Over the next few months, I'd lost Sharon, but Frank Allen gained Lillith Parker as a partner in their joint venture, Lillith Allure Cosmetics. Lillith had all the clout with Breslin Evans that Frank lacked, and she was able to see to it that Blaine Dunhill, new kid on the block, was appointed to handle their account exclusively. In some ways, my life got easier. In others, Lillith definitely was not the easiest client in the world to satisfy.
As the company grew, Lillith decided to try her hand at a subsidiary line of cosmetics based on her passion for astrology. Once Mercury was out of retrograde and it was safe to delve into new ventures, Lillith Allure launched Zodiac. Zodiac's beauty products were based on sun signs. There were twelve different “looks” to the line, which meant a full year of ad campaigns. Lillith wanted one new face to represent the whole line. The Zodiac Girl would be an “All-American,” freshly scrubbed beauty transformed by Zodiac's vividly glam colors.
I didn't think about Sheila when Lillith asked me to find the Zodiac Girl. During our first months in New York, Sheila was a relative newcomer to the world of modeling, and her photogenic clock was ticking. She was twenty-two, just out of college, with a degree in liberal arts and a few letters of recommendation to some Manhattan modeling agencies. Because no one told her how impossible her dreams were, she made them come true, getting a contract with Metropole. She owed it to luck, chutzpah, and a few other assets, including flawless skin, legs that wouldn't quit, and a winning disposition. Even the most jaded people in the industry found Sheila irresistible.
In 1998, more than a year into Sheila's career, everyone wanted to be the Zodiac Girl and enjoy the kind of success Elizabeth Hurley had experienced with Estée Lauder or Cindy Crawford had found with Revlon. It wasn't until the eleventh hour that Sheila's composite card made its way to my desk among the hundreds of other faces that I'd been sifting through. Since she had every quality that Lillith had described, I included Sheila among my five choices for the face of Zodiac.
Lillith had zeroed in on Sheila's picture right off the bat. “That's her. She's the one,” Lillith said, pointing a finger at Sheila's picture. Which I imagined must have been difficult for Lillith, since she was bound in a detoxifying seaweed wrap at the time of our meeting.
A star was born. Almost literally, since everything connected to Lillith Parker and the Zodiac line was fraught with cosmic significance.
I looked over at Sheila, who was staring through the window of our plane. We'd broken through the rain clouds; bright sunlight illuminated the hair surrounding her face, making her look like an angel. Since I could remember her as the gawky kid who'd tagged along after Jake and me, I sometimes forgot how beautiful she was.
Sheila turned to say, “I'm fucking tired, Blaine.”
“Gee, Sheila. You sound like a teamster.”
We laughed together as the seat belt lights went off, signaling that it was safe to move about the cabin of the airplane.
“I'm sorry,” Sheila continued. “What I mean isâwell, I'm
tired,
Blaine. I need a break from all this. I've been going nonstop for over a year now. It's finally getting to me. And I can't hold Josh off any longer.”
“I understand,” I said.
“It's too bad the days of hair bands are over,” Sheila said. “The next logical step in my career would be to put on a bikini and writhe on the hood of a car in a rock video.”
“While being hosed down,” I added.
“Or licking whipped cream off my fingers and tossing my hair around.”
“You could do all that while being hosed down,” I said. “You're good at multitasking.”
“Thanks!” Sheila said. She pointed to the woman across the aisle, who'd dozed off, and said, “I lied to that woman. When I was younger, I really wanted to be one of those rock video vixens. Maybe not when I was nine, but when I was in high school. Then the grunge thing happened, Guns and Roses broke up, and where are the video vixens now?”
“Come back to the five and dime, Tawny Kitaen, Tawny Kitaen,” I mused.
Sheila laughed, then said, “It's just as well. I'm too tired and have no time. I never thought working for Zodiac would be so involved.”
“So why did you rip Bob a new asshole because he turned down one fashion show for you?” I asked.
“It's the principle of the thing. I love doing runway work. If it was up to me, I'd do as many fashion shows as possible, even though the money sucks compared to what I get from Zodiac. No questions asked. And no complaints, either. I guess it doesn't matter. I have to think about Josh. I barely have enough time to spend with him as it is. Let alone get married to the poor guy.”
After dating for over a year, Josh had proposed to Sheila and she'd accepted. However, the proposal came just before Sheila won the position as the Zodiac Girl. Before she knew it, she was swept into a cycle of travel between print shoots, public appearances, interviews, and commercial shoots. Her life became a “Who's That Girl” media frenzy, and she was rarely at home in Manhattan at the same time as Josh.
Working as a fashion photographer for many years made Josh sympathetic to Sheila's job. Although he freelanced occasionally, he was employed by
Ultimate Magazine
and often worked close to home. After Josh's proposal, they'd decided to marry in the summer of 1999. It hadn't happened, and he'd agreed to postpone the wedding a year because of Sheila's new job. They had both thought that Lillith Parker would want a new face for the Zodiac line after the first year was over.
They were both wrong. Lillith was drastically opposed to changing anything about how Zodiac was represented to the world. In her opinion, when people thought of Sheila Meyers, they thought of Zodiac. And vice versa. Josh began pressuring Sheila to drop the Zodiac job and help him plan their wedding.
Since Josh's main concern was that her job was limiting their time together, Sheila offered a compromise: She would move in with him into an apartment on the Upper West Side. They moved, I lost my roommate, and Sheila continued as the Zodiac Girl, certain she could squeeze in a wedding this year if she planned everything just right.
“How are the wedding plans going?” I asked.
“Josh wants to get married in June,” she replied.
“What do you say?”
“I figure it can happen,” she agreed, opening a PalmPilot and bringing up a calendar on its tiny screen. “There's a window of three days during the first weekend of June. If I fly into Wisconsin fromâwhere are we shooting Zodiac's Leo ads?”
“Miami.”
“If I fly to Wisconsin from Miami on Thursday night, have my shower on Friday, rehearsal and dinner on Saturday, and wedding on Sunday, I should be able to fly back to New York Sunday night to kick off the promotion for Zodiac's Cancer line after the reception.”
“And Josh goes on the honeymoon by himself?” I asked.
“Blaine, you heard my schedule,” Sheila said. “Unless I hire a stand-in for my own wedding, it's going to be like an Olympic event trying to fit everything into three days. I can't live my life and also be the Zodiac Girl. It's not fair to Josh. Or to me, for that matter. I'm going to ask Lillith for some time off.”
“What? That's impossible.”
“I knew I shouldn't have told you,” Sheila said and frowned.
“Sheila, we're talking about a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. And you're it. This isn't a shift at Dairy Queen, sweetie. Unless you have a twin sister that I don't know about, there's no way you can take time off.”
“I can't believe you're reacting as a businessman instead of as my friend,” Sheila said, violently tossing her PalmPilot into her purse. “I hoped that since you were going to see Lillith, too, and since you're supposed to be Josh's best man, you might help me find a way to convince her to give me some time off. You'd think there would be a way to free some time for my wedding.”
I sympathized with her, but she knew how Lillith operated. The woman kept every magazine that placed Zodiac's ads in a complete panic because she was determined to shoot each sun sign's photos as closely as possible to the actual dates the sign encompassed. Added to that was her horror of Mercury's capricious behavior and some nonsense about the power of the full moon on cosmetics.
“Call me selfish, but I thought, since you're one of my oldest friends as well as a business colleague, you might find a way to make this all work out,” Sheila added, her voice soft, perhaps even a bit defeated.
“I am your friend. And you are selfish. I just don't see it happening,” I said, and put my hand on her arm, giving it a gentle squeeze.
“It's easy for you. You're not the one running all over the world for the sake of a tube of lipstick. You're the one pulling the levers behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz, running the show. If you want to take a break, all you have to do is say
Stop!
and everything comes to a halt. But what about me? I have to answer to you, Lillith, Bob the pig, and Metropole. I just want to get married, for gosh sake.”
We both paused, listening to the white noise of the airplane as it zoomed us to Baltimore, while we sat in our seats, stuck between a rock and a hard place. A flight attendant stopped by and asked if we'd like something to drink.
“I'd love a Bloody Mary,” I said.
“I'll have a diet ginger ale, please,” Sheila said.
“She's being awfully difficult today. Would you add a little arsenic to her ginger ale?” I asked. “Oh, wait. This is first class. I should be able to get cyanide.”
“Ignore him,” Sheila said, giving the flight attendant a winning smile.
The flight attendant eyed me warily, then stared at Sheila as if noticing her for the first time. “Aren't you in those cell phone commercials?”
“Yes,” Sheila said, blushing.
“I love the one where the spy is trying to break into an office, but he can't remember the alarm codes. Then you fall down from the ceiling on a cable, like in
Mission Impossible,
with a cell phone in your hand so he can call headquarters.”
“But I scare the crap out of him and he ends up setting off the alarm,” Sheila recalled. “That was the first ad in the series. Another one will premiere during the Oscars, but it's my last. I only signed to do five.”
“That's too bad,” the flight attendant said. “They were cute. I'll be right back with your drinks.”
“Your fans know no altitude. We're always running into people who adore you,” I said. Sheila shrugged, but said nothing. I couldn't tell if she was trying to be humble or if she was still annoyed with me, so I said, “When we were teenagers in Eau Claire, I never thought we'd turn into the two people on this plane.”
Sheila started laughing and said, “You didn't? Gosh, when we were dating, I just
knew
you'd turn into a gay advertising executive and I'd be a jaded, bitter model.”
“You're not jaded,” I said. “You're tired. Anyway, when we were dating, even I thought I was straight. I dumped you for Sydney Kepler, after all.”
“You dumped me? I think not, Mister Man. I dumped you when you slept with Sydney, my alleged friend, behind my back. And you stayed with that hag just to look good to all your dumb jock buddies and frat brothers.”
“I did not,” I protested. “And Sydney isn't a hag.” Sheila stared at me with a bemused expression for a second, and we both burst out laughing. “Okay,” I gave in. “Sydney's a bitch, but she's not a hag.”
“You say tomato, I say tomahto.”
“It's best that we don't speak of the extortionist,” I said, using my favorite pet name for my ex-wife.
“You're the one who lets her get away with it,” Sheila said. “I can't believe you fronted her the money for that gallery. As if she'd recognize a decent painting if one landed on her perfectly coifed little head.”
I closed my eyes, wishing I could shut out the memory of Sydney and her paintings, about which the kindest description might be “uniquely atrocious.” Sydney had started out doing the standard novice's still lifes. Bowls of fruit, flowers in a vase, sheet music resting atop a grand piano, next to a violin, in front of a picture window, beyond which could be seen a well-manicured lawn. It was what our friend Blythe called “Junior League Art,” after all the women who took an art class between shuffling kids to soccer and raising money for charity.
Then one night the accident occurred. In the middle of a fight with me about the Lady in Red campaignâSydney was positive I was having an affair with the model because our marital bed was hardly blissful and rarely busyâshe flung a bottle of Allure's Ruby Red nail polish at me. It shattered on a canvas of marigolds, the glass sticking in the paint, and
art
was born. Sydney liked to give interviews in which she said she was challenging a patriarchal society's view of beauty in its traditional forms. It was all bullshit, but somehow it launched a career for her.
Unfortunately, that career didn't come with enough money to keep Sydney away from my bank account, even after our divorce. She was determined not to slither back under the thumb of her wealthy, domineering father, and I was easily intimidated by her, especially after she learned “Blaine's little secret,” as she liked to call my homosexuality.
Sydney's manipulations were like a well-executed marketing campaign, and her slogan was, “Knowledge is power.” Unoriginal, much like Sydney, but effective, since I'd spent so many years successfully selling the product that was Blaine Dunhill: scion of a prominent Eau Claire businessman, hero of the gridiron in my youth, the golden boy who was going places. If Sydney exposed my secrets, my trophies and awards would be yanked from the shelves faster than a tainted batch of Tylenol. Daniel's slogan for the quandary was, “The truth shall set you free.” Unfortunately, that clashed with my golden-boy catchphrase, “What you don't know won't hurt you.” Even if I could face a fall from grace in Eau Claire, there was still my family to consider. The truth would probably finish what remained of my relationship with my parents after my divorce.