I eased myself into a nice hot pool, oozy with capfuls of Isolde’s fine imported bath oil and snowy with bubbles.
The bath itself was very pretty: all mirrors and brass fixtures and Japanese seagulls swooping across a pale blue ceiling. Unfortunately, above the waterline it was freezing cold. I wondered why Germans found it utterly frivolous to heat an entire room, however small, for any longer than the short, industrious time one would and should be in it. Another thing I found: they refused, en masse, to support the phenomenon of the shower curtain. You were expected to manipulate your body between the spout and the rim of the tub so that you became a sort of bounceback for the stream of water.
I could hear Isolde and Daisy scuffling about and shouting outside the door.
“Run into the attic and get that white wine out of the Kühlschrank, Daisy!”
“Right. Schon erledigt. Already done it.”
“Then could you get the good scotch away from Harry? He’ll be asleep before anyone gets here.”
“That would save you a lot of scotch in the long run.”
Daisy walked in.
“At least you could shut the door,” I said.
“Oh, sorry,” Daisy said, paying no attention whatsoever and leaving the door ajar, then dabbing herself with a robust flounce of Isolde’s dusting powder. She sat down companionably on the rim of the tub and rumbaed in place. Peaches, cream, and flapping lashes. A corpulent Betty Boop. “She’s driving me mad.” Daisy sighed. “And she’s going to be home all week, too.”
“Hmm. That’s bad.” Isolde, as marvelous as she was to be with, was also quite a pleasure to be without. She did have the good grace to be off on location somewhere half of the time, shooting a film or modeling fur coats on some runway or other, leaving Daisy long, lazy mornings and nights undisturbed by guests and great meals to clean up afterward. The boys, her real job, were never really that much trouble, having early on learned to fend for themselves. But Isolde was always up to something that required group participation: furiously cleaning out a winter closet at two in the morning, deciding suddenly to paint her bedroom red when the yellow wasn’t dry a month. There was Daisy, then, right behind, sulking, but doing it just the same. Lost in the trap, as everyone was, of not being able to say no to Isolde.
Daisy tugged at a piece of her mop of brown hair turning into determined ringlets from the steam. “I’m going off and get a normal job,” she said. “That will teach her. She’ll never find another slave like me.”
“She’d find someone right away. Don’t be such a teenager.” I blew a glob of bubbles at her.
“You should talk! You’re not that much older than I!”
“It isn’t that bad. What else would you do? Wait tables? You
wouldn’t like that too much after a while. Why don’t you just go back to school?”
The truth was that Daisy was already better educated than most. She patted her hair. “Because it’s more fun here. I know. I’m just sick of all her stupid men hanging about. And it’s no better when she’s gone. They call her nonstop, you know. I’m like a bloody secretary.”
“At least your German’s getting decent. I can’t say half the things you can.”
“Yes, I’ve become a regular little Bavarian, I have.” She sighed. It wasn’t easy cavorting with models who ran off to exotic ports while you were left holding the laundry bag.
“Has Harry gone?” I asked, to change the subject.
“Certainly not. He’ll stay for supper. And long after that if she lets him. Funny about men,” Daisy marveled. “They can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to Isolde. Even respectable businessmen like Harry. Poor sods. They just sort of melt beneath her bossiness and get lost there, don’t they? Poor, poor Vladimir.”
“Oh, come on, little Miss Priss. Vladimir’s been with everyone. Why do you think Isolde started fooling around in the first place? He left her long before she left him. She told me.”
“Phhhhh. She tells you everything she thinks will amplify your sympathy.”
“She doesn’t need my sympathy.”
“Yes. For some reason, she does.” Daisy admired me with envy.
“I’m sorry I took your lovely apartment away from you,” I said. I wasn’t really sorry, though.
“It was you or someone else.”
“By the way, I saw Vladimir at the Riding School café with an exotic girl.”
“Yeah? Was she a looker?”
“A stunner. And she was our age. Younger.”
“Oh, don’t let Isolde hear you say that! She’s jealous.”
I put an arm across my bent knees. “I’m absolutely sure Isolde has no intention of giving up Vladimir. She just figures let him have his little fling.”
“Nothing she can do about it, is there? I mean, he just up and left.”
“Oh, Isolde will think of something.”
“She’d better get cracking, then. She’s got to be thirty.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, that’s true.”
We sat there silently for a while, thinking about all these things, when in barged Isolde herself, noticeably filling up the bathroom. “What’s this?” she said. “The clubhouse?”
“Mm-mmm,” we murmured noncommittally, preoccupied.
“Where are my black mules?” she demanded. That was the thing. The flat was cool and huge until Isolde came home. She filled it with heat and business and things and perfume the moment she walked in. It was always the same.
“Oh.” Daisy turned bright red. “They’ll be under my bed.” Then, “I was trying them on.”
“By the way,” Isolde said to me, “don’t invite that Afghani anymore.”
“Chartreuse? He’s French.”
“Tch. Of course he isn’t. He might have been in prison there once.”
“I’m sure he would have told me if he was Afghani,” I said, almost to myself.
“He looks like a Moroccan,” Daisy said.
“You’re the one who invited him,” I reminded Isolde.
“It’s no good to be seen with someone of that caliber.”
I looked away. I wouldn’t invite him back here to Isolde’s house, but no one told me with whom to be friends. No one.
“He’s dangerous,” she added, pointedly scrubbing behind the
faucet with a thrown-away toothbrush. She did this as a reprimand to Daisy.
He’s harmless, I started to say, but then I remembered that of course he wasn’t. His velvet pouch of opium-veined hashish was in his pocket, ever at the ready. His secretive, conspiratorial eyes promised crime with a nudge from the top of the head and fun and who knew what all.
“Company’s coming in thirty minutes, you two,” Isolde fumed, as though this were our fault. “Well, you might have come home a little earlier, then, to get things started,” Daisy dared.
“I was at a cattle call. Twen magazine is doing a bathing suit layout in the Canary Islands, Claire. You might want to try out.”
“Not me. I never want to see the Canary Islands again. I was just there. Don’t you remember? That was some horrible trip. The photographer was awful. Mean.”
“Who was it?” Isolde said.
“Reiner Decke.” I loathed even to say his name.
“Reiner? He’s brilliant. I love Reiner.” Isolde stretched herself in isometric detachment.
“Uch.” I grimaced and went rigid. “How could you like that creepy man?”
“How much money did you make on that trip, Claire?”
“A ton,” I admitted.
“And every catalog house in Germany started to book you right after he used you. I think I’ll give him a call. I wonder if it’s too late to invite him for tonight … .”
“Oh, no,” I moaned. But I could see she’d already made up her mind.
“Don’t put him next to me,” I warned, “because I won’t come.”
“I’ll bet I could catch him before he leaves his studio.” Isolde was halfway out the door. “We’ll put Harry next to him. And I need you, Claire.”
“You don’t need me,” I phiffed.
She actually looked hurt. She came back in. “Yes, I do. You’re pretty. So no one can say I’m the only good-looking woman I allow at my table. You’re quiet, so you don’t get in my way—”
“I’m not that quiet. Oh, please don’t! Isolde, I beg you … .”
“Why not?” Her eyes already danced at the thought of him admiring her across her wonderful dinner table. And if his presence made me suffer, all the more fun! “Maybe he’ll book me for his fall catalog. I was just thinking I could use new pictures.”
It occurred to me that Isolde really did want me for something besides money. She thought my newness would rub off on her. This vulnerability in her touched me.
“I wish someone would choose me to go to the Canary Islands,” Daisy said thoughtfully, her eyes still round, pretending not to notice Isolde’s last barb about the only other good-looking woman. Isolde was so thoughtless.
Isolde leaned up against the mirror, peering suspiciously at all her nooks and crannies. “You know,” she said, “anyone might arrive any minute. You’d better not leave me alone with them out there.” What she meant, of course, was that she didn’t like the two of us conspiring in here without her and we’d better get the show on the road.
“Don’t be long,” Isolde called back to me. I knew where she was going. Off to telephone that Reiner Decke.
“And gussy yourself up a bit, will you?” she added. “Sunday’s Pfingsten!”
“What the hell is Pfingsten?” I called after her.
“Why, it’s Pentecost,” Daisy said and skedaddled off.
Pentecost! The feast of the Ascencion. My impulse was to immediately say a Hail Mary. Pentecost was big. At home we would be gathering the family together. But I didn’t believe in God anymore, did I? I remembered. So how, I reasoned, could I pray through His mother? I thought guiltily of my Queen of the
Rosary beads left dejectedly in the back of a drawer in my old life back home. I could never have thrown them away. But neither could I have brought them along. For no God would have allowed my brother to have died back there in that filthy hallway. Not like that. And no mother of God. I shivered. Michael would never be there for me now when we were older. I’d always thought we’d be out in the yard raking leaves in some faraway October. I’d seen it. And now it would never be. We would never laugh together again. Never. Nor would I have my faith to console me. Still. There were times I missed my saints. I’d had one for each occasion. It had been a handy and fulfilling system. But I was grown up now, a friend of sophisticated Isolde’s. No one was going to put one over on me.
The air was cold. The idea, though, of once again sitting at table with the horrible Reiner Decke was such a shock that I plunged obliteratingly under the stolen, perfumed water and—as it always does when you try purposefully to forget about something—the entire memory played before my closed eyes like a film.
I’d hardly been in Munich a week when my agency had sent me out to Grunwald to see this “big” photographer.
I’d gone on the tram. His studio was a huge beams-and-stucco affair in a pretty courtyard behind a pocketbook factory.
Reiner Decke sat on his palomino-skin sofa, flipping through my portfolio. This was right after I’d left Milan. I hadn’t done well there, but I had some great tear sheets. Reiner just raced through these but stopped at my horrible commercial stuff from New York—really ugly shots of me for Ingénue and Seventeen. I’d only kept them to fill up my empty pages and to prove I’d worked in New York. I wasn’t yet aware of just how impressed with anything American the German was.
“Na?” He’d leaned back and gleamed at me. “How would you like to go on safari? To Africa! Groovy, or?”
“Safari?” Not a year ago I’d been a mere senior in a Catholic high school. Safari sounded just the thing. No need to convince me. There would be excitement. Experience. The eyes of tigers. “I’d love to go.” I nodded excitedly.
Oh, boy. A trip like this was big. Really big. I went outside to catch the trolley back to Schwabing. There was a pay phone at the tram stop. With my resigned New York skepticism, I put in my coins and was surprised when it worked. I called the only number I knew, my agency. The girl on the other end was very excited. Reiner Decke had just booked me for two weeks’ catalog in the Canary Islands! I lit an HB cigarette and sucked it in. How much was I going to make? Wow.
Only a few days later I was on a charter flight to Tenerife. I had my newly purchased, slumpy burlap bag and my extra carton of cigarettes. I sat alone on the plane, my head filled with dreams. I wondered what I would do when I saw my first tiger. Would I be up to it or go numb with fear? There was no question of charcoals. Wild animals came and went like a flash. I would photograph it and draw later. What film would I use? I checked my camera battery.
Everyone spoke German, of course. I didn’t mind. Anyway, all the other models were old. If not old, too old for me. They were cool and never looked my way. Now I know that they were afraid of me. But I hadn’t known that then. They could hardly speak a word of English and they probably thought I was pushing them out. Quite a few times I would overhear them saying, “Ausländer.” They said it so often, and with such specific disdain, I was beginning to wonder what it meant.
I remembered the first night there very well because that was the first inkling I’d had things weren’t going to be all hunky-dory. We’d all sat down to an elaborate dinner. I was still a little aghast at the high-rise hotel. I’d imagined native huts on stilts. What
with Reiner’s Ronald Coleman attire there had been nothing else to think. He wore his many-pocketed vest and bush hat like a daring trooper, his elbows out, his cameras at the ready. Reiner spent a great deal of time admiring, in English (and so for my benefit), one of the other models. “Just look at Helga. She’s the picture of a ballerina, or?” he kept urging. “Yes,” I must have agreed ten times. Although I must admit, I’d found her too remote and brittle for my taste. And too tall for any ballerina I had ever seen.
“Just look at the way she eats,” he approved, “like a little bird.”
While I, on the other hand, shoveled in like an old farmhand whatever I could get my greedy hands on. Was that what he was implying? But I wasn’t one to take offense. It was for just this sort of information I had come to Europe. I tried to eat a little more slowly and delicately.
“Americans,” Reiner pointed out, “have absolutely no culture. And their homes,” his expression withered, “are pure kitsch!” Without waiting for a reply to this, he went back to speaking German from the head of his long banquet table. These were his well-done sides of beef, his attitude implied, his paella, and his models, assistant, and one radiant, miniature client.
Uncomfortable, I patted my mouth with my napkin. And just when was this safari about to begin? I wondered. It was more like Spain than Africa. The whole setup was suspiciously touristy. Even I gave the room a sweep, like a little low-end Atlantic City.
There were some English. A bevy of retired Liverpudlians. They sat politely at their assigned places eating shiny shrimp and drinking umbrella gins. Enjoying the flamenco dancers on the portable stage. Taking it all in. They looked nice, I thought, sunburned and convivial. I was, however, loudly discouraged from making contact with any of them. Reiner reeled me back in the minute I would strike up a conversation with anyone. “We need not associate with working-class foreigners,” he advised me. “Or?”
“And just what class do you think I am?” I spoke up boldly.
“There has never been the slightest doubt as to which class you belong,” he snorted.
So it was to be a disgruntling two weeks.
Reiner Decke was mean because he was vain. What he’d wanted was my admiration and I withheld it simply because I had none. I embraced this refusal tightly in my clenched, hurt feelings.
Day after day, the front desk rang up before dawn and we girls staggered to the Range Rover bus. Up the landscape we would climb, Styrofoam cups of delicious coffee warming our hands.
I was directed to the rear of the bus. I honestly didn’t know any better than to do as I was told. It was all so much like school. Here I was, in trouble again. Only instead of aggravated nuns, I now had Reiner Decke.
He was angry at me because I turned out to be so short. I had misrepresented myself, he said, wearing my platform shoes. They would have to prop me up on three telephone books. Big deal, I thought. I didn’t see why we couldn’t all just adjust. My latest offense was that I had no accessories with me. Who knew? Where I’d come from there were stylists and makeup people, I harrumphed to myself.
The other models were induced to grudgingly come up with hair falls and scarves and jewelry for me. They would hand over such items with distaste. The one named Helga had an entire suitcase just for ribbons in every color. She hated to give me her precious ribbons but my hair kept blowing in front of my face and Reiner insisted I use them to hold back my unruly mane. I learned to return each item swiftly. The owner would take it back as though she were receiving something unctuous, like snails, because, I supposed, it had come into contact with me.
So there I was with Helga and Werma and Unke and Uli, six-foot-something women, while I perched on my Tenerife telephone books.
Only the model called Helga spoke some English. Unavoidably
I learned a couple of German words. Things they’d say over and over, separate from complete sentences. “Wirklich?” (Really?) “Genau!” (Exactly!) “Scheisse!” (Shit!) Never to me. No one ever spoke to me. But occasionally, Reiner would shout at me, “You are too short!” or “I don’t understand! You presented yourself as such a professional! Where is your fingernail polish?! You are being paid for this, or?”
There was a clerk who sat at the greasy reception desk at the hotel. “What does the word ‘Ausländer’ mean?” I asked him on my way out the door.
He looked up from his Spanish true crime soft cover. “Foreigner,” he told me.
Yes, I knew Reiner Decke. I gave my hair one last long rinse and climbed from the tub.