Scruples (32 page)

“Ash,” she asked, “are you interested in art?”

“Yes, Mrs. Ikehorn, I always have been.”

Billy smiled faintly, her eyes looking right into his. “I’m not surprised. Somehow I imagined you would be.”

T
wiggy, Veruschka, Penelope Tree, Lauren Hutton, Marisa Berenson, Jean Shrimpton, Susan Blakely, Margaux Hemingway—Harriet Toppingham had spotted them all as they first appeared on the scene. Sometimes she was too late, and the new girls were already so identified with another magazine that she either would not or could not use them. The competition among fashion editors to find The Next New Beauty before another magazine does is enormous. They rely largely on tips from spies inside the model agencies and from their favored photographers. Naturally Spider brought the test shots he had taken of Melanie to Harriet as soon as he finished developing and enlarging them.

Her dull brown eyes narrowed secretively as she looked at the enlargements. She felt a lunge of acquisitiveness catch her in the gut. When she saw something or someone she wanted, it started all her juices flowing. This was where her emotions lived, in getting hold Of the illusive, in laying hands on the rare and special.

“Well. Hmm. Yes, indeed.”

“Is that all you’re going to say, Harriet?” Spider demanded, almost angrily.

“She’s quite killingly beautiful, Spider. Is that what you want to hear? Ruthlessly, killingly beautiful.”

“My God, you make her sound like something out of
Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Not at all, Spider. Merely that this is not a face we’re going to forget. A little scary, don’t you think? No? Well, you’re young,”

“Harriet, that’s nuts. You’ve never been scared by anyone in your life. Admit it.”

“I admit nothing.” She blew in his face, enjoying the prolongation of the inevitable. Of course she had to have the girl. A great model has to be unique. One merely beautiful girl looks like another, but this was an entirely different face. It held something joltingly special she couldn’t put a name to. Finally she continued, “I’ll book her solid for the next two weeks and shoot the most important part of the fall designer collection on her. The cover too.” Her voice was carefully flat, without inflection or exhilaration, but she could feel her heart swelling with excitement Power glowed like a hot stone in her stomach.

“I’ll clear my decks,” Spider said with joy, “There’s nothing I can’t get finished before then.”

“Oh? Really?” She sounded mildly surprised, with a hint of embarrassment.

“Harriet! Harriet! I found her! You
are
going to give me the job?” Spider hadn’t imagined that she would use Melanie and not use him.

Harriet’s bright red lips curved in a thin red smile, barely permitting herself amusement She waited, thoughtfully, putting out her cigarette meticulously in a heavy jade ashtray before she spoke.

“You’re good Spider, I don’t deny that. But very new, very untested. What have you done for us so far? Bras? Shoes? Kids’ pajamas? Remember, the September issue is the most important one of the year for us. I simply can’t afford to make a mistake.” She took another cigarette from a bronze Empire-style box and lit it carefully, with the air of someone who has successfully closed the subject.

Spider bit down on his rage and forced himself to speak calmly.

“You wouldn’t be taking a chance, Harriet. I’m aware that just because I brought Melanie to you first, instead of taking her pictures to
Vogue
or
Bazaar
, doesn’t mean you have to give me the assignment You want to use Melanie? She’s all yours. But I don’t think there’s anyone she’ll work with as well as she’ll work with me. She’s green, she’s never modeled before. You didn’t know that, did you? It didn’t show in these pictures, and I took them in her street clothes, without special makeup or hairstyling. Trust me, Harriet. I’m ready for this. More than ready.”

Harriet stared vaguely up at the ceiling and tapped her nails reflectively on her desk. She leafed through the pictures again, leisurely, feeling simmering flutters of pleasure fill her as she kept him waiting. Spider’s work had already caused more talk than that of any other new photographer in years. If she let him slip through her fingers, he would be snapped up in a second. And he could do the job—she had known that from the beginning. However, she hated to be pushed into anything—still—on occasion—

“Well, I’ll just have to think about—no—perhaps—after all, Spider, on second thought, I’ll take the chance. I’ll let you have a shot at it.”

Never before in his life had Spider known what it was to be in someone’s power. The relief of her words had not reached him yet. He stood shaking with fury and an astonished awareness of injustice at the pleasure he perceived in her baiting of him. Harriet watched him carefully. Had he finally been made afraid? Fear was out of Spider’s normal emotional range—she had sensed that from the beginning and prized it in him—it made him more interesting to work on,

“Thank you.” Spider gave her a glance that was too complicated for her to read immediately for all her cunning: a look of scorn, hurt, surprise, and disgust mixed with gratitude and the beginning of a private excitement. But no fear. She saw that at once. He gathered up the pictures and walked quietly out of her office. Harriet smoked meditatively. That boy still had a lot to learn.

While the September issue was being photographed, Spider’s studio was jammed with people, each of them tensely looking for a way to make some impact on the main event. Harriet and her two assistants hovered; the accessory editor and shoe editor and their assistants, all four of them as heavily loaded with bags and boxes as little Italian market donkeys, came and went; Spider’s own assistant, a bright kid from Yale, whom he had just hired, was never far from his side. A changing stream of people arrived from the various designers carrying precious original models over their arms. They waited around nervously, looking anxiously at their watches, for the pictures to be taken so that they could rush the garments back to the showrooms, while Harriet’s assistants nagged at them to stay out of the way or ineffectively tried to convince them to go away and come back at the end of the day. Men from David Webb and Cartier brought cases of borrowed jewels and watched carefully until they could take them back again, while the assistant shoe editor’s apprentice, a young beglamoured du Pont debutante, fresh from Vassar, was reduced to bringing everybody coffee and sandwiches and taking away half-empty cups and paper plates. In the dressing room a star hairdresser and his crew worked in coordination with a makeup expert and her helper, not just on Melanie but on the succession of male models who were booked to pose with her. The art director of
Fashion and Interiors
kept coming in, watching for a while, grunting to himself and leaving, only to return in an hour.

Spider worked in an electric trance. As far as he was concerned there was no one in the studio except Melanie and the cameras and the shadow of his assistant.

Melanie was as collected as he was concentrated. While she was being dressed and undressed and lipsticked and combed and told how to hold her head or move or smile, the tight bud of some gigantic question seemed about to unfold its petals in her depths, some perception seemed to stir, a perception that was in itself another question, not an answer. She found the long hours of posing surprisingly easy, in spite of her inexperience. It seemed a very natural, a very right thing to be doing. The more they asked of her, the more she gave, happier than she’d ever been.

At the end of each day Harriet and the art director, in a temporary truce, huddled together over the tiny 35-mm slides, projecting them on a white wall. Their lack of discussion indicated more clearly than any words could have that they both knew it was going well. They didn’t want to give each other the satisfaction of showing approval, and with nothing to complain about, they had no reason to talk. They could tell, from years of experience, that a number of the slides would become some of the most ravishingly pure fashion photographs that they had ever published. Classics. The poetic, impenetrable beauty of the model lent each dress a dimension it had never had, except perhaps in the designer’s first inspiration.

During the late spring and short summer that followed, Melanie’s career was in a state of suspended animation. Until the September issue of the magazine appeared, in late August, Harriet had advised her not to do any commercial work, so that when she burst upon the fashion scene, she would be a completely new face. She kept Melanie busy doing editorial pages for
Fashion’s
future issues throughout the summer months in such a way that Melanie was never available to any other magazine, all of whom shoot on roughly the same day. It is normal for a fashion editor to use one favorite model consistently, issue after issue. It keeps the model out of the hands of other editors, and it develops a certain look for the magazine.

Melanie accepted all of Harriet’s guidance unquestioningly and avoided the Ford Agency’s offices, dealing with them by telephone. Some instinct told her that Harriet, more surely than anyone she had ever met, might hold the answer to her still formless question, might tell her what it was that she wanted to know. She was fascinated by Spider’s pictures of her. She spent hours studying them, with strained curiosity. Sometimes, when she was alone, she held up life-size enlargements of her face next to her own face and looked in the mirror for long minutes. The pictures told her some things she had not yet known about what she looked like to other people, but they still didn’t satisfy that parched hunger in her that cried out for an absolute answer. Spider’s photographs, which showed her what she looked like to him, showed her at the same time a mystery that only deepened her own perplexity. Perhaps if she could be photographed by another photographer, she thought, but Harriet was playing her cards very close to her chest and didn’t want Melanie to work with anyone but Spider until September.

“Darling, Melanie darling, you’ve never talked about yourself.” They were sitting at the kitchen table in Spider’s loft, eating hero sandwiches.

“Spider, you’re terribly nice to me, but you’re the most inquisitive person I’ve ever met. I’ve told you everything there is to tell. What more do you want?”

“Jesus, all you’ve given me is bare bones—it sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale. Handsome, rich father, beautiful social mother, no sisters or brothers, parents still madly in love, envied by all Louisville. As for you, a perfect childhood and a year and a half at Sophie Newcombe before you talked your doting dad into letting you come to New York to try your luck. End of story. How can you say that’s all there is to know?”

“What’s wrong with having had a perfect childhood?”

“Nothing. I just don’t understand the human connections there. Everyone is beautiful and loving and it’s all so goddamned nice. I can’t taste it, it doesn’t have texture, it’s too bright and light to be true.”

“Well—it was. Honestly, Spider, I don’t know what you expect from me. It seems to me that you had a pretty good time as a kid too—so what’s the difference? You make it sound as if I’m hiding something. Would a blow-by-blow description of my first high-school dance make you happy? It was a genuine Gothic horror story.” Melanie wasn’t impatient. She was used to people who wanted to dig and dig at her. She had told him the truth as she knew it. Her private fantasy, about getting out from behind her eyes, wasn’t something she had really put into words and certainly it wasn’t something she’d tell anyone about.

Spider looked at her in indignant rapture. She didn’t even seem to have any idea how mad she was driving him. He didn’t think she was a tease; he didn’t feel that she was holding out on him deliberately; but he knew that there had to be more, something that would make him feel she had given him something special of herself, something that responded to his love. She was so damn ungettable—at that it was almost like being in love with the world’s most beautiful deaf-mute. And yet, the hellish thing was that the less she gave, the more he wanted it, the more she deflected his questions with bland disclaimers, the more he was convinced that she was refusing him something—some key detail—that he absolutely had to know.

Before he fell in love Spider had been lazily and good-naturedly willing to listen to his woman-of-the-moment’s endless discussions of her psyche, her inner consciousness, her traumas of childhood, her parents’ lack of understanding, even her astrological forecasts. He was amused and often charmed by the way the women he had known probed and poked around in themselves, dredging up bits and pieces for him to see. He had given no more of himself to them than he had promised, but now, when he wanted to understand someone’s soul and to give her the most intimate access to himself, she was afflicted with a kind of softly unyielding dreaminess. He was filled with a desire to envelop her, to engulf and enfold her, to hear about her most private wishes and hopes and fears, her wildest ambitions, her most petty and ignoble feelings, her saddest days, her silliest faults. Everything.

Even while they made love he didn’t feel she was totally there for him. They had made love for the first time on the day after the pictures for the September issue were completed. Melanie hadn’t been a virgin, but she might just as well have been for all the difficulty Spider had had in coaxing her into bed. Finally, perhaps because it was easier to say yes than to keep saying no, she allowed him—quite crazy with love and desire—to take her to his apartment. He had been careful and patient and artful, curbing his lust, totally intent on her pleasure rather than on his. Spider was used to women who wanted him, who were as excited as he was, who met him halfway, who flung themselves into bed greedy for his body. Melanie made love with an unrelenting fragility. She responded to kisses and touching like a child being petted. She prolonged these gentle preliminary caresses, keeping him at her lips and her nipples, until he began to think that she wouldn’t let him go any farther. Finally, wistfully, almost disappointedly, she allowed him to enter her. Then she urged him on with what he thought was passion, realizing too late that she wanted him to satisfy himself as quickly as possible.