She knew the strain it put on them and even people who weren’t at anything like their level of fame. Many was the neck rub she’d given to a young woman arriving at a shoot in bits after having one too many long lens aimed up her skirt as she got out of a car.
‘And then, of course,’ said Ava, smiling warmly at Natasha, ‘the final piece of the magic will be those more personal lifestyle stories. In fact, Blythe and I were wondering whether you might like to do the beach house shoot with your girlfriend, as a couple story …?’
Natasha heard Ava’s words and then it felt as though the whole world had come to a standstill. Time stopped, everything had gone silent, she was frozen like a frame in a film. What the hell had just happened?
She turned to look at Blythe who was still smiling at her enthusiastically and then back at Ava, who also looked perfectly happy. So it’s only me who’s finding this weird, she thought. Holy shit.
‘Blythe told me …’ Ava glanced quickly down at the pad on her desk, ‘that Mattie is really beautiful and she’s also a make-up artist, so that adds another great layer to the story.’
Natasha still couldn’t speak. She looked over at Blythe again, who was nodding in agreement. Neither of them seemed to have noticed that Natasha had been struck dumb. Or possibly turned to salt.
‘Yeah,’ said Blythe, ‘it was great running into you guys yesterday. You look so good together, I thought the pics would be amazing and I was even thinking, we could do some shots where you are doing each other’s make-up, using the range, especially as you have such different colouring.’
‘Oh, that would be great,’ said Ava, ‘what a fantastic idea. What do you think, Natasha?’
Natasha didn’t think anything, except that she seemed to have been transported to a parallel universe.
‘It’s a dream story for us to place,’ Ava continued, either not noticing Natasha’s lack of response, or choosing to ignore it. ‘I’m going to ring Anna myself to offer it and suggest the cover line, I’ve had a great idea for it. What do you think of this: “Lipstick Lesbians – Natasha Younger and her partner share their make-up secrets”?’
Blythe was clapping with delight.
‘That is so great,’ she said, ‘don’t you love it, Tash?’
No. She didn’t love it. Not at all did she love the idea of her private sexual preferences being plastered on the cover of one of the most widely circulated magazines in the world.
And neither did she love the idea of Ava personally giving Anna Wintour the news that one of the magazine’s most acclaimed make-up artists was a lesbian. Were they outing her by force? Is that what this was?
Ava was talking again, so Natasha made herself snap back to attention.
‘Or how about this?’ Ava was saying, gazing off into space again. ‘Let me see …’
She clicked her fingers and looked back at Natasha, smiling excitedly.
‘Got it,’ she said. ‘What do you think of this? “Girls on film: make-up superstar Natasha Younger showcases her new range on her girlfriend”. Or should it be “Girl on Girl” …? Risqué, but fun.’
Blythe was laughing and clapping again and Natasha tried to paste something like a smile on her own face, as it began to sink in what was actually going on. They were outing her, but not in a mean and nasty way, it was more of a loving intervention.
They hadn’t got her there to let her know they’d got wise to her secret love life and were disgusted – it was more like the opposite. They were telling her they knew she had a girlfriend and they were totally cool about it.
In fact they seemed genuinely enthusiastic at the prospect of marketing the range with her as an out-and-proud lesbian make-up artist. In their highly tuned commercial heads, they saw it as her Unique Selling Point.
And that was exactly what she didn’t want. Not just because of her long-standing anxiety that being known as ‘the lesbian make-up artist’ could limit her career – she simply didn’t want to be defined by her sexuality.
It wasn’t that she was ashamed that she preferred to kiss women, she just didn’t think it was the most interesting thing about her. It was how she was wired, as prosaic as preferring green tea to coffee, that’s all there was to it. Straights didn’t have to go public about their specific sexual preferences, so why should the details of her private life be public knowledge?
‘Those are all brilliant ideas,’ she said tentatively, knowing that the next words she spoke might be the most crucial of her entire career, ‘but I hadn’t really thought of the campaign being quite so personal.’
‘Oh, come on, Tasha,’ said Ava. ‘You’re one of the big players in the Instagram generation, this is how it works now, you know that – everyone’s daily life is their currency. Edited, of course, for maximum fabulousness, but you can’t expect to keep your professional and your personal lives separate any more. Your lifestyle is your image, and your image is your brand. Your name is going to be on those products – and you’re going to have to own every part of yourself, Natasha, or it won’t work.’
She looked at Natasha so intently as she said the last thing – ‘own every part of yourself’ – it was almost like it was echoing around the room. This was why this sudden meeting had been called.
Blythe clearly had seen Natasha holding hands with Mattie as they’d crossed the road to Eataly the morning before – but that wasn’t the reason she’d hurried back to alert Ava. It was because she’d also seen Natasha drop Mattie’s hand the moment she saw her. The issue wasn’t that Blythe had figured out the true scenario, but that she’d seen Natasha trying to hide it.
Natasha looked over at her. She was still smiling, but it was gentler now, seeming to say: I hate to lay this on you, sister, but you need to wise up about this, get real with yourself.
So there was no point in even discussing how Natasha felt about it. They knew what they knew and they’d made it clear how they wanted to handle it. What was that business cliché? Not a problem – an opportunity.
An opportunity for them to flog her sexuality as a marketing concept to sell more product, but at what cost to her privacy and dignity?
Natasha felt a sudden flare of anger. She knew she should be relieved that her fear of losing the range if anyone found out she wasn’t 100 per cent heterosexual wasn’t happening, but this felt almost worse. She was being forced to come out as a flag-waving lesbian to keep it.
She knew she had to leave Ava’s office fast, before she said something she’d regret. She needed to think long and hard about this, with a clear head, well away from Ava’s penetrating gaze and Blythe’s sympathetic one. She forced herself to meet Ava’s eyes again and was relieved to see her warm expression had returned.
‘So let’s leave it there for now,’ said Ava. ‘You’ve got a lot to think about. A campaign at this level is a lot to take on. It’s life changing and will require your full commitment.’
There she went, Natasha understood, reminding her again what the subtext was. Just in case you want to pull out now, while you still can. Because if you can’t handle having your whole life on public display – you’d better tell us immediately, before we spend another moment or another dollar on you.
It was tough love, OM style, but at least Natasha knew where she stood. She forced herself to smile back.
‘Thanks so much, Ava,’ she said, ‘it is a lot to take in, but it’s incredibly exciting. I can’t tell you what it means to me to be launching my range with you. I’ve probably learned more in this one meeting than I would have in years making endless mistakes, trying to do the brand on my own. I’m so grateful.’
Which wasn’t a word of a lie, because she was sincerely glad she knew where she stood with them this early on in the process. All she had to do now was to figure out what the hell she was going to do about it.
Natasha left the OM building feeling dazed. Emerging onto the heat of Fifth Avenue, for a moment she stood rooted to the spot, not knowing which way to turn. Cabs were streaming past her, headin
g downtown towards home and Mattie. But she didn’t feel ready to see Mattie yet. What was she going to say to her? Or anyone? What was she going to do about any of it?
The OM doorman came over to ask if she wanted him to hail her a taxi, and she thanked him, saying she was fine on foot, then walked up to the corner of 59th Street, waited for the lights to change and crossed over into Central Park. She needed space to think.
Her feet were walking, left, right, left, right, one after the other, but Natasha felt as though she were floating above her own body, she didn’t feel connected to the ground at all. In just a few moments in that corner office her world had tilted on its axis and she was no longer quite sure where she belonged in it.
After leaving the main path and taking a few random turns she found an empty bench under some trees and sat down, leaning her head back, to stare up into the canopy of leaves. Trying to think. Trying to sort the jumbled ideas fighting for precedence in her head into some kind of rational order.
Listening to the rustling of the breeze in the branches, Natasha thought suddenly of her mother, feeling a stab of primal longing for her comforting arms. She’d like to sob onto her shoulder, to see her face which shone with love whenever she looked at her daughters.
What would Mum do in this situation? she asked herself. She’d grab her crystals, of course and then she’d probably meditate. Natasha didn’t have any crystals with her, although she did have a couple back at the apartment, gifts from her mum, but the meditation she could do right there, without props.
She sat up straight and after shifting her handbag onto her lap and fastening her hands around it – she’d lived in New York too long to sit with her eyes closed in a public place with her bag unsecured – she started breathing slowly in and out, pausing at the end of each out breath, trying to release her mind of active thought.
Thanks, Mum, she thought, as she opened her eyes again ten minutes later, feeling much calmer. Thanks for raising me with all your yoga wisdom. Joy took all her new-age woo woo a bit far sometimes – Rachel was so funny about all that, she remembered with a pang, something else awful she had to sort out – but in times of crisis, Natasha always found it more reassuring than she’d ever admit to her cynical middle sister. And she knew Tessa felt the same as she did. She’d smile at Rachel’s jokes, but without comment, and Natasha had long suspected she was as fey as their mum in her own way, but didn’t want to talk about it.
Thinking about them Natasha had a sudden insight: were they a large part of the reason she didn’t feel comfortable about the idea of publicly coming out as a gay woman?
Not because she was worried they would react badly – as Mattie had said, she didn’t think you could meet three people less likely to judge her for her choice of partner – but out of shame for not having been honest with them about it all along?
That really might explain it, she thought, swivelling her head from side to side, trying to alleviate the neck tension that stress always gave her. On top of the guilt and regret she carried for going off to live with her dad that time, being gay had always felt like another way she’d made herself different from them.
Not that it was ever a choice. Her sexuality had been a realisation when she was fourteen and all her school friends were madly in love with boys and male pop stars and she’d realised she really wasn’t, but that her heart did beat faster every time she looked at the strong legs of the lady PE teacher.
She might have spoken to her mum about it then, except very soon after it had all got messily tied up with her apparently impetuous decision to move back to Brisbane with her dad.
What had actually prompted the move was that she’d fallen in mad unrequited love with a girl at school. She’d been so terrified of her own feelings – and of being found out by her peers – that she’d used the excuse of wanting to live with her dad to run away to Australia, hoping that by getting away from the object of her passion, she’d get over it. She had, very quickly, but only because she’d fallen for another girl over there.
Natasha sighed deeply, closing her eyes again and feeling slightly nauseous as she always did remembering those confusing times. She hated even thinking about how she had hurt her mother – and her sisters – by doing that and how it had created a sense of separateness from them that had never quite left her.
Different father, living in a different country … perhaps a different sexuality was just one difference too many. And now with this awful rift between her and Rachel, she felt more isolated from the family than ever.
The noise of skateboarders swishing past made her eyes snap open again and Natasha shook her head quickly a couple of times, to try and physically scatter those unhelpful thoughts. Dredging all that up now was not going to help, she had to concentrate on what was at stake here. Only the most important thing in her life: the make-up range she’d dreamed of starting since the beginning of her career.
But that wasn’t all. There was the other most important thing in her life too, becoming more important every day. Mattie. Natasha could imagine all too clearly how she would react to this new situation – it was proof that what she’d been saying was right all along, that Natasha had been crazy to worry about coming out.
Mattie said it was a mental block – and that Natasha was ‘mental’ because she had a block about it. Even in her dismay, Natasha couldn’t help smiling as she remembered the look on Mattie’s face as she’d said that to her. But jokes apart, this same goddamn issue which had come up their very first morning after, in Paris, was still the one thing that caused tension between them.
And then, among the confusion, something she’d never understood about herself became clear to Natasha. This was why she’d put up with the complications of affairs with ‘straight’ women, culminating in the previous two years of torture with her married lover.
It may have been difficult, but at least those women hadn’t demanded that Natasha come out. In fact, they’d begged her not to, in case it reflected back on them.
Then, even as that sunk in, something else came into her mind. She suddenly had a very clear memory of waking up that first morning of the Fourth of July weekend in her beach house, with Mattie at her side.
She remembered how happy she’d felt at the prospect of spending the whole holiday weekend together, just the two of them. No need to go to some forced Hamptons A-list barbecue, making sure she talked to all the right people, didn’t drink too much, stayed well away from the carbs and was suitably thrilled by the fireworks.
The clandestine affairs with their stolen hours and secret kisses might have made her feel protected, but knowing she had three whole days when she’d be able to be entirely herself, with somebody who loved her for who she was, was worth so much more. Genuine togetherness. The thought of being without that now was unbearable.
There was no escaping it. She was going to have to tell Mattie what had just happened and find a way to talk it through with her, to come to a decision before Mattie went back to London in forty-eight hours.
She still didn’t know exactly what she would say to her, how to explain all the complicated feelings, but she was already crystal clear about one thing. The two most important things in her life now were Mattie and ‘Younger by Natasha’.
And if she wanted to hold on to both of them she was going to have to come out.
Thursday, 10 July
Cranbrook
Tessa and Tom were out in the barn opening boxes, looking for things to put along the ‘story path’ she’d designed to lead customers through the main yard to the barn without them quite realising it. She couldn’t stop smiling, she was so happy he was there to help her, after arriving back from the big trip to the US the evening before, much earlier than planned.
‘I knew the minute I walked into that man’s office, which was on some kind of industrial estate, in the back of the LA beyond, the whole thing was a disaster,’ he was saying, then having to pause while Jack did something very loud with a ring saw.
&n
bsp; He was in the process of putting in some new – although actually old – windows to create a lighter and brighter curated retail area for pieces with instant appeal. Other stuff they were going to leave lying about in the still deliberately gloomy back end of the barn, looking as though it had been untouched for decades, for customers who actively preferred salvaging at the more basic level.
‘How come?’ asked Tessa, as soon as they could hear again. ‘How did you know it was a disaster?’
‘Everything in his office was brand new. It looked like he’d sent someone down to IKEA to buy a room set. Hideous.’
Tessa laughed. ‘Did you ask him about it?’
‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘He said his decorator had done it and asked me if I’d like one of her cards. It was very shiny with a picture of her on it.’
‘Blonde? Unnaturally white teeth?’
‘Affirmative,’ said Tom, ‘and it just got sleazier from there. He kept referring to salvage as “second-hand junk”. “So is there much cash in this second-hand junk of yours, Tim?” I’d love to see what he’d make of this.’
He held up one of the mangier-looking stuffed birds.
Tessa immediately thought of Simon and was hugely relieved to find it no longer affected her. Not even a pang. He was now a man she knew in her current life as a middle-aged married woman and a mother, not some kind of shamanic time traveller from their briefly shared youth.
One day she might even tell Tom about it, she thought. Especially if he stayed the way he’d been since he had unexpectedly arrived back the day before. She wasn’t making any assumptions yet, but he seemed much more like his old self.
‘So what was the final thing that made you decide to throw it in and come home?’ she asked him.
Tom started laughing. ‘When they sent me my call sheets for the filming and the first thing on my schedule was an appointment for Botox followed by one with a hair “colorist”.’
Secret Keeping for Beginners Page 32
