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“Welcome to New York, my darlings.”
The Glitter Baby
Chapter 8
“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.
