The Home for Wayward Supermodels (8 page)

Another man, with red hair sticking out all over his head and thick-rimmed black glasses, took advantage of the gap and danced up to me. The odd thing was that he was carrying a notebook and a Bic pen that was leaking onto his fingers.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said. “You must be a new girl. What’s your name?”

“Amanda,” I said.

He wrote that down, without asking my last name.

“And what agency are you with?”

“How do you know I’m a model?” I asked.

He laughed, ignoring my question and instead asking, “Whose clothes are you wearing tonight?”

I stopped dancing and looked down at the dress Desi had made me. “Why,” I said, “my own.”

“Charming!” he cried, scribbling another note on his pad as a flash went off so close to my eyes I was temporarily blinded.

By the time I could see clearly again, the red-haired man had disappeared and so had Tati and her boyfriend. I pushed my way through the room as quickly as I could manage on the ridiculous heels, but they were nowhere to be found. It hadn’t even occurred to me to bring money along; I was with Tati, she would get me home. Someone tried to hand me a glass of champagne and another man asked me to dance, but I sat at the bar to get off my feet, hoping that Tatiana would once again appear, wishing with sudden longing that Tom were there. It almost made me laugh out loud to imagine Tom in a place like this, but I loved thinking of his strong arms lifting me clear into the air, carrying me outside and home—Wisconsin home or Manhattan home, it didn’t matter—safe with him.

Finally I gave up waiting for Tom or any other White Knight to come along and save me, and fought my way outside, where at least I could get a cell signal to call Desi or start trying to stagger in my heels toward home. But when I reached the sidewalk in front of the club, I was surprised to find the chauffeur waiting for me.

“Miss Tati asked that I drive you home,” he said.

“Where did she go?”

“She went with Mr. Billings to his town house.”

“Oh,” I said. “All right. I’ll go home.”

Since I hadn’t spent any time with Tati in the apartment, I hadn’t missed her being there before, but when I got back that night I did. For the first time since I’d been in New York, I felt lonely, really and truly lonely.

Feeling like this, the first person I thought of was my mom. If I wanted to talk before bed, or if I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, Mom had always been there.

But I didn’t want Mom to be the one who was there for me now. I was an adult, I reminded myself, I’d made my break. I couldn’t go running to Mommy.

Tom. In the summer, Tom was always in bed by nine so he could be up before dawn to take one client or another fishing. But more than once I’d called him or sneaked into his room in the middle of the night. He wouldn’t mind.

At the first sound of his muffled sleepy voice, I nearly melted. It sounded as if he were right there in the bed next to me. That combined with the memory of Tati dancing with her boyfriend made me long to feel Tom’s arms around me, tight as they had been in the airport.

“Oh, Tommy,” I groaned, falling back onto my pillow. “I miss you so bad.”

“Me too, baby,” he said huskily.

“Can’t you come here, Tommy? Come to New York and visit me.”

He was silent for a long minute, and then he said, “Nope.”

“Oh, come on, Tom. It would be so much fun. I have an apartment where we could stay. I even have enough money to buy you a plane ticket.”

“I have work,” he said.

“So, some old rich guy doesn’t catch a trout. I really need to see you, Tommy.”

“Come here,” he said.

Now I was the one who went silent. If I could afford to buy him a ticket to visit me, I could afford to buy myself one to go back home. I didn’t have any work scheduled for this weekend; all I had to do was blow off Alex and Desi. I could fly home and back so quickly no one would ever have to know I was even gone.

But I would know. And Tom would know, even if he didn’t tell my mom and Duke. That would be weird, trying to sneak around in a town where every single person knew me. Plus, the real point was that I wanted Tom to come here, so I could show him the place where I had my new life. And maybe if Tom were with me, I’d learn to feel more at home here.

“I really want to take you around New York so when we talk you’ll know what I’m talking about,” I tried to explain. “We could go to Chinatown, to the top of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty…”

He interrupted me. “Can’t do it, Amanda.”

I hesitated. “Why not?”

“Work,” he said. “Money.”

“But I already told you,” I began, “I have enough money and it wouldn’t have to be for long…”

He interrupted me with a single word: “Can’t.”

I knew what that meant, in Wisconsinese. It meant “won’t.” It meant “don’t want to.” Except wanting or not wanting to wasn’t considered a good enough reason for anything in Wisconsin.

I felt slapped. I knew that pressing him wasn’t going to get me any more information or help me understand what was happening to us. Even if I were with him now, he probably wouldn’t tell me exactly why he couldn’t or wouldn’t come to New York to visit me. Maybe he didn’t even understand it himself.

That made me realize not only how far apart we were, but that the distance was growing. Instead of feeling like he was right next to me on the pillow, or even a thousand miles away, it felt as if we lived on distant planets, with not even our language in common.

“We were going to get married, Tom,” I said.

He interrupted me. “Were?”

That shook me. I felt my arms begin to tremble as my breath grew jagged.

“Yes,
were,
” I said. I was trying to keep my voice calm—Tom hated yelling—but I wasn’t succeeding. My volume began to rise as I felt myself grow more upset. “I was willing to live
your
life, Tom—fishing and hunting and camping and staying in Eagle River forever. So now that I have something of my own, why
can’t
you share my new world?”

“That’s just not me, Amanda,” Tom said, his voice still maddeningly level. “If you want some guy to carry your fancy shopping bags and put a tie on to go to a chichi New York restaurant, you’re going to have to find somebody else.”

“Maybe I will!” I screamed. “Maybe I’ll find somebody who doesn’t smell like worms and has been someplace more interesting than
Milwaukee!
”

Then I think I actually growled, and I slammed down the phone. I felt a moment of satisfaction—I showed him!—until I realized I was now more alone than ever.

S
o you broke up?”

Desi and I were in the Kiehl’s Pharmacy on Third Avenue, one of the oldest shops in Manhattan, moving methodically down the aisles rubbing tester creams and lotions into our skin. Desi at least was sniffing before she rubbed, while I was slathering on every single thing I came to without thinking.

“We didn’t break up, exactly,” I said. “But we had a huge fight.”

“Did anybody threaten to crucify anybody?” Desi asked, dabbing moisturizer from a sea blue jar on her forehead.

I conceded crucifixion had not been threatened.

“Were any weapons mentioned or produced?”

No, I said, no weapons.

Desi shrugged. “Well, where I come from, that’s not a serious fight.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “We’ve never even raised our voices before.”

“Then maybe you were overdue.”

I didn’t know about that, but I knew things were changing between me and Tom. It had been naïve of me to think I could make such a major shift and our relationship would stay exactly the same. Even if Tom refused to change,
we
couldn’t help changing. But I wasn’t sure what that meant.

It was Saturday morning, and Desi and I had met up early so she could take me on a tour of the New York I hadn’t already seen. When Mom was here we’d visited all the big tourist attractions and shopped at Bloomingdale’s and Barneys and H & M. We’d eaten corned beef at the Stage Deli and had tea at The Pierre and gone to a Broadway show. And of course Desi and I had already done SoHo and Canal Street and the East Village.

Today, she said, she was going to show me some of her favorite places in New York that most people only got to when they lived here—and a lot of them not even then. We’d started the day with coffee at Caffe Reggio in the Village, and then we walked over to Kiehl’s. Now we each bought a tiny bottle of shower gel—mango for Desi, grapefruit for me—and headed back outside and downtown toward the Dumpling Man on St. Mark’s Place, where Desi promised me they had more different kinds of dumplings than Mom had pies.

“I don’t understand how Tom could not want to see all this,” I said to Desi, gesturing toward the busy avenue and the parade of outrageously dressed people. “I mean, maybe he wouldn’t be into SoHo, but I know he’d love Central Park, even something like the Statue of Liberty.”

“Maybe he’s afraid,” Desi said.

I was so accustomed to thinking of Tom as strong and fearless and brave that this possibility hadn’t occurred to me.

“What makes you think that?” I asked Desi.

She shrugged. “I get afraid,” she said. “Like, I’m afraid to go anyplace besides New York.”

“Well, I’d be afraid to go to Europe or Asia or something too,” I assured her. “But if you’re staying in America…”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean I’d be afraid to go to Wisconsin.” She laughed a little. “Hell, I’m afraid to go to New Jersey. I’ve never been anywhere but here, Amanda.”

“You mean…”

“I’ve never been out of New York City. Okay, I’ve been to Staten Island on the ferry, over to Brooklyn, to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx on a class trip once, but those are still technically New York. California, Jersey, even Long Island—fuhgeddaboutit.”

This was as astounding to me as Tom not wanting to visit me in New York, until I remembered that up to a few weeks ago, I’d never been out of Wisconsin.

“But you want to go other places,” I said to Desi, remembering how excited I’d been about my trip to New York. “You’d love northern Wisconsin. I’d love to take you there.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “For a long time I never went anyplace because we didn’t have any money and I didn’t know anybody who lived anywhere but here. But now”—she shrugged again—“the thought of being someplace strange like that makes my hands sweat and my stomach go all queasy just thinking about it. I don’t know if I want to go anyplace else.”

I was about to argue with her but then I thought, This is not something I’m going to be able to talk her out of. She might have hit on something about Tom. Tom might be scared of coming to New York, or he might just have made up his mind that he’d hate it here so there was no point in coming. And maybe, I had to admit to myself, he was even right. I loved it so I wanted him to love it, yet the truth was I had never seen any evidence that he would.

But Desi—Desi had an adventurous soul. She had the drive to break out of the limitations she was born into. I could
imagine
her in Paris or Tokyo even more easily than I could imagine myself, could see her loving it there. Someday, I thought, I’ll just buy her a ticket and get her onto a plane and the rest will take care of itself.

Today, though, she was my guide. We rode the subway all the way out to Coney Island, where I saw the ocean for the first time, though Desi was more interested in the kitschy attractions of the boardwalk. Then we went to Central Park and rowed a boat on the lake. It was funny to me that Desi thought the most amazing things about New York were the ones they had all over the place in Eagle River. And then we meandered through the park to meet Alex for dinner.

We found the Time Warner Center and made our way to the J.Crew store, where Alex was waiting near the candycolored cotton sweaters. He smiled when he saw me and kissed my cheek, but looked surprised when he saw Desi.

“This is my girlfriend, Desi,” I told him.

“Oh,” he said, shaking her hand. “
Enchanté.
”

“I asked Desi to come to dinner with us,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows, but quickly nodded. “I understand. That’s totally fine.”

“But if you don’t want me here…” Desi began.

I kicked her ankle. “No, it’s fine, isn’t it, Alex?”

“Of course,” he said smoothly. “I’m sure the restaurant will be happy to accommodate another guest.”

He led us onto the escalator, heading up rather than down, as I’d expected.

“Where are we going?” I asked suspiciously, thinking he might be trying to lure us to some private apartment.

“You’ll see,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.

“No fucking way,” said Desi.

“What?” I asked, my heart seizing up.

“You’re not,” she said to Alex.

“Not what?” he asked, in a teasing voice.

We were on the fourth floor, and he was leading us past an elegant grouping of velvet and leather chairs and sofas, much more elegant than I’d seen in any mall, even the one in Wauwatosa.

Desi stopped still. “I can’t. Amanda, I know I said I’d come with you, but I can’t let someone who doesn’t even know me treat me to a dinner like this.”

“What are you talking about?” I wailed in frustration.

“He’s taking you to Per Se,” Desi explained. “That’s one of the best restaurants in New York—in the world. And one of the most expensive.”

I looked questioningly toward Alex, but he refused to meet my eye.

“I’m taking
both
of you,” he said, lightly touching Desi’s back and urging her forward. “Please. I insist.”

The entrance to Per Se seemed to be through two tall doors painted an elegant shade of dark blue, but when we approached the doors a thick glass panel to one side mysteriously slid open, like something in a James Bond movie. Inside, all was dim, serene, plush, and modern, with wood paneling and steel accents and a wall of glass looking down over the darkening park where Desi and I had just been walking.

Suddenly I felt self-conscious about what I was wearing, a short ruffly skirt from vintage material that Desi had made and a black tank top and flip-flops onto which Desi had glued big red plastic roses. Desi was dressed in her usual bodycamouflaging black, as severe and chic as any
Vogue
editor.

“I’m not dressed right,” I whispered in panic to Alex.

“You look
magnifique
,” he assured me.

He was wearing loose white pants and a white tee shirt and a navy blue linen jacket over that. On his feet, I was cheered to see, were flip-flops.

“I’m proud to be with you both,” he said.

The restaurant wasn’t very big, but the tables were as roomy and spread as far apart as they were at the fanciest supper club in northern Wisconsin. It had the same luxurious feeling as the park it overlooked: that sense of space. I felt myself relax into the emptiness, felt myself grow more confident as the waiters and waitresses, totally professional yet sweet and down-to-earth, asked me what I wanted and ferried amazing food and drinks to our table as we gazed out on the fairy-tale lights of the city.

Just about every single thing I ate and drank was something I’d never had to eat or drink before. I didn’t feel like lying about my age and getting Alex into trouble, so the wine guy suggested “the nonalcoholic beverage pairing,” pouring Desi and me a procession of sparkling ciders and fruity sodas and iced tea made with leaves gathered by mountain goats high in the Himalayas, or something like that.

We didn’t get to pick our own food and I was a little worried that I might not like it, but I ended up scraping up every tiny scrap from every dish they set before me, trying to memorize each detail so that when I was finally talking to Mom again, I’d be able to tell her all about it. Here’s what we had:

• Oysters and caviar.
  
• Foie gras, which tasted even better than my grandpa Trippel’s liver sausage.
  
• Grilled pompano from Florida, good enough to put any Wisconsin Friday night fish fry to shame.
  
• Lobster in a sauce so sweet that Desi and I insisted it must be made from sugar, though Alex assured us it was not.
  
• Something they called “barbeque” that Desi kept marveling was better than what her neighbor Mrs. Alvarez made.
  
• Prime rib that was delicious, though it was hard to enjoy it because that’s Mom’s favorite, so it made me want to tell Mom all about this dinner, though I still was convinced that I was not going to call her.
  
• A salad whose leaves were the exact color of Alex’s eyes.
  
• Grapefruit sorbet that didn’t remind me of anything except grapefruit, thank goodness.
  
• A caramel and hot fudge sundae that just might have been better than the one at JoAnn’s Dairy Bar.
  
• Lots of little cookies and chocolates, as if we were still hungry—but we ate them anyway!
  

By the time we left, it was nearly eleven and we all felt relaxed and happy, putting our arms around each other and strolling down Broadway as if it were the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Finally Alex hailed a cab and directed it downtown.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Bar 13,” he said—that place Tati had taken me the other night.

Desi settled back happily into the taxi. “I’ve always wanted to go there,” she said, smiling. “Thank you, Alex. And thank
you
, Amanda, for inviting me along tonight.”

She took my hand and held on to it, and I thought of what she’d told me, about how she’d never gone anywhere. I was grateful to Alex for doing something to change that, even if we were still in New York. I may not have been dying to go back to Bar 13 and subject myself to that level of cool again so soon, but if Desi wanted the experience, it was all good with me.

When we pulled up to the club, there was an even larger crowd on the sidewalk than there had been the night before. Just as Tati had, Alex walked confidently through the crowd, greeting Rocco, who magically opened the door.

“Hi, Rocco,” I said, waving to him. He smiled in recognition and silently admitted me.

But I had just stepped over the threshold when I heard the door bang closed behind me. I swiveled around, but Desi wasn’t there.

I had to hammer on the door to get Rocco to open it back up again. Immediately I spotted Desi standing against the ropes, looking horrified.

“She’s with us,” I explained to Rocco, certain that it had been a misunderstanding, that Desi would automatically be allowed in.

But Rocco kept staring straight ahead.

Now Alex was by my side, taking in what was going on.

“Rocco,” he said. “There are three in my party.”

Rocco stood fast.

Looking confused, Alex took a bill—I saw it was a hundred—out of his wallet and waved it toward Rocco. “I said the girl is with us.”

Rocco crossed his substantial arms over his chest. “Sorry. Full,” he finally said.

“It’s all right,” said Desi, shooting Rocco a dirty look. “I’m tired anyway.”

“No!” I said. I turned to Rocco. “Come on. This is crazy. You know me. I was here with Tatiana last night. You know, Tatiana, the model.”

“You’re in,” Rocco said.

“You go ahead,” Desi said. “It was supposed to be just you and Alex anyway.”

“No,” I said, furious, turning on Rocco. “Why am I in and my friend isn’t? Because I’m taller? Thinner? Because her skin is darker?”

Now that I was paying attention, it was clear that everyone who was being let into the club was cut from the same mold, like Stepford Partyers: They were all tall, thin, beautiful, smooth, chic in the most obvious way, like they could have stepped from an ad in a magazine. Desi certainly didn’t fit that glossy profile, and Rocco steadfastly ignored her, mimicking one of those statues on Easter Island, stony, immovable.