“Not really, no.”
A couple strolled past, pushing a pram. Late to be out with a baby. All the girls Kate knew in Maidstone with kids were bathing and bed-timing bang on 6:00 p.m. The pram was made from some kind of lightweight tubular steel; it glided past, smooth and streamlined, the man steering.
“What about Alexis, Jean-Paul?” Seeing the woman with the pram, wondering about growing old with no one, these things had made her think of her boss. She couldn’t imagine her with anyone, now or when she was older. She couldn’t put her finger on why, exactly, just that feeling that devoting all her energy to work, something she’d always believed in herself . . . maybe it wasn’t good for one’s old age?
“What about ’er?” he said with not so much arrogance as curiosity, perplexed as to why Kate could be asking about her.
“Well, are you seeing her?”
“No. We went out a couple of times. Ages ago. I was joking that night. . . . But you know, Alexis I actually ’ave a lot of respect for. There are many things about ’er. . . .”
“Like what?”
“Well, she ’as a boyfriend, a poet. Frederick Wallner. She goes to a poetry club every Tuesday night. But you can’t tell anyone at work, eh?”
“Why not?”
“She’s embarrassed. She thinks they will laugh at ’er if it’s not something to do with fashion, or you know . . . a shop opening.”
“And Frederick? How does she keep him a secret?”
“No. It’s ’im who keeps ’er a secret. It’s not a good look for a poet, a serious academic to go out with someone who works on, you know, women’s magazines. Zat’s why she has, you know, the moostache. She thinks it makes ’er look clever.”
They laughed. It was impossible to understand how someone so cool in her world could be so uncool in another, or vice versa.
When he laughed, she noticed Jean-Paul wasn’t far off from his description of how he wanted to look when he was old, his face full of character, his smile pushing up the Serge Gainsbourg bags under his eyes. His hair was even a little bit gray at the temples. She wouldn’t mind if he kissed her right now. She wondered if he knew.
A party. Jean-Paul wanted to drop by at a friend’s house in SoHo. Portia London was an art dealer who was having a gathering of twenty or so of her closest friends.
"Five minutes, I promise. I want you to see . . . I don’t know . . . people.”
They had to tap in a security code to gain access to the lift. It took Jean-Paul five attempts to remember it. They giggled as they entered the lift, then got out on the wrong floor and had to walk down a flight of stairs. Outside Portia’s apartment was a rail where her guests had put their coats. Jean-Paul hung his up, then tried on a couple of others. A Hermès biker jacket ("That’s just wrong!” said Kate) and a denim vintage Gucci that was way too small.
The apartment was midway up a tower block, with a corner view. Inside, it was small, minimalist, with nothing but a couple of paintings on the wall, an open fireplace, and cream leather sofas, the kind that you could join up in fifty different configurations and end up with either a bed, or a sofa with a footrest, or a big table to put magazines on, but still not be comfortable for a TV dinner. A waiter passed drinks round self-consciously. In spite of managing to contain such a large sofa, the flat wasn’t much bigger than Kate’s bedroom in Maidstone.
“Portia, ’oo did this painting?” asked Jean-Paul to their hostess, a woman so thin her cheeks were concave. She was wearing a tight black dress. Her matching black bob cut harshly into her face.
She smiled enthusiastically and sat down beside them, stroking Kate’s legs. Kate prayed they weren’t too stubbly. “Oh, darling, I’m so glad you asked. Miraval Esposito! I bought it in Mexico City—isn’t it joyous? He’s dead already, but he’s going to be sooooo big in a couple of years!”
She moved on.
Jean-Paul looked at Kate apologetically. She burst out laughing.
“I promised, five minutes only. Let’s go. I keep my promises.”
At the top of the Empire State Building they gazed at the view.
"Oh, my God, it’s just like
Sleepless in Seattle
! What was that film it was based on? You know, the black-and-white one, where she can’t get up from her chair because she’s been knocked over in an accident, and he doesn’t realize, at least I think he does but only right at the end, and—oh, you must know the one?”
“I know, I think I know. . . . It will come to me.” He looked around anxiously at the small crowd in the bar. “It’s not too cheesy for you? Being here, you know, with tourists?”
“I love tourists!” She did. It was wonderful to be doing nothing, hanging out with normal people, not thinking about work, or Patty, or anything like that. Every so often she’d see a helicopter swooping past on some night tour. She felt as if they were all in it together somehow, all celebrating the delights this incredible city had to offer.
“Will you kiss me, Kate?”
He leaned forward and gently kissed her lips. She felt that same feeling she’d felt recently with JK3; like the drunken warmth of alcohol spreading through her veins, only better, so much better than any Bacardi Breezer, drowning her whole body in a seminauseous state of delirium, not wanting to come up for air.
Jean-Paul broke off suddenly and looked into her eyes. The city lights glittered in the reflection of the glass behind him:
“An Affair to Remember.”
“What? Well, yes, obviously, I hope so . . . what a lovely thing to say!”
"The movie, Kate!”
“Oh! Thank you!” She laughed. She put her arms round him impetuously. “Let’s go dancing!”
“Where?” He wasn’t expecting the tourist to be taking charge of the itinerary.
“My place.”
twenty-two
“I don’t know where to start.” Alexis was sitting at her desk, her chin resting on her hands. For once she wasn’t trying to edit copy while she was talking. It was a sunny day. The light streaming in from the window behind her spotlit the pages of white paper, neatly printed out in a pile, that sat squarely before her. Kate’s copy.
For a split second Kate wondered whether Alexis had somehow found out about her night out with Jean-Paul. What if he’d been lying, and she still had the hots for him? Now that she knew him—well, she didn’t know him, but she felt since last night she had a much better idea—it was hard to put those two together in the first place. Maybe it had been a career move on his part: get a glowing review of one of his shows in return for a couple of dinners, maybe more, with the editor? If that was why, or how, then at least he now had some respect for Alexis, and in that sense something good had come out of their association. She certainly couldn’t imagine him being with Alexis the way he had been with her. Dancing naked in her apartment to Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça Plane pour Moi.” Falling into bed to Bill Wyman’s “Je Suis un Rock Star.” She couldn’t believe he’d picked out that record for her. She giggled inwardly, tried to concentrate on the matter—seemingly a serious matter—at hand.
Judging by the somber look on Alexis’s face, it looked like she’d have to make some copy changes. That was inevitable. Changes were good. But what?
“If there’s a problem with some of the language,” she started, cautiously, “I think I used the word ‘mutilations,’ for example, which might be a bit strong, but I’m sure we could get it checked over with the legal department.”
Alexis motioned her to stop talking.
Kate didn’t know what to say anyway. She hadn’t been expecting this. It had come from her heart, all of it, and somehow she’d thought that Alexis would have appreciated her honesty, her candor, her openness.
Alexis sighed, her hand over her mouth. She looked worried.
“Kate . . . Kate.”
“Yes?”
“I appointed you to write about beauty. To give our readers, well . . . something different, yes, but something they wanted to read about. Now, I have issues with what you have written, serious issues, which”—she reached over for a cigarette, lit it with her lighter, and inhaled deeply—“which go beyond the subject matter, and I’ll tell you about those in a minute. Those issues alone mean this article can never be printed.”
Kate felt anger, frustration rising like a tide.
"What? Alexis, you don’t understand! There’s a woman’s life at stake here!”
Alexis motioned her to be silent. The way she scowled told Kate she meant business. “Shut up and listen!” she snapped.
No one had ever spoken to Kate like that before. Not Brian Palmers, not her mother, not anyone. It was unacceptable.
“Alexis, I really don’t think you should—”
“Shut up and listen!”
Alexis shouted at her, animatedly. From outside the glass wall of her office, Kate could feel the entire office looking up.
Alexis stood up, put both hands on the desk, and leaned over to Kate. Up this close, Kate could see the open pores around her nose, the lines in her forehead. Her lips were dry. Anger aged her.
“Do you even realize what you’ve done?” She wasn’t shouting now, but speaking quietly, rapidly, furiously, in a way that was even more frightening than when she had been shouting. “I mean, do you, Kate? Kate, we are not here to save the world! You are not a reporter! And this is not some feminist magazine! ”
Kate sat, stunned. Of course she was a reporter, and weren’t all women’s magazines feminist magazines, if one went with the definition of feminism that advocated equal rights for all women? What was she talking about?
Alexis picked up Kate’s copy and threw it in the bin. Kate drew a sharp intake of breath.
“And don’t patronize me just because I’m a fucking American! ” she shouted.
“I’m sorry?” Kate really didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Quoting Graham Greene to me, like I’ve never read a book before. Well, you know what, Kate, he also said, in that very same novel,
The Quiet American
, I believe, that the biggest mistake a reporter can make is to become
’engagé
’—you know what that means? Engaged! Involved! I might add the words ‘bigoted,’ ‘subjective’ . . . these are all the things that sprang to mind when I read your copy.”
She really didn’t like it then.
“Besides which, how dare you change an assignment without telling me about it first! How dare you!”
True, there was that, but Clarissa had been so sure. . . .
Alexis reached down into the bin and pulled the copy out again. She whacked it with the back of her hand.
“And another thing . . . you write about ‘egos’ and ‘God complexes.’ Does it not occur to you that most men and women who have any degree of talent—politicians, poets, actors, and yes . . . little upstart journalists who think they know better than anyone else—that they have egos, too? That it’s these same egos that allow them to develop and nurture that talent? What kind of a dumb argument is that?”
She paced around to Kate’s side of the desk and whacked the copy down before her.
“And another thing, did it ever occur to you that this supplement is sponsored by the very people—plastic surgeons—you are attacking? How did you think you were going to get past that one? Do you think they really want to save the world, too?”
“I’m really sorry. Clarissa did mention there might be a problem there. . . .”
“Shh! I’m not done yet!” She picked up a remote control on her desk, pointed it at the neat flat-screen TV to the side of her desk, and hit Play.
“Above all, Kate, this is the real reason I’m so . . . pissed!” She moved back to her desk and sat down, head in hands again. She looked up at her and said, calmly, “I take it you didn’t see the news this morning?”
What was going on? Alexis began to shake, as the screen came to life, black lines fizzling quickly into a clear picture. Vivienne Fox’s tidy bob and huge smile came on-screen. A yellow strap line blazed her CNN name and file, with a “Live from Los Angeles” banner along the bottom of the TV screen. She appeared to be standing in the entrance of JK3’s clinic, though there was no sign of him.
“Well, Roger, it’s been a great victory today for one of Los Angeles’s best-loved plastic surgeons. Very exciting, but in the early hours of this morning, two women were arrested for a number of charges, all connected with the surgeon to the stars, John Kingsley the Third.”
The camera cut to an image of JK, laughing outside the Face-Off convention, then switched back quickly to a shot of a tower block of flats that looked suspiciously like Patty’s. It was dawn, the sky a sleepy gray-white with yellow undertones. Lights flashed like those same thunderbolts of lightning Kate had seen before, only this time they were coming from a cluster of police cars gathered near the front of the building.
“Patty Patrice and Aurelie Spencer have been charged with offenses under the California State libel laws. It appears the two were approaching journalists with claims that the surgeon had damaged the face of Patty Patrice. An ex-girlfriend of Kingsley’s, Ms. Patrice had been sending images of herself to selected journalists made up to look as if her face had been ruined by John Kingsley’s surgery. Her mission? To ruin the reputation of Dr. Kingsley. . . .”
Vivienne must have been fooled. They’d all been fooled. There was no way you could do that with makeup!
As if anticipating the viewer’s disbelief, the camera cut to an image of Patty, scarred and damaged, then showed police ripping off a latex mask from her face to reveal the “before” picture of Patty, like a Scooby-Doo episode now come to life. Suddenly, the camera was showing Aurelie, looking fierce, angry, and unrepentant as police cuffed her and walked her over to a van.
“Her lover, Aurelie Spencer, was able to act as Patty’s accomplice thanks to her position as John Kingsley’s personal assistant. In a plot that sounds like something from a John Grisham novel, the two had planned to ruin the surgeon’s reputation in revenge for perceived slights to Ms. Patrice during his monthlong romance with her. A hoax like this could have cost the surgeon millions in loss of earnings, especially as the pair had planned to disappear just as soon as any articles were published, making it virtually impossible for John Kingsley to defend his reputation in a court of law. The surgeon said today, from the island retreat of Brazilian super-surgeon Professor Paracato, that he was relieved and grateful to the FBI for putting an end to these plans before they’d managed to do any damage, and that he hoped Ms. Patrice and Ms. Spencer would seek psychiatric help for their various problems. . . .”