Glitter Baby

“Look at her skin.” Belinda tapped her fingernail against the page. “She doesn’t have pores. Photos like this make me feel forty breathing hard down my neck.”

Fleur gazed more closely at model in the ad for an expensive cosmetics line. “That’s Annie Holman. Remember the Bill Blass layout Annie and I did together a couple of months ago?”

Belinda had trouble remembering anyone who wasn’t already famous, and she shook her head.

“Mother, Annie Holman is thirteen years old!”

Belinda gave a weak laugh. “It’s no wonder every woman in this country over thirty is depressed. We’re competing with children.”

Fleur hoped women didn’t feel that way when they looked at her photographs. She hated the idea that she was earning eight hundred dollars an hour making people feel bad.

Belinda went off to the bathroom. Fleur got up her nerve and approached Chris, who’d just finished hanging the backdrop. “So…How’s school going?” Smile, stupid. And don’t be so big.

“Same old stuff.”

She could tell he was trying to act casual, as if she were just another girl in one of his classes and not the Glitter Baby. She liked that.

“I’m working on a new film, though,” he said.

“Really? Tell me about it.” She eased herself into a folding chair. It creaked as she sat.

He started to talk, and before long, he got so caught up in what he was saying that he forgot to be intimidated by her.

“It’s so interesting,” she said.

He stuck his thumb into the pocket of his jeans, then pulled it back out again. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times. “Do you want to…I mean, I’ll understand if you’ve got other things going on. I know you have a lot of guys asking you out, and-”

“I don’t.” She hopped up from the chair. “I know everybody thinks I do-that everybody’s asking me out. But it’s not true.”

He picked up a light meter and toyed with it. “I see your picture in the paper with movie stars and Kennedys and everybody.”

“Those aren’t real dates. They’re…sort of for publicity.”

“Does that mean you’d like to go out with me? Maybe Saturday night. We could go down to the Village.”

Fleur grinned. “I’d love to.”

He beamed at her.

“You’d love to what, baby?” Belinda came up behind her.

“I asked Fleur to go to the Village with me on Saturday night, Mrs. Savagar,” Chris said, looking nervous again. “There’s this restaurant where they have Middle Eastern food.”

Fleur curled her toes in her shower thongs. “I said I’d go.”

“Did you, baby?” Belinda’s forehead puckered. “I’m afraid that won’t work. You already have plans, remember? The premiere of the new Altman picture. You’re going with Shawn Howell.”

Fleur had forgotten about the premiere, and she definitely wanted to forget about Shawn Howell, who was a twenty-two-year-old film star with an IQ that matched his age. On their first date he’d spent the evening complaining that everybody was “out to screw him,” and he’d told her he’d dropped out of high school because all the teachers were creeps and faggots. She’d begged Gretchen not to arrange any more dates with him, but Gretchen said Shawn was hot now, and business was business. When she’d tried to talk to her mother about it, Belinda had been incredulous.

“But, baby, Shawn Howell’s a star. Being seen with him makes you twice as important.” When Fleur complained that he kept trying to put his hand under her skirt, Belinda had pinched her cheek. “Celebrities are different from ordinary people. They don’t follow the same rules. I know you can handle him.”

“That’s okay,” Chris said, disappointment written all over his face. “I understand. Some other time.”

But Fleur knew there wouldn’t be another time. It had taken all of Chris’s courage to ask her out once, and he’d never do it again.

Fleur tried to talk to Belinda about Chris in the cab on the way home, but Belinda refused to understand. “Chris is a nobody. Why on earth would you want to go out with him?”

“Because I like him. You shouldn’t have…” Fleur pulled on the fringe of her cutoffs. “I wish you hadn’t put him off like that. It made me feel like I was twelve.”

“I see.” Belinda’s voice grew chilly. “You’re telling me that I embarrassed you.”

Fleur felt a little flutter of panic. “Of course not. No. How could you embarrass me?” Belinda had withdrawn from her, and Fleur touched her arm. “Forget I said anything. It’s not important.” Except it was important, but she didn’t want to hurt Belinda’s feelings. When that happened, Fleur always felt as though she was standing in front of the Couvent de l’Annonciation watching her mother’s car disappear.

Belinda didn’t say anything for a while, and Fleur’s misery deepened

“You have to trust me, baby. I know what’s best for you.” Belinda cupped Fleur’s wrist, and Fleur felt as if she’d been about to fall off a precipice, only to be snatched back to safety.

That night after Fleur had gone to bed, Belinda stared at her daughter’s photographs on the wall. Her determination grew stronger than ever. Somehow she had to protect Fleur from all of them-from Alexi, from nobodies like Chris, from anyone who stood in their way. It would be the hardest things she’d ever done, and on days like today, she wasn’t sure how she’d manage.

The blanket of depression began to settle over her. She pushed it away by reaching for the telephone and quickly dialing a number.

A sleepy male voice answered. “Yeah.”

“It’s me. Did I wake you?”

“Yeah. What do you want?”

“I’d like to see you tonight.”

He yawned. “When you coming?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

As she began to pull the phone away from her ear, she heard his voice on the other end. “Hey, Belinda? How ’bout you leave your panties at home.”

“Shawn Howell, you’re a devil.” She hung up the phone, grabbed her purse, and left the apartment.

Chapter 9

Hollywood wanted Jake Koranda smart-ass and mean. They wanted him staring at a piece of street scum over the barrel of a.44 Magnum. They wanted him using pearl-handled Colts on a band of desperados and then kissing a busty broad good-bye before he walked out the saloon doors. Koranda might only be twenty-eight years old, but he was a real man, not one of those pansies who carried a hair dryer in his hip pocket.

Jake had hit it big right from the start playing a drifter named Bird Dog Caliber in a low-budget Western that grossed six times what it had cost to make. Despite his youth, he had the rough, outlaw image that men liked as much as women, the same as Eastwood did. Two more Caliber pictures immediately followed the first, each one bloodier. After that, he made a couple of modern action-adventure movies. His career rise was meteoric. Then Koranda got stubborn. He said he needed more time to write his plays.

What was Hollywood supposed to do about that? The best action actor to come along since Eastwood, and he wrote shit that ended up in college anthologies instead of staying in front of a camera where he belonged. The fuckin’ Pulitzer Prize had ruined him.

And it got worse…Koranda decided he wanted to try writing for film instead of the theater. He called his screenplay Sunday Morning Eclipse, and there wasn’t a single car chase in the whole damned thing. “That highbrow shit is okay for the stage, kid,” the Hollywood brass told him when he started shopping it around, “but the American public wants tits and guns on screen.”

Koranda eventually ended up with Dick Spano, a smalltime producer who agreed to do Sunday