Spring Collection (20 page)

“Adolescence. I lost it all in less than six months. I’ll spare you the details but I turned into an ungodly slob. I couldn’t believe it. I … I basically ran away. I couldn’t face my mother’s disappointment with me. I didn’t run far, naturally, just to my Aunt Annie and Uncle Charles’s. She’s my mother’s sister and they don’t have any kids, so they were happy to have me, repulsive though I was. By that time my mother had started dating again so she didn’t mind. On the contrary, she was relieved. Aunt Annie probably saved my life. She taught English and she got me started reading … that’s almost all I did for the next six years. I read every novel in the library stacks. That and school.”

“And then you got your looks back—?”

“My looks, yes, but I still can’t walk.”

“But you must have had to walk in the pageants,” he protested.

“And that’s exactly the problem,” Tinker said, shaking her head in a rush of animation. “The child’s pageant walk is the absolute opposite of a runway walk. I walked like an automaton, a windup toy, a good, good,
good
little girl with the best possible posture, a little princess reviewing the troops. I stood up absolutely stiff and straight, head held high, chin up, eyes straight ahead, and I learned not to swing anything, not even my hair—the judges hate the slightest
hint of overt sexuality—Lolita would never make it to the Little Miss Most Adorable Nashville contest. I was a living doll with my arms held out to the side, just so, with my hands barely grazing the frills of my dress so I didn’t flutter them, my feet perfectly placed, totally stiff, a smile pasted on my face. A doll, Tom, a doll, not a child, and certainly not a personality. There’s no contest for best personality … not even a Miss Congeniality. It’s
all
about how you look. My training is as deeply ingrained as if I’d been popped into a Russian school for potential Olympic gymnasts all those years, or brought up to be the next Queen of England. Did you ever see a photo of the Queen slumping, no matter what happens to her? I knew Princess Diana was in trouble as soon as she started showing her playful side in public. I’m trying to change, but my body doesn’t want to. I think they call it muscle memory.”

“You were trained like a show dog!” He quivered with outrage.

“Do you think I don’t know that? In my head I understand exactly what the problem is, but you can know something about yourself and still not be able to change it.”

“Then why the hell are you beating your head against the wall if you don’t think you can do something about it?” Tom pounded his fist on the table in exasperation.

“It’s the only thing I know how to do. I have to try now that I have the chance. I want to win again,” Tinker said simply.

“Jesus! That’s got to be the craziest thing I ever heard!”

“To you, maybe, but I don’t feel that way,” she said in a voice in which finality rang clearly.

Tom studied her determined expression and fell silent. Tinker didn’t think she had an identity but she had a powerful one and she didn’t even know it, she wouldn’t believe him if he told her, this girl who flat out told him a Gothic horror story about herself without varnish, without self-pity, in an analytical way, not
hiding her fears and wounds but not giving in to them, certainly not asking for advice or help. She was strong even if she was absolutely wrong. Even if she didn’t have a flirtatious bone in her body. Why should she? A girl who looked like she did never had to flirt with anyone.

“I haven’t said a word about this since I came to New York,” Tinker said with astonishment in her voice, “except a little bit to Frankie. In fact, I’ve never talked this much about myself in my whole life, to anybody at all. You know everything there is to know about me now.… you must think I’m completely self-centered, with nothing on my mind but a silly runway walk, as if that could possibly be important to you or anyone with any brains—”

“I was drawing you out, didn’t you notice? Can’t you tell how interested I am?”

“I thought you were just being a good listener, so that you could lull my suspicions,” Tinker said, turning to him and unleashing her luminous glance, with the merest hint of the possibility of the chance of a smile at the corner of her lips.

“What kind of suspicions?” he asked, stumbling over the words. Oh, God, he was wrong, she did know how to flirt, Tom thought, feeling sick with swift, undiluted jealousy for every poor sucker she’d ever flirted with—there must be hundreds of them, the miserable, unworthy dickheads whatever she’d said about spending her time reading in a library. She probably didn’t even know the Dewey Decimal System. Maybe she’d made up the whole story of her life, maybe she was a psychopathic liar, oh, God, he was going insane, why would she bother to lie to him when whatever she said was fascinating, even the ankle socks?

“The suspicions,” Tinker explained, “that would be aroused when you ask me to go to your studio with you and look at your work. Isn’t that what artists do? I’ve read all about it.”

“Read about it?” he mumbled, feeling stupid.

“I’ve never met a real artist before.” Now the smile
was a reality. Tinker bent her head, took his hand in hers and looked at it carefully. “No paint under the fingernails,” she said finally, as if in regret.

“Try my pulse,” he suggested, putting two of her fingers on the inside of his wrist.

“What’s normal?” Tinker inquired earnestly. “I missed First Aid, I never had time to join the Girl Scouts, not even the Brownies.”

“You’re utterly useless, aren’t you?” He tried to sound indifferent although he could feel his pulse jumping madly under her fingertips and he was short of breath.

“Utterly,” Tinker agreed readily. “That’s exactly what I’ve been explaining to you. In a world going rapidly to hell, I have no place, not even on the runway.”

“What if I could find a use for you? Would that help?” He listened to his own words in a cloud of shocked disbelief.
He
was flirting and he didn’t do that, it wasn’t his style, he got flirted
at
, that was the way things had always been in his life.

“Now that’s the sort of question that might arouse my suspicions, if I were a suspicious type, but I’m not. I’m gullible, a sitting duck, an innocent, helpless, basically worthless little country girl from Tennessee,” Tinker said with rising delight, feeling something she didn’t quite understand shift in her inner landscape, lightening the shadows, making the phantoms disappear.

“Ah, shit, you win, just don’t stop taking my pulse.”

“Win what?” she asked.

“Me. If you want me.”

“Well, I don’t know about that yet, do I?” she asked reasonably.

“Will you come and look at my pictures?”

“When?”

“Now?”

“That seems to be as good a time as any,” Tinker said, trying to keep the surge of eagerness out of her voice.

•   •   •

“Promise me one thing,” Tom said, as he paused before turning his key in the lock of his Left Bank studio, on the top floor of an ancient building on an unfashionable street in an unpicturesque neighborhood of the sixth
arrondissement
. “Don’t say anything about the pictures. Not a word. I know you’re not experienced in making the kind of polite remarks people make when they visit a studio.”

“What about impolite remarks?”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. Not,” he added hastily, “that the pictures are good, just that people have this idea they have to be complimentary, no matter what they really think.”

“Come on and open the door. I don’t know anything about art, I don’t even know what I like, so you have nothing to worry about from me.” How come Tom had suddenly become so self-conscious, Tinker wondered. First he wanted her to see his paintings, now he didn’t want to know her reaction to them. Were all artists shrinking violets when it came right down to showing their stuff? Were all
people
, even the ones who seemed the most confident, shrinking violets about going public with their personal efforts, even to one other person?

She was busy turning this thought over in her mind when Tom snapped on the lights of a room with flaking plaster walls painted chalk white, a paint-splotched floor, and a pyramid grid of white metal overhead that supported a skylight ceiling. It was a big room, divided into various areas by old, vaguely Art-Deco screens. The largest object in the room was an enormous, sagging old couch draped in a piece of white fabric adorned with a few ancient pillows, around which three space heaters were placed. The couch stood on a ratty-looking Persian rug, and some candles on the floor evidently served as a fireplace equivalent.

“Not exactly cozy,” Tinker said with a shiver as all the whiteness popped into view. There must be an easel hidden somewhere behind one of those screens, she
thought, and a kitchen and a bathroom of some sort, and even a closet, or didn’t artists bother with closets?

“It’s perfect,” he objected, “perfect. I dreamed of a place like this all of my adult life. I never thought I’d be lucky enough to find it. It gets every bit of available light in a dark city … finding it was an incredible stroke of luck. I suppose you’re wondering why Paris? Why did I go for that old, outdated, unhip, not-happening cliché of coming to Paris to paint when I could have done it better in New York where the art scene is? But New York is where I had my advertising life and my advertising friends and my advertising success. I had to get out of town, make a clean break, throw myself into another world. For some deep-down reason—probably something I read, maybe
everything
I’d read, it was important to me to live the familiar dream, go the whole way with the experience, not duck it, but buy into the whole banal old-fashioned, outdated romantic fantasy of being a painter in Paris—that way, when I go back, if it doesn’t work out for me, at least I’ll know that I didn’t do it the safe way or halfway—”

“If you want to keep standing here talking, and putting off the inevitable, we might just as well go back to the Flore where it’s warmer,” Tinker said, laughing at the sight of his feet firmly planted at the entrance to the studio, as if to go in would be dangerous.

“Damn, you’re probably freezing. Here I’ll go turn on the space heaters,” Tom said, finally moving to the couch.

“I just want to look at the pictures and you’re stopping me,” Tinker said, unzipping her parka. The room wasn’t actually ice cold, she decided, it was the effect of that glacial white paint. She crossed the floor and began to inspect paintings that stood propped up against the walls.

“See, what it is,” Tom said nervously, “is that I don’t believe that there isn’t plenty of room to work in the area between pure representation and pure abstraction. Most artists are deconstructing, disassembling,
and certainly attempting to find some other way to work than straightforward easel painting, but I don’t give a damn what the hell is fashionable at the moment. What I’m trying to do is recapture, well, try anyway, to recapture
memory
, you know, like poetry is supposed to be emotion recollected in tranquility, I try to recapture specific important memories, certain significant moments in my life, recollected in color, in fact—”

“Shut up,” Tinker said, “you’re confusing me.” As she walked slowly, pausing before each painting, she made no judgments or comparisons, for she lacked the background to do so. She simply allowed the paintings to happen to her, she plunged her eyes into each one, reveling in the lushness, the downright unabashed gorgeousness of the colors that spilled down every inch of the canvas as well as over their wide wooden frames that were treated as an essential part of the pictures. The shapes Tom had created were mysteriously both familiar and unfamiliar. There was a singing vibrancy, an almost irresistible allure, an intense sensuous pull to each painting that made Tinker ache to touch them, to dip into them, to run her hands over their seductive, thickly painted surfaces, to find out if these marvelous, happy, dancing colors would come off on her.

“I could eat them,” she murmured to herself.

“What?” Tom asked from the doorway, where he seemed to be fastened to the floor.

“An inappropriate remark,” Tinker replied.

“What did you say, damn it!”

“I said I could eat them, damn it! Whatever happened to freedom of speech?”

Tom blushed with deep pleasure.

“I know that’s not the right thing—” Tinker began.

“It’s the perfect thing!” He crossed the room behind her and lifted her mass of hair off the collar of her parka and kissed her lightly just where the short curls of her hairline lay on the tender skin of the nape of her neck. “The
one
perfect thing—there’s only one problem,” he laughed, pulling briefly on one of the
short curls. “How will I paint the memory of this moment without actually painting you?”

“What’s stopping you from painting me?” Tinker asked, turning to face him. “Did I say I wouldn’t pose?”

“I don’t do portraits. I’ve never painted someone real, someone sitting right in front of me.”

“Why not?” she demanded, her hands on her hips.

“Painting a real person involves or at least implies, getting some sort of ‘likeness,’ and that’s a word that’s always bothered me,” Tom said, standing his ground. “It imposes a limit, with conventional boundaries, it’s something with thousands of years of history behind it, it’s one of the most ancient forms of art, it goes all the way back to drawing animals and hunters on the walls of caves and making fertility goddesses out of stone.”

“If getting a likeness isn’t fashionable because it’s been done forever, then isn’t that a good reason to do another, in your own style? I want you to put me on the wall of your cave,” Tinker informed him, with the beat of teasing but real confrontation clear in her voice. “But I don’t want you to wait to recollect me, either in tranquility or in hitting yourself on the head, like a total jerk, asking yourself why you let me get away when I was right here inviting you to paint me. I don’t want to be a ‘significant moment’ in your life, dredged up years from now, turned into a bunch of colors.”

“Oh.”

“ ‘Oh’? Is that all you have to say?” she challenged him. “You’re plenty talkative when you’re telling me what you will or won’t do in your work, how about a few words like ‘yes, thank you’ or ‘no, thank you’ when I make you an offer I wouldn’t turn down if I were you.”