Applause. My time’s up.
“And finally, bridal fashions from June Jenny’s and Tuxaco.”
As I hit the stairs, I catch Sandrine’s eye. I follow her gaze over my shoulder, see the beach chair still at the top of the t. Too late. I’m already on my way down, wondering now if Zoë left it there on purpose.
Back inside I start to hang up my clothes, only doing up the important buttons. My collars are ringed with brown sweat, armpits soggy like cereal.
“Keep them on, put them back on!” Tairhun screams. “The finale! Everyone on together when they announce the winner.” He wipes his face with the bandanna draped around his neck. With twelve models furiously changing in a small canvas tent, it’s unspeakably hot. But most of us are sweating from the tension.
I stare at the other male models. Otto, Sandor, and three other guys I’ve worked with but forgotten their names. California blonds, slick-haired Greeks, All-Canadian quarterbacks. Square jaws, undulating abs, even when they aren’t flexing. The stuff of shaving-cream ads and truck commercials. I glance at myself in the small mirror. From this angle I look like a badger. Not like the black guys you see in magazines, videos, those ebony princes with strong noses, bald Negroes with chiselled features. I don’t stop traffic. I’ve been dumped by my last three girlfriends.
I’m a mediocre model. Blessed perhaps with fair mulatto skin, fine features, a ski-jump nose, full lips, Barbie-doll eyelashes. With no chance of winning. Yet here I am, the coloured clown in this lunchtime cabaret, ready for my final tumble. Here because of what? Not because of the money. For three years now I’ve grinned and jigged at every mall in town. Eight-foot-long runways. Freeze modelling, heckled and jeckled by grubby kids, old ladies touching me—is he real?—hockey players flinging boogers from a safe distance, trying to make me laugh. Shoots for National Wildlife magazine, direct-mail catalogues, government brochures, posters for the Tulip Festival. Grocery-store mockups and neighbourhood flyers and isn’t-he-cute family-friend dinners and “I saw you in oh, what was it again” run-ins at the bus stop. I’m in a model’s purgatory, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The poster boy of mediocrity. Mediocrity’s a one-mall town—comfortable and predictable. Every road a dead end.
“Don’t forget the props in the bag by your name tag,” Tairhun says. “Briefcases or purses, kids. Briefcases or purses.”
I rummage through my bag. Cindy’s purse, I see, is orange. She looks at me, looks away. Knowing that, for her, it’s already over. All around I hear the whispered prayers of the has-beens and never-will-bes. No time to pray. A minute and a half to change.
TWO
I have always lusted after white girls, ever since I was old enough to wash my own sheets. Megan Fegan, taller and a little wider than her sister, Lara, but just as easy. Mo, who used to pay for everything. Agi Popescu, the Romanian cosmetician who just had to see me at least three times a week. The girl who worked in the little card store at Pinecrest Mall, whose name I’ve forgotten. Rhonda, whose breasts bounced over me like pink water balloons. Cyanne, who came after me one night with a fork.
This girl must have been a model at some point before she gained the weight. Dark hair, pale white skin. Asleep. A baseball cap, SEX DRIVE, pulled low over her eyes. A copy of the Tao Te Ching has slipped between her thighs. She reminds me of Melody’s ex-roommate, who I desperately wanted to sleep with. A little thicker, much of it in the right places. Once the bathing suits stopped fitting, the agency must have put her out to pasture answering phones and faxing pictures of the younger girls who haven’t yet discovered the pill. I can hear the tico-tico-tac of her headphones from the doorway.
I’m in a small round room with plenty of light streaming in from a large concave window. There’s a gnarled iron table in the centre, and a bench, upholstered in mock Kente cloth, runs along one wall. Facing me, behind the girl, is an enormous white placard, FEYENOORD in yellow lettering, and underneath it in black, PARIS, NEW YORK, MILAN, LOS ANGELES, BUENOS AIRES, TORONTO. The last city is tacked on, seemingly, as an afterthought. And all around the sign are pictures of Feyenoord’s finest, plastered peanut-butter-thick on the walls, hurled at crazy angles to stick where they may.
None of these girls are nude, though many are a nipple shy or a shadow away. The girls are blond mostly, some brown, a few red, an occasional yellow or gumball-green. I see one black girl wearing face paint and a buzz cut, body harder than algebra. Girls crouched in corners, chained to rainy streetlamps, covered in webbing, fur, smoke, scarves. Girls with angel wings, devil horns, boxing gloves, and attitudes. One girl, pale, almost translucent, wearing nothing except a sailor’s hat made of newspaper perched on her hearse-black hair. She’s palming her small breasts, her mouth open, exposing a sliver of tongue, pierced. White teeth. Her naked pubis lurks out of view, cloaked in shadow. She glows like an erotic angel.
“You know, I could make you a copy.”
The girl at the desk, awake now, arches an eyebrow, though most of the sarcasm was lost in the plucking. It’s possible she was the naked sailor.
“You’re late. Almost an hour,” she says.
“I thought...Mr. Manson told me twelve o’clock.”
“Chelsea? He’s lost. I make the bookings. When I say 11:00, that means 10:45. He went out to lunch. Everyone’s out to lunch except me.” She sizes me up. “This won’t take long. Let’s go in the back.”
I hoist my satchel and follow her dumbly, wheeling my suitcase down the dimly lit corridor. Along the right wall are tables littered with black-and-white prints, loupes, and guillotines. On the left, an office and a plushly decorated bathroom with the biggest mirror I’ve ever seen. In front of us, a glass door. On it, a tiny piece of paper taped to it: DO NOT ENTER. BOOKINGS IN PROGRESS. She opens the door.
“I’m Rianne. Have a seat.”
She pulls a rolling chair toward me, sits down herself at a circular desk with four evenly spaced computers. The walls are lined with comp cards—cardboard ones. The good kind. Rows of portfolios on the shelves. Each book with the model’s name labelled plastically to the spine.
“Your book?”
I fish my portfolio out of my satchel. It’s a sombre black volume, with DAVIS-BARRON MODELS INTERNATIONAL emblazoned in letters that aren’t quite gold. Why INTERNATIONAL I’ve never figured out. All the DBMI models I know work in Nepean, though rumour has it they sent a girl to Paris once. I open my book to the first page, hand it over open and facing her the way we’re taught. I don’t know who the hell she is. I give her a smile, but she’s already thumbing through the pictures. In a Harry Rosen suit, serious, the young black executive, the caption MAN AT WORK. In a Georgetown sweatshirt and jeans, walking down the street, oozing boy-next-door, hand waving to an imaginary friend. On a cast-iron stool in black Paul Carville, legs wide, cigarette dangling, James Dean with a tan. Snarling in outrageous plaid, stuffed into a white corner, bare-chested except for a bead necklace and a peace sign. The last shot. Army fatigues, waist-deep in snow, opening a can of army rations with an expression of sheer glee. It made the cover of Guns and Bullets. A joke shot that my agency insists I take out, the picture I always sneak back in. So the client always leaves with a grin.
Rianne snaps my book shut. Grinless. “I’ll have to be honest. First of all, it’s obvious you don’t have much experience. More important, the market for black guys, it’s not really big here yet. Not like New York or Miami. Have you tried there?”
I shake my head, trying to figure out what’s going on.
“Anyway, we already have a couple of guys with the same look.” She points to a group of photos on the wall of men who look nothing like me. “They get pretty much all the work there is around here. Have you heard of Crispen Jonson? No? He’s going to be really big. Huge. The next Simien.”
I’ve heard whispers of Simien. The first black model on the cover of New York Life. The next Tyree.