Spring Collection Page 5

  Justine and I both cherished high hopes that Jordan would become the first true breakthrough girl, the one who finally and conclusively proves that a woman of color is as unquestioningly across-the-board commercial as a Caucasian. Jordan—think Ave Gardner with a suntan—had the potential to be seen as a beautiful woman who simply transcends color or race.

  Jordan’s twenty-two, the daughter of a career colonel in the Army, a Cornell graduate who majored in French and minored in art history. She’s poised, mature and sophisticated far beyond the usual new face or even the usual twenty-two-year-old. There’s a total dignity in her bones, yet, when I look at her, I want to start blowing kisses.

  Jordan had finished her health food and composed herself for sleep before I glanced her way again. I enjoyed looking at her and calculating the amazing variations on the oval of which her face was composed: arched oval eyebrows over miraculously deep eyelids; long, uptilted oval eyes with hazel pupils; exquisite oval nostrils at the end of a small, straight nose; and a sultry oval mouth. The outlines of her eyes and lips were drawn with a simple, bold clarity almost no Caucasian models possess without makeup. Her hair was a rich dark brown, worn off her forehead in short, cherubic curls. I don’t think anybody would ever ask, “Why Jordan?”

  “Frankie,” Maude Callender all but whispered, “don’t you agree that fashion is nothing more than one giant conspiracy to make women unhappy with what’s in their closets? A lot of basically male-inspired intimidation to make them spend money unnecessarily?”

  “Listen, Maude, more money is spent on fashion, worldwide, than is spent on armaments. Make fashion, not war, that’s my motto.”

  “I hadn’t realized that,” she said dubiously, although my statistics are exact.

  “What’s more, American women spend over three million dollars a year on leg waxing alone,” I said, improvising in irritation.

  “Oh, everybody knows that,” she told me, condescendingly. I could see that Maude was bringing her own prejudgments to this “Innocents Abroad” story, but that wasn’t my problem. On the other hand, Tinker Osborn was.

  Our third model had a rough emotional history and Justine and I knew that her success was problematic, although, of all our new faces, she probably had the greatest potential.

  Tinker’s test shots had sent us into a trance. Glamour is real, and she had it. Charm is real, and she had it. The particulars of her looks are all but irrelevant: masses of vaguely wavy, long, pale-red hair, almost a coral color, the color that Venetian women were working on five centuries ago, sitting on their rooftops in the sun with henna or some such muck on their roots; perfect skin; and vast, silver grey eyes. Moonriver eyes I called them. They express more soul, more mystery, more edge than April or Jordan will ever have. Her eyes make you want to really know her, ask her questions, watch her live. Yet Tinker’s face, without makeup, is the perfect blank canvas, like an albino chameleon on white paper. Makeup artists will worship at her feet.

  Tinker comes from Tennessee, where she became a star of the kids’ beauty pageant circuit at the age of two, growing up under the inhuman pressure that those kids are subjected to.

  She continued to win pageants until she turned twelve when Tinker, no Brooke Shields, hit the awkward age with a crash, entering adolescence in a hormonal shitstorm that included acne and a huge weight gain. It took almost six years until she grew out of it, and into her present looks. She’d had no school friends to suffer adolescence along with her, no school achievements, just, thank God, an interest in reading that she depended on more and more in her lonely exile from the only world she’d known.

  “During my senior year in high school,” Tinker told me, frowning, “I dared to look at fashion magazines again and try out makeup and hairstyles in my room. I got the idea that maybe, just maybe … I could get my identity back, maybe I could model for magazines and become a winner again. That’s why I came here.”

  I don’t remember if I groaned out loud or just internally. Of all the reasons for wanting to be a model, a search for identity was the worst. Any kind of ambition was acceptable to me, from achieving worldwide adulation to serial marriage with rock stars. Some of the most successful and strongest girls are in the business simply for the money and that strikes me as the best motive of all. But identity! No way. It’s only common sense to know that a job based on something as fleeting as looks will never give any girl an identity she can count on.

  Justine and I realized how emotionally fragile Tinker was. However we knew that she was determined enough to go on making the agency rounds until someone else signed her. At that point we decided that we’d take her on and protect her as much as possible.

  Tinker had barely graduated from our training program when Gabrielle d’Angelle came calling. Justine and I would have preferred GN to tap any of our other models than Tinker. This was a girl who’d never set foot on a runway. She hadn’t even started to build a career and now she’d have to do an haute couture fashion show in the electric atmosphere of the spring collections. The very last thing she needed was to flop in the glare of publicity surrounding the new Lombardi face. Yet there was nothing we could do. GN had made its choice.

  At least she’ll see Paris.

  “May I have another lobster?”

  Right behind me, occupying two seats, one for him, one for the cameras he deemed too important to let out of his sight, I heard Mike Aaron getting, without even saying please, the second lobster I’d been too restrained to ask for. Naturally Mike Aaron hadn’t recognized me. He’d been a senior at Lincoln during my freshman year. He’d been the captain of the football team and the captain of the basketball team and the editor of the yearbook and president of the photo club and president of his class. He’d been light years beyond a legend.

  Mike Aaron was the guy I’d had that crush on all through high school. Now, all those years later, I have to admit that it was more than a crush. I’d loved Mike Aaron for years and years after he’d graduated and disappeared, loved him with a hopeless, wild, adolescent purity of passion I don’t think I ever felt for my husband, Slim Kelly, on his best day. How could any girl have been so dumb?

  And what an arrogant son of a bitch he’d turned out to be, now that I’d encountered him again. I didn’t like the private sense of amusement I could all but smell on him, I didn’t like his power to charm that I’d watched him use on the girls, a power he probably practiced in front of a mirror until he’d hypnotized himself into making it seem natural. I didn’t trust his big salty grin or his big, happy-go-lucky laugh and his extravagantly offhand gangsta style, all beat-up leather and charisma. The bastard even had Paul Mitchell hair.

  4

  Peaches Wilcox lay flat on her back on the carpet of her bedroom in the Plaza-Athénée hotel, holding a hand mirror directly above her face and scrutinizing her image intently. Very slowly, using only her formidable stomach muscles, she rose until she was in a sitting position, never taking her eyes from the mirror. Finally she permitted herself a satisfied smile.

  Her features, viewed in the prone position and the sitting position, looked exactly the same, just as Dr. H. had promised in New York, two months ago. No section of facial skin or muscle had undergone a change as the pull of gravity worked on them. Of course, she knew better than to look at herself with the mirror on the floor as she bent over it. That was one sure way to ruin her day. How many women realized that the often-scorned missionary position took fifteen years off a gal’s face? Only a really young thing could afford to be seen when she was on top with everything hanging down, no matter what improved friction the astride position provided.

  It had been a good long while since she’d had that horsey luxury, Peaches reflected, as she rang for her maid to bring the herb tea, grapefruit and dry whole wheat toast that made up her breakfast. Yes, indeed, there were a few things money couldn’t buy, not even with the five hundred million that darlin’ Jimmy had left her free and clear, with no horrid nonsense about trusts that would have given
her only the income to spend. With no children to provide for, with the Wilcox Foundation already funded, Jimmy’d wanted her to have everything money could buy. She already had more than her fair share, as Jimmy knew: good health, good skin—which was, let it never be forgotten, the largest organ in the body—good hair, and a glorious ass; but he’d wanted to ensure her a happy future.

  Poor darlin’ Jimmy died without knowing that certain things existed that no amount of money could buy. Peaches searched her mind for something tangible but only an aircraft carrier, a national park and Swiss citizenship came to mind. She had more than enough real estate, thank you, she got seasick in a rowboat and she’d never want to be anything but a Texan. But, as they said, it was the intangibles that counted. Like having only happy dreams and being forty-six again. Both were equally impossible. Nightmares happened from time to time, even to her, in spite of a clear conscience, and her forty-seventh birthday had arrived, unmentioned and unwelcome, two weeks ago. Youth was as unattainable as the possession of Marco Lombardi, who should, by all rights, be nailed down with long, rusty nails on a hot stove in eternal hell for what he was doing to her.

  It was downright humiliating at best for a woman who was entertained by everybody who mattered to be languishing for an Italian dress designer, unknown as yet, and twelve years younger than she. And wouldn’t you know he’d be so notoriously gorgeous that it was an obviously pathetic lapse in taste to go for him? Yep, a reversal of passion, there was another thing money couldn’t buy, Peaches brooded. There was no other word than passion for how she felt about Marco. If only he weren’t straight this would never have happened, she thought as she put on her leotard.

  Peaches McCoy Wilcox just did not have man trouble, she told herself firmly as she began the obligatory stretching and mat routine before starting a half hour on one of the identical Nordic-Track machines that she kept in each of her four homes as well as in any hotel in which she planned to stay for more than a night.

  Starting with her daddy, who’d owned every Caddy dealership from Houston to Dallas, she’d had good luck with men. Her parents had blessed her with adoring brothers and no troublesome sisters, she’d had a string of boyfriends so persistent that it had taken her years to work through them, breaking hearts ruthlessly, as was only her due, and she’d finally decided to marry darlin’ Jimmy, who’d never looked at another woman until he’d died three years ago. Jimmy had been in oil of course, there was really no other way to go making serious money unless you were in real estate, the record business, big-time, or geeky enough to invent yet another unnecessary version of computer junk.

  She’d mourned Jimmy well and truly for six months and then started making the rounds that could be counted on to keep a widow in her position busy without having to pretend interest in a lot of boring committee meetings: the villa at Cap-Ferrat for two months in the summer, Venice for September, New York through the holidays, Saint-Moritz after Christmas; and, of course, a few days to rest up at the Texas ranch every now and then.

  The essential constants of her life were the spring and fall couture collections in Paris, which was how she’d come across Marco Lombardi to begin with, Peaches thought wrathfully. If only she’d had the sense to stay home in Texas, never messing in the high life, never needing a constant infusion of new French clothes to keep her appropriately dressed, she wouldn’t have known that such a tantalizingly manipulative peckerhead existed. By now she’d be comfortably remarried to some nice guy, predictably ordering her clothes from the trunk shows at Neiman’s, and never knowing the difference between Seventh Avenue and the Avenue Montaigne.

  Peaches was dedicated to maintaining her flamboyant allure. She could have gone for chic, and achieved it by toning down her natural wide-screen looks, cutting the homecoming-queen hair that reached to her shoulders in blond abundance, reducing the wattage of her smile, and taming her natural inclination to buy truly rich-lady clothes.

  Hell, you could always be chic if you took the right advice, but she’d be damned if she’d give up sexy before sixty—no, make that sixty-five—and chic and sexy had little to do with each other. Would Marco love her back if she were chic? Peaches shook her head severely at her wistful folly. Marco might love her back if she were twenty-five or even thirty, but otherwise she had to try to be content with what he gave her: the most glorious fucking she’d ever had and a lot of meaningless Italian handkissing. But, oh, Lord, when he bent that dark head over her hand, that incredible head with the curly hair worn deliberately too long, with eyelashes that were equally excessive, with those slightly pouting lips that were too perfectly cut for a man, with his warmly olive skin … damn him for not being gay! If he were gay she could rumple his hair and tease him about his being too handsome for words and forget about him as soon as he left the room.

  But no, Marco created an agonizing sexual tension in her that never disappeared except for a few minutes after they’d made love and when she was concentrating on her morning workout. No man had ever had the upper hand with her before, no man had ever made her beg for it. She’d spotted him running up the staircase at Dior over a year ago, and demanded that her vendeuse introduce them, something that apparently wasn’t done from the woman’s surprised expression. Impulsively, she’d invited him over for drinks that same night, knowing that the importance of her guests would be bound to make an impression on anyone, especially a mere assistant designer.

  Marco had stayed only a half hour, displaying such quiet self-assurance that every woman in the room had called the next day, enviously trying to find out where on earth she’d found him. As he left he’d asked her if she’d like to have a hamburger with him at Joe Allen’s some night soon.

  And that was how it had started, Peaches thought, as she left the Nordic Track, her heart pounding as it was intended to, and started in on the free weights that were the last part of her two-hour-long exercise routine. He’d told her all about studying at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts and realizing, after a few years, that while his talents might lie in the pursuit of architectural history, he would be better served by his curiosity about the architecture of the human body. He had left the Academy and become an apprentice for the great couturier Roberto Capucci, a designer little known in the United States but considered a superb artist by museum curators in Europe and the Far East.

  “Buildings have been constructed in a relatively limited number of basic ways for the single primordial purpose of housing human beings,” Marco had said seriously as he passed her an unwanted dessert brownie in the noisy room full of French Yuppies having an American experience. “Yet clothes, which are just as primordial, come in thousands of varieties. Why do we have so many different envelopes with which to surround the shoulders, the breasts, the waist, the hips, the legs, none of which changes basically over the ages?”

  Peaches remembered clearly that she had been unable to form a remotely intelligent answer. Looking at him had blasted a short circuit in her brain cells and turned her into a creature of pure body who only wanted his cock. Years of training in being a Texas lady, years of keeping the most desirable men at the University of Texas in a state of staggering confusion and lust, had stopped her from making an overt move. Some old habits never die. It had taken Marco a whole week to stop toying with her in that deceptively respectful manner and give her what she needed so terribly.

  Peaches Wilcox put down the two ten-pound free weights, afraid that she’d throw them through the window of the hotel in rage and kill someone walking by on the Avenue Montaigne. Marco hadn’t returned her calls in five days. How dared he?

  Why was he reaching for a cigarette he hadn’t had in his pocket for three years, Marco Lombardi asked himself irritably? He hadn’t really wanted one for a year. Why now, when his designs for the spring collection were all decided on, when the actual samples were being finished, did he feel a nervous straining itch to start sketching another replacement collection that would be more circus-like in its unwearable humor than Jean-Paul Gault
ier, go further into the vulgarity of strip tease and bondage than Versace, be more pretentiously opulent than Lacroix, more absurdly avant-garde than Vivienne Westwood? In other words, a collection that would create such a shock, even a scandal, that the press would be forced to mention it?

  Marco left his studio hurriedly, before he had time to entertain any more disturbing and unworthy thoughts. He was stopped by his secretary, a middle-aged Frenchwoman, stern of manner and plain of face, who looked up at him sharply.

  “You should start returning these calls now, Monsieur Marco. I have a long list of people who should be called back before tomorrow. Madame Wilcox called again as well.”

  “Tell me, cara Madame Elsa, what do you think is the worst thing that will happen to me if I don’t return those calls?” Marco asked in a voice that became a caress as he spoke.

  “I … but you know how important they are,” she said, trying to sound as severe as possible. “And if you don’t answer them today, they will still be here tomorrow, along with many others.”

  “Did you ever see Gone With the Wind, cara Madame Elsa?”

  She looked at him warily. He was the least predictable man she’d ever been asked to work for. He’d tried to get her to call him by his first name, but she refused, finally letting him tease her into accepting a compromise that retained some proper formality. But everyone knew that the Italians were children, you had to make allowances for them. Of course she was too clever not to understand that he counted on his looks, this man who was too excessively attractive for his own good, but she congratulated herself that she had refused to become one of his gasping worshipers like so many of the women who worked for him.