Emerald City (6 page)

Finally I began to walk, swinging my bag of shoes. I breathed deeply, inhaling the last of her smell, but it lingered, and after several more blocks I realized that what I smelled was not Amanda. It was myself, and this day of early summer—the fresh, snarled leaves and piles of sunlit dirt. I was almost fifteen years old.

Rory knew before he came to New York what sort of life he would have. He’d read about it in novels by hip young authors who lived there. He saw the apartment, small but high-ceilinged, a tall, sooty window with a fire escape twisting past a chemical-pink sky. Nights in frantic clubs, mornings hunched over coffee in the East Village, warming his hands on the cup, black pants, black turtleneck, pointed black boots. He’d intended to snort cocaine, but by the time he arrived, that was out. He drank instead.

He was a photographer’s assistant, loading cameras all day, holding up light meters, waving Polaroids until they were dry enough to tear open. As he watched the models move, he sometimes worried he was still too California. What could you do with sandy blond hair, cut it off? Short hair was on the wane, at least for men.
So there it hung, golden, straight as paper, reminiscent of beaches he’d never seen, being as he was from Chicago (in Chicago there was the lake, but that didn’t count). His other option was to gain or lose some weight, but the starved look had lost its appeal—any suggestion of illness was to be avoided. Beefy was the way to go; not fat, just a classic paunch above the belt. But no matter how much Rory ate, he stayed exactly the same. He took up smoking instead, although it burned his throat.

Rory stubbed out his cigarette and checked to make sure the lights were off in the darkroom. He was always the last to leave; his boss, Vesuvi, would hand him the camera as soon as the last shot was done and then swan out through the sea of film containers, plastic cups, and discarded sheets of backdrop paper. Vesuvi was one of those people who always had somewhere to go. He was blessed with a marvelous paunch, which Rory tried not to admire too openly. He didn’t want Vesuvi to get the wrong idea.

Rory swept the debris into bags, then he turned out the lights, locked up the studio, and headed down to the street. Twilight was his favorite hour—metal gates sliding down over storefronts, newspapers whirling from the sidewalk into the sky, an air of promise and abandonment. This was the way he’d expected New York to look, and he was thrilled when the city complied.

He took the subway uptown to visit Stacey, a failing model whom he adored against all reason. Stacey—when girls with names like Zane and Anouschka and Brid regularly slipped him their phone numbers during shoots. Stacey refused to change her name. “If I make it,” she said, “they’ll be happy to call me whatever.” She never acknowledged that she was failing, though it was obvious. Rory longed to bring it up, to talk it over with her, but he was afraid to.

Stacey lay on her bed, shoes still on. A Diet Coke was on the
table beside her. She weighed herself each morning, and when she was under 120, she allowed herself a real Coke that day.

“What happened at
Bazaar?”
Rory asked, perching on the edge of the bed. Stacey sat up and smoothed her hair.

“The usual,” she said. “I’m too commercial.” She shrugged, but Rory could see she was troubled.

“And that was nothing,” Stacey continued. “On my next go-see the guy kept looking at me and flipping back and forth through my book, and of course I’m thinking, Fantastic, he’s going to hire me. So you know what he finally says? I’m not ugly enough. He says, ‘Beauty today is ugly beauty. Look at those girls, they’re monsters—gorgeous, mythical monsters. If a girl isn’t ugly, I won’t use her.’”

She turned to Rory. He saw tears in her eyes and felt helpless. “What a bastard,” he said.

To his surprise, she began to laugh. She lay back on the bed and let the laughter shake her. “I mean, here I am,” she said, “killing myself to stay thin, hot-oiling my hair, getting my nails done, and what does he tell me? I’m not ugly enough!”

“It’s crazy,” Rory said, watching Stacey uneasily. “He’s out of his mind.”

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She looked slaphappy, the way she looked sometimes after a second gin and tonic. Eight months before, after a year’s meticulous planning, she had bought her own ticket to New York from Cincinnati. And this was just the beginning; Stacey hoped to ride the wave of her success around the world: Paris, Tokyo, London, Bangkok. The shelves of her tiny apartment were cluttered with maps and travel books, and whenever she met a foreigner—it made no difference from where—she would carefully copy his address into a small leatherbound book, convinced it would not be long before she was everywhere. She was the sort of girl for whom nothing happened by accident, and it pained Rory to watch
her struggle when all day in Vesuvi’s studio he saw girls whose lives were accident upon accident, from their discovery in whatever shopping mall or hot dog stand to the startling, gaudy error of their faces.

“Rory,” Stacey said. “Look at me a minute.”

He turned obediently. She was so close he could smell the warm, milky lotion she used on her face. “Do you ever wish I was uglier?” she asked.

“God no,” Rory said, pulling away to see if she was joking. “What a question, Stace.”

“Come on. You do this all day long.” She moved close to him again, and Rory found himself looking at the tiny pores on either side of her nose. He tried to think of the studio and the girls there, but when he concentrated on Stacey, they disappeared; and when he thought of the studio, he couldn’t see Stacey anymore. It was a world she didn’t belong to. As he watched Stacey’s tense, expectant face, Rory felt a dreadful power; it would take so little, he thought, to crush her.

“Never mind,” she said when Rory didn’t answer. “I don’t want to know.”

She stood and crossed the room, then leaned over and pressed her palms to the floor. She had been a gymnast in high school and was still remarkably limber. This limberness delighted Rory in a way that almost shamed him—in bed she would sit up, legs straight in front of her, then lean over and rest her cheek against her shins. Casually, as if it were nothing! Rory didn’t dare tell her how this excited him; if she were aware of it, then it wouldn’t be the same.

Stacey stood up, flushed and peaceful again. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

Her apartment was right off Columbus, a street Rory scorned but one that nevertheless mesmerized him. He and Stacey walked arm in arm, peering into the windows of restaurants as eagerly as
diners peered out of them. It was as if they had all been told some friend might pass this way tonight and were keeping their eyes peeled.

“Where should we go?” Stacey asked.

Rory cracked his knuckles one by one. The question made him edgy, as if there were some right answer he should know. Where were the people who mattered? Occasionally Rory would be stricken with a sense that they had been exactly where he was only moments before, but had just left. The worst part was, he didn’t know who they were, exactly. The closest he came was in knowing people who seemed to know; his roommate, Charles, a food stylist who specialized in dollops, and of course Vesuvi. Vesuvi was his main source.

They headed downtown, enjoying the last warm days of fall, the pleasant seediness of Seventh Avenue. They passed intersections where patches of old cobblestones were exposed beneath layers of tar, relics of another New York Rory dimly remembered from novels: carriages and top hats, reputations and insults.

“Rory,” Stacey said, “do you feel more something, now that you’ve gotten successful?”

Rory turned to her in surprise. “Who says I’m successful?”

“But you are!”

“I’m no one. I’m Vesuvi’s assistant.”

Stacey seemed shocked. “That’s not no one,” she said.

Rory grinned. It was a funny conversation. “Yeah?” he said. “Then who is it?”

Stacey pondered this a moment. Suddenly she laughed—the same helpless way she had laughed on the bed, as if the world were funny by accident. Still laughing, she said, “Vesuvi’s assistant.”

At Stacey’s suggestion they took a cab to a TriBeCa bistro where Vesuvi often went. It was probably expensive, but Rory had just
been paid—what the hell, he’d buy Stacey dinner. Maybe he would even call Charles to see if he was back from L.A., where he’d been styling all week for Sara Lee. Rory didn’t envy Charles his job, although he made good money; sometimes he was up half the night, using tweezers to paste sesame seeds onto hamburger buns or mixing and coloring the salty dough that looked more like ice cream in pictures than real ice cream did. Rory had been amazed to learn that in breakfast cereal shots it was standard to use Elmer’s glue instead of milk. “It’s whiter,” Charles had explained. “Also it pours more slowly and doesn’t soak the flakes.” Rory had found this disturbing in a way he still didn’t quite understand.

Inside the restaurant, Rory spotted Vesuvi himself at a large round table in back. Or rather, Vesuvi spotted him, and called out with a heartiness that could only mean he was bored with his present company. With a grand sweep of his arm he beckoned them over.

The waiters pulled up chairs, and Rory and Stacey sat down. Stacey ordered a gin and tonic. Rory could see she was nervous—the girls at the table were faces you saw around a lot: red-headed Daphne, Inge with her guppy-face, others whose names he’d forgotten. What distressed him was seeing Anouschka, a moody girl whose journey from some dour Siberian town to the height of New York fashion seemed to have happened in an afternoon. Once, she had lingered at the studio while Rory cleaned up after work, humming a Fine Young Cannibals song and flipping aimlessly through his copy of
The Great Gatsby.
“My father is a professor,” she told him. “He teaches this book.” “In Russian?” Rory asked incredulously. Anouschka laughed. “Sure,” she said, curling the word in her accent. “Why not?”

Outside the studio, Rory and Anouschka had hovered uncertainly in the dusk. Rory was supposed to meet Stacey, but felt awkward saying so to Anouschka. Instead, he blundered forward and
hailed a cab, leaving Anouschka standing on the curb, then paid the driver three blocks later and took the subway to Stacey’s. He arrived shaking, mystified by his own idiotic behavior.

Anouschka had frightened him ever since; last week, while he was loading Vesuvi’s camera, she had casually reported the numerical value of her IQ, then subjected him to a humiliating quiz on the Great Books. “Have you read much Dostoevsky?” she called up the rickety ladder, where Rory was grappling with a light.
“The Brothers Karamazov?
No? What about
War and Peace?”
When Rory called back down that
War and Peace
was by Tolstoy, Anouschka colored deeply, stalked back onto the set, and did not speak to him again. Rory felt terrible; he’d never read a word of
War and Peace.
He even considered confessing this to Anouschka after the shoot as she grumpily gathered her things. But what the hell, he decided, let her think he was brilliant.

Now Rory looked at Vesuvi sprawled amid the models: sphinxlike, olive-skinned, his close-cropped beard peppered with gray, though his wild curly hair showed no sign of it. He was short, and wore high-heeled boots that Rory found spectacular. Vesuvi was a man of few words, yet he often gave the impression of being on the verge of speech. Conversation would proceed around him tentatively, ready to be swept aside at any moment by whatever Vesuvi might say. Rory watched him adoringly over his glass of bourbon, unable to believe he was sitting with Vesuvi after all the times he had watched him glide away in cabs, feeling as if most of what mattered in the world were disappearing with him. Yet Rory wasn’t entirely happy: everyone at the table was watching him, especially Anouschka, and he felt that in return for being included, he was expected to do something stunning.

He glanced at the next table, where conversation seemed more lively. It was a group of downtown types, the men like deposed
medieval kings in their bobbed haircuts and gigantic silver medallions. During his first month in New York, Rory had gone out with a girl like the ones at that table—Dave, she’d called herself. She wore nothing but black: bulky sweaters, short loose skirts, woolen tights, and round-toed combat boots. The thrill of the relationship for Rory lay mostly in watching Dave undress—there was something tremendous in the sight of her slender white form emerging from all of that darkness. Once she finished undressing, Rory often wished she would put part of the outfit back on, or better yet, dress completely again and start over.

Vesuvi was eyeing Stacey. “You look familiar,” he said. “Did I use you for something?”

“Once,” she said. “Four and a half months ago.”

“Right, I remember now. It was that …” He waved a languid hand, which meant he had no idea.

“For
Elle,”
Stacey said. “Bow ties.” It had been her best job, and she was crushed when the pictures the magazine printed had failed to include her head. To use them in her book would look desperate, her agent said, so she kept them pasted to her bathroom mirror. Rory looked at them while he was shaving.

Vesuvi sat back, satisfied. The question of whether or not he had worked with a girl always troubled him, Rory had noticed, as if the world were divided between girls he had shot and girls he hadn’t, and not knowing which side a girl was on caused a cosmic instability.

“You worked for
Elle?”
Anouschka asked Stacey.

“Once,” Stacey said.

“So far,” Rory quickly added.

Anouschka glanced at him, and then at Stacey, with the same startled look she’d worn when Rory left her on the curb. He felt guilty all over again.

“You must’ve worked for them, too,” Stacey said to Anouschka, who nodded absently.

“I heard you got a cover,” someone said.

“Yes,” Anouschka said dully. Then she seemed to take heart, as if hearing this news for the first time. “Yes!” she said, grinning suddenly. “I am the cover for December.”

Rory felt Stacey move in her chair. Anouschka lit a cigarette and smoked; exotic, dragonlike, her black hair tumbling past her shoulders. For a moment all of them watched her, and against his will even Rory was moved by a face so familiar from pictures. Never mind what you thought of Anouschka; she was
that woman
—you recognized her. There was an odd pleasure in this, like finding something you’d been looking for.