'It is terrible here.' She squeezed my arm illogically again. 'You never can tell. A old fart of a bishop makes a speech one Sunday and hall the theaters go dark the next day. And if the wife of the President or a cabinet minister 'appens to walk by and see a poster ... you 'ave no hidea how narrow-minded French people can be about hart. Luckily, there is halways a new scandal next week to take the pressure hoff.' Suddenly, she stopped, releasing my arm. She moved off two steps and looked searchingly at me. 'To the naked heye,' she ' said, 'you look very nicely built. Ham I wrong?'
'I used to ski a lot,' I said.
'We 'ave not yet cast the role of the villain,' Nadine said. ' 'E has two very interesting scenes. One with Priscilla alone and one with Priscilla and a Nubian girl... Maybe it would hamuse you.'
'She's offering you a job, Douglas,' Miles said. His voice seemed to boom out over all the noise of the avenue traffic. 'Protect your investment.'
'It's very good of you, madame,' I said to Nadine, 'but if my mother in America ever saw it, I'm afraid...' I was ashamed to bring my dead mother into this affair, but at the moment it seemed like the quickest way to end the conversation.
'Priscilla 'as a mother in America, too,' Nadine said.
'There are mothers and mothers in America. I'm an only son,' I said idiotically.
'Oh, take it,' Lily said. 'I'll go over your lines with you on the set. And we could rehearse the difficult bits back at the hotel.'
'Sorry,' I said, glaring at her, 'I'd really love to do it. But I may be called out of Paris at any time.'
Nadine shrugged. 'The trouble with this business,' she said, 'there hare nevair henough new faces. Halways the same hequipment, the same horgasms. Some bother time, maybe. You have something - ha kind hof underground sexiness, like a young curé ... Ham I right. Lily?'
'Absolutely,' Lily said.
'It would be beautifully perverse,' Nadine said. 'Hinnocently rotten. A new dimension. The bishops would gnash their teeth.'
'Some other time,' I said firmly.
'I will work hon you.' Nadine smiled her incorruptible schoolgirl smile.
The two beers he drank one after the other in the brasserie seemed to have aroused the critic with the beard. He began to speak excitedly in French to Nadine.
'Philippe,' Nadine said, 'speak Henglish. We have guests.'
'We are in France,' Philippe said loudly through his beard. 'Why shouldn't they speak French?'
'Because we're stupid Anglo-Saxons, dearie,' Lily said, 'and, as every Frenchman knows, undereducated.'
' 'E speaks Henglish very good,' Nadine said. 'Very good. 'E was in Hamerica two years. 'E was in 'Ollywood. 'E wrote criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma.'
'Did you like Hollywood?' Fabian asked.
'I hated it.'
'Did you like the pictures?'
'I hated them.'
'Do you like French pictures?' Lily asked.
'The last one I liked Was Breathless.'' Philippe swigged at his beer.
'That was ten years ago,' Lily said.
'More than that,' Philippe said complacently.
' 'E is very particular,' Nadine said. 'Halso political.'
'How many times...' He turned angrily on her. 'How many times have I told you the two invariably go together?'
'Too many times. Don't be an emmerdeur[10], Philippe. He likes China,' Nadine explained to us.
'Do you like Chinese films?' Lily asked. She seemed to take delight in baiting the man, in her offhand, ladylike way.
'I haven't seen any - yet,' the man said. I wait. Five years. Ten years.' His English was heavily accented, but fluent. His eyes glittered. He was the sort of man who would debate happily in Sanskrit. I had the impression that if he ever got into a conversation with anybody who agreed with him he would jump up and storm out of the room.
'Tell me, old man,' Fabian said, hearty and friendly, 'what do you think of our little opus so far?'
'Merde. A piece of shit.'
'Really?' Lily sounded surprised.
'Philippe,' Nadine said warningly. 'Priscilla hunderstands English. You don't want to hundermine her performance, do you?'
"That's all right,' Priscilla said, in her pure corn-fed, high-school soprano, I never take what a Frenchman says seriously.'
'We are in the city where Racine presented Phèdre, where Molière died,' the critic recited, 'where Flaubert went to court to defend Madame Bovary, where they rioted in the streets after the first performance of Hernani, where Heine was welcomed because of his poetry in another language, and Turgenev found a home.' Philippe's beard was electric with argument, the great names luscious on his tongue. Tn our own time, in the same medium - film - we have to our credit at least Grande Illusion, Poil de Carotte, Forbidden Games.
And what have we gathered tonight to discuss? A comic and distasteful attempt to arouse our basest emotions...'
'Do not sound, chéri,' Nadine Bonheur said calmly, 'as though you are too fine to fuck. I could gather testimony.'
The critic glowered at her and waved for another beer. 'What have you shown me? The rutting of an empty-faced American poupée and a Moroccan pimp, the...'
'Chéri,' Nadine said, more sharply now, 'remember, you are halways signing petitions against racism.'
'That's all right, Nadine,' Priscilla said. She was spooning away at a huge bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce. 'I never take what a Frenchman says seriously.'
The Moroccan smiled benignly, his English obviously not up to complicated observations on aesthetics in that language.
'Made in France,' the critic said, 'written in Prance, composed in France, painted in France - You remember—' He pointed an accusing finger at Nadine. 'I ask you to remember what that used to mean. Glory. Devotion to beauty, to art, to the highest aspirations of the human race. What does your Made in France mean? A tickling of the balls, a lubricity of the vagina ...'
'Hear, hear,' Lily said.
'English lightness of character,' the critic said, leaning forward over the table, jutting his beard fiercely at Lily. "The Empire is gone. Now we will emit a Buckingham Palace snicker.'
'Old man,' Miles said amiably, 'if I may say so, I think you're missing the point.'
'If I may say so, sir,' Philippe said, I think I am missing nothing. What is the point?'
'For one thing, the point is to make a dollar or two,' Miles said. 'From what I've heard, that isn't completely against the French character.'
'That is not the French character. That is capitalism in France. They are two different things, monsieur.'
'All right,' Fabian said good-naturedly, 'let's leave money out of it for the time being. Although permit me to point out in passing that the greatest number of pornographic films and the most - ah - explicit ones - come out of Sweden and Denmark, two Socialist countries, if I have my facts straight.'
'Scandinavians,' the critic said. He snorted, dismissing the North. 'A mockery of the word Socialism. I piss on such Socialism.'
Fabian sighed. 'You're a hard man to do business with, Philippe.'
'I have my definitions,' Philippe said. 'I define Socialism.'
'China, again,' Nadine said. She made a small, wailing sound.
'We can't all live m China, now, can we?' Fabian spoke reasonably. 'Whether we like it or not, we live in a world that has a different history, different tastes, different needs...'
'I piss on a world that needs merde[11] like the merde we saw tonight.' Philippe called for another beer. He would have a belly like a barrel by the time he was forty.
'I went to the Louvre with my young friend this afternoon.' Fabian waved in my direction, his voice gentle. 'And yesterday I treated myself to a visit to the Jeu de Paume. Where the Impressionists are collected.'