Glitter Baby

Chapter 20

Dark, erotic dreams invaded Fleur’s sleep after she got back to the city. She wondered if their wrestling match on the beach had recharged some kind of internal sexual battery. Wouldn’t that be ironic? She was hungry for the touch of a man, but she was too tightly strung right now to think about looking for a lover.

Two weeks after the beach party, she sat on a straight-backed chair in Michel’s boutique while he locked up for the evening. At first they’d invented excuses to talk to each other. He called to see if she’d gotten stuck in traffic on her way back from Long Island. She called to ask his advice about an outfit she wanted to buy Kissy for her birthday. Finally they abandoned subterfuge and openly enjoyed each other’s company.

“I went over your books last night.” She’d brushed some sawdust from her jeans. “Bottom line…Your finances are a mess.”

He flipped off the store’s front lights. “I’m an artist, not a businessman. That’s why I hired you.”

“My newest client.” She smiled. “It never occurred to me to represent a designer, but I’m excited about it. Your gowns and dresses are the most innovative work this city has seen in years. All I have to do is make people want them.” She waved her hands over an imaginary crystal ball. “I see fame, fortune, and brilliant management in your future.” As an afterthought, she added, “I also see a new lover.”

He stepped behind her and pulled the rubber band from her ponytail. She’d spent all day with the carpenters at the townhouse, and she was a mess. “Stick with fame and fortune and leave my lovers alone,” he said. “I know you didn’t like Damon, but-”

“He’s a whiny twit.” Damon was the dark-haired dancer who had been with Michel the night of Charlie’s beach party. “Your choice of men is worse than Kissy’s. Her hunks are only dumb. Yours is snide, too.”

“Only because you intimidated him. Hand me your hairbrush. You look like bad Bette Davis. And those jeans are making me bilious. Really, Fleur, I don’t think I can stand these clothes of yours much longer. I’ve shown you the designs-”

She snatched the brush from her purse. “Hurry up and finish my hair. I have to meet Kissy, and I only stopped by to tell you that you’re a financial screw-up. You also know zip about merchandising. Still, I forgive you. Come to dinner with Kissy and me tomorrow night at the townhouse.”

“Aren’t you missing a few necessities for throwing a dinner party? Like walls and furniture?”

“It’s informal.” She hopped up, gave him a kiss, and left. As she stepped out onto West Fifty-fifth Street, she wondered if he’d sensed how nervous she was about the announcement she intended to make at her improvised dinner party.

She’d leased the red brick townhouse on the Upper West Side with an option to buy. Because the house’s four stories had been awkwardly divided-horizontally instead of vertically-she’d gotten a good price, and she’d been able to adapt the unusual arrangement to her advantage. She intended to live in the smaller rear section of the house and use the larger front section for office space. If all went well, she’d be able to move in by mid-August, a month from now.

“No one’s going to confuse this with La Grenouille,” Michel said as he gingerly lowered himself into a folding chair she’d set in front of the table fashioned from two sawhorses and some sheets of plywood in what would soon be her office.

Kissy looked pointedly at Michel’s white clam diggers and Greek peasant shirt. “They wouldn’t let you in La Grenouille, so stop complaining.”

“I heard you were there, though,” he said. “With a certain Mr. Kincannon.”

“And a group of his nerdy friends.” Kissy wrinkled her nose. Even though she saw Charlie Kincannon frequently, she barely mentioned him, which didn’t bode well for his plan to win her heart.

Fleur began ladling out lemon chicken and spicy Szechuan shrimp from carryout cartons. “I wish you’d move in with me, Kissy. The attic is finished, so you’d have plenty of privacy, not to mention twice as much room as our apartment. There’s a kitchen up there, the plumbing works, and you’ll even have a separate entrance off the front hallway so I won’t be able to cluck my tongue over your playmates.”

“I like my place. And I’ve told you-moving makes me crazy. I never do it if I don’t have to.”

Fleur gave up. Kissy was so down on herself right now that she didn’t feel as though she deserved anything more than what she had, and no amount of persuasion could convince her otherwise.

Kissy dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin. “Why the mystery? You said you wanted Michel and me here so you could make an announcement. What’s up?”

Fleur gestured toward the wine. “Pour, Michel. We’re going to drink a toast.”

“Beaujolais with Chinese? Really, Fleur.”

“Don’t criticize, just do your job.” He filled their glasses, and Fleur lifted hers, determined to project a confidence she didn’t feel. “Tonight we drink to my two favorite clients, as well as the genius who’s going to put you both on top. Namely me.” She clicked their glasses and took a sip. “Michel, why haven’t you ever had a showing of your designs?”

He shrugged. “I had one my first year, but it cost me a fortune and nobody came. My stuff isn’t like anything else on Seventh Avenue, and I don’t have a name.”

“Right.” She looked at Kissy. “And no one will let you audition for the kind of parts you want because of the way you look.”

Kissy pushed a shrimp around and gave a glum nod.

“What both of you need for your careers to take off is a showcase, and I’ve figured out how we’re going to get one.” Fleur set down her glass. “Of the three of us, which one stands the best shot at getting media attention?”

“Rub it in,” Kissy grumbled.

Michel stated the obvious. “You do. We all know that.”

“I beg to disagree,” Fleur said. “Except for the week or so after the story broke, I’ve been in New York over two years without getting any publicity. Even Adelaide Abrams didn’t care I was back. The newspapers don’t want Fleur Savagar, who’s a total bore. They want the Glitter Baby.” She handed them the evening paper, which she’d folded open to Adelaide’s gossip column.

Kissy read it aloud.

Superstar Jake Koranda was seen wandering the beaches of Quogue Fourth of July weekend with none other than Glitter Baby Fleur Savagar. Koranda, taking a break from the Arizona filming of his newest Caliber picture, was a guest at the vacation home of millionaire pharmaceutical heir Charles Kincannon. According to friends, the GB and Koranda only had eyes for each other. So far, no comment from either Koranda’s West Coast office or the elusive Glitter Baby, who’s been quietly making a name for herself in New York these past few years as a talent agent.

Kissy looked up from the article, her face stricken. “I’m sorry, Fleurinda. I know how you hate having the past dredged up. And once Abrams gets hold of a story, she won’t let it go. I don’t know who talked to her, but-”

“I’m the one who planted the story,” Fleur said.

They stared at her.

“Would you care to let us in on the reason?” her brother asked.

Fleur took a deep breath and lifted her glass. “Drag out those designs you’ve been saving up for me, Michel. The Glitter Baby’s coming back, and she’s taking the two of you with her.”

Pain was harder to bear sober, Belinda had discovered, since she’d forced herself to stop drinking. She slipped a cassette into the tape deck and pressed the button with the tip of her finger. As the room filled with the sounds of Barbra Streisand singing “The Way We Were,” she lay back against the satin bed pillows and let the tears trickle down her cheeks.

All the rebels were dead. First it had been Jimmy on the road to Salinas, and then Sal Mineo in that brutal murder. Finally Natalie Wood. The three leading actors from Rebel Without a Cause had all died before their time, and Belinda was afraid she would be next.

She and Natalie were almost exactly the same age, and Natalie had loved Jimmy, too. He teased her when they were shooting Rebel because she was just a kid to him. Bad Boy Jimmy Dean playing with Natalie’s feelings.

Death terrified Belinda, and yet she kept a secret supply of pills stashed in the bottom of an old jewelry box near the spinning gold charm Errol Flynn had given her. She couldn’t stand living her life like this much longer, but a strain of optimism still ran deep inside her that said things might get better. Alexi might die.

Belinda missed her baby so much. Alexi said he’d put Belinda in a sanitarium if she tried to contact Fleur. A sanitarium for chronic alcoholics, even though she hadn’t let herself touch a drop of liquor for almost two years. Although Alexi never left the house anymore, she hardly ever saw him. He conducted his business from a suite of rooms on the first floor, working through a series of assistants who wore dark suits and somber expressions and passed her in the hallways without speaking. Almost no one spoke to her. Her days and nights blended together, stretching behind and before her in an unending line, each one exactly like the last until she couldn’t find a reason to go on living except the hope that Alexi would die.

In the old days, when she walked into a ball or a restaurant on Alexi’s arm, she became the most important woman in the room. People sought her out to curry favor. They told her how beautiful she was, how amusing. Without Alexi, the invitations had stopped.

She remembered how it had been in California when she was the Glitter Baby’s mother. She’d been charged with energy until she was luminescent. Everything she touched became special. That was the best time of all.

The song came to an end. She got out of bed and pushed the rewind button to play it again. The music kept her from hearing the door open, and she didn’t know that Alexi had entered until she turned around.

It had been nearly a month since he’d visited her rooms, and she wished that her hair was combed and that her eyes weren’t red from crying. She nervously toyed with the front of her robe. “I-I’m a wreck.”

“But always beautiful,” he replied. “Fix yourself for me, chérie. I’ll wait.”

This was what made him so dangerous. Not his terrible cruelties, but his awful tenderness. Both were intentional, and each, in its own way, entirely sincere.

While he took a seat in the room’s most comfortable chair, she gathered up what she needed and slipped into the bathroom. When she came out, he lay on the bed, all the lamps turned off except one on the opposite side of the room. The dim light hid his unhealthy pallor, as well as the network of fine lines at the corners of her own eyes.

She wore a simple white nightgown. Her toenails were bare of polish and her scrubbed face clean of makeup. She’d threaded a ribbon through her hair.

She lay back on the bed without speaking. He pushed her nightgown to her waist. She kept her legs tightly closed while he caressed her and slowly removed her underpants. When he pushed at her knees, she whimpered as if she were afraid, and he rewarded her for the whimper with one of the deep caresses she liked so much. She tried to push her legs closed again to please him, but he’d begun to kiss the insides of her thighs, and her eyelids drifted shut. This was their unspoken pact. Now that his teenage mistresses were gone, she played the child bride for him, and he let her keep her eyes shut so she could remember Flynn and dream about James Dean.

Usually he left as soon as it was over, but this time he lay still, a sheen of sweat visible on the flaccid skin of his chest. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Would you hand me my robe, chérie? There are some pills in the pocket.”

She got the robe for him and turned away as he pulled out the vial of pills. Instead of making him weaker, his illness had strengthened his power. Now, with his first-floor fortress and the army of watchful assistants carrying out his orders, he’d made himself invulnerable.

She went into the bathroom to shower. When she came out, he was still there, sitting in a chair and sipping a drink. “I ordered whiskey for you.” He pointed with his glass toward a tumbler on a silver tray.

How typically cruel of him. The cruelty coming after the tenderness in a tightly woven pattern of contradictions that had directed the course of her life for more than twenty-five years. “You know I don’t drink anymore.”

“Really, chérie, you shouldn’t lie to me. Do you think I don’t know about the empty bottles your maid finds hidden in the bottom of the wastebasket?”

There were no empty bottles. This was his way of threatening her to make certain she did his bidding. She remembered the pictures of the sanitarium he’d shown her, a collection of ugly gray buildings in the most remote part of the Swiss Alps. “What do you want from me, Alexi?”

“You are a stupid woman. A stupid, helpless woman. I cannot imagine why I ever loved you.” A small muscle ticked near his temple. “I’m sending you away,” he said abruptly.

A chill shot through her. The ugly gray buildings sat like great cold stones in the snow. She thought of the pills hidden away in the bottom of her old jewelry box.

All the rebels were dead now.

He crossed his legs and took a sip from his drink. “The sight of you depresses me. I do not wish to have you near me any longer.”

Death from the pills would be painless. It wouldn’t be like the suffocating salt water that had closed over Natalie’s head or the terrible pain Jimmy had felt when he died. She’d simply go to bed and drift into endless sleep.

The hard Russian eyes of Alexi Savagar sliced through the layers of her skin like a razor. “I am sending you to New York,” he said. “What you do once you are there no longer concerns me.”