Nick Barker didn’t make any bones about it. He wanted her to let him take out the bump and make her beautiful. She was tempted. Maybe she should. Would Lale love her if she had a perfect nose? It was almost like the hand of God had driven her to the hospital that day and arranged for her to run into Nick. After the cafeteria dinner, he surprised himself by asking her to go for a drink at a nice place near the hospital, reluctant to let her get away. He found himself opening up to her, which was unusual. He gave her the basic information, where he grew up, where he went to school. His father was a doctor and he had been expected to be one, too. He’d had a boring life, he said, all school, then all work, and not much play. He’d been married once, when he was a resident, but was divorced, no kids. He lived in a big house with a swimming pool, in a neighborhood she knew was a ritzy part of town. But it was a waste, he said. He used it only to sleep, since he was at the hospital by six and didn’t come home sometimes until midnight or later. In fact, this was the first time he had taken even this much time off in months. He should be making his rounds right now, he said, but still he sat and talked to her.
“Where are you staying tonight, Cassie? It’s too late to drive back to Buchanan.”
“Oh, I’ll find a motel somewhere. I’m free as a bird. I’m on an adventure.”
“Why don’t you come back to the hospital and wait for me? I’ll make rounds and then you can come and sleep in my guest room.”
“I don’t think so, but thanks, Dr. Barker.”
“Please call me Nick. No strings attached. I promise. No one is ever there, and I have five bedrooms. You’ll be doing me a favor. Bring some life to the poor house.”
It was a little weird, but he seemed like a nice guy and he had a big reputation as one of the best doctors in Little Rock. She finally said yes, something that she would normally not even think of doing, but by the end of a couple of glasses of wine, he felt like an old friend.
She sat in the doctors’ lounge reading magazines while he made rounds, getting curious looks from the other doctors and nurses, and she ignored the whispers as they wondered who she was.
“Can I help you?” a dark-haired nurse wearing O.R. scrubs that couldn’t hide her big bosoms said when she came in for the third time and Cassie was still there.
“No, thanks. I’m waiting for Dr. Barker.”
“Ohhh,” the nurse said, the word full of meaning. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
“I guess it wouldn’t be as good as what Dr. Nick makes, would it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
The nurse took a cup for herself and left, not speaking again. The air behind her was frosty.
He carried her suitcase in, showed her around, and then left her alone. By the time she got up the next morning, he was gone. She was already in bed when he came home that night, and she thought he might have forgotten she was there. She didn’t know what to do, how to get in touch with him. He’d neglected to give her his phone number. She knew she should leave, but it would have been rude not to say good-bye, and the indoor pool was so beautiful she decided to take a swim. Then she shopped for food, there being nothing in the fancy state-of-the-art fridge but a bottle of white wine and a dried-out chunk of cheese. She’d make him a nice dinner to thank him, if he ever got home. He did come home, early, and was so grateful for the dinner that she laughed.
“How long has it been since anybody cooked you dinner?”
“I can’t even remember. Usually dinner is whatever the cafeteria throws together. Sometimes it’s a piece of chocolate from some patient’s bedside table, or a doughnut and coffee in the lounge.”
“How do you keep on running like you do?”
“Adrenaline.”
After dinner, she did the dishes and he said he had to run back to the hospital to check on a recent surgery. He told her not to wait up for him. She locked her bedroom door when she went to bed, but there was no need. She never heard when he came in, and by the time she got up, he was already gone.
She made dinner again that night and left it warming for him. In the morning, he left a thank-you note. The following night, he came home early with a tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken and they shared it at the kitchen table and talked. She showed him pictures of Lale and he said over and over the man was a fool for leaving her.
It was hard to believe he was being this nice to her for nothing. It couldn’t be that he was so anxious to operate on her nose, could it? He mentioned it often, sometimes kiddingly, sometimes seriously. He said he would do it for free. She told him she liked her nose like it was, thank you, but the more she looked at it, the more he talked, the bigger it got. The weight loss had, if anything, made it look even bigger, with less face to surround it. Still, it was weird. What was in it for him?
She tried to find clues about him when she was all alone in the house, which had obviously been decorated by a professional. There wasn’t any of him in it, no homey things, no pictures sitting on the tables, no souvenirs from vacations. The shiny new kitchen appeared as though it had never been used, and his room was the only one that looked lived in at all. He did like fast fancy cars; there were three she’d never heard of in the big garage—he had to tell her what they were—a 1956 silver Jaguar XK140, a black 1955 Gullwing Mercedes 300SL with doors that opened up like…well, a bird’s wings, and the one he used for every day, a new 1970 red Aston Martin with buttery leather seats, like the one James Bond drove.
There were several books about antique cars around and lots of medical books, but nothing much else to read. No novels at all. A few magazines about men’s fashion and cars. He did have an amazing wardrobe—she could tell how expensive the suits were. They were made of good wool and had labels from someplace in London. His shirts were soft cotton or linen or silk, folded in cardboard, lined up on a stack of shirt-size shelves, one to a shelf, and his initials were on all of them in the same color thread so you could hardly notice it. It all said money. Like him, everything had a faint odor of a cologne called Pub, which came in a heavy cask-shaped bottle with a cork top.
Under his bed she found a basket with magazines of naked women, not simple ones like Playboy; these were much worse. Some of the women were having sex with men, some with each other. The pictures were unlike anything she had ever seen before, and she spent an hour looking at them with amazement and not a small amount of arousal. Nick didn’t have much of a love life—that was obvious, since she was living there and hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a woman—but at least this proved he did like the opposite sex, which was somehow a relief.
Then, poking in his underwear drawer, she found a small album with photographs of a younger Nick with more hair and a thin, pretty honey-blonde in a polka-dot bikini on the beach somewhere. They were smiling and had their arms around each other. Her hair was done in the teased-up style of the early sixties, like the girls in the beach-party movies. On one picture she had written, To one Nicky from another, Love always, Nicole. This must be the ex. The woman’s nose was big in some of the shots. But there were other pictures of her, some in the snow in winter, others with a group, more on the beach. In these photos, her nose was not the same at all, even though the hair and everything else was the same. It was small. Cassie stared at the pictures. Maybe he had fixed her nose and she didn’t like it and left him, like his dentist friend’s wife. Well, she obviously left him for some reason.
She put the album back, tried to arrange the underwear exactly as it was before. She felt guilty, like an intruder. She also felt a little sorry for Nick. But she couldn’t be another Nicole for him, if that was what he thought she would eventually be.
She drove to the drugstore and flipped through all the magazines, as she did every month, to find pictures of Lale. She wasn’t disappointed. He was in a lot of them this time, each with a different beautiful woman. There was one layout that had a story. It pretended he and a dark-haired girl with a long high ponytail were on their honeymoon. Every picture w
as them in some romantic pose wearing beautiful outfits—on the rocks by the sea, on the terrace of a hotel room—they were laughing, kissing, so in love. It was torture, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking. She went over all the things that could happen when she got to New York, all the conversations that might occur. None of them was good. In her mind, she was sweet to him; pleading with him; angry at him; indifferent to him. All the scenarios ended badly, with him telling her he didn’t want to see her and walking out.
It hadn’t been real, her actually going to New York to find him. She had been living in a bubble in Nick’s house, putting it off. Until she saw the ad for Diamonds & Ermine, and then the TV commercial. After that, she decided that no matter how it turned out, she had to go.
39
* * *
NANA’S
Suzan invited me to lunch, which was something I never thought she’d do. We went to a restaurant right across the street from the agency called Nana’s, an old-timey lunch place with little-old-lady waitresses who must have started working there when they were young girls and who, fifty years later, still served food like meatloaf and mashed potatoes and tapioca pudding. They made great doughnuts and sugared crullers, which I’d never seen before, and there was a long counter with stools where you could sit and drink a cup of coffee and take a load off between go-sees. We sat at one of the tables by the window. Both of us ordered the meatloaf, which surprised me a little. I thought Suzan was a vegetarian.
“Oh, not really. It’s just the lowest-calorie food around. You’re the only one in this town who would understand, but the thing I miss most about Arkansas is the food. Nobody up here knows what okra is, much less that you’re supposed to fry it. The tomatoes taste like cardboard, they boil the squash into a bland pulp. When I first got here, I asked for fried catfish and hush puppies and they didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I realized soon enough, though, that I had to give up anything that tasted good, which translates to fried. I can just think about fattening food and my hips get bigger.”
“Well, I guess I’m lucky then. I never seem to gain, no matter what I eat, and with all the exercise I’ve been getting, I think I’ve lost a couple of pounds.”
“When I was modeling, I used to eat twice a week. Sunday and Thursday. I mean, eat a real meal, meat and vegetables. Though never any sugar. The rest of the time I’d have a boiled egg or a salad with lemon-juice dressing for dinner. Vats of coffee the rest of the day. And cigarettes, of course.” She had one going during the meal and paused between bites to take a puff. “Be glad you aren’t hooked on these things. Most of the girls have to smoke to stay thin. It works, but it’s a deal with the devil. All it asks is that you give it your health, and I seem to be feeding it just fine. I’d like to quit at this point. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.”
“I have a friend who’s a priest, and he once said the church believed the spirit and body were at war with each other, and the spirit had to defeat the body to get to heaven.”
“Or to get in the magazines. Not so different, are they, heaven and success?”
“Not in this business. By the way, how are your ribs?”
“Mended.”
I wanted to ask her more, but she said it in a way that let me know not to pursue that train of thought. I still didn’t know why she had invited me for lunch, so I didn’t push it.
“You’re probably wondering why I invited you for lunch.”
“Um, kind of.”
“No special reason. I just wanted to big-sister you a little bit, I guess. You’re about to be shot out of a cannon and I don’t know if you’re ready for it.”
“Were you? You made it big pretty fast.”
“Of course I wasn’t. Who’s ever ready for it? One minute you’re seventeen, scuffling to make the rent, and the next they’re running to get your coffee and you’re calling the shots. No young girl is able to make that transition without losing herself. I would just hate for you to make the same mistakes I did and do anything stupid.”
“Like what?”
“Like, get involved with the wrong man…or let anybody talk you into changing agencies. That’s the first thing the others will do, try to get you to go with them because they’re bigger and they’ll say they can do more for you, but that’s not true.”
“Oh. I’d never leave you, Suzan. You took a chance on me and I appreciate it.” She took a bite of meatloaf. I thought she looked a little relieved. “As far as the wrong man goes, who would that be?”
“A Freddy.”
I was totally shocked. I had never, never gone near him and had to keep myself from cringing when he came around me. He literally made my skin crawl.
“Suzan, I would never sleep with Freddy! Frankly, I hate to say it, but he creeps me out. I have a great boyfriend, a jazz musician named Aurelius Taylor, so please don’t worry about that. Ever.”
“Oh, I don’t think you would sleep with Freddy. Not that he wouldn’t try. He’s stuffing half the girls in the agency. Maybe most of the girls in the agency, fools that they are. But there are a lot of Freddys out there, and you should be on the lookout for them. They’re charming when they want to be, but they’ll never love any woman more than they love themselves. They have no conscience and think women exist to support and please them. Like a pimp, only with better manners in public.”
“I understand. Don’t worry. I promise I won’t get taken in by a good-looking pimp. Of any kind.”
She laughed. “They don’t usually have PIMP stamped on their foreheads. Kind of silly advice, isn’t it?”
“Not at all. I’ll be alert. And don’t worry about me going to another agency, either. We’re Arkansas girls. We have to stick together.”
“Yes, we do. There’s not many of us up here.” She shook out another cigarette, lit it. “So you’ll be meeting with Mrs. Vreeland on Monday. She’s a terror on the surface, but kind underneath. Eccentric to the point of nuttiness. She polishes the bottoms of her shoes. I wouldn’t call her a liar, but she exaggerates everything. She likes to think she discovers the girls, so let her think that. Dress outrageously. Have fun with it. I know I haven’t been the nicest to you, and I’m sorry. Maybe I saw myself and was trying to run you off to save you—who knows? But it looks like you’re going to make it in spite of me. My time in the spotlight is over. I’ve made a mess of my personal life and got screwed out of more than half the agency, but I know a lot about the business. I hope you’ll come to me for advice from time to time.”
“Of course I will. And forgive me for saying this, but I don’t understand why you think your life is over and you have to stay with Freddy. You’re not even forty. Why don’t you leave him and start over? You could call the new agency something else. Everyone would go with you—nobody would stay with him.”
“I wish it were that easy.” She looked wistful for a minute. “Have a merry Christmas, Cherry.”
40
* * *
CHRISTMAS
I woke up to bright sunshine coming through Aurelius’s window. It was the first time I had slept in his bed all night long, which was kind of a shock. I guess I was more tired the previous night than I thought. We’d gone to a little theater down the street, Cinema Village, that showed older movies, and saw True Grit with John Wayne, who I never particularly liked, but it was set in Dardanelle, Arkansas, near where I grew up. We laughed all the way through. It was so stupid. They had the actress Kim Darby talking in this weird stilted way that was supposed to be an Arkansas accent—Arkansas by way of Hollywood. I just hate phony southern accents. Nobody can do them right. John Wayne didn’t even try for an accent, thank goodness. He was playing John Wayne like he always does, except older and drunker with an eye patch, and he swore a lot. My daddy saw it last year, and didn’t recommend it, so I hadn’t gone. He didn’t believe in going to movies, but made an exception for John Wayne, and he was pretty disappointed in ol’ John this time out. He’d admired him since he did a movie called The
Fighting Seabees, the outfit my daddy was in during the war, and Daddy somehow had the idea he was a clean-living, stand-up man, like he played in most of his movies, but I’d read Photoplay and knew he’d been married several times and drank and smoked like a fiend. I never told Daddy, though. I didn’t want to tarnish his hero. I don’t think he’s gone to the movies again.
After the movie we had spaghetti at a little place in the Village called Tavola Calda. It was run by a guy named Alfredo, who liked to sit and hang out with the customers and was kind of a bore, but it was Christmas Eve and he bought us each a glass of wine, so we were nice to him. Then we came back to bed. I’m an optimist, I guess, because I was always so attracted to Aurelius and always had such high hopes for the bed thing, and somehow it just never turned out right. He was beginning to really get into what I did for him, and I totally understood Mrs. Digby saying she liked doing it because it was one of the things she did best, but like her, each time, I found myself getting more resentful of him never returning the favor, and I saw why her marriage to Mr. Digby ended after a year. I didn’t bring it up again, though. I had too much pride. Another thing that was beginning to get to me was he always took a shower before bed, no matter how late it was, and craftily invited me in with him. It was fun at first, getting all soaped up and slippery together, but I secretly thought he just did it to erase any trace of my natural smell, and that took some of the joy out of it. I had no idea what his natural smell would be, since I’d never smelled it. I never met anybody who took as many showers as he did, and I’d had to get a big bottle of bath oil to soak in my tub since the hot water and soap of all those extra showers dried out my skin. I have to admit I sometimes wistfully thought about Tripp and how he always complained I bathed too much. He would be totally disgusted with me now.
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