than the boss (which I suspect a lot of people do).
E. J2 REDUX
Something happened just before I left for Paris to work with Jeunet that I’m not proud of. Elise was about to finish up in Montreal and head to New York, and we were using Skype to visit with each other nightly, unless she had a late shoot, and then we’d try to talk earlier. One afternoon when I had nothing scheduled that I couldn’t postpone for another day or two, I ducked out to see a movie, a five p.m. matinee that I hoped wouldn’t have a lot of people in it, and if I timed it right, I’d be able to slip in after the previews had started and no one would notice me. It was a German movie about a man who takes a vow of silence for a year, moves out to a remote farm in Bavaria, and tries to figure out why the Holocaust happened and then write the defining book about it. When I got up after the credits rolled, a little dazed by the film’s sorrowful intelligence, I ran into someone I knew in the lobby. Seeing her there, as if conjured out of a daydream with her pretty short yellow skirt and flowing white blouse, I felt this sudden, almost sinister desire rise up from the pit of my stomach. This lovely girl was my son’s most recent ex-girlfriend, Danielle, and we hadn’t seen each other since last fall, not long before she broke up with Billy. The final time that I saw them together, I got a little drunk on champagne and kissed her good-bye right on the lips. I’m pretty sure that she and I both enjoyed it more than we should have, and I’m also pretty sure that one of the reasons I kissed her was because I was still very angry with Billy over that fucking poem he gave to Elise last fall, hardly more than a month after she and I had first gotten together.
The whole time Anna, Billy, Danielle, and I were together that night at Sylvia’s, listening to the house band blow blue notes into the electrified air, I felt sorry for Danielle, knowing what I did about my son’s behavior in New Orleans, and how it was very unlikely that she had much of a clue about what he’d been up to there. I knew that it wasn’t my place to tell her, and I didn’t, but I liked Danielle and had enjoyed seeing her the few times we’d all gotten together. She had always seemed smart and kind, a girl my son was lucky to have in his life. I can’t say that about all of his girlfriends. One of them, a rail-thin performance artist he’d dated in college, had offered me a blow job at Billy’s graduation party. Another had also offered sex in exchange for an introduction to a director I was working with at the time.
For the record, I turned them both down. But I did not turn down another offer that I should have ignored too—one made by one of my daughter’s closest friends. I did not turn around and walk away when I knew what she was about to do—she was lying by the pool in my backyard, facedown on a lounge chair, her bikini top untied. I knew before she did it that she would rise up and show me her perfect seventeen-year-old breasts. I knew that she would do it because Billy was staying at his mother’s house, and Anna had just left to pick up carryout at an Italian place five miles away. Jill sat up and gave me the kind of smile that’s impossible to misinterpret, and we went into the cabana where I sometimes took naps or changed into my swim trunks. We locked the door and lay down on the sofa beneath the windows and almost before she could pull off her bikini bottom, I had my face between her legs, tasting the chlorine on her cunt, the salty sweetness beneath it, and then she climbed on top of me and I went for it so hard that I think my teeth were bared, scarcely managing to pull out in time, even though she swore that she was on the pill. It was all over in about seven or eight minutes. She wanted to do it again, wanted to sneak over whenever I’d let her, but after a few more times,