Rake Read Online Free PDF Page B

impressed with his ability to capture my manner of speaking, my cadences and tones. In darker moments I believed he was better than me.
    Onscreen Me was arguing with his half-sister, and based on Becky’s hairstyle—long and braided—I estimated that the episode dated back about seven years, to a period when we’d broken up over some insensitive remark I’d made deliberately just to piss her off, and there was a real fire to our scene together: Her very real anger toward the real me spilled helplessly over into her character’s anger with mine. I suddenly missed her, wished I had treated her better, wished we could spend a few weeks here together, but of course that was impossible given the number of entanglements I’d already entered into. Maybe Rome someday, where the show was reasonably popular but aired at a worse timeslot and where the general public hadn’t gone apeshit over it the way the French had. Or maybe London, where it aired during the day, same as in the States, and was enjoyed only by the most depressive of shut-ins and unemployables.
    Fred’s arrival interrupted my reverie, and I shook his hand with unfeigned enthusiasm. With his skills as a writer and mineas an idea man we would come up with a script that would be impossible to turn down.
    He ordered a beer and the bartender put down a fresh bowl of amuse-gueules before us, and I set about pitching the movie.
    “I’m an archaeologist, somewhere down in the Mediterranean.”
    “So this is sort of an Indiana Jones thing?”
    “No. I don’t know, maybe. Just listen. I’m on a dig and I find a chunk of marble.”
    “Are you alone on the dig?”
    “I don’t know. Sure. Or maybe I’ve got my girlfriend with me.”
    “If you’ve already got a girlfriend then there’s no love interest later on.”
    “True. No girlfriend then. Maybe just some students. I’m a professor.”
    “Like Indiana Jones.”
    “Or not. Maybe I’m sleeping with one of the students. Like a charming rogue.”
    “Okay. Or maybe you’ve got a girlfriend who’s a bitch, and the audience wants you to find a different one.”
    I liked the way he thought. “Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I find this chunk of marble.”
    “Does it have to be marble?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why? Because I have another idea about what he could find.”
    “Shoot.”
    “A mummy.”
    “No. It’s not a horror movie. Try not to get distracted, okay? He finds a chunk of marble, and something about it makes him think, hmm, this is familiar. Where have I seen this particular type of marble before?”
    “What type of marble is it? Do we need to research the different kinds?”
    His inability to stay focused was starting to worry me. “Forget that for a second. Anyway, he digs some more and he figures it out. You want to know what he finds?”
    “I guess.”
    I looked down the bar to make sure the bartender wasn’t listening. They say execution is everything and inspiration counts for very little, but this was the sort of high concept that could get easily hijacked by the wrong sort of character. I leaned in and said quietly, “He finds a pair of arms.”
    “Skeletal arms?” Fred said.
    “Marble arms.”
    “Okay. Marble arms. What happens next?”
    “Don’t you get it?”
    “I guess I don’t.”
    “They’re the Venus de Milo’s arms.”
    He looked blank. “That’s your idea?”
    “That’s it.”
    “What else is there?”
    “That’s the start of the movie. Now we figure out the rest.”
    “There was already a movie maybe thirty years ago with Noiret and Annie Girardot about an archaeologist and a statue with a missing part.”
    “Jesus, really? The Venus de Milo?”
    “No, it was a statue of Jupiter and they stole his leg.”
    “Then I don’t see what the problem is.”
    “I didn’t say there was one.”
    “Good.” I was getting a little tired of his tendency to piss on my ideas, but in the end it was probably good to have someone playing devil’s advocate.
    “Did you read my