Spring Collection (21 page)

“What a provoking bitch you’ve turned out to be!” he said, unable to suppress a laugh. “You come in here announcing that you don’t know anything about art, you make a quick judgment about my pictures, and now you want me to change my style at your command.”

“So what? It’s a free country. Just what are you going to do about it?”

“What do you think?” he asked, taking her by the shoulders of her parka and shaking her slowly, a few inches in each direction. “Do I have a choice? Do I want a choice? I’m going to do exactly what you want me to do.” He pulled Tinker into his arms, bent his head and kissed her full on the mouth. “That was the first thing you wanted me to do, wasn’t it?”

“Right on,” she quavered.

“And the second and the third—” He kissed her over and over again, kiss following kiss until they were trembling against each other, all but holding each other up in the center of the room. “What else,” Tom muttered between kisses, “what else do you want me to do?”

Mutely Tinker shook her head, trying to send him a message with her eyes.

“It’s up to me now?” he guessed.

She nodded, closing her eyes and holding up her lips again. “I’m shy,” she whispered.

“We’ll fall down if I kiss you again,” Tom said, picking Tinker up and carrying her over to the huge couch, where the space heaters had created a humming oasis of warm air. He put her gently on the couch, with her feet on the floor, and sat down beside her. Tinker’s eyes remained closed. “That parka …” he said out loud, “gotta lose the parka.…” With a certain amount of pulling and tugging and lifting her arms, he managed to divest her of the bulky garment, deadweight though she made herself. She lay back encased in a sweater, ski pants and boots, every inch of her long, graceful shape covered in a tight prison of black wool, stretch fabric and leather. She looked as utterly relaxed as if she were unconscious.

Tom took one of her calves in his hand, and released her heel from the boot with another, gradually easing it off her leg. He did the same to the second boot and slipped off the stirrups that held her ski pants down, so that Tinker’s feet were free.

“I don’t think I can manage anything more,” Tom told her unmoving form, and bent over her and rearranged her on the couch so that she was lying full length. Tom kicked off his shoes, lay down next to her and put Tinker on the curve of his arm, holding her comfortably and securely, lulling her into deeper relaxation with the warmth and stillness of his big body. Motionless, he listened to Tinker breathing, while he inhaled the delicate spicy smell of her hair. A change in the rhythm of her breathing made him aware that from feigning sleep Tinker had actually fallen asleep.

After a few minutes Tom snaked his arm slowly out from under her. He’d never felt more wide awake in his life and her weight, slight though it was, was numbing his arm. Moving silently, he switched off the bright, overhead lights, covered her with the parka, and carefully arranged one of his old sweaters over her feet like a lap rug. Then Tom pulled up a chair, lit all of a group of candles that sat on the floor in saucers, and observed the sleeping girl.

Minutes passed as he looked at her in a way that hadn’t been possible while she was awake, and distracting him by the play of her eyes and the range of expressions that passed over her features as she told him what her life had been like. The painter in Tom had a chance now to be as interested in Tinker as was the man.

He observed how rare the color of her hair now looked as it rose, almost cracking with life, from the fair curve of her forehead, rare and valuable, now a pale coral red he’d only seen before inside certain seashells, a hidden red, delicate and changeable, a red born of the candlelight. Her eyebrows and eyelashes had been drawn by a calligrapher of genius and the curves of her fresh, full mouth were presumptuous and triumphant, even in sleep. There was a fascinating economy to her profile. Each feature, from her rounded chin to her straight nose to the curve of her cheek, seemed to have been sculpted with precisely the necessary
amount of bone and flesh, not a tenth of a millimeter too much or too little.

Tom fell into a reverie as the time passed. This time, this hour he was spending next to Tinker as she slept, was a moment he would paint one day, he knew that already. Paint over and over. Hidden in the furniture was how he would re-create it, how he would find the way to capture the surprising, unnameable surge of emotion he felt sitting by candlelight in this white studio, guarding this precious, majestic, sleeping girl, only half-revealed in the candlelight. Now all he knew was that every moment, every detail, was important, from the hum of the heaters to the shadows her lashes made on Tinker’s cheeks. A likeness … no, his paintings wouldn’t be a likeness, they would be far more, at least to him.

What Tinker looked like was only part of the spirit of magic that had fallen over him. He wanted to give her something, wanted to more and more with each passing minute. He felt deeply connected to her in a way he couldn’t logically understand or put exactly into words. She had such suddenness to her, like a bottle of just-opened champagne, she imposed an answering suddenness in him. Perhaps it had been because he’d been able to imagine her so clearly as an exquisite little girl, leading a life of an awfulness she hadn’t understood and might never understand. Perhaps it had been the straightforward way she told him about herself, perhaps her impudent, artless personality and her ignorance of its charm, perhaps the almost childlike wonder of her kisses, the scent of her hair, even the strong shape of her shoulders under his hands.

Suddenly he stood up and soundlessly made his way to the cupboard where he kept his supplies of paint. He found a pad of white paper and a thick, soft pencil and brought them back to the chair. It was only a party trick, he thought, something he’d been able to do from an early age, a facile talent he’d never honored, but she’d wanted a likeness and that, at least, he would give her. He worked swiftly and surely, sketching
Tinker’s head and as much of her shoulders as he could see before the bulk of the parka covered her. When he’d finished the sketch he looked at it and shook his head. Yes, it was exactly like Tinker, the essence of Tinker, it could not be a sketch of any other human on earth, yet how many other artists could do the same? Or better, perhaps, with a camera? But there was something he could add that a camera couldn’t, Tom realized, and he drew a large heart around the entire sketch. It was five or six weeks early, but why the hell not? “For my Valentine,” he inscribed under the heart, and he was about to sign his name when he found that he wanted, desperately wanted, to add more words. “I love you,” he wrote.

“I’ll be damned,” he said out loud in sheer surprise. “Where did
that
come from?” Tom Strauss stood up and began to pace around his studio. In this familiar, beloved, safe space he felt as unanchored as a ship tossing on a heavy sea, a ship suddenly set adrift.
“Where
did that come from?” he repeated to himself as he walked. Finally he stopped and stood clutching a window frame, gazing out of the window at the chimney pots of Paris, half-visible in the light of the moon. His heart steadied.
He meant it, wherever it came from
, he realized. Wherever it led him, he’d follow. Too overcome by emotion to even think of sleep, yet so surprised that he didn’t know what else to do, he went over to the couch where Tinker slept and lay down on the rug as close to the couch as possible, looking up through the grid of the skylight at the new horizon that had opened to him.

“Why are you smiling to yourself?” Tinker asked.

“I—I didn’t hear you wake up.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“I’m not sure, maybe an hour, maybe more,” he said, sitting up on the floor.

“Thank you for covering me up,” Tinker said, emerging from the parka and stretching lazily. “It must have been jet lag.”

“How do you feel?” he asked anxiously.

“As if I’ve been asleep for days. Born this instant, like a chick right out of the egg.”

“You mean you don’t remember anything?”

“Hmmm … no,” she said in judicious wonder. “Dear me … goodness, gracious.… I just remember looking at your pictures, and then, after that … it’s all a blank. Say, who took my boots off?”

“The Tooth Fairy,” Tom said. He sat down on the couch, scooped her into his arms and kissed her. “Does that bring back anything?”

“I’m not sure … barely … just a little.” She seemed doubtful.

“Do you like it?” he asked and kissed her again, beginning to quiver. He should never have let her go to sleep, he thought, never have let her out of his arms, her emotions weren’t involved like his. And yet, if she hadn’t slept, would he have understood so quickly how he felt about her?

“Like it? Oh, yes,” Tinker answered. “I like it fine.”

“Are you still shy?”

“Ummm,” Tinker growled in disbelief, “did I actually say that?”

“Don’t you remember
anything
?”

“Well … maybe … I can’t really say for sure.” She gave him a small, infinitely provocative smile, signaling that she was prepared to toy with him until she wearied of the game. She was falling back on flirtation, reaching automatically for a technique that had worked in the past, Tom thought, but he wouldn’t let her. He believed in her shyness and he knew that only shock therapy could drive it away.

“I made something for you,” Tom told Tinker, pulling away purposefully and reaching down for the sketch pad he’d left on the rug. “It’s a likeness,” he said, giving it to her and holding up a candle so that she could see it clearly.

“Oh,” said Tinker, in surprise. Then, she bent her head so that she could read his words in the candlelight. “Oh,” she said again, in a changed voice, a tiny flame
of a voice, an incandescent voice. “Do you mean it, Tom?”

“Yes, God help me.”

Tinker sat silently a moment, her head still bent, while he held his breath. Finally he put the candle and the sketch pad back on the rug and with his finger, lifted her chin and tilted her head toward him. His heart lurched when he saw the tears welling in her eyes.

“I know you’re shy, but help me out here,” Tom said. “Is this good news?”

Tinker nodded slightly and the trembling tears escaped her eyes and started down her cheeks.

“Do you like me?” he asked her. First she shook her head and then nodded vigorously. “You don’t
just
like me, you like me a lot?” he interpreted. She nodded even more fiercely. “You might … possibly … love me?” he asked so softly that if she didn’t want to answer she could pretend she hadn’t heard. Tinker forced herself to look him in the eyes and inclined her head in a tiny, single inclination of her head, a mute but unmistakable avowal. Then, galvanized, she threw her arms around his neck with all her strength and pulled him down so that they lay sprawled in a tumble. She scrambled on top of him and kissed Tom vehemently all over his face and his neck. “Here and here and here,” she said voraciously, made suddenly savage by the need to imprint every available inch of him with her lips, until he started to laugh because she was tickling his ears and her elbows were sticking into his chest.

“Hold off,” he gasped, catching her hands in his. “Where do we go from here? Please, Tinker, darling Tinker,
talk
to me. I know you can, when you’re in the mood, you’ve talked before.”

“Where would you normally go?” she asked.

“There’s nothing normal about this. I’ve just fallen in love for the first time in my life.”

“Me too.”

“You finally said it,” he cried in jubilation.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You just this second said you were in love with me,” Tom insisted.

“No I didn’t. You jumped to a conclusion. I, Tinker Grant, am in love with you, Tom Strauss.
Now
I’ve said it. Ouff … I feel better now.”

“Say it again!”

“Make me,” she challenged him.

“Oh, you’re asking for it, you know that, don’t you?”

“Is that a threat? Or a promise?” she crooned.

“Oh, Tinker, you’re going to drive me mad, aren’t you?”

“Time will tell,” she answered, pulling off her sweater. “Time will soon tell,” she repeated, as she slithered out of her ski pants and lay smiling in all her supremely young and tender beauty on the white couch.

Holding his breath, Tom touched his fingertip to the faint rose of one nipple and felt it rise immediately. Mad, utterly mad, he thought to himself as he threw off his clothes. She would make him mad and she would make him whole and she would be everything in the world to him.

F
rankie is in a rage,” April confided to Maude Callender when they encountered each other at the lobby newsstand. “Just because Tinker didn’t sleep here last night she’s acting like it’s my fault—since when I am supposed to be in charge of bed check?”

“When did you see Tinker last?” Maude asked with interest.

“Last night at dinner. Then she took off alone with one of the guys and Jordan and I went to another club and danced for a few hours. Now Jordan’s gone off too and I’ve been left on my lonesome. Frankie’s dragging me to the Louvre after lunch, she says we haven’t been exposed to any French culture yet. Exposed! She sounds like my grandmother with Beethoven when I was twelve. She didn’t want to listen when I told her there must be more fun things to do in Paris than look at a lot of pictures. Frankie’s turned into a tyrant, and I’m her only target.”

“Come have lunch with me instead,” Maude suggested. “I’ll show you the real Paris, or a small slice of it, anyway. I’ve lived here on and off for years and it’s taken that long to scratch the surface of this city. You’d be surprised how little time I’ve spent in the Louvre.”

“Thanks, Maude, you’re the answer to a prayer. I’ll leave Frankie a message. Meet you down here in five minutes, okay?”

“Perfect.” And it was perfect, Maude thought.
She’d almost despaired of getting one of the girls alone without their omnipresent minder, Miss Severino. The first rule of any interviewer’s working life is “get rid of the minder.” It doesn’t matter if the murder is an official PR rep, a designated chaperone or an amateur friend, sister or mother, even a child. The presence of any third person changes the dynamics of an interview. The interviewer can’t ask questions as freely and the person being interviewed never responds as openly. The official interview atmosphere never progresses into a free-wheeling conversation. Both parties consciously or unconsciously censor themselves even if all the minder does is sit in a corner, eyes downcast, pretending to read a magazine.