Susan Phillips - Glitter Baby

Fleur Savagar would make that happen.

Fleur gazed out the window as the taxi jockeyed for position in the Manhattan traffic. It was a cold, crisp early December afternoon. Everything was dirty and beautiful and wonderful. If she wasn’t so terrified, New York City would have felt just right to her.

Belinda stubbed out her third cigarette since they’d gotten in the cab. “I can’t believe it, baby. I can’t believe we got away. Alexi’s going to be furious. His daughter, a model. But since we won’t need his money, he can’t do one thing to stop us. Ouch! Be careful, baby.”

“Sorry.” Fleur pulled her elbow in. Knowing that Belinda was pinning their futures on Fleur having a modeling career made her sick at her stomach.

Gretchen was supposed to have rented a modest apartment for them, but the cab pulled up in front of a luxury high-rise with the address cut into the glass above the door. The doorman wheeled their suitcases into an elevator whose last occupant had been wearing Joy.

Fleur’s stomach jumped as the elevator shot upward. She couldn’t do this. She’d seen the test shots, and they were ugly. Her feet sank into thick celery-green carpeting as they got out. She followed Belinda and the doorman down a short hallway to a paneled door. He unlocked it and set their suitcases inside. Belinda entered the apartment first. As Fleur followed her, she noticed a weird smell. Familiar, but she couldn’t identify it. Sort of like-

She looked past Belinda and saw them. They were everywhere. Vase after vase of full-blown white roses. She sucked in her breath. Belinda made a soft, muffled cry. Alexi Savagar stepped out of the shadows.

“Welcome to New York, my darlings.”

“What are you doing here?” Belinda’s voice was little more than a whisper.

“Quelle question. My wife and daughter strike out for the New World. Should I not at least be here to greet them?” He gave Fleur a disarming smile, inviting her to share the joke.

Fleur started to smile in response, but caught herself as she saw how pale her mother had become. She moved closer to Belinda’s side. “I won’t go back. And you can’t make me.”

She sounded like a baby, and he seemed amused. “Whatever makes you think I would want you to? My attorneys have examined the contract Gretchen Casimir has offered you, and it seems quite fair.”

All the secrecy Belinda had imposed was for nothing. Fleur breathed in the scent of roses. “You know about Casimir?”

“I do not mean to sound immodest, but little escapes my notice when it comes to the welfare of my only daughter.”

Belinda seemed to come out of a trance. “Don’t believe him, Fleur! This is a trick.”

Alexi sighed. “Please, Belinda, do not inflict your paranoia on our daughter.” He made an elegant gesture. “Let me show you the apartment. If you don’t like it, I will find you something else.”

“You found this apartment for us?” Fleur said.

“A father’s gift to his daughter.” His smile made her feel soft inside. “It is past time for me to begin to make amends. This is a small token of my best wishes for her future career.”

A small, inarticulate sound escaped Belinda’s lips. She reached out to pull Fleur to her side, but she was a moment too late. Fleur had already gone off with Alexi.

Alexi took a suite at the Carlyle for the month of December. During the day, Fleur spent countless hours being primped and polished by Gretchen Casimir’s team. She met with movement coaches and dance teachers, ran every day in Central Park, and studied with the tutors Alexi hired so she could complete her education.

In the evening, he showed up at the apartment with theater or ballet tickets, sometimes with an invitation to a restaurant where the food was simply too wonderful to miss. He took her on a trip to Connecticut to track down the rumor that a 1939 Bugatti was hidden away on a Fairfield estate. Belinda sat in the backseat and chain-smoked. She never let Fleur go anywhere alone with him. If Fleur laughed at one of his jokes or sampled some tidbit he fed her from his fork, Belinda stared at her with an expression of such deep betrayal that Fleur felt sick. She hadn’t forgotten what he’d done to her, but he sounded so sorry about it.

“It was childish jealousy,” he told her when Belinda slipped off to the restroom during one of their meals together. “The pathetic insecurity of a middle-aged husband deeply in love with a bride twenty years his junior. I was afraid you would take my place in her affections, so after you were born, I simply made you disappear. The power of money, chérie. Do not ever underestimate it.”

She had to blink back tears. “But I was just a baby.”

“Unconscionable. I knew it at the time. Also ironic, non? What I did drove your mother away far more than one small child could ever have done. By the time Michel arrived, it made no difference.”

His explanation confused her, but he kissed the palm of her hand. “I don’t ask you to forgive me, chérie. Some things are not possible. I merely ask that you give me some small place in your life before it is too late for both of us.”

“I-I want to forgive you.”

“But you can’t. Your mother would never allow it. I understand.”

In January, Alexi returned to Paris and Fleur had her first shoot-a shampoo print ad. Belinda stayed with her the whole time. Fleur was petrified, but everybody was nice, even when she tripped on a tripod and knocked over the art director’s coffee. The photographer played the Rolling Stones, and a really nice stylist made Fleur dance with her. After a while, Fleur forgot about her height, her shovel hands, tugboat feet, and great big face.

Gretchen said the photos were “historic.” Fleur was just glad to have the first experience behind her.

She shot another ad two days later, and a third the next week. “I never thought it would happen this fast,” she told Alexi during one of their frequent telephone conversations.

“Now the entire world will see how beautiful you are and fall under your spell, just as I have.”

Fleur smiled. She missed him, but she wasn’t so foolish as to mention that to Belinda. With Alexi back in Paris, Belinda had started to laugh again, and she hadn’t taken a single drink.

The buzz began to build. In March, Fleur did her first fashion spread, and Gretchen’s press agent started referring to her as the “Face of the Decade.” No one except Fleur objected.

Suddenly it seemed everyone wanted her. In April, she got a Revlon contract. In May, she shot a six-page fashion spread for Glamour. Vogue sent her to Istanbul to shoot caftans, then to Abu Dhabi for resort wear. She celebrated her seventeenth birthday at a resort in the Bahamas shooting swimwear while Belinda flirted with a former soap opera star vacationing there.

She continued to have various tutors, but it wasn’t the same as being in a classroom. She missed her schoolmates. Fortunately Belinda went everywhere with her. They were more than mother and daughter. They were best friends.

Fleur began earning bigger sums of money that needed to be invested, but Belinda didn’t understand finance, so Fleur started asking Alexi questions during their phone calls. His answers were so helpful that she and Belinda grew to rely on him and eventually dumped the entire matter into his capable hands.

Fleur’s first cover appeared. Belinda bought two dozen copies and propped them all over the apartment. The magazine sold more issues than any in its history, and Fleur’s career exploded. She was grateful that her success had come so easily, but it also made her uncomfortable. Every time she looked in a mirror, she wondered what all the fuss was about.

People magazine asked for an interview. “My baby doesn’t just shine,” Belinda told the reporter. “She glitters.” That was all People needed.

GLITTER BABY FLEUR SAVAGAR

SIX FEET OF SOLID GOLD

When Fleur saw the cover, she told Belinda she was never ever going out in public again.

“Too late.” Belinda laughed. “Gretchen’s press agent is making sure the nickname sticks.”

Fleur had been in New York for a year when the first movie offer rolled in. The script was trash, and Gretchen advised Belinda to turn it down. Belinda did, but she was depressed for days afterward. “I’ve been dreaming about us going to Hollywood, but Gretchen’s right. Your first movie has to be special.”

Hollywood? It was all happening too quickly. Fleur took a deep breath and tried to hold on.

The New York Times did a feature story. “The Glitter Baby Is Big, Beautiful, and Rich.”

“I mean it this time.” Fleur moaned. “I’m never, never going out again.”

Belinda laughed and poured herself a Tab.

Belinda gradually got rid of the antiques in their apartment and decorated it in a starkly contemporary style, as different from the house on the Rue de la Bienfaisance as she could make it. Buff suede covered the living room walls. A chrome and glass Mies van der Rohe table sat in front of the pit sofa, which had black and brown graphic pillows. Fleur didn’t tell Belinda she liked the antiques better. She especially hated the long living room wall decorated with window-sized enlargements of her own face. Looking at them made her feel creepy. It was as if someone else had taken up residence in her body, and the makeup and clothes formed a thick shell hiding the real person beneath. Except she didn’t know who that person was.

Alexi promised he’d come to New York in February. He’d canceled two other trips to the city, but this time he swore nothing would keep him away. As the day approached, she struggled to hide her excitement from Belinda, but just hours before his plane was supposed to land, the phone rang in the apartment.

“Chérie,” Alexi said, as foreboding curled in her stomach. “I’ve had an emergency. It’s impossible for me to leave Paris now.”

“But you promised! It’s been more than a year.”

“Once again I have failed you. If only…” She knew what he was going to say. “If only your mother would let you come to Paris. But we both know she will forbid it, and I won’t go against her wishes. Hélas, she uses you to hurt me.”

Fleur wouldn’t betray Belinda by agreeing. As she tried to swallow her disappointment, she heard high heels tapping down the hallway. A moment later, Belinda’s bedroom door clicked shut.

Belinda settled on the edge of her bed and closed her eyes. He was canceling on Fleur again, just as he’d done twice before. Fleur would be heartbroken and resentful, not at Alexi but at her. His strategy was brilliant. Make it Belinda’s fault that father and daughter couldn’t be together.

Fleur had held out against Alexi’s charms longer than Belinda had expected, and even now, she maintained at least a trace of reserve with him. Alexi didn’t like that, which was why he called her several times a week, why he sent lavish gifts calculated to make her feel his presence, and why he’d stayed away for the past year. Any moment now, Fleur would knock on her bedroom door and beg for permission to fly to Paris to see him. Belinda would refuse. Fleur would be resentful and withdraw into herself. Although she wouldn’t say it out loud, she saw her mother as neurotic and jealous. But Belinda had to keep Fleur in New York where she could protect her. If only she could explain why it was so necessary without offering up the truth.

Your father-who, by the way, isn’t your father-is seducing you.

Fleur would never believe it.

“Further to the right, sweetheart.”

Fleur tipped her head and smiled into the camera. Her neck hurt, and she had cramps, but Cinderella hadn’t whined at the ball just because her glass slippers pinched.

“That’s beautiful, honey. Perfect. A little more teeth. Amazing.”

She sat on a stool in front of a small table with a mirrored top, which was elevated like an easel to reflect the light. The open neck of her champagne silk blouse revealed a magnificent string of square-cut emeralds. Summer had arrived, and it was a blistering hot New York afternoon. Out of camera range, she wore cutoffs and pink rubber shower thongs.

“Fix her eyebrows,” the photographer said.

The makeup man handed her a tiny comb, then dabbed at her nose with a small, clean sponge. She leaned over her reflection and combed her thick brows back into place. She used to regard things like eyebrow combs as weird, but she no longer thought about it.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Chris Malino, the photographer’s assistant. With his shaggy, sandy hair and open, friendly face, he wasn’t nearly as good-looking as the male models she worked with, but she liked him a lot better. He was taking filmmaking classes at NYU, and the last time they’d worked together, he’d talked to her about Russian films. She wished he’d ask her out, but none of the guys she liked ever got up the nerve. Her only dates were with older men, celebrities in their twenties that Belinda and Gretchen wanted her to be seen with at some important event. She was eighteen years old, and she’d never had a real date.