Glitter Baby (25 page)

The bronze satin
gown hugged her body with its high neck, bare arms, and slashed skirt. She wanted to part her hair in the middle and wear it in a low Spanish knot like a flamenco dancer, but Michel wouldn’t let her. “That big streaky mane is the Glitter Baby’s trademark. For tonight, you have to wear it down.”

Fleur had just moved into her living quarters at the townhouse, but Michel ordered her to dress at the apartment where Kissy could supervise. Her former roommate stuck her head in the bedroom. “The limo’s outside.”

“Wish me luck,” Fleur said.

“Not so fast.” Kissy turned Fleur toward the mirror. “Look at yourself.”

“Come on, Kissy, I don’t have time—”

“Stop squirming and look in the mirror.”

Fleur glanced at her reflection. The gown was exquisite. Instead of deemphasizing her height, Michel’s lean design accentuated it. The diagonal slash of skirt started at mid-thigh and crossed over her body, offering tantalizing glimpses of long legs through the filmy black
point d’esprit
flounce that filled the space.

Slowly she lifted her eyes. In a few weeks, she’d be
twenty-six, and her face had a new maturity. She catalogued her separate parts—the wide-spaced green eyes, the marking-pen brows, the mouth that spread all over—and then, for an instant, it all came together, and her face finally seemed to belong to her.

The moment passed, the impression faded, and she turned away. “Just shows what a fabulous dress and good makeup will do.”

Kissy looked disappointed. “You never see yourself.”

“Don’t be silly.” She picked up her purse and dashed downstairs to the limousine. Just before she got in, she looked up at the window and saw Michel and Kissy standing there watching her. She gave them her very cockiest grin. The Glitter Baby was back.

What she hadn’t counted on was Belinda.

Adelaide Abrams slowly dropped her hand from Fleur’s arm and nodded toward the doorway of the Orlani Gallery where Belinda stood wrapped in golden sable, as fragile and beautiful as a butterfly. Fleur fought to control the whirlwind of emotions spinning inside her. She took one deep breath and then another as Belinda approached. Fleur hadn’t seen her mother for six years, and she felt as if she were shattering into a thousand ice-cold pieces.

Belinda extended one hand and pressed the other to the bodice of her dress as if she were touching something hidden there. “People are watching, darling. For appearances, at least.”

“I don’t play to the crowd anymore.” Fleur turned her back and walked away from the scent of Shalimar, from the sight of delicately etched lines, like the veins of an autumn leaf, crinkling the corners of her mother’s blue eyes.

As she made her way across the gallery, she smiled automatically and exchanged a few words here and there with people she recognized. She even managed a short interview with the reporter from
Harper’s.
But all the time she
wondered why it had to happen tonight. How had Belinda known the Glitter Baby would be reappearing?

Kissy and Michel were scheduled to arrive soon. Their appearance was the point of all this, and Belinda’s presence had thrown it all off balance.

“Fleur Savagar?” A young man dressed in black stopped in front of her and held out a long florist’s box. “A delivery for you.”

Adelaide Abrams appeared at her side like magic. “An admirer?”

“I don’t know.” Fleur flipped open the box and pushed aside the nest of tissue paper. Lying beneath were a dozen long-stemmed white roses…She lifted her head and looked across the gallery. She locked eyes with Belinda and slowly pulled one of the roses from the box.

Belinda’s forehead creased and her shoulders drooped. She stared at the white rose, then turned toward the door and fled from the gallery.

Adelaide poked in the box. “There’s no card.”

“I know who they’re from.” Fleur took in the empty doorway.

“His initials wouldn’t happen to be J.K., would they?” Adelaide asked.

Fleur fixed a bright smile on her face. “Secret admirers are meant to be secret. Especially ones who’ve made a career out of protecting their privacy.”

Adelaide gave her a sly wink. “You’re a good girl, Fleur, despite your occasional lapses.”

As Adelaide disappeared, Fleur shoved the rose back into the box. The cloying smell stuck in her nostrils and clung to her throat. Fleur had been expecting something like this ever since Alexi’s phone call. He was letting her know he hadn’t forgotten anything.

She pushed the lid back on and set the box on a bench. She wanted to stuff it in the nearest trash can, but she couldn’t afford to with Adelaide Abrams looking on. Let her think they came from Jake. He was a big boy, and he
could take care of himself. She also needed the publicity, and she didn’t have a single qualm about using him as he’d once used her.

She saw Michel and Kissy standing in the doorway. Michel wore a white tuxedo with a black nylon T-shirt. He’d dressed Kissy in a tiny pink and silver version of a prom dress, perfectly proportioned for her size. She clung to his arm, feminine, helpless, lips slightly pursed as if she were ready to expel a breathless boop-boopy-doop.

Fleur took the long way through the crowd, giving everyone time to watch where she was going. When she reached the doorway, she brushed cheeks with them both and whispered in Michel’s ear that Belinda had just left. He gazed at her searchingly. She had no idea what to tell him.

Kissy and Michel’s entrance coupled with Fleur’s greeting had attracted attention, just as she’d planned.
Women’s Wear Daily
got to them first, and Fleur made the introductions. Both Michel and Kissy performed like champs, bored sophistication on his part, a frothy cloud of pink and silver exuberance on hers. When they had finished with
WWD, Harper’s
, and Adelaide Abrams, the three of them circulated through the gallery, stopping to chat with everyone they met. She introduced her brother as Michel Savagar instead of Michael Anton. Not long after they’d been reunited, he’d decided to stop hiding under an assumed name. Michel remained aloof and mysterious while Kissy chattered like a magpie, and Fleur directed the conversation exactly where she wanted it.

“Isn’t my brother the most magnificent designer…? My brother designed my gown. I’m glad you like it…My brother is obscenely talented. I’m trying to get him to share his gift, but he’s so stubborn…”

She responded to questions about Kissy’s identity with a smile. “Isn’t she outrageous? So adorable. One of the Charleston Christies. Michel designed her dress, too.”

When they asked what Kissy did for a living, Fleur waved
an airy hand. “A little acting, but that’s more a hobby than anything else.”

The women’s envious gazes flickered between Fleur’s incredible bronze satin and Kissy’s reimagined prom dress. “My brother has so many women begging him to design for them,” she confided, “but right now he’s only designing for Kissy and me. Confidentially I’m hoping to change that.”

Several people commented on Belinda’s appearance. Fleur answered as briefly as possible and then changed the subject. She told everyone about her new agency—Fleur Savagar and Associates, Celebrity Management—and issued early invitations to the big open house she planned to throw in a few weeks. A good-looking celebrity heart surgeon invited her to dinner the next evening. She accepted. He was charming, and she needed a chance to show off Michel’s iris and blue silk sheath.

By the time they got into the limousine after the party, Fleur was fighting off a headache, and Michel picked up her hand. “You’re exhausted. You don’t have to put yourself through this, you know.”

“Yes, I do. We couldn’t buy this kind of publicity. Besides, it’s long past time I figure out how to live with who I am, and that includes the Glitter Baby.”

She thought of the roses she’d abandoned at the gallery, and suddenly she understood their message as clearly as if Alexi had sent her a letter. He’d kept Belinda out of her life for all these years. Now he’d sent her back.

A week later, the phone calls began. They usually came around two in the morning. When Fleur answered, she heard music turned low in the background—Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Simon and Garfunkel—but the caller never spoke. Fleur had no hard evidence that the calls were coming from Belinda. No scent of Shalimar magically wafted through the telephone lines. But she was certain all the same.

She hung up without saying a word, but the calls began
to wear on her, and whenever she turned a corner, she found herself waiting for Belinda to appear.

Fleur made Michel shut down his store and bring in the people who’d done the Kamali boutique to refashion the space with better display areas, a more elegant storefront, and the name Michel Savagar embossed over the doorway in bold red script on a deep purple background.

She and Kissy immediately made themselves an integral part of New York’s social scene. Wherever they went, they wore Michel’s wonderful designs. They lunched at Orsini’s then popped into David Webb to pick up an eighteen-karat bauble, which one of them later returned because “It wasn’t quite right.” They stopped at Helene Arpels for a new pair of evening pumps, then danced at Club A or Regine’s. As they lunched, shopped, and danced, they modeled silk dresses that floated like sea foam around their hips, a slim skimp of blue jersey with a gathered side seam, an evening gown that shimmered with tomato-red sequined panels. Within a week, every fashion-forward social butterfly in New York began asking about Michel Savagar’s dresses. Just as Fleur had hoped, they wanted them even more when they discovered the garments weren’t available.

Fleur and Kissy publicly gossiped about Michel. “My grandmother ruined him with all the money she left him,” Fleur confided to Adelaide Abrams from a banquette at Chez Pascal where she also showed off a silk wrap dress printed with gossamer water lilies. “People who don’t have to work for a living get lazy.”

The next day she confided in the gossipy wife of a department store heir. “Michel’s afraid commercialism will stifle his creativity. But he
is
working on something, and I do have some plans…Oh, never mind.”

Kissy was less subtle. “I’m almost positive he’s secretly putting together a collection,” she told everyone. And then
her candy apple mouth formed a little pout, and she patted the skirt of whatever sugarplum confection she was showing off that day. “I don’t think it’s right that he won’t confide in me. Except for his sister, I’m his very dearest friend, and I can keep a secret as well as anyone.”

While Fleur and Kissy spread the word about Michel’s idealism and indifference to commercial success, Michel was working eighteen-hour days overseeing every detail of a collection he was financing with the last of Solange Savagar’s money.

Fleur was surviving on four hours of sleep. Every minute she didn’t spent playing the social butterfly she was in her office interviewing for staff, planning her open house, and dodging the last of the workmen. Several actors approached her about representation, but none of them had the special qualities she was looking for.

Fleur loved the way the townhouse renovations had turned out, despite the challenges the structure had presented. Her offices occupied the larger front section of the house and her living quarters the smaller rear portion. She’d decorated the office spaces in black and white with shots of gray and indigo. Her private office and the reception area occupied the front of the main floor, while the other offices were set off a balcony above. She’d added tubular ocean liner railing and black art deco columns with chrome collars to border the balcony, along with an open curved staircase that looked as if Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers would be dancing the Continental down it at any moment.

Her first two hires were Will O’Keefe, a cheerful redhead from North Dakota, who was an experienced publicist and talent agent, and David Bennis, gray-haired and professorial, who’d take charge of business and financial management, as well as give her agency an air of stability. She
also hired a single mother named Riata Lawrence as office manager. For now, she didn’t have enough clients to keep them all busy, but they were part of the facade of success she had to create, right along with her beautifully decorated office and couture wardrobe.

A week before the open house, Will stepped over the last of the drop cloths outside her office. Since they weren’t officially open for business until after the open house, she wore jeans and an orange Mickey Mouse sweatshirt instead of the executive wardrobe Michel had designed for her.

“You’ve made Abrams’s column again,” Will said. “Unfortunately this isn’t one of our plants.”

Fleur took the paper and read.

Fleur hadn’t seen Belinda since the Orlani Gallery two weeks ago, but she was still getting the middle-of-the-night phone calls.

The next day, Will handed over Adelaide’s newest column:

Some item. Fleur had detested Shawn Howell from their first arranged date.

Adelaide went on to write:

Fleur pitched the column into the wastebasket.

She’d just gotten off the phone with another actor she didn’t want to represent when Will O’Keefe stuck his head into her office, his lightly freckled face pale. “We have a big problem. Yesterday Olivia Creighton called to chew me out because she hadn’t received her open house invitation. I sent her another one and didn’t think anything more about it until an hour ago when Adelaide Abrams called with the same complaint. Fleur, I’ve checked around. No one’s received their invitation.”