The Home for Wayward Supermodels (9 page)

“Never mind,” said Alex, putting the money back in his pocket. “This place has a bad smell anyway.”

“I’m going to tell Tatiana and Mr. Billings how incredibly rude this place is,” I said, taking Desi’s arm, gratified that I at last seemed to have shaken the statue.

But it was too late, we were on our way, me and Alex flanking Desi, arms linked through hers. We kept walking, none of us talking, for a long time, until finally Alex suggested we go into a quiet-looking bar we were passing and just relax for a while, try to end the evening on an up note.

“Nah,” Desi said. “I’m so tired. I just want to go home.”

Neither of us could blame her, so we didn’t try to argue. We kept walking until we had delivered Desi safely to her door, and then we turned around and started hiking back toward my place.

“I’m sorry about that,” Alex said finally.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Maybe not. But if you go to that kind of place, you should be aware of what it feels like to be on the wrong side of the ropes.”

“I’ve always been on the wrong side of the ropes,” I told him.

He gave a short, sharp laugh, but then he saw that I was serious.

“You?” he said. “How can that be?”

“I was always different,” I said. “Where I come from, ‘different’ is what people call something that’s ugly or weird or frightening when they don’t want to come right out and say how much they don’t like it.”

“Yes,” he said gently. “But you were different because you were beautiful. Surely that is not a bad thing?”

I shook my head. “Beautiful is not how I felt,” I told him. “Just tall and skinny and strange-looking. But it wasn’t just my looks that made me different.”

“Ah,” he said. “I understand.”

“You do?” I said.

“You perhaps had…different interests from the other girls.”

“I did,” I said decisively, surprised that he knew this. “I mean, I liked to fish and hunt and camp, and not a lot of girls liked doing those things. But then I also liked clothes and fashion. I was dying to come to New York, even just to go to the little college in a bigger town. It got so that by the end of high school, I had to go online to find people I could connect with, people who were like me.”

“Like Desi,” Alex said gently.

“Yes, like Desi.”

Walking with Alex, listening to his accent, made me think about the other way I felt different, the thing I hadn’t been conscious of until this trip but that perhaps, down deep, I’d known about all along.

“There’s something else,” I told Alex, “something my mom told me that night when you first took my picture. I grew up thinking that my mother’s husband, who is this really nice Wisconsin guy, was my father. But the truth is my real father is French. He’s a photographer.” I laughed a little. “Just like you.”

“But maybe,” Alex said, “that is not such a terrible thing. I would take you for a French girl, with that black hair and those skinny hips. Who is this photographer father of yours?”

“I don’t know much about him, where he is, whether he’s even still alive. My mother never kept in touch with him, never even told him she was pregnant. All I know is that his name is Jean-Pierre Renaud…”

“Wait a minute,” Alex said, and stopped walking. “
The
Jean-Pierre Renaud?”

“I don’t know,” I said, confused. “Maybe.”

“There’s a fashion photographer named Jean-Pierre Renaud who’s very well known in Europe. He worked in New York for a while—I don’t know, twenty, twenty-five years ago, but since then he’s been based in Paris, working for French
Vogue,
Italian
Vogue,
that kind of thing.” Alex was looking at me strangely.

“That might be him,” I said. “What do you know about him?”

“Not much,” said Alex, “though his work,
j’adore.
I met him once, very briefly, when I was just starting out. I interviewed to be his assistant. I didn’t get the job.”

“What was he like?”

“You know, it was an odd situation, because I was the beginner, the young boy, and he was the great man. This was maybe ten years ago, and at that time he was in his forties. So older than your mom, I think. But now that I remember it…”

He was still staring at me, and began nodding his head.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “There’s definitely a resemblance. He’s very tall and thin, with black hair and intense dark eyes. He had this eccentric laugh and this unique style. Like, well…”

“Like what?”

He hesitated for a moment. “Like you,” he said.

It was one thing to discover that my real father was somewhere out there, a theoretical man who could be anywhere, doing anything, who I might never be able to find even if I wanted to, who might not even be alive. It was another to discover that I was walking down the street with someone who’d actually met him. Who could probably, with a phone call or two, put me in touch with him tomorrow.

“Really?” I asked, feeling my heart beat faster, overwhelmed at the idea that this person who held the genetic key to my identity had suddenly moved so much closer to being real. All I had to do was reach out and I could touch him, talk to him, discover a whole new dimension of myself. “Do you know how I could find him? Do you have his address? Or maybe his phone number?”

“I might have saved it,” he said. “Or I seem to remember an editor I know in Paris, Danique, once had a little thing with him. She probably knows…”

“No no no!” I chanted, stopping dead still and sticking my fingers in my ears.

I shocked even myself by how childishly I was acting. But the closer my father got to being a living, breathing man, a man with
girlfriends,
the more I felt myself freak out.

“It’s all right,” said Alex, touching my arm. “I thought you were saying you wanted to get in touch with him.”

“I do!” I said. “Or no, I don’t! Oh God, I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. It’s all too much, too fast.”

“It’s okay,” he said, gently taking my arm and leading me forward. “You have time. You don’t have to decide anything now.”

He had a way of helping me calm down. As we walked, I began to breathe more deeply, to feel myself reinhabiting my own body. And as I began to be aware of my own body again, I started to notice
his.
He was about my height, not nearly as tall as Tom, but that was nice: I could look directly into his eyes. He wasn’t as muscular as Tom either, but he was slim and graceful, his arm hard through the fabric of his shirt. I found myself thinking about his fingers, imagining how long they must be, and agile, on account of all that fiddling with the camera.

I shook my head briskly, to try to clear it of all these confusing thoughts and feelings. But some of the confusion, I was disturbed to find, was going on much lower down in my body. Not so long ago, I was certain that I was going to marry Tom, that he was the only man I’d ever want. But now I found myself fielding some distinctly nonmonogamous desires.

“In some ways,” I told Alex, “I was happier before any of this happened—coming to New York, getting discovered by Raquel, finding out about my father. But at the same time I can’t imagine having stayed in Eagle River and never knowing any of this. That seems now like I was living someone else’s life, and this is my real life.”

We had reached my building and were standing on the sidewalk. Even though it was well after midnight, crowds of people still swarmed around us. Yet the only person I was really aware of was him. Should I invite him upstairs? Tati was undoubtedly out with her Mr. Billings. Alex was so nice, so understanding. And then there were those fingers, which it was taking all my restraint not to reach down and take in my hands, bring to my lips. Tom was so far away—and not getting any closer.

Alex put his hand out to pat my shoulder sympathetically and I leaned into him, resting my head on his shoulder, broader and stronger-feeling than I had guessed. It felt so good there; his chest felt so solid against mine. I pulled away a little bit and then, looking at the swell of his lips, leaned in to give him a kiss, a test kiss, just a little one.

But he reared back before I was able to connect.

“It’s late,” he said quickly, nervously. “What a night. Woooo!”

I was confused. Here I thought I was the one who was resisting his advances. And suddenly he seemed to be resisting mine.

Then I remembered what Desi said, about him being gay. Maybe she was right. Either that or I’d done something tonight without knowing it that had really turned him off.

But he seemed to like me—I mean
like
me like me—as much as he ever had before. In fact, he seemed to like me more, giving me a warm hug good night, kissing me on the cheek, telling me to keep in touch, to let him know how I was doing.

Gay it must be. One part of me was relieved, as I passed the doorman by myself and headed up to the apartment, that even if he was a thousand miles away, I had still stayed true to Tom. But another part of me was more disappointed than I had ever guessed I could be. It seemed as if every single one of my beliefs was being turned completely inside out, and here was another one. Just last week, I would have named Alex Pradels as the last man on earth I’d want to kiss. And now here it was a few days later, and he’d moved all the way up to number one.

I
t was nearly a
week before I had a chance to go to the library and research my so-called real father, this Jean-Pierre Renaud character. I was too busy working, going to a handful of go-sees, but more often simply getting booked for jobs.

“They want to grab you,” Raquel explained. “You’re hot hot hot!”

Very quickly, I learned some of the Cardinal Rules of Modeling:

1. Be on time, even if you know you’re going to spend at least the first hour of the shoot sitting around waiting.
   
2. While you’re waiting, do not, repeat do not, eat Krispy Kremes from the catering table even though you know for a fact you could eat six Krispy Kremes a day and not gain weight.
   
3. Don’t wear white cotton panties, or they’ll make you strip down to nothing at all.
   
4. Don’t take those hands all over your body personally: They think you’re made of plastic.
   
5. The makeup person is usually a phony.
   
6. The stylist usually believes that things are what they look like they are.
   
7. The music blasting from the speakers will never be the music you love most.
   
8. The photographer sees things nobody else sees.
   
9. You’re the most important person in the room until the shoot’s over. Then you go back to being a genetically gifted but otherwise uninteresting teenager from nowheresville.
   

Actually I liked the part where I went back to being the teenager. Thanks to Tati, I went out clubbing a couple of times, though I refused to return to Bar 13 and, once she heard about my experience there, so did Tati. Her boyfriend, whom she always called Mr. Billings, seemed like a very nice guy—kind of a rich, urban version of Tom—though Tati was constantly agonizing over whether he really cared about her. As far as I could see, he was crazy about her, putting up with her drinking and smoking and wild ways but at the same time being a total gentleman. She’d dance away from him, draping herself over some sleazy guy just to make him jealous, but instead of getting mad he’d talk to me about how cute he thought she was, how exciting, how awful her life had been in Ukraine and how much he wanted to take care of her. And he’d ask me about myself too, acting genuinely interested in my modeling stories and listening to me agonize about Tom. Just be patient with Tom, he always advised me, casting a wistful glance toward Tati. He was sure that even if Tom couldn’t always be the person I wanted him to be, Tom really loved me and everything would work out in the end. If Tati gave up teasing him and decided to go home with him, he always sent his car back to wait to bring me home—which more and more often was much later than my ten o’clock curfew. I always wanted to dance just a little bit longer these days, the nights at the clubs my only physical outlet now that I wasn’t getting any sex.

The morning of my day off, I had been planning to air out and clean the apartment and then head to the library, but when I woke up I was stunned to find Tati snoring in the bed beside me. When had she come home? She’d been out with Mr. Billings the night before and usually that meant she either stayed over at his place or returned very early in the morning, flipping on the television or the stereo, smoking up a storm, and polishing off another bottle of brandy, inevitably waking me in the process.

But last night she must have sneaked in and slipped into bed without a peep. I tiptoed around the place, showering and pulling one of my T-shirt dresses over my head, making myself a cup of tea and peeling an orange for breakfast.

I was about to tiptoe out to head to the library when I heard Tati in the bed, moaning.

I went in and stood at the bedroom door. She looked pale, and was lying with her arm flung across her eyes.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She groaned. “Sick like dog.”

“Oh gosh, Tati, I’m sorry. Can I get you something? Some water? An aspirin?”

“Nothing,” she muttered, closing her eyes and pulling the covers up to her nose even though the sun was streaming in the window and the apartment was toasty, despite the steady hum of the air conditioner.

She must be really sick, I decided, because in the time I’d known her, one of the first things she did whenever she woke up was light a cigarette. But today she just kept lying in bed, making little moaning noises.

“I was going to go to the library,” I said, “but would you like me to stay with you until you feel better?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing you can do.”

That alarmed me. “Should I call Raquel?”

Raquel might not be the warmest, fuzziest, most sensitive person on the planet—okay, she may have had fewer of those qualities than anyone else alive—but she was the person who was supposed to help us in an emergency.

“No!” she said loudly.

“Mr. Billings?”

Now her eyes shot open.
“No!”

She curled into a ball and turned toward the wall. “Go away,” she muttered.

I stood there for a few more minutes and finally went out into the already hot morning. In Eagle River when it got hot, there was always a lake to jump in, but here the closest thing was an air-conditioned shop or restaurant. Walking uptown to the library, I stopped along the way at a Starbucks, a Krispy Kreme, a big Barnes & Noble, Macy’s, and an enormous fabric store where everything was so beautiful I ended up buying bright pink silk and dark gray linen and iridescent blue taffeta and rich green velvet for Desi, just in case she got inspired.

When I got to the library, they directed me to the reading room, which looked like a set they would build for a movie in which something completely wonderful happened in a library. It had a carved wooden ceiling and tall arched windows, like in an old church, and murals of New York buildings marching all around the top third of the walls, and long polished wooden tables lit with low golden lamps. It made me wish I were a scholar or a writer instead of a supermodel, so I could go there every day.

The first thing I did was type “Jean-Pierre Renaud” into the computer. My own computer was still at home—I figured Mom was holding it hostage to get me to call her, but I wasn’t ready to do that. My one serious email friendship, with Desi, could take place in real life now, and I was feeling strangely liberated without the Web, especially now that all the stimulation anyone could ever need was right outside my door.

Anyway, when I Googled “Jean-Pierre Renaud” and “photographer,” more than five thousand references popped up. He’d had celebrity portraits in the Louvre and wildlife pictures in a French nature magazine. He’d been the still photographer for a Danish movie and shot the wedding portrait of minor Spanish royalty. While I couldn’t find an address or even a website for him, I did find a picture, which hit me so hard I slumped, breathless, in my chair.

I couldn’t help but think of how strangely Alex had looked at me that night, when he was describing what Jean-Pierre Renaud looked like. If I’d had a mirror right then, I would have looked strangely at
myself.
The fact was, I was nearly a carbon copy of my biological father. Same straight black hair, same stretched-out angular body, same prominent cheekbones and dark eyes and full mouth. The only thing that was like my mother was my relatively discreet nose—but then again, relative to the beak on Monsieur Renaud, Jimmy Durante’s nose would be considered discreet.

He looked…forbidding, with his long dramatic backswept hair and his chic white shirt and black pants, with the cigarette dangling from his fingers and the focused, commanding look of an artist on his face. But he also looked intriguing. What characteristics of this famous foreign man had found their way into
me?
How much of my love of clothes, my visual sense, my
differentness
came from him?

I felt a strong pang then for Duke, the man I’d known as my father forever, whom I’d always loved and still did. More than once I’d been on the brink of calling him, but part of what made this so hard was that our relationship had never been based on talking. Rather we’d just
be
together, sitting in a rowboat fishing, or canoeing down some fastflowing stream, or putting our feet up watching a Packers game. I felt if we could just do something like that together now, it would go a long way toward resolving all the distance between us.

Surely some of Duke had gotten into me too: my taste for fishing, for instance, and my love of nature. But as dear as Duke was to me, the truth was that I’d always been baffled by how I could be such a chatterbox when he was so quiet, why I loved all kinds of design and art while he had (sorry, Duke) no taste at all, how I could be so intense while he was pale and round and mild.

My mom had always explained this by saying I looked like her when she was young, a claim it was difficult to refute since her weight made it hard to tell what she really looked like. I did see a resemblance to the modeling pictures she’d saved from her early years. Especially around the nose.

I thought back now to one photo in particular of Mom. I’d never thought to question it, but now when I considered it, I saw that it held a lot of clues that Mom had indeed been to New York before last month. Number one, it was from
Glamour
magazine, her one appearance in a big-time publication, and it was obvious to me now that it must have been shot in Manhattan not Milwaukee, as I had always assumed. I could see it in my mind’s eye: Mom in a velvet leggings and cowl-neck knit tunic and suede booties, chin lowered, eyes sparkling, smiling into the camera. It was a fall 1987 issue, which meant, I now knew, that it had been shot in the summer of 1987. Which happened to be about nine months before I was born.

Moving as if in a dream, I approached the librarian and asked for the specific 1987 issue of
Glamour
Mom was in. Hands trembling, I carried the magazine to one of the long shiny tables and sat down, opening it slowly to page 221, the page number I’d long memorized as the one Mom’s picture was on. Then I sat there gazing down at my young mother’s smiling face and at the tiny photographer’s credit beside the picture: Jean-Pierre Renaud.

It was like being present, in a way, at my own conception, or at least at the first twinkle in my father’s eye. My mother’s smile took on a new significance: It was directed at
him.
She looked so happy—happier than I’d ever seen her. She looked
in love.

But what about him? Was he in love with her too? Or was it just an affair? He was significantly older than she was, and he had been married, she said. Maybe I had brothers and sisters—
French
ones! He’d never known about me, but would he even remember
her?

If I hadn’t been having all these thoughts and feelings in such a calm and beautiful place, I might have lost it completely, but as it was I just sat there blinking hard and breathing deeply.

And then someone tapped me on the shoulder.

I’d been so lost in my thoughts that I leaped off my seat as if I’d been given an electric shock and let out a little scream—though even a little scream in that temple of silence caused all the other patrons to turn around and glare at me.

“Oh God, I’m sorry,” said the tapper, a young woman with elaborately waved hair who was dressed the way I’d expected the
Vogue
editors to be dressed—like a fashionista. But despite her high-style clothes and hair, she had a sweet face and seemed horrified that she’d scared me.

“Sssssh,”
someone hissed.

“I’m sorry,” whispered the young woman, hunching down so she was closer to me. “It’s just that…didn’t I see you in
Us Weekly
?”

I frowned, running through the jobs I’d been doing. There was
Vogue,
of course, something for
Glamour, Men’s Fitness,
InStyle,
and ads for lipstick, bathing suits, and fruit punch. They all tended to run together, because the truth was, one shoot was pretty much like the next, none of them nearly as glamorous as they looked when you were on the other side of the photograph, reading the magazine. But I’d done nothing for
Us Weekly
, which as far as I knew was a celebrity gossip magazine and didn’t even hire models.

“I don’t think so,” I whispered back.

“You’re a designer, right?” the young woman said.

I shook my head. “No. You’ve got the wrong person.”

“I’m sure it was you,” she insisted. “I was just reading it. You’re also a model?”

A not very educated guess. “Yes,” I admitted. “But I wasn’t…”

“Amanda. Right?”

This was getting a little creepy. “How did you know that?”

“I told you—you’re in the new
Us Weekly
! Just a minute. I’ll get it.”

She scurried over to where she’d been sitting and came back holding the magazine, thrusting it onto the table in front of me.

There I was, all right, that first night I’d gone out with Tatiana. But Tati wasn’t in the picture, just me. “Hot new supermodel Amanda,” the caption read, “hits Bar 13, here wearing a dress of her own creation. Will this multitalented newcomer end up designing more of these beautiful clothes, modeling them—or both?”

“Oh God,” I said, lurching to my feet. “I’ve got to call Desi.”