We stand shoulder to shoulder, surrounded by guys in their twenties and fifteen-year-old girls in cutoff T-shirts. Exposed navels. Illegal thoughts.
“How old are these girls, anyway?” I ask.
“Impossible to tell without carbon-dating,” Breffni says.
“Young enough to need a permission slip from their parents.” Crispen grabs my head and whispers in my ear. “See that guy?” He points into the crowd.
“The guy with the blond hair?”
“Yeah, he’s garbage. Can’t walk. About as much talent as a Japanese rock star. Don’t trust him. Last time we were at a shoot he gave me a piece of gum that makes your breath smell like puke. All day everybody kept moving away from me, and I couldn’t figure out why no one wanted to be on my side of the group shot. He said it was a joke, and we all laughed about it, but I heard him later in the change room talking to one of the ad guys about my stinking breath. But don’t worry, pretty boy,” he says in the general direction of the tall blond, “when you least expect it...”
“Watch your tongue, C.J.,” Breffni says. “If people hear you and he happens to break his face, they’ll be after you.” To me, he adds, “Not only do the walls have ears, they have fists. It’s a small world, modelling. Everybody knows everybody.”
“Payback...” Crispen nods, still glaring at the blond. Then he peers at me. “How did you get into this crazy business, anyway?”
“It’s a long story.”
“We have forever.”
“Well...the abridged text? This girl Melody got me into it.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Ex-girlfriend. She told me I was good-looking enough to be a model. I wanted to find out if that was true. So I did.”
“And how’d you end up here?”
“The Faces contest.”
“You won Faces?”
The tone of incredulity whenever I mention Faces is beginning to grate. “No. Manson spotted me and told me I could work here. No guaranteed contract or anything.” I look at Crispen. “What about you? How’d you get here?”
“Later. I think Rianne just called my name.”
Crispen pushes through the throng and disappears into the room. I follow behind him to the silver doors. They aren’t closed all the way, and through the crack I glimpse flashes of Crispen as he struts for his hidden audience. It’s the strangest walk I’ve ever seen, in that he doesn’t have one. He just walks the way he walks—lopsided, two full sneakers of attitude, and fully toothpicked.
“Chelsea spotted him in a bar in North Carolina.” Breffni is beside me, peeking through the doors.
“What was Crispen doing in North Carolina? And what was Chelsea doing there?”
“Chelsea? I’m not sure. I think his lover at the time was a freshman at one of the universities. He used to fly to Raleigh every second weekend. Crispen was going to school there till he got kicked out.”
“For what?”
“Not my place to tell. You’ll have to ask him.”
Breffni and I each get a door in the forehead as Crispen pushes against them from the inside.
“Already?” I ask. He couldn’t have been in there more than three minutes.
“It only takes five seconds to say no and two minutes to explain why. I’ll meet you guys outside.”
“Stacey?” Rianne flaps her hand at me. My turn.
Eva is disappointingly plain. She’s a tanned, greying woman, wrinkled like her green scarf. She smells of cigar, and her eyebrows are pulled taut like bows. “Hello, dear. Please sit,” she says in an accent I assume is Greek. Her mouth moves, but her eyebrows don’t. She motions to the stool in front of her.
I hand her my book. She flips through without lingering on any of the shots. The kiss of indifference. Hope evaporates like milk.
“Very nice, thank you. Would you walk for me, please?”
The room has its own mini-ramp, raised carpeted blocks that form a capital L. I do my best, but between Breffni’s advice and Crispen’s example, my confident walk becomes a limp. My hips are out of joint, my arms feel six feet long. They swish uselessly at my sides, and my smile at the top of the L catches her checking the clock on the wall. I would have done better to crawl along the ramp on all fours or wriggle up and down it like a snake. At least I would have arched those impossible eyebrows, earned a story over cocktails back in Greece. My shoulders slump, my feet are broken. I keep moving until she delivers the coup de grâce—a curt thank-you. Returning to my perch on the stool, I’m ready to be dismissed.
“You seemed much more relaxed at the end. That’s good.”
“I guess resignation can be a relaxing influence.”
She smiles. “You have a nice look but not much experience. And, to be honest, there isn’t a big market for blacks with us right now. But if you plan on coming to Greece, please give us a call.”
She doesn’t specify who “us” is, or give me any way of reaching them, but it’s better than “Are you sure you want to be a model?”—the line one of my friends in Nepean was slapped with at his last go-see.
I slide off the stool, feeling as if I’m still on the ramp—eight inches off the ground, drunk on adrenaline. I’m more excited by this first failure in Toronto than I was by my first success in Nepean. I might have struck out, but at least I’m in the game. I push through the doors, too hard maybe, nailing a peeping model on my way out.
Chelsea Manson’s goatee is gone and his hair is now silver, but he’s still wearing black and laughing at everything. Like those sinister characters in black-and-white movies who find everything funny. Then he stops laughing. “But where’s Simien? He hasn’t checked in for a couple of days.”
I shrug. “He...I haven’t seen him yet. He doesn’t really live with us anymore.” I wonder if I’ve said too much.
“Well, where the hell is he then? He missed a shoot yesterday. Just didn’t show up. He’s never done that before. Did you give him the message?”
“I never got any message. I just got in yesterday.”
“Right, right.”
Manson laughs. “But listen,” he says, scribbling a date, time, and name. “This is for Thursday. Make sure he gets it. His phone isn’t working, his pager isn’t working. I’m thinking about sending pigeons.” He laughs again. “But enough of that. How did it go with Eva?”
“She told me to look her up if I ever get to Greece.”
“Too bad. Well, don’t worry. You’re beautiful. We’ll get you ready in time for Kameleon.”
“What’s that?”
“Kameleon? That’s the day Kameleon Jeans comes to town.”
“Who’s that?”
“They’re the hottest company around these days, ad-wise. You remember those spots with the blind albino guy?”
“No.”
“They’re huge.”
“Where’s Kameleon from?”
“Germany, I think.”
“And when are they here?”
“In about two months. Plenty of time. You’ll