Spring Collection (9 page)

Marco cursed, realizing that the door was still wide open and he was lying on the bed with his trousers open and his limp penis hanging down. He hastened to make himself presentable and hurried to the entry, where he was stopped by the butler who had taken his scarf. In the few seconds that it took the man to find it, Marco heard Peaches’ laugh ring out from the room where she was again entertaining her guests.

P
ossibly she ought to feel guilty about sending Frankie off with such little notice, Justine told herself, but on the other hand, shipping her off to Paris with a new wardrobe and a whirlwind of activity ahead of her was probably the sort of shock therapy Frankie needed to get her out of the slump she’d been in ever since her divorce.

Yes, Justine thought, as she prowled restlessly from her office to the main booking room, it was high time to take action. Who knows where that girl would end up if somebody didn’t take care of her? Actually she should have done something like this a year ago, but no exceptional opportunity had presented itself. She’d exhausted her powers of suggestion and canny advice, powers that had been honed by years of whipping raw girls into shape. Then she’d degenerated into mere nagging, and even that didn’t work on a person who was so maddeningly stubborn, planted so squarely on those gigantic feet she was so proud of, operating from a center of gravity in her solar plexus so powerful that you could almost see it. Martha Graham had a lot to answer for, she thought darkly.

Justine kicked off her shoes and lay back on the couch in her office, putting her feet up in a position that should make her feel pleasantly relaxed. She breathed deeply, Pilates style, for a few minutes, and then, with an angry shake of her head, started picking at her nail polish, something she hadn’t done in twenty years.
Frankie really got her goat, she thought, her frown deepening. She hated to see somebody piss herself away! There was no other way to put it, not when she considered all the natural advantages Frankie brought to the party.

She was such a crazily terrific-looking creature, with a magnificent body that she was well on her way to treating as if she were its evil twin sister. From the day she’d first walked on a sidewalk with Frankie, Justine realized that the girl never even noticed how men turned to look after her as she swept by with her swift and sinuous step, men who were clearly intrigued and attracted by the brief glimpse they’d caught of her flashing vitality, by the haughtiness of her carriage, by the cloak of unconventionality that she seemed born to wear. Damn the girl, she escaped any category. Still and all, Justine admitted to herself, Frankie did hold herself pulled up high in a dancer’s stance, her head tilted on her fine, graceful neck in a way that implied that she held a license for arrogance. Every morning that infernal creature spent twenty minutes applying eye makeup that could be seen from the second balcony of any theatre, and then she’d pile her long brown hair on top of her head and skewer it with two tortoiseshell pins in five seconds flat, without even the aid of a mirror.

If Frankie’d been a model, Justine told herself, she would have fired her ass after she put on the first two pounds. To say nothing of the dogged way she managed to conceal the incalculable asset of her magnificent head of hair! Thank God she couldn’t take the veil and hide her arrestingly dramatic face. Not another beautiful face, not another pretty face, thank God, but something much more interesting, a face full of living and fun and drama, although Frankie’d never admit that there was anything special about her, the pigheaded bitch! Frankie was suffering from a case of terminal contemporary dance, that was her problem. Didn’t she know that a well-paid, highly professional woman who got herself up as if she were going to a
dance rehearsal hall every day of her working life should probably be in therapy? Oh, to hell with her, Frankie wasn’t her problem.

Justine listened to the noises in the booking center that filtered through her open office door. Everyone seemed to be on the phone, as usual, but there was a quality of diminished attention, as if they were all working by rote, instead of keeping themselves alert to every future possibility concealed in their conversations, like Indian scouts in old movies listening to the humming of the railroad tracks.

As she’d impressed on them many times, if they could tell her why any given girl
hadn’t
been booked she could learn as much about the future as she could from knowing who was suddenly in demand. She depended on them for that kind of information. Was it a post-holiday letdown? No agency could afford that. Fashion photography was a round-the-year business. But she didn’t feel in the mood to go and investigate. Oh, to hell with them too, the bookers weren’t her problem.

She felt … anxiety … as if something bad were waiting to happen, which made no sense at all. She should be feeling enormous relief, Justine told herself. She’d been waiting for the day when the girls would leave for France, poised in a paralyzed combination of the instincts of flight and fight, determined to escape the snare that had been set for her. But even with Frankie, the girls, and the team from
Zing
all safely aloft, she still felt that nothing had been resolved. Maybe
that
was the problem? In any case, Frankie’s absence left the office feeling desolate. Knowing that she was there to talk to about business, to gossip with about anyone in complete confidence … yes, she’d come to rely on that feisty, upbeat presence.

What if Necker were to come to New York and walk in on her?

Damn! Justine found herself on her feet, her heart pounding, as if he’d just appeared in the doorway. This was exactly the kind of crazy thought that had awakened her, sweating, in the middle of the night for the
past three nights. She closed her office door firmly and made herself sit down behind her impressive desk, the one place in the world where she felt most in a position of command. She must think this through, Justine informed herself sternly, or she’d become a victim to her growing apprehension. What, after all, had she accomplished in not going to Paris? She’d merely postponed events. She was too based in reality not to admit that eventually a confrontation with Necker was inevitable. She was reacting, damn it, instead of acting, and that ran contrary to the way she wanted to live her life.

Normally, that is. Normally she didn’t hide, she spoke her mind clearly, she made decisions without waffling. She liked to think of herself as a decisive woman, a late-twentieth-century working woman who was fully in charge of her destiny.

Yet one of the pillars on which her life was based had been far from normal, no matter how you looked at it, Justine brooded. When she was thirteen, as soon as she’d had her first period, her mother had told her that the father she’d always believed had been killed in Vietnam, was still alive.

“He was my first lover, and he left me in the lurch as soon as I found out I was pregnant with you. I’ve never seen or heard from him again. I’m forced to tell you this, Justine, now that you’ve become a woman, physically capable of getting pregnant. It’s essential for you to know what every male, no matter how you think you love him or he loves you, can do to you, Justine. You must never, ever forget the lesson I had to learn.”

“But who is my father?”
she had asked her mother, over and over. “What was he like? How could he leave you like that? How did you meet him? How long did you know him?” Endless questions until she finally realized, with painful frustration, that her mother never intended to give her any information, no matter how many times she insisted that she had a right to know something,
anything
, about her father.

“Nothing about that person is important, darling,”
Helena Loring had invariably responded to her questions, “except for the fact of
what he did
to me. If you’d been a boy, I wouldn’t have owed it to you to say a single word about the matter. It’s a closed subject, Justine, I’ve earned the right to keep it private.”

No question about it, Justine brooded, her mother had been a formidable woman, quite apart from her stubborn silence. Eventually, as Justine grew older, Helena Loring had been willing to tell more of her own story. Justine learned how her mother had refused to fall apart when she found herself alone and pregnant. She’d cleaned out the savings account she’d built up through years of summer jobs and birthday presents and she’d gone to have her baby in a middle-sized city outside of Chicago where no one knew her. Out of a massive streak of independence, she’d concealed Justine’s birth from her own parents until a few weeks after it took place. Then, wrapped in a sense of rightness, Helena Loring had told them only that although she’d made a mistake, she was determined to bring up her child on her own.

In less than three weeks after Justine’s birth she’d found a kind, capable woman to take care of her infant and secured a job as a salesgirl in the best local department store. Helena Loring had worked so single-mindedly that she rose rapidly to assistant buyer, eventually to department manager and finally to executive vice-president of the entire store.

Her mother had loved her dearly, Justine knew, loved her exclusively, for she’d never responded to the few men who dared to try to get to know her better. She had a circle of friends, couples and single women, but they were all deftly made to understand that she had been so devastated by the death of her husband that she never wanted to marry again.

“Risk.” Justine said the word to herself, feeling the familiar, complicated twist of emotions it always gave her. Her mother had been risk-adverse with her emotions, as if to expose them to anyone but her daughter, and that only briefly, would be to see her life lying
about her in ruins. Justine’s grandparents had both died before she was ten, and there had been no other family in her life. She’d been popular in school but she’d never confided a word of the story of her parentage to a single friend, knowing that there was no one she could trust with this dangerous knowledge in a gossip-loving circle in which everyone knew everyone else. In high school it was soon understood that the class beauty, Justine Loring, never granted any boy more than a peck on the cheek, although she never lacked for constant male attention.

At seventeen Justine had been discovered by a scout for Wilhelmina and when she moved to New York she brought with her years of her mother’s warnings firmly embedded in her consciousness. Yet, in her natural curiosity, she’d dared to have affairs, the first of which had only confirmed her mother’s words. Several times in her life Justine had come close to falling in love, but every relationship had withered before it became serious. For one reason or another the songs of summer never carried over into autumn. There were always plenty of men in her life, but they took a distant second place to her agency.

When Justine entered her thirties, she’d briefly considered psychotherapy, but the whole process seemed unthinkably time-consuming, particularly when she considered the low rate of success it seemed to have among her friends. She’d even flirted with the frivolous notion of marrying and divorcing the next suitable man who asked her, just to get the necessary ritual over with. A divorcee wouldn’t have to endure the unspoken curiosity about why she’d never married that she sensed rightly in everyone she met. However, her common sense and pride held her back; she didn’t need the explanation of divorce to make her seem like a whole person to herself. Let people speculate about her—she didn’t give a damn. Certainly her mother’s experience had given her a one-sided view of the male gender, but it seemed to Justine, as she observed the messy love entanglements of her models, that men were
not
to be
counted on, that her mother hadn’t been wrong, that the expression “a good man” was an oxymoron.

Several months earlier, when her mother found out that she had only a short time to live, she’d called Justine home and told her that Jacques Necker was her father.

“Why are you telling me
now
? I’m thirty-four, for God’s sake,” Justine had asked, incredulous and suddenly angry. “I don’t need a stranger for a father. I grew up without one, remember? And why on earth did you wait so long, Mother—over twenty years!—if you planned to tell me someday?”

“I never intended to tell you, darling. You didn’t need to know and he doesn’t
deserve
to know. I had no idea what had happened to him until he became so successful that there was no way to avoid reading about him. When he married, I waited for him to have children. As the years went by, I realized that he was childless. Now that I’m staring at the end of my time, things look different to me. I realize how desperately much I’ve missed because of that man. He took my life away from me, Justine, and I find that I don’t believe there’s going to be anything after this is over. So I decided to take my revenge. It’s the only thing that gives me any comfort.”

“What revenge, Mother, for heaven’s sake?”

“The scrapbooks,” her mother had replied, with a strange smile of grim contentment that Justine didn’t recognize.

“The scrapbooks? The ones … the scrapbooks you’ve made of me?”

“Yes. All of them, starting with the picture they took in the delivery room the minute you were born. All the pictures, Justine, pictures of me giving you your bath when you were tiny, pictures of your first birthday party, pictures in kindergarten, in high school, in ballet class, in the school plays, tear sheets of all your most successful modeling jobs, pictures of your growth from a beautiful baby to a beautiful woman—he has all the scrapbooks now. I won’t need them anymore.”

“Why!!”

“So he’ll realize exactly what he’s missed in his life—there was no other way for him to know. So he’ll suffer, oh, not as much as he made me suffer, but almost enough to satisfy me. Isn’t that obvious?”

“But what—what will he do?” she asked, stunned by her mother’s tone of utterly ruthless victory, a note she’d never heard before from her mother’s lips.

“Darling Justine, what can he do? He can’t hurt you or help you. You’ve made yourself independent of a man, just as I did. But I know how he’ll
feel
and that’s enough to let me die in peace.” And her mother had fallen silent, exhausted but still smiling an uncannily happy smile of frozen triumph. From that time on Helena Loring turned inward, speaking less and less, but a smile of unmistakable fulfillment reappeared faintly on her lips many times as Justine watched over her until she died several days later.