by Victoria Fox
One day, in a busy café on Mercer, she noticed a girl flicking through apartment rentals on her phone. Calida slipped in opposite her.
‘OK if I sit?’ she asked, without waiting for a reply. The girl nodded.
Calida stole a glance at her companion. Early twenties, like her, with blue eyes, pale candyfloss hair, and a large, straight nose that she touched every so often, in the way of someone who wears glasses and keeps checking they haven’t slid down. She was locked on her phone and, when after several fraught minutes she released a huge, exasperated sigh that couldn’t go uncommented on, Calida put down her book.
‘Everything OK?’ she asked. The girl glanced up, put down her phone and sighed again. It was a wistful, romantic sigh, one that belonged in a black-and-white love story, or a rooftop in Vienna, or a Casablanca beach, not a bursting café whose barista was getting yelled at for putting too much foam in a cinnamon latte.
‘I’m officially homeless,’ the girl admitted. Calida placed the accent—a warm, southern twang. ‘And this coffee tastes like shit.’ She took a sip and cursed it when it was too hot. ‘I’m, like, this close to getting my Brooklyn share,’ she pinched a slice of air between her thumb and forefinger, ‘and my best friend, who by the way isn’t my best friend since, like, nine o’clock this morning when she called to say she was moving to freaking Philadelphia—I mean, hello, who the fuck goes to Philadelphia?—was meant to come with me. That was the condition. It’s a shared room, see.’
Calida had a solid grasp of English from her work in Buenos Aires, inevitable since most of the tourists she had dealt with spoke not a word of Spanish. She nodded at the girl’s plight. ‘I’m Calida,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Lucy. Lucy Ackerman of Austin, Texas. You’re pretty, Calida. I like your eyes.’ It was said perfunctorily, in precisely the same tone that Lucy had announced that the coffee was shit. ‘You know what it’s like to be so near to something you really, really want, then it gets ripped away, and there’s nothing you can do about it?’
‘Yes. I know that feeling.’
‘What do you do about it?’
‘You make it happen. If you want something, you go after it.’
Lucy rested her chin on her hand. ‘So here’s the story,’ she said. ‘One of the guys in this house, he’s the hottest guy ever. He’s an artist and his name’s Brandon and I’ve liked him for ages, ever since I went to one of his shows and for some crazy reason he got talking to me. I don’t know, maybe he saw something in me that no one else does. And just because I don’t dress like his friends, like I’m not a hipster or whatever, it doesn’t mean I’m not smart …’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry. We only just met and listen to me. I mean, stop listening to me! I’ve got diarrhoea.’ At Calida’s expression, she clarified, laughing, ‘Verbal diarrhoea—meaning I talk too much.’
Calida seized her opportunity. ‘I need a place to stay, too. I travelled from Buenos Aires. I’m in New York to make it. Money, fame—I want it all.’
‘Everyone says that.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Have you been in love?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think I’m in love with Brandon. Is that even possible? I barely know him.’
‘Of course,’ said Calida. ‘You don’t have to know everything about a person to be sure they’re right. You just … know. Take you and me. I can tell inside five minutes that we’ll be friends.’ As she’d planned, Lucy glanced up, her expression open. ‘Let’s take the room together,’ said Calida. ‘Solve both our problems.’
Lucy’s blue eyes brightened. ‘Seriously?’
‘Sure, why not?’
Lucy blinked, then beamed. ‘I can’t think of a reason! OK, I guess—yes! God, I can’t believe it, this is going to be so much fun!’
Calida smiled back. ‘You’re right about that. Lucy, you’re going to be glad you met me today. You, me, all of this, it’s meant to be.’
The Williamsburg share was everything Lucy had promised: a six-storey brownstone sheltering a collection of self-conscious creatives, who spent their days drifting in and out of communal areas where they indulged in lengthy conversations about socialism and the evils of religion, and then locked themselves away for hours on end in their bedrooms with the aim of producing ‘work’ but never elaborating on what that work was. The most Calida saw were a couple of Danish Johann’s poems stuck on the refrigerator, one of which began with the line: ‘I am an apple, you are a bowl; I sit in state in the cup of your hands.’ Calida thought she was missing something.
‘They love you,’ Lucy encouraged during their first week, as they sat over bowls of spaghetti at the little wooden table in the kitchen. Calida didn’t mention that neither girl’s presence seemed to have registered with the housemates; on the whole they were ignored, but she was happy with that. Moreover, she wished to spare Lucy the realisation, which surely must have occurred, that Brandon Carter had barely sent two words in her direction since they’d arrived. Calida could see Brandon’s appeal: he had the loveliest, darkest skin she had ever seen. His art—sketchy charcoal impressions that he exhibited at nearby galleries, and that Calida, with her devotion to the illuminating, absolute photographic image, found good if a touch frustrating—gave him an extra dimension. He was kind to Lucy, but clearly had his radar trained on another of the housemates, an elfin, French beauty named Evie.
Lucy was oblivious. ‘Did you hear Brandon ask me out?’ She sucked up a string of pasta. Calida liked that she ate with gusto, and wasn’t prissy like the hipsters with their lentil salads and rye crackers that resembled rectangles of carpet.
‘To the warehouse party?’ Yesterday, they had walked in on Brandon making plans for a downtown birthday celebration. He’d been obliged to extend the invite.
‘Sure! You are coming, aren’t you? I can’t go on my own.’
‘I thought you wanted to be alone with him.’
‘I do—but not at first. I can’t turn up by myself.’
After a week of pestering, Calida finally agreed. She liked Lucy and wanted to help her, but equally she was aware that every night spent partying with rich kids who pretended poverty and acted like they were the Next Big Creatives but in fact were heading nowhere was going to wind her up just the same. She had to find a path in. Manhattan, the money and the mission: some channel that would lead her to her twin.
The warehouse was on Fulton Street and was packed with Brandons and Johanns. Chilled beats throbbed through the space and an array of beers, drugs, and smoking paraphernalia littered each surface, around which saggy armchairs and burst-leather benches were gathered. Everyone was thin and beautiful, and slightly tortured.
‘There he is!’ Lucy grabbed her arm.
Brandon’s impressive Afro could be seen hovering by the decks. He was talking with a guy in a neon baseball cap who was languidly putting on records that nobody recognised but were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t recognise.
Calida urged her to hang back, wait for Brandon to come to them, for it struck her as uncool for Lucy to be falling at his feet. But Lucy wouldn’t be discouraged.
‘Brandon,’ they sidled up next to him and Lucy’s voice turned into a purr, ‘what’s up? Great party.’
‘Oh.’ Brandon looked surprised to see her: perhaps he had forgotten the invitation. ‘Hey. Yeah. Cool.’ He perked up a bit when he saw Calida.
‘Like your boots,’ he commented.
Calida had thrown on a black dress and her old gaucha boots, which she wore on bare legs. ‘Thanks.’
His handsome face broke into a smile. ‘Want a drink?’
‘Just a beer.’
‘Sure.’ He held her gaze.
Calida turned to Lucy. ‘You want the same?’ Lucy nodded, stricken, and when Brandon departed she wailed: ‘He was flirting with you!’
‘No, he wasn’t.’
‘I know flirting when I see it. G
od! I feel like hurling.’
‘Don’t be stupid. I don’t even like him that way.’
But, to be safe, she spent the rest of the night avoiding Brandon. Instead she got talking to Johann, if the term could be applied to the intermittent grunts that emerged in between tokes on a joint. He was grudging and only passed it to her twice.
‘What’s Denmark like?’ Calida asked.
‘It’s cool.’
‘How long have you been in New York?’
‘Three years.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘It’s cool. I guess. Though, sometimes, it can be uncool.’
For a man who wrote on fridges about apples and bowls and cups made of hands, Johann had a surprisingly limited vocabulary.
At midnight, someone started letting off fireworks. They climbed a stepladder and, out on the roof, Calida found Lucy clinging to Brandon and gazing so dotingly at him that she missed the show. It was a spectacle: showers of red, pink, and green raining down on the Manhattan skyline, framing the Brooklyn Bridge and shimmering off the water. This is my city, thought Calida. I’m going to fucking well take it over.
Lucy staggered up. ‘I think this is it,’ she slurred. ‘He’s into me. I can feel it.’
Calida was about to ask how drunk Lucy was and if maybe she ought to go home, when, over her shoulder, she spotted something problematic. Brandon and Evie were pressed against each other, kissing like their lives depended on it. She tried to distract Lucy and lead her away, but it was too late. Lucy saw, and was silent.
Watching her friend’s eyes fill with disappointment, she was reminded of the night she had sneaked into town and found Daniel at Las Estrellas. How it had felt to see him with that other girl. Now, he was married to another girl, a girl who got to have him in her bed every night, feel his body, wake up to his face every morning.
She put her arms around Lucy and held her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Can we go?’ Lucy asked in a small voice.
‘Yes,’ said Calida. ‘Of course we can.’
That night, she told Lucy her story: about the farm where she’d grown up, about Daniel, about Julia, and finally about her sister. She told her how she had sent the money from the sale of the estancia to Cristian Ramos and his family, and in doing so had put their struggles to some good use of which her papa might be proud.
She stopped short of making the Tess Geddes connection, instead referring to her twin only as Teresa and saying she was living somewhere in England but she didn’t know where. She couldn’t risk Lucy’s loose tongue leaking it to Brandon, then Evie, then Johann—and where would it end? No. She must keep it to herself.
They drank vodka, shared a packet of cigarettes, and stayed up until five, when the sun was bleeding over the river. She told Lucy because she thought it might cheer Lucy up, make her see she wasn’t the only one for whom life was hard, but she also told her for herself. To remind herself why she was here and what she had to do. To refresh the hatred she checked in on every day, feeding it, keeping it warm, so that when the time came she could unleash it. Watch it savage the thing for which it was bred.
In time, Lucy got over Brandon. She had to, given that every day she was confronted by him and Evie draped over each other, giggling and kissing, and darting off for shared showers in the middle of the afternoon. It was painful, but at least it made an effective cure for her crush. Despite this, Calida wasn’t immune to the occasional flirtatious comment from Brandon—whose sly advances corroborated Lucy’s suspicion that he did indeed have it bad for her—and even a stoned offer one night to draw her naked.
‘You’d make the perfect subject,’ Brandon said, leaning in, eyes red-rimmed, ‘kind of lost and sexy … I’m really into you, Calida. Evie and I have an understanding … she’s cool about other girls. What do you say we make this happen …?’
Flatly, Calida turned him down, before getting up and going to bed.
‘Hey,’ he moaned at her retreating back, ‘you could at least suck me off?’
‘Suck yourself off, dickhead.’
The next morning Brandon attempted to retract his advance, mortally embarrassed, and make out like he’d been so out of it he hadn’t known what he was saying. ‘I thought you were Evie,’ he wheedled. ‘You won’t tell her, will you?’
Calida had no intention of mentioning the slip to Evie but she chose not to tell Brandon this. It was useful to own a piece of him—especially since he’d begun work at a studio in Manhattan and was returning to Williamsburg each night brimming with stories about the city’s power clique. Brandon was the key; she felt it. Now she only had to keep her eye out for the door—and, soon enough, that door appeared.
Brandon and Evie became closer, exacerbating his fear of Calida’s reveal. The job offer bought and secured her silence: they both knew it.
It came about through a friend, who was assistant to a fashion photographer on East 8th. The friend was going abroad and the studio was seeking a replacement: did Brandon know anyone? Calida had already shared her photographs of New York with him—golden light falling in shafts across the Chrysler Building, the crinkled face of a storekeeper by the side of the road, the majestic, emerald Statue of Liberty like a giant aquarium ornament—and he encouraged her to put them in a portfolio.
‘You’re good,’ said Brandon, ‘seriously good.’
The studio called back and summoned her for an interview. She dressed sharp and spoke sharper, unwilling to let this chance slip through her fingers. Photography had been the one constant to draw her through the past decade, since Diego had died. Her papa had given her this gift and she had held it tight to her heart, unaware the whole time that it would become the thing that set her free. SilverLine Studios was super-league. It shot for the big guns—Tatler, Elle, Glamour, InStyle—and its owner Ryan Xiao was one of the hottest properties in America. Calida would start as a runner and welcomed the graft, the climb to the top that her sister had bypassed so regally because she was spoiled and stubborn and cared about no one but herself.
Within the week, the job was hers, and so was the elusive prize she had dreamed of since arriving in America: a work visa. The instant she turned up at SilverLine, she knew it was where she was destined to be. The place was a hub of energy. Rails of clothes were gathered along one wall, an efficiently dressed woman flicking through them and scribbling down notes. Bulb-lined mirrors appeared in a bank alongside crates of make-up, powders and lipsticks, shadows and airbrushes, pots and pastels. A collection of leather seats was positioned around a glass table, topped with neat cubes of glossy magazines; nearby a small fridge was filled with miniature bottles of Perrier and Dom Perignon, and a tray of untouched sandwiches.
Beyond the vibrant mess of preparation rolled a pure-white wasteland: the blank stage awaiting its model. The camera—a huge, handsome thing on a tripod—stood on the line between the two, like a giant punctuation mark.
‘Calida Santiago?’ Ryan Xiao, the most renowned photographer in New York, for bitchiness as well as brilliance, heaped a pile of fabrics in her arms. ‘I’ll say this once and I won’t say it again, so listen up and listen good: I don’t give a rat’s if it’s your first day, you’ll haul ass at my pace, in my way, you’ll do everything I damn well tell you without so much as an answer-back or you’re out on the street before your first paycheck and I’m not kidding. Winona and Mags are here. Tell them they look stunning, they’ve never looked better, do not under any circumstances offer them breakfast, then get them into these and only ask Vicki for help if you absolutely have to because let me tell you she’s doing my fucking head in today and I can’t take another gripe about her workload. Do whatever the models require and do it with a smile on your face: I haven’t time to crawl up their asses myself and I’ve already got enough shit on my nose to last ten lifetimes. Then go get Starbucks for everyone. Got it?’
Ryan strode back to the set.
‘Got it,’ Calida answered. Over the next few hours she moved between t
asks with skill, enthusiasm, and drive. She sensed how to be useful, to have faith in her initiative and earn the trust to be given the same job next time. Her only glitch came when she was introduced to the models. Winona Glazer and Mags Lalique were two of the most in-demand cover queens of the decade: instantly she knew their faces, seen so often gazing out from newsstands across the city and billboards on Times Square. She was awed. She had never been in close proximity to such raw, unfettered beauty.
Is this what Tess Geddes is like? Is she a goddess, just like them? As Calida positioned reflectors, angled lighting, tweaked garments and cleared the scene for the next storm of images, she conceded the unbridgeable chasm between an assistant and a star, a minion and a princess, a plain-Jane and a knockout.
A sister left behind and another one taken …
Bullshit. I can be just as good as her. Better.
‘Beautiful!’ Ryan encouraged, as the models posed in an effortless sequence of gorgeousness, their bodies impeccably tanned and toned, the clothes hanging off them like a second skin. Over the coming weeks, Calida learned how adept Ryan was at making the women feel like a million dollars, only to wait until the door slammed behind them at the end of the day and then he’d demand a drink and a smoke and tell anyone who’d listen what an awful bunch of bitches populated the fashion industry.
‘Did you know Winona dared criticise her headshots?’ Ryan whined to her on Friday night. ‘Some of the best work I’ve ever shot and she says her cheeks look fat? Lose some fucking weight off your cheeks then! Isn’t that what surgery’s for?’
Slowly but surely, Calida gained her boss’s confidence. Whatever the task, from booking runway royalty to fetching his linen Armani suit from the dry-cleaner’s, she made herself indispensable. Ryan wasn’t one to dole out praise, but refraining from insult was pretty much the same thing. She had been at SilverLine three months when she suggested to Ryan partway through a sitting that they shoot their model from above. Brett Bennett, dashingly handsome but painfully insecure (as she was learning all models were), was anxious about the ‘extra chin’ he had acquired on a pool party shoot in Iceland at which he had drunk one too many Brennivín. Combined with the shadow contrasts she recommended, and the addition of a bunched-up shirt held to Brett’s naked, sweat-gleaming torso, they had a win. Brett was thrilled.