Susan Phillips - Glitter Baby

With a choked sob, she ran from the attic room and down the stairs to her own room, where she locked the door and pressed her back against it.

Before long, she heard his footsteps in the hallway. He paused outside her door. She squeezed her eyes shut, barely able to breathe. He moved away. She slid down along the door and sat on the floor, where she curled her body over her bent knees. She stayed like that, listening to the pounding of her own heart until the deepest hours of the night.

The key turned soundlessly in the lock as she let herself into the museum. She set down her shoulder bag and flicked on the panel of lights. Her palms were sweating, and she rubbed them on her jeans while she walked toward the small tool room at the back.

Everything was scrupulously neat, just as he was. She remembered the feel of his hands when they’d touched her breasts, and she crossed her arms over her chest. She forced herself to concentrate on the rows of tools. Finally she found what she wanted. She lifted it off the narrow shelf and tested its weight in her hands. Belinda was wrong. The rules were the same for everyone. If people didn’t follow the rules, they lost their humanity.

She closed the door and walked across the museum to the Royale. The ceiling lights shone like tiny stars in the gleaming black finish. The car had been cherished. Alexi had wrapped it in canvas and straw so no harm would come to it.

She lifted the crowbar high above her head and brought it down on the shiny black hood. The jaws of the beast snapped shut.

Fleur cashed a check at American Express using her Gold Card as ID. When she arrived at the Gare de Lyon, she pushed through the crowd to the schedule board and studied the blur of numbers and cities. The next train was leaving for Nîmes, which was four hundred miles from Paris. Four hundred miles from Alexi Savagar’s retribution.

She’d destroyed the Royale, systematically smashing the hood and the windshield, grille and lights, beating in the fenders and the sides. Then she’d attacked the heart of the car, Ettore Bugatti’s peerless engine. The thick stone walls of the museum had held in the noise, and no one tried to stop her as she put an end to Alexi’s dream.

The old couple already occupying the compartment regarded her suspiciously. She should have cleaned herself up first so she wasn’t so conspicuous. She turned to stare out the window. There was blood on her face, and the cut on her cheek from the flying glass stung. It was only a small cut, but she should clean it so it didn’t get infected and leave a scar.

She envisioned her face with a little scar on her cheek. And then she imagined the scar beginning at her hairline, cutting a diagonal across her forehead, and thickening to bisect one eyebrow. It would pucker her eyelid and cut down over her cheek to her jaw. That would just about do it, she thought. A scar like that would keep her safe for the rest of her life.

Just before the train pulled out of the station, two young women came into the compartment carrying a supply of American magazines. Fleur watched their reflections in the window as they settled into their seats and began studying the other occupants in typical tourist fashion. It seemed as if weeks had passed since she’d slept, and she was so tired she felt light-headed. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the rhythm of the train. As she drifted into an uneasy sleep, she heard the echo of smashing metal and the crunch of broken glass.

The American girls were talking about her when she woke up. “It has to be her,” one of them whispered. “Ignore her hair. Look at those eyebrows.”

Where was the scar? Where was that pretty white scar cutting her eyebrow in half?

“Don’t be silly.” the other girl whispered. “What would Fleur Savagar be doing traveling by herself? Besides, I read that she’s in California making a movie.”

Panic beat inside her like the pounding of a crowbar. She’d been recognized a hundred times before and this was no different, but being connected with the Glitter Baby made her feel sick. Slowly she opened her eyes.

The girls were looking at a magazine. Fleur could just make out the page in the window’s reflection, a sportswear ad she’d done for Armani. Her hair flew in every direction from beneath the brim of a big, floppy hat.

The girl directly across from her finally picked up the magazine and leaned forward. “Excuse me,” she said. “Has anybody ever said that you look exactly like Fleur Savagar, the model?”

She stared back at them.

“She doesn’t speak English,” the girl finally said.

Her companion flipped the magazine closed. “I told you it wasn’t her.”

They reached Nîmes, and Fleur found a room in an inexpensive hotel near the railroad station. As she lay in bed that night, the numbness inside her finally broke apart. She began to cry, racking sobs of loneliness and betrayal and awful, boundless despair. She had nothing left. Belinda’s love had been a lie, and Alexi had soiled her forever. Then there was Jake…The three of them together had raped her soul.

People survive by their ability to make judgments, yet every judgment she’d made was wrong. You are nothing, Alexi had said. As the night settled around her, she understood the meaning of hell. Hell was being lost in the world, even from yourself.

“I am sorry, mademoiselle, but this account has been closed.” Fleur’s Gold Card disappeared, tucked like a magician’s trick into the palm of the clerk’s hand.

Panic gripped her. She needed money. With money, she could hide someplace where she’d be safe from Alexi and where no one would recognize her, someplace where Fleur Savagar could cease to exist. But that wasn’t possible now. As she hurried through the streets of Nîmes, she tried to shake off the feeling that Alexi was watching her. She saw him in the doorways, in the reflections of store windows, in the faces passing her in the street. She fled back to the train station. Run. She had to run.

When Alexi saw the wreckage of the Royale, he felt his own mortality for the first time. It took the form of a slight paralysis in his right side that lasted nearly two days. He closed himself in his room and saw no one.

All day, he lay in bed, holding a handkerchief in his left hand. Sometimes he stared at his reflection in the mirror.

The right side of his face sagged.

It was almost imperceptible, except for the mouth. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t control the trickle of saliva that seeped from the corner. Each time he lifted his handkerchief to wipe it away, he knew that the mouth was what he would never forgive.

The paralysis gradually faded, and when he could control his mouth, he called in the doctors. They said it was a small stroke. A warning. They ordered him to cut back on his schedule, stop smoking, watch his diet. They mentioned hypertension. Alexi listened patiently and then dismissed them.

He put his collection of automobiles up for sale at the beginning of December. The auction attracted buyers from all over the world. He was advised to stay away, but he wanted to watch. As each car went on the block, he studied the faces of the buyers, printed their expressions in his mind so he would always remember.

After the auction was over, he had the museum dismantled, stone by stone.

Fleur sat at a battered table in the back of a student café in Grenoble and stuffed every cloying bite of her second pastry into her mouth until nothing was left. For nearly a year and a half, food had provided her only sense of security. As her jeans had grown tighter and she’d been able to pinch that first definitive fold of fat at the base of her ribs, the thick fog of numbness had lifted long enough for her to feel a brief sense of accomplishment. The Glitter Baby had disappeared.

She imagined Belinda’s expression if she could see her precious daughter now. Twenty-one years old, overweight, with cropped hair, and cheap, ugly clothes. And Alexi…She could hear his contempt tucked away inside some honeyed endearment like a piece of candy with a tainted center.

She counted out her money carefully and left the café, pulling the collar of her man’s parka tighter around her neck. It was February, and the dark, icy sidewalk still held remnants of that morning’s snow. She tugged her wool hat further down over her head, more to protect herself from the cold than from fear that anyone would recognize her. That hadn’t happened in nearly a year.

A line had already begun to form at the cinema, and as she took her place at the end, a group of American exchange students fell in behind her. The flat sounds of their accents grated on her ears. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken English. She didn’t care if she ever spoke it again.

Despite the cold, the palms of her hands were sweating, and she shoved them more deeply into the pockets of her parka. At first she’d told herself she wouldn’t even read the reviews of Sunday Morning Eclipse, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself. The critics had been kinder to her than she’d expected. One called her performance “a surprisingly promising debut.” Another commented on the “sizzling chemistry between Koranda and Savagar.” Only she knew how one-sided that chemistry had been.

Now she simply existed, taking whatever job she could find and sneaking into university lecture halls when she wasn’t working. Two months ago, she’d gone to bed with a sweet-natured German student who’d sat next to her in an economics lecture at the Université d’Avignon. She hadn’t wanted Jake to be the only man she’d made love with. Not long afterward, she’d imagined Alexi’s presence breathing down her neck, and she’d left Avignon for Grenoble.

A French girl standing in line ahead of her began to tease her date. “Aren’t you afraid I won’t be interested in you tonight after I’ve spent two hours watching Jake Koranda?”

He glanced over at the movie poster. “You’re the one who should be worried. I’ll be watching Fleur Savagar. Jean-Paul saw the film last week, and he’s still talking about her body.”

Fleur huddled more deeply into the collar of her parka. She had to see for herself.

She found a seat in the last row of the theater. The opening credits rolled, and the camera panned a long stretch of flat Iowa farmland. Dusty boots walked down a gravel road. Suddenly Jake’s face flooded the screen. She’d once loved him, but the white-hot fire of betrayal had burned up that love, leaving only cold ash behind.

The first few scenes flicked by, and then Jake stood in front of the Iowa farmhouse. A young girl jumped up from a porch swing. The pastries Fleur had stuffed down clumped in her stomach as she watched herself run into his arms. She remembered the solidness of his chest, the touch of his lips. She remembered his laughter, his jokes, the way he’d held her so tight she’d thought he’d never let her go.

Her chest constricted. She couldn’t stay in Grenoble any longer. She had to leave. Tomorrow. Tonight. Now.

The last thing she heard as she rushed from the theater was Jake’s voice. “When did you get so pretty, Lizzie?”

Run. She had to run until she disappeared, even from herself.

Alexi sat in the leather chair behind the desk in his study and lit a cigarette, the last of the five he permitted himself to smoke each day. The reports were delivered to him at exactly three o’clock every Friday afternoon, but he always waited until nighttime when he was alone to study them. The photographs before him looked much like the others that had been sent to him over the past few years. Ugly barbershop hair, threadbare jeans, scuffed leather boots. All that fat. For someone who should be at the apex of her beauty, she looked obscene.

He’d been so certain she would go back to New York and resume her career, but she’d surprised him by staying in France. Lyon, Aix-en-Provence, Avignon, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Montpelier-all towns with universities. She foolishly believed she could hide from him in anonymous throngs of students. As if such a thing were possible.

After six months she’d begun to take classes at some of the universities. At first he’d been mystified by her choice of courses: lectures in calculus, contract law, anatomy, sociology. Eventually he’d discerned the pattern and realized she chose only classes held in large lecture halls where there was little chance of anyone discovering she wasn’t a registered student. Officially enrolling was out of the question, since she had no money. He’d seen to that.

His eyes slid down the list of ridiculously menial jobs she’d held to support herself for the past two years: washing dishes, cleaning stables, waiting tables. Sometimes she worked for photographers, not as a model-such an idea was ludicrous now-but setting up lights and handling equipment. She’d unwittingly discovered the only possible defense she could use against him. What could he take from a person who had nothing?