“I mean it this time.” Fleur moaned. “I’m never, never going out again.”
Belinda laughed and poured herself a Tab.
Belinda gradually got rid of the antiques in their apartment and decorated it in a starkly contemporary style, as different from the house on the Rue de la Bienfaisance as she could make it. Buff suede covered the living room walls. A chrome and glass Mies van der Rohe table sat in front of the pit sofa, which had black and brown graphic pillows. Fleur didn’t tell Belinda she liked the antiques better. She especially hated the long living room wall decorated with window-sized enlargements of her own face. Looking at them made her feel creepy. It was as if someone else had taken up residence in her body, and the makeup and clothes formed a thick shell hiding the real person beneath. Except she didn’t know who that person was.
Alexi promised he’d come to New York in February. He’d canceled two other trips to the city, but this time he swore nothing would keep him away. As the day approached, she struggled to hide her excitement from Belinda, but just hours before his plane was supposed to land, the phone rang in the apartment.
“Chérie,” Alexi said, as foreboding curled in her stomach. “I’ve had an emergency. It’s impossible for me to leave Paris now.”
“But you promised! It’s been more than a year.”
“Once again I have failed you. If only…” She knew what he was going to say. “If only your mother would let you come to Paris. But we both know she will forbid it, and I won’t go against her wishes. Hélas, she uses you to hurt me.”
Fleur wouldn’t betray Belinda by agreeing. As she tried to swallow her disappointment, she heard high heels tapping down the hallway. A moment later, Belinda’s bedroom door clicked shut.
Belinda settled on the edge of her bed and closed her eyes. He was canceling on Fleur again, just as he’d done twice before. Fleur would be heartbroken and resentful, not at Alexi but at her. His strategy was brilliant. Make it Belinda’s fault that father and daughter couldn’t be together.
Fleur had held out against Alexi’s charms longer than Belinda had expected, and even now, she maintained at least a trace of reserve with him. Alexi didn’t like that, which was why he called her several times a week, why he sent lavish gifts calculated to make her feel his presence, and why he’d stayed away for the past year. Any moment now, Fleur would knock on her bedroom door and beg for permission to fly to Paris to see him. Belinda would refuse. Fleur would be resentful and withdraw into herself. Although she wouldn’t say it out loud, she saw her mother as neurotic and jealous. But Belinda had to keep Fleur in New York where she could protect her. If only she could explain why it was so necessary without offering up the truth.
Your father—who, by the way, isn’t your father—is seducing you.
Fleur would never believe it.
“Further to the right, sweetheart.”
Fleur tipped her head and smiled into the camera. Her neck hurt, and she had cramps, but Cinderella hadn’t whined at the ball just because her glass slippers pinched.
“That’s beautiful, honey. Perfect. A little more teeth. Amazing.”
She sat on a stool in front of a small table with a mirrored top, which was elevated like an easel to reflect the light. The open neck of her champagne silk blouse revealed a magnificent string of square-cut emeralds. Summer had arrived, and it was a blistering hot New York afternoon. Out of camera range, she wore cutoffs and pink rubber shower thongs.
“Fix her eyebrows,” the photographer said.
The makeup man handed her a tiny comb, then dabbed at her nose with a small, clean sponge. She leaned over her reflection and combed her thick brows back into place. She used to regard things like eyebrow combs as weird, but she no longer thought about it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Chris Malino, the photographer’s assistant. With his shaggy, sandy hair and open, friendly face, he wasn’t nearly as good-looking as the male models she worked with, but she liked him a lot better. He was taking filmmaking classes at NYU, and the last time they’d worked together, he’d talked to her about Russian films. She wished he’d ask her out, but none of the guys she liked ever got up the nerve. Her only dates were with older men, celebrities in their twenties that Belinda and Gretchen wanted her to be seen with at some important event. She was eighteen years old, and she’d never had a real date.
Nancy, the stylist on the shoot, adjusted one of the clothespins on the back of Fleur’s blouse so it better fit her smaller breasts. Then she checked the piece of Scotch Tape she’d stuck to Fleur’s neck to raise the height of the emerald necklace. Fleur had come to think of the beautiful clothes on magazine pages as false-fronted buildings on a movie set.
“I’ve got three rolls on the emeralds,” the photographer said not long after. “Let’s take a break.”
Fleur stepped around Nancy’s ironing board and changed into her own open-necked gauze shirt. Chris was shifting the backdrop. She poured a cup of coffee and wandered over to Belinda, who was studying a magazine ad.
Her mother had changed so much since they’d come to New York a little over two and a half years ago. The quiet, nervous gestures had disappeared. She was more confident. Prettier, too—tan and healthy from weekends at the Long Island beach house they rented. Today she wore a Gatsby white tank top and matching skirt with mulberry kid sandals and a slim gold ankle bracelet.
“Look at her skin.” Belinda tapped her fingernail against the page. “She doesn’t have pores. Photos like this make me feel forty breathing hard down my neck.”
Fleur gazed more closely at model in the ad for an expensive cosmetics line. “That’s Annie Holman. Remember the Bill Blass layout Annie and I did together a couple of months ago?”
Belinda had trouble remembering anyone who wasn’t already famous, and she shook her head.
“Mother, Annie Holman is thirteen years old!”
Belinda gave a weak laugh. “It’s no wonder every woman in this country over thirty is depressed. We’re competing with children.”
Fleur hoped women didn’t feel that way when they looked at her photographs. She hated the idea that she was earning eight hundred dollars an hour making people feel bad.
Belinda went off to the bathroom. Fleur got up her nerve and approached Chris, who’d just finished hanging the backdrop. “So…How’s school going?” Smile, stupid. And don’t be so big.
“Same old stuff.”
She could tell he was trying to act casual, as if she were just another girl in one of his classes and not the Glitter Baby. She liked that.
“I’m working on a new film, though,” he said.
“Really? Tell me about it.” She eased herself into a folding chair. It creaked as she sat.
He started to talk, and before long, he got so caught up in what he was saying that he forgot to be intimidated by her.
“It’s so interesting,” she said.
He stuck his thumb into the pocket of his jeans, then pulled it back out again. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times. “Do you want to…I mean, I’ll understand if you’ve got other things going on. I know you have a lot of guys asking you out, and—”
“I don’t.” She hopped up from the chair. “I know everybody thinks I do—that everybody’s asking me out. But it’s not true.”
He picked up a light meter and toyed with it. “I see your picture in the paper with movie stars and Kennedys and everybody.”
“Those aren’t real dates. They’re…sort of for publicity.”
“Does that mean you’d like to go out with me? Maybe Saturday night. We could go down to the Village.”
Fleur grinned. “I’d love to.”
He beamed at her.
“You’d love to what, baby?” Belinda came up behind her.
“I asked Fleur to go to the Village with me on Saturday night, Mrs. Savagar,” Chris said, looking nervous again. “There’s this restaurant where they have Middle Eastern food.”
Fleur curled her toe
s in her shower thongs. “I said I’d go.”
“Did you, baby?” Belinda’s forehead puckered. “I’m afraid that won’t work. You already have plans, remember? The premiere of the new Altman picture. You’re going with Shawn Howell.”
Fleur had forgotten about the premiere, and she definitely wanted to forget about Shawn Howell, who was a twenty-two-year-old film star with an IQ that matched his age. On their first date he’d spent the evening complaining that everybody was “out to screw him,” and he’d told her he’d dropped out of high school because all the teachers were creeps and faggots. She’d begged Gretchen not to arrange any more dates with him, but Gretchen said Shawn was hot now, and business was business. When she’d tried to talk to her mother about it, Belinda had been incredulous.
“But, baby, Shawn Howell’s a star. Being seen with him makes you twice as important.” When Fleur complained that he kept trying to put his hand under her skirt, Belinda had pinched her cheek. “Celebrities are different from ordinary people. They don’t follow the same rules. I know you can handle him.”
“That’s okay,” Chris said, disappointment written all over his face. “I understand. Some other time.”
But Fleur knew there wouldn’t be another time. It had taken all of Chris’s courage to ask her out once, and he’d never do it again.
Fleur tried to talk to Belinda about Chris in the cab on the way home, but Belinda refused to understand. “Chris is a nobody. Why on earth would you want to go out with him?”
“Because I like him. You shouldn’t have…” Fleur pulled on the fringe of her cutoffs. “I wish you hadn’t put him off like that. It made me feel like I was twelve.”
“I see.” Belinda’s voice grew chilly. “You’re telling me that I embarrassed you.”
Fleur felt a little flutter of panic. “Of course not. No. How could you embarrass me?” Belinda had withdrawn from her, and Fleur touched her arm. “Forget I said anything. It’s not important.” Except it was important, but she didn’t want to hurt Belinda’s feelings. When that happened, Fleur always felt as though she was standing in front of the Couvent de l’Annonciation watching her mother’s car disappear.
Belinda didn’t say anything for a while, and Fleur’s misery deepened
“You have to trust me, baby. I know what’s best for you.” Belinda cupped Fleur’s wrist, and Fleur felt as if she’d been about to fall off a precipice, only to be snatched back to safety.
That night after Fleur had gone to bed, Belinda stared at her daughter’s photographs on the wall. Her determination grew stronger than ever. Somehow she had to protect Fleur from all of them—from Alexi, from nobodies like Chris, from anyone who stood in their way. It would be the hardest things she’d ever done, and on days like today, she wasn’t sure how she’d manage.
The blanket of depression began to settle over her. She pushed it away by reaching for the telephone and quickly dialing a number.
A sleepy male voice answered. “Yeah.”
“It’s me. Did I wake you?”
“Yeah. What do you want?”
“I’d like to see you tonight.”
He yawned. “When you coming?”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
As she began to pull the phone away from her ear, she heard his voice on the other end. “Hey, Belinda? How ’bout you leave your panties at home.”
“Shawn Howell, you’re a devil.” She hung up the phone, grabbed her purse, and left the apartment.
Chapter 9
Hollywood wanted Jake Koranda smart-ass and mean. They wanted him staring at a piece of street scum over the barrel of a .44 Magnum. They wanted him using pearl-handled Colts on a band of desperados and then kissing a busty broad good-bye before he walked out the saloon doors. Koranda might only be twenty-eight years old, but he was a real man, not one of those pansies who carried a hair dryer in his hip pocket.
Jake had hit it big right from the start playing a drifter named Bird Dog Caliber in a low-budget Western that grossed six times what it had cost to make. Despite his youth, he had the rough, outlaw image that men liked as much as women, the same as Eastwood did. Two more Caliber pictures immediately followed the first, each one bloodier. After that, he made a couple of modern action-adventure movies. His career rise was meteoric. Then Koranda got stubborn. He said he needed more time to write his plays.
What was Hollywood supposed to do about that? The best action actor to come along since Eastwood, and he wrote shit that ended up in college anthologies instead of staying in front of a camera where he belonged. The fuckin’ Pulitzer Prize had ruined him.
And it got worse…Koranda decided he wanted to try writing for film instead of the theater. He called his screenplay Sunday Morning Eclipse, and there wasn’t a single car chase in the whole damned thing. “That highbrow shit is okay for the stage, kid,” the Hollywood brass told him when he started shopping it around, “but the American public wants tits and guns on screen.”
Koranda eventually ended up with Dick Spano, a smalltime producer who agreed to do Sunday Morning Eclipse on two conditions: Jake had to take the leading role, and he had to give Spano a big-budget cops-and-robbers afterward.
On a Tuesday night in early March, three men sat in a smoke-filled projection room. “Run Savagar’s screen test again,” Dick Spano called out around one of the fat Cuban cigars he loved to smoke.
Johnny Guy Kelly, the film’s legendary silver-haired director, popped the lid on a can of Orange Crush and spoke over his shoulder to the lone figure sitting in the shadows at the back. “Jako, boy, we don’t want you unhappy, but I think you left those genius brains of yours in bed with your latest lady friend.”
Jake Koranda pulled his long legs from the back of the seat in front of him. “Savagar’s wrong for Lizzie. I can feel it in my gut.”
“You take a long, hard look at Cupcake up there and tell me you don’t feel something someplace other than in your gut.” Johnny Guy pointed his Orange Crush toward the screen. “The camera loves her, Jako. And she’s also been taking acting lessons, so she’s real serious about this.”
Koranda slouched deeper into his seat. “She’s a model. One more ditzy glamour girl who wants a movie career. I went through this with what’s-her-name last year, and I swore I’d never do it again. Especially not on this picture. Did you check Amy Irving again?”
“Irving is tied up,” Spano said, “and even if she wasn’t, I gotta tell you I’d go with Savagar right now. She’s hot. You can’t pick up a magazine without seeing her face on the cover. Everybody’s been waiting to see what she chooses for her first film. It’s built-in publicity.”
“Screw the publicity,” Koranda said.
Dick Spano and Johnny Guy Kelly exchanged glances. They liked Jake, but he had strong opinions, and he could be a stubborn son of a bitch when he believed in something. “It’s not that easy,” Johnny Guy said. “She’s got some smart people behind her. They’d been waiting a long time to find exactly the right picture.”
“Bullshit,” Jake retorted. “All they want is a leading man tall enough to play with their little girl. It doesn’t go any deeper than that.”
“I think you’re underestimating them.”
Cold silence drifted their way from the back of the room.
“Sorry, Jake,” Spano finally said, not without some trepidation, “but we’re going to overrule you on this one. We’re making her an offer tomorrow.”
Behind them, Koranda uncoiled from his seat. “Do what you have to, but don’t expect me to roll out the welcome mat.”
Johnny Guy shook his head as Jake disappeared, then once again looked at the screen. “Let’s hope Cupcake up there knows how to take some heat.”
Belinda had dragged Fleur to all of Jake Koranda’s pictures, and Fleur had hated every one of them. He was always shooting someone in the head, knifing him in the belly, or terrorizing a woman. And he seemed to enjoy it! Now she had to work with him, and she knew from her agent exactly
how dead set he’d been against casting her. Part of her couldn’t exactly blame him. No matter what Belinda believed, Fleur was no actress.
“Stop worrying,” Belinda said, whenever Fleur tried to talk to her about it. “The minute he sees you, he’ll fall in love.”
Fleur couldn’t imagine that happening.
The white stretch limousine the studio had sent to pick her up at LAX delivered her to the two-story Spanish-style Beverly Hills house Belinda had rented for them. It was early May, unseasonably cold when she’d left New York, but warm and sunny in Southern California. When she’d come over from France three years ago, she’d never imagined her life taking such a strange direction. She tried to be grateful, but lately that had been hard.
A housekeeper who looked like she was at least a hundred years old let her into a foyer with white walls, dark beams, a wrought-iron chandelier, and a terra-cotta floor. Fleur took the suitcases away from her when she started to carry them upstairs. She chose a back bedroom that looked down over the pool and left the master bedroom for Belinda. The house seemed even larger than the photos. With six bedrooms, four decks, and a couple of Jacuzzis, it had more space than two people needed, something she’d made the mistake of mentioning to Alexi during one of their phone conversations that substituted for visits.
“In Southern California, lack of ostentation is vulgar,” he’d said. “Follow your mother’s lead, and you will be a wonderful success.”
She’d let the dig pass. The problems between Alexi and Belinda were too complicated for her to solve, especially since she’d never been able to understand why two people who hated each other so much didn’t get a divorce. She kicked off her shoes and gazed around the room with its warm wooden pieces and earth-toned fabrics. A collection of Mexican crosses hanging on the wall gave her a pang of homesickness for the nuns. Never once had she imagined making this particular trip alone.
She sat on the side of the bed and called New York. “Are you feeling any better?” she asked when Belinda answered.