17
panties sliding down. It was a fabulous perk of being in the fashion business. Jenner allowed the corner of his eyes to take in the sides of those tantalisingly concealed breasts, quivering as her chest rose and fell with her anger. It was a mistake. He started to get hard.
She’d never make it in modelling, he thought. Not even if she put out. She was a man’s woman. All those curves. Short and luscious. But middle America didn’t aspire to the skinny-minnie look as much as the citT chicks. He thought contemptuously of his own readership. He sold
to milk-fed farmers’ daughters in Des Moines.
.’And it’s Miss Morales, Mr Jenner.’
Arrogant little wetback, he thought, his groin tightening. He’d have to call in one of the blonde interns he had come up to his suite on the twelfth floor and get some head. It wouldn’t be the same as having this
Chiquita do it, but he needed something.
‘There are lots of other models.’
‘And there are lots of other magazines. I think Bill told your people the price. If it’s too much, we’ll wish you good day and be on our way.’
The almond-shaped eyes were staring him down so coldly he felt his erection subside.
‘Pay her,’ he said furiously to his assistant. He stormed off the set. He vowed he’d never use the bitch again. But he knew that wasn’t true. The last two times they’d featured her - in sprayed-on Levi’s and a backless evening gown - sales had improved by ten per cent. Using her caf-au-lait skin and large-breasted, firm-assed shape next to all the
heroin’d-out stick insects gave his ” ‘ a
magazine certain erotic daring, and
his readers something to identify with.
When he used I
‘You gotta be careful,’ Bill Fisher said, as the.y emerged from the City Woman building. Lita wore a pair of tight black pants with a gold belt, kitten heels and an off-the-shoulder black silk jersey. The silver outfit was neatly packed into the black leather holdall she brought along with every job. In addition to her extra money, Lita insisted that each shoot let her keep the clothes. That was unheard of, but if they wanted Lita, they had to agree. Even if they shot her in Chanel.
‘If you cop that much ‘tude, baby, they might stop using you.’ ‘They won’t. Sales are up.’ Lira looked at her booker with all the confidence he didn’t feel. ‘Besides, they always give me grief over there, and still come back for more.’
Bill didn’t argue. Besides, he was getting better commissions for Lira than any of his other mid-level girls, and she was doing all the
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negotiating. After two weeks he’d learned to stop giving advice and start taking it. The most Models Six could do was to keep her up to date on circulation and rates. He had never known a chick to take an interest in that kind of thing. What most of them wanted to know was which photographers were straight, so they could try and get into their pants and maybe get a better shoot, nicer lighting or an in at a big magazine. Morales lived in her own little world. She even checked out the advertisers. She knew, being Hispanic, that the big campaigns were probably beyond her, but she didn’t seem to care. She took every job that paid her price, and made sure that it kept going up. She took receipts for everything. He had an idea that she even kept a log of her subway tokens. Come tax time, she was going to screw the government out of every last dime.
Bill found her intensity a little scary.
But it was exhilarating, too. He’d ‘discovered’ Morales, hut that was the extent of it, he thought with a rare burst of honesty. Lira was a
freight train, and he’d just jumped on board. ‘Costa R-ica Coffee,’ she said. ‘What about them?’
‘They’ve just fired Carmen Liena,’ she said flatly. ‘I heard it from Marcel LeBroux at the Seventeen shoot last week. I want that campaign.
It has TV spots coming up, the whole deal.’
‘That’s a serious deal, Lira …’
‘They’re considering P,.achel Diego, Consuela Benes and Tina Mendes,’ Lita said, ignoring him. ‘All those girls are in their late twenties. My family’s from Puerto Rico, so I have the looks, plus I’m
eighteen years old. They’ll want omebody fresh.’
‘You don’t have experience in TV.’
‘Just set it up, Bill, OK? This is my stop.’
He looked up. They were at Penn Station. ‘At least take a cab.’
‘Call me when you have the audition, honey,’ she said, kissing him on the cheek.
Was she really eighteen? he wondered, watching her go, that sexy little sway in her walk. She acted like she could be thirty-eight.
He adored her. She almost made him wish he were straight. Maybe not, though; the guy that wound up with her was going to have a spitfire on his hands.
Lita took the train out to Jamaica, Queens. The first thing shb had done with her money was to get out of Soundview. She’d done it quietly, using a real-estate agent to get around the red-lining. If you wanted to move somewhere tony, you needed to be white. That was the first thing
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she learned. Black people, even black people with money, weren’t acceptable in certain places. The real-estate agents suddenly had nothing to show. The prices went up fifty per cent, and previously ‘unforeseen difficulties’ came up in the surveys. For Hispanics, it wasn’t much better. She’d burned when she’d found this out.
‘That’s just the way it is, honey,’ one buyer’s agent said to her, right before she fired him.
But Lita had come to accept certain things. Her parents were not cut from the same cloth she was, she knew that. If she was confronted with prejudice, she fought it. Mama and Pappy would not. Stick them in a racist, white-bread, country-club community in a good part of Brooklyn and the hostility would make them miserable. It might almost be better to be back in the shoe-box in Soundview.
There were better destinations. She chose a nice two-family in Queens, in a Hispanic section, one with low taxes and a big yard in the back. Mama could do gardening there - something she’d always wanted. There were four bedrooms, which meant Chico could get some space. She took the lower, two-bedroom apartment and had steel bars run over the windows. Once it was secure, she would live in it, and when she’d made some more money, she could rent it out. Some veteran with a war pension could take it. Then she would move to the city. Manhattan was the place to be, and Lita was moving there as soon as she could afford it.
She had the lawn mowed, cheap, attractive flowers planted and a bottle of Sangria chilled in the brand-new’fridge. Then she brought her parents to see it.
‘It’s amazing, Lita. Is this your boss’s house?’ Pappy asked her doubtfully.
Her parents no longer complained about her ‘dirty’ photos. For her father, any photo in clothes other than the. long shapeless skirts was indecent. At first he and his wife had been so ashamed that they threatened to kick Lira out of the house. But it only took one week for Lita to come back and count five one hundred dollar bills into his hand.
Carlos had never even seen a one hundred dollar bill. He held it up to the light, then looked at his wife. They never complained about Lira’s career again.
‘No.’ She passed him a set of keys. ‘It’s your house.’
Lita let herself in. She switched on the lights and carefully unpacked the bag of clothes, smoothing down the leather and holding up the mesh vest so that it sparkled. Mr Wong owned the dry cleaner’s two blocks away; she’d take them to him in the morning, light now her place was little more than a storage rack for clothes. Mobile garment racks were in
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every room, neatly stacked against the wall. Because of her insistence that she keep all the pieces she modelled, Lira was one of the best dressed women she knew and it all cost her nothing.
She fixed herselfa light salad with a glass of white wine. Gradually the chilled alcohol seeped its way into her bloodstream, relaxing her. Lira mined to the Village Voice and the local PennySaver. Demand for apartments in this area was increasing. Tomorrow she would speak to a rental agent. This place could fetch a decent rent, and it would defray the costs of her move across the bridge. If she wanted to get the Costa
Rica campaign, she needed to be where the action was.
And that wasn’t Queens.
She marched into Bill’s office the next day.
‘Costa 1Lica,’ she said brightly.
His face fell. ‘Honey, I asked the agency, they said the girl has to be at
least five ten, and they said they don’t have a screen test of you.’ ‘So let them take a screen test,’ Lira said impatiently.
Bill blenched. He had no desire to tell her the truth. ‘They just decided to go in another direction. We’ll get the next one.’
‘Bill, if you want to remain my agent, I suggest you tell me exactly what they said,’ Lira replied coldly.
He did want to remain her agent. ‘Don’t take it personally. The guy said that he didn’t want a minor model, that he wanted somebody well known, he had a big brand to sell, and Models Six should know better than to waste his time.’
What the guy had actually said was that he didn’t want some two-bit fat chick from the inner pages, but Bill wasn’t brave enough to relay that message to his client. °
‘What’s the name of the account executive?’
‘Rupert Lancaster. A llmey.’ Bill realized too late what that look on her face meant. ‘But you can’t go over there, Lira. He works for Benson Bailey and we do a lot of work with them. tkenee has a shot at an EstSe
Lauder ad with them …’
‘I have to,’ Lira said.
Bill folded his arms and studied his feet. ‘Lira, I hate to break it to you. But we have bigger clients than you, cover girls, that do a lot of work with Benson Bailey and you’re going to jeopardize our relationship with them if you start causing a scene. We’ll just have to work twice as hard to get you another TV campaign.’
He looked up. She was already gone.
Lita had chosen her outfit carefully this morning. She threw together pieces from her last ten or so shoots. Nothing stereotypically South
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American - that wasn’t the impression she was aiming for. Teetering shoes by Gucci in pale pink leather with rhinestone straps, a one shoulder halter-necked top by Fendi in clinging white jersey, to bring out her golden skin, and a swirling, bias-cut printed skirt by Mary Quant in eggshell blue and ivory. Her hair had been blown out by P,,oberto at Elizabeth Arden and blew glossy and perfect in a loose mane around her shoulders. She topped it all off with a pair of huge white Chanel sunglasses set with crystal and bright glittery silver eyeshadow. Even her underwear was Dior - a tiny wisp of coffee-coloured lace, a thong, with a matching underwired bra. Over the top she threw a belted cotton Burberry raincoat.
As she reached the lobby of Benson Bailey, Lita examined herself in
the mirror. Perfect. She looked like a dusky flower child, like a groupie with a million bucks. She could have stepped off the back of a lolling Stones tourbus with no problem. It was so, so, so… sixty-nine. With money.
The receptionist fairly quailed when Lita strutted up to her desk. ‘What floor is Rupert Lancaster again? I work with Bill Fisher over at Models Six. I have some details I need to discuss with him on an account.’
‘Eighth floor, ma’am,’ the girl said hastily.
‘That’s right. Floor eight,’ Lita agreed, and stepped over to the elevators. A suited man dived to press the button to hold it open for her. Lira minutely inclined her head. Long ago she had learned not to thank men for things. You always had to act like it was your right. Otherwise men assumed it wasn’t, and they wanted you to pay for it.
Her adrenaline started to race as the floors ticked off. This was taking
a risk. Even though she had ignored Bill, what he said was true. If she pissed off this Rupert dude enough to cost lenee that campaign, a million-dollar job that would net hundreds of Łhousands in commission for Models Six, they might drop her. And even though she’d get new representation, the jobs would lessen, would drop in price. Nobody wanted to work with ‘difficult’ girls. As much as she refused to budge on the money and the clothes, Lita was not known as difficult. She showed up on time, she was polite to the photographers, she stole nobody’s boyfriends, she didn’t shoot up, she didn’t come to work with bags under her eyes and she didn’t try and get out early. She did what she was told. If Lira Morales was your model, you could expect to pay, but you could also expect no disruption.
She was about to be very disruptive.
She took a deep breath and walked out of the elevator.
22
Benson Bailey was one of the biggest advertising firms in New York, and it showed.
The eighth floor was as impressive as the lobby had been. Photos were mounted on the walls - she thought they were original David Baileys. There was also a Hockney and a massive Jackson Pollock. Futuristic silver-leather furniture that looked like the miniskirt she’d worn yesterday was everywhere. Discreet stills from their more famous TV campaigns were mounted on every office door right over the nameplate.
Lita marched up to the polished girl with the pearls sitting at the kidney-shaped reception table.
‘I’m here to see Mr Lancaster,’ she said smoothly. ‘I have an appointment.’
The girl looked up sharply.
‘Mr Lancaster? I don’t see anything in Lord Lancaster’s book.’ Her eyes darted towards a corner oce. ‘I’ll have to check with his assistant,
n’kiss.’
Damn. Lord Lancaster. She should have checked; Bill said he was a limey, lookie mistake, Lita thought, angry with herself. She followed the suspicious girl’s line of sight.
‘I can’t help it that you don’t know how to keep appointments written down,’ she snapped, and marched across to the corner oce. She heard the girl getting up from her desk and padding across the thick white carpet after her, but she didn’t look back. Lita was used to running the streets of Soundview and this Upper East Sider was no match for her. Her hand closed or the office’s brass door and she pushed it open.