could afford, a room in a dirty motel not far from the campus. She had walked past her dormitory each day to see if it was open yet, and then sneaked in on the fourth day at seven A.M., when the last of the janitorial crews were cleaning up after the painters who had given the hive of cubical cinder-block rooms a fresh coat of bile green.
She had dreaded the way the first day at the dormitory would be. She had seen simulations of that day in movies and television shows—the happy, eager students, the resigned, tearful mothers, the proud, worried fathers all haunting the dormitories—and had known there was no place for her in that event. For her it could only be an unmasking. Everyone would see that nobody cared about her, and that she was nothing.
She put her clothes into one of the two dressers in her room, left a note to claim one of the beds, and went out until evening, after the other girls were settled and their families gone. She told the girls on her floor that her parents were living in Europe, and couldn’t come with her.
College began badly and became an ordeal. She had hoped college would change her life, but the girls snubbed her, the city was gray and filthy, and the work was demanding and monotonous. The world was pretty much the same everywhere, and her status in it was fixed at the lowest slot. Nothing Charlene Buckner ever did was going to make more than a minor change that would probably be temporary and might not even be an improvement.
Near the end of the semester, Charlene began to make her first visits to another life, one that existed because she chose it. She bought two good outfits at Marshall Field’s. One was a black cocktail dress that was on deep discount because there was a tiny tear in the hem that she could fix in a minute. The other was a sleek black skirt and three different tops to go with it.
She found a good pair of black shoes on sale because they had heels too high for most women to bear. Her mother had trained her from the age of four to dance in high heels for the beauty pageants, so she loved them. There was also a pair of black flats that she could wear in less formal places, and a small, elegant black purse. The coat she bought was intended as a raincoat, too light for a Chicago January, but she knew it looked right, so she tolerated the cold. She began to dress and go out alone at night.
Charlene would call for her reservations in various names that she made up while she was standing at the dormitory pay phone, like Nicole Davis or Kimberly De Jong. She would go into the bar after dinner, and when men asked her name, she would give them the latest one. During the long weeks of classes she was Charlene, but once or twice a week, there would be a night when she became Nicole or Kimberly or Tiffany.
She discovered that she could attract men. Occasionally she would go out on a Friday night, meet a man, and then not return to the dormitory until Saturday, or even Sunday. If anyone asked where she had been, she would say she had gone to visit an old school friend in Boston, or met her parents for dinner in New York. But the other girls had so little interest in her that they seldom asked.
She loved the nights when she was someone else. The only disappointment was the men. They excited her at first because they were a few years older than she was, but they were all so involved with their careers as stockbrokers or sales representatives or junior executives that they were unable to convey anything to her about their lives that she understood, except that they worked very long hours.
On one of those Friday evenings, at a restaurant called Luther’s, she met Carl. She’d walked in from the dining room and stepped toward the bar when she became aware that someone was close behind her. There was a tap on the shoulder, and she turned to see Carl. He smiled and said, “Please join me at my table.”
Carl was older than the men she had been meeting: he looked about forty-five. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he was trim and had good posture, and his dark suit was beautiful. For a second when she had first turned around she’d thought he might be a hotel employee who was going to check the forged identification she’d bought outside the student union. But she looked at his expression and saw his eyebrows raised in an offer rather than knitted in anger, so she assumed a look of self-assurance she had been practicing, and went with him.
He introduced himself as Carl Nelson, and said he had noticed her at dinner and had not been able to let her leave without meeting her. He spoke without any embarrassment or uncertainty, a feat that she could not imagine any of the younger men performing. Everything he said seemed effortless. He told her she was a young woman who deserved to be congratulated on her beauty and told her that seeing her gave him pleasure.
She was so pleased that she invented a name for the occasion. She said she was Tanya Starling. It came to her because Tanya had always seemed to her to be foreign, and therefore frankly sensual. Starling was the corrective, a word that made her sound tiny and vulnerable, a way of protecting herself from the Tanya part.
Carl liked her name, and he liked her. When the waiter arrived, Carl didn’t ask her what she wanted. He simply ordered two vodka martinis, up, with an olive. When they arrived, cold and clear, she recognized them. As a child she had always imagined her mother in an elegant place like this with a man like Carl, drinking something from a stemmed glass that moved back and forth to throw off reflected light when she lifted it.
Carl was a lawyer. Unlike the younger men, he didn’t say much about his work, but it was clear he had made money. Tanya didn’t exactly lie about what she was doing, but she made getting a bachelor’s degree into “studying the arts at the university,” so it would sound like a whim of an older woman.
When she went back to the dormitory she had to tell her roommates that she would take any calls for her friend Tanya. Two days later, Carl called her and took her to another good restaurant. After that he took her out every couple of days, and called her whenever he happened to be thinking of her. He sent her flowers because they reminded him of her. He began to see other things—a set of sapphire earrings that would set off her blue eyes, a dress that would make her proud of her tiny waist.
He called one day at the end of February, when the ground was covered with dirty snow that had partially thawed and then frozen into ice, and the wind was punishing. He said, “Honey, I’m going to Florida for a few days on business. I thought you might like a little break, and I’d like some company.”
“Florida?” was all she could say.
“I’ve got to meet with a client in Palm Beach. That part won’t take long, but I’m staying until Friday. Can you spare the time for me?”
She packed her two suitcases with the few good clothes she owned, said good-bye to her roommates early in the morning, and told them she’d be back in a week for midterms.
That day she learned what life with Carl Nelson would be. When they arrived in Florida a limousine waited to take them to the hotel and then to the country club for lunch with the client. The client was about sixty years old with impossibly white capped teeth, a pair of red-tinted glasses, and a suntan of a depth that had not been stylish during Charlene’s lifetime.
Carl introduced them by saying, “Tanya, this is Richard Fellowes. Richard, this is the most beautiful girl in the state of Illinois, and her name is Tanya.”
After only a moment she realized that Carl had brought her there to be decorative, so she imitated the haughty, bored look of the fashion models of her childhood and kept all of her movements graceful, while showing no awareness that the men were having a conversation. She answered direct questions and smiled politely at Richard Fellowes when it seemed necessary, but smiled much more warmly at Carl.
The lunch told her a bit about Carl. Fellowes had owned a chain of dry-cleaning plants in the Midwest. Carl had helped him sell his controlling interest in the business at a large profit and move to Palm Beach a few years ago. Fellowes had remained on the board of directors, but now that the new owners were considering selling it, they wanted to buy his remaining shares.
Carl went over the papers with Fellowes while Tanya Starling gazed out over the shady veranda at the deep green lawns and the first hole of the golf course, a tree-bordered straight stretch of grass that looked to her about the length of an airport runway, with, at the end of it, a tiny flag. The only sight beyond the flag was the blue of the ocean she had never seen before.
Carl’s voice was deep and calm and reassuring. She could tell he was smart, that he had instantly seen what he had needed to in the contract and knew exactly how much of it to explain to his client. At the end, he handed Fellowes an onyx fountain pen and had him sign. When Fellowes said, “What’s this?” he answered, “You’re just initialing there to show that you know I’m also getting a fee from the company.” Tanya let her face reveal nothing. Carl was being paid by both sides.
On the way back to the hotel, Tanya wanted to say something to Carl about the opulence of the country club, but she didn’t. She wanted him to believe that she was sophisticated from birth, a creature of natural taste who belonged in luxury because she was unimpressed by it.
When the week in Florida was over, they flew back to Chicago at night. There was no discussion about Tanya going back to the dormitory. Carl simply had the driver go directly to his apartment in a high-rise building
