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Dallie grunted something Francesca didn't quite catch as he pulled into the parking lot, which didn't look all that different from the one they'd left less than four hours earlier, and swung around toward the office. Francesca's stomach growled, and she realized she hadn't had anything to eat since the evening before when she'd grabbed a hamburger after pawning her suitcase. Nothing to eat... and no money to buy anything with. And then she wondered who Holly Grace might be, but she was too demoralized to feel more than a passing curiosity.
“Francie, I'd already pushed my credit card limit pretty close to the edge before I met you, and that little romp of yours just about finished the job. You're going to have to share a room with Skeet.”
“No!”
“No!”
Dallie sighed and flicked off the ignition. “All right, Skeet. You and I'll share a room until we get rid of Francie.”
“Not hardly.” Skeet threw open the door of the Riviera. “I haven't shared a room with you since you turned pro, and I'm not gonna start now. You stay up half the night and then make enough noise in the morning to wake the dead.” He climbed out of the car and headed toward the office, calling back over his shoulder, “Since you're the one who's so all-fired anxious to bring Miss Fran-chess-ka along, you can damn well sleep with her yourself.”
Dallie swore the entire time he was unloading his suitcase and carrying it inside. Francesca sat on the edge of one of the room's two double beds, her back straight, her feet side by side, knees pressed together, like a little girl on her best behavior at a grown-up party. From the next room she heard the sound of a television announcer reporting on an anti-nuclear group protesting at a missile site; then someone flipped the channel to a ball game and “The Star-Spangled Banner” rang out. Bitterness welled up inside her as the music brought back the memory of the round button she had spotted on the taxi driver's shirt: AMERICA, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY. What kind of opportunity? The opportunity to pay for food and shelter with her body in some sordid motel room? Nothing came entirely free, did it? And her body was all she had left. By coming into this room with Dallie, hadn't she implicitly promised to give him something in return?
“Will you stop looking like that!” Dallie threw his suitcase on the bed. “Believe me, Miss Fancy Pants, I don't have any designs on your body. You stay on your side of the room, as far out of my sight as possible, and we'll do just fine. But first I want my fifty bucks back.”
She had to salvage some morsel of her self-respect when she handed him back his money, so she tossed her head, flicking her hair back over her shoulders as if she hadn't a care in the world. “I gather you're some sort of golfer,” she remarked offhandedly, trying to show him that his surliness didn't affect her. “Would that be a vocation or an avocation?”
“More like an addiction, I guess.” He grabbed a pair of slacks from his suitcase and then reached for the zipper on his jeans.
She spun around, quickly turning her back to him. “I—I think I'll stretch my legs a bit, take a turn around the parking lot.”
“You do that.”
She circled the parking lot twice, reading bumper stickers, studying newspaper headlines through the glass doors of the dispensers, gazing sightlessly at the front-page photograph of a curly-haired man screaming at someone. Dallie didn't seem to expect her to go to bed with him. What a relief that was. She stared at the neon vacancy sign, and the longer she stared, the more she wondered why he didn't desire her. What was wrong? The question nagged like an itch. She might have lost her clothes, her money, all of her possessions, but she still had her beauty, didn't she? She still had her allure. Or had she somehow lost that, too, right along with her’ luggage and her makeup?
Ridiculous. She was exhausted, that was all, and she couldn't think straight. As soon as Dallie left for the golf course, she would go to bed and sleep until she felt like herself again. A few remnant sparks of optimism flickered inside her. She was merely tired. A decent night's sleep and everything would be fine.
Chapter
11
Naomi Jaffe Tanaka slammed the palm of her hand down on the heavy glass top of her desk. “No!” she exclaimed into the telephone, her intense brown eyes snapping with displeasure. “She isn't even close to what we have in mind for the Sassy Girl. If you can't do better than her, I'll find a model agency that can.”
The voice on the other end of the line grew sarcastic. “Do you want some phone numbers, Naomi? I'm sure the people at Wilhelmina will do a wonderful job for you.”
The people at Wilhelmina refused to send Naomi anyone else, but she had no intention of sharing that particular piece of news with the woman on the phone. She pushed blunt, impatient fingers through her dark hair, which had been cut as short and sleek as a boy's by a famous New York hairdresser intent on redefining the word “chic.” “Just keep looking.” She shoved the most recent issue of Advertising Age away from the edge of her desk. “And next time try to find someone with some personality in her face.”
As she put down the receiver, fire sirens screamed up Third Avenue, eight floors below her corner office at Blakemore, Stern, and Rodenbaugh, but Naomi paid no attention. She had lived with the noises of New York City all her life and hadn't consciously heard a siren since last winter when the two gay members of the New York City Ballet who lived in the apartment above her had lit their fondue pot too near a pair of Scalamandré chintz curtains. Naomi's husband at the time, a brilliant Japanese biochemist named Tony Tanaka, had illogically blamed her for the incident and refused to talk to her for the rest of the weekend. She divorced him soon after—not just because of his reaction to the fire, but because living with a man who wouldn't share even the most elementary of his feelings had grown too painful for a wealthy Jewish girl from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who in the never-to-be-forgotten spring of 1968 had helped take over the dean's office at Columbia and hold it for the People.
Naomi tugged on the black and silver caviar beads she was wearing with a gray flannel suit and silk blouse, clothes she would have scorned in those fiery, close-fisted days of Huey and Rennie and Abbie when her passions had focused on anarchy instead of market share. For the last few weeks, as the news reports about her brother Gerry's latest anti-nuclear escapade had surfaced, stray memories of that time kept flickering into her mind like old photographs, and she found herself experiencing a vague nostalgia for the girl she had been, the little sister who had tried so hard to earn her big brother's respect that she had endured sit-ins, love-ins, lie-ins, and one thirty-day jail sentence.
While her twenty-four-year-old big brother had been shouting revolution from the steps of Berkeley's Sproal Hall, Naomi had begun her freshman year at Columbia three thousand miles away. She had been her parents’ pride and joy—pretty, popular, a good student—their consolation prize for having produced “the other one,” the son whose antics had disgraced them and whose name was never to be mentioned. At first Naomi had buried herself in her studies, staying far away from Columbia's radical students. But then Gerry had arrived on campus and he had hypnotized her, right along with the rest of the student body.
She had always adored her brother, but never more so than on that winter day when she had watched him standing like a young blue-jeaned warrior at the top of the library steps trying to change the world with his impassioned tongue. She had studied those strong Semitic features surrounded by a great halo of curly black hair and couldn't believe the two of them had come from the same womb. Gerry had full lips and a bold nose unredeemed by the plastic surgeon who had reshaped hers. Everything about him was larger than life, while she felt merely ordinary. Lifting his strong arms over his head, he had pumped his fists in the air and tossed his head back, his teeth flashing like white
stars against his olive skin. She had never seen anything more wondrous in her life than her big brother exhorting the masses to rebellion that day at Columbia.
Before the year was over, she had become part of Columbia's militant student group, an act that had finally won her brother's approval but had resulted in a painful estrangement from her parents. Disillusionment had settled in slowly over the next few years as she fell victim to the Movement's rampant male chauvinism, its disorganization, and its paranoia. By her junior year she had severed her contacts with its leaders, and Gerry had never forgiven her. They had seen each other only once in the past two years, and they had argued the entire time. Now she spent her days praying he wouldn't do something so irredeemably awful that everyone at the agency would find out he was her brother. Somehow she couldn't imagine a firm as conservative as BS&R appointing the sister of a nationally renowned radical as its first female vice-president.
She pulled her thoughts away from her past life and looked down at her present one—the layout spread on her desktop. As always, she felt the rush of satisfaction that told her she had done a good job. Her experienced eye approved the Sassy bottle design, a frosted glass teardrop topped by a wave-shaped navy blue stopper. The perfume flagon would be elegantly packaged in a shiny navy box imprinted with the hot pink letters of the slogan she had created—“SASSY! For Free Spirits Only.” The exclamation point after the product name had been her idea, and one that particularly pleased her. Still, despite the success of both the packaging and the slogan, the spirit of the campaign was missing because Naomi hadn't been able to perform one simple task: she hadn't been able to find the Sassy Girl.
Her intercom buzzed, and her secretary reminded her that she had a meeting with Harry R. Rodenbaugh, senior vice-president and board member of BS&R. Mr. Rodenbaugh had specifically requested that she bring along the new Sassy layout. Naomi groaned to herself. As one of BS&R's two creative directors, she'd been handling perfume and cosmetic accounts for years, and she'd never had so much trouble. Why did the Sassy account have to be the account that Harry Rodenbaugh had made his pet project? Harry, who desperately wanted one last Clio to his credit before he retired, insisted on a fresh face to represent the new product, a model who was spectacular but not recognizable to fashion magazine readers.
“I want personality, Naomi, not just another cookie cutter model's face,” he had told her when he called her on his Persian carpet the week before. “I want a long-stemmed American Beauty rose with a few thorns on her. This campaign is all about the free-spirited American woman, and if you can't deliver anything closer to target than these overused children's faces you've been shoving under my nose for the past three weeks, then I don't see how you could possibly handle a position as a BS&R vice-president.”
The sly old bastard.
Naomi gathered up her papers the same way she did everything, with quick, concentrated movements. Tomorrow she would start contacting all the theatrical agencies and look for an actress instead of a model. Better male chauvinists than Harry R. Rodenbaugh had tried to keep her down, and not one of them had succeeded.
