Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (10 page)

“Good for you,” Paul said, as the Rothman bobbed in his mouth. The flare from his old Zippo lighter illuminated his face. “Healthy lifestyle.” He cupped the flame and the scene was briefly reflected in the window.

Claudia had never been alone with Bronwyn's father before, let alone after a night of drinking, let alone in a darkened bedroom, let alone with cigarettes. But it was the dirty loafer now resting on the expensive striped fabric that gave Claudia a pang of something, and suggested that either Paul had some degree of disregard for the house rules, or that perhaps he had begun to chafe under them. Claudia pictured him as a patrician prep-school senior, sick to death of the same place that held him firmly in its bosom. Paul pulled his knees up, tucking himself deeper into his perch. He rested his wrists on his knees as he considered Claudia, his cigarette burning. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“I wish you would,” Claudia replied. If Paul was a senior, and Claudia was an underclassman, she could talk to him like this.

“What's really going on?”

“With what?”

“You and your sister. Bronwyn says she's been living with you for more than a month.” In fact, Bronwyn had illuminated the situation to her father in far greater detail. Worried, and amazed that Ivy Leaguers could have problems that she'd typically associated with Appalachia, Bronwyn had reported to Paul a variety of troubling anecdotes regarding Claudia's family of origin and sworn him to absolute secrecy. “Are you okay?” he asked Claudia, lightly.

“ . . . Sure.”

“You're on your own, working full-time, and now you've got a teenager to keep an eye on. That's got to be stressful for you.”

“
You've
done it.” Claudia countered. “Three times.”

“I have a wife.”

“Me, too,” said Claudia. “In another county.”

“Enough with the jokes,” said Paul, not unkindly. Claudia looked away, temporarily humiliated, but the warmth of Paul's large hand as it briefly touched her shoulder brought her back. “Where's the money coming from?” he asked.

You,
Claudia considered replying. She didn't want to tell Paul that there was no money and now no job, because that would make it true. “From the engines of capitalism, I guess.” She shrugged.

“And you can't ask your dad for help,” Paul reflected. Bronwyn had long ago reported Claudia's quasi-bastard status.

“Who?” It was hard to stop the jokes.

Paul took a long, squinting pull on his Rothman. “And what about
Phoebe's
dad?”

“He makes mine look like Dick Van Patten.”

“Maybe you and your sister should explore the idea of Phoebe becoming an emancipated minor.”

“Um . . . a
what?
”

“An emancipated minor,” Paul repeated. “Legally declaring herself independent from your mother.”

“I . . . I guess I'm not familiar.”

“If you're going to keep up this arrangement,” Paul advised, “I recommend you look into it. The State of New York will grant Phoebe all sorts of rights and protections if she becomes emancipated. But if she doesn't, your mother can make things difficult for you. She can have Phoebe declared a runaway, or worse, she can accuse you of kidnapping her. It sounds intimidating, but the process is manageable. It's something I can help you with, Claudia.” Paul let his cigarette droop in his mouth as he looked out at the snow. Claudia easily pictured them standing outside a bar on upper Broadway during Christmas break after two pitchers of Rolling Rock, Paul having just said to her, “Let's get out of here.”

“Okay,” said Claudia.

“Here.” Paul propped his Rothman on a small, lidded silver ashtray and returned to the dresser.

Claudia watched him reach for his wallet. The hundred-dollar bill pulsed in her pocket. She picked up Paul's cigarette. “Cigarettes are cool,” she said.

He glanced at her in the dresser mirror. “You can have your own, you know. You're a grown woman.” Paul was now standing before her, his arm outstretched, a thick ivory business card in his fingers. “I want you to call me,” he said.

Claudia hesitated, then took the card as Bronwyn appeared in the doorway.

“What are you guys doing?” There was mild accusation in Bronwyn's voice. She carried a pair of dessert plates, each one bearing a slice of bûche de Noël.

“Just watching the snow,” Paul replied easily.

“Do you know what I had to do to defend your meringue mushrooms?” she asked. In a fluid motion, she handed Claudia a cake plate, kissed her father's forehead, and extinguished his cigarette.

Paul popped a meringue mushroom into his mouth and sighed as it dissolved on his tongue. “You want to get out of here?” he asked his daughter in between rapid forkfuls of cake. “Take a walk in the snow?”

“I thought you'd never ask,” Bronwyn replied.

Paul rose from his perch. “You, too, Claudia.” He and Bronwyn were the same shape, tall and lean, more leg than torso.

Claudia sensed unenthusiastic vibrations emanating from Bronwyn. “Actually,” she volunteered, lifting her cake plate for emphasis, “Meringue mushrooms are about as outdoorsy as I get. And I've got my eye on seconds.” With that, she excused herself discreetly from the farthest corner of the Tates' apartment with the priceless view, and left the man and his daughter to make their preparations for a midnight stroll.

 

Three days later, at 11:50 in the morning, in the week between Christmas and New Year's, on a bright, cold corner of West Twenty-Seventh Street, Phoebe Goldberg drained the dregs of the hot chocolate with whipped cream that the guy at the Cuban diner had insisted on giving her for free. The flower district was a red and white sea of poinsettias, which Edith had always vociferously loathed. Phoebe, stopped in a stand of shivering ficus, pulled a folded-up business card from the back pocket of her jeans for the millionth time:
PAOLO CRESPI—IMAGE MODEL MANAGEMENT
. She lobbed the blue and white takeout cup and sunk it neatly into the trash as the light turned.

Ambling across the street, oblivious to the heads that turned to follow her appreciatively, Phoebe calculated with mild pleasure that She was keeping up her truancy skills even during Christmas break. It had been easy to drop Claudia and Bronwyn at the F-train stop and head off to the fictional Trivial Pursuit tournament that she'd convinced her distracted sister was being conducted on a classmate's sun porch in Ditmas Park.

Image Model Management was located on the fifth floor, past the inconsistent guardianship of the lobby security guard, a hulking, uniformed woman with lacquered hair and nails, both shot through with plastic pearls and streaks of hot pink. Her beard was faint, her transistor radio tuned fuzzily to WLIB. Her security policy included the chatting up of all UPS men, the harassment of most non-English-speaking food delivery boys, and the random interrogation of the young Miss Things with portfolios under their scrawny-ass arms.

“Ex-
cuse
me, lovely ladies,” she warned. Phoebe kept going, since the security guard was confronting a ramrod suburban blond who looked like a Pan Am stewardess and her matching daughter, with duct-tape-wrapped Weejuns, most definitely not
her.
“You think this is a puzzle book in front of me? 'Cause it ain't. It's a
sign-in book
and it's waiting for your autograph and I don't
care
how many times you been here before . . .” The lilting tirade continued as the elevator doors bumped closed.

Phoebe followed a narrow hallway around so many bends she thought she might end up where she began, and eventually arrived at the unassuming offices of Image Model Management. The reception area was lined in molded plastic chairs occupied by ambitious mothers in fresh lipstick. Snaking through the center of the small room, an anxious queue of slender, permed, and processed girls from the perimeters of the city bristled with pride. The dusty silk orchid on the coffee table gave the place the neutral but benevolent air of a Planned Parenthood, dulled the impact of the framed magazine covers lining the walls, and put Phoebe at ease as she took her place at the back of the line. A moment later, the statuesque mother-daughter duo from downstairs sailed in.

“We have an appointment.” The mother was firm as she threaded through the crowd, gripping her daughter's hand. “Terrific new glasses, Dennis. They really suit you.”

Dennis the receptionist, a pear-shaped young man with bleached hair, red-framed glasses, acne scars, and a bolo tie, framed Phoebe in his crosshairs as he leaned sideways from his perch. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“Only if you have a cure for jet lag,” the mother replied with a knowing chuckle. “Tokyo always takes the stuffing out of us.”

But Dennis was pointing at Phoebe. “No,” he said.
“You.”

“Me?” Phoebe looked around.

“Come here.”

Phoebe shifted in her moccasins, feeling the eyes of the wary hopefuls upon her. “Hey,” she grinned at Dennis, giving an easy wave as the knobs of her wrist jutted from her sleeve. It was the cockeyed grin of beautiful tomboys everywhere who don't give a shit in the nicest possible way, girls shot through with a rusty vein of testosterone, and so up for whatever. She approached the front desk in her loping glide. A chubby girl in a chair followed Phoebe with her eyes and opened a sugarless candy; the taut silence was instantly filled with crinkle.

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the donkey, and a bucketful of myrrh,” Dennis exclaimed quietly as she arrived before him. He was fixated, with a strictly entrepreneurial arousal, on the space between Phoebe's teeth—otherwise known on the block as her
liar's gap.
“Lauren Hutton.”

“Phoebe?” she corrected uncertainly.

“Your
teeth.
”

“ . . . Excuse me?” Phoebe poked her tongue into the space that she never thought about.

“How tall are you?”

“Yeah, um . . . so Paolo told me to stop by.”

“That's how tall you are?”

“Five-ten,” Phoebe replied. “My mother says I'd be five-eleven if I did the whole stomach-in, chest-out thing.” Posture was an area in which Edith had remained vigilant. “Stomach?” Dennis bored a hole through Phoebe's peacoat. Beginning to understand, the girl stared back at him, slowly opening her jacket and pushing up the hem of her sweater to display a sliver of sunken belly.

“Nope.”

“Bitch don't got no ass, neither,” one of the waiting girls muttered, to the delight of her friends. Like Claudia, Phoebe had long ago developed eyes in the back of her head. She now reached behind herself in silent retort, subtly cupping a butt cheek with one hand and flipping the bird with the other without shifting her eyes from Dennis. The girls doubled over in ragged peals.

“Or manners,” Pan Am murmured.

“Or shut the fuck up,” a round-the-way girl with a sleek wrap growled, having just decided she liked Phoebe. Pan Am inhaled sharply.

Dennis hit the intercom button. “Drop-in,” he announced flatly.

Paolo Crespi emerged from the back of the office. He still had the slicked hair, fingerless driving gloves, and gangly carriage that Phoebe remembered from their first meeting outside a Korean market on Christmas Eve. Dennis hid his half-eaten package of Donettes with a pink message pad.

“Darling, what a surprise,” Paolo said, extending his hands to Phoebe, then pulling her in to kiss her cheeks. He looked around, feigning anxiety. “Where is your bodyguard?”

“My sister?”

“She did not appreciate my sophisticated recruitment methods.”

“She's cool,” Phoebe offered uncomfortably, unwilling to conspire against Claudia. Gently pivoting her chin with the tip of his index finger, Paolo examined her jaw and throat.

“And you,” Paolo marveled, “are maybe perfect.”

“Are you thinking
Moxy
outdoor?” Dennis asked, right there with him.

“Among other things.” Paolo took Phoebe's broad hand. “Come back and meet everybody, darling.”

Paolo fancied himself a Milanese cowboy leading a fresh filly along the inner corridor of Image Model Management. He was perfectly aware that booking agents were emerging from their cubicles to form a murmuring crowd, but kept his breathing steady and his eyes on the warm, dry stall of his glass-walled office before Phoebe reared and bolted. As she was removed from her peacoat, fed a Diet Coke, and spun gently around, as her arms were checked, as she was led onto a digital scale that Paolo produced from under his desk, he marveled at the way the girl seemed to relax
into
the strange ministrations of his staff. Finally, Phoebe was deposited onto a puffy black leather loveseat, a relic from Paolo's first apartment. She stretched her arms along its back and folded her legs, hooking the foot behind the ankle. In this iconic pose struck only by the very slim, Phoebe commanded the office, and from there, Paolo quickly plotted, the entire Western world. And Japan.

“So,” he said, leaning forward, “you have always wanted to model, yes?”

“Actually,” she replied, “no. Definitely not.” Paolo paused, allowing himself a deep inhalation. Her not caring was
brilliant.

“Absolutely wonderful,” he marveled. “So I assume that the pictures, you don't have.”

“Of myself?”

“That's right.”

“Not really.” Phoebe frowned. “I could get somebody to take some—”

“No. We will make the arrangements. And give your hair a health trim. It is only two inches, no big deal. You don't even need highlights, because God, he already gave them.”

“Okay.”

“And there is something I must tell you right now,” Paolo continued gravely, “before we start down this road together. It is one of the most important things you will ever know.” He coughed wetly, clearing the contained excitement from his throat, closed the door, and assumed a gargoyle perch. “It is a life lesson, but please God you don't have to learn it, because you trust me now. You must always trust me, Phoebe. Because when you give something away that is so precious, you can never get it back. So you must protect it. And I must protect you. No matter what they say, no matter how powerful they seem or how fabulous the evening is or what covers he promise us. Do you understand me, Phoebe?”