Renn Ivins! C’est votre père? C’est vrai?”
Will nodded. “Oui.” Weren’t Europeans supposed to be blasè about fame, at least compared to Americans? Apparently this did not apply to all of them.
More questions started coming, from the teacher and a few of his classmates, some in French, some in English. Was Renn Ivins also in Paris, and would he visit their class? Did he have a black belt in karate? Had he really carried an actual tarantula in his pocket in Death Valley by Nightfall? No, no, no. Did Will know Harrison Ford too? Brad Pitt? George Clooney? Scarlett Johanssen? Yes, sort of, sort of, no, but that’d be nice.
After several minutes, Mme Moreau finally held up her hand and said that they needed to move on, but perhaps Will would tell them more about Hollywood and his father in a future class. The atmosphere in their classroom had changed, probably permanently, the air altered by the introduction of something powerful—desire, curiosity, hope that their lives would somehow be transformed for the better because they were spending a couple of hours each week with a film star’s son. Will had not felt this atmospheric shift since college, when in a film class about the French New Wave a guy whose name he couldn’t remember kept sitting next to him but was often too shy to talk to him, though two weeks before the end of the semester, he had asked if Will might get his father’s autograph for him. He hadn’t done it. The request had annoyed and embarrassed him, although he realized later that his embarrassment was for this nervously smiling guy who thought that autographs actually meant something. What would he do with it besides stare at it from time to time? And what exactly was the point of that?
Girls had made the same request, and sometimes Will had brought them the autograph, especially if he wanted to get them into bed. For the first few years of college, and almost all of high school, he had used his father’s name to get pretty girls out of their clothes. He had slept with quite a few women, probably well over a hundred, though he had stopped keeping track after fifty. He had had sex with young actresses who hoped to get to his father through him; he had slept with the daughters of other actors, and some of his sister’s friends, including two of her closest—Jill and Celestine, who had sometimes come over and hung around his room when they knew that Anna wouldn’t be home. He had had sex with much older women too; a couple of them were actresses his father’s age who had made passes at him at parties or spotted him on the street and told him to get in, they would drive him home, but usually it was after they had taken him to their homes first. He had lost his virginity at fourteen to a twenty-three-year-old woman who acted on a soap but dropped out of sight two years later, lost to drugs and alcohol, he had heard. He had slept with her on five different occasions, until his father, not nearly as outraged as Will expected, caught wind of their affair and told him that it would ruin the actress’s career if word got out that she was fucking a fourteen-year-old. Word did eventually get out, but only a little, and it didn’t matter very much—she was already an addict by then, as far as Will knew.
It wasn’t until he got back from a semester abroad in Scotland that his self-disgust became a force that he couldn’t ignore anymore, even when he was drunk. He decided to stop having sex until he found a girl who liked him, not just his father. Some of the girls he’d slept with had seemed to like him for who he was, but these were the older women and they were so busy, and he was only a puppy, one of them had said, and surely he would grow tired of her and then where would she be? It was best not to get too serious; he was so young and would meet so many women in his life. After he stopped the gratuitous fucking his senior year in college, he eventually found real girlfriends, two of them women whose parents were in the movie business too, but few of his relationships lasted for more than three or four months, until Danielle, who had stayed with