people in his office used to work for the CIA before they fired him for laughing too hard or something.”
She was pleased but not surprised when he insisted she accompany them to dinner. Philip Quirini, who worked for Bert, drove her home and waited outside in the car while she changed; and when she got back in the car she said, “Have you worked here long?”
“Four years. Or you mean the house. No, ma’am. It’s just rented for July and August.”
“I guess this is going to sound like a strange question,” she said, “but what does your boss do for a living?”
She caught Quirini’s eye in the mirror. He had a hard face-jowls, a round heavy jaw, tough dark eyes, hair getting thin and grey. He seemed amused. “You heard of AJL Construction, ma’am? That’s us.”
She’d seen the big signs all over New York on building sites.
Pushing things she said, “I suppose he’s married.”
A sharp look in the mirror; then a brief smile. “No. He was married once I guess. Before I came to work. I think it was annulled.”
He brought her back to the manor where Bert handed her a wine spritzer and studied her best low-cut designer job. “You pass inspection,” he said drily.
The Sertics were there; they went on to one of the restaurants-she doesn’t remember now if it was Shippy’s or Balzarini’s or the Palm; whichever, Bert knew the maitre d’ and there was no trouble about a table even though they hadn’t had a reservation.
She remembers the relaxed savor of the evening: the way they included her, now and then going out of their way to explain a private point of reference, generally seeming to take it for granted she was grown up and sophisticated.
Not like what she was used to: a world that appeared to believe she couldn’t possibly have more than two brain cells to rub together.
It was the curse of the smooth skin and big eyes and the Goddamned bone structure that earned success for her as a model: often she’d be taken for twenty or twenty-one.
She’d learned there wasn’t much to the men who went for girls barely out of their teens. One of them, suntanned and Nautilus-muscled and trying his best to look like a high-school jock, had propositioned her just two days earlier-in that same disco where she’d met Bert-and she’d been so bored with it all that she’d just looked the jock in the eye and said in her deepest go-to-hell baritone, “What do you think we’d have to talk about after the first four minutes?”
“Four minutes?” The jock feigned indignation. “I’m good for at least an hour and a half.” He might as well have been flexing his muscles. “Come on. What do you want to talk about. Name it.”
“How about Kierkegaard?”
He’d edged away from her.
Not that she was out for the presidency of U.S. Steel. She made good money modeling and spent it on rent and clothes and amusements; there was nothing ambitious or far-seeing about her life. She had no plans beyond the date she’d made to spend the Labor Day weekend with the parents of a girlfriend from the agency up in a cabin on one of the Finger Lakes.
This one now, this Bert-she couldn’t fathom him. She’d catch him looking her up and down with a quick frank smile of appreciation but he didn’t stare down at her boobs or shove a figurative elbow into her ribs with clumsy fatuous attempts to be sly and lascivious. He’d spent the whole day with her but every minute seemed to have been carefully chaperoned: they hadn’t been alone at all. That did not seem to be an accident. Was he afraid of something?
He liked talking to her. He watched her face while they spoke. He laughed at the right points; he listened.
She watched his profile beside her at the dinner table as he talked with forceful confidence and made lavish gestures with his big hands. He caught her looking at him; he stopped in midsentence and smiled. It illuminated his face: it was an overflowing smile that demanded a response in kind.
She can remember vividly the startling beauty of his smile-especially now because of the irony it engenders. She remembers the life to which he introduced her: hard young capitalists on the make, a jet-propelled world of expensive toys, midnight conference calls, ringside seats, luxury condominiums, show-business evenings, sudden trips cushioned by limousines and hotel penthouses and VIP lounges.
By then they were married. She remembers the way he phrased his proposal. At the time she wasn’t sufficiently sensitive to its subtext. What he said was, “I want you to be the mother of my children.”
19
The weather cools a bit. Finally on August 1 the California license arrives and she spends two days going from bank to bank in Long Beach and Inglewood and Culver City, breaking one or two of the thousand-dollar bills at each stop.
Then she returns to the Valley and opens a checking account with eight hundred dollars in cash-not enough to draw attention-and applies for a credit card, listing herself as a divorcee with a monthly alimony income of $2,500. On the application she attests to numerous lies. As her residence she lists the dummy apartment. For a reference she gives the name of a fictitious company president at the address of the Las Vegas mail-forwarding service. For a second reference she gives Doyle Stevens.
At various post offices she mails $500 money orders to herself; when these arrive she uses them to open an account in a savings-and-loan where they give you a year’s free rent on a safety-deposit box for opening a new account. She puts the diamonds and most of the rest of the cash in the box.
Examining the driver’s license for the ’steenth time she studies the color photograph of herself: slightly blurred (she must have moved her head a bit), unsmiling. Points of reflected light on the lenses of the glasses obscure the color of her eyes.
The cropped hair and glasses serve to harden her appearance: in the picture she looks-what’s the best word?
Actually she has always been efficient; it is only that until recently she hasn’t had very much need to prove it.
She showers away a day’s grit and wipes the towel across the bathroom mirror so she can scrutinize herself.
The body isn’t bad for an old broad of thirty-one. Too bony if your taste runs toward Rubens nudes but she could still pose in a bikini if she wanted to and nothing sags perceptibly; the stretch marks aren’t pronounced.
The face, absent the phony glasses and with the wet hair matted down, looks fragile and vulnerable-all eyes and bones and angles as if she’d posed for one of those child-girls on black velvet. Ironic that she looks so young: she is thinking, I don’t feel a day over ninety-three.
There is a hint of haggard gauntness in that image. With a detachment that feels almost academic she wonders how long you can go on living on your nerve endings before you begin to disintegrate.
In the mirror the unmade-up lips are definitely too thin and wide; no rosebud here. She’s always had trouble with the look of her mouth; it took years of experiment to find a proper way to paint it for modeling. It is a big mouth made for smiling; it doesn’t take naturally to the expression that photographers seem to want: distant chill with a contradictory hint of seductiveness. That is one of the reasons (there are others, God knows) why she never became a top model-she only came as near as perhaps the upper section of the second class.
She studies herself with dispassion. What else wants changing?
There’s the gap between the two upper front teeth. He said it was sexy, didn’t he. He didn’t want you to fix it.
Tomorrow she’ll find a dentist and have them bonded to fill in the space.
She leans forward with belligerent challenge and speaks aloud:
“All right. Now who are you?”
