Glitter Baby (Wynette, Texas #3)(70)

“This escapade has cost you a fortune,” Gretchen said. “The broken contracts. The lawsuits.”

Fleur tried to slip a hand into her jeans pocket, but the fabric was stretched so tight she could only manage a thumb. She didn’t care. If she weighed her former one hundred and thirty pounds, she’d lose even her fleeting feelings of safety. “Send the bill to Alexi,” she said. “He has two million dollars of mine that should cover it. But I imagine you’ve already found that out.” Alexi knew where she was. He was the one who’d sent Gretchen here. The room closed in on her.

“I’m taking you back to New York,” Gretchen said, “and getting you into a fat farm. It’ll be months before you’ll be in shape to work. That awful hair is going to hurt you, so don’t think I can get your old price, and don’t think that Parker can get you another film right away.”

“I’m not going back,” Fleur said. It felt odd to speak English.

“Of course you are. Look at this place. I can’t believe you actually work here. My God, after Sunday Morning Eclipse came out, some of the top directors in Hollywood wanted you.” She stabbed the stem of her sunglasses into the pocket of her suit jacket so the lenses hung out. “This silly quarrel between you and Belinda has gone on long enough. Mothers and daughters have problems all the time. There’s no reason to make such a thing out of it.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Grow up, Fleur. This is the twentieth century, and no man is worth splitting up two women who care about each other.”

So that was what everyone believed, that she and Belinda had quarreled over Jake. She barely thought about him anymore. Occasionally she saw a picture of him in a magazine, usually scowling at the photographer who’d invaded his privacy. Sometimes he was with a beautiful woman, and her stomach always did an unpleasant flip. It was like stumbling unexpectedly across a dead cat or bird. The corpse was harmless, but it still made you jump.

Jake’s acting career was stronger than ever, but even though Sunday Morning Eclipse had earned him a screenwriting Oscar, he’d stopped writing. No one seemed to know why, and Fleur didn’t care.

Gretchen made no effort to conceal her scorn. “Look at yourself. You’re twenty-two years old, hiding away in the middle of nowhere, living like a pauper. Your face is all you have, and you’re doing your best to ruin that. If you don’t listen to me you’re going to wake up one morning, old and alone, satisfied with whatever crumbs you can pick up. Is that what you want? Are you that self-destructive?”

Was she? The worst of the pain was gone. She could even look at a newspaper picture of Belinda and Alexi with a certain detachment. Of course her mother had gone back to him. Alexi was one of the most important men in France, and Belinda needed the limelight the way other people needed oxygen. Sometimes Fleur thought about returning to New York, but she could never model again, and what would she do there? The fat kept her safe, and it was easier to drift through the present than to rush into an uncertain future. Easier to forget about the girl who’d been so determined to make everybody love her. She didn’t need other people’s love anymore. She didn’t need anyone but herself.

“Leave me alone,” she said to Gretchen. “I’m not going back.”

“I have no intention of leaving until—”

“Go away.”

“You can’t keep on like—”

“Get out!”

Gretchen let her eyes slide over the ugly man’s shirt, over the bulging jeans. She assessed her, judged her, and Fleur felt the exact moment when Gretchen Casimir decided she was no longer worth the effort.

“You’re a loser,” she said. “You’re sad and pitiful, living a dead-end life. Without Belinda, you’re nothing.”

The venom behind Gretchen’s words didn’t make them any less true. Fleur had no ambition, no plans, no pride of accomplishment—nothing but a mute kind of survival reflex. Without Belinda, she was nothing.

An hour later, she fled the photo shop and boarded the next train out of Strasbourg.



Fleur’s twenty-third birthday came and went. A week before Christmas, she threw some things into a duffel bag, picked up her Eurail pass, and left Lille to board a train to Vienna. France was the only place in Europe where she could work legally, but she had to get away for a few days or she’d suffocate. She could no longer remember how it felt to be slim and strong, or what it was like not to worry about paying the rent on a shabby room with a rust-stained sink and damp patches on the ceiling.

She chose Vienna on a whim after she read The World According to Garp. A place with bears on unicycles and a man who could only walk on his hands seemed just about right. She found a cheap room in an old Viennese pension with a gilded birdcage elevator the concierge told her had been broken by the Germans during the war. After lugging her duffel bag up six flights of stairs, she opened the door to a minuscule room with scarred furniture and wondered which war he meant. She peeled off her clothes, pulled the coverlet over her, and, as the wind rattled the windows and the elevator creaked, she went to sleep.

The next morning she walked through the Sch?nbrunn Palace and then had an inexpensive lunch at the Leupold near Rooseveltplatz. A waiter set a plate of tiny Austrian dumplings called Nockerln in front of her. They were delicious, but she had a hard time getting them down. There were no bears on unicycles in Vienna, no men who walked on their hands, only the same old problems that no amount of running away could solve. She’d never been the bravest, the fastest, or the strongest. It had all been an illusion.