“I like my place. And I’ve told you—moving makes me crazy. I never do it if I don’t have to.”
Fleur gave up. Kissy was so down on herself right now that she didn’t feel as though she deserved anything more than what she had, and no amount of persuasion could convince her otherwise.
Kissy dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin. “Why the mystery? You said you wanted Michel and me here so you could make an announcement. What’s up?”
Fleur gestured toward the wine. “Pour, Michel. We’re going to drink a toast.”
“Beaujolais with Chinese? Really, Fleur.”
“Don’t criticize, just do your job.” He filled their glasses, and Fleur lifted hers, determined to project a confidence she didn’t feel. “Tonight we drink to my two favorite clients, as well as the genius who’s going to put you both on top. Namely me.” She clicked their glasses and took a sip. “Michel, why haven’t you ever had a showing of your designs?”
He shrugged. “I had one my first year, but it cost me a fortune and nobody came. My stuff isn’t like anything else on Seventh Avenue, and I don’t have a name.”
“Right.” She looked at Kissy. “And no one will let you audition for the kind of parts you want because of the way you look.”
Kissy pushed a shrimp around and gave a glum nod.
“What both of you need for your careers to take off is a showcase, and I’ve figured out how we’re going to get one.” Fleur set down her glass. “Of the three of us, which one stands the best shot at getting media attention?”
“Rub it in,” Kissy grumbled.
Michel stated the obvious. “You do. We all know that.”
“I beg to disagree,” Fleur said. “Except for the week or so after the story broke, I’ve been in New York over two years without getting any publicity. Even Adelaide Abrams didn’t care I was back. The newspapers don’t want Fleur Savagar, who’s a total bore. They want the Glitter Baby.” She handed them the evening paper, which she’d folded open to Adelaide’s gossip column.
Kissy read it aloud.
Superstar Jake Koranda was seen wandering the beaches of Quogue Fourth of July weekend with none other than Glitter Baby Fleur Savagar. Koranda, taking a break from the Arizona filming of his newest Caliber picture, was a guest at the vacation home of millionaire pharmaceutical heir Charles Kincannon. According to friends, the GB and Koranda only had eyes for each other. So far, no comment from either Koranda’s West Coast office or the elusive Glitter Baby, who’s been quietly making a name for herself in New York these past few years as a talent agent.
Kissy looked up from the article, her face stricken. “I’m sorry, Fleurinda. I know how you hate having the past dredged up. And once Abrams gets hold of a story, she won’t let it go. I don’t know who talked to her, but—”
“I’m the one who planted the story,” Fleur said.
They stared at her.
“Would you care to let us in on the reason?” her brother asked.
Fleur took a deep breath and lifted her glass. “Drag out those designs you’ve been saving up for me, Michel. The Glitter Baby’s coming back, and she’s taking the two of you with her.”
Pain was harder to bear sober, Belinda had discovered, since she’d forced herself to stop drinking. She slipped a cassette into the tape deck and pressed the button with the tip of her finger. As the room filled with the sounds of Barbra Streisand singing “The Way We Were,” she lay back against the satin bed pillows and let the tears trickle down her cheeks.
All the rebels were dead. First it had been Jimmy on the road to Salinas, and then Sal Mineo in that brutal murder. Finally Natalie Wood. The three leading actors from Rebel Without a Cause had all died before their time, and Belinda was afraid she would be next.
She and Natalie were almost exactly the same age, and Natalie had loved Jimmy, too. He teased her when they were shooting Rebel because she was just a kid to him. Bad Boy Jimmy Dean playing with Natalie’s feelings.
Death terrified Belinda, and yet she kept a secret supply of pills stashed in the bottom of an old jewelry box near the spinning gold charm Errol Flynn had given her. She couldn’t stand living her life like this much longer, but a strain of optimism still ran deep inside her that said things might get better. Alexi might die.
Belinda missed her baby so much. Alexi said he’d put Belinda in a sanitarium if she tried to contact Fleur. A sanitarium for chronic alcoholics, even though she hadn’t let herself touch a drop of liquor for almost two years. Although Alexi never left the house anymore, she hardly ever saw him. He conducted his business from a suite of rooms on the first floor, working through a series of assistants who wore dark suits and somber expressions and passed her in the hallways without speaking. Almost no one spoke to her. Her days and nights blended together, stretching behind and before her in an unending line, each one exactly like the last until she couldn’t find a reason to go on living except the hope that Alexi would die.
In the old days, when she walked into a ball or a restaurant on Alexi’s arm, she became the most important woman in the room. People sought her out to curry favor. They told her how beautiful she was, how amusing. Without Alexi, the invitations had stopped.
She remembered how it had been in California when she was the Glitter Baby’s mother. She’d been charged with energy until she was luminescent. Everything she touched became special. That was the best time of all.
The song came to an end. She got out of bed and pushed the rewind button to play it again. The music kept her from hearing the door open, and she didn’t know that Alexi had entered until she turned around.
It had been nearly a month since he’d visited her rooms, and she wished that her hair was combed and that her eyes weren’t red from crying. She nervously toyed with the front of her robe. “I—I’m a wreck.”
“But always beautiful,” he replied. “Fix yourself for me, chérie. I’ll wait.”
This was what made him so dangerous. Not his terrible cruelties, but his awful tenderness. Both were intentional, and each, in its own way, entirely sincere.
While he took a seat in the room’s most comfortable chair, she gathered up what she needed and slipped into the bathroom. When she came out, he lay on the bed, all the lamps turned off except one on the opposite side of the room. The dim light hid his unhealthy pallor, as well as the network of fine lines at the corners of her own eyes.
She wore a simple white nightgown. Her toenails were bare of polish and her scrubbed face clean of makeup. She’d threaded a ribbon through her hair.
She lay back on the bed without speaking. He pushed her nightgown to her waist. She kept her legs tightly closed while he caressed her and slowly removed her underpants. When he pushed at her knees, she whimpered as if she were afraid, and he rewarded her for the whimper with one of the deep caresses she liked so much. She tried to push her legs closed again to please him, but he’d begun to kiss the insides of her thighs, and her eyelids drifted shut. This was their unspoken pact. Now that his teenage mistresses were gone, she played the child bride for him, and he let her keep her eyes shut so she could remember Flynn and dream about James Dean.
Usually he left as soon as it was over, but this time he lay still, a sheen of sweat visible on the flaccid skin of his chest. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Would you hand me my robe, chérie? There are some pills in the pocket.”
She got the robe for him and turned away as he pulled out the vial of pills. Instead of making him weaker, his illness had strengthened his power. Now, with his first-floor fortress and the army of watchful assistants carrying out his orders, he’d made himself invulnerable.
She went into the bathroom to shower. When she came out, he was still there, sitting in a chair and sipping a drink. “I ordered whiskey for you.” He pointed with his glass toward a tumbler on a silver tray.
How typically cruel of him. The cruelty coming after the tenderness in a tightly woven pattern of contradictions that had directed t
he course of her life for more than twenty-five years. “You know I don’t drink anymore.”
“Really, chérie, you shouldn’t lie to me. Do you think I don’t know about the empty bottles your maid finds hidden in the bottom of the wastebasket?”
There were no empty bottles. This was his way of threatening her to make certain she did his bidding. She remembered the pictures of the sanitarium he’d shown her, a collection of ugly gray buildings in the most remote part of the Swiss Alps. “What do you want from me, Alexi?”
“You are a stupid woman. A stupid, helpless woman. I cannot imagine why I ever loved you.” A small muscle ticked near his temple. “I’m sending you away,” he said abruptly.
A chill shot through her. The ugly gray buildings sat like great cold stones in the snow. She thought of the pills hidden away in the bottom of her old jewelry box.
All the rebels were dead now.
He crossed his legs and took a sip from his drink. “The sight of you depresses me. I do not wish to have you near me any longer.”
Death from the pills would be painless. It wouldn’t be like the suffocating salt water that had closed over Natalie’s head or the terrible pain Jimmy had felt when he died. She’d simply go to bed and drift into endless sleep.
The hard Russian eyes of Alexi Savagar sliced through the layers of her skin like a razor. “I am sending you to New York,” he said. “What you do once you are there no longer concerns me.”
Baby Resurrected
Chapter 21
The bronze satin gown hugged her body with its high neck, bare arms, and slashed skirt. She wanted to part her hair in the middle and wear it in a low Spanish knot like a flamenco dancer, but Michel wouldn’t let her. “That big streaky mane is the Glitter Baby’s trademark. For tonight, you have to wear it down.”
Fleur had just moved into her living quarters at the townhouse, but Michel ordered her to dress at the apartment where Kissy could supervise. Her former roommate stuck her head in the bedroom. “The limo’s outside.”
“Wish me luck,” Fleur said.
“Not so fast.” Kissy turned Fleur toward the mirror. “Look at yourself.”
“Come on, Kissy, I don’t have time—”
“Stop squirming and look in the mirror.”
Fleur glanced at her reflection. The gown was exquisite. Instead of deemphasizing her height, Michel’s lean design accentuated it. The diagonal slash of skirt started at mid-thigh and crossed over her body, offering tantalizing glimpses of long legs through the filmy black point d’esprit flounce that filled the space.
Slowly she lifted her eyes. In a few weeks, she’d be twenty-six, and her face had a new maturity. She catalogued her separate parts—the wide-spaced green eyes, the marking-pen brows, the mouth that spread all over—and then, for an instant, it all came together, and her face finally seemed to belong to her.
The moment passed, the impression faded, and she turned away. “Just shows what a fabulous dress and good makeup will do.”
Kissy looked disappointed. “You never see yourself.”
“Don’t be silly.” She picked up her purse and dashed downstairs to the limousine. Just before she got in, she looked up at the window and saw Michel and Kissy standing there watching her. She gave them her very cockiest grin. The Glitter Baby was back.
What she hadn’t counted on was Belinda.
Adelaide Abrams slowly dropped her hand from Fleur’s arm and nodded toward the doorway of the Orlani Gallery where Belinda stood wrapped in golden sable, as fragile and beautiful as a butterfly. Fleur fought to control the whirlwind of emotions spinning inside her. She took one deep breath and then another as Belinda approached. Fleur hadn’t seen her mother for six years, and she felt as if she were shattering into a thousand ice-cold pieces.
Belinda extended one hand and pressed the other to the bodice of her dress as if she were touching something hidden there. “People are watching, darling. For appearances, at least.”
“I don’t play to the crowd anymore.” Fleur turned her back and walked away from the scent of Shalimar, from the sight of delicately etched lines, like the veins of an autumn leaf, crinkling the corners of her mother’s blue eyes.
As she made her way across the gallery, she smiled automatically and exchanged a few words here and there with people she recognized. She even managed a short interview with the reporter from Harper’s. But all the time she wondered why it had to happen tonight. How had Belinda known the Glitter Baby would be reappearing?
Kissy and Michel were scheduled to arrive soon. Their appearance was the point of all this, and Belinda’s presence had thrown it all off balance.
“Fleur Savagar?” A young man dressed in black stopped in front of her and held out a long florist’s box. “A delivery for you.”
Adelaide Abrams appeared at her side like magic. “An admirer?”
“I don’t know.” Fleur flipped open the box and pushed aside the nest of tissue paper. Lying beneath were a dozen long-stemmed white roses…She lifted her head and looked across the gallery. She locked eyes with Belinda and slowly pulled one of the roses from the box.
Belinda’s forehead creased and her shoulders drooped. She stared at the white rose, then turned toward the door and fled from the gallery.
Adelaide poked in the box. “There’s no card.”
“I know who they’re from.” Fleur took in the empty doorway.
“His initials wouldn’t happen to be J.K., would they?” Adelaide asked.
Fleur fixed a bright smile on her face. “Secret admirers are meant to be secret. Especially ones who’ve made a career out of protecting their privacy.”
Adelaide gave her a sly wink. “You’re a good girl, Fleur, despite your occasional lapses.”
As Adelaide disappeared, Fleur shoved the rose back into the box. The cloying smell stuck in her nostrils and clung to her throat. Fleur had been expecting something like this ever since Alexi’s phone call. He was letting her know he hadn’t forgotten anything.
She pushed the lid back on and set the box on a bench. She wanted to stuff it in the nearest trash can, but she couldn’t afford to with Adelaide Abrams looking on. Let her think they came from Jake. He was a big boy, and he could take care of himself. She also needed the publicity, and she didn’t have a single qualm about using him as he’d once used her.
She saw Michel and Kissy standing in the doorway. Michel wore a white tuxedo with a black nylon T-shirt. He’d dressed Kissy in a tiny pink and silver version of a prom dress, perfectly proportioned for her size. She clung to his arm, feminine, helpless, lips slightly pursed as if she were ready to expel a breathless boop-boopy-doop.
Fleur took the long way through the crowd, giving everyone time to watch where she was going. When she reached the doorway, she brushed cheeks with them both and whispered in Michel’s ear that Belinda had just left. He gazed at her searchingly. She had no idea what to tell him.
Kissy and Michel’s entrance coupled with Fleur’s greeting had attracted attention, just as she’d planned. Women’s Wear Daily got to them first, and Fleur made the introductions. Both Michel and Kissy performed like champs, bored sophistication on his part, a frothy cloud of pink and silver exuberance on hers. When they had finished with WWD, Harper’s, and Adelaide Abrams, the three of them circulated through the gallery, stopping to chat with everyone they met. She introduced her brother as Michel Savagar instead of Michael Anton. Not long after they’d been reunited, he’d decided to stop hiding under an assumed name. Michel remained aloof and mysterious while Kissy chattered like a magpie, and Fleur directed the conversation exactly where she wanted it.
“Isn’t my brother the most magnificent designer…? My brother designed my gown. I’m glad you like it…My brother is obscenely talented. I’m trying to get him to share his gift, but he’s so stubborn…”
She responded to questions about Kissy’s identity with a smile. “Isn’t she outrageous? So adorable. One of the Charleston Christies. Michel designed
her dress, too.”
When they asked what Kissy did for a living, Fleur waved an airy hand. “A little acting, but that’s more a hobby than anything else.”
The women’s envious gazes flickered between Fleur’s incredible bronze satin and Kissy’s reimagined prom dress. “My brother has so many women begging him to design for them,” she confided, “but right now he’s only designing for Kissy and me. Confidentially I’m hoping to change that.”
Several people commented on Belinda’s appearance. Fleur answered as briefly as possible and then changed the subject. She told everyone about her new agency—Fleur Savagar and Associates, Celebrity Management—and issued early invitations to the big open house she planned to throw in a few weeks. A good-looking celebrity heart surgeon invited her to dinner the next evening. She accepted. He was charming, and she needed a chance to show off Michel’s iris and blue silk sheath.
By the time they got into the limousine after the party, Fleur was fighting off a headache, and Michel picked up her hand. “You’re exhausted. You don’t have to put yourself through this, you know.”
“Yes, I do. We couldn’t buy this kind of publicity. Besides, it’s long past time I figure out how to live with who I am, and that includes the Glitter Baby.”
She thought of the roses she’d abandoned at the gallery, and suddenly she understood their message as clearly as if Alexi had sent her a letter. He’d kept Belinda out of her life for all these years. Now he’d sent her back.
A week later, the phone calls began. They usually came around two in the morning. When Fleur answered, she heard music turned low in the background—Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Simon and Garfunkel—but the caller never spoke. Fleur had no hard evidence that the calls were coming from Belinda. No scent of Shalimar magically wafted through the telephone lines. But she was certain all the same.
She hung up without saying a word, but the calls began to wear on her, and whenever she turned a corner, she found herself waiting for Belinda to appear.