Spring Collection (19 page)

“Thank you, thank you, master, I’m everlastingly in your debt, I couldn’t possibly have handled them myself, you great big wonderful man. How can I ever repay you?” I snarled.

“Well you don’t have to be snotty. I thought I was doing you a favor.”

“Oh, shit, I guess you did think so. Thanks, Aaron, you were sweet to ruin my evening.”

“Just exactly who were those crude characters?” Maude asked curiously.

“Old school chums,” I said. “They got a date mixed up.”

“Well whoever the others are,” Maude said thoughtfully. “I hope they bring the girls back safe and sound.”

I ran to the limos and looked inside. Nobody. In the melee with my admirers the girls had vanished into the French night with pick-ups from Les Bains Douche, one of them, God help me, on a motorcycle. Mike and Maude were watching me closely. I smiled and shrugged. “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm?” I asked as philosophically as possible.

“What do you suppose they’re up to?” Maude wondered.

“Dinner in some wonderfully typical, authentic little bistro, maybe a visit to a famous old café on the Left Bank where students their age hang out, lots of good conversation—a really French experience, just what girls their age should have in Paris.”

“Yeah, right,” Mike said. “Or maybe they can find a bookstore with a poetry reading going on, or listen to some good classical music—even the opera. Or a ballet? Paris is such a cultural feast.”

“Who knows?” I answered, too worried to react to him. All I wanted to do was go back to the hotel and drown myself in one of my two bathtubs.

One thing I didn’t plan to do was call Justine. I didn’t want to alarm her about Tinker’s inability to
walk. She didn’t need to know anything—not one little word—about it until Marco had a chance to coach Tinker and get her over the problem. Nor did Justine ever have to know that the girls were out on their own.
Damn Justine anyway!
I felt a totally justifiable anger.

This was her bloody responsibility, not mine, and
she
should be here, not me. Whose crazy idea had it been to send the girls so early? Hers, only hers. But here I was, put upon by everyone, working like a sheep-herder, one person trying to keep track of three girls, pulled in every direction, given an impossible job, having to lie and juggle and worry all on my own, fending off Maude’s journalistic instincts and Mike’s trouble-making because Justine didn’t have the minimum of guts to meet her own father. This whole mess was fucking unfair!

Besides, I was still in the mood to dance, damn it!

I
had to get you away from the others,” Tom Strauss said as he and Tinker sat in the Café Flore, later that night. They were almost alone. The crowds were downstairs, packed into the glassed-in terrace and jamming the first-floor rooms with so much noise and smoke that he hadn’t even looked for a table, but had led Tinker immediately up the creaking flight of wooden stairs, to the refuge of a worn leather banquette and a battered table.

“Why?” Tinker asked, looking at him warily. Tom was an American, one of the gang they’d met at Les Bains Douche who’d shown up outside of Lombardi’s earlier that night. She had danced with him a lot but there hadn’t been more than a moment to talk.

“Because you look so damn sad.”

“Do not,” Tinker murmured from the depths.

“You’re not the same girl as you were last night. At dinner April and Jordan were happy and excited … you were way down, even if no one noticed but me. Tinker, please, tell me what’s wrong.”

“None of your business,” she quavered.

“I want it to be my business.”

Tinker turned her angelic countenance on him. “Go get stuffed!” she said and burst into tears. Great sobs shook her and she turned into Tom’s shoulder to hide her face. He could feel her grief although he couldn’t hear it, for she wept silently and bitterly. He put his arm around her quivering back and held her tightly
through the mass of her red parka, making little sounds of comfort until she threw off his arm and pulled herself together enough to speak.

“Those bitches … such show offs … I can’t
do
that, I didn’t want to, they made me.…”

“Who
made you?” he demanded.

“Everyone!” She was wracked by another huge sob.

“Everyone made you do
what
?”

“Walk,” Tinker finally managed to gasp out.

“Walk? I don’t get it,” Tom Strauss said, totally confused.

“Of course you don’t, what could you know about it?”

“Just tell me,” he implored her.

“I don’t even know you,” Tinker wailed.

“Do you have anybody else to talk to?” he persisted.

Tinker snuffled miserably and considered his words. Everyone else she knew in Paris had been there to see her humiliation, everyone but this prying, stubborn guy who was interested enough in her to keep passing her Kleenex, who had been watching her so closely at dinner that he’d noticed her depression, who had been sensitive to the mood she thought she’d hidden so well and who’d realized that Jordan and April were driving her mad with their elated self-satisfaction.

“Oh, all right, since you’re so anxious to know,” she said grudgingly, through her hiccups. “I had to do my runway walk today, at Lombardi’s, in front of everybody, and I proved what a total, absolute, complete loser I was.”

“What’s a runway walk?”

“Oh … it’s the special way you wear the clothes, your … manner, I guess, the way you project … having a walk is like being able to carry a tune. Either you can or you can’t. And I can’t. Oh, shit, I just
can not
!”

“You mean it’s a special talent?”

“No, not that exactly, it’s something else, not having a talent but
being a talent
, being somebody special,
inside yourself, being able to have fun with it,
playing with it
, oh, you know,” she said impatiently, “tweaking it, pushing it, making yourself interesting until everybody who looks at you can’t take their eyes away. Some girls have it, others don’t. I don’t.”

“I thought it was enough to be beautiful.”

“That shows how much you know,” Tinker said, morosely. “All the girls are beautiful, beauty’s expected, beauty’s the basic alphabet, but the ones who make it to the top know how to put themselves over as personalities. They play themselves, they’re famous characters in the whole drama of fashion. People think they actually know something intimate about Naomi and Claudia, they think that Naomi’s wonderfully naughty and mischievous and mocking and sophisticated and having a ball with life, but in a fun way, an acceptable way whatever she does, and they think that Claudia must be the purest one of all, an angel, a princess royal, sweet and so basically good, so above the others that she manages to remain utterly virginal in the tiniest bikini—they think she’s doing some sort of marvelous favor in actually allowing the crude public to see her solid gold belly button.”

“So what the hell would they think you were, chopped liver?” Tom Strauss was impatient. He’d never seen such a truly glorious girl, never expected to see one, and all she did was put herself down, even if she did it in a way that opened his eyes to things he’d never known about.

Tinker sighed deeply, shaking her head slowly to indicate that she was finished with this conversation. She raised her hands to her hair and hid herself in its wings, hunching her shoulders and all but disappearing in its Venetian red cloud. But she’d have to talk to him, Tom decided, he wasn’t going to let her sit there and molder away speechlessly in this famous room impregnated with the aura of people who had drunk, smoked and talked to each other within its walls for hundreds of years.

Tom Strauss was not uneasy with words the way
painters sometimes are. At nineteen, he’d been lured out of his graphic arts training by an ad agency headhunter, and he’d spent the next eight years working as an art director with a number of highly verbal copy writers, exchanging many more ideas than images. All that time he’d lived frugally and collected an ever-escalating salary, saving most of it, because he was determined to grant himself a couple of sabbatical years in Paris before he was thirty, to find out, once and for all, if he could or could not realize his lifelong dream to be an artist with more than a facile commercial talent.

He looked at Tinker’s bent head, her eyes shadowed by her lids, and continued to probe.

“So what you’re saying about the walk, is that it’s a question of expressing your identity, right?”

“I guess,” Tinker muttered, finishing the brandy that was left in her glass. “Just drop it, would you? Please?”

“So what’s your identity?”

“What’s yours?”

“I asked first,” Tom said.

“But I don’t want to play this stupid game,” she insisted.

“Okay, okay, I’ll start. I’m a man, I’m an American, from Chicago, I’ve been a successful art director in a New York agency, I’m trying to be a painter and I think I might, possibly, have a shot, I’m Jewish but not religious, I’m unmarried but I don’t intend to stay that way forever, I have two younger sisters, both still in college, I’m the son of a mother who’s a professor of art history and doctor father who …”

“Stop! I get the picture,” Tinker interrupted. “I’m a girl and I’m pretty.”

“That’s it? The whole one-line story?”

“Oh, I’m from Tennessee. Maybe,” Tinker ventured with her first small smile, turning slightly in his direction, “if I’d been born in Chicago it would count more. Oh, my mother’s a nonpracticing Methodist, whatever that is.”

“You didn’t mention your profession,” he said,
trying not to reveal how her smile hit him in the stomach. He felt as if he’d been shot out of a cannon into a wildly blue sky with land nowhere in sight. “Doesn’t being a model qualify as a piece of your identity?”

“Only if you’re more than that, if you’ve got that thing that makes you special, the thing I explained. And I don’t.”

Tom Strauss ordered more brandy from a waiter. “I suggest a drink,” he said, “while we recover from your temporary identity crisis. It sounds like a basic country music title, ‘I Found a Pretty Girl in Tennessee Who Didn’t Have No Identity.’ There’s got to be a verse, in fact, a whole song to go with the title.”

Tinker giggled and inspected him closely for the first time. Dancing with him last night, she had noticed that he was taller than she was, which didn’t happen every day, but she hadn’t really paid him much attention in the crowd. He was not unattractive at close range, she decided. Not bad at all. How come she hadn’t noticed before? He seemed so very much at home inside his skin. With his messed-up dark brown hair that made you want to fix it and his sort of quirky, easy mouth and that lazy grin and good teeth, and the laugh lines that sprouted from the sides of his narrow, long, dark brown eyes, and the absolutely grand way his eyebrows just swung upward and upward, this Tom Strauss person looked … smart. As if he thought interesting, funny thoughts when he was alone, things he didn’t tell anyone. Something about that suddenly annoyed her. If he had anything interesting to say, she’d like to hear it.

“Let’s work on your childhood,” he suggested.

“I don’t like to think about my childhood,” she said, dismissively.

“But there’s
identity,”
Tom pounced. “An unhappy childhood automatically gives you an identity, it’s practically a prerequisite. Why were you unhappy?”

“I didn’t say I was unhappy, I said I didn’t want to think about it. Oh, I give up, you’re looking at a retired
beauty pageant queen,” Tinker said wryly. “I used to be a star. I reached my peak before I had my first period. Isn’t that ridiculous and pathetic? When I was crowned Little Miss Tennessee in the under-three-year-old category it was my seventh pageant and I’d won all of them. Ten years later I had a hundred and sixty trophies and crowns, all won before I was twelve. That and fifty cents will get you a phone call so long as it isn’t long distance.”

“But that’s terrible! You must have been pushed into a kind of pressure and competitiveness before you were ready to handle it, just a little kid—it’s obscene.”

“I don’t necessarily believe that,” Tinker said, frowning. “It was the only life I knew. Oh, you can’t imagine how
important
it was, how important I felt! I had nothing to compare it to except school, and of course the regular kids didn’t like me, how could they have? I thought I didn’t care about them because on the circuit I was … oh, I was
such
a big winner, so envied, so admired, so petted … you can’t begin to imagine what it was like.”

“Still,” Tom said carefully, “it sounds like it’s something you were too young to make a judgment about.”

“My mother thought the contests were good for me,” Tinker said in a soft dreamy voice. “She said they would build my self-confidence. Almost every weekend we were out driving the circuit together, just the two of us. She was divorced and didn’t have much of a social life so she had plenty of time to devote to me.”

“Hmmm.” Tom’s tone was neutral and encouraging.

“Even before you get into an actual contest there are dozens and dozens of regional preliminaries,” Tinker went on, remembering, “and all sorts of categories to enter … Most Beautiful, Most Adorable, Miss Memphis in May, Best-Dressed, Most Photogenic, Universal Charm Queen … it never stops. Of course they’re all about how you look, not who you are, but you have to behave beautifully. All the contestants wear special, custom-made dresses that cost hundreds of dollars
each and the only difference in them is how fancy they get. My mother used to curl my hair and put on my lipstick and rouge and eye makeup, grooming and polishing me … I grew up wearing lacy, frilly, fussy pastel dresses with puffed sleeves and so many petticoats under the skirts that sometimes they were wider than I was tall, and hair bows to match each dress. Every week I had a new pair of spotless white shoes with white satin bows on the toes and white ankle socks with ruffles around the tops … and I won and won … I
reigned
for a decade … I was unbeatable … a star, a true star.”

“And then what happened?” Tom spoke as softly as if he were talking to a sleepwalker.