Glitter Baby (24 page)

“Bird Dog’s getting more sensitive.”

“That’s gotta be a real stretch for you.”

“Don’t be a bitch, okay?”

Fireworks went off in her head, and she was once again standing in the rain on the front lawn of Johnny Guy Kelly’s house finishing a conversation that had barely gotten started. She spit out her words through a rigid jaw. “You used me to get your picture finished. I was a stupid, naïve kid who didn’t want to take her clothes off, but Mr. Big Shot’s love machine made short work of that. You made me happy to take everything off. Did you think about me when they handed you your Oscar?”

She wanted to see guilt. Instead he launched a counterattack. “You were your mother’s victim, not mine—at least not much. Take it up with her. And while you’re doing that, remember you weren’t the only one who got screwed. I’ve lost more than you can imagine.”

Her fury ignited. “You! Are you seriously trying to paint yourself as the injured party?” Her hand flew back of its own volition. She hadn’t planned to hit him again, but her arm had a will of its own.

He caught it before she made contact. “Don’t you dare.”

“I think you’d better take your hands off her.” A familiar voice drifted toward them from the dunes. Both of them turned to see Michel standing there. He looked like a boy who’d accidentally wandered into the company of giants.

Jake loosened his grip on her arm but didn’t let her go.
“This is a private party, pal, so how about minding your own business?”

Michel came closer. He was dressed in a madras blazer and yellow net-T-shirt, with wisps of blond hair blowing across his delicately carved cheek. “Let’s go back to the house, Fleur.”

She stared at her brother and realized he’d somehow appointed himself her protector. It was laughable. He stood half a head shorter than she did, and yet here he was challenging Jake Koranda, a man with quicksilver reflexes and an outlaw’s squint.

Jake’s lip curled. “This is between her and me, so unless you want your ass kicked, leave us alone.”

It sounded like a line from a Caliber movie, and she almost stopped the confrontation right then. She could have stopped it…but she didn’t. Michel, her protector. Would he really stay here and defend her?

“I’ll be happy to leave,” Michel said softly. “But Fleur goes with me.”

“Don’t count on it,” Jake retorted.

Michel slipped his hands in the pockets of his shorts and held his ground. He knew he couldn’t physically remove her from Jake, so he’d decided to wait him out.

Bird Dog wasn’t used to confronting a soft-spoken opponent with wispy blond hair and a delicate physique. His eyes dropped to half mast as he turned to her. “A friend of yours?”

“He’s…” She swallowed hard. “This is my brother, Michael An—”

“I’m Michel Savagar.”

Jake studied them both, then stepped back, the corner of his mouth twisting. “You should have told me that right away. I make it a rule never to be in the same place with more than one Savagar at a time. See you around, Fleur.” He strode off down the beach.

Fleur studied the sand, then lifted her head and gazed at her brother. “He could have broken you in two.”

Michel shrugged.

“Why did you do it?” she asked softly.

He looked past her to study the ocean. “You’re my sister,” he said. “It’s my responsibility as a man.” He headed toward the house.

“Wait.” She moved automatically. The sand tugged at her feet like old hurts, but she pulled herself free. Images of the beautiful gowns she’d seen in his shop window flashed through her head. Who was he?

He waited for her to reach his side, but when she got there, she didn’t know what to say. She cleared her throat. “Do you…want to go someplace and talk?”

Several seconds ticked by. “All right.”

They didn’t speak as he drove his ancient MG to a roadhouse in Hampton Bays where Willie Nelson sang on the jukebox and the waitress brought them clams, french fries, and a pitcher of beer. Fleur began, haltingly, to tell him about growing up at the
couvent.

He told her about his schooling and his love for his grandmother. She learned that Solange had left him the money that was supporting his business. An hour slipped by and then another. She explained how it felt to be an outcast, and he talked about his terror when he’d realized he was gay. As the neon sign outside the roadhouse window flashed blue across his hair, she leaned against the back of the scarred wooden booth and told him about Flynn and Belinda.

His eyes grew dark and bitter. “It explains so much.”

They spoke of Alexi and understood each other perfectly. The roadhouse began to close up for the night. “I was so jealous of you,” she finally said. “I thought you had everything I’d been denied.”

“And I wanted to be you,” he said. “Away from them both.”

Dishes clattered in the kitchen, and the waitress glared at them. Fleur saw that Michel had something more he wanted to say, but he was having trouble forming the words.

“Tell me.”

He gazed down at the battered tabletop. “I want to design for you,” he said. “I always have.”

The next morning she pulled on a tangerine bikini, fastened her hair into a loose top knot, and slipped into a short white cover-up. The living room was deserted, but through the windows she saw Charlie and Michel lounging on the deck with the Sunday papers. She smiled as she took in Michel’s outfit for the day, a pair of Bermuda shorts and an emerald-green shirt with “One Day Dry Cleaning” emblazoned across the back. After so many years of misdirected hatred, she’d been given the unexpected gift of a brother. She could hardly take it in.

She went into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee. “How about making that two cups?”

She spun around and saw Jake standing in the doorway. His long hair was damp from his shower. He wore a gray T-shirt and a pair of faded swim trunks that looked like the same ones he’d worn six years ago when Belinda had invited him for a backyard barbecue. She’d already figured out that last night’s encounter hadn’t been accidental. He was one of Charlie’s party guests, he’d known she was here, and he’d gone out looking for her.

She turned away. “Get your own damned coffee.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you last night.” His arm brushed hers as he reached for the coffeepot. She smelled Dial soap and mint toothpaste. “I wasn’t completely sober. I’m sorry, Flower.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m sorry, too. That I didn’t split your head open.”

He leaned back against the counter and took a sip of his coffee. “You did okay in
Eclipse
. Better than I expected.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Go for a walk on the beach with me?”

She started to refuse, only to hear one of Charlie’s
houseguests coming downstairs. This was as good an opportunity as any to say what she needed to. “After you.”

They slipped out the side door, avoiding the group on the deck. Fleur pulled off her espadrilles and tossed them aside. The wind tugged at Jake’s Wild West hair. Neither of them spoke until they got near the water. “I talked to your brother for a while this morning,” he said. “Michael’s a nice guy.”

Did he really think he could melt away the years so easily? “A nice guy for a dress designer, you mean.”

“You’re not provoking me, no matter how hard you try.”

She’d see about that.

He flopped down on the sand. “Okay, Flower, let’s have it out.”

The acid words churned inside her, all the rage and bitterness ready to spill out. But as she watched a father and son fly a Chinese kite with a blue and yellow tail, she realized she couldn’t say any of it, not if she wanted to hold on to even a shred of her pride. “No lasting scars,” she said. “You weren’t that important.” She made herself settle next to him in the sand. “And you’re the one who’s had to live with what you did.”

He squinted against the sun. “If it wasn’t that important, why did you give up a career that was earning you a fortune? And why haven’t I been able to write anything since
Sunday Morning Eclipse
?”

“You’re not writing at all?” She felt a stab of satisfaction.

“You haven’t seen any new plays running around with my name on them, have you? I’ve got a frigging case of concrete writer’s block.”

“Too bad.”

He threw a shell toward the water. “Funniest thing. I was writing just dandy before you and Mama came along.”

“Hold on. You’re blaming me?”

“No.” He sighed. “I’m just being a prick.”

“Finally something you’re good at.”

He looked her square in the eyes. “What happened between us that weekend didn’t have anything to do with
Eclipse.
”

“Come off it.” Despite her determination, the words spilled out. “That picture meant everything to you, and I was ruining your big opportunity. A nineteen-year-old kid with an absurdly misdirected case of puppy love. You were a grown man, and you knew better.”

“I was twenty-eight. And, believe me, you didn’t look like a kid that night.”

“My mother was your lover!”

“If it’s any consolation, we never did the dirty deed.”

“I don’t want to hear.”

“All I can say in my defense is that I was a lousy judge of character.”

Fleur knew her mother well enough to believe Belinda had made it easy for him, but she didn’t care. “So if you were Mr. Innocent, why haven’t you been able to write since then? I can’t pretend to see into the murky depths of your psyche, but there must be some connection between your writing block and what you did to that stupid nineteen-year-old kid.”

He came to his feet, spraying her with sand. “Since when did I get nominated for sainthood? Nineteen and looking the way you did wasn’t a
kid.
” He pulled off his T-shirt and ran down to the water, where he dived under a wave, then swam out. His form was as lousy as ever. Big he-man movie star. Bastard. She wanted to retaliate, and when he finally emerged, she unfastened her beach robe and let it drop. Underneath was the tiny tangerine bikini Kissy had bought her, and she made sure he got a front-row view as she performed a perfect runway walk to the water, planting one foot directly in front of the other so that her hips swayed. At the edge, she lifted her arms to fasten a tendril of hair that had come loose from the pins, casually stretching as she did it to make her legs look even longer.

She stole a glance out of the corner of her eye to see if
he was watching. He was. Good. Let him eat his shriveled little heart out.

She plunged into the water and swam for a while, then came out and walked back to where he was sitting. He held her beach robe on his lap, and as she leaned down to pick it up, he moved it just out of her reach. “Give a guy a break. I’ve been working with horses for three months, and this is a nice change of scenery.”

She straightened, then walked away. Jake Koranda was as dead to her as the grandmother she’d never known.

Jake watched Fleur until she disappeared into the beach house. The beautiful nineteen-year-old who’d sent him into a tailspin couldn’t hold a candle to this woman. She’d become every man’s fantasy. Was it his imagination, or did that pert little butt sit higher than ever on those knockout legs? He should have given her back the robe so he didn’t have to torture himself watching her body in that ridiculous tangerine bikini tied together with those little bits of string. He could eat that bikini off her in three good bites.

He headed for the water to cool off. The guy flying the kite with his kid had spotted Flower as soon as she came over the dunes, and now he was backing into the water to get a better view. It had always been that way—men stumbling over themselves while she sailed past, oblivious to the stir she’d created. She was the ugly duckling who wouldn’t look into a mirror long enough to see that she’d changed into a swan.

He swam for a while, then went back to the beach. Fleur’s cover-up lay in the sand. As he picked it up, he caught the same light floral scent he’d smelled the night before when she was struggling in his arms. He’d been a real prick, and she’d stood up to him. She always had, in one way or another.

He dug his heels into the sand. The music started playing in his head. Otis Redding. Creedence Clearwater. She’d
brought back all the sounds of Vietnam. He’d never forget kneeling on Johnny Guy’s lawn with her wet and sobbing in his arms. She’d ripped a hole through the wall he’d built inside him—a wall he’d thought was secure—and he hadn’t been able to write a word since then for fear he’d bring the whole damned thing crashing down. Writing was the only way he’d ever been able to express himself, and without it, he felt as though he was living half a life.

As he gazed toward the beach house, he wondered if the woman she’d become could hold the key to unlocking this prison he’d fallen into.

Dark, erotic dreams
invaded Fleur’s sleep after she got back to the city. She wondered if their wrestling match on the beach had recharged some kind of internal sexual battery. Wouldn’t that be ironic? She was hungry for the touch of a man, but she was too tightly strung right now to think about looking for a lover.

Two weeks after the beach party, she sat on a straight-backed chair in Michel’s boutique while he locked up for the evening. At first they’d invented excuses to talk to each other. He called to see if she’d gotten stuck in traffic on her way back from Long Island. She called to ask his advice about an outfit she wanted to buy Kissy for her birthday. Finally they abandoned subterfuge and openly enjoyed each other’s company.

“I went over your books last night.” She’d brushed some sawdust from her jeans. “Bottom line…Your finances are a mess.”

He flipped off the store’s front lights. “I’m an artist, not a businessman. That’s why I hired you.”

“My newest client.” She smiled. “It never occurred to me to represent a designer, but I’m excited about it. Your gowns and dresses are the most innovative work this city has seen
in years. All I have to do is make people want them.” She waved her hands over an imaginary crystal ball. “I see fame, fortune, and brilliant management in your future.” As an afterthought, she added, “I also see a new lover.”

He stepped behind her and pulled the rubber band from her ponytail. She’d spent all day with the carpenters at the townhouse, and she was a mess. “Stick with fame and fortune and leave my lovers alone,” he said. “I know you didn’t like Damon, but—”

“He’s a whiny twit.” Damon was the dark-haired dancer who had been with Michel the night of Charlie’s beach party. “Your choice of men is worse than Kissy’s. Her hunks are only dumb. Yours is snide, too.”

“Only because you intimidated him. Hand me your hairbrush. You look like bad Bette Davis. And those jeans are making me bilious. Really, Fleur, I don’t think I can stand these clothes of yours much longer. I’ve shown you the designs—”

She snatched the brush from her purse. “Hurry up and finish my hair. I have to meet Kissy, and I only stopped by to tell you that you’re a financial screw-up. You also know zip about merchandising. Still, I forgive you. Come to dinner with Kissy and me tomorrow night at the townhouse.”

“Aren’t you missing a few necessities for throwing a dinner party? Like walls and furniture?”

“It’s informal.” She hopped up, gave him a kiss, and left. As she stepped out onto West Fifty-fifth Street, she wondered if he’d sensed how nervous she was about the announcement she intended to make at her improvised dinner party.

She’d leased the red brick townhouse on the Upper West Side with an option to buy. Because the house’s four stories had been awkwardly divided—horizontally instead of vertically—she’d gotten a good price, and she’d been able
to adapt the unusual arrangement to her advantage. She intended to live in the smaller rear section of the house and use the larger front section for office space. If all went well, she’d be able to move in by mid-August, a month from now.

“No one’s going to confuse this with La Grenouille,” Michel said as he gingerly lowered himself into a folding chair she’d set in front of the table fashioned from two sawhorses and some sheets of plywood in what would soon be her office.

Kissy looked pointedly at Michel’s white clam diggers and Greek peasant shirt. “They wouldn’t let you in La Grenouille, so stop complaining.”

“I heard you were there, though,” he said. “With a certain Mr. Kincannon.”

“And a group of his nerdy friends.” Kissy wrinkled her nose. Even though she saw Charlie Kincannon frequently, she barely mentioned him, which didn’t bode well for his plan to win her heart.

Fleur began ladling out lemon chicken and spicy Szechuan shrimp from carryout cartons. “I wish you’d move in with me, Kissy. The attic is finished, so you’d have plenty of privacy, not to mention twice as much room as our apartment. There’s a kitchen up there, the plumbing works, and you’ll even have a separate entrance off the front hallway so I won’t be able to cluck my tongue over your playmates.”

“I like my place. And I’ve told you—moving makes me crazy. I never do it if I don’t have to.”

Fleur gave up. Kissy was so down on herself right now that she didn’t feel as though she deserved anything more than what she had, and no amount of persuasion could convince her otherwise.

Kissy dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin. “Why the mystery? You said you wanted Michel and me here so you could make an announcement. What’s up?”

Fleur gestured toward the wine. “Pour, Michel. We’re going to drink a toast.”

“Beaujolais with Chinese? Really, Fleur.”

“Don’t criticize, just do your job.” He filled their glasses, and Fleur lifted hers, determined to project a confidence she didn’t feel. “Tonight we drink to my two favorite clients, as well as the genius who’s going to put you both on top. Namely me.” She clicked their glasses and took a sip. “Michel, why haven’t you ever had a showing of your designs?”

He shrugged. “I had one my first year, but it cost me a fortune and nobody came. My stuff isn’t like anything else on Seventh Avenue, and I don’t have a name.”

“Right.” She looked at Kissy. “And no one will let you audition for the kind of parts you want because of the way you look.”

Kissy pushed a shrimp around and gave a glum nod.

“What both of you need for your careers to take off is a showcase, and I’ve figured out how we’re going to get one.” Fleur set down her glass. “Of the three of us, which one stands the best shot at getting media attention?”

“Rub it in,” Kissy grumbled.

Michel stated the obvious. “You do. We all know that.”

“I beg to disagree,” Fleur said. “Except for the week or so after the story broke, I’ve been in New York over two years without getting any publicity. Even Adelaide Abrams didn’t care I was back. The newspapers don’t want Fleur Savagar, who’s a total bore. They want the Glitter Baby.” She handed them the evening paper, which she’d folded open to Adelaide’s gossip column.

Kissy read it aloud.

Kissy looked up from the article, her face stricken. “I’m sorry, Fleurinda. I know how you hate having the past dredged up. And once Abrams gets hold of a story, she won’t let it go. I don’t know who talked to her, but—”

“I’m the one who planted the story,” Fleur said.

They stared at her.

“Would you care to let us in on the reason?” her brother asked.

Fleur took a deep breath and lifted her glass. “Drag out those designs you’ve been saving up for me, Michel. The Glitter Baby’s coming back, and she’s taking the two of you with her.”

Pain was harder to bear sober, Belinda had discovered, since she’d forced herself to stop drinking. She slipped a cassette into the tape deck and pressed the button with the tip of her finger. As the room filled with the sounds of Barbra Streisand singing “The Way We Were,” she lay back against the satin bed pillows and let the tears trickle down her cheeks.

All the rebels were dead. First it had been Jimmy on the road to Salinas, and then Sal Mineo in that brutal murder. Finally Natalie Wood. The three leading actors from
Rebel Without a Cause
had all died before their time, and Belinda was afraid she would be next.

She and Natalie were almost exactly the same age, and Natalie had loved Jimmy, too. He teased her when they were shooting
Rebel
because she was just a kid to him. Bad Boy Jimmy Dean playing with Natalie’s feelings.

Death terrified Belinda, and yet she kept a secret supply of pills stashed in the bottom of an old jewelry box near
the spinning gold charm Errol Flynn had given her. She couldn’t stand living her life like this much longer, but a strain of optimism still ran deep inside her that said things might get better. Alexi might die.

Belinda missed her baby so much. Alexi said he’d put Belinda in a sanitarium if she tried to contact Fleur. A sanitarium for chronic alcoholics, even though she hadn’t let herself touch a drop of liquor for almost two years. Although Alexi never left the house anymore, she hardly ever saw him. He conducted his business from a suite of rooms on the first floor, working through a series of assistants who wore dark suits and somber expressions and passed her in the hallways without speaking. Almost no one spoke to her. Her days and nights blended together, stretching behind and before her in an unending line, each one exactly like the last until she couldn’t find a reason to go on living except the hope that Alexi would die.

In the old days, when she walked into a ball or a restaurant on Alexi’s arm, she became the most important woman in the room. People sought her out to curry favor. They told her how beautiful she was, how amusing. Without Alexi, the invitations had stopped.

She remembered how it had been in California when she was the Glitter Baby’s mother. She’d been charged with energy until she was luminescent. Everything she touched became special. That was the best time of all.

The song came to an end. She got out of bed and pushed the rewind button to play it again. The music kept her from hearing the door open, and she didn’t know that Alexi had entered until she turned around.

It had been nearly a month since he’d visited her rooms, and she wished that her hair was combed and that her eyes weren’t red from crying. She nervously toyed with the front of her robe. “I—I’m a wreck.”

“But always beautiful,” he replied. “Fix yourself for me,
chérie.
I’ll wait.”

This was what made him so dangerous. Not his terrible cruelties, but his awful tenderness. Both were intentional, and each, in its own way, entirely sincere.

While he took a seat in the room’s most comfortable chair, she gathered up what she needed and slipped into the bathroom. When she came out, he lay on the bed, all the lamps turned off except one on the opposite side of the room. The dim light hid his unhealthy pallor, as well as the network of fine lines at the corners of her own eyes.

She wore a simple white nightgown. Her toenails were bare of polish and her scrubbed face clean of makeup. She’d threaded a ribbon through her hair.

She lay back on the bed without speaking. He pushed her nightgown to her waist. She kept her legs tightly closed while he caressed her and slowly removed her underpants. When he pushed at her knees, she whimpered as if she were afraid, and he rewarded her for the whimper with one of the deep caresses she liked so much. She tried to push her legs closed again to please him, but he’d begun to kiss the insides of her thighs, and her eyelids drifted shut. This was their unspoken pact. Now that his teenage mistresses were gone, she played the child bride for him, and he let her keep her eyes shut so she could remember Flynn and dream about James Dean.

Usually he left as soon as it was over, but this time he lay still, a sheen of sweat visible on the flaccid skin of his chest. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Would you hand me my robe,
chérie
? There are some pills in the pocket.”

She got the robe for him and turned away as he pulled out the vial of pills. Instead of making him weaker, his illness had strengthened his power. Now, with his first-floor fortress and the army of watchful assistants carrying out his orders, he’d made himself invulnerable.

She went into the bathroom to shower. When she came out, he was still there, sitting in a chair and sipping a drink.
“I ordered whiskey for you.” He pointed with his glass toward a tumbler on a silver tray.

How typically cruel of him. The cruelty coming after the tenderness in a tightly woven pattern of contradictions that had directed the course of her life for more than twenty-five years. “You know I don’t drink anymore.”

“Really,
chérie
, you shouldn’t lie to me. Do you think I don’t know about the empty bottles your maid finds hidden in the bottom of the wastebasket?”

There were no empty bottles. This was his way of threatening her to make certain she did his bidding. She remembered the pictures of the sanitarium he’d shown her, a collection of ugly gray buildings in the most remote part of the Swiss Alps. “What do you want from me, Alexi?”

“You are a stupid woman. A stupid, helpless woman. I cannot imagine why I ever loved you.” A small muscle ticked near his temple. “I’m sending you away,” he said abruptly.

A chill shot through her. The ugly gray buildings sat like great cold stones in the snow. She thought of the pills hidden away in the bottom of her old jewelry box.

All the rebels were dead now.

He crossed his legs and took a sip from his drink. “The sight of you depresses me. I do not wish to have you near me any longer.”

Death from the pills would be painless. It wouldn’t be like the suffocating salt water that had closed over Natalie’s head or the terrible pain Jimmy had felt when he died. She’d simply go to bed and drift into endless sleep.

The hard Russian eyes of Alexi Savagar sliced through the layers of her skin like a razor. “I am sending you to New York,” he said. “What you do once you are there no longer concerns me.”