Lessons in Heartbreak. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ was surrounded by skinny charity queens, spindly legs set elegantly on equally spindly-legged gilt chairs, and he was staring at her. No, staring wasn’t the right word: gazing at her hungrily, that summed it up.

      Lots of men looked at Izzie like that. She was used to it; not in a cavalier, couldn’t-care-less way, but certainly she barely glanced at the men who stared at her. She honestly didn’t need their stares to make her feel whole. But when Joe Hansen looked at her like that, he flipped her world upside down.

      The most shocking thing was that when his eyes were on her, she could feel the old Izzie – uncompromising, strong, happy in her own skin – slip away to be replaced by a woman who wanted this compelling stranger to think her beautiful.

      ‘You know, honey, from what I hear, that whole fashion world sounds kinda like hard work,’ sighed the ranch owner to Izzie now, hauling her mind away from the Plaza and the first time she’d met Joe.

      ‘I tried that South Beach once and it takes a lot of time making those egg-white and spinach muffins ‘n’ all.’

      ‘Too much hard work,’ agreed Izzie, who worked in an office where the refrigerator was constantly full of similar snacks. Quinoa was the big kick at the moment. Izzie had tried it and it tasted like wet kitchen towels soaked overnight in cat pee – well, she imagined that was what cat pee tasted like. Give her a plate of Da Silvano’s pasta with an extra helping of melting parmesan shavings any day.

      ‘Pasta’s my big thing,’ she said.

      ‘Spaghetti with clams,’ said the other woman.

      ‘Risotto. With wild mushrooms and cheese,’ Izzie moaned. She could almost taste it.

      ‘Pancakes with maple syrup and butter.’

      ‘Stop,’ laughed Izzie, ‘I’m going to start drooling.’

      ‘Bet those little girls never let themselves eat pancakes,’ the woman said, gesturing to where two models sat chain-smoking. Even smoking, they looked beautiful, Izzie thought. She was constantly humbled by the beauty of the women she worked with, even if she knew that sometimes the beauty was only a surface thing. But what a surface thing.

      ‘No,’ she said now. ‘They don’t eat much, to be honest.’

      ‘Sad, that,’ said the woman.

      Izzie nodded.

      The ranch owner departed, leaving the crew to it and Izzie wandered away from the terrace where the last shots had been taken and walked down the tiled steps to the verandah at the back where Tonya, at eighteen the youngest of the Perfect-NY models, had gone once she’d whipped off the cheerful Zest pinafore dress she’d been wearing and had changed into her normal clothes.

      A brunette with knife-edge cheekbones, Tonya sat on a cabana chair, giraffe legs sprawled in Gap skinny jeans, and took a first drag on a newly lit cigarette as if her life depended on it. From any angle, she was pure photographic magic.

      And yet despite the almond-shaped eyes and bee-stung lips destined to make millions of women yearn to look like her, Izzie decided that there was something tragic about Tonya.

      The girl was beautiful, slender as a lily stem and one hundred per cent messed up. But Izzie knew that most people wouldn’t be able to see it. All they’d see was the effortless beauty, blissfully unaware that the person behind it was a scared teenager from a tiny Nebraska town who’d won the looks lottery but whose inner self hadn’t caught up.

      As part of the Perfect-NY team, Izzie Silver’s job was seeing the scared kid behind the carefully applied make-up. Her stock-in-trade was a line of nineteen-year-olds with Ralph Lauren futures, trailer-trash backgrounds and lots of disastrous choices in between.

      Officially, Izzie’s job was to manage her models’ careers and find them jobs. Unofficially, she looked after them like a big sister. She’d worked in the modelling world for ten years and not a week went by when she didn’t meet someone who made her feel that modelling ought to include free therapy.

      ‘Why do people believe that beauty is everything?’ she and Carla, her best friend and fellow booker, wondered at least once a week. It was a rhetorical question in a world where a very specific type of physical beauty was prized.

      ‘’Cos they don’t see what we do,’ Carla inevitably replied. ‘Models doing drugs to keep skinny, doing drugs to keep their skin clear and doing drugs to cope.’

      Like a lot of bookers, Carla had been a model herself. Half Hispanic, half African-American, she was tall, coffee-skinned and preferred life on the other side of the camera where the rejection wasn’t as brutal.

      ‘When the tenth person of the week talks about you as though you’re not there and says your legs are too fat, your ass is too big, or your whole look is totally last season, then you start to believe them,’ Carla had told Izzie once.

      She rarely talked about her own modelling days now. Instead, she and Izzie – who’d bonded after starting at the agency at the same time and finding they were the same age – talked about setting up their own company, where they’d do things differently.

      Nobody was going to tell the models of the Silverwebb Agency – the name had leaped out at them: Izzie Silver, Carla Webb – they were too fat. Because the sort of models they were going to represent were plus-sized: beautiful and big. Women with curves, with bodies that screamed ‘goddess’ and with skin that was genuinely velvety instead of being air-brushed velvety because the model was underweight and acned from a bad lifestyle.

      For two women who shared the no-bullshit gene and who both struggled with the part of their jobs that dictated that models had to be slender as reeds, it had seemed such an obvious choice.

      Five months ago – pre-Joe – they’d been sharing lunch on the fire escape of Perfect-NY’s West Side brownstone, talking about a model from another agency who’d ended up in rehab because of her heroin addiction.

      She weighed ninety pounds, was six feet tall and was still in demand for work at the time.

      ‘It’s a freaking tragedy, isn’t it?’ Carla sighed as she munched on her lunch. ‘How destructive is that? Telling these kids they’re just not right even when they’re stop-traffic beautiful. Where is it going to end? Who gets to decide what’s beautiful any more, if the really beautiful girls aren’t beautiful enough?’

      Izzie shook her head. She didn’t know the answer. In the ten years she’d been working in the industry, she’d seen the perfect model shape change from all-American athletic and strong, although slim, to tall, stick-like and disturbingly skinny. It scared everyone in Perfect-NY and the other reputable agencies.

      ‘It’s going to reach a point where kids will need surgery before they get on any agency’s books because the look of the season is too weird for actual human beings,’ she said. ‘What does that say about the fashion industry, Carla?’

      ‘Don’t ask me.’

      ‘And we’re the fashion industry,’ Izzie added glumly. If they weren’t part of the solution, then they were part of the problem. Surely they could change things from the inside?

      ‘You know,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘if I had my own agency, I really don’t think I’d work with ordinary models. СКАЧАТЬ