Plus

by Veronica Chambers

  “No, she was a great friend to me.”

  “Then call her.”

  “Okay, I will,” I said, and I meant it too.

  The agency set us up at this cool hotel where after checking in, you could have a goldfish delivered to your room. We named ours Ben, in honor of Aunt Zo’s new boyfriend, who was a clarinetist in the touring company of Wicked. Zo and I had dinner at Yo! Sushi, a funny restaurant where you sit at a counter and this conveyor belt of sushi goes around and around. You just pick what you want as it comes by. I had an early call the next day, so I went to bed while Aunt Zo caught up with some of her musician buddies. “We’re night owls by nature,” she said as she took off for her second dinner date of the evening at ten p.m.

  The next morning, I showed up at the studio and met the director and her team. It was kind of a weird situation. I’d never been in a music video before. I knew that the lead singer of the band—they were called Guess Again Girl—had been in New York and seen my billboard in Times Square. Jess, the director, had this concept to shoot me as a painting in all the museums from all over the world. The lead singer, Garrett, would wander in and out of museums and sing to me in the paintings. It sounded pretty cool—there was going to be lots of blue screen, lots of elaborate costume changes.

  “It’s going to take bloody forever,” Jess said, explaining why it was a four-day shoot.

  “No problem,” I said. “I’m used to waiting around.”

  It was a whole new crew of people to get used to. But there must be some law that the hair and makeup people become a model’s best friend. Because in no time, I was chatting to the lead hair guy, Karl, and the lead makeup guy, Mickey, as if they were long lost friends.

  The first setup was a reproduction of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, a painting Aunt Zo had actually taken me to see at the Met in New York. It was apparently the Paris Hilton videotape of its time, although it’s just a painting of a woman in a long strapless black dress. Karl put a red glaze in my hair and then Mickey gave me a fabulous glamour look. Three hours later, I was ready. Three hours after that, the band showed up.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Garrett said, kissing Jess on the cheek. The other guys in the band mumbled apologies as well.

  Garrett came up to me, looking like a nineteenth-century painting, and actually got on one knee and kissed my hand.

  “My muse,” he said. “I’m Garrett, and those other geezers are Lance, Mario, and Benny.”

  I waved hello to the band.

  Mickey gave all the guys a dusting of face powder, and literally ten minutes later, they were ready to go. No makeup. No hair. No stylists. I’d always thought that the scruffy rock star thing was contrived. That it took ages to get that lived-in look. Not these guys.

  The set was made to look like a museum gallery room, the genius of which, Jess explained, is that all over the world, gallery rooms look the same. One set would work for all four locations. They were just changing the paintings, the extras, the costumes.

  The song was called “Picture in a Frame,” and since it was off of the upcoming Guess Again Girl album, I hadn’t heard it yet. In the video, Garrett wanders around the gallery, singing the song. There are all these extras looking at paintings and sketching while the other guys in the band play their instruments in the corner and everyone pretends not to see them. In the first setup, Garrett is singing to a reproduction of Sargent’s Madame X. In the second setup, the painting comes to life and I’m there, leaning on a chestnut side table, trying to look elegant and swank and 150 years old. I’d never had anyone serenade me before; that was kind of nice, even if there were dozens of people standing around and watching us.

  The next day was even crazier. I was meant to be a portrait by Velázquez come to life. The museum was the Prado and the painting was Queen Margherita on Horseback. The queen part was cool. I had this fluffy white collar around my neck and this amazingly intricate burgundy brocade gown, and while I didn’t wear a crown (apparently not horseback riding gear), they pulled my hair up in a bun and covered it with this sexy little silk net. The problem was the horse. She was lovely, her name was Paula, and she was golden brown with white spots and either amazingly well behaved or drugged out of her horsey little mind. Either way, I was happy. The thing is that in my long brocade gown, it took three people to hoist me on top of Paula, and once I had mounted her, I discovered this fear of heights I’d never had before. I was terrified that I would fall or that Paula would start bucking and I would fall and she would trample me. So when Garrett started singing, I apparently had this dazed and terrified look on my face. I loved the song and had no problem looking at him dreamily before. But I could barely focus on him now as he sang:

  “You’re just a picture in a frame

  I’m no match for your games

  I bet the house, how could I win?

  Now I’m out and the other guy’s in

  All I’ve got’s a picture in a frame.”

  Jess called cut, then she came over to me. “What’s wrong, Bee?”

  “I’m just a little nervous, that’s all,” I said.

  “You look beautiful,” Garrett said, coming up to me and kissing my hand for the second day in a row.

  “The horse is perfectly tame. Have you met her trainer, Louden?”

  Louden, a scrappy-looking old guy in a tweed cap and a plaid vest, came over and shook my hand. His accent was heavy.

  “Don’t you worry about Paula. You could trust her to carry a newborn baby safely to London Tower on her back.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said.

  Jess suggested we take a break, and the three photo assistants helped me dismount the horse.

  I was sitting in a corner, trying to do the yoga breaths that Melody had taught me, when Benny, the guitarist, came over to see me.

  “You going to be okay, Bee?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “I brought you over some potato salad.”

  FYI, just because I’m a plus-size model doesn’t mean I eat like it’s going out of style.

  “It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” I said.

  “My mum made it,” he said, pouting a little.

  I took the bowl from him and ate one spoonful. It was awful. I put the spoon down.

  “It’s delicious,” I said.

  “Well, eat up, then,” Benny said. “Finish this bowl and I’ll give you a second.”

  Which made me wonder, would “yum” have been a less enthusiastic but still polite response?

  He sat there staring at me, so I ate the whole bowl. When he jumped up to get a second, I said, “No, please, I’m stuffed.”

  Jess called us back into the shot, and I started walking toward the set.

  Twelve hours later, I woke up to find myself in my hotel room. The room was dark, and I could barely make out Ben the goldfish in the bowl next to my bed.

  I wandered out of the room and Zo jumped to her feet. “You’re up, thank God. What happened to you, Bee?”

  That was a very good question. What had happened to me?

  “I don’t know. I was at the shoot . . .”

  “And you were spooked by the horse? The photographer thought maybe you had a panic attack and blacked out. Of course, she also implied that you might have been on drugs, but I told her you were clean. Speaking of which, Leslie’s called about a dozen times, so give her a call, okay?”

  I was thinking about what Aunt Zo had said about drugs, then I realized that the last thing I remembered was Benny giving me that bowl of potato salad and being so insistent that I eat it, even though it was ten in the morning.

  “Zo, is there some sort of drug that you could put in potato salad?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You can put almost anything into anything. Why?”

  I told her about Benny and his “mother’s potato salad.” She agreed that it didn’t sound right. We called the hotel concierge, and they arranged for us to go to the hospital.

  An hour later, we had the toxi
cology report. I’d been given a horse tranquilizer. The doctor looked at me and said, “You are very lucky that you are not ze skinny girl. Your body could metabolize ze drugs in a healthy way. Ze skinny girl might have had a heart attack and died.”

  Of course, what I heard him saying was that I was big enough for a horse tranquilizer. Aunt Zo and I argued about this the whole cab ride back to the hotel.

  “He said I was a horse,” I said.

  “He said you’re lucky to be alive,” she said.

  “Because I’m a horse.”

  “Because you’re lucky,” Zo said. “Look, Bee, I won’t do this with you. This “Am I fat?” thing. You are gorgeous. You have always been gorgeous. And now you are getting paid a ton of money and have become quite famous for being gorgeous. You are my favorite niece. The fact that you are my only one is immaterial. Please don’t let this modeling thing turn you into a self-hating “Do I look fat in this?” person. It’s petty and it’s boring.”

  Those were harsh words coming from Aunt Zo. She hated petty people and she hated boring people more. She’d never, ever used either word in reference to me.

  “By the way,” Aunt Zo said. “My concert was tonight.”

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “I’m so sorry you cancelled it because of me.”

  “There’ll be other concerts.”

  I reached across the cab and hugged her. Amazingly, she hugged me back. Memo to self: Shape up and earn Zo’s respect again.

  Back at the hotel, I called Leslie in New York. She was furious at me for passing out at the shoot until I explained that I’d been drugged.

  “Well, you’re about to get your first taste of the British tabloid system,” she said. “Tomorrow’s Daily Mail is running an article that implies you stole the tranqs from the trailer in order to get high.”

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  The next morning, it was worse than I’d imagined. There was a picture of me looking terrified on top of Paula. The headline read:

  BOVINE BEAUTY STEALS HORSE PILLS FOR CHEAP THRILLS

  The British paparazzi were waiting outside of my hotel, and when I got to the lobby, the hotel manager said, “I wouldn’t go out that way, ma’am.” He said he’d order the car to come back around the side entrance, but they were there too. I was used to cameras flashing in my face, but not forty or fifty at a time. The hotel manager threw his jacket over my head and shoved me in the backseat.

  “Um, thanks,” I said, just before he slammed the door shut.

  “Tell the agency you need some sort of security,” he said. “Protect you from the wolves.”

  Call time was eleven a.m. I arrived on set, with a lunch packed by Aunt Zo. She’d run out to the food court at Harrod’s and prepared a feast for me. If I could’ve kept it under lock and key, I would have.

  Jess took me aside and apologized for the band’s behavior. She said that they were all going to apologize to me as well and she hoped that we could get through the rest of the shoot without incident.

  Garrett and the guys arrived, and they shuffled over to me one by one, like they were naughty schoolboys preparing to be spanked. I accepted their apologies, though I decided that Benny was a toad. He seemed to be holding back a laugh when he muttered, “It wasn’t a very funny joke, was it?” Which I guess in England passes for an apology. But when I went to the bathroom, someone had taped a dozen copies of the front page of the Daily Mail to the bathroom wall. I wonder who?

  21

  Just Bee-astly

  The next day, I got dressed up as Queen Margherita once again. Maybe it was the residual tranq in my system or maybe after the day I’d had, I was up for anything, but I mounted Paula with no problem and managed to get through Garrett’s song with a loving expression on my face.

  Since we’d missed a day’s worth of work, we were pulling a double shift. Just before dinner, we set up for the third shot. In this one, I was to be portraying the Toilet of Venus, by Rubens. In the painting, the woman is looking in a mirror held by an angel. She also had one breast showing, which Leslie had already told them wasn’t happening. Karl put extensions in my hair, and I wore this white silky nightgown. There was a little girl dressed up as an angel, all set to hold my mirror. Her name was Gwendolyn, and she was gorgeous: big beautiful eyes, dark curly hair. She was also a little monster. She started off by sticking her tongue out at me. No biggie. I stuck my tongue out back at her. I thought we were just playing around.

  Then she started pulling my extensions out. Karl had glued them instead of sewing them in since we were pressed for time. Every time she yanked one, I screamed in pain. Finally Jess took both the monster and the monster’s mother aside and gave them a talk about professional behavior.

  Gwendolyn came back to the set with a little angel smile on her face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I said, reaching down to give her a hug. But she pulled away from me.

  “I’m sorry you’re a drug-addicted cow,” she said, and then she kicked me.

  Kicking me when nobody was looking, which was every five minutes or so, became Gwenny’s game for the rest of the shoot, which lasted until two the following morning. I know that I’m vastly overpaid as a model, but on the Guess Again Girl shoot I was earning every penny.

  The final day of the shoot was an easy one. I was to be Madame Monet in Renoir’s Madame Monet Reclining on a Sofa Reading Le Figaro, which meant that I got to wear a gorgeous pale blue gown, lie on a chaise lounge, and read a French newspaper. Well, look at a French newspaper and pretend to read. Still, the shoot took all day. Jess wanted to get plenty of angles so that she’d have a lot to work with in the editing room, so we did a thousand variations on this one simple shot. By the end of the day, when she called a wrap, I thought if I never heard “Picture in a Frame” again, it would be too damn soon.

  Afterward, everyone went out to dinner at a cool restaurant called Spoon. I was nervous about eating anywhere in the vicinity of the band, but Jess assured me she’d keep Benny and the other guys far away from my food. I sat at the other end of the table with Karl and Mickey, the hair and makeup guys, who referred to themselves as BQs: bitchy queens. They made wicked jokes about everyone in the restaurant, and I laughed all night long.

  After dinner, Garrett asked me if he could walk me back to my hotel. I figured it was okay. After a guy sings you a love song two hundred times, you start to have friendly feelings toward him. He was cute, and he knew it. In the restaurant, girls kept coming up to him and asking for an autograph. Even walking down the street, it was funny to see people doing double takes as they realized who they’d walked by.

  I’d never been to London before, and central London at night was like something out of a movie. We walked past the most perfect town houses: cream-colored bricks with shiny jet-black doors and wrought iron balconies and gates. There were a million little parks and greenery everywhere: plants, trees, shrubs. No wonder all the cool American celebrities were moving to London: Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. It was like New York, but older and different and so pretty.

  Garrett told me about how he’d grown up north of London in Manchester. Apparently they have a really great soccer team, which they call football. He told me how he’d named the band, Guess Again Girl, after his high school girlfriend dumped him and told him he’d never amount to anything, which I thought was pretty cool. He asked me if I had a boyfriend, and I told him that we’d just had a pretty nasty breakup. He said, “Those must be going around. I just had one of those too.”

  When we got to the hotel, I was telling Garrett all about the goldfish the front desk had given us for our stay and how we’d named him Ben, after Zo’s new boyfriend.

  “I’d love to meet Ben,” Garrett said, touching my hair.

  “Well, my aunt Zo is sleeping,” I said, covering, as if Zo ever went to bed before midnight. />
  “Fine, I’ll get us another room,” he said, walking toward the check-in desk.

  “I’m not going to bed with you,” I said bluntly.

  “What? You’ve got morals now?”

  “I’ve got morals always.”

  “How American of you, to sit up on your high horse . . .”

  “You should know better than to talk to me about horses, Garrett.” I glared at him, memories of the night Zo missed her concert because of his friends and their stupid practical joke returning.

  “So you let me fly you to London, make you the star of my most expensive video yet, and you don’t think I’m entitled.”

  “Entitled to what?”

  “Entitled to some of that ass that I paid for.”

  You know how if you ask your parents what the sixties was about and they always say, “Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll”? If someday my kids ask me what the early twenty-first century was about, I’m going to tell them, “Sex, drugs, and bullshit.”

  “Garrett, let me break it down for you. You did not fly me here: your record company did. You did not pay my modeling fees: your record company did. And neither you nor your record company paid for any ass. Now run home like a good little boy.”

  He looked like he was going to say more, whether to insult me or cajole, I couldn’t tell. But then Aunt Zo walked in the front door and came over and gave me a hug.

  “How you doing, Bee?” she said, giving Garrett a once-over.

  “Just fine,” I said.

  And on that note, we turned and left him standing there. But even as we walked away, I could hear a girl asking him, “Excuse me, are you Garrett Phillips from Guess Again Girl . . .”