Gloss

by Marilyn Kaye

  Still, maybe they needed to talk just a little bit about the future. It was less than two weeks away. Tonight, she decided. She’d bring it up casually, without a lot of fuss. What was going to happen to her — to them — when the summer was over?

  ‘Could you drop me in the Village?’ she asked the driver.

  There was a lot of traffic, and getting back into Manhattan took a lot longer than she’d expected. With a sinking heart she realized she’d probably miss Sam’s performance. She just hoped she could get to the club before he left, since she had no idea where he was crashing tonight.

  In the Village, they got stuck in a jam on Sixth Avenue, and it was already eight thirty.

  ‘I’ll get out here,’ she told the driver. She ran down 8th Street, and bumped into Sam and his pals. When Sam saw her, he scowled.

  ‘You missed my set.’

  ‘Which was just as well,’ one of Sam’s pals said. It occurred to her that she didn’t know this guy’s name, or any of the others’ for that matter. Sam never bothered with silly things like introductions.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘He got booed.’

  She was shocked. ‘No!’

  ‘He forgot the words,’ one of the girls said.

  ‘How could you forget the words to your own song?’ Allison asked him.

  He looked at her coldly, and she quickly changed her tone. ‘Listen, I’m so sorry I missed it. I got stuck at work.’

  ‘Work,’ the other boy repeated, in a tone that made it sound like a dirty word. The others laughed.

  Allison linked her arm with Sam’s. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she whispered in his ear.

  ‘We’re having a party,’ Sam told her. ‘At the new crash pad.’

  She couldn’t argue with him, not after what he’d just been through at the club. With her arm firmly linked through his, she walked with the group.

  ‘I can’t believe they booed you.’

  ‘Jerks,’ Sam muttered. He pulled her closer. She appreciated this, but at the same time, she harboured a hope that this new crash pad might have shower facilities available. Sam didn’t seem to have indulged in a good wash recently. She wished she knew the name of that nice minty soap Bobby Dale used.

  The group turned into an alley that was lined with trashcans. Allison had to hold her breath. At a metal door, one of Sam’s friends fiddled with a padlock hanging from a chain, and the door opened.

  She let out her held breath, but the smell inside wasn’t much of an improvement over the alley. In darkness, they all filed down some creaking stairs. At the bottom someone clicked a switch on the wall, and a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling emitted a dim light. Allison was actually grateful for the limited illumination. What little she could see looked pretty dismal — a grimy cement floor, with three bare mattresses.

  ‘You sleep on that dirty mattress?’ she whispered to Sam in horror.

  He gave her a look she’d come to recognize. Great, profound words of wisdom were about to come.

  ‘If you’re comfortable with yourself, you can be comfortable anywhere.’

  ‘Walter Quincy!’ she exclaimed. ‘The Free Spirit!’ She reached in her bag and pulled out the book.

  He stared at her with something like alarm. Suddenly, Mr Comfortable didn’t look quite so comfortable any more.

  One of the boys opened a paper bag and took out a large bottle. A girl went over to a corner of the room and returned with three grimy glasses.

  ‘We’ll have to share — these were all I could find,’ she announced.

  ‘Why don’t I wash them first?’ Allison suggested brightly. ‘Is there a sink?’

  Someone muttered something, and it sounded like ‘bourgeois’. For once she didn’t care. There was no way she was drinking out of those disgusting glasses.

  Gathering them up, she found a tiny bathroom, just a toilet and sink. So Sam wouldn’t be taking any showers here, she thought sadly. It was too bad really, she thought as she tried to rinse out the glasses in the trickle of brownish water. She had that lovely shower back at the Cavendish, but she couldn’t get Sam past the lobby. Things would be different when she got a real apartment.

  Opening the door, she heard some scratchy-sounding voices, and they weren’t the voices of her companions. Approaching the group, now sprawled across the mattresses, she was horrified to see that one of the girls was fooling around with her tape recorder.

  ‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s mine!’

  ‘Whoa, she’s the possessive type,’ a guy said. ‘Better watch out, Sam.’

  Sam uttered a short laugh. Meanwhile Allison tried to get the machine away from the girl. By now the faint but audible sound of ‘This Land Is Your Land’ could be heard.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Sam asked.

  Allison had managed to get the recorder from the girl, who fell back on the mattress and started giggling hysterically.

  ‘Who was that on the tape?’ Sam asked again.

  ‘Bobby Dale,’ Allison muttered as she put the machine back in her bag.

  The non-giggling girl let out a shriek. ‘Bobby Dale? You know Bobby Dale?’

  Her boyfriend looked at her in disgust. ‘Don’t tell me you like that crap!’ He turned to Sam. ‘Did you hear that? Your girlfriend’s carrying a tape of Bobby Dale.’

  Allison tried to defend herself. ‘It was for my job.’

  ‘Job,’ the guy muttered, in the same tone he’d used for the word ‘work’.

  ‘Bobby Dale,’ the girl cried out again. ‘He’s so cute!’

  Allison got a good look at her for the first time. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old.

  Now she was really uncomfortable, and she wanted to get out of there. Not to mention the fact that she needed to get Sam alone, so they could talk. She turned to him.

  ‘Sam …’

  But Sam was too preoccupied to look at her. He had a little plastic bag in his lap. ‘Who’s got the papers?’ he asked.

  Someone tossed him a packet. Sam deftly began rolling some of the bag’s contents into a small rectangle of paper. Then he twisted the ends, held it to his lips and struck a match.

  ‘Hey, man, you got weed!’ one of the boys exclaimed in delight.

  Sam took a long drag, and then passed it to the guy. Allison caught a whiff of something she’d frequently smelled in Washington Square Park. Combined with the mouldy smell of the basement room and the cheap wine, she suddenly felt nauseous. She was going to have to suffer the little toilet room again.

  It was while she was in there that she heard a pounding sound. And then a muffled but audible voice.

  ‘Police! Open up!’

  She froze. Through the bathroom door she could hear girls shrieking and the sound of heavy shoes coming down the stairs. There were loud cries of protest. Then someone was banging on the bathroom door.

  ‘Police! Come out now!’

  With a trembling hand she opened the door and faced the uniformed man. He was holding her handbag.

  ‘Is this yours?’ he demanded to know.

  She nodded.

  From the pocketbook he pulled out the little bag of marijuana.

  ‘But that’s not mine!’ she cried out.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, shaking his head wearily, and took her arm.

  ‘You’re under arrest.’

  In her room at the Cavendish, Donna sat at her desk and studied the contact sheets David had given her. ‘Look them over carefully,’ he’d said. ‘Then pick the one you think is best of each intern.’

  Donna had been taken aback. ‘You want me to choose the pictures for the magazine?’

  ‘Why not? You’ve got the gift, Donna. A good eye. And you know these girls, I don’t. So you won’t just pick the prettiest photo — you’ll choose the one that best reflects the girl and her personality.’

  Donna just stared at him. He thought she knew these girls. In reality, she could barely attach names to the faces.
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br />   He misread her reaction. ‘You don’t have to stay here and do it,’ he assured her. ‘Wow, it’s almost seven. I’ve kept you too late already.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m going to take off now, and I don’t feel comfortable leaving you here on your own. Did you hear about the stuff that was stolen from the samples closet?’

  Donna managed a thin smile. ‘I heard it was all replaced.’

  ‘Yeah, but even so, who knows what kind of people are hanging out here after hours.’ He put the contact sheets in a large envelope and gave her a magnifier loupe so she could examine them back in her room.

  Now, moving the loupe from photo to photo, she realized the only person she felt she knew at all was her roommate, Sherry. Looking at Sherry’s photo now, she could see warmth and openness, but confusion too.

  With the special marking pen David had lent her, she checked Sherry’s best photo and moved on to the girls she knew at least slightly. Allison … she was an interesting girl, but puzzling. Her family had plenty of money, she’d been accepted to a top college — and yet she was a rebel and misfit. Donna didn’t get it. But who was she to pass judgement? Maybe a girl could have it all and still have problems.

  And then there was Pamela, who looked like a real tart when she first arrived at Gloss. She’d seemed like a happy-go-lucky type, without a care in the world, and determined to have a good time. But appearances could be deceiving, Donna thought. Pamela looked more conventional now, and most people seemed to think this was an improvement, but gazing at her photo, Donna could see a tension and an uncertainty that hadn’t been there before.

  She realized she knew nothing about any of their lives, not really. She didn’t know their stories any more than they knew hers. For all she knew, they could all be like Sherry, with anxieties and issues and all kinds of mixed-up feelings going on beneath their oh-so-normal Gloss exteriors.

  As for her own photo … she went through the proofs and searched for the one that looked least like herself, a photo that was totally unrecognizable. But David was just too good a photographer. Every picture was a clear image of Donna Peake.

  Or maybe not. Scrutinizing each picture through the magnifier, she got the feeling that maybe she didn’t look exactly like the girl who’d arrived here less than two months ago. Something was different. Not her hair, not her eyes, nose, mouth … it was something in the expression.

  She’d always hated having her picture taken at school. When she brought the pictures home, her mother would laugh and say she looked like a deer caught in the headlights of a car. She always looked frightened.

  She didn’t look so frightened in these pictures — in fact, she looked calm. Which was strange, since she had more reason than ever to be frightened now. In less than two weeks this picture would be in one of the most popular magazines in the country, on newsstands all over. Someone was bound to bring it to Ron’s attention.

  Donna didn’t know the laws of marriage, but she assumed that as her legal husband Ron had rights. She had memories of her mother talking about her marriage to Martin Peake, how he’d bossed her around, controlled their money, told her what to do. Never get married, she would tell Donna. A husband owns you, and you’ll lose your independence.

  She imagined Ron tracking her down in New York, claiming her, taking her back to the trailer. Forcing her to call her father and demand that he start sending cheques again. Oh yes, she should be afraid, very afraid.

  But she didn’t see fear in the photos. She turned to the mirror and examined her reflection. No, she couldn’t say she saw fear there either.

  Something had changed over the course of the summer. Maybe it had something to do with the way she’d faked her way through the internship. Or the fact that once she started working with David Barnes she’d discovered that she could do something well, that she had value. That maybe, just maybe, she could survive in the world on her own.

  Sherry came into the room and flung herself on her bed. ‘I’m beat. I finally finished revising the article about the designer, and Caroline’s happy with it.’

  ‘Great!’ Donna exclaimed. ‘You must be starving. I figured you wouldn’t be back until after the dining hall closed, so I brought something back for you.’ She handed Sherry the neatly wrapped sandwich.

  ‘Thank you,’ Sherry said with feeling. She started to unwrap it, but she didn’t get far. There was a knock on the door and then a voice.

  ‘Sherry Ann Forrester? There’s a call for you.’

  Sherry let out a heartfelt groan. ‘It’s got to be my mother. She’s the only one who would ask to speak to Sherry Ann. Coming!’ she called out, and got off the bed. For a moment she just stood there, looking grim.

  ‘You think something’s wrong?’ Donna asked.

  ‘She must have received the letter I wrote.’

  Donna knew about the letter, and she looked at Sherry with sympathy. ‘This isn’t going to be easy, is it?’

  Sherry shook her head. ‘But I’m going to have to deal with it sooner or later. Wish me luck.’

  ‘Good luck,’ Donna said as her roommate started towards the door, looking for all the world like a soldier going into battle.

  Donna watched her in sympathy. For all the good things she had going for her, Sherry had problems too. Probably every girl in this residence had some problem or another, something she had to face and conquer. Maybe that’s what had changed for Donna.

  She had her problems, but she wasn’t alone.

  Pamela turned on Alex’s television. It was a game show, where a contestant was streaming hysterically because she’d just won a new refrigerator. She turned the dial to the next channel, and saw the comedian Red Skelton. He could usually make her laugh, but she didn’t feel like laughing tonight. She turned the dial again. Make Room for Daddy — one of those happy-family shows, with a mother and a father and two kids. No, she wasn’t in the mood for that either, and she turned off the set.

  She didn’t really feel like watching TV at all. She’d only turned it on because it was so quiet in the apartment. Maybe music would help. She turned on the radio.

  The sound of a popular crooner filled the room, Steve Lawrence singing his big hit of the summer, ‘Go Away, Little Girl’. It was about an older man in love with a much younger girl, and he was telling her to leave because the relationship could never work out. Immediately she switched off the radio. This was definitely not something she wanted to hear at this point in time.

  She looked at the clock on the mantle and saw that it was already after nine. Where was he? She tried not to fret, or conjure up images of accidents and hospital emergency rooms. He’d been working late a lot.

  Pamela couldn’t understand why he wasn’t more anxious to get back to her. After all, he’d invited her to stay here. True, it was supposed to be for that one night, after they’d gone to the Copa, when it was too late for her to get back into the Cavendish. And she couldn’t help recalling that surprised look on his face when she showed up the next evening with a suitcase.

  But that expression hadn’t lasted long. She’d smothered him with kisses, and then, while he was mixing their drinks, she’d disappeared into the bedroom and changed into a red negligee that she’d bought for the occasion.

  That was the first night they made love. She couldn’t say it was a wonderful experience. It hurt, and it was all she could do to keep from crying out. She’d thought he’d be pleased, realizing that he was her first, that she’d saved herself for someone like him, but he seemed uncomfortable, almost reluctant. He didn’t say so, but she could sense it. Afterwards she wanted to talk about it, to talk about them, but he apologized and said he was just too tired, he needed to sleep.

  He hadn’t touched her since then, not really. Even his kisses changed — they became little peeks that didn’t last very long. For the past four nights she’d cuddled up to him in bed, but he didn’t respond. Maybe he thought she needed time to recover from that first n
ight. Maybe he was just tired — he’d been working late every night. Problems with a new account, he’d said. She wasn’t sure she believed him.

  Maybe he just didn’t like coming back here, she thought. Wandering through the apartment, it occurred to her that his wife, his soon to be ex-wife, had probably decorated the place. The woman was usually responsible for that sort of thing. Most likely it was Phyllis who had picked out the colour of the walls, chosen the furniture. The dishes and the silverware — they were probably wedding gifts. And there were framed photos all over the place — Alex and Phyllis and … She didn’t even know the names of his two little boys.

  This was why he didn’t want to come home, she decided. Too many memories. It was a relief to have figured this out, and now she could think of a way to deal with it. There was an easy solution, she thought. A new place! An apartment that she could decorate, a place where they could make their own memories.

  When she finally heard his key in the door she rushed to open it before he could. He bent down to kiss her — it was a brief kiss, but she thought she could smell alcohol on his breath. The guys from the office must have gone out for a drink …

  But when she wrapped her arms around him, she smelled something else.

  ‘Shalimar.’

  He moved past her and set his briefcase on the coffee table. ‘What?’

  ‘I can smell Shalimar on you. It’s a perfume. Were you with someone who wears Shalimar?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe in the elevator.’

  ‘It must have been awfully crowded for the scent to rub off on you like that. And you must have been in the elevator for a long time. Did it get stuck between floors or something?’

  She spoke lightly, as if she was joking, but he frowned. ‘Do you want to check for lipstick on my collar too?’

  ‘I’m teasing!’ she protested.

  He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘OK, OK.’ Then he noticed something on the coffee table, and he frowned. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A vase,’ she told him. ‘I passed a stoop sale on the way home, and I got it for a dollar. Isn’t it pretty?’