“Very, very lightly,” she says. “You have to use the lightest touch on the sensitive parts of their body. Like this.” Her fingers trace up and down her arm.
“How do you prepare to go to the train station at night?”
“I bathe. Set my hair. Put on makeup.”
“Could you go with a fifteen-year-old boy?”
She shakes her head no. “He would remind me of my son.”
“Who was the youngest you’ve gone with?”
“Eighteen or nineteen. And totally naïve about sex.”
I wonder if the filmmaker is thinking of Franck, in asking her if she could go with a fifteen-year-old. But Franck is much younger. And Franck doesn’t pay for sex.
“How do you pick up clients?” the filmmaker asks her.
She answers as though he has asked, How do you manage psychologically to do it, even as he has not asked that.
“Every day, the first client I’m with, it’s difficult. It anguishes me. It’s very hard. But after the first one, I do okay with the others.”
“What would you like to say about your life?”
She pauses, searching her mind for how to answer.
“I once fucked a man with a screwdriver.” She emits a sharp laugh, but her laughter seems false, as if a devil is forcing her to laugh at a joke she doesn’t find funny.
“He wanted me to tap his balls with something and that’s what I had in the car. It worked. I made him come with the tools of the trade.” More laughter. The tools of the trade. She’s told this one before.
The filmmaker asks her what she dreams about.
Dead people, she answers.
“I dream I’m talking to them. They tell me about simple, everyday things, like their house chores or how long they waited for the bus. But I want to know other things. I have so many questions. And as soon as I start to ask them, they recede. The dead disappear and I don’t see them anymore.”
The laughter is gone now. She’s turning inward, to these dead people in her dreams who won’t answer her questions.
“What do you want to ask them?”
“So many things. What it’s like to live on the other side. If paradise exists. I want to know about hell.”
“How do you imagine hell?”
“A place where you cannot see God.”
Her eyes redden and water. She looks to the side. And up. And again to the side. People do this to try to dissipate sadness, to cast it from their own face, by looking here and there to avoid crying. It doesn’t work.
The boy with the chin-line beard had done this.
In his filmed confessions, they tell him that Nancy has already turned state’s evidence against him. (She has not; they are lying.) The boy doesn’t want to believe them, but he’s not seasoned. He doesn’t know that cops lie.
He blinks, looks at the floor and into the corners of the room. Looks up. Tears crest, roll down his cheeks.
I betrayed this boy. It was my job to betray him. But it could also be said that he betrayed me, by mounting that entrapment defense, which got me fired. Still, I blame Nancy for my exile, more than I do him. It’s not logical, exactly, it’s emotional. We all like to find a person to hate, and for me that person is Nancy.
The boy, as a type, is one of the lost and the weak. The rudderless. Nancy is among the strong and vengeful, as I could see from the character test of the surprise raid at her warehouse.
She and the boy were still together from what I could tell. They had lawyers working to clear their names. Nancy gave interviews to left-wing journalists blathering on about the agent who set them up. No one had discovered this agent’s real name. Instead, they used the alias the boy knew her by, which was Amy, and they always put the name in quotes. “Amy” this and “Amy” that. They had no photo of her to match the name.
“TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK OF MEN,” the filmmaker says to the prostitute in her tidy kitchen, she and her kitchen both reeking of despair.
“Men are all the same,” she says. “They try to get what they want. And after they get it, they change. They’re completely different.”
The screen goes black.
Words come up:
The day after this interview, the woman killed herself by drinking bleach.
I had watched that film in Lucien’s apartment in Paris, which had become my apartment as well.
The next night, I was in the bar of the Hotel Meurice with Lucien and Serge and Vito.
Is her death the filmmaker’s fault? I asked Vito.
“I don’t think it’s his fault,” Vito said. “It’s her life, her decision to end it.”
We were in a dark corner of the bar, but that bar is all dark corners.
