Glitter Baby (19 page)

“I’m taking you back to New York,” Gretchen said, “and getting you into a fat farm. It’ll be months before you’ll be in shape to work. That awful hair is going to hurt you, so don’t think I can get your old price, and don’t think that Parker can get you another film right away.”

“I’m not going back,” Fleur said. It felt odd to speak English.

“Of course you are. Look at this place. I can’t believe you actually work here. My God, after
Sunday Morning Eclipse
came out, some of the top directors in Hollywood wanted you.” She stabbed the stem of her sunglasses into the pocket of her suit jacket so the lenses hung out. “This silly quarrel between you and Belinda has gone on long enough. Mothers and daughters have problems all the time. There’s no reason to make such a
thing
out of it.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Grow up, Fleur. This is the twentieth century, and no man is worth splitting up two women who care about each other.”

So that was what everyone believed, that she and Belinda had quarreled over Jake. She barely thought about him anymore. Occasionally she saw a picture of him in a magazine, usually scowling at the photographer who’d invaded his privacy. Sometimes he was with a beautiful woman, and her stomach always did an unpleasant flip. It was like stumbling unexpectedly across a dead cat or bird. The corpse was harmless, but it still made you jump.

Jake’s acting career was stronger than ever, but even though
Sunday Morning Eclipse
had earned him a screenwriting Oscar, he’d stopped writing. No one seemed to know why, and Fleur didn’t care.

Gretchen made no effort to conceal her scorn. “Look at yourself. You’re twenty-two years old, hiding away in the middle of nowhere, living like a pauper. Your face is all you have, and you’re doing your best to ruin that. If you don’t listen to me you’re going to wake up one morning, old and alone, satisfied with whatever crumbs you can pick up. Is that what you want? Are you that self-destructive?”

Was she? The worst of the pain was gone. She could even look at a newspaper picture of Belinda and Alexi with a certain detachment. Of course her mother had gone back to him. Alexi was one of the most important men in France, and Belinda needed the limelight the way other people needed oxygen. Sometimes Fleur thought about returning to New York, but she could never model again, and what would she do there? The fat kept her safe, and it was easier to drift through the present than to rush into an uncertain future. Easier to forget about the girl who’d been so determined to make everybody love her. She didn’t need other people’s love anymore. She didn’t need anyone but herself.

“Leave me alone,” she said to Gretchen. “I’m not going back.”

“I have no intention of leaving until—”

“Go away.”

“You can’t keep on like—”

“Get out!”

Gretchen let her eyes slide over the ugly man’s shirt, over the bulging jeans. She assessed her, judged her, and Fleur felt the exact moment when Gretchen Casimir decided she was no longer worth the effort.

“You’re a loser,” she said. “You’re sad and pitiful, living a dead-end life. Without Belinda, you’re nothing.”

The venom behind Gretchen’s words didn’t make them
any less true. Fleur had no ambition, no plans, no pride of accomplishment—nothing but a mute kind of survival reflex. Without Belinda, she was nothing.

An hour later, she fled the photo shop and boarded the next train out of Strasbourg.

Fleur’s twenty-third birthday came and went. A week before Christmas, she threw some things into a duffel bag, picked up her Eurail pass, and left Lille to board a train to Vienna. France was the only place in Europe where she could work legally, but she had to get away for a few days or she’d suffocate. She could no longer remember how it felt to be slim and strong, or what it was like not to worry about paying the rent on a shabby room with a rust-stained sink and damp patches on the ceiling.

She chose Vienna on a whim after she read
The World According to Garp.
A place with bears on unicycles and a man who could only walk on his hands seemed just about right. She found a cheap room in an old Viennese pension with a gilded birdcage elevator the concierge told her had been broken by the Germans during the war. After lugging her duffel bag up six flights of stairs, she opened the door to a minuscule room with scarred furniture and wondered which war he meant. She peeled off her clothes, pulled the coverlet over her, and, as the wind rattled the windows and the elevator creaked, she went to sleep.

The next morning she walked through the Schönbrunn Palace and then had an inexpensive lunch at the Leupold near Rooseveltplatz. A waiter set a plate of tiny Austrian dumplings called
Nockerln
in front of her. They were delicious, but she had a hard time getting them down. There were no bears on unicycles in Vienna, no men who walked on their hands, only the same old problems that no amount of running away could solve. She’d never been the bravest, the fastest, or the strongest. It had all been an illusion.

A Burberry trench coat and Louis Vuitton briefcase brushed by her table, then backtracked. “Fleur? Fleur Savagar?”

It took her a moment to recognize the man standing in front of her as Parker Dayton, her former agent. He was in his mid-forties with one of those faces that looked as if it had been perfectly formed by a Divine Sculptor and then, just before the clay was dry, given a push inward. Even the neatly trimmed ginger-colored beard he’d grown since she’d last seen him couldn’t quite hide the less-than-impressive chin or balance out the squished-in nose.

She’d never liked Parker. Belinda had selected him to handle Fleur’s movie career on the strength of Gretchen’s recommendation, but it turned out he was Gretchen’s lover at the time and not a member of the upper echelon of agents. Still, from the evidence offered by the Vuitton briefcase and the Gucci shoes, business seemed to have picked up.

“You look like shit.” Without waiting for an invitation, he took a seat across from her and settled his briefcase on the floor. He stared at her. She stared back. He shook his head. “It cost Gretchen a bundle to settle on the modeling contracts you broke.” His hand tapped the table, and she had the feeling he was itching to pull out his calculator so he could punch in the numbers for her.

“It didn’t cost Gretchen a penny,” she said. “I’m sure Alexi paid the bills with my money, and
I
could afford it.”

He shrugged. “You’re one reason I pretty much stick to music now.” He lit a cigarette. “I’m managing Neon Lynx. You have to have heard of them. They’re America’s hottest rock group. That’s why I’m in Vienna.” He fumbled in his pockets and finally pulled out a ticket. “Come to the concert tonight as my guest. We’ve been sold out for weeks.”

She’d seen the posters plastered all over the city. Tonight was the opening concert in their first European tour. She
took the ticket and mentally calculated what she could get for scalping it. “I can’t see you as a rock manager.”

“If a rock band hits, it’s like you’ve got a license to print money. Lynx was playing a third-rate club on the Jersey shore when I found them. I knew they had something, but they weren’t packaging it right. They didn’t have any style, you know what I mean? I could have turned them over to a manager, but business wasn’t too great at the time, so I decided, what the hell, I’d give it a shot myself. I made some changes and put ’em on the map. I’ll tell you the truth. I expected them to hit, but not this big. We had riots in two cities on our last tour. You wouldn’t believe—”

He waved to someone behind her, and a second man joined them. He was maybe in his early thirties with bushy hair and a Fu Manchu mustache.

“Fleur, this is Stu Kaplan, road manager for Neon Lynx.”

To Fleur’s relief he didn’t seem to recognize her. The men ordered coffee, then Parker turned to Stu. “Did you take care of it?”

Stu tugged on his Fu Manchu. “I spent half an hour on the phone with that goddamned employment agency before I found anybody who spoke English. Then they told me they might have a girl for me in a week. Christ, we’ll be in freakin’ Germany next week.”

Parker frowned. “I’m not getting involved, Stu. You’re the one who’s going to have to work without a road secretary.”

They talked for a few minutes. Parker excused himself to go to the men’s room, and Stu turned to Fleur. “He a friend of yours?”

“More an old acquaintance.”

“He’s a freakin’ dictator. ‘I’m not getting involved, Stu.’ Hell, it’s not my fault she got knocked up.”

“Your road secretary?”

He nodded mournfully into his coffee, his Fu Manchu
drooping. “I told her we’d pay for the abortion and everything, but she said she was going back to the States to have it done right.” Stu looked up and stared at Fleur accusingly. “For chrissake, this is Vienna. Freud’s from here, isn’t he? They gotta have good doctors in Vienna.”

She thought of several things to say and discarded them all. He groaned, “I mean it wouldn’t be so bad if this had happened in Pittsburgh or somewhere, but freakin’ Vienna…”

“What exactly does a road secretary do?” The words came out of her unintended. She was drifting, just as always.

Stu Kaplan looked at her with his first real spark of interest. “It’s a cushy job—answering phones, double-checking arrangements, helping out with the band a little. Nothing hard.” He took a sip of coffee. “You—uh—speak any German?”

She sipped, too. “A little.” Also Italian and Spanish.

Stu leaned back in his chair. “The job pays two hundred a week, room and board provided. You interested?”

She had a job waiting tables in Lille. She had her classes and a cheap room, and she no longer did anything impulsively. But this felt safe. Different. She could handle it for a month or so. She didn’t have anything better to do. “I’ll take it.”

Stu whipped out a business card. “Pack your suitcase and meet me at the Intercontinental in an hour and a half.” He scrawled something on the card and rose. “Here’s the suite number. Tell Parker I’ll see him there.”

Parker came back to the table, and Fleur told him what had happened. He laughed. “You can’t have that job.”

“Why not?”

“You couldn’t stick it. I don’t know what Stu told you, but being road secretary to any band is a hard job, and with a band like Neon Lynx it’s even tougher.”

There it was, the open acknowledgment that she wasn’t
worth anything without Belinda. She should leave and forget all about this, but what had been nothing more than an impulse had suddenly become important. “I’ve had tough jobs.”

He patted her hand patronizingly. “Let me explain something. One of the reasons Neon Lynx has stayed on top is because they’re spoiled, arrogant bastards. It’s their image, and, frankly, I encourage it. Their arrogance is a big part of what makes them so great when they perform. But it also makes them impossible to work for. And road secretary isn’t what you’d call a high-prestige job. Let’s face it. You’re used to giving orders, not taking them.”

A lot Parker Dayton knew. She dug in with a stubbornness she’d forgotten she possessed. “I can handle it.”

The man who didn’t have a sense of humor laughed again. “You wouldn’t last an hour. I don’t know what happened with you three years ago, but you screwed yourself pretty good. Here’s some free advice. Take a pass on the bread and cookies, then call Gretchen and get yourself back in front of the cameras.”

She stood up. “Stu Kaplan can hire his own road secretary, right?”

“Under normal circumstances, but…”

“Okay, then. He offered me the job, and I’m taking it.”

She was out of the restaurant before he could say anything more, but halfway down the street she had to lean against the side of a building to catch her breath. What was she doing? She told herself this was safe, nothing more than a secretary’s job, but her heart rate refused to slow down.

When she walked into the suite at the Intercontinental an hour later, she felt as if she’d walked into Bedlam. A group of reporters was talking to Parker and two extravagantly dressed young men she assumed were band members. Waiters wheeled in trays of food, and three phones rang at
the same time. The insanity of what she’d done hit her full force. She had to get out of here, but Stu had already picked up two of the phones and was gesturing for her to pick up the third.

She answered with an unsteady voice. It was the manager of the Munich hotel where the group was staying the next night. He told her he’d heard rumors about the destruction of two hotel suites in London and regretted to inform her that Neon Lynx was no longer welcome at his establishment. She put her hand over the receiver and told Stu what had happened.

Within seconds, she realized that the pleasant Stu Kaplan of the coffee shop was not the same man standing in front of her. “Tell him it was Rod Stewart, for chrissake! Use your freakin’ head, and don’t bother me with the little shit.” He tossed a clipboard at her, smacking her in the knuckles. “Double-check the arrangements while you got him on the phone. Double-check everything, and then check it again.”

Her stomach clenched. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t work at a job with someone screaming at her and expecting her to know things that had never been explained. Parker Dayton gave her a smug smile with I-told-you-so written all over it. As she turned away from him, she caught sight of her reflection across the room. The mirror that hung above the sofa was the same size as those blown-up photographs Belinda had hung on the apartment walls in New York. Those oversized, beautiful faces had never seemed to belong to her. But neither did the pasty, tense reflection staring back at her.

She tightened her damp palms around the receiver. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but you can’t blame Neon Lynx for damage they didn’t do.” Her voice sounded thin from lack of air. She took a quick breath, then began a systematic assassination of Rod Stewart’s character. When she was done, she launched into a determined review of the room assignments from the instructions on the clipboard,
then went on to detail arrangements for luggage carts and food. As the manager relayed the instructions back to her, and she realized she’d convinced him to change his mind, she felt a rush of satisfaction far out of proportion to what she’d done.