Someone from John Plesaurus’s office calls to say that John would like to messenger me some of the shots from the photo shoot, which is totally cool because I didn’t expect to see them until they ran in the magazine.
“Tell him thank you, I really appreciate it.”
Only it occurs to me that I probably do not want the envelope arriving at my house because then my mom or dad might open it along with the AmEx bill and People or Blue Cross garbage and solicitations from the church, and if the pictures look pornographic, forget the bakery, they’ll chain me to a pipe in the basement for the rest of my life. So instead I give them Clive’s name and address and tell them that would be a preferable move.
When Clive gets home from school he calls. “It’s here, Gia, I have the envelope.”
“Open it, open it,” I shout, my foot tapping on the floor. There’s a pause and I hear paper being torn and then paper rustling, then more rustling.
“Oh my God, Gia!” he yells. “You won’t believe these pictures…Oh my god!”
“What? What?” I scream, jumping up and running down the stairs and getting into a cab barefoot and telling the driver to “go faster, go faster, go faster,” and he probably thinks I’m having a coronary, which I am. Finally we get to Clive’s and I’m so nervous I drop the phone and have to go searching for it on the filthy floor of the cab and then I sprint past the doorman who already knows me and waves me in, and I get into the elevator and the doors open on Clive’s floor.
He’s pasted the pictures up on a wall and I am totally out of my mind and hysterical because they are positively incendiary.
“I may just have to sleep with John Plesaurus to thank him,” I say, only half kidding. “I mean just look at these pictures.”
“Gia, you are a born model,” Clive says. “The camera loves you.”
Except for iPhone shots and pathetic family photos from when I was little, the only pictures, I’ve really seen of myself have been awful graduation pictures, where your face looks pasty because they white out your zits, or those photobooth candids, which only show a mini version of your face and neck and you have an idiotic grin on your face or your eyes are closed, but not any kind of close-ups of my face and body.
So the first thing I do is take the best two shots—that show my entire naked back with me turning my face around over my shoulder and doing this hot vamp thing with my eyes—and put them in an envelope. Clive and I go to the post office and I overnight them to Michael, who, of course, has no idea that I even know where he lives and will probably be pissed to find out that I did all this detective work on him, but whatever. So then Clive and I celebrate by going out to Per Se, this over-the-top restaurant in the Time Warner Center. We have gnocchi Parisienne with tarragon custard and cauliflower mushrooms and carrots with fines herbes and beurre rouge and some other entrees just to taste them. We try to order wine but they just smile and shake their heads because even though we show our IDs, they know they’re laughably fake. So we go with San Pell and even though I don’t know what I’m eating, it all tastes so fabulous that it feels like I’ve died and gone to heaven and Clive charges the seven hundred dollar bill to his dad.
I call John Plesaurus when I get home. “You are such a genius.”
Of course he loves being told what he already thinks about himself.
“Gia, you were a perfect model, really, and you’re so incredibly beautiful, and you know what?” He takes a deep breath and then there’s like this thirty-second pause. “More than anything, I’d like to take pictures of your extraordinary body.”
What follows is this embarrassing three-hour silence on the phone because hello, John is, what, like forty-five, and that is so not what I expected to hear from him and how do I answer that?
“Naked pictures?” I finally blurt out.
“Mmm, really beautiful nudes, but just for me,” he says. “No one else would see them.”
I swallow hard. “John…do you know who I am?”
Another pause.
“Yes, so?” he says in this supercool innocent way.
“So?” I laugh. “So? So John, my dad would chop you up into little pieces and leave you at a Dumpster if he knew you said that to me.”
He doesn’t take that entirely seriously, which he should, and sort of laughs it off.
“Gia, it’s just a thought or maybe just my fantasy, okay, so why don’t we leave it at that?”
Then I crack up and it breaks the mood and I thank him again and hang up and then stare at the phone and go holy crap and pray the feds haven’t bugged it and that this doesn’t come out on the front page of the New York Post or a supermarket tab tomorrow.