Glitter Baby (6 page)

“He doesn’t have
me
, honey. Just remember that.”

“And I don’t have a father. But it’s still not even. At least Michel gets to go home when he’s not in school. He gets to be with you.”

“We’re here to have a good time, baby. Let’s not get so serious.”

Fleur wouldn’t be sidetracked. “I can’t understand Alexi. How could anybody hate a baby so much? Maybe now that I’m grown up…But not when I was one week old.”

Belinda sighed. “We’ve been through this so many times. It’s not you. It’s just the way he is. God, I wish I had a drink.”

Even though Belinda had explained it dozens of times, Fleur still didn’t understand. How could a father want to have sons so much that he would send his only daughter away and never see her again? Belinda said Fleur was a reminder of his failure and Alexi couldn’t stand failure. But even when Michel was born a year after Fleur, he hadn’t changed. Belinda said it was because she couldn’t have any more children.

Fleur had cut pictures of her father out of the newspapers, and she kept them in a manila envelope in the back of her closet. She used to pretend Mother Superior called her to the office and that Alexi was there waiting to tell her he’d made a terrible mistake and he’d come to take her home. Then he’d hug her and call her “baby” the way her mother did.

She tossed another piece of bread at the ducks. “I hate him. I hate them both.” And then, for good measure, “I hate my braces, too. Josie and Celine Sicard hate me because I’m ugly.”

“You’re just feeling sorry for yourself. Remember what I’ve been telling you. In a few years, every girl at the
couvent
will want to look just like you. You need to grow up a little more, that’s all.”

Fleur’s bad mood slipped away. She loved her mother.

The palace of the Grimaldi family was a sprawling stone and stucco edifice with ugly square turrets and candy cane guard boxes. As Belinda watched her daughter dart through the crowd of tourists to climb on top of a cannon that overlooked the Monaco yacht basin, she felt a lump form in
her throat. Fleur had Flynn’s wildness, his restless zest for living.

Belinda had wanted to blurt out the truth so many times. She wanted to tell Fleur that a man like Alexi Savagar could never have been her father. That Fleur was Errol Flynn’s daughter. But fear kept her silent. She’d learned long ago not to cross Alexi. Only once had she beaten him. Only once had he been the helpless one. When Michel was born.

After dinner that night, Belinda and Fleur went to see an American Western with French subtitles. The film was half over when Belinda saw him for the first time. She must have made some sort of sound because Fleur looked over at her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Belinda managed. “It’s…That man…”

Belinda studied the cowboy who’d just sauntered into the saloon where Paul Newman was playing poker. The cowboy was very young and far from movie star handsome. The camera moved in for a close-up and Belinda forgot to breathe. It didn’t seem possible. And yet…

The lost years dropped away. James Dean had come back.

The man was tall and lean with legs that didn’t stop. His long, narrow face looked as if it had been chipped from flint by a rebellious hand, and his irregular features projected a confidence that went beyond arrogance. He had straight brown hair; a long, narrow nose with a bump at the bridge; and a sulky mouth. His slightly crooked front tooth had the tiniest chip at one corner. And his eyes…Restless and bitter blue.

He didn’t look at all like Jimmie—she saw that now. He was taller, not as handsome. But he was another rebel—she felt it in her bones—another man who lived life on his own terms.

The film ended, but she stayed in her seat, clutching Fleur’s impatient hand and watching the credits roll. His name flashed on the screen. Excitement welled inside her.

Jake Koranda.

After all these years, Jimmie had sent her a sign. He was telling her she mustn’t lose hope.
A man is his own man. A woman her own woman.
Jake Koranda, the man behind that off-kilter face, had given her hope. Somehow she could still make her dreams come true.

The boys of Châtillon-sur-Seine discovered Fleur the summer before her sixteenth birthday. “
Salut, poupée!
” they called out as she emerged from the
boulangerie.

She looked up, a smear of chocolate dotting her chin, and saw three boys lounging in the doorway of the
pharmacie
next door. They were smoking cigarettes and listening to “Crocodile Rock” on a portable radio. One boy stubbed out his cigarette. “
Hé poupée, irons voir par ici.
” He made a beckoning gesture with his head.

Fleur glanced around to see which of her classmates he was talking to.

The boys laughed. One nudged his friend and pointed at her legs. “
Regardez-moi ces jambes!
”

Fleur looked down to see what was wrong, and another dab of chocolate from her éclair dripped onto the blue leather strap of her Dr. Scholl’s sandals. The taller of the boys winked, and she realized they were admiring her legs.
Hers!

“
Qu’est-ce que tu dirais d’un rendezvous?
”

A date.
He was asking her for a date! She dropped the éclair and ran up the street to the bridge where the girls were meeting. Her streaky blond hair flew behind her like a horse’s mane. The boys laughed and whistled.

When she got back to the
couvent
, she dashed to her room and stared at herself in the mirror. Those same boys used to call her
l’épouvantail
, the scarecrow. What had happened? Her face looked the same: thick, marking-pen eyebrows, green eyes set too far apart, mouth spread all over. She’d finally stopped growing, but not until she’d reached five feet, eleven and a half inches. The braces were gone now. Maybe that was it.

By the time August arrived, Fleur was nearly sick with excitement. A whole month to be with her mother. And on Mykonos, her favorite of all the Greek islands. The first morning as they walked along the beach in the dazzling white sunlight, she couldn’t stop talking about everything she’d been saving up.

“It’s creepy the way those boys keep calling out at me. Why would they do something like that? I think it’s because I got rid of my braces.” Fleur tugged on the oversized T-shirt she’d pulled on top of the apple-green bikini Belinda had bought to surprise her. She loved the color, but its skimpy cut embarrassed her. Belinda wore an oatmeal striped tunic and a chrome Galanos slave bracelet. Both of them had bare feet, but Belinda’s toenails were painted burnt umber.

Her mother sipped from the Bloody Mary she’d brought along. Belinda drank a lot more than she should, but Fleur didn’t know how to get her to stop.

“Poor baby,” Belinda said, “it’s hard not being the ugly duckling anymore. Especially when you’ve been so dedicated to the idea.” She slipped her free arm around Fleur’s waist, and her hipbone brushed the top of her daughter’s thigh. “I’ve been telling you for years the only problem with your face is that you hadn’t grown into it, but you’re stubborn.”

The way Belinda said it made Fleur feel as though that was something to be proud of. She hugged her mother, then flopped down on the sand. “I couldn’t ever have sex. I mean it, Belinda. I am
never
getting married. I don’t even like men.”

“You don’t
know
any men, darling,” Belinda said dryly. “Once you’ve gotten away from that godforsaken convent, you’ll feel differently.”

“I won’t. Can I have a cigarette?”

“No. And men are wonderful, baby. The right men, of
course. Powerful ones. When you walk into a restaurant on the arm of an important man, everyone looks at you, and you see admiration in their eyes. They know you’re very special.”

Fleur frowned and picked at the bandage on her toe. “Is that why you won’t get divorced from Alexi? Because he’s important?”

Belinda sighed and tilted her face into the sun. “I’ve told you, baby. It’s money. I don’t have the skills to support us.”

But Fleur would have the skills. She already excelled in math. She spoke French, English, Italian, and German, even a little Spanish. She knew history and literature, she could type, and when she went to the university, she’d learn even more. Before long, she’d be able to support them both. Then she and Belinda could live together forever and never be separated again.

Two days later, one of Belinda’s Parisian acquaintances arrived on Mykonos. Belinda introduced Fleur as her niece, something she always did on the rare occasions when they ran into a person she knew. Each time it happened, Fleur felt sick inside, but Belinda said she had to do it or Alexi would cancel their trips.

The woman was Madame Phillipe Jacques Duverge, but Belinda said she’d once been Bunny Groben, from White Plains, New York. She’d also been a famous model during the sixties, and she kept pointing her camera at Fleur. “Just for fun,” she said,

Fleur hated having her picture taken, and she kept running into the water.

Madame Duverge followed, clicking away.

As one white-hot Mykonos day gave way to another, Fleur discovered the young men who roamed the sandy Greek beaches were no different from the boys of Châtillon-sur-Seine. She told Belinda they were making her so nervous she couldn’t enjoy her new snorkeling mask. “Why do they have to act so stupid?”

Belinda took a sip of her gin and tonic. “Ignore them. They’re not important.”

When Fleur returned to the
couvent
for her final year, she had no way of knowing her life was about to change forever. In October, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, a fire broke out in the dormitory, and all the girls were forced to evacuate. A photographer for the local newspaper rushed out and caught the daughters of France’s most exclusive families standing by the blazing building in their pajamas. Although the dormitory was badly damaged, no one was hurt, but because of the notoriety of the families involved, several of the photos made their way into
Le Monde
, including a close-up of the nearly forgotten daughter of Alexi Savagar.

Alexi was too intelligent to keep Fleur’s existence a secret. Instead he’d simply look pensive whenever her name was mentioned, and people assumed his daughter was handicapped, perhaps mentally retarded. But the astonishingly beautiful young woman with the wide mouth and startled eyes could never be mistaken for anybody’s closet skeleton.

Alexi was furious that the newspaper had identified her, but it was too late. People began asking questions. To make it worse, Solange Savagar picked that particular time to die. Alexi couldn’t tolerate the vulgar speculation that would grow even worse if the obviously healthy granddaughter who’d been so recently photographed was absent from her grandmother’s funeral.

He ordered Belinda to send for her bastard.

I’m going to meet my father today.
The words tumbled through Fleur’s head as she followed a maid down the silent, forbidding hallway of the gray stone mansion on the Rue de la Bienfaisance. When they reached a small salon with a pilaster-framed doorway, the maid turned the knob, then slipped away.

“Baby!” Liquor splashed over the edge of Belinda’s glass as she shot up from the silk damask couch. She abandoned her glass and held out her arms.

Fleur rushed forward, only to stumble on the Persian carpet and nearly fall. They hugged each other, and, as she inhaled her mother’s Shalimar, Fleur felt a little better.

Belinda looked pale and elegant in a black Dior suit and low-heeled pumps with pear-shaped openings at the toes. Fleur couldn’t bear having
him
think she was trying to impress, so she’d dressed in her black wool slacks, cowl-necked sweater, and an old tweed blazer with a black velvet collar. Her friends Jen and Helene had told her to put up her hair so she’d look more sophisticated, but she’d refused. The barrettes on each side of her head weren’t an exact match, but they were close enough. Finally she’d tucked her
silver horseshoe stickpin in her lapel for confidence. So far, it wasn’t working.

Belinda cupped Fleur’s cheek. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

Fleur saw the shadows under her mother’s eyes, the drink on the table, and hugged her more tightly. “I missed you so much.”

Belinda grasped her shoulders. “It’s not going to be easy, baby. Stay out of Alexi’s way, and we’ll hope for the best.”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

Belinda waved off Fleur’s bravado with a trembling hand. “He’s been impossible ever since Solange got sick. I’m glad the old bitch is dead. She was getting to be a trial, even for him. Michel is the only one who’s sorry to see her go.”

Michel.
Her brother was fifteen now, a year younger than she. She’d known he’d be here, but she hadn’t let herself think about it.

The door behind them gave a soft click. “Belinda, did you telephone the Baron de Chambray as I asked? He was especially fond of Mother.”

His voice was low and deep, filled with authority. The kind of voice that never had to be raised to be obeyed.

He can’t do anything more to me
, Fleur thought.
Nothing.
Slowly she turned to face her father.

He was surgically well groomed, his hands and fingernails immaculate, his thin, steel-gray hair impeccably neat. He wore a necktie the color of old sherry and a dark vested suit. Next to Pompidou, he was said to be the most powerful man in France. He gave a short, elegant snort as she saw her. “So, Belinda, this is your daughter. She dresses like a peasant.”

Fleur wanted to cry, but somehow she managed to lift her chin and look down at him. She spoke English deliberately. American English. Strong and clear. “The nuns taught me that good manners are more important than clothes. I guess things are different in Paris.”

She heard Belinda’s quick intake of breath, but the only
reaction Alexi showed to Fleur’s impertinence was in his eyes. They drifted slowly over her, searching for the flaws she knew he’d find in abundance. She’d never felt bigger, uglier, more awkward, but she matched him stare for stare.

Standing off to the side, Belinda watched the duel taking place between Alexi and Fleur. A rush of pride swelled inside her. This was her daughter—strong, full of spirit, achingly beautiful. Let Alexi compare Fleur with his weakling son. Belinda sensed the exact moment when he saw the resemblance, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, she felt calm in his presence. When he finally looked her way, she gave him a small, triumphant smile.

It was Flynn’s face Alexi saw in Fleur, the young, unblemished Flynn, with his features softened and transformed, made beautiful for his daughter. Fleur’s face had the same strong nose and wide, elegant mouth, the same high forehead. Even her eyes bore his mark in their shape and generous spacing. Only the green-gold irises were Fleur’s own.

Alexi turned on his heel and left the salon.

Fleur stood at the window of her mother’s bedroom while Belinda napped. She watched Alexi pull away from the house in a chauffeured Rolls. The silver car glided down the drive and through the great iron gates onto the Rue de la Bienfaisance. The Street of Charity. What a stupid name. There was no charity in this house, just a horrible man who hated his own flesh and blood. Maybe if she’d been tiny and pretty…But weren’t fathers supposed to love their daughters no matter how they looked?

She was too old for the baby tears she wanted to shed, so she slipped into her loafers and set out to explore. She found a back staircase leading into a garden where mathematically straight paths delineated geometric beds of ugly shrubbery. She told herself she was lucky to have been sent away from this horrible place. At the
couvent
, petunias
flopped over the borders and cats could sleep in the flower beds.

She swiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. Some small, stupid part of her had wanted to believe her father would have a change of heart when he saw her. That he’d realize how wrong he’d been to abandon her. Stupid. Stupid.

She took in a T-shaped, one-story building sitting at the back of the grounds. Like the house, it was constructed of gray stone, but it had no windows. When she found the side door unlocked, she turned the knob and stepped into a jewel box.

Black watered silk covered the walls, and gleaming ebony marble floors stretched before her. Small, recessed spotlights shone down from the ceiling in starry clusters like a Van Gogh night sky, each cluster lighting an antique automobile. Their polished finishes reminded her of gemstones—rubies, emeralds, amethysts, and sapphires. Some of the automobiles rested on the marble floor, but many sat on platforms, so they seemed to be suspended in the air like a handful of jewels flung into the night.

Slim columns bearing engraved silver plaques sat next to each car. The heel plates of her loafers clicked on the hard marble floor as she investigated. Isotta-Fraschini Type 8, 1932. Stutz Bearcat, 1917. Rolls-Royce Phantom I, 1925. Bugatti Brescia, 1921. Bugatti Type 13, 1912. Bugatti Type 59, 1935. Bugatti Type 35.

All the automobiles grouped in the shorter wing of the L-shaped room bore the distinctive red oval of the Bugatti.

Positioned in the exact center, a brightly illuminated platform, larger than all the others, sat empty. The label at the corner of the platform had been printed in big, bold script.

BUGATTI TYPE 41 ROYALE

“Does he know you’re here?”

She spun around and found herself gazing at the most
beautiful boy she’d ever seen. He had hair like fine yellow silk and small, delicately formed features. Dressed in a faded green pullover and rumpled chinos fastened at the waist with an oversized cowboy belt, he was much shorter than she and as small-boned as a woman. His long, tapered fingers had nails bitten to the quick. His chin was pointed, and pale eyebrows arched over eyes that were exactly the same brilliant shade of blue as the first spring hyacinths.

Belinda’s face looked back at her from the form of a young man. Her old bitterness rose like bile in her throat.

He looked younger than his fifteen years as he nibbled on the remnants of a thumbnail. “I’m Michel. I didn’t mean to spy.” He gave her a sad, sweet smile that suddenly made him look older. “You’re mad, aren’t you?”

“I don’t like people sneaking up on me.”

“I wasn’t really sneaking, but I guess that doesn’t matter. Neither of us is supposed to be here. He’d be pissed if he found out.”

His English was as American as hers, and that made her hate him even more. “He doesn’t scare me,” she said belligerently.

“That’s because you don’t know him.”

“I guess some of us are lucky.” She made the words as nasty as she could.

“I guess.” He walked over to the door and began flicking off the ceiling lights from a panel of switches. “You’d better go now. I have to lock up before he finds out we’ve been in here.”

She hated him for being so tiny and pretty. A puff of air could blow him away. “I’ll bet you do everything he tells you to. Like a scared rabbit.”

He shrugged.

She couldn’t face him a moment longer. She dashed through the door and rushed out into the garden. All those years she’d worked so hard to win her father’s love by being the bravest, the fastest, and the strongest. The joke was on her.

Michel gazed at the door his sister had disappeared through. He shouldn’t have let himself hope they’d be friends, but he’d wanted it so much. He’d needed something, someone, to help fill the aching chasm left by the death of the grandmother who’d raised him. Solange had said he was her chance to make up for past mistakes.

It was his grandmother who’d overheard his mother screaming the news to his father that she was pregnant with Michel. Belinda had told Alexi she wouldn’t give any more love to the child she was carrying than he’d given to the baby abandoned at the Couvent de l’Annonciation. His grandmother said his father had laughed at Belinda’s threats. He’d said Belinda couldn’t resist loving her own flesh and blood. That this baby would make her forget the other one.

But his father had been wrong. Solange was the one who’d held him, and played with him, and comforted him when he was hurt. Michel should be glad she was finally free from her suffering, but he wanted her back, puffing away on her lipstick-stained Gauloise, stroking his hair as he knelt in front of her, offering all the love that the others in the house on the Rue de la Bienfaisance denied him.

She was the one who’d negotiated the uneasy truce between his parents. Belinda had agreed to be seen in public with Michel in return for twice-yearly visits with her daughter. But the truce hadn’t changed the fact that his mother didn’t love him. She said he was his father’s child. But Alexi didn’t want him, either, not when he’d seen that Michel couldn’t be like him.

All the trouble in his family had happened because of his sister, the mysterious Fleur. Not even his grandmother knew why Fleur had been sent away.

He left the garage and made his way back to his rooms in the attic. He’d gradually transported his belongings up there until no one remembered exactly how it was that the
heir to the Savagar fortune came to be living in the old servants’ quarters.

He lay on his bed and locked his hands behind his head. A white parachute hung as a canopy over his small iron bed. He’d bought it in an army surplus store not far from the Boston prep school he attended. He liked the way the parachute rippled in the moving air currents and sheltered him like a great, silken womb.

On the whitewashed walls he’d hung his precious collection of photographs. Lauren Bacall in Helen Rose’s classic red sheath from
Designing Woman.
Carroll Baker swinging from a chandelier in
The Carpetbaggers
, clad in Edith Head’s gaudy sprinkle of beads and ostrich plumes. Above his desk, Rita Hayworth wore Jean Louis’s famous Gilda gown, and, by her side, Shirley Jones struck a pose in the deliciously tawdry pink slip she’d worn in
Elmer Gantry.
The women and their wonderful costumes enchanted him.

He picked up his sketch pad and began drawing a tall, thin girl, with bold slashes for eyebrows and a wide mouth. His telephone rang. It was André. Michel’s fingers began to tremble around the receiver.

“I just heard the wretched news about your grandmother,” André said. “I’m so sorry. This is very difficult for you.”

Michel’s throat constricted at the warm show of sympathy.

“Is it possible for you to slip out this evening? I—I want to see you. I want to comfort you,
chéri
.”

“I’d like that,” Michel said softly. “I’ve missed you.”

“And I’ve missed you. England was beastly, but Danielle insisted on staying through the weekend.”

Michel didn’t like being reminded of André’s wife, but soon André would leave her, and the two of them would move to the south of Spain and live in a fishing cottage. In the mornings Michel would sweep the terra-cotta floors, plump the cushions, and set out earthenware pitchers filled with flowers and wicker bowls piled with ripe fruit. In the
afternoons, while André read him poetry, Michel would create beautiful clothes on the sewing machine he’d taught himself to use. At night they would love each other to the music of the Gulf of Cadiz lapping at the sandy shore outside their window. That’s the way Michel dreamed it.

“I could meet you in an hour,” he said softly.

“An hour it is.” André’s voice dropped in pitch. “
Je t’adore, Michel.
”

Michel choked back his tears. “
Je t’adore, André.
”

Fleur had never worn such an elegant dress, a long-sleeved black sheath, with small, overlapping leaves picked out in tiny black beads at one shoulder. Belinda put Fleur’s hair up in a loose chignon and fastened polished onyx drops at her ears. “There,” her mother said as she stepped back to observe her handiwork. “Let him call you a peasant now.”

Fleur could see that she looked older and more sophisticated than sixteen, but she felt weird, as if she’d dressed up in Belinda’s clothes.

Fleur took her place at the center of the long, silent dinner table with Belinda sitting at one end and Alexi at the other. Everything was white. White linen, white candles, heavy alabaster vases holding dozens of full-blown white roses. Even the food was white—a cream soup, white asparagus, and pale scallops whose smell mixed with the cloying fragrance of the white roses. The three of them dressed in black looked like ravens perched around a funeral bier, with Belinda’s blood-red fingernails the only spot of color. Even Michel’s absence didn’t make the awful meal bearable.

Fleur wished her mother would stop drinking, but Belinda consumed one glass of wine after another while only toying with her food. When her mother ground out a cigarette on her dinner plate, a servant whisked it away. Alexi’s voice penetrated the silence. “I will take you to view your grandmother now.”

Wine sloshed over the rim of Belinda’s glass. “For God’s sake, Alexi. Fleur didn’t even know her. There’s no need for this.”