Spring Collection

by Judith Krantz

  “I haven’t said a word about this since I came to New York,” Tinker said with astonishment in her voice, “except a little bit to Frankie. In fact, I’ve never talked this much about myself in my whole life, to anybody at all. You know everything there is to know about me now.… you must think I’m completely self-centered, with nothing on my mind but a silly runway walk, as if that could possibly be important to you or anyone with any brains—”

  “I was drawing you out, didn’t you notice? Can’t you tell how interested I am?”

  “I thought you were just being a good listener, so that you could lull my suspicions,” Tinker said, turning to him and unleashing her luminous glance, with the merest hint of the possibility of the chance of a smile at the corner of her lips.

  “What kind of suspicions?” he asked, stumbling over the words. Oh, God, he was wrong, she did know how to flirt, Tom thought, feeling sick with swift, undiluted jealousy for every poor sucker she’d ever flirted with—there must be hundreds of them, the miserable, unworthy dickheads whatever she’d said about spending her time reading in a library. She probably didn’t even know the Dewey Decimal System. Maybe she’d made up the whole story of her life, maybe she was a psychopathic liar, oh, God, he was going insane, why would she bother to lie to him when whatever she said was fascinating, even the ankle socks?

  “The suspicions,” Tinker explained, “that would be aroused when you ask me to go to your studio with you and look at your work. Isn’t that what artists do? I’ve read all about it.”

  “Read about it?” he mumbled, feeling stupid.

  “I’ve never met a real artist before.” Now the smile was a reality. Tinker bent her head, took his hand in hers and looked at it carefully. “No paint under the fingernails,” she said finally, as if in regret.

  “Try my pulse,” he suggested, putting two of her fingers on the inside of his wrist.

  “What’s normal?” Tinker inquired earnestly. “I missed First Aid, I never had time to join the Girl Scouts, not even the Brownies.”

  “You’re utterly useless, aren’t you?” He tried to sound indifferent although he could feel his pulse jumping madly under her fingertips and he was short of breath.

  “Utterly,” Tinker agreed readily. “That’s exactly what I’ve been explaining to you. In a world going rapidly to hell, I have no place, not even on the runway.”

  “What if I could find a use for you? Would that help?” He listened to his own words in a cloud of shocked disbelief. He was flirting and he didn’t do that, it wasn’t his style, he got flirted at, that was the way things had always been in his life.

  “Now that’s the sort of question that might arouse my suspicions, if I were a suspicious type, but I’m not. I’m gullible, a sitting duck, an innocent, helpless, basically worthless little country girl from Tennessee,” Tinker said with rising delight, feeling something she didn’t quite understand shift in her inner landscape, lightening the shadows, making the phantoms disappear.

  “Ah, shit, you win, just don’t stop taking my pulse.”

  “Win what?” she asked.

  “Me. If you want me.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that yet, do I?” she asked reasonably.

  “Will you come and look at my pictures?”

  “When?”

  “Now?”

  “That seems to be as good a time as any,” Tinker said, trying to keep the surge of eagerness out of her voice.

  • • •

  “Promise me one thing,” Tom said, as he paused before turning his key in the lock of his Left Bank studio, on the top floor of an ancient building on an unfashionable street in an unpicturesque neighborhood of the sixth arrondissement. “Don’t say anything about the pictures. Not a word. I know you’re not experienced in making the kind of polite remarks people make when they visit a studio.”

  “What about impolite remarks?”

  “Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. Not,” he added hastily, “that the pictures are good, just that people have this idea they have to be complimentary, no matter what they really think.”

  “Come on and open the door. I don’t know anything about art, I don’t even know what I like, so you have nothing to worry about from me.” How come Tom had suddenly become so self-conscious, Tinker wondered. First he wanted her to see his paintings, now he didn’t want to know her reaction to them. Were all artists shrinking violets when it came right down to showing their stuff? Were all people, even the ones who seemed the most confident, shrinking violets about going public with their personal efforts, even to one other person?

  She was busy turning this thought over in her mind when Tom snapped on the lights of a room with flaking plaster walls painted chalk white, a paint-splotched floor, and a pyramid grid of white metal overhead that supported a skylight ceiling. It was a big room, divided into various areas by old, vaguely Art-Deco screens. The largest object in the room was an enormous, sagging old couch draped in a piece of white fabric adorned with a few ancient pillows, around which three space heaters were placed. The couch stood on a ratty-looking Persian rug, and some candles on the floor evidently served as a fireplace equivalent.

  “Not exactly cozy,” Tinker said with a shiver as all the whiteness popped into view. There must be an easel hidden somewhere behind one of those screens, she thought, and a kitchen and a bathroom of some sort, and even a closet, or didn’t artists bother with closets?

  “It’s perfect,” he objected, “perfect. I dreamed of a place like this all of my adult life. I never thought I’d be lucky enough to find it. It gets every bit of available light in a dark city … finding it was an incredible stroke of luck. I suppose you’re wondering why Paris? Why did I go for that old, outdated, unhip, not-happening cliché of coming to Paris to paint when I could have done it better in New York where the art scene is? But New York is where I had my advertising life and my advertising friends and my advertising success. I had to get out of town, make a clean break, throw myself into another world. For some deep-down reason—probably something I read, maybe everything I’d read, it was important to me to live the familiar dream, go the whole way with the experience, not duck it, but buy into the whole banal old-fashioned, outdated romantic fantasy of being a painter in Paris—that way, when I go back, if it doesn’t work out for me, at least I’ll know that I didn’t do it the safe way or halfway—”

  “If you want to keep standing here talking, and putting off the inevitable, we might just as well go back to the Flore where it’s warmer,” Tinker said, laughing at the sight of his feet firmly planted at the entrance to the studio, as if to go in would be dangerous.

  “Damn, you’re probably freezing. Here I’ll go turn on the space heaters,” Tom said, finally moving to the couch.

  “I just want to look at the pictures and you’re stopping me,” Tinker said, unzipping her parka. The room wasn’t actually ice cold, she decided, it was the effect of that glacial white paint. She crossed the floor and began to inspect paintings that stood propped up against the walls.

  “See, what it is,” Tom said nervously, “is that I don’t believe that there isn’t plenty of room to work in the area between pure representation and pure abstraction. Most artists are deconstructing, disassembling, and certainly attempting to find some other way to work than straightforward easel painting, but I don’t give a damn what the hell is fashionable at the moment. What I’m trying to do is recapture, well, try anyway, to recapture memory, you know, like poetry is supposed to be emotion recollected in tranquility, I try to recapture specific important memories, certain significant moments in my life, recollected in color, in fact—”

  “Shut up,” Tinker said, “you’re confusing me.” As she walked slowly, pausing before each painting, she made no judgments or comparisons, for she lacked the background to do so. She simply allowed the paintings to happen to her, she plunged her eyes into each one, reveling in the lushness, the downright unabashed gorgeousness of the colors that spilled down every inc
h of the canvas as well as over their wide wooden frames that were treated as an essential part of the pictures. The shapes Tom had created were mysteriously both familiar and unfamiliar. There was a singing vibrancy, an almost irresistible allure, an intense sensuous pull to each painting that made Tinker ache to touch them, to dip into them, to run her hands over their seductive, thickly painted surfaces, to find out if these marvelous, happy, dancing colors would come off on her.

  “I could eat them,” she murmured to herself.

  “What?” Tom asked from the doorway, where he seemed to be fastened to the floor.

  “An inappropriate remark,” Tinker replied.

  “What did you say, damn it!”

  “I said I could eat them, damn it! Whatever happened to freedom of speech?”

  Tom blushed with deep pleasure.

  “I know that’s not the right thing—” Tinker began.

  “It’s the perfect thing!” He crossed the room behind her and lifted her mass of hair off the collar of her parka and kissed her lightly just where the short curls of her hairline lay on the tender skin of the nape of her neck. “The one perfect thing—there’s only one problem,” he laughed, pulling briefly on one of the short curls. “How will I paint the memory of this moment without actually painting you?”

  “What’s stopping you from painting me?” Tinker asked, turning to face him. “Did I say I wouldn’t pose?”

  “I don’t do portraits. I’ve never painted someone real, someone sitting right in front of me.”

  “Why not?” she demanded, her hands on her hips.

  “Painting a real person involves or at least implies, getting some sort of ‘likeness,’ and that’s a word that’s always bothered me,” Tom said, standing his ground. “It imposes a limit, with conventional boundaries, it’s something with thousands of years of history behind it, it’s one of the most ancient forms of art, it goes all the way back to drawing animals and hunters on the walls of caves and making fertility goddesses out of stone.”

  “If getting a likeness isn’t fashionable because it’s been done forever, then isn’t that a good reason to do another, in your own style? I want you to put me on the wall of your cave,” Tinker informed him, with the beat of teasing but real confrontation clear in her voice. “But I don’t want you to wait to recollect me, either in tranquility or in hitting yourself on the head, like a total jerk, asking yourself why you let me get away when I was right here inviting you to paint me. I don’t want to be a ‘significant moment’ in your life, dredged up years from now, turned into a bunch of colors.”

  “Oh.”

  “ ‘Oh’? Is that all you have to say?” she challenged him. “You’re plenty talkative when you’re telling me what you will or won’t do in your work, how about a few words like ‘yes, thank you’ or ‘no, thank you’ when I make you an offer I wouldn’t turn down if I were you.”

  “What a provoking bitch you’ve turned out to be!” he said, unable to suppress a laugh. “You come in here announcing that you don’t know anything about art, you make a quick judgment about my pictures, and now you want me to change my style at your command.”

  “So what? It’s a free country. Just what are you going to do about it?”

  “What do you think?” he asked, taking her by the shoulders of her parka and shaking her slowly, a few inches in each direction. “Do I have a choice? Do I want a choice? I’m going to do exactly what you want me to do.” He pulled Tinker into his arms, bent his head and kissed her full on the mouth. “That was the first thing you wanted me to do, wasn’t it?”

  “Right on,” she quavered.

  “And the second and the third—” He kissed her over and over again, kiss following kiss until they were trembling against each other, all but holding each other up in the center of the room. “What else,” Tom muttered between kisses, “what else do you want me to do?”

  Mutely Tinker shook her head, trying to send him a message with her eyes.

  “It’s up to me now?” he guessed.

  She nodded, closing her eyes and holding up her lips again. “I’m shy,” she whispered.

  “We’ll fall down if I kiss you again,” Tom said, picking Tinker up and carrying her over to the huge couch, where the space heaters had created a humming oasis of warm air. He put her gently on the couch, with her feet on the floor, and sat down beside her. Tinker’s eyes remained closed. “That parka …” he said out loud, “gotta lose the parka.…” With a certain amount of pulling and tugging and lifting her arms, he managed to divest her of the bulky garment, deadweight though she made herself. She lay back encased in a sweater, ski pants and boots, every inch of her long, graceful shape covered in a tight prison of black wool, stretch fabric and leather. She looked as utterly relaxed as if she were unconscious.

  Tom took one of her calves in his hand, and released her heel from the boot with another, gradually easing it off her leg. He did the same to the second boot and slipped off the stirrups that held her ski pants down, so that Tinker’s feet were free.

  “I don’t think I can manage anything more,” Tom told her unmoving form, and bent over her and rearranged her on the couch so that she was lying full length. Tom kicked off his shoes, lay down next to her and put Tinker on the curve of his arm, holding her comfortably and securely, lulling her into deeper relaxation with the warmth and stillness of his big body. Motionless, he listened to Tinker breathing, while he inhaled the delicate spicy smell of her hair. A change in the rhythm of her breathing made him aware that from feigning sleep Tinker had actually fallen asleep.

  After a few minutes Tom snaked his arm slowly out from under her. He’d never felt more wide awake in his life and her weight, slight though it was, was numbing his arm. Moving silently, he switched off the bright, overhead lights, covered her with the parka, and carefully arranged one of his old sweaters over her feet like a lap rug. Then Tom pulled up a chair, lit all of a group of candles that sat on the floor in saucers, and observed the sleeping girl.

  Minutes passed as he looked at her in a way that hadn’t been possible while she was awake, and distracting him by the play of her eyes and the range of expressions that passed over her features as she told him what her life had been like. The painter in Tom had a chance now to be as interested in Tinker as was the man.

  He observed how rare the color of her hair now looked as it rose, almost cracking with life, from the fair curve of her forehead, rare and valuable, now a pale coral red he’d only seen before inside certain seashells, a hidden red, delicate and changeable, a red born of the candlelight. Her eyebrows and eyelashes had been drawn by a calligrapher of genius and the curves of her fresh, full mouth were presumptuous and triumphant, even in sleep. There was a fascinating economy to her profile. Each feature, from her rounded chin to her straight nose to the curve of her cheek, seemed to have been sculpted with precisely the necessary amount of bone and flesh, not a tenth of a millimeter too much or too little.

  Tom fell into a reverie as the time passed. This time, this hour he was spending next to Tinker as she slept, was a moment he would paint one day, he knew that already. Paint over and over. Hidden in the furniture was how he would re-create it, how he would find the way to capture the surprising, unnameable surge of emotion he felt sitting by candlelight in this white studio, guarding this precious, majestic, sleeping girl, only half-revealed in the candlelight. Now all he knew was that every moment, every detail, was important, from the hum of the heaters to the shadows her lashes made on Tinker’s cheeks. A likeness … no, his paintings wouldn’t be a likeness, they would be far more, at least to him.

  What Tinker looked like was only part of the spirit of magic that had fallen over him. He wanted to give her something, wanted to more and more with each passing minute. He felt deeply connected to her in a way he couldn’t logically understand or put exactly into words. She had such suddenness to her, like a bottle of just-opened champagne, she imposed an answering suddenness in him. Perhaps it had been because
he’d been able to imagine her so clearly as an exquisite little girl, leading a life of an awfulness she hadn’t understood and might never understand. Perhaps it had been the straightforward way she told him about herself, perhaps her impudent, artless personality and her ignorance of its charm, perhaps the almost childlike wonder of her kisses, the scent of her hair, even the strong shape of her shoulders under his hands.

  Suddenly he stood up and soundlessly made his way to the cupboard where he kept his supplies of paint. He found a pad of white paper and a thick, soft pencil and brought them back to the chair. It was only a party trick, he thought, something he’d been able to do from an early age, a facile talent he’d never honored, but she’d wanted a likeness and that, at least, he would give her. He worked swiftly and surely, sketching Tinker’s head and as much of her shoulders as he could see before the bulk of the parka covered her. When he’d finished the sketch he looked at it and shook his head. Yes, it was exactly like Tinker, the essence of Tinker, it could not be a sketch of any other human on earth, yet how many other artists could do the same? Or better, perhaps, with a camera? But there was something he could add that a camera couldn’t, Tom realized, and he drew a large heart around the entire sketch. It was five or six weeks early, but why the hell not? “For my Valentine,” he inscribed under the heart, and he was about to sign his name when he found that he wanted, desperately wanted, to add more words. “I love you,” he wrote.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said out loud in sheer surprise. “Where did that come from?” Tom Strauss stood up and began to pace around his studio. In this familiar, beloved, safe space he felt as unanchored as a ship tossing on a heavy sea, a ship suddenly set adrift. “Where did that come from?” he repeated to himself as he walked. Finally he stopped and stood clutching a window frame, gazing out of the window at the chimney pots of Paris, half-visible in the light of the moon. His heart steadied. He meant it, wherever it came from, he realized. Wherever it led him, he’d follow. Too overcome by emotion to even think of sleep, yet so surprised that he didn’t know what else to do, he went over to the couch where Tinker slept and lay down on the rug as close to the couch as possible, looking up through the grid of the skylight at the new horizon that had opened to him.