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‘– for plus-sized models –’
They caught each other’s hands and screamed like children.
‘Do you think we could do it?’ asked Izzie earnestly.
‘There’s definitely a market for plus-sized models now,’ Carla said. ‘You remember years ago, nobody ever wanted bigger girls, but now, how often are we asked do we have any plus-sized girls? All the time. The days of plus girls being used just for catalogues and knitting patterns are over. And with lots of the big-money design houses making larger lines, they want more realistic models. No, there’s a market, all right. It’s niche, but it’s growing.’
‘Niche: yes, that sums it up,’ Izzie agreed. ‘I like niche. It’s special, elite, different.’
She was fed up working for Perfect-NY and having daily corporate battles with the three partners who’d long ago gone over to the dark, money-making side. The agency’s Dark Side Corporates didn’t care about people, be it employees or models. Any day now, time spent in the women’s room would involve a clocking-in timecard and a machine that doled out a requisite number of toilet-paper sheets.
Besides, she’d given ten years to the company and she felt at a crossroads in her life. Forty loomed. Life had run on and – it hit Izzie suddenly what was wrong with her, why she’d been feeling odd lately – she felt left behind.
She had all the things she’d wanted: independence, her own apartment, wonderful friends, marvellous holidays, a jam-packed social life. And yet there was a sense of something missing, a flaw like a crack in the wall that didn’t ruin the effect, but was still there, if you thought about it. She refused to believe the missing bit could be love. Love was nothing but trouble. Having a crack in her life because she didn’t have someone to love was just such a goddamn cliché, and Izzie refused to be a cliché.
Work was the answer – her own business. That would be the love affair of her life and remove any lingering, late-night doubts about her life’s path.
‘I’m sure we could raise the money,’ Carla said. ‘We haven’t got any dependants to look out for. There has to be some bonus in being single women, right?’
They both grinned. Izzie often said that New York must surely have the world’s highest proportion of single career women on the planet.
‘And it’s not as if we don’t know enough Wall Street venture capitalists to ask for help,’ Carla added.
This time, Izzie laughed out loud. Their industry attracted many rich men who had all the boy toys – private jets, holiday islands – and felt that a model on their arm would be the perfect accessory.
‘As if they’d meet us,’ she laughed. ‘You know there’s a Wall Street girlfriend age limit, and we’re ten years beyond it, sister. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘not ten, more like fifteen. Those masters of the universe men with their Maseratis and helicopter lessons prefer girlfriends under the age of twenty-five. They are blind when women of our vintage are around.’
‘Stop dissing us, Miz Silver,’ Carla retorted. ‘When we have our own agency, we can do what I’m always telling them here and have an older model department. And you could be our star signing,’ she added sharply. ‘The masters of the universe only keep away from you because they’re scared of you. You’re too good at that “tough Irish chick” thing. Men are like guard dogs, Izzie. They growl when they’re scared. Don’t scare them and they’ll roll over and beg.’
‘Stop already,’ Izzie said, lowering her head back to her wrap. ‘It doesn’t matter whether I scare them or not: they prefer nineteen-year-old Ukrainian models every time. If a man wants a kid and not a woman, then he’s not my sort of man.’
She didn’t bother to reply to the remark about her working as a model. It was sweet of Carla, but she was too old for a start, and she’d spent too long with models to want to enter their world. Izzie wanted to be in control of her own destiny and not leave it in the hands of a bunch of people in a room who wanted a specific person to model a specific outfit and could crush a woman’s spirit by saying, ‘We definitely don’t want you.’
‘Could we make our own agency work?’ she’d asked Carla on the fire escape. ‘I mean, what’s the percentage of new businesses that crash and burn in the first year? Fifty per cent?’
‘More like seventy-five.’
‘Oh, that’s a much more reassuring statistic.’
‘Well, might as well be real,’ Carla said.
‘At least we’d be doing something we really believed in,’ Izzie added.
For the first month after the conversation, they’d done nothing but talk about the idea. Then they’d begun to lay the groundwork: talking to banks, talking to a small-business consultancy, and drawing up a business plan. So far, nobody was prepared to loan them the money, but as Carla said, all it took was one person to believe in them.
Then, two months ago, Izzie Silver had found love.
Love in the form of Joe Hansen. Love had obliterated everything else from her mind. And while Carla still talked about their own agency, Izzie’s heart was no longer in it, purely because there was no room in her heart for anything but Joe.
Love had grabbed her unexpectedly and nobody had been more shocked than Izzie.
‘If it all works out, we won’t be the backbone of Perfect-NY any more,’ Carla had said happily just before Izzie had set off for New Mexico. ‘Imagine, we’ll be the bosses…and the bookers, assistants, accountants and probably the women who’ll be mopping out the women’s room at night too, but, hey, we won’t care.’
‘No,’ agreed Izzie, thinking that she didn’t give a damn about anything because she was so miserable at having to fly to New Mexico and be away from Joe. Once, she’d have loved this chance to leave the office for a shoot in a far-flung location. Now, thanks to Joe, she hated the very idea.
‘Catalogue shoots are tough,’ Carla added. ‘Pity you weren’t sent to babysit an editorial shoot instead. ‘Cos it’s going to be hard work, honey.’
She was right, Izzie thought, standing in the New Mexico heat, watching the Perfect-NY model work.
Catalogue shoots were hard work. Hours of shooting clothes with no time to labour over things the way they could on magazine shoots. On magazine shoots, Izzie knew it could easily take a day to shoot six outfits – here, they might manage that in one morning. The models had to be ultra professional. The girl with the cheekbones, still-eyed and silent, was just that.
During the morning, Izzie had watched Tonya in an astonishing seven different outfits, transforming her silent watchful face into an all-American-girl-next-door smile each time. It was only when the cameras were finished, and Tonya’s face lapsed back into adolescent normality, that Izzie thought again and again how incredibly young she was.
Now it was lunchtime. The photographer and his two senior assistants were drinking coffee and gulping down the food brought in from outside; the other two assistants were hauling light reflectors and shifting huge lights.
No lunch for them.
The make-up and hair people were sitting outside, letting the sun dust their pedicured toes and gossiping happily about people they knew.
‘She insists she hasn’t had any cosmetic procedures done. Like, hello!! That’s so a lie. If the skin round her eyes get pulled up any further at the corners, she’ll be able to see sideways. And talk about botox schmotox. She never smiled much before, but now she’s like a wax dummy.’
‘Dummy? She wishes. Dummies were warm once – isn’t that how they melt the wax?’
‘You’re a scream!’
The woman from Zest’s enormous marketing department was loudly phoning her office.
‘It’s fabulous: we’re on target. We’ve the rest of the day here because the light’s so good that Ivan says we can shoot until at least six. Then tomorrow we’re going up to the pueblo…’
Izzie’s cell phone buzzed discreetly and she fumbled in her giant tote until she found it. She loved big bags that could hold her organiser, make-up, spare flat shoes, gum, emergency Hershey bars, water bottle, and flacon of her favourite perfume, Acqua di Parma. The minus was triumphantly holding up a panty liner by mistake when you were actually looking for a bit of note paper. How did they always manage to escape their packaging and stick themselves to inappropriate things? They never stuck to knickers as comprehensively as they did to things in her handbag.
‘How’s it goin’?’ asked Carla on a line so clear that she might be in the next room instead of thousands of miles away in their Manhattan office.
‘It’s all going fine,’ Izzie reassured her. ‘Nobody’s screamed at anybody yet, nobody’s threatened to walk off in a temper, and the shots are good.’
‘You practising magic to keep it all running smooth, girl?’ asked Carla.
‘Got my cauldron in my bag,’ replied Izzie, ‘and I’m ready with the eye of newt and the blood of a virgin.’
Carla laughed at the other end of the phone. ‘Not much virgin blood around if Ivan Meisner is the photographer.’
Ivan’s reputation preceded him. As a photographer he might be a genius who had W and Vogue squabbling over him, but the genius fairy hadn’t extended her wand as far as his personality.
Nobody watching him idly caressing his extra-long lens as he watched young models could be in any doubt that he considered himself a bit of a maestro in the sack as well as behind the Hasselblad.
‘He’s definitely got his eye on Tonya,’ Izzie said, ‘but don’t worry. I’m going to put a stop to his gallop.’
‘Can somebody tape that?’ Carla asked. ‘I’d like to see him when you’ve finished with him. Hard Copy would love film of Ivan having his lights punched out.’
Izzie laughed. Carla was one of the few people who knew that, at fourteen, Izzie Silver had had a reputation for being a tomboy with a punishing right hook. It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d want widely known – violence was only in fashion when it came to faking hard-edged shoots in graffiti-painted alleyways – but it still gave her an edge.
‘Don’t mess with the big Irish chick,’ was how some people put it. Izzie was more than able to stand up to anyone. Ruefully, she could see how that might put some men off. Before Joe, it had been six months since her last date. Not that she cared any more: you had to move on, right?
‘Carla, you’re just dying to see me hit someone, aren’t you?’ laughed Izzie now.
‘I know you can because of all those kickboxing classes,’ Carla retorted. ‘Sure, you’re the queen of glaring people into silence with the evil eye and telling them you don’t take any crap, but I’d still prefer to see you flatten someone one day. For fun. Pleeese…? I hate the way Ivan hits on young models.’
‘He won’t this time,’ Izzie said firmly. ‘He might try, but he won’t get anywhere. Since the company have actually spent hard cash to fly me here to make sure it all runs smoothly, I’m going to do my best. Any news at your end?’
‘No, it’s pretty quiet. Rosanna’s off sick so we’re a woman down. Lola spotted a gorgeous Mexican girl on the subway last night. She got a photo of her and gave the girl her card, but she thinks the kid’s scared she’s from immigration or something, so she may not call. Stunning, Lola says. Tall, with the most incredible skin and fabulous legs.’
‘Oh, I hope she phones,’ Izzie said. As bookers, they were always on the lookout for the next big thing in modelling. Despite the proliferation of television shows where gorgeous girls turned up hoping to be models, there were still scores of undiscovered beauties, and there was nothing worse than finding one and having her not believe the ‘I work for a model agency’ schtick.
‘Me too. Lola keeps glaring at her phone. It’s going to catch fire soon.’
‘No more news?’
‘Nah. Quiet. What’s the Zest marketing guy like? I heard he’s a looker.’
Izzie grinned. Carla had said she was never dating ever again just the previous week.
‘He couldn’t come. They sent a woman instead.’
‘You can catch up on your beauty sleep, then,’ laughed Carla, before hanging up.
When shooting was over for the day, the entire crew repaired to their hotel’s restaurant-cum-bar for some rest and relaxation. There was a sense of a good day’s work having been done, but it wasn’t quite party time. That would be tomorrow night when the catalogue shots were all finished, when nobody had to be up at the crack of dawn and hangovers didn’t matter.
Besides, the Zest marketing woman was there watching everything alongside Izzie, and there was too much money in catalogue shoots to screw it all up mid-shoot.
Izzie knew what happened on shoots when party night had happened too early. Someone phoned her up at the office and screamed that her models had gone on the razz, and that the following day had been a blur with the make-up people working extra hard to hide the ravages of sleep deprivation, while general hungover irritation meant it was a miracle any shots were taken at all.
‘Menus,’ said the Zest woman cheerily, handing them out like a prefect at school trying to quash any naughtiness in advance. ‘There’s a salad bar too, if anyone wants anything lighter.’
A line of skinny people who did their best to never eat heavy if possible, stared grimly back at her. No mojitos tonight, then.
Food was finally ordered, along with a modest amount of wine and, thanks to the hair guy, who hated bossy women, cocktails.
‘Just one each,’ chirped the Zest woman, who had the company credit card to pay for all this, after all.
As Izzie had predicted, Ivan wasn’t long slithering up the cushioned wooden seat to where Tonya sat nursing something alcoholic from the cocktail menu.
Izzie sat down on a stool opposite Ivan and Tonya, simultaneously patting Tonya comfortingly on the knee, and giving Ivan the sort of hard stare she’d perfected after years of dealing with men just like him.
‘How’s Sandrine?’ she said chattily. Sandrine was his wife and a model who’d miraculously staved off her sell-by date by being labelled a super. Normal models were considered elderly once they hit twenty-five; supers could get another ten years out of the industry if they were clever.
Ivan didn’t appear to get the hint. He took another long pull of his margarita, gazing at Tonya over the top of his salt-encrusted glass.
‘She’s in Paris doing editorial for Marie Claire,’ he said finally.
Tonya, bless her, looked impressed. Izzie wished she could explain to the younger girl that she wouldn’t absorb Sandrine’s brilliance by osmosis. Sleeping with a supermodel’s photographer husband didn’t make you a supermodel. It just made you look stupid, feel used and get a bad reputation.
Izzie had another try at the subtle approach. She was working for Tonya’s agency, after all. No point in irritating the photographer so much that he took awful shots of the girl, thus screwing up both her career and her part of the catalogue shoot. Izzie knew that wasn’t what her boss had in mind when she said ‘make sure nothing goes wrong’.
‘Ivan’s married to Sandrine,’ Izzie informed Tonya gently, as if Tonya didn’t already know this. ‘She’s so beautiful and so successful, but she travels a lot. It must be so hard to be apart when you’re married,’ Izzie added thoughtfully. ‘You must miss Sandrine so much. I bet you’re dying for the moment you can phone her. How far ahead is Paris? Ten hours, eleven?’
Izzie was not a natural liar. Catholic school had done its work a long time ago, but for her job, she’d perfected the art of subtle manipulation. A tweak here, an insinuation there, was all it took.
She could see the rush to Ivan’s brain: would the smooth fire of the local tequila make it there first or would her suggestion about phoning his wife overtake it?
A moment passed and Ivan reached into his jacket for his cell phone.
Izzie allowed herself a small, internal smile.
Too much cocaine and general stupidity had eroded Ivan’s logistic skills but still he had a certain bovine intelligence. He was aware that Izzie knew the bookers in his wife’s agency and that, if he misbehaved, the news would reach Sandrine. He began to dial.
His wife was the sort of model Tonya might be one day, given plenty of kindness and therapy and people to stop predatory males hitting on her.
Quite why Sandrine had married Ivan in the first place was beyond Izzie. Models knew that photographers were drawn to models like flies to jam. And that DCOL (doesn’t count on location) was such a given in their industry that it should have been part of the model-wedding-vow thing. I promise to love, honour, obey and look the other way if he/ she has a fling doing a shoot in Morocco. However, it didn’t work quite that way with the supers; when you could have any man on the planet, you didn’t stand for being cheated on.
When Tonya got up to go to the women’s room, Izzie quickly slipped into the young model’s seat, to make sure that Ivan couldn’t get close to her when she came back.
Eventually, the rest of the group joined them, the food arrived and the danger of Ivan getting Tonya on her own for a quiet tête-à-tête passed.
The group shared a low-key meal and Ivan wandered off with his assistant early on. Probably to score coke, Izzie guessed – and not the liquid type that refreshed, either. After all, he didn’t need to look good in the morning.
Once he was gone, she left Tonya in the gentle hands of the other models and the make-up and hair people, and went to bed.
Her room was large, decorated in the soft ochre that seemed to be part and parcel of New Mexico, and looked out over a pretty pool that was surrounded by ceramic candle-holders, all lit, twinkling like so many stars. Opening the double doors on to the small terrace, she stepped outside for a moment and breathed in the balmy night air.
There were two wooden loungers on her terrace, along with a little blue and yellow tile-topped table with a lit citronella candle to ward off the giant flying things that seemed to hum in the air. A heady scent of vanilla rose from below, as well as a more distant smell of garlic cooking. It was all very romantic and begging for a special someone to share it with. Even the bath in the huge ensuite was big enough for two. Sad for one, though.
Izzie sighed and went back into the room. She stripped off her simple belted shirtdress and sank on to the bed, trying not to worry how many other people had sunk on to the heavy Dupion coverlet – hotels were freaky. So many other people using exactly the same space, over and over again, leaving their auras and their sweat there – and laid down. Her head felt heavy from the heat and she was tired. Tired and emotional.
She looked at her phone again. No messages. What was it Oscar Wilde said: that it was better to be talked about than not to be talked about?
Cell phones were the same. No matter how often people moaned about them, it was nicer to be phoned than not to be phoned.
She ran one unvarnished fingernail over the rounded plastic of the screen, willing some message to appear there. But there was nothing: the blankness mocked her.
He hasn’t called. What’s he doing?
What was the point of being wise, clever, savvy – all the things she’d worked hard at being – when she was risking it all for a married man?
Izzie closed her eyes and let the now-familiar anxiety flood over her. She loved Joe. Loved him. But it was all so complicated. She longed for the time when it would be simpler.
Of course, it was complicated simply because of the sort of person Joe was. He might be a tough member of the Wall Street elite, a hedge-fund man who’d gone out on his own with a friend to set up a closed fund and was slowly, relentlessly pushing towards the billionaire Big Boys’ Club. But he was a family man underneath it all, and that was where the complications appeared.
Raised in the Bronx, married at twenty-one, a dad at twenty-two, his professional life may have been fabulous but his home life had gone sour long ago. What he did have, however, were three sons whom he adored, and while he was living a separate life from his wife, they were trying to shield their two younger sons from the break-up.
