Amelie’s fifteen minutes of fame had come at last. While
Vanity Fair
was working photoshop magic on the results of the Christina Morgan shoot, Amelie the call girl was taking part in a photo shoot of her own in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in front of the camera, but it was the first time she’d been in front of a camera with her clothes on. If you could call the scraps of fabric she was wearing clothes.

“Chin down, eyes to camera,” said the photographer. “Give me a smile, sweetheart. That’s great.”

Amelie was a natural, running through a whole gamut of pouty, seductive faces, blowing kisses and cupping her own breasts in classic glamour-model mode.

Because of France’s strict tabloid journalism laws (and because the French didn’t really care about Bill Tarrant), the story would be broken in Britain’s
News of the World.
Alongside the full-color shots of Amelie in a virginal white bra and knickers set, the paper would run a couple of grainy pictures lifted from the chip in her mobile phone:
Bill Tarrant, exhausted after a night of Parisian hospitality courtesy of Mathieu Randon…

“I hope that one day in the future Bill will look at this article and smile,” said Randon to Fraser as they admired the finished piece in their respective offices on either side of
La Manche.
“Five times in one night. Without Viagra! He’s quite a guy.”

“If it were true.” Fraser laughed. “It’s a time-honored tradition,” he explained to Randon. “Five times a night. What man is going to bring a libel suit if he has to gainsay an article that paints him in quite such a spectacular light?”

Randon allowed himself a rare burst of laughter.

Christina was in Napa Valley when the story broke. The previous night she had hosted a fund-raising event for ISACL at the Top of the Mark, the restaurant at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. And so, by the time she awoke—slightly later than usual because she was so exhausted from being on show the night before—the story of Bill’s adventures in Paris had raced around the globe and was waiting in her in-box. When she turned on her mobile, she was momentarily gratified to hear she had fifteen messages on her voicemail. The first seven were from Bill.

“Baby,” he said. “Pick up the phone. You’ve got to call me as soon as you get this message. Don’t check your e-mail first. Promise me you won’t. Call me right away. I need to speak to you the minute you get this. Please pick up the goddamn phone, my love. Don’t check your e-mail first.”

Christina checked her e-mail.

It took a moment before Christina connected the grainy photograph that popped up on the screen of her Mac with the man she had exchanged vows with. She felt a little sor
did as she clicked on a link to YouTube that actually showed a video clip from the same evening. Her husband lying on a messed-up hotel bed. Spent. The girl holding the camera phone used her free hand, with its chipped red nails, to lift his flaccid penis from his washboard stomach and try to coax it back to life.

Bill woke up and looked into the camera.

“What are you doing?” he asked his companion.

“Taking a souvenir,” said the girl in her heavy Parisian accent. “Smile.”

“Don’t show anyone, will you,” said Bill, then he lay back against the pillows and closed his eyes.

“Oh, Bill.” Christina put her head in her hands. “You stupid, stupid man.”

She turned off her laptop and remained sitting at her desk with her own eyes closed for quite some time. The screen might be blank but now the scene played inside her head instead. She wondered if she would ever be able to see anything else.

Meanwhile, her mobile was vibrating intermittently—irritatingly—to tell her that she had messages. People were trying to get through. Not just Bill now but her agent, Marisa; her lawyer, Todd; her mother … eventually, she had to pick up.

“Hello,” she said wearily.

“Christina?” It was Bill. “Are you OK?”

“What do you think, you fuck?” her voice cracked.

How on earth was this going to
look?

Bill flew back to the States from London right away, missing the last day of the film junket he had flown to Europe for (he was, in any case, in no state to do TV interviews after a bout of very heavy drinking in anticipation of the shit hitting the fan). Christina arranged to meet her husband in New York, at an apartment belonging to Marisa’s sister,
since the paparazzi were staking out all their own properties. She was snapped rushing through SFO wearing a scarf and a beanie hat despite the eighty-degree heat.

God, she hated her husband for doing this to her. He better have a good excuse.

“I guess the honeymoon period is well and truly over,” Christina sighed when she saw him. Her mood had not been helped by the fact that every newspaper she was offered in the first-class cabin of her United Airlines flight (where were your friends with private jets when you needed them?) carried pictures of Christina alongside a cheap headshot of the slut her husband had slept with. No matter that the headlines expressed their incredulity that Bill would cheat on a
supermodel
with a cheap French call girl by asking “Would you swap this for
that?”
The awful truth was he
had
swapped her for
that.
Christina was humiliated. Devastated. Crushed.

“That bastard Randon stitched me up,” Bill launched into his defense right away. “He took me out to dinner and got me drunk.”

“Bill,” said Christina, full of faux patience. “You’re not some sixteen-year-old girl. You’re a grown man. No one gets a forty-year-old man drunk without his cooperation.”

“Then maybe someone drugged me. Rohypnol or something. I’m telling you, my darling, all I remember after having dinner with Randon is going up to my hotel room and going to sleep. I’d had a hard day. I swear I left him and that girl in the bar. But when I woke up, she was there.”

“Sitting on your cock,” said Christina bluntly.

“No.” Bill covered his eyes. “I swear I don’t know how she even got into my room!”

“How about you let her in? Bill,” sighed Christina, “I’m not an idiot. I don’t want to hear any excuses. You’re
a jerk. You’re a dickhead. You’re the sorriest bastard I ever met and I wish I’d never laid eyes on you!”

When it was clear that Christina wasn’t going to accept his assertion that he had been drugged and set up, Bill tried that other tactic. So maybe he had slept with a prostitute. It was, of course, Christina’s own fault. They’d argued before he flew to Paris to try to rescue the Randon deal.
Their
deal. She’d made him so angry that he needed to let off steam. He deserved to.

“You deserved to let off steam by having some girl blow you? Why couldn’t you have just gotten into a fist-fight like you normally do?” Christina asked. “That way it’s only you who has to face the humiliation the morning after. You have made me look an idiot, Bill. My face is in all the papers next to a mug shot of some girl who looks like she hasn’t seen a dentist in ten years. People want to know what’s so wrong with me that you’d choose to stick your cock in that thing, that slut, rather than in the world’s most beautiful woman. Do you know how bad that is? I’m a laughingstock. They love it. That you would rather go with some ugly little French bitch than fuck me. It’s so embarrassing.”

“Is that all you care about? How you look in the papers?” Bill deftly turned Christina’s argument back on her. “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? Not me. Not our marriage. Just how it looks in the news. Is that what’s important?”

“Fuck you,” said Christina. “It
is
important. I’m going to bed. On my own.”

“Yeah,” scoffed Bill. “Like that’s a change.”

After a night in separate bedrooms Bill convinced himself that Randon had been right. He didn’t need Christina. She was holding him back with her holier-than-thou
stance on globalization. She was a model and he was a film star. Their job was to entertain, not proselytize. Quite apart from that, Christina was colder than a penguin’s backside. Not only did Bill never get laid anymore, he didn’t get any appreciation either. He needed someone who understood how hard he worked. Someone who would be grateful for the flowers and the jewelry and not ask what he’d done that he needed to offset with a lastminute gift from duty-free.

Bill hated always being the bad guy. He screwed up sometimes but he wasn’t a bad man. Fuck. Much to his chagrin, he didn’t even really remember what that stupid French slut had done to him. Was he going to have to be punished for some forbidden pleasure he couldn’t even recall? Every guy slipped up from time to time, didn’t he? Anger swiftly morphed into self-pity.

All Bill wanted was to be forgiven, he told himself. To be loved unconditionally. He hugged a pillow tightly against his body like a little boy missing his mother. Christina was supposed to forgive him. Wasn’t that in their marriage vows?