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“I think we can clean it,” said Julius, glancing at me. He was a big man with olive skin and hair that shone like plastic. Each mark of the comb was visible on his head. I knew why my mother loved him, then—he was the sort of man who stayed warm when it was cold out, who kept important tickets and slips of paper inside his wallet until you needed them. The coat looked small in his hands. Julius held it a moment, looking at the matted fur. Stubbornly I shook my head. I hated that coat, and it wasn’t going to change in a minute.
To my surprise, Julius began to laugh. His wide, wet lips parted in a grin, and a loud chuckle shook him. I smiled tentatively back. Then Julius stuffed the coat into the white cylinder of the hospital garbage can. “What the hell,” he said, still laughing as the silver flap moved back into place. “What the hell.” Then he took my hand and walked me back to the parking lot.
Rory knew before he came to New York what sort of life he would have. He’d read about it in novels by hip young authors who lived there. He saw the apartment, small but high-ceilinged, a tall, sooty window with a fire escape twisting past a chemical-pink sky. Nights in frantic clubs, mornings hunched over coffee in the East Village, warming his hands on the cup, black pants, black turtleneck, pointed black boots. He’d intended to snort cocaine, but by the time he arrived, that was out. He drank instead.
lol
She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She looked slaphappy, the way she looked sometimes after a second gin and tonic. Eight months before, after a year’s meticulous planning, she had bought her own ticket to New York from Cincinnati. And this was just the beginning; Stacey hoped to ride the wave of her success around the world: Paris, Tokyo, London, Bangkok. The shelves of her tiny apartment were cluttered with maps and travel books, and whenever she met a foreigner—it made no difference from where—she would carefully copy his address into a small leatherbound book, convinced it would not be long before she was everywhere. She was the sort of girl for whom nothing happened by accident, and it pained Rory to watch her struggle when all day in Vesuvi’s studio he saw girls whose lives were accident upon accident, from their discovery in whatever shopping mall or hot dog stand to the startling, gaudy error of their faces.
At Stacey’s suggestion they took a cab to a TriBeCa bistro where Vesuvi often went. It was probably expensive, but Rory had just been paid—what the hell, he’d buy Stacey dinner. Maybe he would even call Charles to see if he was back from L.A., where he’d been styling all week for Sara Lee. Rory didn’t envy Charles his job, although he made good money; sometimes he was up half the night, using tweezers to paste sesame seeds onto hamburger buns or mixing and coloring the salty dough that looked more like ice cream in pictures than real ice cream did. Rory had been amazed to learn that in breakfast cereal shots it was standard to use Elmer’s glue instead of milk. “It’s whiter,” Charles had explained. “Also it pours more slowly and doesn’t soak the flakes.” Rory had found this disturbing in a way he still didn’t quite understand.
“So,” Anouschka said, “what places you have been?”
Stacey didn’t answer at first. She looked double-jointed in her chair, heaped like a marionette.
“I’ve been to New York,” she said.
There was a beat of silence. “New York,” Anouschka said.
Vesuvi started to laugh. He had a loud, explosive laugh that startled Rory at first. He had never heard it before. “New York!” Vesuvi cried. “That’s priceless.”
Stacey smiled. She seemed as surprised as everyone else.
Vesuvi rocked forward in his chair, so that his heavy boots pounded the floor. “I love it,” he said. “New York. What a perfect comeback.” Anouschka just stared at him.
It began to seem very funny, all of a sudden.
A chuckle passed through the group like a current. Rory found himself laughing without knowing why; it was enough for him that Vesuvi had a reason. His boss gazed at Stacey in the soft-eyed way he looked at models when a shoot was going well. “It’s a hell of a place, New York,” he said. “No?”
cute
Stacey opened the refrigerator. Rory always kept a supply of Cokes for her in there; Diet, of course, but also some regulars in case she had earned one that day and not yet rewarded herself. To his surprise, she pulled out a can of regular now.
“What the hell,” she said. “I mean, really, what difference does it make?”
Rory stared at her. She had never said anything like this before. “What about Vesuvi?” he asked, regretting it even as he spoke.
“Vesuvi won’t hire me. You know it perfectly well.”
She was smiling at him, and Rory felt as if she had peered into the lying depths of his soul. “Vesuvi doesn’t know shit,” he said, but it sounded lame even to himself.
Rory’s heart beat quickly. “So maybe it doesn’t work,” he said. “The modeling. Maybe that just won’t happen.”
He searched her face for some sign of surprise, but there was none. She watched him calmly, and for the first time Rory felt that Stacey was older than he, that her mind contained things he knew nothing of. She stood up and handed her Coke to Rory. Then she grasped the railing of the fire escape and lifted her body into a handstand. Rory held his breath, watching in alarmed amazement as the slender wand of her body swayed against the yellow sky. She had no trouble balancing, and hovered there for what seemed a long time before finally bending at the waist, lowering her feet, and standing straight again.
“If it doesn’t work,” she said, “then I’ll see the world some other way.”
The photographer is ready. The silver umbrellas are raised to gather the light. He holds a light meter to the girl’s chest. Hair and Makeup share a cigarette. There are two other models on this trip, and they watch from a distance. The sea mumbles against the dunes. The girl looks especially bare, surrounded by people who are dressed. She is still so new the camera frightens her. Jann has removed it from his tripod and is holding it near her face. “This face,” he says, pausing to glance at the rest of them. “Will you look at this face?”
They look. It is delicate as a birdcage. Jann squints behind his camera. The rhythm of the shutter mingles with the breaking waves. Catching it, the girl begins to move.
“There,” cries Jann, “that’s it!”
They look again. Bernadette looks and sees it, too, feels the others see it. In the way the light falls, there is something; in the girl’s restless hands, her sad mouth. A stillness falls. She is more than a skinny young girl on a beach; she is any young girl, sad and longhaired, watching a frail line of horizon. The camera clicks. Then the moment passes.
As they watch her go, Bernadette reaches under the table and touches him, softly at first, then more boldly. It’s amazing, she thinks, how you can just do this to people. Like stealing. Luckily, the youngest girls don’t know it.
Jann looks at her and swallows. She decides that he is younger than she thought. She sips her beer, which tastes of smoke, and does not move her hand. “What does this remind you of?” she says.
He shakes his head. Color fills his cheeks.
“Let’s go upstairs,” says Bernadette.
Bernadette looks again at the picture. Sunlight fills the girl’s hair. The sand is pale and bright as snow, the sea turquoise. She longs suddenly to be in those white dunes, as if she had never seen anything like them before. She must remind herself that she was standing just outside the shot, that she chose the girl’s bathing suit.
“Have you ever noticed how meaningful these things can look?” she asks.
Jann laughs. “Have I noticed?” he says. “It’s my shot.”
Bernadette flips the picture back among the others. Her voice goes soft. “I meant in a general sense.”
“In a general sense,” says Jann, “that’s how they work.”