‘We welcome great Russia to our Luna Park,’ he cries.
‘You’ll see, soon we shall be as rrrrrich as you, we shall rrrrise above the rrrrabble by selling our nuclearrr weapons to your enemies [Boris rolls his ‘r’s with application]. One day, we shall wearrrr Mickey Mouse costumes of finest orrrrgandie.’
‘Good, good! Party on!’
‘Do you know,’ Loulou murmurs in a confiding tone, ‘I have a friend who is so racist and so anti-communist that she has always refused to drink Black Russians.’
‘Ha, ha,’ Boris laughs. ‘Now, perrrhaps she will change herrr mind!’
‘I adore your cane,’ says Irène. ‘It’s marvellous, really.’
‘Fo’ shizzle, man,’ chimes in Fab. ‘The stick is shabby.’
‘Hey, wow,’ yells Marc, ‘it’s not just my table, it’s a global village!’
‘Look, I have amassed thirrrteen pearrrls,’ brags Boris, brandishing a small purse full of small nacreous spheres.
‘Why?’ asks Marc, with something in mind.
‘As a souvenirrrr of this soirrrrée!’
‘Why?’
‘So that I can tell the storrry to my grrrandchildren!’
‘Why?’
‘So they will have something to rrrremember me by when I pass away …’ intones the Russian President gravely.
Marc’s inner glee can be read in the gleam in his eyes. Pythagoras, Euclid, Fermat – watch out! The Nobel Prize for Mathematics can’t be far off.
The service isn’t slack. Already they’re bringing on the main course: rack of lamb with Smarties. Marc gets up to go for a piss. Just before he leaves the table, he leans over to Loulou and whispers in her ear:
‘I swear, when you really need to take a piss, well, it’s almost as good as shooting your load. So there!’
Marc knew the party would be a success when he saw the mob at the ladies’ toilets, touching up their make-up or snorting coke (which amounts to the same thing since cocaine is simply brain cosmetics). On a Post-it, he writes: ‘The twenty-first century will take place in the ladies’ toilets or not at all.’
I sense that I shall only feel truly sad after having dined.
Paul Morand Tendres Stocks
On his way back to his table, Marc runs into Clio, Joss Dumoulin’s girlfriend, who is having trouble negotiating the stairs. Her legs are ten yards long with a pair of wedge-heel flip-flops at one end. Her almost perfect body is violently shoehorned into a latex dress.
‘Mademoiselle, may I offer you a glass of lemonade?’ Marc asks, offering his elbow so that she can support her weight.
‘Sorry?’
‘Well, now, little girl,’ Marc changes tack, ‘you’re very late, you deserve to be punished!’
‘Oh, yes please!’ the girl replies, with a flutter of her gargantuan fake eyelashes. ‘I’m a naughty girl!’
She clutches his arm as she talks.
‘As punishment, you shall sit at my table.’
‘But … I have to see Joss …’
‘The sentence is irreversible!’ bawls Marc.
And thus he takes Clio by her pretty bare wrist and leads her to his table.
He has barely seated himself before his plate of dead sheep when he must endure a heated interrogation from his neighbours.
‘So,’ asks Loulou Zibeline, mockingly, ‘are you working on your second novel?’
‘Yes,’ Marc answers, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. “French literature” is about as significant nowadays as Noh theatre. Why bother writing when a novel has a shorter shelf-life than a TV ad for pasta? Besides, look around you – there are as many photographers as there are stars. Well, in France, literature is the same: there are as many writers as there are readers.’
‘So, why bother?’
‘Yeah. Why bother … As a writer, I’m stillborn, spoiled by happiness. My only readers live in a couple of blocks around Mabillon metro station. I don’t give a fuck: all I ask is that one day, after my death, in some foreign land, I be rediscovered. I think it would be cool to bring pleasure in one’s absence, posthumously. And maybe one day, in a hundred years, a woman like you will be interested in me. “A minor, neglected fin-de-siècle author.” Patrick Mauriès will have written my biography In 2032. I will be reprinted. My public will be elderly aesthetes who are resolutely paedophile. Then, only then, will this mad circus not have been in vain …’
‘Nnnyes …’ Loulou is dubious. ‘That’s just vanity … I’m sure there must be more to it than that. The quest for beauty, for instance. There must be some things you find beautiful, no?’
Marc gives the matter some thought.
‘It’s true,’ he says after a pause, ‘the two most beautiful things in the world are the violins in Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” and a woman in a bikini wearing a blindfold.’
Clio is sitting in Marc’s lap. She may well be thin, but she is quite heavy.
‘Aren’t you bored of dating a star?’ Marc asks her. ‘Wouldn’t you rather sleep with your chair?’
‘What?’
She stares at him, her face blank.
‘Well, since you’re sitting on me, if you were to go out with your chair, that would be me … [He makes a sweeping gesture.] Just a joke … Forget it.’
‘This guy is weird,’ says Irène to Clio.
Marc’s sense of humour does not meet with universal approval. If this keeps up, he will begin to suffer self-doubt, which is inadvisable when attempting to seduce. Suddenly, he has an idea. He slips his hand into the pocket of his jacket and finds the tab of Euphoria Joss gave him on page 27. He discreetly opens it and tips the powder into Clio’s glass of Oxygen vodka just as she grabs the glass and drains it, all the while chattering to Irène. It’s like a movie. Marc rubs his hands. Now all he need do is wait for the drug to take effect. Long live drugged dating! No need to impress, to spend a fortune, to have candlelit dinners: one capsule and so to bed.
The air is redolent with costly perfumes, fermented grain drinks and societal sweat. HRH the Princess Giuseppe de Montanero has managed to gatecrash the party thanks to some transves-tite friends who spent some time distracting the doorman. Everywhere are unattainable women wearing inestimable jewellery. Some of whom are men, for all that. (In the toilets, Marc even saw a bulge beneath the dress of an elegantly dressed lady powdering her nose – inside and out.)
Joss Dumoulin waves to his girlfriend. He could get up, come over, kiss her, pay her a compliment, offer her a drink. But Joss doesn’t get up, doesn’t come over, doesn’t kiss her, doesn’t pay her a compliment, and Clio finishes her drink alone. Welcome to the twentieth century.
*
Meanwhile, the Hardissons are force-feeding their child foie gras; forlorn PR people stare at the TV screens (can there be anything more depressing than a solitary Director of Communications?); Ali de Hirschenberger, distinguished producer of porn films, affectionately slaps Nelly, his wife, a sybarite who is wearing a leash; millionaire playboy Robert