The Home for Wayward Supermodels Read online

  “Don’t you think I’d make a fabulous mommy?” she asked, after the waiter made his escape.

  “Oh,” I said, realizing this question had only one possible answer, “yes.”

  “That’s what I think. I’m so dying to have a baby I could steal one right out of its carriage.”

  She looked around, as if expecting to find a poachable baby in the Circa Tabac.

  “But of course I’d want it to have my genes,” she said, sighing. “With adoption or even kidnapping, you never know what you’re getting. And if you went to all that trouble and then you got stuck with a baby that wasn’t smart and beautiful, that would be really depressing.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “What about my mountain man?” she asked. “Have you found someone for me?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I haven’t been to Wisconsin.”

  She looked blank. “What’s Wisconsin?”

  It was my turn to be surprised. “It’s where I’m from. Where I was supposed to look for the mountain man.”

  “Oh, right, right,” Raquel said. “I knew it started with a W, but I was thinking Wyoming. Well, you ought to get busy on that. I’m ready now.”

  My heart rose up. “That’s actually one of the things I’d like to talk to you about. I’d really like to take a little time off in early September to go home and see my family.”

  “Absolutely not,” Raquel said.

  “But…why not?”

  “You’re red-hot right now. I can’t let you have time off when your career is starting to soar.”

  The waiter deposited our food and I took a big bite of my hamburger, which at the moment seemed like my best friend in the world. I might as well ask the hamburger for advice about my problems for all the help I was getting from Raquel.

  Five Problems That Can Be Solved By a Hamburger

  Personal hunger.

  Crankiness.

  Quandary over what to have for dinner (hamburger is always a good solution).

  Boredom (if you use a lot of ketchup).

  Loneliness (at least while the hamburger is in your mouth).

  Five Problems That Can’t

  World hunger.

  World peace (though maybe I should have said “world war”).

  Horniness.

  Most relationship problems, except those caused by such factors as boredom and crankiness.

  Loneliness (once your mouth is empty again).

  Absently Raquel started picking the french fries off my plate and popping them in her mouth.

  “Let me tell you something,” she said. “There’s a time for work and a time for life, and right now you’re in a time for work.”

  “I get that,” I said. “I really do. I just want to go home for a day or two, make sure everything’s all right with my boyfriend, maybe spend a little time with my parents.”

  “Call them up,” Raquel said, pulling my plate over to her side of the table. “Send them an email. At some point, things will cool off and then you can go back. Until then, I want you here.”

  I pulled my plate back in front of me. “What if I don’t do what you tell me to do?”

  She took the last fry and stuffed it in her mouth. “You signed a contract,” she said. “You don’t have any choice.”

  I picked up her cocktail and took a deep swallow. Finally I understood why I had sat through all those history classes in high school. “I’m a free human being and that means I always have a choice,” I told her. “I can stand up right now and walk out of here and you’d never see me again.”

  “You could,” Raquel admitted, leaning back and lighting another cigarette. “But then you’d be in breach of contract, and the agency would have to sue you for hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  I flashed on an image of Tom and me, old and bent, selling worms by the roadside to pay off my lifelong debt to Awesome Models. Or worse, my mom and Duke selling the bait and pie shops to buy me out of my contract.

  “Listen, Raquel,” I said. “I don’t want to walk out on you and the agency. I just miss my boyfriend and I have some things to straighten out with my family and I was asking for your help to try and work that out. I thought you said that you were going to take care of me now.”

  “And I am, I am,” she said, reaching across the table and grasping my hand. “I don’t want you to think for a minute that I don’t have your best interests at heart. Admit it: You didn’t always like everything your mom told you to do either, but you can see now it was because she only wanted the best for you, right? Like when she made you go to school and wear your boots in the rain?”

  I had to admit that Raquel had a point.

  “Well, that’s the same with me,” said Raquel. “Except my advice is more about how to succeed in the modeling world. I’m like your modeling mom.”

  Maybe she was right. She definitely knew more about all this stuff than I did, or my real mom. And who else was I going to turn to?

  “There was one other thing I wanted to ask you about,” I said. “It’s about Jonathan Rush wanting to buy my designs, I mean my friend Desi’s designs, and put my name on the label.”

  “Oh, you absolutely have to do that,” she said, tapping a long ash into the ashtray.

  “But…” I said, “I don’t feel right about it, since I’m not really the designer.”

  “Let me tell you something,” she said. “Who do you think designs Chanel clothes? Not Coco Chanel. She’s been dead for decades. Even the designers who are alive—Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan—they may set an overall style for their lines, but there’s somebody else, somebody invisible, who does the actual designing.”

  I blinked. “I know about people like Tom Ford at Gucci,” I said. “But designers with their own labels like Ralph Lauren…”

  “We can call Ralph if you don’t believe me,” Raquel said. “Do you want to call him right now? I have him on speed dial.”

  She was holding out her cell phone to me.

  “Uh, no thanks.”

  “Okay. So, you would be like that. You would be the name, and set the overall style of the line. And your little friend would do the actual designing. And get a big piece of the money, let me add.”

  “We’d have to have a contract,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” said Raquel. “We could help you with that.”

  “You could?”

  “Of course, for the standard agency percentage. Believe me, we handle this kind of deal all the time.”

  She made it sound not only reasonable, but easy. It wasn’t weird or unethical that Jonathan Rush had offered me this deal; it was normal. Desi wanted to do it. Why was I being so ridiculous as to stand in its way?

  “Thank you, Raquel,” I said, pushing away my now empty plate. Maybe she was tough, but a New York agent had to be tough. I wanted her to be tough. And I needed her to guide me through this baffling new world. “That would be great.”

  “Good,” she said. “Now if you want, I can go into the ladies’ room with you and teach you how to throw up that hamburger.”

  ten

  Both Desi and Jonathan Rush—along with Raquel and Awesome Models—were thrilled when I said I’d “do” the Amanda clothing line. My hands were sweating and my pen was wobbling when I signed the contract with Rush, but I felt calmer by the time I signed my separate agreement with Desi, whose entire family, cousins included, gathered for the event. I think they all had plans for her money, which I’d insisted be the entire licensing fee minus the modeling and personal appearance fees that Raquel had carved out. At least this made me feel better about the whole thing.

  Rush wanted to, well, rush the line into the stores for fall, so they’d be there when all the pictures of me finally started appearing in the magazine pages and ads I’d been shooting all summer. (All the big magazines, I’d learned, worked about four months ahead, so most of my pictures hadn’t hit the stands yet.) Desi was shut away in a design studio in the building above the Rush store, working day and night l
ike a fairy-tale princess charged with spinning straw into gold.

  Barely a week into the process, the Rush people photographed me wearing the first of the samples Desi had designed and stitched up by hand, one-of-a-kind items that were whisked from my back along with Tom’s fishing vest and my sock monkey slippers—sock monkeys were going to be a “motif” of the line, decreed Rush—off to the Far East to be copied and mass-produced. There was actually a clause in my contract that the original vest and slippers had to be returned to me intact or they’d have to pay me a hundred thousand dollars.

  Desi was happy, at least, but frantic, with barely time to talk to me when I stopped in at the studio to visit, and no time at all to go shopping or out to eat. Alex was away on a series of shoots and I’d taken to avoiding Raquel, so mostly I hung out with Tati, who still seemed sad but was at least looking healthier, her cheeks pink and round rather than sunken and pale. Every day we’d both go off for long hours to be photographed in heavy winter clothes and furs, only to emerge from the studio into the hot, humid summer evening, the air dense and stinking of exhaust fumes and dog poop. Sweating even in our tiny tank tops, we’d bring home sushi and fruit—whatever was cold—from the shoots and that would be our dinner, which we’d eat slumped on the sofa, watching the summer crop of reality shows.

  And then early on a Thursday morning of what promised to be the tenth 98-degree day in a row, I was walking through Times Square on my way to the library to do more research on my French father when I looked up and there I was, thirty feet tall and ten feet wide, wearing one of Desi’s trademark vintage-fabric dresses and, on my feet, sock monkeys as big as King Kong. AMANDA, the poster read, in huge letters across the top. And then, at the bottom: THE GIRL, THE LOOK, THE RUSH.

  This was it. Until now, I’d been going to all these shoots and having all these pictures taken without confronting any of these images of myself out in the real world. I’d come to feel like a real model in terms of what I did every day; the hair, the makeup, the lights, even the sliced-up chocolates had become so routine they seemed normal. But none of that had progressed to the next step, the step that didn’t have anything to do with my flesh-and-blood self but was the point of everything: the actual photographs. These images of me that would go out in the world and that people—millions of people, every single person moving through Times Square—were going to see. That I was going to see myself, as well as Tom, my mother, Duke, even Jean-Pierre Renaud. Would he notice the resemblance?

  I was so riveted by the unearthly image towering above me that I didn’t notice how hard my heart was pounding until I realized I was feeling a little faint. And it didn’t occur to me that anyone would connect the bare-faced messy-haired T-shirt-wearing me standing on the sidewalk with the enormous glossy girl on the poster until a guy hauling a messenger’s bag stopped and cocked his head at me.

  “Hey,” he said, pointing up. “Ain’t you her?”

  A middle-aged woman, a tourist judging from her running shoes worn with shorts and a backpack, overheard him and glanced up at the poster and then at me.

  “Look!” she said to her friend. “It’s that sock monkey girl, Amanda.”

  The friend looked at my feet. “But she’s not wearing the monkeys.”

  “She’s not wearing lipstick either,” the first woman said.

  “Maybe it’s not really her,” said the messenger.

  “It’s her,” said a fortyish man in an expensive-looking suit. “What are you doing tonight, baby?”

  Watching The Bachelorette with Tatiana was the truth, but thank gosh I was sophisticated enough by now to know I couldn’t say that.

  “Excuse me,” I said, ducking my head and attempting to walk forward. But the crowd closed around me.

  “I love your clothes,” a girl about my age said softly. “Are they in the store now?”

  “Soon,” I said, smiling at her. “My friend Desi is really the designer.”

  “Amanda!” someone else in the still-thickening crowd shouted. “Can I have your autograph?”

  I scribbled my name on the train schedule he thrust toward me and blinked as the flash of a camera went off. The circle tightened around me and panic began to bubble up in my throat.

  “Personally I think the monkeys are weird,” said the tourist woman.

  A wave of heat washed over me and I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t breathe.

  “Excuse me,” I said, trying to edge through the crowd. “Excuse me, I have to go.”

  “You’re not so pretty!” said the businessman as I brushed past him.

  “Hey!” called the messenger, as I finally broke away from the crowd. “Is Amanda your real name?”

  “No!” I shouted, sprinting free.

  I ran. The library was behind me, but no matter; I couldn’t go back through Times Square. I jogged north, toward Central Park. And every time I slowed down, I noticed people staring.

  I soon figured out why. A bus trundled by, and there on the side of it was my picture, just like in Sex and the City. It was also on the back of a taxicab—even on the back of a horse and buggy. When I reached the edge of the park, I saw someone sitting on a park bench reading the New York Times; the picture, in full color, was on the back page.

  “Hey, Amanda!” someone called.

  “It’s the monkey girl!” said another voice.

  I ran, full out this time, ran like I was in a track meet for Northland Pines. When I finally saw the Central Park lake up ahead, I aimed for a clump of bushes, thinking I would rest there like I used to at Big Secret Lake, when Tom went out fishing and I sat under a tree at the shoreline, dreaming about New York and all the delights of my future. But under these bushes were two guys in a clinch, their pants around their ankles.

  “Whooops,” I said. “Excuse me.”

  “Amanda—the Rush?” said one.

  I thrashed away, jogging again until I found an isolated spot under a tree within view of a playground. I could sit here out of sight of everyone, but still see the kids on the slides and the moms and nannies on the benches and know I was safe.

  Never had sitting by myself seemed so pleasurable, so luxurious. Was this what it was like to be famous? Was I famous? Surely all the hoopla would die down. This was the first day, the photos were everywhere, people were noticing. But soon people would get used to that poster and those ads and they’d stop paying attention to me on the street.

  Then I thought, with sinking heart, of all the activities Jonathan Rush had planned for me leading up to the launch of the line. More shoots for ads as Desi produced more prototypes. A press conference next week. And finally an in-store fashion show the same day that the clothes would actually be in the stores.

  Cowering behind this tree to escape attention, I realized, was like a little kid hiding under the bed to keep from getting in trouble for breaking a glass. Sooner or later I’d have to come out, and when I did, the trouble would be right there waiting for me.

  When I was younger, I’d always dreamed of being famous—a famous actress, singer, runner, cook, it really didn’t matter. What about it had appealed to me so much, I wondered from the shelter of my tree? I guess I’d imagined meeting some star or another I’d had a crush on—Johnny Depp or Brett Favre—and I’d anticipated basking in admiration and attention.

  But had I really wanted the attention of masses of strangers? Had I really thought that would be fun? No, I realized. In the end, there was only one person’s attention and admiration I really craved. And that was my mom’s.

  This whole experience—not just the sudden fame, but the modeling, living in New York, meeting glamorous people—was so much less exciting than it might have been because I wasn’t talking about it to her. She was the one person in my life who would love hearing every detail, who believed in me absolutely, and who would encourage me to wring every ounce of pleasure from being here and doing this.

  I had my cell phone in my backpack right now. I could call her right here, from my hiding place, and t
ell her everything. I could imagine what she’d say, after she oohed and aahed over the idea of the poster in Times Square. Make the most of it, she’d tell me. Don’t run away. Stand tall and smile and talk to people. No, not every minute of this is going to be good, but it isn’t going to last forever. For the short time you’re in the spotlight, hold your head up and let it shine on you.

  Suddenly my phone rang. I was startled, as if thinking so intensely about my mother had made her call. Over in the playground, a few of the moms looked up and toward the tree to see where the ringing was coming from. I wanted Mom to call, I realized as I fumbled to answer the phone. Part of the reason I hadn’t called her was that I was waiting for her to call me, was daring her to circumvent the strictures I’d put on Tom and Raquel and find out my phone number or just come back to New York and track me down. I was in this way too like the little kid huddling under the bed, half terrified that my mom would find me, half wishing every second that she would.

  But it was not my mom on the phone; it was Raquel.

  “Have you seen the Rush posters?” she crowed.

  “Yes,” I said, attempting to whisper.

  “What’s wrong? Are you at a shoot? I have this as your day off.”

  “It is,” I whispered. And then, realizing how ridiculous the whole thing was, I stood up and said again, out loud, “It is.” I brushed myself off, and stepped out into the clearing.

  “I’m just walking in the park,” I told Raquel.

  “Well,” she said, excitement creeping into her voice. “It’s happened, just as I predicted it would. You’re huge! A megastar!”

  “Right,” I said, trying to stand tall as I imagined Mom had instructed me, but feeling the terror begin to edge back in.

  “I’ve heard from the Today show and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Spielberg wants to talk to you about a movie, and the producers of Cabaret want to know if you’re interested in playing Sally Bowles. Vogue wants you for a cover, and Rush is already planning an Amanda perfume. And I’ve heard from the agents of Jude Law, Justin Timberlake, and Leo DiCaprio, who all want to know if you’ll go to dinner with their clients.”