“Frankie reports to me and there haven’t been any problems.” Justine managed to keep her voice level and light and semi-amused. Why was this insulting piece of vermin pushing his horror of a country-life nose into her business?
“Well, good for Frankie, but in your place, I’d be in Paris no matter what I missed in New York. I’m leaving in a few days as a matter of fact. Which brings me to my pitch, Justine.”
“I’ve been wondering when you’d get around to it,” Justine said, not bothering to suppress a chilly smile.
“You accepted my invitation, so you must be curious to know why I invited you to lunch.”
“Perhaps a touch curious, Dart, but mostly polite. How many times could I turn down your flattering invitation?”
“I’m never ashamed to be persistent. Justine, you know how big Benedict is. I run a magnificent, well-oiled machine. We cover every branch of the business, and we make a fortune in commissions, yet I don’t feel we’ve gone nearly as far as we can go. There’s room to expand and this is the perfect moment to do it.”
“Go for it, Dart,” Justine said encouragingly. “Rah, team!”
“Be serious, Justine. I’d like to buy Loring Model Management at a price you’d be more than satisfied with and sign you to a long-term management contract on your own terms. It would be a win-win proposition. You’d come out of it with a significant fortune, you’d still be working in the field you’ve chosen, but you wouldn’t have any financial responsibilities. No more Friday paydays, no more worry about your line of credit, no more concerns that a key booker might leave and take some of your best girls with her—all that would become Benedict’s problem and Benedict is big enough to absorb them easily. You’d be free to do what you do so brilliantly: find promising girls and develop them into stars.”
“Win-win? Who would I report to, Dart?”
“You’d run your own division, absolutely. And of course you could bring Frankie with you.”
“But who would I report to?”
“Well, in the final analysis, you and I would have a pow-wow every now and then, but your contract would spell out the terms of the issues on which you’d defer to my judgment.”
“So I’d report to you, and there’d be an area in which you’d have the last word. Have I got that right?”
“Correct. I can’t pay a lot of money for your business and then give you an absolutely free rein … that wouldn’t make sense. But there’s no reason we can’t hammer out an agreement that’s satisfactory to both of us.”
“It wouldn’t work. I’m not interested, Dart.”
“Look Justine, you haven’t had time to give this any real consideration. Don’t answer now, just think about it. But let me ask you this, do you realize that you’re a slave to your agency? It’s run in an old-fashioned way, as if you lived over a candy store. On the other hand, in spite of all my responsibilities, I have enough strong second management working in my shop so that whenever I feel like it, I can run off with Mary Beth and relax at our place in Hobe Sound. And when the kids are out of school we manage to get away for a real family vacation, a month, even six weeks.”
“Relaxation’s not my cup of tea, unless it’s just a weekend.”
“You’re being deliberately frivolous, Justine. You know perfectly well what I mean. You’re more than young enough to pick and choose from a hundred eligible guys—you should get married, have children, entertain, buy a place in the country, garden, travel—I don’t have to spell out all the possibilities but they’re as real as that salad you’re eating. It’s all out there for you but you’ve chosen to marry your business. That’s not healthy.”
“I could also sew my own clothes, Dart. I’ll think about getting a life,” Justine said sharply. Necker, Aiden, now Martha Stewart advice from a turd! Just what she’d needed.
“Look, we both know I’m not saying this because I’m disinterested. I really and truly need your talent at my shop,” Dart said, undeterred. If you don’t want to sell Loring Management outright we could still work out a different kind of agreement, some form of partnership, that would free you of business problems, afford me the benefit of your brains and give you a fair percentage of all the profits I’m positive we’d make together.”
“Sorry, Dart, but I don’t want to work with anyone as a partner. I like my independence.”
“With all due respect, Justine, you must realize how vulnerable you are running what’s essentially a two-woman shop. For example, what if somebody took it into his head to offer Frankie twice the salary you pay her? She gets seventy-five thousand a year—a hundred-and-fifty wouldn’t be out of line, if you ask me, considering how good she is.”
“How the hell do you know what she makes?” Justine asked, startled and angry.
“I asked her. I’m the guy who offered her double. And don’t bother to say I’m a bastard, it was strictly business. I figured that if I didn’t, someone else would.”
“She never told me.”
“Probably because she didn’t want to seem to be pressing for a raise you couldn’t afford. But the day might come, Justine, when she changes her mind. As I said, persistence pays off.”
“Look, do you really want to know why I won’t join forces with you, Dart, in spite of the very favorable conditions you’ve spelled out?”
“Of course I do, because it doesn’t add up, and you’re a sensible woman.”
“The business of renting out beautiful young females should only be done by someone who’s deeply concerned with what happens to the girls, someone who sees them as individual human beings, each one precious in her own way. As it is now, there are too many girls who don’t get a contract without sleeping with an important man at a given agency or who can’t get a booking without sleeping with the client. There’s too much pimping the new girls to photographers and their reps. Young women who go into modeling are exposed to enough inevitable shit about their weight, their looks and their stamina without being pressured into sex.”
“How can you stay in the business if you think it’s so terrible?”
“Because someone, as you said about trying to hire Frankie, has to do it, and at least with me there’s no abuse.”
“So, you consider yourself a version of a mother superior?” he asked with a nasty edge to his voice.
“Dart, let me give you an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about here. There’s an agency in this town in which girls are divided, unofficially, into three groups. There’s a group known as the ‘Untouchables’—the girls who are great enough to get contracts anywhere. They’re left strictly alone, spoiled like princesses, sexual favors are never required of them. Then there’s a second group, known as the ‘Maybes.’ They’re watched carefully and brought along to see which of them has genuine potential. If they have what it takes they become ‘Untouchables.’ The others, unofficially again, are demoted into a third group, known as the ‘Troops.’ ”
“Where do you pick up this stuff?”
“The Troops,” Justine continued, “no matter how pretty they are, will never have a chance to get to the top. They’re not told that fact in so many words, of course, but they’re destined to have ordinary careers: catalog work, small print jobs, all the nonglamorous mid-level kind of thing every agency needs. They’ll never do high fashion or television or runway, but they make good money for themselves and accumulate steady commissions for the agency—”
“Justine, every shop in town including yours has more girls like that than any other kind. Only civilians don’t know how tiny the percentage is of the so-called supermodels … we’re talking about less than two dozen out of hundreds and hundreds of girls. Thousands if you count the girls outside of New York.”
“The owner of this agency I’m talking about,” Justine said, disregarding his interruption, “regards all the Troops as his private harem. When he wants to … use … them, all he does is tell them where and when to show up. They either comply or they’re asked to leave the agenc
y. There’s no shortage of would-be models, is there, Dart, especially at the mid-level? Now, until the girl gets to this man’s place, she never knows if she’ll be alone with him, or if there’ll be other girls working on him, or strange men she’ll be required to service, or even other girls she’ll be expected to perform with. And there’s a lot of drugs around—a strong possibility exists that she may try them, possibly for the first time. Oh, I forgot, this scene only takes place at lunch. The amazing thing is that the agency owner who stages these … lunches … is happily married, with great kids, a real pillar of the community. What’s more, his wife has never suspected a thing. No one would be cruel enough to tell her.”
“And you actually believe that rumor? Where’d you hear all this nonsense?”
“Everywhere, Dart, everywhere. That’s why I’m never planning to go into business with anybody else. You never know what’s under the rock in someone’s backyard until you move into his house.”
“Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug. “Stay out there on your own, if that’s what makes you happy. But you’d better invest in some long johns made out of cashmere, you’re going to need them during that long, cold, risky winter when the wind blows and other agencies start raiding your bookers and your girls.”
“I’ve survived so far—in my pure silk scanties. Do you mind if I skip coffee? I have to get back to my candy store.”
“Good-bye, Justine. I won’t forget to tell Marco about our lunch when I call him, he’ll be interested in news of an old friend.”
Justine walked quickly out of the restaurant, without shaking hands. She’d known from the inflection in his voice when he was talking about “that scamp, Marco” that he was letting her know that he was in full possession of the details of her shameful, humiliating affair with Lombardi. Men like the two of them would never fail to report such conquests to each other, boasting about them in full detail. But for Dart to use it as ammunition so many years later, ammunition to soften her up, ammunition to put her in her place, before he made his buyout proposition! Wouldn’t a really smart man have realized that it was the last thing he should have mentioned? And wouldn’t a really smart man have avoided threatening her with raids on her agency when she’d made it plain that she knew what went on in his private lunches?
No, Justine told herself, it was simpler than that. Dart Benedict saw no difference between her and the girls he preyed on. He’d worked on her with the same combination of bullying and the promise of rewards that made them do his bidding. He wanted to fuck her brains, not her body—that was the only difference. And this was to have been the lunch in which her professionalism would be engaged, a lunch without emotions, without pressure, without an agenda of presumption.
As Justine hurried back to her office she tried to put any further thought of Dart Benedict out of her mind. He’d made an enemy and she’d made an enemy. So much for the business lunch. From now on it was a tuna sandwich, alone at her desk.
Later that afternoon her secretary put a letter from Frankie on Justine’s desk. It had arrived by overnight Federal Express from Paris.
Dearest Justine,
I have to tell you and I couldn’t fax it because someone might read the fax even if it’s marked confidential and I didn’t want to try and get you by phone because I couldn’t interrupt you in the office to talk about this, but I’m so happy I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m roaming around this huge suite like a madwoman, trying to believe it’s really happened.… Mike Aaron and I are in love. Oh, Justine, I can’t sleep, I can’t make myself sit still, I can’t do anything but write to you—the only person in the world I can confide in—and hope it calms me down. In love, can you believe it? I didn’t know till this afternoon, but he’s in love with me! You know how I’ve always said such awful things about him? Did you guess I was just covering up the way I’d loved him since high school? Oh, Justine, he’s so magnificent! I wish I could write poetry—or even prose that could come anywhere close to how I feel. Mike’s my dream come true ten thousand times over. I didn’t know a person could be so happy. And you were absolutely right about my hair and my clothes—I don’t know how much of that helped him to notice me, but it certainly didn’t hurt. We spent all day alone together, at the Louvre in the morning and at the Hôtel du Louvre in the afternoon. Yes, Justine, yes! Now the whole mob here knows, they couldn’t miss seeing it when we met them for drinks. Do you realize it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t sent me here? I still can’t believe it! Everything’s under control, I’m keeping my head, I’m not letting down on the job, don’t worry about a thing. I faxed you all the details about Tinker this morning and there’s been no new news since then. Except Mike and me. We. Me and Mike. Us. I don’t know what it’s going to mean—even if you don’t believe in a personal God, pray for me, Justine darling. Pray that this isn’t just a Paris version of a shipboard romance. I don’t think I could recover from that—not after this afternoon. I hope someday you’ll be as happy as I am right now. I miss you so much! With love and kisses,
Frankie.
Justine reread the letter four times before she put it down and went over to the window and leaned her head on the glass. She nodded her forehead gently from side to side, as one would over the crib of a sleeping baby, a nod of wonder and apprehension and helplessness and love and hope. Let it go well, she thought, please God, let it go well.
18
I’m trying so hard to rationalize this,” April said to Maude, her words rushing out passionately. “I’m trying to accept it, to tell myself that it isn’t the end of the world, that I never expected to win anyway and all the exposure in Zing will be wonderful for my career, but I’m so disappointed I don’t know what to do—” April dropped down on the edge of Maude’s bed, and burst into tears.
Frankie had visited both Jordan and April in their rooms soon after they were awake that morning and told each of them separately that from now on they’d be seeing little of Tinker since she’d be busy with her tango lessons and working with Lombardi. In spite of her efforts to downplay any premature assumption that Tinker had won the Lombardi prize, Frankie hadn’t convinced either girl that there was still an open competition. Jordan had received the news with composure, but April, still in her bathrobe, had brushed Frankie aside and rushed to take her emotions to Maude, who was sitting on her bed, her draperies still drawn, reading the International Herald Tribune by the light of her bedside table, before getting dressed for the day.
“Marco Lombardi should be drawn and quartered,” Maude cried vehemently. “April, poor baby, don’t sob so terribly. Oh, I know how you feel, I really do. I know how important this is to you. Remember how I told you that my story is based on your winning? It still is, this changes nothing. If the ending turns out differently, I’ll make it perfectly clear that it was rigged against you, that no honest choice was ever made. Here, put this quilt around you, you’re shivering. There, that’s better, now blow your nose. Have you even had breakfast?”
“I’d just finished when Frankie came in.”
“Want some of my coffee to warm you up? It’s still hot, and it’s chilly in this room. No place in France understands central heating, American style.”
“No thanks,” April answered, her tears reduced to a few sniffs by Maude’s sympathy.
“Lombardi hasn’t given you even a fighting chance at the contract. Or Jordan, for that matter. Of course you realize what has to have happened?” Maude said, soothingly. “Tinker must have let him make love to her when she went for that runway lesson, there’s no other explanation. Maybe she even put the idea in his head, who knows what tricks she could get up to? But you’d think Lombardi would pretend that he hasn’t made his choice so early in the game, you’d think he’d let it play out as a competition and declare a winner afterward. He’s utterly shameless … what I don’t understand is how he can not realize that after the show no one will believe he could have chosen her instead of you?”
“He doesn’t
give a damn, that’s the only answer I can think of,” April said thoughtfully. “Jordan won’t be particularly upset, she hasn’t believed she had a real shot because she’s black, she told me that on the plane coming over and she’s never changed her mind. To think I was worried because Necker took her to Versailles. I should have been worried about Tinker instead. But damn it, I don’t see why any one of us, including Jordan, couldn’t have ended up as the Lombardi girl if people played fair.”
“April, darling, it was never going to be Jordan, she was right about that. But it should have been you.”
Maude looked with compassion and adoration at April’s face. Her beauty gave no quarter, there was no mercy in it, as there was in less perfect faces. It seemed indecent to her that there would not be a consensus about April’s perfection for it rang so true.
“Do you think …?” Maude began and then stopped.
“What? What were you going to say?”
“That maybe what Lombardi said is true, that Tinker’s simply given him new ideas for design, who knows why, and that’s the only reason he’s working with her every day? That would explain why he didn’t bother to pretend—nothing is settled in his mind, and we’re jumping to conclusions, April! After all, Tinker only has a few hours a day for those stupid tango lessons, and from tango to runway is by no means a clear path. I think this story is very far from over—you’ve still got every chance to win, I’m sure of it!”
“Do you really believe that or are you only saying it to make me feel better?”
“I’d never give you false hope, April. I truly believe that nothing’s been decided and once you’re on that runway, you’ll carry the day.”
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