Fancy Pants (14 page)
She sank down on the end of the bed, hurt enveloping her. "I see," she
said quietly.
He stood and pulled out his wallet. "I don't have a lot of ready cash
right now. I'll cover the rest of the motel bill with plastic and leave
fifty dollars to hold you for a few days. If you get around to paying
me back, send me a check in care of General Delivery, Wynette, Texas.
If you don't get around to it, I'll know things didn't work out between
you and Nicky, and hope greener pastures turn up soon."
With that speech, he tossed the motel key on the desk and walked out
the door.
She was finally alone. She stared down at a dark stain that looked like
an outline of Capri on the motel carpet. Now. Now she'd hit bottom.
"You want me to drive?" he asked. "You can crawl in the back and try
for a few hours' sleep."
Dallie opened the driver's door. "You drive too damned slow, and I
don't feel like sleeping."
"Suit yourself." Skeet settled in and handed Dallie a Styrofoam coffee
cup with the lid still snapped on. Then he gave him a slip of pink
paper. "The cashier's phone number."
Dallie crumpled the paper and pushed it into the ashtray, where it
joined two others. He pulled on his
cap. "You ever heard of
Pygmalion
,
Skeet?"
"Is he the guy who played right tackle for Wynette High?"
Dallie used his front teeth to pull the lid off his coffee cup while he
turned the key in the ignition. "No, that was Pygella, Jimmy Pygella.
He moved to Corpus Christi a few years back and opened up a Midas
muffler shop.
Pygmalion's
this
play by George Bernard Shaw about a
Cockney flower girl who gets
made over into a real lady." He flipped on
the windshield wipers.
"Don't sound too interesting, Dallie. The play I liked was that Oh!
Calcutta! we saw in St. Louis. Now that was real good."
"I know you liked that play, Skeet. I liked it, too, but you see it's
not generally regarded as a great piece of literature. It doesn't have
a lot to say about the human condition, if you follow me. Pygmalion, on
the other hand, says that people can change . . . that they can get
better with a little direction." He threw the car into reverse and
backed out of the parking place. "It also says that the person
directing that change doesn't get anything for his trouble but a load
of grief."
Francesca, her eyes wide and stricken, stood in the open door of the
motel room clutching her case to her chest like a teddy bear and
watched the Riviera pull out of the parking place. Dallie was really
going to do it. He was going to drive away and leave her all by
herself, even though he'd admitted he'd thought about going to bed with
her. Until now, that had always been enough to hold any man to her
side, but suddenly it wasn't. How could that be? What was happening to
her world? Bewilderment underscored her fear. She felt like a child
who'd learned her colors wrong and just found out that red was really
yellow, blue was really green—only now that she knew what was wrong,
she couldn't imagine what to do about it.
The Riviera swung around to the exit, waited for a break in the
traffic, and then began to move out onto the wet road. The tips of her
fingers had gone numb, and her legs felt weak, as if all the muscles
had lost their strength. Drizzle dampened her T-shirt, a lock of hair
fell forward over her cheek. "Dallie!" She started to run as fast as
she could.
"The thing of it is," Dallie said, looking up into his rearview mirror,
"she doesn't think about anybody but herself."
"Most self-centered woman I ever encountered in my life," Skeet agreed.
"And she doesn't know how to do a damn thing except maybe put on
makeup."
"She sure as hell can't swim."
"She doesn't have even one lick of common sense."
"Not a lick."
Dallie uttered a particularly offensive oath and slammed on the brakes.
Francesca reached the car, gasping for breath in small sobs. "Don't!
Don't leave me alone!"
The strength of Dallie's anger took her by surprise. He vaulted out of
the door, tore the case from her hands, and then backed her up against
the side of the car so that the door handle jabbed into her hip.
"Now you listen to me, and you listen good!" he shouted. "I'm taking
you under duress, and you stop
that goddamn sniveling right now!"
She sobbed, blinking against the drizzle. "But I'm—"
"I said to stop it! I don't want to do this—I got a real bad feeling
about it—so from this minute on, you'd better do exactly what I say.
Everything I say. You don't ask me any questions; you don't make any
comments. And if you give me one minute of that fancy horseshit of
yours, you'll be out on your skinny ass."
"All right," she cried, her pride hanging in tatters, her voice
strangling on her humiliation. "All right!"
He looked at her with a contempt he made no effort to disguise, then
jerked open the back door. She turned to scramble inside, but just as
she bent forward, he drew back his hand and cracked her hard across her
bottom. "There's more where that came from," he said, "and my hand's
just itching for the next shot."
Every mile of the ride to Lake Charles felt like a hundred. She turned
her face to the window and tried to pretend she was invisible, but when
occupants of other cars looked idly over at her as the Riviera sped
past, she couldn't suppress the illogical feeling that they knew what
had happened, that they could actually see how she had been reduced to
begging for help, see that she had been struck for the first time in
her life. I won't think about it, she told herself as they sped past
flooded rice fields and swampland covered with slimy green algae. I'll
think about it tomorrow, next week, any time but now when I might start
crying again and he might stop the car and set me out on the highway.
But she couldn't help thinking about it, and she bit a raw place on the
inside of her already battered bottom lip to keep from making the
smallest sound.
She saw a sign that said Lake Charles, and then they crossed a great
curved bridge. In the front seat, Skeet and Dallie talked on and off,
neither of them paying any attention to her.
"The motel's right up there," Skeet finally remarked to Dallie.
"Remember when Holly Grace showed up here last year with that Chevy
dealer from Tulsa?"
Dallie grunted something Francesca didn't quite catch as he pulled into
the parking lot, which didn't look all that different from the one
they'd left less than four hours earlier, and swung around toward the
office. Francesca's stomach growled, and she realized she hadn't had
anything to eat since the evening before when she'd grabbed a hamburger
after pawning her suitcase. Nothing to eat. . . and no money to buy
anything with. And then she wondered who Holly Grace might be, but she
was too demoralized to feel more than a passing curiosity.
"Francie, I'd already pushed my credit card limit pretty close to the
edge before I met you, and that little romp of yours just about
finished the job. You're going to have to share a room with Skeet."
'Wo.'"
"No!"
Dallie sighed and flicked off the ignition. "All right, Skeet. You and
I'll share a room until we get rid of Francie."
"Not hardly." Skeet threw open the door of the Riviera. "I haven't
shared a room with you since you turned pro, and I'm not gonna start
now. You stay up half the night and then make enough noise in the
morning to wake the dead." He climbed out of the car and headed toward
the office, calling back over his shoulder, "Since you're the one who's
so all-fired anxious to bring Miss Fran-chess-ka along, you can damn
weil sleep with her yourself."
Dallie swore the entire time he was unloading his suitcase and carrying
it inside. Francesca sat on the edge of one of the room's two double
beds, her back straight, her feet side by side, knees pressed together,
like a little girl on her best behavior at a grown-up party. From the
next room she heard the sound of a television announcer reporting on an
anti-nuclear group
protesting at a missile site; then someone flipped the channel to a
ball game and "The Star-Spangled Banner" rang out. Bitterness welled up
inside her as the music brought back the memory of the round button she
had spotted on the taxi driver's shirt: AMERICA, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY.
What kind of opportunity? The opportunity to pay for food and shelter
with her body in some sordid motel room? Nothing came entirely free,
did it? And her body was all she had left. By coming into this room
with Dallie, hadn't she implicitly promised to give him something in
return?
"Will you stop looking like that!" Dallie threw his suitcase on the
bed. "Believe me, Miss Fancy Pants, I don't have any designs on your
body. You stay on your side of the room, as far out of my sight as
possible, and we'll do just fine. But first I want my fifty bucks back."
She had to salvage some morsel of her self-respect when she handed him
back his money, so she tossed her head, flicking her hair back over her
shoulders as if she hadn't a care in the world. "I gather you're some
sort of golfer," she remarked offhandedly, trying to show him that his
surliness didn't affect her. "Would that be a vocation or an avocation?"
"More like an addiction, I guess." He grabbed a pair of slacks from his
suitcase and then reached for the zipper on his jeans.
She spun around, quickly turning her back to him. "I—I think I'll
stretch my legs a bit, take a turn around the parking lot."
"You do that."
She circled the parking lot twice, reading bumper stickers, studying
newspaper headlines through the glass doors of the dispensers, gazing
sightlessly at the front-page photograph of a curly-haired man
screaming
at someone. Dallie didn't seem to expect her to go to bed
with him. What a relief that was. She stared at
the neon vacancy sign,
and the longer she stared, the more she wondered why he didn't desire
her. What
was wrong? The question nagged like an itch. She might have
lost her clothes, her money, all of her possessions, but she still had
her beauty, didn't she? She still had her
allure. Or had she somehow lost that, too, right along with her luggage
and her makeup?
Ridiculous. She was exhausted, that was all, and she couldn't think
straight. As soon as Dallie left for the golf course, she would go to
bed and sleep until she felt like herself again. A few remnant sparks
of optimism flickered inside her. She was merely tired. A decent
night's sleep and everything would be fine.
glass top of her desk. "No!" she exclaimed into the telephone, her
intense brown eyes snapping with displeasure. "She isn't even close to
what we have in mind for the Sassy Girl. If you can't do better than
her, I'll find a model agency that can."
The voice on the other end of the line grew sarcastic. "Do you want
some phone numbers, Naomi? I'm sure the people at Wilhelmina will do a
wonderful job for you."
The people at Wilhelmina refused to send Naomi anyone else, but she had
no intention of sharing that particular piece of news with the woman on
the phone. She pushed blunt, impatient fingers through her dark hair,
which had been cut as short and sleek as a boy's by a famous New York
hairdresser intent on redefining the word "chic." "Just keep looking."
She shoved the most recent issue of Advertising Age away from the edge
of her desk. "And next time try to find someone with some personality
in her face."
As she put down the receiver, fire sirens screamed up Third Avenue,
eight floors below her corner office at Blakemore, Stern, and
Rodenbaugh, but Naomi paid no attention. She had lived with the noises
of New York City all her life and hadn't consciously heard a siren
since last winter when the two gay members of the New York City Ballet
who lived in the apartment above her had lit their fondue pot
too near a pair of Scalamandre chintz curtains. Naomi's husband at the
time, a brilliant Japanese biochemist named Tony Tanaka, had
illogically blamed her for the incident and refused to talk to her for
the rest of the weekend. She divorced him soon after—not just because
of his reaction to the fire, but because living with a man who wouldn't
share even the most elementary of his feelings had grown too painful
for a wealthy Jewish girl from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who in
the never-to-be-forgotten spring of 1968 had helped take over the
dean's office at Columbia and hold it for the People.
Naomi tugged on the black and silver caviar beads she was wearing with
a gray flannel suit and silk blouse, clothes she would have scorned in
those fiery, close-fisted days of Huey and Rennie and Abbie when her
passions had focused on anarchy instead of market share. For the last
few weeks, as the news reports about her brother Gerry's latest
anti-nuclear escapade had surfaced, stray memories of that time kept
flickering into her mind like old photographs, and she found herself
experiencing a vague nostalgia for the girl she had been, the little
sister who had tried so hard to earn her big brother's respect that she
had endured sit-ins, love-ins, lie-ins, and one thirty-day jail
sentence.
While her twenty-four-year-old big brother had been shouting revolution
from the steps of Berkeley's Sproal Hall, Naomi had begun her freshman
year at Columbia three thousand miles away. She had been her parents'
pride and joy—pretty, popular, a good student—their consolation prize
for having produced "the other one," the son whose antics had disgraced
them and whose name was never to be mentioned. At first Naomi had
buried herself in her studies, staying far away from Columbia's radical
students. But then Gerry had arrived on campus and he had hypnotized
her, right along with the rest of the student body.
She had always adored her brother, but never more so than on that
winter day when she had watched him standing like a young blue-jeaned
warrior at the top of the library steps trying to change the world with
his impassioned tongue. She had studied those strong Semitic features
surrounded by a great halo of curly black hair and couldn't believe the
two of them had come from the same womb. Gerry had full
lips and a bold nose unredeemed by the plastic surgeon who had reshaped
hers. Everything about him was larger than life, while she felt merely
ordinary. Lifting his strong arms over his head, he had pumped his
fists in the air and tossed his head back, his teeth flashing like
white stars against his olive skin. She had never seen anything more
wondrous in her life than her big brother exhorting the masses to
rebellion that day at Columbia.
Before the year was over, she had become part of Columbia's militant
student group, an act that had finally won her brother's approval but
had resulted in a painful estrangement from her parents.
Disillusionment had settled in slowly over the next few years as she
fell victim to the Movement's rampant male chauvinism, its
disorganization, and its paranoia. By her junior year she had severed
her contacts with its leaders, and Gerry had never forgiven her. They
had seen each other only once in the past two years, and they had
argued the entire time. Now she spent her days praying he wouldn't do
something so irredeemably awful that everyone at the agency would find
out he was her brother. Somehow she couldn't imagine a firm as
conservative as BS&R appointing the sister of a nationally renowned
radical as its first female vice-president.
She pulled her thoughts away from her past life and looked down at her
present one—the layout spread on her desktop. As always, she felt the
rush of satisfaction that told her she had done a good job. Her
experienced eye approved the Sassy bottle design, a frosted glass
teardrop topped by a wave-shaped navy blue stopper. The perfume flagon
would be elegantly packaged in a shiny navy box imprinted with the hot
pink letters of the slogan she had created—"SASSY! For Free Spirits
Only." The exclamation point after the product name had been her idea,
and one that particularly pleased her. Still, despite the success of
both the packaging and the slogan, the spirit of the campaign was
missing because Naomi hadn't been able to perform one simple task: she
hadn't been able to find the Sassy Girl.
Her intercom buzzed, and her secretary reminded her that she had a
meeting with Harry R. Rodenbaugh, senior vice-president and board
member of BS&R. Mr. Rodenbaugh had specifically requested that she
bring along the new
Sassy layout. Naomi groaned to herself. As one of BS&R's two
creative directors, she'd been handling perfume and cosmetic accounts
for years, and she'd never had so much trouble. Why did the Sassy
account have to be the account that Harry Rodenbaugh had made his pet
project? Harry, who desperately wanted one last Clio to his credit
before he retired, insisted on a fresh face to represent the new
product, a model who was spectacular but not recognizable to fashion
magazine readers.
"I want personality, Naomi, not just another cookie cutter model's
face," he had told her when he called her on his Persian carpet the
week before. "I want a long-stemmed American Beauty rose with a few
thorns on her. This campaign is all about the free-spirited American
woman, and if you can't deliver anything closer to target than these
overused children's faces you've been shoving under my nose for the
past three weeks, then I don't see how you could possibly handle a
position as a BS&R vice-president."
The sly old bastard.
Naomi gathered up her papers the same way she did everything, with
quick, concentrated movements. Tomorrow she would start contacting all
the theatrical agencies and look fcr an actress instead of a model.
Better male chauvinists than Harry R. Rodenbaugh had tried to keep her
down, and not one of them had succeeded.
As Naomi passed her secretary's desk, she stopped to pick up an Express
Mail package that had just arrived, and in the process knocked a
magazine onto the floor. "I'll get it," her secretary said, as she
reached down.
But Naomi had already picked it up, her critical eye caught by the
series of candid photographs on the page that had fallen open. She felt
a prickle go up the back of her neck—an instinctive reaction that told
her more clearly than any focus group when she was onto something big.
Her Sassy Girl! Profile, full-face, three-quarters—each photograph was
better than the last. On the floor of her secretary's office, she had
found her American Beauty rose.
And then she scanned the caption,. The girl wasn't a professional
model, but that wasn't necessarily a
bad thing.
She flipped to the front cover and frowned. "This magazine's six months
old."
"I was cleaning out my bottom drawer, and—"
"Never mind." She turned back to the photographs and tapped the page
with her index finger. "Make some phone calis while I'm in my meeting
and see if you can locate her. Don't make any contact; just
find out
where she is." •
But when Naomi returned from her meeting with Harry Rodenbaugh it was
only to discover that her secretary hadn't been able to come up with
anything. "She seems to have dropped out of sight, Mrs. Tanaka. No one
knows where she is."
"We'll find her," Naomi said. The wheels in her mind were already
clicking away as she mentally shuffled through her list of contacts.
She glanced down at her Rolex oyster watch and calculated time
differentials. Then she snatched up the magazine and headed into her
office. As she dialed her telephone, she looked down at the series of
pictures. "I'm going to find you," she said to the beautiful woman
looking up from the pages. "I'm going to find you, and when I'm done,
your life will never be the same."
said quietly.
He stood and pulled out his wallet. "I don't have a lot of ready cash
right now. I'll cover the rest of the motel bill with plastic and leave
fifty dollars to hold you for a few days. If you get around to paying
me back, send me a check in care of General Delivery, Wynette, Texas.
If you don't get around to it, I'll know things didn't work out between
you and Nicky, and hope greener pastures turn up soon."
With that speech, he tossed the motel key on the desk and walked out
the door.
She was finally alone. She stared down at a dark stain that looked like
an outline of Capri on the motel carpet. Now. Now she'd hit bottom.
* * *
Skeet leaned out the passenger window as Dallie approached the Riviera."You want me to drive?" he asked. "You can crawl in the back and try
for a few hours' sleep."
Dallie opened the driver's door. "You drive too damned slow, and I
don't feel like sleeping."
"Suit yourself." Skeet settled in and handed Dallie a Styrofoam coffee
cup with the lid still snapped on. Then he gave him a slip of pink
paper. "The cashier's phone number."
Dallie crumpled the paper and pushed it into the ashtray, where it
joined two others. He pulled on his
cap. "You ever heard of
Pygmalion
,
Skeet?"
"Is he the guy who played right tackle for Wynette High?"
Dallie used his front teeth to pull the lid off his coffee cup while he
turned the key in the ignition. "No, that was Pygella, Jimmy Pygella.
He moved to Corpus Christi a few years back and opened up a Midas
muffler shop.
Pygmalion's
this
play by George Bernard Shaw about a
Cockney flower girl who gets
made over into a real lady." He flipped on
the windshield wipers.
"Don't sound too interesting, Dallie. The play I liked was that Oh!
Calcutta! we saw in St. Louis. Now that was real good."
"I know you liked that play, Skeet. I liked it, too, but you see it's
not generally regarded as a great piece of literature. It doesn't have
a lot to say about the human condition, if you follow me. Pygmalion, on
the other hand, says that people can change . . . that they can get
better with a little direction." He threw the car into reverse and
backed out of the parking place. "It also says that the person
directing that change doesn't get anything for his trouble but a load
of grief."
Francesca, her eyes wide and stricken, stood in the open door of the
motel room clutching her case to her chest like a teddy bear and
watched the Riviera pull out of the parking place. Dallie was really
going to do it. He was going to drive away and leave her all by
herself, even though he'd admitted he'd thought about going to bed with
her. Until now, that had always been enough to hold any man to her
side, but suddenly it wasn't. How could that be? What was happening to
her world? Bewilderment underscored her fear. She felt like a child
who'd learned her colors wrong and just found out that red was really
yellow, blue was really green—only now that she knew what was wrong,
she couldn't imagine what to do about it.
The Riviera swung around to the exit, waited for a break in the
traffic, and then began to move out onto the wet road. The tips of her
fingers had gone numb, and her legs felt weak, as if all the muscles
had lost their strength. Drizzle dampened her T-shirt, a lock of hair
fell forward over her cheek. "Dallie!" She started to run as fast as
she could.
"The thing of it is," Dallie said, looking up into his rearview mirror,
"she doesn't think about anybody but herself."
"Most self-centered woman I ever encountered in my life," Skeet agreed.
"And she doesn't know how to do a damn thing except maybe put on
makeup."
"She sure as hell can't swim."
"She doesn't have even one lick of common sense."
"Not a lick."
Dallie uttered a particularly offensive oath and slammed on the brakes.
Francesca reached the car, gasping for breath in small sobs. "Don't!
Don't leave me alone!"
The strength of Dallie's anger took her by surprise. He vaulted out of
the door, tore the case from her hands, and then backed her up against
the side of the car so that the door handle jabbed into her hip.
"Now you listen to me, and you listen good!" he shouted. "I'm taking
you under duress, and you stop
that goddamn sniveling right now!"
She sobbed, blinking against the drizzle. "But I'm—"
"I said to stop it! I don't want to do this—I got a real bad feeling
about it—so from this minute on, you'd better do exactly what I say.
Everything I say. You don't ask me any questions; you don't make any
comments. And if you give me one minute of that fancy horseshit of
yours, you'll be out on your skinny ass."
"All right," she cried, her pride hanging in tatters, her voice
strangling on her humiliation. "All right!"
He looked at her with a contempt he made no effort to disguise, then
jerked open the back door. She turned to scramble inside, but just as
she bent forward, he drew back his hand and cracked her hard across her
bottom. "There's more where that came from," he said, "and my hand's
just itching for the next shot."
Every mile of the ride to Lake Charles felt like a hundred. She turned
her face to the window and tried to pretend she was invisible, but when
occupants of other cars looked idly over at her as the Riviera sped
past, she couldn't suppress the illogical feeling that they knew what
had happened, that they could actually see how she had been reduced to
begging for help, see that she had been struck for the first time in
her life. I won't think about it, she told herself as they sped past
flooded rice fields and swampland covered with slimy green algae. I'll
think about it tomorrow, next week, any time but now when I might start
crying again and he might stop the car and set me out on the highway.
But she couldn't help thinking about it, and she bit a raw place on the
inside of her already battered bottom lip to keep from making the
smallest sound.
She saw a sign that said Lake Charles, and then they crossed a great
curved bridge. In the front seat, Skeet and Dallie talked on and off,
neither of them paying any attention to her.
"The motel's right up there," Skeet finally remarked to Dallie.
"Remember when Holly Grace showed up here last year with that Chevy
dealer from Tulsa?"
Dallie grunted something Francesca didn't quite catch as he pulled into
the parking lot, which didn't look all that different from the one
they'd left less than four hours earlier, and swung around toward the
office. Francesca's stomach growled, and she realized she hadn't had
anything to eat since the evening before when she'd grabbed a hamburger
after pawning her suitcase. Nothing to eat. . . and no money to buy
anything with. And then she wondered who Holly Grace might be, but she
was too demoralized to feel more than a passing curiosity.
"Francie, I'd already pushed my credit card limit pretty close to the
edge before I met you, and that little romp of yours just about
finished the job. You're going to have to share a room with Skeet."
'Wo.'"
"No!"
Dallie sighed and flicked off the ignition. "All right, Skeet. You and
I'll share a room until we get rid of Francie."
"Not hardly." Skeet threw open the door of the Riviera. "I haven't
shared a room with you since you turned pro, and I'm not gonna start
now. You stay up half the night and then make enough noise in the
morning to wake the dead." He climbed out of the car and headed toward
the office, calling back over his shoulder, "Since you're the one who's
so all-fired anxious to bring Miss Fran-chess-ka along, you can damn
weil sleep with her yourself."
Dallie swore the entire time he was unloading his suitcase and carrying
it inside. Francesca sat on the edge of one of the room's two double
beds, her back straight, her feet side by side, knees pressed together,
like a little girl on her best behavior at a grown-up party. From the
next room she heard the sound of a television announcer reporting on an
anti-nuclear group
protesting at a missile site; then someone flipped the channel to a
ball game and "The Star-Spangled Banner" rang out. Bitterness welled up
inside her as the music brought back the memory of the round button she
had spotted on the taxi driver's shirt: AMERICA, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY.
What kind of opportunity? The opportunity to pay for food and shelter
with her body in some sordid motel room? Nothing came entirely free,
did it? And her body was all she had left. By coming into this room
with Dallie, hadn't she implicitly promised to give him something in
return?
"Will you stop looking like that!" Dallie threw his suitcase on the
bed. "Believe me, Miss Fancy Pants, I don't have any designs on your
body. You stay on your side of the room, as far out of my sight as
possible, and we'll do just fine. But first I want my fifty bucks back."
She had to salvage some morsel of her self-respect when she handed him
back his money, so she tossed her head, flicking her hair back over her
shoulders as if she hadn't a care in the world. "I gather you're some
sort of golfer," she remarked offhandedly, trying to show him that his
surliness didn't affect her. "Would that be a vocation or an avocation?"
"More like an addiction, I guess." He grabbed a pair of slacks from his
suitcase and then reached for the zipper on his jeans.
She spun around, quickly turning her back to him. "I—I think I'll
stretch my legs a bit, take a turn around the parking lot."
"You do that."
She circled the parking lot twice, reading bumper stickers, studying
newspaper headlines through the glass doors of the dispensers, gazing
sightlessly at the front-page photograph of a curly-haired man
screaming
at someone. Dallie didn't seem to expect her to go to bed
with him. What a relief that was. She stared at
the neon vacancy sign,
and the longer she stared, the more she wondered why he didn't desire
her. What
was wrong? The question nagged like an itch. She might have
lost her clothes, her money, all of her possessions, but she still had
her beauty, didn't she? She still had her
allure. Or had she somehow lost that, too, right along with her luggage
and her makeup?
Ridiculous. She was exhausted, that was all, and she couldn't think
straight. As soon as Dallie left for the golf course, she would go to
bed and sleep until she felt like herself again. A few remnant sparks
of optimism flickered inside her. She was merely tired. A decent
night's sleep and everything would be fine.
Chapter
11
Naomi Jaffe Tanaka slammed the palm of her hand down on the heavy11
glass top of her desk. "No!" she exclaimed into the telephone, her
intense brown eyes snapping with displeasure. "She isn't even close to
what we have in mind for the Sassy Girl. If you can't do better than
her, I'll find a model agency that can."
The voice on the other end of the line grew sarcastic. "Do you want
some phone numbers, Naomi? I'm sure the people at Wilhelmina will do a
wonderful job for you."
The people at Wilhelmina refused to send Naomi anyone else, but she had
no intention of sharing that particular piece of news with the woman on
the phone. She pushed blunt, impatient fingers through her dark hair,
which had been cut as short and sleek as a boy's by a famous New York
hairdresser intent on redefining the word "chic." "Just keep looking."
She shoved the most recent issue of Advertising Age away from the edge
of her desk. "And next time try to find someone with some personality
in her face."
As she put down the receiver, fire sirens screamed up Third Avenue,
eight floors below her corner office at Blakemore, Stern, and
Rodenbaugh, but Naomi paid no attention. She had lived with the noises
of New York City all her life and hadn't consciously heard a siren
since last winter when the two gay members of the New York City Ballet
who lived in the apartment above her had lit their fondue pot
too near a pair of Scalamandre chintz curtains. Naomi's husband at the
time, a brilliant Japanese biochemist named Tony Tanaka, had
illogically blamed her for the incident and refused to talk to her for
the rest of the weekend. She divorced him soon after—not just because
of his reaction to the fire, but because living with a man who wouldn't
share even the most elementary of his feelings had grown too painful
for a wealthy Jewish girl from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who in
the never-to-be-forgotten spring of 1968 had helped take over the
dean's office at Columbia and hold it for the People.
Naomi tugged on the black and silver caviar beads she was wearing with
a gray flannel suit and silk blouse, clothes she would have scorned in
those fiery, close-fisted days of Huey and Rennie and Abbie when her
passions had focused on anarchy instead of market share. For the last
few weeks, as the news reports about her brother Gerry's latest
anti-nuclear escapade had surfaced, stray memories of that time kept
flickering into her mind like old photographs, and she found herself
experiencing a vague nostalgia for the girl she had been, the little
sister who had tried so hard to earn her big brother's respect that she
had endured sit-ins, love-ins, lie-ins, and one thirty-day jail
sentence.
While her twenty-four-year-old big brother had been shouting revolution
from the steps of Berkeley's Sproal Hall, Naomi had begun her freshman
year at Columbia three thousand miles away. She had been her parents'
pride and joy—pretty, popular, a good student—their consolation prize
for having produced "the other one," the son whose antics had disgraced
them and whose name was never to be mentioned. At first Naomi had
buried herself in her studies, staying far away from Columbia's radical
students. But then Gerry had arrived on campus and he had hypnotized
her, right along with the rest of the student body.
She had always adored her brother, but never more so than on that
winter day when she had watched him standing like a young blue-jeaned
warrior at the top of the library steps trying to change the world with
his impassioned tongue. She had studied those strong Semitic features
surrounded by a great halo of curly black hair and couldn't believe the
two of them had come from the same womb. Gerry had full
lips and a bold nose unredeemed by the plastic surgeon who had reshaped
hers. Everything about him was larger than life, while she felt merely
ordinary. Lifting his strong arms over his head, he had pumped his
fists in the air and tossed his head back, his teeth flashing like
white stars against his olive skin. She had never seen anything more
wondrous in her life than her big brother exhorting the masses to
rebellion that day at Columbia.
Before the year was over, she had become part of Columbia's militant
student group, an act that had finally won her brother's approval but
had resulted in a painful estrangement from her parents.
Disillusionment had settled in slowly over the next few years as she
fell victim to the Movement's rampant male chauvinism, its
disorganization, and its paranoia. By her junior year she had severed
her contacts with its leaders, and Gerry had never forgiven her. They
had seen each other only once in the past two years, and they had
argued the entire time. Now she spent her days praying he wouldn't do
something so irredeemably awful that everyone at the agency would find
out he was her brother. Somehow she couldn't imagine a firm as
conservative as BS&R appointing the sister of a nationally renowned
radical as its first female vice-president.
She pulled her thoughts away from her past life and looked down at her
present one—the layout spread on her desktop. As always, she felt the
rush of satisfaction that told her she had done a good job. Her
experienced eye approved the Sassy bottle design, a frosted glass
teardrop topped by a wave-shaped navy blue stopper. The perfume flagon
would be elegantly packaged in a shiny navy box imprinted with the hot
pink letters of the slogan she had created—"SASSY! For Free Spirits
Only." The exclamation point after the product name had been her idea,
and one that particularly pleased her. Still, despite the success of
both the packaging and the slogan, the spirit of the campaign was
missing because Naomi hadn't been able to perform one simple task: she
hadn't been able to find the Sassy Girl.
Her intercom buzzed, and her secretary reminded her that she had a
meeting with Harry R. Rodenbaugh, senior vice-president and board
member of BS&R. Mr. Rodenbaugh had specifically requested that she
bring along the new
Sassy layout. Naomi groaned to herself. As one of BS&R's two
creative directors, she'd been handling perfume and cosmetic accounts
for years, and she'd never had so much trouble. Why did the Sassy
account have to be the account that Harry Rodenbaugh had made his pet
project? Harry, who desperately wanted one last Clio to his credit
before he retired, insisted on a fresh face to represent the new
product, a model who was spectacular but not recognizable to fashion
magazine readers.
"I want personality, Naomi, not just another cookie cutter model's
face," he had told her when he called her on his Persian carpet the
week before. "I want a long-stemmed American Beauty rose with a few
thorns on her. This campaign is all about the free-spirited American
woman, and if you can't deliver anything closer to target than these
overused children's faces you've been shoving under my nose for the
past three weeks, then I don't see how you could possibly handle a
position as a BS&R vice-president."
The sly old bastard.
Naomi gathered up her papers the same way she did everything, with
quick, concentrated movements. Tomorrow she would start contacting all
the theatrical agencies and look fcr an actress instead of a model.
Better male chauvinists than Harry R. Rodenbaugh had tried to keep her
down, and not one of them had succeeded.
As Naomi passed her secretary's desk, she stopped to pick up an Express
Mail package that had just arrived, and in the process knocked a
magazine onto the floor. "I'll get it," her secretary said, as she
reached down.
But Naomi had already picked it up, her critical eye caught by the
series of candid photographs on the page that had fallen open. She felt
a prickle go up the back of her neck—an instinctive reaction that told
her more clearly than any focus group when she was onto something big.
Her Sassy Girl! Profile, full-face, three-quarters—each photograph was
better than the last. On the floor of her secretary's office, she had
found her American Beauty rose.
And then she scanned the caption,. The girl wasn't a professional
model, but that wasn't necessarily a
bad thing.
She flipped to the front cover and frowned. "This magazine's six months
old."
"I was cleaning out my bottom drawer, and—"
"Never mind." She turned back to the photographs and tapped the page
with her index finger. "Make some phone calis while I'm in my meeting
and see if you can locate her. Don't make any contact; just
find out
where she is." •
But when Naomi returned from her meeting with Harry Rodenbaugh it was
only to discover that her secretary hadn't been able to come up with
anything. "She seems to have dropped out of sight, Mrs. Tanaka. No one
knows where she is."
"We'll find her," Naomi said. The wheels in her mind were already
clicking away as she mentally shuffled through her list of contacts.
She glanced down at her Rolex oyster watch and calculated time
differentials. Then she snatched up the magazine and headed into her
office. As she dialed her telephone, she looked down at the series of
pictures. "I'm going to find you," she said to the beautiful woman
looking up from the pages. "I'm going to find you, and when I'm done,
your life will never be the same."
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