Face Value (29 page)

“I couldn’t find the number, I remember now. . . .” said Lizbet. Alexis looked daggers at her. “So I called international directory inquiries . . . and they gave me the number.”

Alexis and Kate looked at her, waiting for more.

“Well, when I called, she answered, ‘Kate Miller . . .
Bazaar
,’ so I . . .”

Alexis sighed and sat down.

Lizbet looked at Kate apologetically. Kate handed her the last corner of her tissue.

“So,” she whimpered, “what you’re saying is . . . you didn’t really want me here at all?”

“Kate, I’m sorry, I . . .” Alexis looked in despair at her, then turned her back on them both and stared out of the window. Kate’s eyes followed her stare, beseeching something to happen; a winged messenger from the East to burst through and make everything all right again. Instead she saw the leaves on the trees in Central Park beginning to turn a yellowy brown. She wondered whether she would be here to see fall, the famous fall; when the old would shift to make way for the new, like some gentle exfoliating process, a little microdermabrasion. Her instincts had been right. She was a mistake. And now look where her vanity had got her. She had allowed herself to believe that she might be special, might be one of the beautiful people.

Alexis turned around again to face Lizbet and Kate. She was calm.

“Lizbet, you’d better call Elizabeth Geary in Personnel. Get her to come down. We need to sort this out.” Lizbet left the room, sniffling like a wounded dog.

“What do I do?” Kate looked forlornly at her.

“I don’t know,” said Alexis.

twenty-four

They had put her on gardening leave. She had had to ask Elizabeth Geary, the nice woman from Personnel, what that meant exactly. Gardening leave, it transpired, was what happened when they weren’t exactly pleased with you, but they weren’t exactly cross with you either. It was every journalist’s dream: a holiday, with pay, until they made up their minds how they were going to get themselves out of this mess you’d got them into. In her case, they felt so bad, they’d even booked her onto the first flight back to London, with the proviso that she finish her rewrite of the surgery story in the week that she was away. It didn’t seem like much of a holiday, but she was so shell-shocked she would have taken whatever they offered, anything to not have it end, to not have a one-way ticket.

And so here she was, at the airport, sitting in the lounge with the common people, even though her business-class seat entitled her to unlimited CNN and tartan-wrapper shortbread biscuits in the club-class room over to the right. Here it felt more at home, more real, and she badly needed a dose of reality to make up for her big taste of the great pretend. Her bags had been waiting for her at the office when she’d arrived. Well before her meeting with Alexis, she’d had Cynthia organize a car to pick them up from the porter in Jean-Paul’s block. She’d gone straight from the office to the airport. As much as she’d been tempted to swing by Jean-Paul’s to say good-bye, she couldn’t cope with seeing anyone, not even him. The only person she wanted to see now was . . . no. That was well and truly over. He would never talk to her now.

She felt like a failure. She felt like a failure for feeling like a failure. Why was she giving up already? They’d said gardening leave, not redundancy, and Elizabeth Geary had categorically refused to accept that Kate could have been in any way responsible for what had happened. Even Alexis had defended Kate’s reputation, had extolled the virtues of the work she’d done prior to Surgerygate. (Thankfully they hadn’t talked much about Surgerygate itself, for which she had done several things wrong. It was hard to think of anything she’d done right.) But with regard to actually hiring her, Alexis had gone through the correct hiring procedures, read the interview with Trisha, commented on its originality. So once again, it came down to those two little words:
Maidstone Bazaar.
Did they have to matter quite so much?

There were no free chairs, so she positioned her bottom uncomfortably on a broad, ribbed radiator, with her back against one of the vast windows that overlooked the airplanes. The glass felt cold on her shoulders. The sun, that same sun that looked so different in Maidstone, Los Angeles, Rio, and now New York, was setting a pale orange, casting a soft glow over the mishmash of faces gathered before her, easing their features. Earlier, she’d steered past the McDonald’s outlet and, in a bid of defiance against global branding, gone for a more upmarket kind of café with a name she’d never heard of for her comfort-food takeaway. Her noble gesture had backfired. The plate of nachos and cheese now before her had quickly settled into something resembling a plate of vomit. She pushed the unbiodegradable polystyrene container under the radiator, and left it sulking there, praying it would be cleared up before the heating was turned back on.

What a mess. What a mess it all was, with no feasible means of being corrected. All these other travelers looked blissfully removed from messes of any sort. Families, fraternity groups on mass vacations, businesspeople tapping away furiously at their laptops; all innocent of the calamities that had tipped over into Kate’s life. Free of all charges, their faces were calm, guiltless, going on with their daily business, oblivious to the turmoil in hers. She scrutinized them, weighed them up. They made her think about beauty and what a strange, indefinable thing it indeed was. What was beauty? Genes, luck, and face creams, and not necessarily in that order.

From her position on the radiator she was in the perfect vantage point to see all mankind, God’s big melting pot, in its various beautiful and ugly guises. Couples, singles, middle ages, young ages. What was it that made everyone so different? A sense of humor or a cute button nose and sparkling blue eyes? Kate had only lived in this strange new beautiful world for a few months—weeks—but what if this was the world you grew up in? Plastic surgery couldn’t really buy beauty, just improvements. It couldn’t give you confidence, that innate sense of being that those who were born with beauty, true beauty, seemed to have. Or could it?

Lise was beautiful. Not in the conventional sense. There was much about Lise that was beautiful in a cheesy way—the breasts, the hair, the smile, the big eyes. If Kate were being really cruel, she would say that Lise’s beauty had a certain blow-up doll quality about it. But it worked. Lise was beautiful because she was the complete package: fun-loving, hilarious, outrageous, sexy. Lise couldn’t be anything other than beautiful. Kate had tried calling her back but she was nowhere to be found. Nor was her mother. She was missing them, for the first time in ages. Perhaps even the first time ever.

According to JK, she was beautiful, too. She still didn’t really understand why, but perhaps, like Lise, it was the sum of the parts that made her whole, the fact that she was different from the Barbie dolls in his world, the fact that she could still get drunk and throw up in a fountain or forget to book a blow-dry every once in a while. She remembered writing a story about the great perfumes of the world, one of her few main features in the short time she’d been at
Darling
. Some perfumer, a “nose,” had said that it was the dirt in the sea of purity that made a perfume truly beautiful, the putrid-smelling civet among the delicate roses or sensual jasmines. Was it this that made her beautiful? The imperfect in her perfect? Except in her own case, her ratio of perfect to imperfect was more likely to be rigged the other way round: a drop of perfect in a sea of imperfect.

She wasn’t brave enough to call JK yet. Didn’t know what to say, beyond “sorry.” She had wanted to believe he was in the wrong because she hated what he did for a living. Alexis was right: it didn’t get much more bigoted than that. He’d actually been sweet with her, sent her a flower, made her feel special. Of course he’d done that to Patty, too, at some point; even if her story had been a complete lie, he must have done that to her while courting her, before it all went wrong. But sending girls flowers hardly made him a monster, did it? And hadn’t he championed Kate’s “look,” accepted that the cloned style of plastic surgery that seemed to prevail in America, in the world, perhaps needed to change, to be more subtle? His eyes. She’d liked his eyes. She remembered how she’d felt before she’d got that note from Aurelie. Alcohol had something to do with it. But she could blame it on the peach Bellinis, the sunshine, the moonlight, the good times, even the boogie, but she knew that wasn’t all it was. He had followed her down to the island! She . . . missed him. She pulled out her cell phone. Stared at it. Went to dial his number . . . no. Not yet. She couldn’t.

There was, too, the question of Clarissa. The whole time she’d trusted her, thought she’d won her round, got her onside, the girl was in fact scheming away, trying to get her revenge. Now, perhaps that was a little strong, perhaps Clarissa’s master plan wasn’t a conscious attempt to wreck her career, but there was definitely something a little fishy going on. She must have known about Petruschka’s breasts being fake! And she had been so insistent that Alexis would love the publicity that went with the surgery story. She had been a fool to trust her, a fool to let her fly her to Brazil, getting her out of the way for when the JK story broke. She wondered what Clarissa was doing now, pictured her moving herself back into Kate’s desk. But she couldn’t blame it all on Clarissa. Had to blame herself for most of it, for all of it. She’d broken some fairly preliminary rules. Not validating her sources, not clearing the job with her editor, not checking her facts! She’d never been so haphazard about a story before! What had happened to her?

She still couldn’t believe Petruschka’s breasts were fakes.

It was only when she was on the plane that she allowed herself to think about Jean-Paul. What was all that about? He was her respite to all the drama of the last twenty-four hours, her knight in shining armor, her distraction from the mental torture she was inflicting upon herself. She liked him, that was obvious. There was chemistry, an attraction that went beyond insults about cellulite in midnight bars, that transcended previous dalliances with one’s boss. But there was something else. Something that had nothing to do with Jean-Paul. She would never have been so daring before; never have asked a man home to dance naked into the early hours; never have taken his hand and led him gently into bed, then once in that bed have made all the moves, dancing around his body long after the music had stopped; never have woken up, kissed him good-bye, jokingly stolen his bottle of Eau Sauvage from his bag and spritzed it all over herself, to carry his smell with her for the rest of the day.

What had given her that extra self-confidence, that self-assuredness? Being an English girl abroad, where no one knew her, where she could reinvent her personality, her sexual personality, certainly went some way to explaining this new daring. Feeling successful, being blissfully ignorant still that she’d messed up big-time on the surgery story definitely helped.

But as much as she hated to admit it to herself, she knew what the difference was, the real difference between Kate
before
and Kate
after
. More than knowing that Jean-Paul found her attractive, she found her thoughts returning to another’s face, a face that flashed into her mind every so often, bringing with it feelings she didn’t know how to handle. Guilt, restlessness, anxiety, even remorse, and the supreme confidence that came with knowing
he
found her beautiful. If she was to be honest, really honest with herself? All those feelings about Jean-Paul were because she couldn’t be with JK. All those things she had done with Jean-Paul were things she had wanted to do with JK. That probably wasn’t very nice of her. But it was exciting.

maidstone

beauty note:

Model wears Virgin Upper Class freebie pyjamas; Christian Louboutin leopard open-toe stilettos.
Complexion:
Model’s own.
Eyes:
Model’s own.
Fragrance:
Dior Eau Sauvage pour Homme.

twenty-five

She could hardly be blamed for hoping that once at home, in the bosom of her diminutive family, she might be offered a little comfort. But as she turned the key in the door and walked into the house, it quickly became apparent that this was not to be the case. After a long taxi ride home—extravagant, but what the hell—she’d hoped to find her mum and a plate of veggie shepherd’s pie waiting for her. Instead she found the house strangely quiet, despite her telephoning Darleen to tell her when she’d be back. It was, frankly, almost disobedient of her to be so absent in her daughter’s hour of need.

“Mum!”
she shouted into the hallway, dropping her bags by her feet. Darleen must have pulled up the carpet on the floor. In its place were shiny parquet wooden tiles, crisscrossing their way down to the kitchen. Was that a bang coming from upstairs? Something being dropped in her mum’s bedroom? She rubbed her eyes. Tired. She hadn’t slept a wink on the flight despite the business-class comforts she was becoming frighteningly used to, just when they were most in danger of being taken away. She took her shoes off. She’d flown in her stilettos. With cabs to and from airports, she didn’t need trainers anymore. Round toes, leopard print, they had suffered a little from the journey, the pile ruffling up at the heels and toes.

“Mum!”
Just in case. Was that laughter? She stopped dead in her tracks, frowned, raising her head up in the direction that she’d thought she’d heard the noise. Nothing.

In the absence of a plate of veggie shepherd’s pie, she opted for the next best thing. Two slices of thick-cut Mother’s Pride white bread, the kind with no nutritional values attached to it whatsoever. They popped out of the toaster, a joyful salute to her return, their welcoming warmth dissolving the butter into a silky yellow pool that dribbled on her chin in a tender caress. Delicious. She looked out onto the green garden beyond the kitchen sink. There was a new birdhouse, she noticed, a heart-shaped one made with twigs, nailed into the sycamore tree in the corner near the back fence. She used to like climbing that tree. She remembered getting her jeans all dirty and her mum getting all cross. Someone had trailed what looked like a honeysuckle plant around its trunk. The lawn was mown short, the borders clipped neatly, the brown soil making a sharp knife edge to frame the border of lime-pink hydrangeas, her mum’s favorite flowers.