Spring Collection (50 page)

“No. I admit … it wasn’t only … I suppose … I guess … I must have wanted to be with you,” he muttered, woodenly.

“All that while I was falling more and more in love with you, and you speak as if you noticed
nothing
. Nothing! No wonder you don’t have any friends. You never even tried to kiss me. I’ll never forgive you for that, never!”

“Damn it, Jordan! I didn’t
dare to kiss you
, you’re so
young,”
Necker exclaimed, his composure deserting him entirely. “You take my breath away! You entrance me! You’re a gala, every minute with you is a celebration, for God’s sake! You’re the most ravishing, fascinating, original woman I’ve ever met, but you’re so terribly damn
young
. Ask yourself how it would have seemed if I’d tried to kiss you in the context of the contest, when I was the one to decide the winner?”

“So you
were
thinking about it, at least?”

“All the time
. Even when I was talking about what a shit I was, I was thinking, in the back of my mind, about kissing you, which makes it worse! Don’t you see that? Yes, I wanted to talk about Justine, but I wanted to talk about myself too, and about you, and, oh about everything.…”

“How shameless of you,” Jordan said, smiling for the first time. “How imprudent. But now the contest’s over. Now you’re not even a shit, except retroactively.”

“No, Jordan, it’s impossible, just as impossible now as it was before.”

“How can it be impossible—if I entrance you?” she asked with a proud lift of her superb little head.

“Because, oh, Christ, Jordan, don’t you realize I’m fifty-three, and you’re what? Twenty-two. That’s thirty-one years younger than I am—thirty-one reasons why we can’t be in love.”

“Is there some law that says so?”

“There should be!” Necker answered fiercely,
pounding the polished wood of the table. “It wouldn’t work out, Jordan, no matter how delicious it could be in the beginning, don’t think I haven’t had these same fantasies too … you and me together … but I keep coming back to reality. Too much separates us, I’ve lived too long. You’ve lived too little. That gulf of experience between us would grow more and more important once the initial thrill was gone.”

“It must be wonderful to have the gift of seeing into the future,” she said, shaking her head in wonder that she could love someone with such an unromantic turn of mind. “And to have such a pessimistic view of it. What if the initial thrill grew better in time? What if the gulf narrowed? That’s been known to happen.”

“I’m merely trying to be
realistic
. One of us has to be! We have such different expectations of life. I’ve lived the most important years of mine, I’m set in my ways, I’m known as a confirmed hermit, for God’s sake! I’ve grown used to being essentially
alone
with my business, my routines and my interests. It’s not a wide existence but I’ve been satisfied with it. But you! My God, Jordan, you’re just beginning a wonderful adventure, the whole world is opening up for you, there isn’t any way to know how high you’ll fly. Why would you want to settle for a man like me?”

“Damned if I know, now that you’ve told me what a miserable old creep you are, but unfortunately I still do. Tell me something,” Jordan asked, curling the corners of her lips provokingly, “this little hermit’s life of yours, is that going to seem so safe and cozy when you dream about what you might have had with me?”

“Would being with me be exciting and fulfilling enough for you, when you’d realize what you’d missed, what you’d thrown away?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Jordan, I simply don’t have the right to you. I can’t make love to you unless I marry you.”

“Have I said anything about
marriage
?” she pounced, furiously. “Did I propose to you without realizing it, did they just declare a new leap year?”

“Do you think I’d let you be involved with me
without
marriage? Do you think I’d ever allow myself to look like one of those rich old men who buys himself a beautiful young mistress? And how could I dream of putting you in the position of looking like a girl who plotted successfully to marry money?”

“Now you’re thinking like Peaches Wilcox! You make me sick! This is you, Jacques, and me, Jordan, not two people your society friends gossip about at lunch.”

“But they would, ferociously. You’d never, never be free of the gossip, the envy, the peeking around corners to see if we were still happy. You’d always be suspect, you’d be considered a successful gold digger, there isn’t a hostess in this city who’d trust you.”

“Don’t you really mean that there isn’t a hostess who’d invite me?”

“On the contrary. You’d be a wild social success, for all the wrong reasons—curiosity, malice, a constant barrage of inspection as to whether you were doing it right or doing it wrong.”

“I’ve been dealing with that all my life, or have you forgotten? I can handle it. Only the surroundings would be different, and the manners. And somehow, I think I’d manage to find a real friend here and there. I didn’t grow up an Army brat for nothing.”

“You have an answer for everything,” Necker said. “But what about children?”

“What about them?”

“You’d want children, wouldn’t you?”

“Eventually, yes. Not as many as Charlie Chaplin and Oona O’Neill, but a few.”

“And what kind of life would they have?”

“The best we could give them, nothing’s guaranteed. Unless … of course … unless you’d hate to have kids.”

“How do I know? My only child happens to be a thirty-four-year-old woman I’d never seen in the flesh until yesterday.”

“Let’s forget the kid problem, then. Why worry about something that can’t happen unless we get married
first?” she asked, with a glint of victory in her voice. How many more objections would he raise, she wondered, before he realized that love was too rare to turn his back on it?

“Jordan, you have a way of brushing aside reality that amazes me.”

“You mean because I haven’t brought up the racial problem?”

“What?”

“The racial problem,” she repeated, implacably.

“Jesus … your parents … as if I weren’t too old, I’m also the wrong race.”

“That’s
the racial problem?”

“What else could it be?” he asked, puzzled.

“You can be as oblivious to reality as I can, when you want to be, Jacques. If you don’t even recognize it, then there isn’t any racial problem, as far as I’m concerned. My parents would come to appreciate you … eventually … so long as you didn’t try to call my father ‘Dad.’ I’m leaving now. Just promise me one thing, think about everything we’ve talked about. That’s all I ask. Think about it tonight. Sleep on it. And remember, you haven’t managed to say you’re not in love with me and that’s the only thing that matters.”

Jordan rose, in a liquid movement, and vanished rapidly from the Ritz Bar, taking all the magic in the room with her.

I
found that I was slipping into my usual airborne reverie of where-and-whither almost as soon as we took off for New York in GN’s 727 private jet.

Could it really be only a little more than two weeks since we’d left New York for the Lombardi spring collection? I actually had to count from one date to another on my fingers, just to make sure, because that trip, so much of which had been interrupted by Maude Callender’s interrogation on the habits of models, seemed to have taken place an eon ago. In another world. On another level of existence.

Looked at from one point of view, the last two weeks had been like an extended, real-life episode of the “Love Boat.” I’ve watched a few cable reruns of that show, when I needed to choose between mindless entertainment or brooding myself to death. At the beginning of the hour a whole bunch of strangers meet, and by the end of the show, they’ve all paired off. I guess life no longer imitates art, but TV, except that our version hasn’t worked out as neatly as I remember it.

Did people on the “Love Boat” ever get off at a port and never get back on? That’s what’s happened to Tinker. She came to the hotel yesterday afternoon and informed Justine and me that she would be staying on in Paris. Maybe, just
maybe
, drug-induced freak-outs are good for some people, the way electroshock therapy has come back into use for clinical depression, but the
experience with Goddess had left Tinker feeling, in her own words, “born yesterday.”

Looking happier and more relaxed than we’d ever seen her, Tinker told us that she wasn’t sure if she’d ever model again, but that if she did, it wouldn’t be in any continuation of her search for identity, but solely for the bucks.

“I’m over the proving-who-I-am-by-winning thing,” she said. “The beauty contests, the contest for my mother’s affection, the runway walk contest, the contest for Marco’s attention, the contest for the Lombardi contract and, God knows,
any
kind of dance contest. I know you two probably think I’m just saying that to put up a good front, because I didn’t win, but you’ve got to believe me, something snapped—not just my mind—last night, and I felt a load of gigantic pressure just blow away, pressure I hadn’t even realized I was under. Maybe falling on my face in public was exactly what it took.”

“Then what are you going to do with yourself?” Justine asked her.

“I’m going to stay here, get myself a studio apartment, or even live in some little hotel if I can’t find anything else. I’m in love with Tom but living with him … no, that’s over for now. I fell into it much too quickly because I needed him. I adore Tom but I’m not ready to get into a whole domestic thing, and now that the spring collection’s over, that’s what it would turn into. I didn’t come to Paris to play house and sit around watching him paint, and I don’t believe he’d really want me to … he’s into a different trip. Another thing, maybe you haven’t noticed, but he can be awfully possessive. Possibly that’s going to work out, possibly not, but right now I’m giving myself time to simply find out what
I
need, as opposed to what other people expect of me. Even Tom, or
especially
Tom.”

Under Tinker’s bright glance there was a resonance that had a density rare in an eighteen-year-old. “I have that hundred thousand dollars, minus your commission, from doing the show—or rather from not doing
it—and the way I plan to live, it should last a long time … years and years if I want it to. I’m going to read and go to galleries and walk all over Paris and maybe learn French … oh, there’s so much I don’t know! Damn-near everything. I can’t wait to find out who I am when my looks don’t matter to anyone, even to me.”

Justine and I exchanged glances, deciding in an instant, that it would be plain and simply wrong to tell Tinker about the enormous clamor there was for her back in New York.

“Remember, Tinker,” Justine contented herself with saying, “if you get restless or bored or need money, you can always pick up a phone and call me collect and I’ll get you a job right here. You don’t have to make any final decision about working for a long time. You’re still so young. Who knows, maybe you’ll want to go to college, you’ve got a million options.”

“That’s exactly why I’m going to do nothing,” Tinker said with the smile that had sent both of us reeling around the bend with excitement about her potential. At that moment it suddenly occurred to me that her face had lost its chameleon quality. It no longer was the perfect blank canvas, ready to be painted, with which she’d left New York.

Whoever Tinker Osborn was, she was definitely somebody with a mind of her own, a mind that would be interesting to watch as it developed.

So we’d lost Tinker, at least for now, but we’d kept April, I thought. She’d left New York an underappreciated Minnesota ice-princess and now she was returning in triumph, boasting the freshest, most original look in the world of modeling, a look that makes all the other blonds—even Elle and Claudia and Karen—who still cling to their long manes, look like dated versions of each other. Sure, men will always go for surrealistically big and prodigiously beautiful blonds, clonelike, glorious Amazons, with hair growing down to the crack of the ass, but April will intrigue and fascinate all the sexes with the element of wildness she’d tapped into.

I’m willing to bet that April has a lot more metamorphosing to do, that this is only the first new version of April Nyquist, that there’ll be change after change in the face and attitude and version of sexuality she’ll present to the world. Somehow she’ll escape the frozen fetishism of the camera yet, because of the relentless classicism of her features, there’s no way she can fuck up or be fucked up. How do I know? I don’t
know
—as some great mind once summed up Hollywood, “nobody knows anything”—but looking at her, I get a strong feeling about her future, and I’ve learned to trust my feelings more than my more logical thought processes. Remember when I thought that I couldn’t stand Mike?

I didn’t have to lean on my judgment when it came to April’s future with Maude. April was deeply engaged in a giggly, whispered exchange with a dark-haired French beauty, a startlingly sultry little piece named Kitten, whom April had managed to pick up somewhere, somehow, after the Lombardi show. She’d simply brought her along to hitch a ride to New York, where Kitten had an appointment to meet Katie Ford, and nobody’d asked any questions. Maude was sitting alone, as far away from them as possible, working steadily on her laptop. Personally I’d rather have flown commercial than punish myself that way. I felt truly sorry for her, but of course it was bound to happen. Still and all—so soon?

I looked around the interior of the jet with unjaded wonder. I’d never imagined that somewhere there had to be someone who understood how to design aircraft seating. Our various lush swivel chairs were a combination of love seat and Barcalounger that gave comfort a new meaning. I was having such a delicious time with my thoughts that I had to fight to keep myself from drifting off, as Jordan had done, falling instantly asleep as the jet left the airport. I wasn’t surprised, not after last night.

Jordan had been quiet as we all packed after a final dinner at the Relais Plaza, where we’d amused
ourselves by the sight of Peaches Wilcox, brilliant, beyond-bejeweled and looking as bloomingly rejuvenated as a vampire after a particularly tasty feast. Last night she’d reigned over three large tables of her guests, the cream of the small clan of American socialites who are rich enough to order from the couture. Marco, whose new affiliation had been fully explained to Justine by her father, glued himself to her side all through the meal, attentive, adoring, hanging on every word she said; the only thing missing were his leg irons and handcuffs, which, I assumed, had been left in her suite.