We ended up going to the show with them, going backstage, causing all kinds of trouble, convincing everyone we were an up-and-coming girls’ country-and-western hip-hop group called For Whom the Belle Tolls. At the end of the evening, we all headed from the outskirts of Paris (where the concert took place) to town again, ending the evening dancing at Le Bains Douches, and from that night on, Paris was in the palms of our hands.
At first I believed that Paris was ours simply because of this lucky, wondrous, silly start. But I came to know that we held another quiet power simply by being models, specifically models with the Agence Maxi, and all that the owner of the agency represented. But I lived and worked a few carefree months before I discovered the secret, simply enjoying being the toast of Paris.
GO OMAN OR GO HOME
I have a few test shoots right away, and though I’ve never liked having my picture made, they aren’t really bad. They’re quite good, actually, to build my book. As Sabine suggests, they paint me as a fashion girl, much more “hard” than the early tear sheets, which show me as a sunny, blond, cheery, wholesome California girl. Frankly, I like my Paris persona better. It feels like the true me.
I am Aleché.
I don’t have any trouble navigating go-sees or test shoots, as I’ve taken French for six years in school. Everyone buys the Italian thing, as my French teacher was Mrs. Beatrice Tournabene, and it turns out I speak French with an impeccable Sicilian accent.
It’s true that my heart isn’t entirely in it. I’d rather be in school. I’d rather be writing. I’d rather be doing anything but model, but every day I see the go-sees and gigs as my dues for living in Paris.
I never wanted to be a model, and being immersed directly into this world of Paris fashion leaves me cold. It’s not the high you’d expect. Sure, it’s intriguing, even sexy, but it doesn’t call to any of the important parts of me—it doesn’t shake me or make me want to cry with relief or run down avenues or fuck until the sun rises. I envy the kids I see streaming in and out of the Sorbonne, their fingers stained with paint, their lips bitten raw. One day, coming out of a casting, I come across Shakespeare and Company.
I go inside. I talk to George Whitman about why I’m in Paris and how I hate it and love it and how I climb down the bridge and drop down on the island every day I can, and he is willing to let me take as many books as I want out at a time. I take them and read them without paying, careful not to break the spine, and return them back to the shelves for paying customers. Sometimes I shove money at him, but he refuses it, shoving it back. George smiles at me as I sit within the aisles of the store for hours when I am supposed to be at go-sees, and he lets me take naps in the bed below the bulletin board. He feels bad for me that I am in Paris for modeling.
I’d like to move into the apartment above, but I already have a sweet place, so I don’t.
“Take advantage of it. Don’t waste time on guilt!”
The more I talk to George, the less I audition, the more I take books and peaches to my favorite spot. I begin to write: first on the paper bags, then in a spiral notebook I bought at the grocery.
Just behind the Maxi Pad, the Île aux Cygnes sits in the middle of the Seine with the replica of the Statue of Liberty rising up in the sunlight. I like to fill my messenger bag with the diaries of Anaïs Nin and the notebook and sharpened pencils and ripe peaches and slip over the guardrail of the Grenelle Bridge down onto the island and sit in the sun all day, reading and nibbling on the peaches I can never really eat and writing letters and poems. The tourist barges pass like lazy hippos floating, and sometimes tourists take photos of me, the Paris girl. At least that’s what I imagine.
I bring George bags of peaches with poems I’d penned on the outside of plain brown paper sacks. He tears the poems from the bags and walks around the store while we talk, tucking them into random books that people later, I presume, would purchase.
“I hate modeling,” I tell George. “I hate it.”
“Go to Deux Magots, not Bains Douches,” he scolds.
One day, George gives me a copy of Anaïs Nin’s Little Birds, and I read it again and again and wish I had a lover.
I want a lover, but I’m too wounded. From my childhood, from my accident. I want to be a writer, but I’m writing poems on paper bags and my life is go-sees and nightclubs. After the clubs, I go with wandering, still-drunk groups of models and musicians and artists and I watch as couples peel off into the gloaming of pink skies two by two, and even when someone wraps their fingers in my hair, tangling it, even when they kiss me hard on the mouth, the stain of my dark lips smearing while mothers push prams in the early morning light, I pull back.
Gather myself.
Make excuses.
Hold back.
Drop myself neatly into a sack of my own making: like ripe peaches rotting in a paper sack, sweet and uneaten, wild poetry scrawled on the outside, useless, anonymous, a decoration.
I look for human connection in the most desperate, small places.
On the dance floor: a body next to mine.
At a fitting: the kindness of a pretty seamstress running her hand the length of my waist.
In the Métro: packed tight, the whole car shifting as one.
Sometimes at night I wake up in such acute, exquisite pain I take the scary elevator down to the street, catch a cab to the American hospital where a terribly kind, young doctor starts a morphine drip for a few hours—until I stabilize.
Sometimes I imagine that this doctor, whose name I do not know, is my lover.
Sometimes I think I should go home.
But still I want to make enough money to pay for a year of college, and I want to make enough to pay for my stay. I go to a little runway workshop with an ancient woman from Chanel who is there to ridicule girls who cannot walk.
I walk last.
I strut the two lengths of the runway, and the little old lady takes Sabine immediately and with some force by the arm, marches her to her office, slams the door. All of us look at each other, shrug. I wonder if I’m about to get sent home.
Instead, I’m then booked for the Chanel runway during fashion week. That’s enough to pay my way, and I am even lazier after that. I wonder how many go-sees I can skip before Sabine realizes I’m not going instead of just not getting the job. I’m either reading on the island, napping at George’s, sunbathing nude on the roof of the Maxi Pad, or drinking too much at the Bains Douches.
One shoot I actually make it to instead of blowing off is with a photographer everyone raves about named Baptiste Devaux. He’s a bit of a legend, and his studio is impossible to find, on the outskirts near the train tracks, a warehouse with enormous windows on one wall that let in a gritty white light the color of broken mornings. We start out on the tracks and eventually move back into his studio. My hair is wild and my eyes black and my lips red and my skirt short, a kind of Debbie Harry look, and it all falls into place the way a poem does when you just know it’s working. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that “click” in modeling, like I might be making something real. He has me climb up onto a short ladder in front of the window, and he is shooting me from below and says, “Take off your top.”
And there it is.
I’m in Paris and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t taken topless shots. Not a single girl.
Kate Moss and her bee-stung tits are on billboards everywhere, and I’m nobody in a warehouse by the tracks, and who am I to say no?
“I’m not your little bird.”
He laughs.
“Take it off.”
“Fuck you.”
That’s when he yanks at my ankle, tries to pull me off the ladder.
Now he’s furious.
It all happens so fast. I’m off the ladder and we’re circling each other and he’s yelling and I’m yelling and I’m gathering up my stuff, my makeup and my book and the clothes I came in, stuffing it in my messenger bag, and he stalks me around the studio, screaming that he’s going to destroy all
the film from today.
I tell him I’m going to tell Sabine not to work with him anymore. He calls me a cunt and grabs my hair. I kick him in the balls and he doubles over and immediately pops back up and punches me smack in the left eye.
I’m so shocked I just stand there, crying.
He’s laughing at me, actually cracking up, pointing at me, mocking me, with the camera in one hand. I don’t know what comes over me, but with one swift move I reach out and grab his camera and put it in my bag and run toward the door. He runs in front of me, pushing me aside, down the long hall of his studio and locks the door. He turns, stamps his foot at me, the way you do to scare off a dog, and I back up, all the way to the back wall.
It’s a standoff.
He’s pacing up and down the hall, laughing. He finds it funny, this skinny model girl who won’t take off her top, who has his camera in her bag. He’s a big guy. He’s talking to himself under his breath now, saying how he could do anything the fuck he wanted to. He could take off my top himself.
He could take his camera back.
He could make sure I don’t work again.
He could tell Sabine anything.
This girl is nothing, just some fucking everyday ordinary girl.
He could do things to me and take pictures of it.
He’d like to take pictures of me with the black eye—that would be fucking brilliant in my book if I had any fucking guts.
Pacing, pacing.
He could tell Sabine, this fucking girl, she never showed up.
He could fucking kill me.
Fucking little cunt, he’s muttering, laughing, back and forth, pacing, back and forth, his thighs straining his black wool trousers.
What a little cunt baby, doesn’t she know who I am?
I could get any girl to do any single thing I want.
And I’m standing there on the concrete floor of his studio, in front of a big plate glass window, watching him. Watching him with my big messenger bag linked over my shoulder with my book in it and his bulky camera in it and I have on my jeans and my motorcycle boots and over that the Debbie Harry miniskirt and impossibly red lipstick and heavy makeup and wild white hair, and what Baptiste Devaux does not know is that I am not just any ordinary girl, because the next time he turns away from me in his pacing, in his rant, I turn, too, away from him, and I jump, full force, through the big plate glass window.
Glass erupts everywhere, falling in shards, splintering all over the place and behind me as I run. I run and run and run, until I get to Shakespeare and Company, where there is a reading going on.
I walk in as quietly as is possible, but George sees me with my black getup and my black messenger bag bulging and my black eye growing more swollen by the moment.
“Give me your boots,” he says.
And I take off each boot, hand them to George. He knows if he has my boots, I’m less likely to sneak away and leave.
My boots are my promise.
“Now, go get into your bed and sleep.”
I crawl up the ladder to the little bed above the bookcase with the bulletin board above it. I put the bag with Baptiste Devaux’s camera underneath the blanket with me. I can hear the reading going on, and I fall asleep reading the little notes posted to the bulletin board, wondering what I’d post if I were to write one tonight.
Little Bird seeks oblivion.
The next morning, I wake up to find a coffee, croissant, a copy of Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, and my boots at the end of my bed. I gather my stuff and head straight to Maxi.
At the agency, I take Baptiste Devaux’s camera out of my bag and drop it on Sabine’s desk.
“Hugo!” Sabine barks, and he comes and takes the camera away, the film still inside.
“Sabine, Baptiste—” I start to tell her what happened, but she raises her hand in a warning, saying what in English would mean “Not a word, you.”
She says, “Ah, ah!”
I take the Métro back to the Maxi Pad, shower, change, and head back to Maxi in the late afternoon. The glossies from my shoot with Baptiste Devaux are there, and they are fucking spectacular. She wants to send them everywhere and print new zed cards with this photo on the front.
“Zeez,” she declares, “is my Aleché!”
“But what about the photo credit?”
“We leave it off,” she says.
No one ever hears his name again.
“I have a job for you,” Sabine says. “Runway, but it is out of the country.”
“Really? What is it?” I ask.
“You go on Friday, and you don’t ask too many questions. Are you okay with zeez?” Sabine asks.
“Are you kidding?” I ask her.
“I never kidding,” she says.
“Uh, yeah, I don’t think I’m okay with that,” I say, laughing.
“I will take you to lunch today, then,” she says, “with a friend. Dress nice.”
Now this has me intrigued. “Am I in some kind of trouble, Sabine?”
“No, no, no, my dear, no trouble, at all.” She laughs. “You are smart girl, brave girl. Just meet me at the Ritz Bar, one o’clock.”
“Well, then, okay. See you then.”
I wear a dress they gave me when I walked for Chanel. They’d fitted it to me and let me have it in the end. It was cream with a weighted hem, a little black tie at the neck, and butterfly sleeves. I wear it with my black cowboy boots, pear-shaped rhinestone earrings, and red lipstick.
Walking into the Ritz Bar, I spot Sabine right away, the braid giving her away from behind. I am surprised to see Hugo sitting next to her, slumped like a brooding gangster. In the third seat at the table is an impeccably dressed gentleman, handsome and erudite—something about the way he moves, slowly, the very air around him charged with a kind of quiet energy, as if everyone in his presence is waiting for his cue—engaging the waitress in what appears to be a spirited and intimate conversation. When I go to the table, he stands.
“You must be Aleché,” he says in a strange accent I can’t quite place.
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Pleasure to meet you,” I say, my Southern accent coming back the way it does any time good manners are required.
“I’m Max, and you are as lovely as your photographs, even lovelier.”
“Well, thank you,” I say. “I do what I can.”
“Ah! Modest, too!” He laughs.
“A realist, sir,” I deadpan.
“Hardly, my dear.”
“And what agency are you with?” I ask.
He roars with laughter. First, let me say it is clear that he is no model. He is a middle-aged businessman of very great means. A deep, jagged scar runs from the corner of his right eye down his face, etching his jawline. Now, if you’ve never spent time with a certain kind of Southern woman who loves to flirt, you’ll likely assume my comment to be crass, even cruel. To the contrary, a Southern girl knows how to take the unspoken in the room and turn it into the sexiest, funniest detail in mixed conversation.
“Well, now that you ask, I am with Agence Maxi Internationale,” he declares.
“You are?” I say, acting surprised. “Me, too!”
“I own it.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I whisper, leaning in, as if it is our secret alone.
“Sabine, this one is a keeper,” says Max, and we continue with lunch. While Sabine and Hugo fall mostly silent, Max and I talk literature and politics, art and oil rigs and travel, one subject falling into the next the way they do in any great conversation. By the end of the lunch, he knows that I have no interest in being a model, and I know that he has no interest in owning a modeling agency. Nonetheless, by the end of the meal, I’ve been invited to a “modeling engagement”—a fashion show in the Middle East—and it sounds like the best idea in the world.
At the time.
Sabine calls later in the day to tell me to be ready to fly to Oman Friday and
that I will not need to bring anything but a small bag of toiletries. After I hang up, an unsettled feeling in my stomach starts inching up the way the cream did in the milk bottles that were delivered at my granny’s every Saturday at her place before sunrise, and I wander up to Wendy’s room on the second level of the Maxi Pad.
“Wendy, do you know Max, the agency owner?” I ask.
“Oh, my gosh, you met Max?” she asks, surprised.
“Yeah, Sabine took me out to lunch to meet him.”
“How’d you like the Ritz?” she asks, smiling. “I love Max. I know him really well. He’s great.”
“Well, who is he?” I ask. “I mean, besides owning the agency?”
“Oh, yeah, you got that, huh?” She laughs. “He’s huge. He’s Max Berg. He’s a big oil trader. His manor house got blown up by some South African revolutionary group.”
“Come again?” I ask. “I mean, what the living fuck? Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Goddamn. And that doesn’t seem a little, I don’t know, down the bayou of batshit of crazy?” I ask.
“Not if you know him,” she says. “He is the best guy, the kindest. He will do absolutely anything for you if you need him.”
I wonder what kind of absolutely anything I could or would need from a man like Max Berg, and what the purpose is for him owning a modeling agency in Paris if his business is doing oil deals in the Middle East.
I can think of about twenty different reasons off the top of my head. And then I think about Baptiste Devaux, and suddenly I realize that a few topless photographs will likely be the least of my concerns.
I have two choices—go Oman or go home.
DIVING INTO THE WRECK
I came to explore the wreck.
—ADRIENNE RICH
I went home.
After six months in Paris, I was determined never to model again. I wanted to write and study. I wanted to be who’d I’d always planned to be, not some bizarre dolled-up version of the real me. The accident had thrown me way off course. I got wrapped around the pole, and the subsequent surgeries and resulting illness had whittled me down to a poor excuse of myself. A skinny shell: a pretty decoration but nothing more. I’d been running around Paris writing poems on paper sacks while people judged me for what I looked like.
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