Spring Collection (6 page)

The part about calling home has always puzzled me a bit—how can there be so many good daughters?—but I assume it’s because they’re so young.

In the last three days, since we heard from d’Angelle, I’d often wondered who at GN had chosen April Nyquist, Jordan Dancer and Tinker Osborn out of the twenty head shots Justine sent. Was it Jacques Necker himself, or Marco Lombardi, or Gabrielle or even someone we don’t know? Whoever it was had picked our three tallest girls; Tinker and Jordan are both five feet, eleven inches, and April’s half an inch taller than either of them, just under six feet. What’s more, they seemed to have been chosen for contrast, like a Clairol
ad, April the blond Viking, Jordan the dark-haired “woman of color” and Tinker the redhead. In any case, new though they may all be, each of our girls is still gorgeous enough to hold her own physically on any runway Paris has to offer.

After all, any busy New York agency sees about seven thousand girls a year, of whom some thirty are picked to go through a training and grooming process. At the end of that time, only four or five of them are finally signed to a contract, and the vast majority of those girls will never become stars. Even among the stars, only five, right now, are internationally famous and still at their peak: Claudia, Linda, Kate, Naomi and Christy. And I’m far from sure that everybody knows Christy’s last name is Turlington. Go know! It’s all such a crapshoot.

Take April Nyquist, for example, sitting across the aisle. She comes from Minneapolis, the natural-blond capital of the United States. There are people who might ask, “Why April, out of all the blonds in Minneapolis?” For one thing, the Scandinavian gene pool, undiluted for tens of thousands of breeding years, that went into producing April’s treasure of buttercup yellow hair, would make Paul Mitchell cry with joy. In addition April seems to breathe air that is fresher than the air available to the rest of us, and her classically perfect features are relieved only by an unexpectedly endearing, ever-so-slightly crooked smile that makes her look even younger than her nineteen years.

April’s been working from the first day she left the training program, although not nearly as much as Justine and I would have liked, because April’s type is deeply
regal
and regal is always a hard sell to advertisers.

“What sort of living arrangements do most models have?” Maude asked me in her low, confidential voice, as if she were telling me a secret instead of trying to find out to what degree they were sluts.

“As far as I know, they live alone in New York or they live with their boyfriends, about fifty-fifty,” I
answered. “And a few of them live with a roommate.” I didn’t like being treated as the statistical expert on models’ behavior, but I’d been in the business long enough to know what I was talking about, and better that Maude got it from me than from somebody else.

The flight attendant arrived with lobster, carefully removed from its shell. I looked at Maude expectantly but apparently lobster was okay on her diet. I addressed mine with concentration, after observing Jordan Dancer, who was sitting next to April, wave hers away with an imperious gesture and unwrap the container of health food she’d brought on board.

Jordan, when she’s serious, calls herself “black,” although one day when we were horsing around, she informed me that her skin was the subtle honey-brown color of a young alder tree when the sunlight hits it. I told her that I doubted she’d ever spent a night in a forest and I thought her skin was more the color of an herb tea I favor called Autumn Garden with milk and sugar added, but I wasn’t about to bicker about technicalities.

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.

P
eaches 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.