A Clean Slate (21 page)

A
fter two delays, one change of planes in San Juan, and middle seats that were ten rows apart (the only ones the magazine could book us on), Cole and I arrived on the island of Tortola well past midnight. I was so exhausted that I barely had time to notice the rusty-red print of the cotton bedding before I crashed on top of it. Cole had given me the green light to book my own little bungalow instead of a room in the main building, which made me want to hug him. I didn't, of course. Cole and I never touched each other. But I was even more grateful the next morning when I opened my very own door leading onto my very own little wooden deck and saw the luminous teal of the ocean below me.

There were two wooden rocking chairs on the deck—one painted peach, the other a mauvey purple. I immediately took up residence in the peach one and rocked for half an hour, just staring out at the line of boulders that formed a
breakwater around the resort, and the splotchy patterns of the coral on the ocean floor.

I glanced at my watch, wondering when Cole wanted to begin our search for sites. His friend Sam, the travel editor at
U Chic
who'd gotten Cole this gig, was supposed to be here already to help us, but because of some problem in New York he wouldn't arrive until tomorrow. Since he planned on being there for the whole shoot, Sam hadn't hired an art director, and now Cole and I would have to decide on the locations—very big decisions, I knew, since Cole was counting on this job to reestablish his reputation.

For now, though, I just wanted to sit on my private deck and stare at my private slice of ocean and feel my private soft breeze. There was something intensely wonderful about being all by myself at that moment. I'd forgotten how to be alone during the many years with Ben. Once we started dating, I was rarely by myself, something I was grateful for at the time but saw as problematic now.

Cole called a few minutes later, and forty-five minutes after that, he and I were on a chartered powerboat, bouncing across the water. I held one hand to my head, trying to secure the wide-brimmed straw hat I'd bought from Melanie, trying to ignore the way the jolt of the boat made the throb in my temples stronger. My headaches were back. I squinted through my sunglasses at the islands in the distance—mounds of green and brown dotting the sky-blue sea. It was sunny and blisteringly hot already, even though it was only ten o'clock, and I wished I'd brought extra sunscreen. Cole, standing near the front by the driver, looked entirely out of place, still wearing black pants and big black leather boots. His only concession to the weather was the white T-shirt he wore, making his pale skin look even more ghost-like beneath his black, choppy hair. Still, there was no denying his good mood. He asked rapid-fire questions of the driver, a black man in his fifties. Would we have to get per
mits to shoot on the different islands? Could the weather change drastically? What time was the sunset? Did he know other drivers who could haul our stuff every morning?

We stopped at a number of private islands that day. Each had stunning white sand beaches and friendly hotel proprietors eager to have a photo shoot on their property. But it was the Baths at Virgin Gorda that caught our imagination. Giant boulders were strewn across the sandy beach, forming exotic pools and caves.

“It's perfect, right, Kelly Kelly?” Cole plowed around in the wet sand, his combat boots making sucking sounds as the surging surf tried to pull him into the sea. He barely seemed to notice, too busy taking a few shots on his ancient Polaroid and mumbling to himself.

By the time we got back to our place on Tortola, it was six o'clock. A whole evening stretched ahead of us, our work done for the day. None of the models or the rest of the crew would arrive until tomorrow.

“So, how about getting a bite to eat?” I said, after our taxi had rumbled away. We were standing in the tiny lobby, Bob Marley music booming from the bar on the other side of the hut. I felt odd, making that social gesture toward Cole, almost like I was asking him out, but he was still too charged from the day to notice.

“Sure,” he said. “I've got to make a few calls to
U Chic,
and I'll meet you at the bar in half an hour, yeah?”

I went back to my own bungalow, checking the phone on the off chance that anyone had called. The problem was that no one knew I was here. Laney, the person I usually checked in with before I went out of town, was off-limits to me. I'd removed myself from Ben's life, and my mom, well, I didn't want her to worry about hurricanes or other natural disasters. I'd call her when I got home. Naturally, I had zero messages.

I changed into one of the sundresses I'd bought at Saks,
pulled my hair back in a short ponytail and was at the bar in twenty minutes. It was a small space with a few white tables and a plank wall covered with pale seashells and fishnets. The stereo pumped out steel drum music. A group of stragglers from the beach had pushed two of the tables together and sat drinking beer, looking sandy and drunk and happy. I ordered a rum punch for myself, something that seemed tropical and refreshing, something that might erase the persistent pounding in my head, if only for a few hours until I could go to bed.

The sugary-sweet drink couldn't hide the one-two punch of the rum, but it went down smoothly. I was almost finished with the first one by the time Cole joined me at the bar, his hair wet from a shower, a purple Hawaiian shirt hanging over his black pants. I nearly spat out my drink at the sight of his shirt.

“What is it?” he said, glancing down at himself, then back at my surprised face. “Right. It's the shirt. I thought this was how people dressed here.” He glanced at the bartender, who wore a golf shirt, then at the beach group in bathing suits. “Maybe I should change. It's rather embarrassing, isn't it?”

“It's fine.” I pushed down my laughter and ordered him a rum punch.

He took a stool next to me. “I wasn't sure what to pack. I haven't been to the Caribbean for a while, and to be honest, I can't really remember those times.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to be helpful. Many men could have gotten away with vacation gear like that, but Cole wasn't one of them. He'd have looked more at home in S&M leather.

“I suppose it hasn't been that long,” he said, “but I, uh…I used to have some rather bad habits.”

“You mean clothingwise?”

He shot me a look. “I mean drugwise.”

“Ah.”

I slurped up the last of my drink and ordered another. I felt strangely giddy and slightly fuzzy from a combination of the punch, my headache and the fact that I was here with Cole, thousands of miles away from Chicago, just the two of us, with the sky outside turning a pinkish-orange. Maybe it was the drink or the odd intimacy that made me blurt out the question I'd wanted to ask for so long. “Is that why you had to leave New York?”

His face muscles seemed to sag, just as they had that one time I'd asked him a similar question at his studio. But he didn't snap at me now. In fact, he didn't say anything for a long moment.

Then he sighed, sipped his drink and finally shifted on the stool until he faced me. “Shall I tell you the whole story then, Kelly Kelly?”

I wanted to say
Yes, yes, I'm dying to know,
but his resigned expression made me ashamed of my prurient curiosity. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked.”

“No, I ought to tell someone. Only a few people know, and none of them lives in Chicago. I'm getting a bit sick of carrying it around by myself.”

I nodded, not wanting to break the spell.

“You don't write for the
Enquirer
on the side, do you?” Cole said with a small smile. “No family members at the
Post
or some such?”

My stomach churned a little. “Actually, my mom works for
The Biz.
”

“That crap television show?”

“Yes, but I swear I never tell her anything, and I won't tell her about this.”

His eyes squinted a little, and he stared at me as if he could see inside my head and discover my true intentions.

“Look, Cole,” I said, sorry that he had to be so wary about some incident that had obviously changed his life. “You don't have to tell me. It's really none of my business.”

“No, it's not, but as I said, I need to tell someone.” He drank from his rum punch. “Okay, here it is. It's not really so big a deal, at least it wasn't at the time, until I found out about her.”

“Her who?”

“I'm getting to that.”

“Sorry.” I clamped my mouth shut and pulled my drink closer.

“I don't know what you've heard about me or if you know anything about what I was like in those days, but it's all true, whatever you've heard. It's the usual sad tale—I got too big too fast, and I never thought I deserved it. At the same time, I never thought that it would go away. It was as if my life was one big toy—a toy that wouldn't break, and I could play with it as much as I liked. And so I did quite a bit of drugs.” He shot a sidelong glance at me, as if searching for signs of disapproval.

I nodded silently.

“And I drank too much, of course. Still do, really, but it was the drugs that fucked me up. I actually thought that I could shoot better when I was high. I suppose that might have been true for a while. It gave me a lot of ideas about how to approach a picture that I might never have had sober, but it began affecting my judgment. Ah, it's pathetic, really. I started thinking I could do no wrong, not with photography, or with anything else for that matter. One day, I had a shoot with a model. Britania. Just that one name, like Madonna.” He rolled his eyes.

“I remember hearing about her,” I said, “but she dropped out of sight, didn't she?”

He looked at me for a beat, but didn't answer my question. “She was getting a lot of work back then, but that day was the first time we'd had a shoot together. It went late and everyone left, and well…How shall I put this? She stayed.”

“Sure.” I thought I saw where this was going. They'd
slept together, right? Probably like he had with many models? So what was the big secret?

Cole sighed. “And then we had a drink, and then we had some other…things. And she just never left. We had sort of a lost weekend. Sex and drugs and all that crap.”

He shot me another glance, as if to check my reaction. I made sure to keep my expression flat.

“And so,” he continued, “that was it, you see? Or at least I thought so. Monday morning came, and she was gone, and I cleaned myself up and got back to work. But here's the thing. Britania, who I thought was twenty-something, was actually not so old. She was—” he took a swallow of his drink “—fifteen, and her father was Morton Lankton.”

I gasped. I couldn't help it. Morton Lankton was a publishing magnate who owned a large number of glossy magazines, and I was sure it was precisely those magazines that had given Cole most of his work, and, therefore, his rise to fame in the industry.

“Ah. I see you know who he was.”

“Was?”

“He died last year.”

“Oh. And you didn't know Britania was his daughter?”

He shook his head. “Hardly anyone did. She was one of those kids who wanted to make it on her own.”

“So what happened?”

“I was served with a summons and complaint for a civil suit from Lankton's lawyers. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that if I left town the case would go away. If not, I could expect a criminal action, as well.”

“And you left.”

“Of course I did. I was embarrassed about what I'd done. Sickened actually, even though I had no idea of her age. And I knew my career couldn't survive something like that, not with Lankton owning half the town. He could easily dry up all my work, so it was either leave
without anyone knowing that I'd sexed and drugged a fifteen-year-old, or let everyone find out and lose my work, anyway.”

“But if he's dead now, doesn't that change things? I mean, I hate to say it like that, but now that he's gone, can't you get back into that scene?”

“I've been trying, Kelly Kelly, but there've been so many bloody rumors about why I left that everyone has been afraid of me. Until now. My mate Sam has been trying to get me a shoot like this for ages, and he finally came through.”

“And what about Britania? What happened to her?”

Cole's head dropped. “She was shipped off to some detox hospital for a few months. Last I heard, she'd gone on to college.”

“So that's why you don't date models.”

He stared into his drink. “That's why I don't date at all.”

“But you didn't know. You can't let that incident keep you away from the entire female population.”

“Kelly Kelly, that incident nearly ruined my entire career.”

“I understand, but you can't stay single your whole life because of it.” I wondered why I was arguing that particular point. It wasn't as if I wanted to date Cole. He seemed more like a pain-in-the-ass-yet-lovable older brother than a potential boyfriend. But I guess I was starting to think of Cole as a friend, and the fact that he'd confided in me made me want to help him somehow.