They swam for half an hour before lunch. Afterward, Adam took out one of the Jet Skis to take a tour around the other boats, and work off some of his energy, while Gray slept on the deck, and Charlie smoked one of his Cuban cigars. It was the perfect life. At two-thirty they took the tender to lunch at Club 55. Alain Delon was there, as he often was, Gerard Dépardieu, and Catherine Deneuve, which caused the three friends to discuss her at length. They all agreed that she was still beautiful, despite her age. She was very much Charlie's type, although considerably older than the women he went out with, who more often than not were somewhere in their thirties, or even slightly younger. He rarely went out with women his own age. He left the women in their forties to men in their sixties, or older. And Adam liked them much, much younger.
Gray said he would have been happy with Catherine Deneuve, at any age. He liked women closer to his own age, or even slightly older, although Ms. Deneuve was disqualified in his case, because she looked completely normal and relaxed as she laughed and talked to friends. The woman Gray was looking for, or would have noticed anywhere, would have been crying softly in a corner, or talking between sobs on her cell phone while appearing distraught. The girl Adam had in mind would have been ten years older than his teenage daughter. And he would have had to buy her breast implants and a nose job. The girl of Charlie's dreams would have been wearing a halo and glass slippers. But this time, in his fairy tale, when midnight came, she wouldn't run away, or disappear, she would stay at the ball, promise never to leave him, and dance in his arms forever. He just hoped that one day he'd find her.
2
THE CAPTAIN DOCKED THE BLUE MOON AT THE END OF the quai in St. Tropez that afternoon. It was a major feat since dock space wasn't easy to come by in high season. Because of her size, they had to have the first spot, but as soon as they tied her up, Charlie was sorry they had gone in, instead of coming into port in the tender, as he usually preferred to do. The paparazzi were out in full force, and instantly drawn by the sheer size of the boat. They snapped a lot of photographs of all three men as they slipped into a car waiting for them. Charlie ignored them, as did Adam, and Gray waved.
“Poor bastards, what a shit way to make a living,” he said sympathetically, as Adam growled. He hated the press.
“Parasites. They're all bottom-feeders,” he said. The press constantly created problems in his clients' lives. He had gotten a call from his office just that afternoon. One of his clients had been caught coming out of a hotel with a woman other than his wife, and the shit had hit the fan. The irate wife had called the office ten times and was threatening divorce. It wasn't the first time he'd done it, and she either wanted a huge settlement in a divorce, or five million dollars to stay married to him. Nice. Nothing surprised Adam anymore. All he wanted right now was to find those Brazilian girls again, and dance the samba until the wee hours. He could deal with the rest of the crap when he got back to New York. Right now he had no interest in dealing with the tabloids, or the infidelities of his clients. They'd done it before, and would do the same things many times again. This was his time now, not theirs. Time out. He had turned his meter off.
They went into town to shop that afternoon, took naps, and had dinner at Spoon at the Hotel Byblos, where a spectacular-looking Russian supermodel had come in wearing white silk pants, and a little white leather bolero, wide open, with nothing underneath. The entire restaurant got a full view of her breasts, and seemed to enjoy it. Charlie looked amused, while Adam laughed.
“She has amazing breasts,” Gray commented as they ordered dinner, and an excellent bottle of wine.
“Yeah, but they're not real,” Adam said clinically, unimpressed but also amused. It took a lot of guts to sit down to dinner in a nice restaurant with your tits hanging out, although they had seen it done before. A German girl had walked into a restaurant the year before with a see-through net blouse you couldn't even see, and no one skipped a beat. She had sat there eating dinner all night, naked from the waist up, talking, laughing, smoking, and obviously enjoying the sensation she had caused.
“How do you know they're not real?” Gray asked with interest. Her breasts were large and firm, and the nipples pointed up. He would have loved to draw them, and was already slightly drunk. They'd been drinking margaritas on the boat before they went out. Another night of decadence and debauchery had begun.
“Take my word for it,” Adam said with confidence. “I've paid for about a hundred pair by now. Actually, a hundred and a half. A couple of years ago some girl I went out with only wanted one done. She said the other one was fine, she just wanted to match up the smaller one.”
“That sounds interesting,” Charlie said, looking amused, as he tasted the wine and nodded to the sommelier. It was fine. Better than fine. It was superb. It was a very old vintage of Lynch-Bages. “Instead of taking them out to dinner and a movie, do you send them out for new breasts first?”
“No, every time I go out with some budding actress, she hits me up for a new pair on the way out. It's easier than arguing about it. They go quietly after that, as long as they like what they got.”
“Men used to buy women pearls or diamond bracelets as consolation prizes. I guess now they buy them implants instead,” Charlie commented drily. The women he went out with would never have asked him for new breasts, or any of the other things Adam paid for. If Charlie's dates had cosmetic work done, they paid for it themselves, from their trusts, and it was never discussed. He couldn't think of a single woman he'd gone out with who'd had plastic surgery, at least not that he knew about. Adam's girls, as he and Gray called them, had been entirely remodeled for the most part. And Gray's women needed lobotomies, or heavy sedation, more than anything else. He had paid for a number of therapists, rehab programs, shrinks, and attorneys' fees for court orders to restrain the previous men in their lives who were either stalking them or threatening to kill them, or him. Whatever worked. Maybe paying for the implants was simpler in the end. After the surgery, Adam's women thanked him and disappeared. Gray's always lingered for a while, or called when the new men in their lives began abusing them. They rarely stayed with Gray for longer than a year. He treated them too well. Charlie's women always became friends, and invited him to their weddings, to someone else, after he had left them, once their fatal flaw had been unearthed. “Maybe I should try that sometime,” Charlie said, laughing over his wine.