I nodded, wondering how this stranger knew my name.
“Hugo,” he announced as if this would mean something to me. “I will take you to Maxi,” he continued, tipping his head to indicate I should hop on.
“But my bag?” I asked, looking down at the impossibly large, black suitcase.
“Leave there,” Hugo barked.
Confused, I did what seemed the only thing to do—I hopped on the back of his bike, wrapped my hands around his thick chest, and held on as he roared into traffic, darting between cars and buses and vans. Glancing back just in time, I saw a gentleman loading my abandoned suitcase into an older-model sedan.
* * *
Riding into the city on the back of that bike, holding dear to this surly, slightly dangerous-seeming stranger, my platinum hair wild, tangling with the purple fringe of my coat, I felt perhaps I had not taken a wrong turn after all but had barreled down the right path, toward something that would revive my aching soul.
Though I’d been to Paris twice before, once on a middle school field trip with the French club and again in high school touring with the jazz band, I wasn’t entirely familiar with its neighborhoods, noted streets, and landmarks beyond those you visit as a tourist.
“Almost there!” Hugo shouted over his shoulder as we turned onto a very swanky street.
“Almost where?” Was he taking me to the agency? To the models’ apartment?
“To Sabine.”
The day opened into brilliance, the kind of sunlight only a Paris day affords, every shop window glinting promises, every impossibly thin new maman pushing a polished pram formal as an impeccable dark chocolate petit four, every couple squeezed into each tiny café table up to the edge of any avenue holding deep claret glasses of simple house wine, dark and decadent nonetheless. And as we zipped closer and closer to our destination, we weren’t traveling down a back road, through a forgotten alley, a dusty rue lined with packing stores, but down one of the finest streets in all of Paris—the Rue de la Paix. Passing the Ritz, Tiffany, an endless row of tony shops, finally Hugo hopped the curb right across the street from Cartier, left the bike in the middle of the sidewalk, and nodded for me to follow.
He pressed a bell and was buzzed through an unmarked door next to a salon de parfums, and we walked up five flights of stairs and into the agency, entering a large pink room with a wall of windows looking out onto the avenue below. There was a small runway at one end, an office at the other, and some desks where regular, secretary-looking girls sat at desks in the middle of the room. Zed cards were organized in a shelf on the wall behind them, a hundred pretty faces staring back at me.
“Alice! Alice! Alice, baby! My blond baby! My California girl!” cooed Sabine, rushing toward me, out of her office, wrapping me in an embrace.
She was much dowdier than I remembered from New York. She was, for lack of a better word, motherly. I hugged her back. Soaked in Chanel N°5, she wore (of course) a pink knit Chanel suit with cream trim, a cream blouse, and her long blond hair pulled back harshly into that same braid that went all the way to her waist, a schoolgirl’s ribbon tied at the top.
“Come zeez way, let’s zee you,” she said, leading me to another part of the main room, where a partial wall divided the room and mirrors surrounded the area. “Take eet all off, my sweet.”
“Everything?” I asked with a nervous giggle, glancing at Hugo, still leaning against a wall, smoking, pulling at the various zippers of his leather jacket.
“Yes, darling, everyzing. Zis is Paris. Don’t be see-lee.”
And so I did, stripped it all off—my purple-fringed suede jacket, my white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, my little black lace bra, my cowboy boots, my beat up 501’s, my black lace G-string, my white tube socks with the red stripes around the top, and stood there totally naked.
Sabine looked at me, her eyes taking me in from head to toe, slowly. I was by now, at five foot eight, about ninety pounds. She took each of my breasts in her fingertips, lifted them up a bit, gave them a little shake, said, “Nice ones!”
We all laughed, even Hugo.
“The scars, why you did not tell me of the scars?” she asked.
I had a scar that ran from between my breasts all the way down my torso, making a little detour around my belly button, disappearing into my pubic hair. Another one crisscrossed my ribs on my right side, my liver tucked underneath. There was a big gash on my right waist where the terrible drain had been and a raised, red notch above my clavicle where the feeding tube had pumped the thick white lipids in like clockwork every night.
“Um, well, I guess you didn’t ask?” I said, starting to feel a kind of panic raise.
Why didn’t I tell her? How stupid could I be?
“I mean, if it’s a problem, I can go home. I mean, I didn’t think I’d be doing swimsuits or anything, and so—”
“Well, in Paris, anything, possible, will be a problem. Blond, will want lingerie. We will have to make you more fashion, cut hair, make more hard, maybe change name.”
“Okay. I’m sorry, Sabine, I didn’t mean to—” I started.
“It is problem,” she said, “but Sabine smart, can fix problem.”
Sabine had a way of talking in these halted sentences as a way to bridge the language barrier, even with those of us who spoke fluent French.
“Just no more lies, and you don’t work, you pay back every money, you understand?” she scolded, looking me square in the eye, her double chin quivering unflatteringly.
“Yes, of course.”
“So pretty,” she switched tone, running her hand down my waist.
“Can I get dressed now?” I asked.
“First, you walk,” she challenged.
“Okay,” I said, strutting over to the little runway, hopping up and walking back and forth, nude, gliding to the quiet house music playing in the background, making use of the seventeen years of ballet I’d studied before my scooter accident.
The secretaries stopped their phone calls and watched.
Hugo’s cigarette gathered a long cylinder of soot at the end.
Sabine stood with her arms folded in front of her ample chest and smiled.
I forgot I was nude. If there was one thing I was comfortable with, it was being on stage, it was performing, it was—if I had to admit it—pretending.
I could step outside of myself in any situation and become whatever you needed me to be.
This was a talent I gleaned from terror but used for mostly my own good.
My father started abusing me sexually when I was four, coming into my room at night just after I fell asleep. I’d long since written it all off as something I’d “survived.” I ran groups for survivors, I was a mentor for survivors. But here’s the thing about abuse—surviving it doesn’t mean that at any moment, a turn of the corner or a lover’s bite of your lip or a stranger’s touch can’t rock your soul in a way that shatters your entire sense of the safety of the universe. No one escapes abuse unscathed.
The damage to my soul was something I thought I could repair with sheer will. Most of the time, I could.
Transforming the pain of abuse into my own sort of power was my rebellion, my power. It made me fearless. It made me reckless, too. There was nothing that scared me, because I had this inner sense that no matter what happened to me, I controlled the outcome.
So even though walking naked on a rickety runway in a tacky pink room in front of a wall of windows in Paris with hundreds of people walking by outside and a heavy-lidded young man staring at me felt like shit, I was able to embrace it—even enjoy it. This is something every survivor knows: you hate it and you love it. Because you know it. There is a power in knowing you can go further than another girl can; you can be reckless, you can push the boundary, you can say fuck you or fuck me with your face or your ass because that’s what you’ve been trained to do. Because you give them way more than they ask for, you make them squirm.
So up on that runway, even though it wasn’t where I wante
d to be, even though it wasn’t who I wanted to be, I called the shots. And when the song morphed into a new one, I walked off, picked up my clothes, dressed, walked past Hugo, swung through the door and down the stairs. It was time to check out my new digs.
Model apartments are famous for being ten rungs down from sweatshop dorms. Agencies rent tiny studio apartments, fill them with multiple bunk beds, and cram in as many girls as they can at once. It’s often a shock to new girls in the business, arriving to find that they’ll be stacked like sardines with up to twenty other girls in an apartment meant for perhaps four. Model apartments were usually in parts of town where rents were cheap, public transit was close, and grit was the name of the game.
The ride to the Maxi apartment with Hugo was another exercise is surrealism. I half wondered if he was taking me on an obligatory sightseeing tour, past the Tuileries, L’Opéra, le Tour Eiffel, the neighborhoods becoming swankier, the apartments becoming statelier, lined with flower boxes, wrought iron balconies, the miniature Statue de la Liberté rising from the Île aux Cygnes in the river Seine, until we arrived at the Maxi Pad, at 15 Avenue de Versailles.
He handed me the key and said, “Penthouse, choose empty room.”
And 15 Avenue de Versailles was an impeccable, white Paris apartment building, tall and stately, square, with gleaming rectangular windows and terraces in mathematical precision across its flawless façade. The double doors were gleaming glass with a swirling wrought iron pattern overlay, more ornate than whimsical. I slid the key in, turned it, and pushed the heavy door open into the large foyer, the door dragging the deep pile of the deep red carpeting, my suitcase right inside the door standing off to one side against a curved, flocked papered wall.
The ceiling stretched up endless floors, and the lighting was muted. Off to one side, a small elevator was tucked behind two folding wrought iron doors, and ahead of me was an enormous red winding staircase twisting into silty sunlight from somewhere far above. I hefted my suitcase, dragged it to the elevator, fought open the wrought iron doors, and shoved the behemoth in. I tried to sneak in with it but got hit with the door twice before finally holding the door open with one foot while backing into the elevator, then letting the gate shut behind me.
There were only two buttons: one arrow pointing up, one arrow pointing down. I pressed the arrow pointing up. The elevator did nothing. I pressed the pointing up arrow again. The elevator suddenly fell about two feet and then slowly, very slowly, with a horrible screeching noise, started to inch up, back up to the level of the lobby and then up past it, then to the interior of the building in between the lobby and the first floor, then to the interior hall of the apartment on the first floor, and then kept going and then a little more and then suddenly fell about two feet back down to the first-floor hall with a big shudder and thud.
I thought my heart had fallen straight through to the lobby.
I pried open the elevator gates and yanked the behemoth out of there so fast you’d think the elevator was on fire. In doing so, I fell on my ass and found myself sitting on the floor of a very pretty foyer with a telephone table on which a baby-blue rotary phone sat by a pad of paper and a cup of sharpened pencils. I heard tiny laughing behind me. On the bottom step, a girl in red cowboy boots and a puppy costume said, “You’re a new one.”
“Yes, I am, apparently. Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m your neighbor, but don’t tell Mama, because I’m not supposed to talk to all a y’all. She’s a magazine editor.”
“Oh, well, it’s always a good idea to avoid ‘all a y’all,’” I said, breaking into my Mississippi drawl from my childhood days in Mississippi, “’cause all a y’all are always gonna git ya into some kind of trouble.”
Giggle.
“Can I ask ya a question that would require no talkin’ whatsoever, do you think?” I asked.
Nodding.
“If a girl who found her fool self movin’ to Paris tryin’ to be a model was tryin’ to find her apartment but seemed to end up in some pretty little puppy dog’s hallway instead, would you think she should get back in a really scary elevator or should she go up some great big red stairs instead?”
Silence.
“Oh, that’s a question, huh?”
Nod.
“I should take the stairs.”
Nod.
“All the way up.”
Big nod.
And so I nudged the puppy dog’s curly black hair and dragged the behemoth up six more flights of very wide, winding, rosy carpeted stairs until I arrived at what was known far and wide around Paris as the Maxi Pad: three penthouse floors of luxury apartment, eight bedrooms overlooking a single three-level great room, two kitchens, three bathrooms, and a sunny roof deck overlooking the better part of Paris, right on the Seine. It would be several weeks before I would figure out why the models of Maxi International enjoyed such luxury.
When I arrived, the place was empty. Midday, all the girls were out on go-sees or working. I poked around from room to room; despite the luxury of the apartment, it wasn’t overly furnished. Most rooms looked comfortably lived in, with twin beds and scratched wardrobes. There were a couple of Day-Glo fuchsia and orange hippie futons in the living room and beat-up tables with mismatched chairs in the kitchens.
The least-private bedroom, on the lower floor next to the great room with only a curtain dividing it from the main room, was the only available room. A twin bed was propped up behind the door, with a set of sheets and a big old quilt folded atop a painted desk. I figured the desk was a good sign for me. I pushed the bed into a corner near the window, where a wrought iron balcony overlooked the wide avenue, made the bed, peeled off my jeans, fell into bed, and dropped into a deep sleep.
FOR WHOM THE BELLE TOLLS
I don’t know how many hours later it was when I heard, from the depths of dreams, voices above me, laughing, talking.
“Bet she’s Swedish! Look at her hair!”
“No, New Yorker, everything in her suitcase is black!”
“Get out of her stuff, Blue, that’s so rude!”
“God, I hope she speaks English at least.”
“Wake her up already!”
“What in the helicopter is wrong with y’all?” I asked, opening my eyes to see five stunningly gorgeous girls lolling around my room in various stages of disrobe. “I mean, besides being way too fucking pretty?”
One, a Hemingway-esque brunette, sat at the edge of my bed smiling at me. “Hi, I’m Wendy.” She was very tall and very thin, with a strong jaw, a perfectly upturned nose, blue eyes, and the cheekbones of a Siamese cat.
“I’m Alice.” I yawned, feeling like hell on wheels.
“Ha, that’s funny. Sabine told us you were ‘Aleché.’”
“Oh, yeah, she says she needs to unpretty me and harden me up, so now I’m a teenager from Milan instead of a twentysomething from California.”
“Works for me. I’m a ‘teenager’ too!” Wendy laughed. “Well, get up, there’s a Madonna concert tonight, and my friend Barry might be able to get us backstage,” she said in a slight Florida drawl.
“Cool.” I smiled. This was my kind of first day. “I need to get ready, though.”
“You got a little black dress and boots?” she asked.
“Are ya new here? Have you met me?” I smiled.
“I’m going to like you just fine.”
An hour later, Wendy and the pixied Texas gamine named Blue and I headed out to meet Barry and his buddies near the Arc de Triomphe to get the passes. Climbing the Métro steps, one of three models dressed in black in the early evening emerging onto that famous avenue, I felt as if I were in a scene from a movie. All the hours in the hospital slipped away, all the hopelessness and pall of sickness fell from my body like a coat lost running in a crowd, and my sense of self came rushing back.
We loitered around waiting for Barry, watching people pass, the great rush of Paris humanity surging around us. He didn’t show up.
“I�
�m starved; let’s eat,” Wendy suggested.
The next thing I knew, I was in line in McDonald’s. My first night in Paris and I was standing in line for Le Big Mac? Shouldn’t I be ordering steak au poivre in a smoky café? Besides, the music was deafening.
Who knew in the McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées they’d pump house music like you can’t believe? Or that there would be dudes in line that break out in moves and grab you to dance and, funny, they’d expect you to be able to keep up! But, stranger yet, what those dudes would not expect (and neither would your new model roommates) is that you’ve been hanging out with skaters the last four years of high school, have been going to punk shows and raves and house shows, and so it turns out you can keep up, and so you end up making a big scene.
Which is to say, you are break-dancing with Madonna’s backup dancers in McDonald’s on your first day in Paris.
Shabba Doo, who basically invented break dancing, is someone I was very familiar with, though I don’t let on. He is entertained by this ski-slope-nosed blonde who can pop and lock. And the little boy on Madonna’s tour, the one in the fedora? He can’t believe his luck at having run into a bevy of models two heads taller than he is at, of all places, McDonald’s in Paris. He doesn’t know we are fresh-off-the-bus models with crappy tear sheets and a questionable agency. He is just a kid on tour with a pop star. Regardless, he is charmingly starry-eyed.
Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away Page 4