The Home for Wayward Supermodels (11 page)

I
needed advice
,
though no
one I knew had faced a problem exactly like this. Or really anything like this.

The first person I called was Alex Pradels.

“
Mais, mignon,
” he said, which I knew from French class meant “But, cutie,” “of course you must do this thing. You are no longer strictly a virgin to this fashion world of ours. You know that things are never quite what they seem to be, that we traffic in the art of illusion, no?”

I looked across the apartment to where Tati was sprawled out on the sofa, wearing ripped shorts and a stretched-out T-shirt, watching
The Simpsons
and sucking on the ragged ends of her honey gold hair.

“That’s true,” I admitted.

“So what is the problem? You mustn’t think that you are contributing nothing to this enterprise. You do have a personal style that is very attractive. And if it weren’t for you and the fact that everyone wants to take your picture, Jonathan Rush would never have even
seen
Desi’s dress.”

Now Tati got up from the sofa, went to the refrigerator, and extracted an orange popsicle. She had started eating again, but only popsicles. Her mouth, even her teeth, were always stained orange or purple or Smurf blue. She brushed them for about twenty minutes on the mornings she had a go-see or a shoot. The good news was that she was working more regularly than she had been when I first arrived, when she’d been partying every night. Now she was asleep before I was most nights and seemed to have stopped seeing Mr. Billings completely.

“But I’m just the model,” I pointed out to Alex. “I could wear the clothes in the ads or whatever and Desi could still be recognized as the designer.”

“But your relationship with Desi is…how you say…completely symbiotic, no? It seems as if you are very close. So what does it matter, as long as you’re together in this deal?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I thanked him and hung up. Maybe it was a French thing. Or a male thing. Or a French male thing.

What I really needed was some down-to-earth advice from someone who really knew me. I wanted, I realized, to talk to Tom.

We hadn’t spoken at all since our blowup. I’d softened since then, and thought of calling him. But some part of me felt like that would be giving in, admitting it didn’t matter to me that Tom had refused to visit New York, and it did matter. How much it mattered, and what that meant for the future of our relationship, I still wasn’t sure. I’d been hoping he would call me first. The more time that passed without my hearing from him, the more insecure I felt, the more I wanted to reassure myself that he still cared about me, and the more nervous I felt about calling.

Wanting his advice about the deal with Desi at least gave me an excuse to call. A flimsy excuse, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing it with both hands.

“Yup,” he said when he answered the phone.

“Hi, Tom, it’s me. Don’t hang up. I need your help.”

There was a beat of silence, which from anybody else, given how insecure I felt, might have made me panic. But from Tom it was…just Tom. “I’m listening,” he said finally.

I filled him in on what had happened with Desi and the dress and the picture, with Jonathan Rush’s offer and my refusal and Desi’s urging me to take it. Then I asked him what he thought I should do.

“You can’t do it,” he said.

I held my breath. “Why not?”

There was a long silence, and then he said, “It’s wrong.”

“But Desi wants me to do it.”

“Doesn’t matter. Still wrong.”

I knew this was what he’d say. I’d
called
him, I realized, because I wanted to hear him say it. But as he did I felt my heart sinking ever lower.

“I know,” I moaned. “It feels wrong inside. But haven’t you ever done anything you felt inside was wrong because in a larger sense you knew it was right? Or because the other person really wanted you to do it?”

There was a long silence—I mean long even for Tom. And then he said, “I told you to stay in New York.”

“Oh, Tom,” I said, feeling awful. “Did you really feel that was wrong?”

“Right for you, maybe,” he said. “Wrong for me. Wrong for your mom.”

“But Mom said she wanted me to do this.”

“She didn’t want you to just take off and never talk to her again.”

During one of his daily runs over to Duke’s bait shop, Tom had obviously bumped into my mother. I still hadn’t called Mom. And I’d instructed Tom and Raquel both that they were not to give her my phone number. I wanted to be the one to choose when we’d talk.

“I’m going to call her,” I told Tom. “I’m just not ready now.”

“Your dad is pretty broken up too,” he said.

I caught my breath. “Duke talked to you about it?”

“We’ve been fishing. He doesn’t need to say anything. I can see how he feels.”

“What about how I feel? This is pretty confusing to me, finding out the person I thought was my dad isn’t.”

“Duke
is
your dad,” said Tom. “We’re all the same people we’ve always been. You’re the one who’s different.”

“It’s not just me, it’s everything,” I said quietly.

“What’s going on with you, Amanda?” he exploded. “Are you
ever
coming back? To Eagle River, I mean.
And
to me.”

“Of course!” I rushed to assure him.

“When?”

That was the question. I was booked to work nearly every day. Plus, while I thought I’d be ready to go soon, I definitely wasn’t yet.

“I’ll be there by the weekend after Labor Day,” I told him. “In time for our annual camping trip to the island. I promise.”

“But for how long, Amanda? I just want to know what I’m doing here. Am I supposed to still be waiting for you?”

“Do you still want to wait for me?” I asked gently.

“You know it,” he said, his voice gruff. “I love you.”

I held my breath. Of course Tom had told me he loved me before. But not often. And rarely when we weren’t naked.

“I love you too,” I told him. “When we go to the island, we’ll work it out.”

I hung up the phone and, exhausted, flung myself onto the chair opposite Tati, trying to keep the lump of tears down in my throat.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I told her.

She looked up from picking the pink polish off her big toenail and pursed her orange-stained lips. “Is it your whisky bird?” she said. “Your mountain man?”

I nodded. “Tom. I love him. But I’m afraid if I don’t go back home soon, we’re not going to make it.”

“And that would be…bad thing?”

“Of course!” I cried. “I want to marry him. Or at least I wanted to marry him, before all this happened.”

“And now?”

Now? I was still operating under the assumption that I was going to marry Tom…someday. Whether that someday was in September or three years from now or when I was thirty, I didn’t know.

“All I’m sure of,” I told Tati, “is that I need to see him before he gives up on me.” What I didn’t add was: And before I give up on him.

“Don’t worry,” Tati soothed. “He’ll wait. I have husband in Ukraine, still waiting.”

“An actual husband?” I asked, stunned. “Is that why you’re not seeing Mr. Billings anymore?”

Tati drew in a sharp breath, and then to my astonishment she began sobbing. She’d always seemed so tough to me, so unemotional even when she was at her most vulnerable, curled up sick in bed. And a moment ago she was her usual, hard-as-nails self. But now she was doubled over, tears and snot covering her lovely face. I moved over and sat next to her, putting my arms around her.

“Mr. Billings don’t love me,” she wailed into my shoulder.

“Oh, Tati,” I said. “I’m sure that’s not true. I saw you two together. He was crazy about you.”

“Oh, crazy, yes, crazy,” she said, looking at me wildly, “but no love.”

“Maybe if you talked to him,” I said, thinking of how she’d pretended, that night at Bar 13, not to be interested even though I knew she was out looking for him, “told him how you really feel.”

“Oh no,” she said, attempting to wipe the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Mr. Billings don’t care how I feel. To him, I’m just for fucking.”

“I don’t believe that, Tati.”

She breathed in deeply, drawing back from me. I could almost see the shell hardening around her.

“I take care of Tati,” she said. “I don’t have nobody and I don’t need nobody.”

“You have me,” I assured her.

But she’d gone to the kitchen to get another popsicle, as far away from me as anybody else.

Signs That It’s Love

1. You
   want
   to meet his mother.
   
2. You like sleeping with him almost as much as you like, uh, sleeping with him.
   
3. When he burps or trips over his own shoelaces, you care about him even more.
   
4. You happily thumb through all his childhood photo albums, thinking how great it would be to one day have a little boy who looked just like him.
   
5. When you’re far away from each other, life doesn’t seem quite like it’s really happening.
   

Signs That It’s Sex

1. You don’t want to know his last name.
   
2. Or his birthday.
   
3. Never mind listen to him talk about his problems with work or help him fix up his apartment.
   
4. You could describe his penis in detail but you’re not quite sure about the color of his eyes.
   

Signs That It’s Neither

1. Every time someone mentions his name, you say, “Who?”
   
2. As soon as you hear his voice on the phone, you start preparing your excuse to get out of whatever it is he’s going to ask you to do.
   
3. You like the way he looks, you like the way he talks…but you hate the way he smells.
   
4. You’re scared of him (even if you are having sex with him and think you’re in love).
   

My call to Tom had raised more questions than it had answered, and I still didn’t know what I was going to do about the Desi-and-Rush issue. And I was uncertain about how to help Tatiana, who was the only person on earth who seemed more confused than me. For about the hundred thousandth time since I’d stalked off into the night in Brooklyn, I longed to talk to my mom. But I also realized that what I needed was not a shoulder to cry on, but the advice of someone who both knew Tatiana and had experience with the fashion world and licensing contracts and difficult negotiations. That was Raquel.

She suggested we meet at a place in Tribeca called Circa Tabac, and when I got there, I saw why: It was one of the few restaurants I’d been to in New York that allowed smoking. Raquel was already sitting at a table by one of the long windows that opened onto the sidewalk, sipping a pink cocktail and drawing on a long cigarette.

As soon as I sat down, Raquel held out the pack to me.

“Oh, no thanks,” I said.

“What?” Raquel frowned. “You’re still not smoking?”

“No,” I said, though I felt oddly guilty, as if she’d asked, What, you’re still not washing your hair? Or: What, you’re still not eating anything but popsicles?

“I thought you wouldn’t be able to resist, living with Tatiana.”

“Actually,” I said, “Tati quit.”

“What?” Raquel screeched. Now she seemed really alarmed.

“I haven’t seen her drinking either. And she’s going to bed early every night.”

Raquel shook her head slowly, her lips slightly parted. I was gratified to see that she looked genuinely concerned, even if she was concerned about the wrong things.

“I think she split with her boyfriend. I don’t know if you knew about him: Mr. Billings.”

“Oh
yes,
” Raquel said, taking a gulp of her drink and lighting another cigarette. “Bobby Billings, Baby Billionaire. Do you mean they’ve actually broken up?”

“It seems so. But Tati is really bummed about it.”

Raquel’s eyes flashed. “That’s good,” she said. “That means he dumped her, not vice versa, so he’s probably already looking again. Do you know him?”

“A little,” I said.

“Would you fix me up with him?”

I was speechless, though I shouldn’t have been. “I don’t really know him well enough,” I finally managed to say. “I don’t even know his phone number or where he lives or anything like that. Besides, I don’t think I could do that to Tati.”

“Oh, what does she care? She’s got a hundred guys dying to get in her pants, and I’ve got nobody but Bobby Billings.”

I wondered whether I needed to point out to Raquel that she didn’t exactly have Mr. Billings either. But I decided to remain on Planet Earth.

“I think she really loved him,” I said. “That’s one thing I wanted to talk to you about. I’m worried about Tati.”

“What?” Raquel said, leaning in, her eyes intense. “Heroin?”