Lipstick Jungle

  “No, you wouldn’t have,” Wendy said. “It’s different if they’re your own kids.”

  Everybody always said that, and Victory supposed it was true, she thought, looking up at Wendy’s billboard again. But it still didn’t make her want to have the experience herself.

  In any case, Wendy was arriving in Cannes on Tuesday morning for the premiere of her movie that evening. She was also staying at the Hotel du Cap, and had arranged to get the suite right next to Victory’s. They were going to open the connecting door and have a two-day sleepover. A very expensive and glamorous sleepover, which was, Wendy said, the only thing she’d had to look forward to for weeks.

  They were going to have so much fun, Victory agreed. She took out her cell phone and texted Wendy a message: “on way to par-tee. am passing ur billbrd in cannes. fab, fab, fab. congrats. cn’t wait 2 c u.”

  She hit the send button, and was startled by the sound of tapping on the window of the Mercedes. A bedraggled child—a little girl with blond hair that hung down like strings on either side of her face—was hitting the window with a bunch of red roses. Victory looked at her sadly. These pitiful children were everywhere—on the streets and in the restaurants and shops, trying to sell roses to tourists. Some of them couldn’t have been more than five or six years old; it was terrible. All weekend, Victory had been wondering what kind of country allowed children to sell things on the streets, especially a country where the inhabitants claimed to love children. It was typical French hypocrisy, she thought, lowering the window. From outside came the sound of music and a raucous party that was taking place somewhere across the street. “Voulez-vous acheter une rose?” the little girl asked. She stared wonderingly into the car, taking in Victory’s gown and necklace, a fifteen-carat teardrop-shaped diamond pendant that Pierre had arranged to have lent to her for the evening.

  “Absolument. Merci,” Victory said. She opened her tiny handbag, which contained five hundred Euros, her black American Express card, a tube of lipstick, and a compact, and handed the girl a hundred-Euro note. “Ah, Madame,” the little girl exclaimed. “Vous êtes très gentile. Et très belle. Vous êtes une movie star?”

  “Non, une fashion designer,” Victory said with a smile. The car inched forward, and the little girl clung to the window, trotting by the side of the car. “Attendez. Le traffic,” Victory called out in alarm. The little girl laughed—she was missing most of her front teeth—and in the next second had disappeared into the line of cars behind them.

  “Madame,” Mr. Hulot said, shaking his head. “You should not do that. It encourages them. Now they will surround the car, like the pigeon . . .”

  “They’re only children,” Victory said.

  “They are . . . how you say, little pirates. They put their hands all over the car and Mr. Berteuil doesn’t like it.”

  Handprints? “Tant pis,” Victory said. If Pierre Berteuil didn’t like her helping out a little girl, that was too bad. He didn’t own her, and just because he was rich didn’t mean he should always get his own way, she thought wryly, remembering that those were nearly the same words she’d used two weeks ago, when she had broken up with Lyne Bennett. Oh, Lyne, she thought, with a shrug of her shoulders. She looked out the window again, frowning. He wasn’t so bad . . .

  And for a moment, she suddenly wished he were there, with her. Going to her big party. It would have been nice.

  Now where were those thoughts coming from? she wondered, rearranging the contents of her bag. She’d barely even thought about Lyne for the past two weeks. The minute she’d broken up with him, he had disappeared from her consciousness, which had to be a sign that she had done the right thing. Still, why did that always happen to her with men? When she first met a man and started seeing him, she was always wildly interested at the beginning, thinking that finally, she might have met the right guy—and then she began to get bored. Was she the only woman who eventually found men and relationships a bit dull? Or was it simply that, when it came to relationships, she was more like a prototypical male than a female? She nibbled her fingernail in consternation. The truth was that lately she’d begun to find it all a bit . . . disturbing.

  But who would ever have imagined that Lyne Bennett would end up becoming clingy? He was one of the most successful men on the planet, but in the end, she’d found herself wondering why he couldn’t just be more like Nico or Wendy, who were also incredibly successful, but knew how to let other people be, and do their work. Ever since she’d fled Lyne’s house in the Bahamas for that meeting in Paris, Lyne had been all over her, calling constantly and making unexpected appearances at her showroom, where he would sit in her office, reading newspapers and doing business on his cell phone.

  “Lyne,” she’d finally had to say, on the third occasion in which he had decided to pop by—at four in the afternoon. “Don’t you have places to go? People to see? Don’t you have anything to do?”

  “I’m doing it, babe,” he said, holding up his BlackBerry. “Mobile office, remember? Mod-tech. No one’s chained to a desk anymore.”

  “Modern technology is not what it’s cracked up to be,” Victory said, giving him a look that indicated that she wished he were at his desk.

  “Oh, hello, Lyne,” her assistant Clare said casually, coming into her office.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Lyne said. “How are things working out with that new guy?”

  This was very strange. “Do you and Lyne spend a lot of time talking?” she asked Clare, later.

  “He’s chatty.” Clare shrugged. “He calls sometimes for you and when you’re not here . . .”

  “He calls himself?”

  “Sure. Why not?” Clare asked. “He’s kind of nice. Or at least it seems like he’s trying to be nice.”

  “ ‘Nice’ is not a word I’d use to describe Lyne Bennett,” Victory said.

  “Well, he’s fun. You have to admit that. He is pretty funny. And it seems like he’s crazy about you. He’s always watching you, and when you’re not here, he constantly asks how you’re doing.”

  Weird. Very weird, Victory thought.

  And then there was the incident with the hip-hop artist, Venetia, who was starring in one of his cosmetics campaigns. Lyne, Venetia, and her entourage of four showed up unannounced at Victory’s showroom one afternoon. Normally, she wouldn’t have minded, keeping an open door policy in which it was tacitly understood that clients and friends could drop in unexpectedly. Under regular circumstances, she would have been happy to show Venetia the collection herself, and to have lent her whatever she wanted. But that afternoon she had Muffie Williams from B et C in her office, an almost unheard-of occurrence, and they were in an intense discussion about the upcoming spring line. She couldn’t ask Muffie to stand aside for a celebrity, a point of honor that Lyne didn’t seem to understand. “Show Venetia that green dress, babe,” Lyne insisted. “You know, the one that I like . . .”

  Muffie stared at Lyne as if he had just run over her cat, and when Lyne didn’t get the message, she stood up and began briskly gathering up her things. “We’ll do this another day, dear,” she said to Victory.

  “Muffie, I’m sorry,” Victory said helplessly. She glared at Lyne.

  “What?” he asked. “What’d I do wrong? Am I not supposed to like the dress?”

  “How could you do that?” Victory asked him later. They were in the backseat of his SUV, dressed in black tie, heading to a charity benefit at the Metropolitan Museum. “I was in a meeting with Muffie Williams, who just happens to be one of the most important women in fashion . . .”

  “Hey, I was only trying to help. I’d thought you’d like dressing Venetia. She’s everywhere. She might wear one of your dresses to the Grammys . . .”

  “Oh Lyne,” she sighed with frustration. “It isn’t that. It’s just that you don’t seem to respect what I do.”

  “Not respect it?” he asked. “I love what you do, babe. You’re the best . . .”

  “What if I just showed up at your office???
? she said. She looked out the window and glared. “I’m sorry, Lyne, but you’re banned from the showroom from now on.”

  “Oh, I get it,” he said. “This is about the money, isn’t it?”

  “Money?”

  “Yeah. Now that you’re going to make twenty-five million dollars, you think you don’t need me anymore.”

  “I never needed you. And especially not for your money. Frankly, Lyne, your money is not that interesting.”

  “And yours is?” Lyne said, refusing to take her seriously. “Are you saying that your money is more interesting than my money?”

  “It’s more interesting to me,” she said sulkily. She squirmed in her seat. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. It is about the money. I don’t want to be with a man who has as much money as you do. Because it’s all about you. You keep trying to drag me into your world, when I’m perfectly happy with the world I’ve made for myself.”

  “Well,” Lyne said. “I don’t really know how to respond to that.”

  “Look,” she said, trying to explain. “It’s like this. Your life is like a big Broadway show. And my life is like a smaller, off-Broadway show. It might not be as big, but it’s my show, and it’s just as interesting as your show. Us trying to be together is like trying to combine the two shows. There’s only one result: the little show will get eaten up and absorbed by the big show. The big show might be happy, but the little show would be miserable. The little show wouldn’t be able to live with itself . . .”

  “I thought you were a fashion designer,” Lyne said, grinning.

  She smiled sarcastically. Would the man ever give up? “I know you know what I’m saying . . .”

  “What I’m hearing is that you seem to think I’m a Broadway show. You’ve got to speak plain English to me, babe. I’m the guy who doesn’t get subtleties, remember?”

  He patted her hand triumphantly. Lyne’s stubborn inability to sense other people’s feelings was something she’d berated him about the week before, and now he was trying to be clever and turn it around on her.

  “The problem is, how can I be a successful woman when I’m with an even more successful man?” she asked. “I can’t. It’s like my success doesn’t count.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Lyne asked, smirking. “I thought that was what all you women wanted. Being with a man who was more successful than you are. Isn’t that what this whole big stink for women has been about for the last twenty years? Successful women who can’t find men because there aren’t enough men who are more successful than they are, and the few who are, don’t want to be with them? Isn’t the big complaint that most successful guys want to be with bimbos? So considering all that, you ought to be happy, kiddo. You grabbed the brass ring, and the brass ring is named Lyne Bennett.”

  The gall of the man! she thought, looking at him, outraged. “That thinking is so early nineties, Lyne. I don’t know any successful women who think like that. Most of the successful women I know want to be with men who are less successful . . .”

  “So they can boss them around?”

  “No. Because they don’t want to be bossed.” She sat back in the seat. “It’s an unavoidable fact that the person who has the most money in the relationship has the control.”

  “That may be,” Lyne said, “but if they’re a decent person, they never let the other person know.”

  She looked at him, startled. For all his swagger, there were moments when Lyne had unexpected flashes of decency. Maybe she did judge him too harshly . . . after all, it wasn’t his fault he was rich. It wasn’t necessarily a personality flaw.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” he said. “You want me to come into your world. So why don’t you take me up to that house in the country you’re always talking about.”

  “Okay, I will,” she said. “But my whole house is about the size of your living room. Probably smaller.”

  “Are you saying that I’m a snob?” Lyne asked with pretend horror.

  “I’m saying you’ll probably be bored out of your skull. There’s nothing there—you can’t even get decent cheese.”

  “Funny,” he said, shaking his head. “I wasn’t planning to go for the cheese.”

  Taking Lyne to her country house was a scenario Victory had been hoping to avoid. Her little cottage, not much bigger than 1,500 square feet, was her sanctuary, located in a remote hamlet in northern Connecticut that boasted a bakery, a post office, a general store, and a gas station. It wasn’t the least bit glamorous; there were no parties to go to, not even a decent restaurant within miles. But that’s what she liked about it. When she went to the country, she wore old clothing and glasses, and sometimes wouldn’t wash her hair for days. She looked at bugs and studied birds through a pair of binoculars, consulting a field guide on the different kinds of woodpeckers. The house sat in the middle of nine acres, and had a tiny pool and a pond. At night, she would listen to the throaty mating call of frogs. It could be, she imagined, intensely boring, but she was never bored there. Who could be, with all that nature around? But would Lyne Bennett understand that? Not likely. He would come in wearing one of his thousand-dollar Etro cashmere sweaters, and he would ruin it all.

  But maybe, she thought, that was the solution. Lyne would see the real Victory, and he wouldn’t be interested anymore.

  Lyne wanted Bumpy to drive them up on Friday night, but Victory refused. “We’re going in my car, and I’m driving.”

  Lyne looked slightly shocked when she pulled up in front of his building in her PT Cruiser, but he didn’t say anything, instead making a great show of fastening his seat belt and pushing the seat back, as if bracing himself for the ride ahead. “So I guess if you sell your company, you’ll probably buy another car,” he said pointedly.

  “I thought about it,” she said, pulling out into the traffic, “but I’m a pretty practical person at heart. I mean, a car is really about vanity, isn’t it? It’s not an investment—it depreciates as soon as you drive it off the lot. You can’t sell a car for what you paid for it, like jewelry or furniture or rugs.”

  “My little mogul,” Lyne said, grasping onto the dashboard as she swerved through traffic.

  “I like to keep in touch with what’s important.”

  “All women do, don’t they? It’s one of those boring rules about being a woman. Why not keep in touch with what’s frivolous?”

  “That’s why I have you,” she said.

  Lyne reached over and started fiddling with the dials on the middle console.

  “Excuse me?” Victory said.

  “Just wondering if this car has air-conditioning.”

  “It does, but I hate it. Even if it’s ninety degrees out, I drive with the windows open.” And to prove her point, she opened the windows, blasting Lyne with warm air.

  * * *

  THE WEEKEND WASN’T A total disaster until Saturday evening. Up until then, Lyne had been doing his very best to show that he too had a different, more relaxed side, but that may have been partially due to the fact that there was no cell phone service within a thirty-mile radius. On Saturday morning, they went to a local agricultural fair, and instead of looking at the rabbits and roosters, Lyne kept looking at his cell phone. “How can you not have service up here?” he asked. “I’ve used this phone on a remote island off the coast of Turkey, but I can’t get service in Connecticut?”

  “Darling, that is so boring,” Victory said. “Complaining about your lack of cell phone service. You’ve got to let it go.”

  “Okay,” Lyne said. He gamely stuck his finger into a rooster’s cage, and was immediately pecked. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his finger. “What kind of a place is this? No cell phone service and killer chickens.”

  “Let’s go check out the tractor pull,” she said.

  “In these shoes?” he asked, lifting up one foot. He was wearing expensive Italian loafers.

  “Hey, watch out,” called a woman in fancy dress, who was sitting astride a horse. Lyne jumped to the si
de, stepping in some kind of manure, which Victory immediately surmised was from a cow. Lyne smiled gamely, only looking down at his shoe about every fifteen seconds.

  “And now, here’s John in the five-horse garden master, making his first attempt to pull four hunnerd pounds,” the announcer said over the loudspeaker.

  “I love this, don’t you?” Victory asked.

  She looked to Lyne for confirmation, but he seemed to have suddenly disappeared. Damn him, she thought. He was just like a child who was always running off and getting lost. She crossed her arms. She wasn’t going to look for him. He was a grown-up and she wasn’t his mother.

  She watched the tractor pull, her irritation and panic over what might have happened to him increasing by the minute. And then she heard the announcer say, “Here’s Line, or Lynn, can’t figure out exactly how to pronounce this fella’s name, making his first attempt at four hunnerd pounds . . .”

  It couldn’t be. But it was. There was Lyne, sitting astride a tractor, grinding the engine as he attempted to race it across the muddy track. He made it to the finish line and she cheered, thinking he was so competitive, he couldn’t resist entering any sort of contest.

  Lyne made it into the semi-finals, but was eliminated when smoke started coming out of the engine of his tractor when he was pulling eight hundred pounds.

  “Hey, did you see that, babe?” he said breathlessly, full of himself. “I sure showed those local farmers a thing or two, eh?”

  “Where did you get the tractor?” she asked.