2 Death of a Supermodel (13 page)

Laura had heard of Baxter City, but never seen it. It was not visible or accessible from the street. She walked up an alley off Centre Street with a cast iron gate and made eye contact with the guy in the building’s window. Unlike every other alley in the city, the cobblestone paving was scrubbed clean and repaired. The dumpsters and their smells were hidden away, and the building windows had not a bar or burglar alarm on them. The guy in the window opened the gate, and she walked through a pair of frosted glass double doors with the letters BH etched in them.

Past the doors, she stepped into a simple lobby about the size of a doctor’s waiting room. The room was dark, with candles and a small casement window as the only sources of light. A thin Asian man in black jeans and thick, black Bakelite glasses circa 1923 greeted her from behind a raw wood counter.

“I’m not a member,” she said, as if deflecting Bakelite’s inevitable derision.

“Very good.” He seemed nonplussed by her plebe status. “Who’s sponsoring you today?”

Laura blinked. She had no idea what he meant.

“You’re a guest of someone?”

His courtesy was disarming. If she had been a guest, it was calculated to make her feel comfortable. If she was an interloper, it was meant to let her know, politely, how one gets in. She felt at ease then, as though she wasn’t going to get thrown out on her ear or shamed into leaving before she had her meeting.

“Penelope Sidewinder invited me?” God. With the question voice again. When had she started to feel so small? When had she decided she was permanently the bottom person on a social ladder that could get pulled up any time?

Bakelite checked his clipboard and motioned toward two doors. “She’s upstairs already. Elevator to the right. Stairs to the left. Sixth floor. Mandy at the counter will help you out once you’re there. There are no photographs, please.”

“Thanks.”

As she walked the three, maybe four steps to the wall with the different transports to the upper floors, she wondered which method the rich people took, the people who weren’t “guests.” One would assume a sense of entitlement took them to the elevator. But the truly entitled, those who didn’t have to think about their entitlements, would probably take the stairs. And didn’t she want to be one of those?

More than what she
wanted
to be, who
was
she? Regardless of money, which method did she
want
to take? She was on the third step, still undecided, almost walking directly into the wall in between, when a couple blew by her so fast they almost knocked her over. She heard a girl giggling and a man mumbling, and saw a leather jacket and bit of pink georgette frill pass her and enter the stairwell. Neither apologized nor even looked back. She decided to take the elevator.

Everything about the place was magical and perfect. The floors were made of an unfinished, distressed wood laid out in a herringbone pattern so irregular and impossible to clean that ten ticks of specialness were added for the simple cost of managing them. The walls were covered with art. Real art. Banksy’s scrawled screams, Barofsky’s numbers, Ryden’s big-eyed mannequins and meats. A Cullen so pornographic she could almost smell it. All were framed and crowded together so close that the wall was almost completely covered. The amount of original art that had to be purchased to achieve the effect was staggering.

At the counter, a Hawkinson soda can/clock sat next to the phone like a knick-knack bought at a thrift store. Mandy looked like a normal person, not a model, not overly made up to out-glamour any of the members.

“I’m meeting Penelope Sidewinder,” Laura said, keeping any hint of a question from her voice. The amount of effort required to do that was monumental.

Mandy smiled in a way that made Laura feel like she was in the club, part of their inner circle, welcome and wonderful, and led her down a hall, up half a flight of stairs, and deeper into that new world. Not wanting to miss a moment, Laura turned off her phone.

They entered the biggest living room Laura had ever seen, with islands of tastefully worn couches at discrete distances from one another, rugs that did not cover too much of the raw wood herringbone floor, and floor-to-ceiling windows with a view that could have been created only by accident or pure mathematics. Both New Jersey to the west and Long Island to the east seemed to be visible. The scope of the space and views from the windows gave her a feeling of peace and rightness. She would join the club and have access to that room any time. It was her place as much as Penelope Sidewinder’s. She belonged. Even wearing her old jeans, a chain mail belt, and a cropped wool crepe shift she had pieced together from extra Sartorial fabric, even with her cheap shoes and unhighlighted roots, even with one eye’s worth of makeup that had rubbed off since the morning, she vowed it was not the last time she’d see that room.

Penelope Sidewinder sat by one of the many windows, sipping something from a porcelain cup. The setting sun glinted off the flyaway strands of hair she hadn’t tucked into her bun. At five-ten and built like a breadstick, she had probably modeled in her younger days. She was one of the top half-percent of people who had the face and build for magazine covers, and the other top half-percent of those who could run her career like a business, stay off the sauce and the powder, and survive. What no one expected was that she was also a woman of strong moral fiber and sharp sartorial eye. When modeling started drying up, she took to fashion reviewing, and as she aged into her forties, she spoke her mind frequently and openly. The girls were too young. Their bodies were too thin, and the industry was eating alive all but the top five percent.

And there she was at Baxter City, waving Laura over to a seat.

“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Laura said, slipping onto the cool leather. “I didn’t know who else to call.”

“Oh, I was at the Calvin show. Same thing every season. I can just look at the pictures. Tea? It’s rooibos. African red. I take it with cream and sugar, like a chai, but most people take it straight.”

Laura accepted the tea and left it plain. “You know, I didn’t really think about any of the girls much, since Mermaid made all the right assurances.” Laura listened to herself and thought she sounded like an actress in a scene from
Upstairs, Downstairs
. “But Thomasina… with what happened at the end. It’s been haunting me all day.”

Penelope leaned forward and put her hand on Laura’s knee. “Don’t worry. If you have the green sheet from Mermaid, you’re protected.” The green sheet was the boilerplate contract, with assurances from the agency that their girls were of minimum age and weight. It was called a green sheet because the agreement had been first scribbled on a green napkin at Marlene X. “But I do need to know what you saw, especially with Thomasina. The board at MAAB is foaming at the mouth. Someone’s going to have their blood drawn.”

“I hope it’s not us.” Laura only breathed the last two words, because in the middle of the sentence, she was pretty sure she shouldn’t have said it.

“I doubt it,” Penelope said. “But who can say? Things happen. And there’s been no time for a full investigation.”

Laura felt pensive. What a stupid thing to lose her business over. Nothing was going right. “This is harder than I thought it would be. Starting the line.” She realized immediately that she’d spoken too frankly.

“Everyone pays a price. Even people born into it have a piece of themselves missing.”

“Thomasina was born rich and wore clothes for a living. I mean, I’m sorry she’s dead, I really am, but—”

“Thomasina had dreadfully conservative parents who only cared about their image, and she carried self-loathing in every picture she took. It was what made her face so special. The complexity there, you don’t learn that in acting class.”

“I never saw it. I’m sorry.”

“You did, even if you couldn’t pin it down. Every girl has a history in her eyes. The brilliant ones put it right there without saying a word. I took pictures before and after I came to New York, and it’s like two different people were in them, because I was different.”

Laura looked past the little wireframes and into Penelope’s green eyes. She found nothing but warmth and sincerity. She felt accepted and invited, finally somewhere she belonged utterly. “Where were you before?”

Penelope sighed. “When I started out, I was fifteen. From Kentucky.”

“You don’t have an accent.”

“Back then, we had to erase our accents. Obliterate them. Now of course, it would be part of my brand. Are you having a cookie? I can’t eat all of them myself.”

Laura took one and nibbled.

Penelope watched closely, cutting the warmth of the moment with a little discomfort. “I was on the volleyball team at East Cherokee High when there were so few girls’ volleyball teams. I was a freshman on varsity. Very impressive. I had a spike, which was unheard of on the girls’ team.” She rooted around in her slip of a bag and came up with a little vial with an eyedropper.

“I tried out for volleyball at Dalton. I was too short.”

“Ah, Dalton. That explains the erudition of your line.”

Laura’s cheeks tingled, and she wished she could ice them down.

Penelope squeezed some liquid into her tea. “Vitamin D concentrate. Would you like some?”

“No, thank you.”

Penelope dropped the bottle back in her bag. “My mom made me an extra jelly sandwich on practice days. We were good. Very good. We went to the regional championship in Chicago. My dad drove me up there in my uncle’s pickup. He complained about closing the store and the cost of the gas the whole way.” Penelope sipped her tea, as if for effect, smiling a little.

“Did you win?” Laura asked.

“I don’t remember. It didn’t really matter. There was a scout there named Dianne Gorbent. Not a volleyball scout or a college scout. Oh, no. A scout for tall girls. And where better to find thin, tall white girls than a volleyball tournament? No one ever underestimated Dianne and lived to tell about it. She approached my father after the game, telling him about all the money a girl like me could make in New York. Of course, we were relatively… well, I want to say, we lived in the back of my father’s drugstore. And imagine, my mother wouldn’t have to make any extra jelly sandwiches. My father said he would miss me on the ride home. Who would listen about the evils of OPEC if I wasn’t there? He wasn’t the crying kind. But you could tell he was proud I was making something off my looks. Before I left, and got on a plane, of all things, he said he expected the next time I came home, I’d be with a man of my own. His words were, ‘Someone richer than your old man.’ This being the scope of what a woman could achieve in Kentucky in the 1970s.

“I got to New York with a duffel bag full of gym shorts and sports bras, and Dianne took me shopping.” She sighed. “Those days. It was like a dream. Like a movie. I lived in a guest apartment off Central Park. She fed me like I have never been fed before. Three hot meals a day. If I could, for one minute, recapture the feeling of constant gratitude and happiness I felt for that first week. Over the simplest things, too. I didn’t have any chores. I didn’t have to take care of my brothers or sweep the store. She took me to Donna Carnegie’s party on Fifth Avenue, with some of the most sophisticated people I have ever seen. Are you sure you’re not related? I see a little resemblance.”

“I never looked into it.”

“You should. Anyway. I hadn’t even gone on a call, and I knew I had found my purpose, at fifteen years old. Those were the best weeks of my life. Dianne let me call home, which was very expensive at the time, and I told my parents not to worry, everything was great. My sister said everyone at school was simply green with envy.”

In the twenty minutes Laura had been there, the sun had crested its apex and started down toward the horizon line, lengthening shadows and warming the world with yellowish light. She wondered if Ruby had ever made it to the showroom, if Rowena had looked haggard for her other jobs, and if Chase had sent his selects. She didn’t really want to hear the rest of Penelope’s story. There was nowhere to go but downhill.

“Ms. Sidewinder, I—”

“I went on my first shoot on a Monday, absolutely high from the weekend. I came out, as it were, and Dianne said she was already getting bookings. She couldn’t make that shoot, and she said it was simply to have some photos to show. His name was Franco. He was relatively well known, she said, and she didn’t have to go with me. I never knew if she knew what he would do. But that doesn’t matter now.”

“I think I get it.” Laura didn’t want to hear another word.

“It was in this studio downtown, before downtown was what it is today. I can’t tell you how many rats I stepped over. But I thought, ‘Ah, this is the high and the low. I’ll see everything and do everything,’ and it added to my happiness. Well. He couldn’t have been more average. Short and scruffy. I did my makeup and went into the lights. And he adjusts the camera, takes a few shots, and tells me I look great. And I believe him. And then, looking through the camera lens, he says, ‘Have you ever sucked a man’s lollipop before?’”

Laura almost choked on her cookie.

“Exactly,” Penelope said. “When I reacted, he snapped a picture, and then he said, ‘You realize, before you leave here today, you’re going to suck my lollipop.’ And he’s click-clicking pictures, and I think I must have misheard him, but he says, ‘You like sucking lollipops,’ and I say, ‘No, thank you.’ But he ignores me. And he’s saying the filthiest things I won’t even repeat. And right before I start crying, he takes the last picture and says, ‘What am I telling Dianne when you leave?’” She sipped her tea and placed the cup on the table. “Laura, I knew I was going to have to do it.”

“No.”

“What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to go home to Kentucky? With what in my bag? Shame? Failure? And what would I do? Play volleyball for varsity, marry some man from my class, and have children? No. I wasn’t from there anymore. I’d changed in that week. Not enough to have a friend to turn to and certainly not enough to refuse him. All I had to do was get through it.”