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She hung up the telephone and walked over to the hotel window where she pushed back the drapery to gaze down on the wet Glasgow street. A jogger dodged a taxi in the rain. She remembered when she’d been a dedicated runner like that, going out regardless of weather. The bravest, the fastest, the strongest…Now she doubted she could run a city block without stopping to catch her breath.
“Hey, Fleur, you seen Kyle?” It was Frank, a can of Budweiser already opened at nine o’clock in the morning. Fleur grabbed her parka and brushed past him. She rushed out into the hallway, into the elevator, through the well-dressed crowd of businessmen in the lobby.
The rain was an icy January drizzle, and by the time she reached the corner, it had trickled off the stubby ends of her hair and under the neck of her parka. As she crossed the street, her feet squished in her cheap wet sneakers. They had no cushioning, no thick padding to support her arches and protect the balls of her feet.
She pulled her hands out of her pockets and gazed up at the steel-gray sky. One long block stretched before her. Just one block. Could she make it that far?
She began to run.
Chapter 18
Kissy’s apartment sat above an Italian restaurant in the Village. The interior decorating looked just like her: lollipop colors, a collection of stuffed teddy bears, and a poster of Tom Selleck taped to the bathroom door. As Kissy was showing Fleur how the makeshift shower worked, a bright pink lip print on the poster caught Fleur’s eye. “Kissy Sue Christie, is that your lipstick on Tom Selleck?”
“So what if it is?”
“You could at least have aimed for his mouth.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Fleur laughed. Kissy had taken the fact that Fleur would be her roommate for granted, and Fleur was more than grateful. Despite her success with Neon Lynx, her self-confidence was shaky at best, and she was plagued with doubts about her decision to return to New York.
Parker begrudgingly gave her a week to get settled before she had to report to work, and she forced herself to leave the safe haven of the apartment and get reacquainted with the city she’d once loved. It was early February, and New York was at its worst, but she found it beautiful. Best of all, no one recognized her.
She ran every morning that week, only a few blocks before she had to walk to catch her breath, but each day she felt stronger. Sometimes she passed a place she and Belinda had visited together, and she felt a sharp, bittersweet pang. But there was no room in her new life for misplaced sentimentality. She was carving out her own future, and she wouldn’t take any dirty laundry from the past with her. She tested herself by sitting through an Errol Flynn retrospective, but she didn’t feel anything for the dashing swashbuckler on the screen.
The day before Fleur had to start work, Kissy threw out all her clothes. “You’re not going to wear those vile rags, Fleur Savagar. You look like a bag lady.”
“I like looking like a bag lady! Give me my clothes back.”
“Too late.”
Fleur ended up trading in her old jeans for ones that fit her slimmer shape and bought a supply of funky tops to go with them—a Mexican peasant shirt, an old varsity letter sweater, and some turtlenecks. Kissy frowned and left a copy of Dress for Success conspicuously displayed on the coffee table.
“You’re wasting your time, Magnolia Blossom,” Fleur said. “I’m working for Parker Dayton, not Xerox. The entertainment world has a more casual dress code.”
“There’s casual and there’s dowdy.”
Fleur could peel away only so many layers at a time. “Go kiss Tom Selleck.”
It didn’t take her long to discover Parker wanted his pound of flesh for the generous salary she’d forced him to pay. Her days blended into nights and spilled over into the weekends. She visited Barry Noy’s purple-painted Tudor in the Hamptons to console him on his loss of Kissy. She wrote press releases, studied contracts, and fielded calls from promoters. The business, finance, and law classes she’d sat in on immediately began to pay off. She discovered she had a talent for negotiation.
She’d known she couldn’t remain anonymous forever, but by dressing inconspicuously and staying away from anyplace connected with the fashion world, she avoided attracting attention for almost six weeks. In March, however, her luck ran out. The Daily News announced that former Glitter Baby Fleur Savagar was back in New York working at the Parker Dayton Agency.
The phone calls started coming in, and a few reporters showed up at the office. But all of them wanted the Glitter Baby back, signing perfume contracts, going to marvelous parties, and talking about her rumored affair with Jake Koranda. “I have a new life now,” she said politely, “and I won’t be making any further comments.”
Try as they might, she refused to elaborate.
A photographer appeared to capture the Glitter Baby’s whirling cloud of streaky blond hair and couture fashion. They got baggy blue jeans and a Yankees cap. After two weeks, the story died of boredom. The fabulous Glitter Baby was yesterday’s news.
Over the next three months, Fleur learned who the record producers were and managed to keep track of the television executives as they played musical chairs at the networks. She was smart, dependable; she honored her commitments, and people began to ask for her. By midsummer she’d fallen in love with the entire business of making stars.
“It’s great to pull other people’s strings instead of having my own pulled,” she told Kissy one hot Sunday afternoon in August as they sat on a bench in Washington Square eating dripping ice cream cones. The park held its usual colorful complement of characters: tourists, leftover hippies, skinny kids with ghetto blasters hoisted on their shoulders.
After six months in New York, Fleur’s hair swung in a jaw-length blunt cut that shimmered in the summer sun. She was tan and too slim for the shorts that sat on her hip-bones. Kissy frowned over the top of her ice cream cone. “We are getting you some clothes that aren’t made out of denim.”
“Don’t start. We’re talking about my job, not fashion.”
“Wearing something decent won’t turn you back into the Glitter Baby.”
