Lessons in Heartbreak

by Cathy Kelly

  Like a lot of bookers, Carla had been a model herself. Half Hispanic, half African-American, she was tall, coffee-skinned and preferred life on the other side of the camera where the rejection wasn’t as brutal.

  ‘When the tenth person of the week talks about you as though you’re not there and says your legs are too fat, your ass is too big, or your whole look is totally last season, then you start to believe them,’ Carla had told Izzie once.

  She rarely talked about her own modelling days now. Instead, she and Izzie – who’d bonded after starting at the agency at the same time and finding they were the same age – talked about setting up their own company, where they’d do things differently.

  Nobody was going to tell the models of the Silverwebb Agency – the name had leaped out at them: Izzie Silver, Carla Webb – they were too fat. Because the sort of models they were going to represent were plus-sized: beautiful and big. Women with curves, with bodies that screamed ‘goddess’ and with skin that was genuinely velvety instead of being air-brushed velvety because the model was underweight and acned from a bad lifestyle.

  For two women who shared the no-bullshit gene and who both struggled with the part of their jobs that dictated that models had to be slender as reeds, it had seemed such an obvious choice.

  Five months ago – pre-Joe – they’d been sharing lunch on the fire escape of Perfect-NY’s West Side brownstone, talking about a model from another agency who’d ended up in rehab because of her heroin addiction.

  She weighed ninety pounds, was six feet tall and was still in demand for work at the time.

  ‘It’s a freaking tragedy, isn’t it?’ Carla sighed as she munched on her lunch. ‘How destructive is that? Telling these kids they’re just not right even when they’re stop-traffic beautiful. Where is it going to end? Who gets to decide what’s beautiful any more, if the really beautiful girls aren’t beautiful enough?’

  Izzie shook her head. She didn’t know the answer. In the ten years she’d been working in the industry, she’d seen the perfect model shape change from all-American athletic and strong, although slim, to tall, stick-like and disturbingly skinny. It scared everyone in Perfect-NY and the other reputable agencies.

  ‘It’s going to reach a point where kids will need surgery before they get on any agency’s books because the look of the season is too weird for actual human beings,’ she said. ‘What does that say about the fashion industry, Carla?’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’

  ‘And we’re the fashion industry,’ Izzie added glumly. If they weren’t part of the solution, then they were part of the problem. Surely they could change things from the inside?

  ‘You know,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘if I had my own agency, I really don’t think I’d work with ordinary models. If they’re not screwed up when they start, they’ll be screwed up by the time they’re finished.’ She took a bite of her chicken wrap. ‘The designers want them younger and younger. Our client list will be nothing but twelve-year-olds soon.’

  ‘Which means that we, as women of nearly forty –’ Carla made the sign of the cross with her fingers to ward off this apocalyptic birthday ‘– are geriatric.’

  ‘Geriatric and requiring clothes in double-digit sizes in my case,’ Izzie reminded her.

  ‘Hey, you’re a Wo-man, not a boy child,’ said Carla.

  ‘Point taken and thank you, but still, I am an anomaly. And the thing is, women like you and me, we’re the ones with the money to buy the damn clothes in the first place.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘Teenagers can’t shell out eight hundred dollars for a fashion-forward dress that’s probably dry-clean-only and will be out of date in six months.’

  ‘Six? Make that four,’ said Carla. ‘Between cruise lines and the mid-season looks, there are four collections every year. By the time you get it out of the tissue paper, it’s out of fashion.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Izzie. ‘Great for making money for design houses, though. But that’s not what really annoys me. It is the bloody chasm between the target market and the models.’

  ‘Grown-up clothes on little girls?’ Carla said knowingly.

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed Izzie.

  As a single career woman living in her own apartment in New York, she had to look after herself, doing everything from unblocking her own sink to sorting out her taxes and then being able to play hardball with the huge conglomerates for whom her models were just pawns.

  Yet when the conglomerates showed off clothes aimed at career women like Izzie, they chose to do it with fragile child-women.

  The message from the sleek, exquisite clothes was: I’m your equal, Mister, and don’t you forget it.

  The message coming from a model with a glistening pink pout and knees fatter than her thighs, was: Take care of me, Daddy.

  ‘It’s a screwed-up world,’ she said. ‘I love our girls, but they’re so young. They need mothers, not bookers.’

  She paused. Lots of people said bookers were part-mother/ part-manager. For some reason, this bothered her lately. She’d never minded what she was called before, but now she felt uncomfortable being described as an eighteen-year-old’s mother. She wasn’t a mother, and it came as a shock that she was old enough to be considered mother to another grown-up. Why did it bother her now? Was it the age thing? Or something else?

  ‘Yeah.’ Carla abandoned her lunch and started on her coffee. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to work with women who’ve had a chance to grow up before they’re shoved down the catwalk?’

  ‘God, yes,’ Izzie said fervently. ‘And who aren’t made to starve themselves so the garment hangs off their shoulder blades.’

  ‘You’re talking about plus-sized models…’ said Carla slowly, looking at her friend.

  Izzie stopped mid-bite. It was exactly what she was always thinking. How much nicer it would be to work with women who were allowed to look like women and weren’t whipped into a certain-shaped box. The skinny-no-boobs-no-belly-and-no-bum box.

  Carla wrapped both hands around her coffee cup thoughtfully. The familiar noises of their fire-escape perch – the hum of the traffic and the building’s giant aircon machine on the roof that groaned and wheezed like a rocket about to take off – faded into nothingness.

  ‘We could –’

  ‘– start our own agency –’

  ‘– for plus-sized models –’

  They caught each other’s hands and screamed like children.

  ‘Do you think we could do it?’ asked Izzie earnestly.

  ‘There’s definitely a market for plus-sized models now,’ Carla said. ‘You remember years ago, nobody ever wanted bigger girls, but now, how often are we asked do we have any plus-sized girls? All the time. The days of plus girls being used just for catalogues and knitting patterns are over. And with lots of the big-money design houses making larger lines, they want more realistic models. No, there’s a market, all right. It’s niche, but it’s growing.’

  ‘Niche: yes, that sums it up,’ Izzie agreed. ‘I like niche. It’s special, elite, different.’

  She was fed up working for Perfect-NY and having daily corporate battles with the three partners who’d long ago gone over to the dark, money-making side. The agency’s Dark Side Corporates didn’t care about people, be it employees or models. Any day now, time spent in the women’s room would involve a clocking-in timecard and a machine that doled out a requisite number of toilet-paper sheets.

  Besides, she’d given ten years to the company and she felt at a crossroads in her life. Forty loomed. Life had run on and – it hit Izzie suddenly what was wrong with her, why she’d been feeling odd lately – she felt left behind.

  She had all the things she’d wanted: independence, her own apartment, wonderful friends, marvellous holidays, a jam-packed social life. And yet there was a sense of something missing, a flaw like a crack in the wall that didn’t ruin the effect, but was still there, if you thought about it. She refused to believe the missing bit could be lo
ve. Love was nothing but trouble. Having a crack in her life because she didn’t have someone to love was just such a goddamn cliché, and Izzie refused to be a cliché.

  Work was the answer – her own business. That would be the love affair of her life and remove any lingering, late-night doubts about her life’s path.

  ‘I’m sure we could raise the money,’ Carla said. ‘We haven’t got any dependants to look out for. There has to be some bonus in being single women, right?’

  They both grinned. Izzie often said that New York must surely have the world’s highest proportion of single career women on the planet.

  ‘And it’s not as if we don’t know enough Wall Street venture capitalists to ask for help,’ Carla added.

  This time, Izzie laughed out loud. Their industry attracted many rich men who had all the boy toys – private jets, holiday islands – and felt that a model on their arm would be the perfect accessory.

  ‘As if they’d meet us,’ she laughed. ‘You know there’s a Wall Street girlfriend age limit, and we’re ten years beyond it, sister. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘not ten, more like fifteen. Those masters of the universe men with their Maseratis and helicopter lessons prefer girlfriends under the age of twenty-five. They are blind when women of our vintage are around.’

  ‘Stop dissing us, Miz Silver,’ Carla retorted. ‘When we have our own agency, we can do what I’m always telling them here and have an older model department. And you could be our star signing,’ she added sharply. ‘The masters of the universe only keep away from you because they’re scared of you. You’re too good at that “tough Irish chick” thing. Men are like guard dogs, Izzie. They growl when they’re scared. Don’t scare them and they’ll roll over and beg.’

  ‘Stop already,’ Izzie said, lowering her head back to her wrap. ‘It doesn’t matter whether I scare them or not: they prefer nineteen-year-old Ukrainian models every time. If a man wants a kid and not a woman, then he’s not my sort of man.’

  She didn’t bother to reply to the remark about her working as a model. It was sweet of Carla, but she was too old for a start, and she’d spent too long with models to want to enter their world. Izzie wanted to be in control of her own destiny and not leave it in the hands of a bunch of people in a room who wanted a specific person to model a specific outfit and could crush a woman’s spirit by saying, ‘We definitely don’t want you.’

  ‘Could we make our own agency work?’ she’d asked Carla on the fire escape. ‘I mean, what’s the percentage of new businesses that crash and burn in the first year? Fifty per cent?’

  ‘More like seventy-five.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a much more reassuring statistic.’

  ‘Well, might as well be real,’ Carla said.

  ‘At least we’d be doing something we really believed in,’ Izzie added.

  For the first month after the conversation, they’d done nothing but talk about the idea. Then they’d begun to lay the groundwork: talking to banks, talking to a small-business consultancy, and drawing up a business plan. So far, nobody was prepared to loan them the money, but as Carla said, all it took was one person to believe in them.

  Then, two months ago, Izzie Silver had found love.

  Love in the form of Joe Hansen. Love had obliterated everything else from her mind. And while Carla still talked about their own agency, Izzie’s heart was no longer in it, purely because there was no room in her heart for anything but Joe.

  Love had grabbed her unexpectedly and nobody had been more shocked than Izzie.

  ‘If it all works out, we won’t be the backbone of Perfect-NY any more,’ Carla had said happily just before Izzie had set off for New Mexico. ‘Imagine, we’ll be the bosses…and the bookers, assistants, accountants and probably the women who’ll be mopping out the women’s room at night too, but, hey, we won’t care.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Izzie, thinking that she didn’t give a damn about anything because she was so miserable at having to fly to New Mexico and be away from Joe. Once, she’d have loved this chance to leave the office for a shoot in a far-flung location. Now, thanks to Joe, she hated the very idea.

  ‘Catalogue shoots are tough,’ Carla added. ‘Pity you weren’t sent to babysit an editorial shoot instead. ‘Cos it’s going to be hard work, honey.’

  She was right, Izzie thought, standing in the New Mexico heat, watching the Perfect-NY model work.

  Catalogue shoots were hard work. Hours of shooting clothes with no time to labour over things the way they could on magazine shoots. On magazine shoots, Izzie knew it could easily take a day to shoot six outfits – here, they might manage that in one morning. The models had to be ultra professional. The girl with the cheekbones, still-eyed and silent, was just that.

  During the morning, Izzie had watched Tonya in an astonishing seven different outfits, transforming her silent watchful face into an all-American-girl-next-door smile each time. It was only when the cameras were finished, and Tonya’s face lapsed back into adolescent normality, that Izzie thought again and again how incredibly young she was.

  Now it was lunchtime. The photographer and his two senior assistants were drinking coffee and gulping down the food brought in from outside; the other two assistants were hauling light reflectors and shifting huge lights.

  No lunch for them.

  The make-up and hair people were sitting outside, letting the sun dust their pedicured toes and gossiping happily about people they knew.

  ‘She insists she hasn’t had any cosmetic procedures done. Like, hello!! That’s so a lie. If the skin round her eyes get pulled up any further at the corners, she’ll be able to see sideways. And talk about botox schmotox. She never smiled much before, but now she’s like a wax dummy.’

  ‘Dummy? She wishes. Dummies were warm once – isn’t that how they melt the wax?’

  ‘You’re a scream!’

  The woman from Zest’s enormous marketing department was loudly phoning her office.

  ‘It’s fabulous: we’re on target. We’ve the rest of the day here because the light’s so good that Ivan says we can shoot until at least six. Then tomorrow we’re going up to the pueblo…’

  Izzie’s cell phone buzzed discreetly and she fumbled in her giant tote until she found it. She loved big bags that could hold her organiser, make-up, spare flat shoes, gum, emergency Hershey bars, water bottle, and flacon of her favourite perfume, Acqua di Parma. The minus was triumphantly holding up a panty liner by mistake when you were actually looking for a bit of note paper. How did they always manage to escape their packaging and stick themselves to inappropriate things? They never stuck to knickers as comprehensively as they did to things in her handbag.

  ‘How’s it goin’?’ asked Carla on a line so clear that she might be in the next room instead of thousands of miles away in their Manhattan office.

  ‘It’s all going fine,’ Izzie reassured her. ‘Nobody’s screamed at anybody yet, nobody’s threatened to walk off in a temper, and the shots are good.’

  ‘You practising magic to keep it all running smooth, girl?’ asked Carla.

  ‘Got my cauldron in my bag,’ replied Izzie, ‘and I’m ready with the eye of newt and the blood of a virgin.’

  Carla laughed at the other end of the phone. ‘Not much virgin blood around if Ivan Meisner is the photographer.’

  Ivan’s reputation preceded him. As a photographer he might be a genius who had W and Vogue squabbling over him, but the genius fairy hadn’t extended her wand as far as his personality.

  Nobody watching him idly caressing his extra-long lens as he watched young models could be in any doubt that he considered himself a bit of a maestro in the sack as well as behind the Hasselblad.

  ‘He’s definitely got his eye on Tonya,’ Izzie said, ‘but don’t worry. I’m going to put a stop to his gallop.’

  ‘Can somebody tape that?’ Carla asked. ‘I’d like to see him when you’ve finished with him. Hard Copy would love film of Ivan having his lights punched out.’


  Izzie laughed. Carla was one of the few people who knew that, at fourteen, Izzie Silver had had a reputation for being a tomboy with a punishing right hook. It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d want widely known – violence was only in fashion when it came to faking hard-edged shoots in graffiti-painted alleyways – but it still gave her an edge.

  ‘Don’t mess with the big Irish chick,’ was how some people put it. Izzie was more than able to stand up to anyone. Ruefully, she could see how that might put some men off. Before Joe, it had been six months since her last date. Not that she cared any more: you had to move on, right?

  ‘Carla, you’re just dying to see me hit someone, aren’t you?’ laughed Izzie now.

  ‘I know you can because of all those kickboxing classes,’ Carla retorted. ‘Sure, you’re the queen of glaring people into silence with the evil eye and telling them you don’t take any crap, but I’d still prefer to see you flatten someone one day. For fun. Pleeese…? I hate the way Ivan hits on young models.’

  ‘He won’t this time,’ Izzie said firmly. ‘He might try, but he won’t get anywhere. Since the company have actually spent hard cash to fly me here to make sure it all runs smoothly, I’m going to do my best. Any news at your end?’

  ‘No, it’s pretty quiet. Rosanna’s off sick so we’re a woman down. Lola spotted a gorgeous Mexican girl on the subway last night. She got a photo of her and gave the girl her card, but she thinks the kid’s scared she’s from immigration or something, so she may not call. Stunning, Lola says. Tall, with the most incredible skin and fabulous legs.’

  ‘Oh, I hope she phones,’ Izzie said. As bookers, they were always on the lookout for the next big thing in modelling. Despite the proliferation of television shows where gorgeous girls turned up hoping to be models, there were still scores of undiscovered beauties, and there was nothing worse than finding one and having her not believe the ‘I work for a model agency’ schtick.

  ‘Me too. Lola keeps glaring at her phone. It’s going to catch fire soon.’

  ‘No more news?’