Fascination Read Online Free PDF Page B

print was appalling).
    Two very groomed women sit beside me, talking to each other, with gratifying volume and clarity. Clearly they don’t know each other very well.
    ‘Where do you live?’ one asks.
    ‘Mexico.’
    ‘Even further away than me – Vermont.’ Pause.
    ‘Where in Mexico?’
    ‘San Miguel. It’s very beautiful.’
    ‘Oh, there are a lot of expatriates, there.’
    ‘There are a few of us.’
    ‘I hear you can get a very cheap face-lift.’
    ‘Cheap face-lifts, cheap domestic staff. It has its advantages.’
    Men have more boring conversations than women, I find, speaking as a professional eavesdropper. Tanja was once in a movie shot in Mexico. She met Duprez there. I think.
    ‘You may not have a drinking problem but I have a problem with your drinking.’ Overheard in Bemelmans.
    Bizarre sight in Going Loco (East Village). A young mother (twenty-one? twenty-two?), suckling her child in the corner of the café, receives a call on her cell-phone. She answers it, rises to her feet and walks to the window of the café chatting on the phone, the baby still at her breast. The unconcern, the utter absence of
pudeur
was entirely admirable – made me feel old, crabbed and confined by my upbringing and the received wisdom of my attitudes and values – as hard to remove as a tattoo. I like the atmosphere in this place – rackety, worldly – I am eating a pungent, garlicky gazpacho at the bar. Very smoky. Tanja flies in tomorrow.
    4.00 p.m. Bemelmans. Drinking beer and eating cashew nuts. The place is full of older people: that generation of New Yorkers who like a cocktail mid-afternoon. There is a man beside me who has just ordered a second dry martini.
    I lunched with Tanja. I went to her suite in the Plaza and to my astonishment there was a young boy there, about six or seven. ‘This is Pascal,’ she said as if his presence were the most naturalthing in the world. Then Pascal said something to her in French and referred to her as ‘
Maman
’. What on earth does he mean by that? I asked. He’s my son, she said, looking at me as if I were a crazy fool, that’s what he calls me. A nanny came to take him away but I had lost my appetite. During lunch I managed to ask if Duprez was the father and Tanja reassured me he wasn’t. Throughout our eight weeks of filming together on
The Sleep Thief
she never once referred to Pascal. Is this normal for a mother? Was she hiding the fact from me in case it interfered with our affair? Maybe she thought I knew and because I never brought his name up she felt it more discreet to do the same? She’s coming to the hotel tonight once the boy has been put to bed.
    Curious: I seem only to drink beer in France or the US. Never touch a drop in England.
    In the pub, The Duke of Kent, Monday lunch. No food in the flat so I came here. An empty fridge in an empty apartment – how depressing is that? I was about to call Janet and have her order in a take-away when I remembered she was working on another film in Malta. Janet and my two assistants, gone. A film director, when a film is finally over, has to return to the unfamiliar state of actually doing mundane things for himself – like going to the bank, fetching clothes from the dry-cleaners, buying food and provisions. Strange to be self-reliant again, strange to be back in London after New York. Missing Tanja desperately, achingly – she flew to L.A. to meet her agent. She promised she would be in Cannes… I’m obsessed by her nervous, mobile beauty. She’s never still –
agitée
, they would call her in France.
    Opposite me three fat guys – heavy, enormous men. Eating pork sausage and mash, brown bread and butter. Two with pints of lager on the go, plus a bottle of red wine on the table between the three of them. I must start thinking about my next film, but I can’t let
The Sleep Thief
go. While I still dream about Tanja all the time – the film, our film, lives on, as if we’re playing out the lost, last reel.