The Lioness(51)

.?.?.

Katie had met Mary Quant when she’d been filming The Courtesan in London in August, and the designer had made her a black leather miniskirt—just for grins. It wasn’t a costume. And when you were only five feet tall, a skirt with a hemline six or seven inches above the knees was, indeed, mini. Miniature. Katie wore it with white go-go boots (also leather) to the Marquee discotheque one night on a day they hadn’t been filming, and the image had become iconic: checkerboard fashion, one reporter called it. She was with both Quant and Michael Caine in the photo, and David had felt a pang of jealousy. It was unfounded. He knew Katie wasn’t the sort to involve herself with another man, especially now that she was engaged to him, but the idea that she drank with superstar fashion designers and danced with movie stars still left him a little unmoored. He didn’t understand her friendship with Terrance Dutton. When he’d asked her if Terrance was an ex-lover, she’d said no; she viewed him rather, she insisted, a bit like she did her brother, Billy. And while he believed her, he had only barely been able to restrain a remark about how she never draped herself around Billy the way she did around Terrance. She was like a human stole when she was with the other actor.

He saw the photo of Katie and Michael Caine in the Los Angeles Times while having breakfast alone: a cup of coffee at a diner on a side street near the gallery. The fact that he’d ordered two eggs instead of the omelet because it was a quarter cheaper—twenty-five cents—was pathetic and upped the ante on his self-loathing. He had to remind himself that one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars loved him and so he should love himself. Or, at least, not hate himself. But he had to figure out this gallery mess. He thought the publicity around his Russian defector’s painting would drive traffic and sales, but all it did was encourage yet more interest in Nina herself. The painting sold, but she wouldn’t share with him any others. He knew in his heart she’d only allowed him that one—an oil painting of a welder, shirtless, his hair a campfire of red and gold—because she wasn’t going to sleep with him again and it was a farewell gift. She regretted their one night after the reception at the museum, mostly, he supposed, because she thought he was rather pathetic: he understood little of international politics—despite, she said ominously, who his father was, as if she knew far more about him and his family than she had ever let on—and spoke but one language. And, she admitted, until they had met she’d never even heard of his “little gallery.”

Little gallery. It was blistering and dismissive. A dagger.

He and Katie had been dating a couple of weeks at the time. Sort of dating. They’d only gone out to dinner twice, but he had hopes. He told himself he had only wound up in bed with Nina because Katie was on location in Arizona and he and Nina had had too much to drink. Probably she was telling herself the same thing.

And yet, it had been fun for them both. Hadn’t it?

Or, at least, it had been fun until he realized the next morning that he had just had sex with one woman while starting to see another—a woman who happened to be one of the world’s biggest movie stars. But…still. The booze was no excuse. He had no future with Nina. Yes, she was sexy as hell, but so was Katie, and he might have a future with her. To risk a life together with Katie Stepanov (she would always be Katie Stepanov to him, never Katie Barstow) for one night with a hot Russian painter? Therein lay the path to madness. It was reckless, and he would have broken it off the next morning himself if she hadn’t spoken first. Of course, it might have been nice if she hadn’t been so damn quick to distance herself from him. God, it was as if the moment she opened her hungover eyes and saw his sad little flat by the pitiless light of morning, she wanted out of his bed and out of his apartment.

The painting? Letting him rep it wasn’t a farewell gift. It was a sympathy gift.

When he sold it and mailed her her cut, he considered adding a note about what a fantastic little capitalist she’d become. Yes, the sale was going to keep the wolves at bay a bit longer, and it was also going to keep Nina in those furs she loved but needed in L.A. about as much as sled dogs. It fascinated him the way she remained news candy, even though it had been three years since she’d defected: she’d been in New York City for a reception at the Metropolitan and managed to elude her KGB handlers in arms and armor. The story she told the press was that the pair, a man and a woman, had been obsessed with a sixteenth-century crossbow with stag horns, and she’d simply walked backward until, before she knew it, she was in medieval art, then a ladies’ room, then the great hall, and then Fifth Avenue. Then she had kicked off her heels and was running down Eighty-Second Street in her stockings. Given her family and the wonderful life she led in Moscow, the KGB hadn’t seriously considered her a flight risk. They hadn’t known how hard and fast she would fall for America.

He sighed. He’d failed when he’d tried to renegotiate the gallery rent last month, and he’d failed when he’d tried to get a soul from the very newspaper before him on the diner counter to review his new show. Katie said he was ahead of his time and the buyers had to catch up to the artists he’d selected. Well, the clock was ticking, and he didn’t have much time left.

The waitress, a pretty girl no more than twenty-two or twenty-three, he guessed, with wide brown eyes and hair badly dyed blond, refilled his coffee cup without his asking and smiled at him. He supposed she thought he was in the business. The right business. Movies. He could feel how badly she wanted to be out from behind the Formica and in front of the camera.