The Glimpsing (12 page)

The boy drowned in a fishing accident less than three weeks later, but by then no one seemed interested in connecting it with
 
anything
Angela had said—except Sumner herself, who subsequently resigned her position.

After a week of observations, Dr. Sumner, Dr. Carl Fischer, and several other psychiatric evaluators had both seen and heard enough to believe that Angela Childress was far beyond the threshold of clinically insanity.
 
They did not believe she necessarily posed an immediate physical threat to Portia, but it was their “professional opinion” that her condition was so acute that the possibility of her potentially harming Portia could not be ruled out.

Shortly thereafter, Angela was committed to the Bedford Mental Asylum, and less than four months later, Eileen had gained permanent custody of Portia.
 
A month after that, Eileen gave consent, Portia signed an initial $100,000 contract, and I became the agent of a sixteen-year-old prodigy whom I believed just might take the fashion industry by storm.

About that I could not have been more correct.

Portia’s rise to fame was the most meteoric in the history of the profession.
 
In her first six months alone, she had been parceled out to more than twenty-two top-tier clients, modeling everything from lipstick to designer furs.
 
She appeared on billboards, cosmetic isle advertisements, and was featured in three television commercials.
 
Photographers and clients alike loved the fact that, given the right makeup and lighting, she could be made to pass for a woman five or even ten years her senior.
 
Like no one before her, Portia’s look encompassed elegance, innocence, and purity, offered paradoxically, however, with a subtle slice of sensuality.
 
 
 
 
At seventeen, she did several ads for a struggling perfume called Night.
 
Sales spiked so sharply that Dior, the perfume’s manufacturer, immediately signed her to a five-year contract.
 
That same year she appeared on the cover of Vogue—no less than three times.
 
Overnight, young Portia Childress had become one of the most recognizable faces in the world.
 
But all of that was about to change, for Portia and I had begun seeing one another.

I suppose it was inevitable.
 
As Portia’s agent, and she the most financially lucrative model I had ever represented, we traveled everywhere together: Los Angeles, Miami, Paris, Rio,
Milan
.
 
I attended more than half her photo sessions, and when I wasn’t present, we spoke on the phone, often long into the night, not just about the next client or event, but about life in general, about everything.

Like everyone else, I had always found Portia extraordinarily attractive, but being almost ten years older than she, I had decided early on that I would not pursue a relationship with her.
 
That proved far more difficult than I had expected.
 
Sometimes, during a photo shoot or while we were having dinner with a prospective client, I’d catch myself gazing at her uncontrollably.
 
There was just something about her, an air that seemed different and irresistible.
 
I kept telling myself that she was really just a child, that I should be ashamed of my petty lusts.
 
But I wasn’t.
 
She was simply too beautiful.
 
What I felt seemed as natural as the sunrise.
 
And that was what doomed me.

Our relationship began in Paris.
 
We were sitting next to one another in a private jet, which was preparing to taxi forward.
 
Portia had leaned over and said: “I’m not sure if you know this or not, but I really hate takeoffs.”

I didn’t know that.
 
For over a year she’d hidden it perfectly.
 
I responded: “It helps if you hold on to something.”
 
I then reached across and took her hand in mine.

The moment I touched her, something changed within me.
 
She seemed so delicate, so fragile.
 
I could feel the fear in her trembling hands—and I became intent on making it disappear.

The plane began to taxi forward.
 
Portia squeezed my hand firmly.
 
I felt a rush like never before.
 
She’d closed her eyes tightly and was leaning back in her seat, her head arched up just slightly.
 
I couldn’t help but gaze at her.
 
My God she was beautiful.
 
I wanted so badly to kiss her that my own hands began to tremble… and then I was kissing her, pressing my mouth to her tender lips.

Once I realized what I was doing, I fully expected her to push me away in shock.
 
I had a compulsion to pull away myself—that any of this was happening seemed almost surreal.
 
But her only reaction was to part her mouth and begin kissing me back, with a passion that left me both stunned and thrilled.
 
When we had finally stopped, she reached up, pulled my head to her ear and whispered: “What took you so long?”

Our relationship advanced quickly, but I made no attempt to become intimate with Portia.
 
In fact, I made certain she understood that the whole affair had to be kept secret.
 
Not even her mother could know we were involved.
 
This was not because I sought to hide our relationship—in the industry it was hardly uncommon for even teenaged models to be dated by men old enough to be their fathers—but because several years earlier I’d had an encounter with an all-too-eager fifteen-year-old that had almost landed me in jail on a statutory rape charge.
 
So with Portia, I had every intention of keeping my nose clean—at least for the time being.
 
Her eighteenth birthday was not far off.

Once Portia turned eighteen, and became “legal,” I wasted little time trying to get what I’d so patiently waited for.
 
To my astonishment, however, Portia firmly resisted my advances—sorrowfully, but she resisted them nonetheless.
 
She told me that her mother had taught that it was always best to wait for marriage, not only as an obligation to God, but so that she would not become emotionally attached, and thereby lured into making poor decisions.

That was a setback, but it hardly left me daunted, for I could see something happening in Portia as clearly as I could see my own name: she was falling in love with me.

At the time, I thought that a very fortunate development, for what love struck girl did not eventually give in to the demands and needs of the one she loved?
 
I did my best to nurse it, knowing that the greater her love for me, the easier my road to what I believed
would be the most gratifying sexual encounter of my life.
 
So I bought her gifts, spoke to her tenderly, made her believe that I was in love with her just as much as she was with me.
 
Yet still, amazingly, Portia remained resolute.

I then decided on a harsher strategy: anger.
 
I told her that I had waited for her, waited when any other man would have taken her after less than a week.
 
I told her how I had rescued her from her mother’s bizarre world of spirits and phantoms, and showed her a new world, one filled with fame, fortune, and universal adoration.
 
Most importantly, I reminded her that she was eighteen now, a grown woman, and that it was time for her to start acting like one.
 
I then kicked her out of my penthouse, and told her not to return until she fully understood what that meant.

It was all a ruse, of course, a psycho-sexual ploy that I’d used quite effectively on several other religious girls not eager to break their vows of chastity.
 
On every one of them it had worked to perfection.
 
In fact, it would have worked on Portia as well, but for the fatal discovery that changed everything.

After I’d thrown her out, Portia returned home, to a place she’d built in Westchester in order to get away from her Aunt Eileen, who had treated her well since taking guardianship but now seemed far more interested in her newfound prosperity than Portia herself.
 
Portia spent the next four days in utter despair, torn between her deep-seated convictions and her urge to please me as her lover.
 
She became so distraught that she finally drove out to the Bedford Asylum seeking her mother’s advice, admitting to the woman not only that she and I had a clandestine relationship, but that I had been pressing her sexually.

Angela’s response was sane, if not predictable.
 
She told Portia that I was almost certainly using her, and that I could not truly be in love with her, because if I was, I’d be willing to wait.

Angela spoke this with such conviction, such motherly concern, that Portia found herself profoundly moved.
 
She intended to immediately return home and not only break off our relationship, but fire me as her agent.

Just as Portia was leaving, however, Angela did something that completely reversed Portia’s thinking.
 
She lazily rolled her eyes to a whitewashed corner of the room and said: “You see William?
 
I told you she would listen.”

William was Portia’s father.
 
He’d been dead for more than ten years.

Heartbroken, Portia left the Bedford Asylum.
 
For the first time in her brief life she was fully convinced that her mother really had gone mad.
 
As she drove home, Portia considered everything the woman had ever taught her: everything about the unseen world, everything about men,
everything
about remaining chaste.
 
None of it was true.
 
It was all just as illusory as her dead father.

She understood then.
 
It really was time for her to grow up.
 
No longer could she hold to her mother’s lunatic whims.
 
She had to make her own decisions, be a woman, just as I had told her.

That night, Portia decided to show not only that she was a woman, but the slavish depths of her love for me.
 
She promptly returned home, entered her bathroom, and began straightening her hair.
 
She cut it into a short shaggy bob with loose fringes, and then proceeded to dye it black.
 
She undressed and slipped into an enticing red dress (the same red dress she’d worn to a cocktail party three weeks earlier—and that I had recklessly salivated over), drew on red lipstick, and proceeded to drive back to my penthouse apartment, where she intended to prove just how much of a woman she’d become.

The reason she’d made such a dramatic change in her appearance stemmed from comments I’d made before Portia and I had even engaged in a relationship.
 
We’d been talking about the type of women I found attractive.
 
I’d told her that I preferred women with shorter hair because it made them look more sophisticated, and brunettes because I felt they tended to behave more maturely.
 
Portia had taken those words to heart, cutting and dyeing her hair in a juvenile attempt to become the kind of woman she believed I desired most—in essence, the woman of my dreams.

However, when I peered through the peephole that night, I didn’t even know
who she was.  I was so drunk I could barely recite my own name.  I happily swung the door open, watching as this unrecognizable girl flashed what was a rather extraordinary smile.  Almost immediately, however, her eyes blinked away to the woman behind me, who was perched on a high bar stool, holding a glass of white wine and wearing little more than a pair of black panties.  The woman’s name was Susanna Amoretti, a twenty-eight-year-old accountant I’d been seeing for the last two weeks.

The face of the girl standing at my door disintegrated to the most pained expression I had ever seen.  Still too drunk to realize what was happening, I looked back and forth between the two women, who were staring at one another, each seemingly transfixed by the other’s presence.  I still had no idea who was standing before me.  In my stupor, she looked so much like Susanna, with her dark hair, milky skin, red lips, and provocative dress, that for a moment I wondered if she might be her sister.  Then, almost magically, my alcoholic haze seized just long enough for me to realize who the girl was.  It was Portia.