Chapter XXIX. Tender Is the Night.
XXIX.
TENDER IS THE NIGHT.
FRIDAY. NIGHT.
Cecilia arrived at dinner after everyone else.
When she finally got off the phone with Lorry, she’d called Marc and told him and the others to go on ahead.
She’d managed to pull herself together and dress, before having the hotel receptionist call her a cab.
And the entire ride over, she’d vacillated between being heartbroken over her best friend, and angry that his timing was costing her upward of forty dollars. Forty dollars she couldn’t afford.
Bas had whistled when she’d arrived at the restaurant, and it took Cecilia a moment to realize the catcall was for her.
“Ceciliaaaa. I almost didn’t recognize you without your overalls.” He smiled, ribbing her as she seated herself across from him, wedged in between Marc and a chair with a green shawl strewn across it.
“Thought I’d make an effort for your sake, Bas.” She was wearing a Banana Republic camisole slip dress over a baby-doll tee, strappy sandals from Nine West. Her hair was down.
“You clean up quite nice.”
“As do you.”
Was Bas toying with her? Or was this just his way?
Earlier in the day, she’d seen him flirting with Paola when Beatriz sent her over mid-shot to unbutton his collar.
He’d feigned biting her finger. Thrice. And each time, she giggled like a schoolgirl.
Currently, she was seated to his left in a gossamer dress nearly as revealing as her wet tank top the previous night at the beach.
Marc, who could read Cecilia better than anyone else in the bunch, turned to her once she was settled, his expression solemn. “What happened?”
“Emergency. I’m sorry.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes, just…” She exhaled. “I don’t want to talk about it right now. And now I’m forty dollars out of pocket.”
“Just have Cathy expense it,” he said, referring to the studio’s bookkeeper.
“Cathy is never going to sign off on it. She’ll come back with, ‘We provided a van. Do you think you’re more special than everyone else?’” Cecilia made a half-hearted attempt at a Jersey accent.
“Cathy is a cunt.”
“Marc!”
“Sorry, it’s true. You know it. I know it. Everyone who’s worked with her knows it. Don’t worry, I’ll tack it on to our general costs, and she’ll never know. You’ll get your fifty dollars.”
“It was only forty.”
“It was fifty. You left a generous tip.” He smiled. “Right? Right?”
“If you insist.” She sipped from the bottled water before her. “Still, I don’t like that word.”
He shrugged. “Call a spade a spade. Wait. Is that racist? I’m sorry.”
“Probably. Have we ordered yet?”
“Just drinks. It’s family style tonight.”
Her “family” on this trip—if that was indeed what they were—were a motley crew.
Eccentric, indulgent egoists. But to Cecilia, they were fascinating.
This late in the week, everyone was glowing from their time in the sun.
She wondered how others saw them, this international coven with their fabulous accessories and assorted accents.
They were seated on the terrace, once again, beneath a pristine sky. No glare of lights to mar the celestial view. The moon a slip in the distance. And stretched out before them, the peninsula coastline and the Sea of Cortez.
All twenty-three were jammed in around an extended table.
Blue votives and boughs of bougainvillea in between bowls of chips and guacamole and ceviche.
Elliot was in one corner chatting up Rafaella and Hugh.
Bas was snuggled between Paola and Katrine.
Didier and Beatriz were at one end of the table, Jean-Luc and Rafaella at the other.
Maren, almost unrecognizable with her hair down and in a black linen dress, was flanked by Italians.
“Italians love the blonds,” Sarah had informed Cecilia the day they shot on the boat. “Do you see them falling over themselves for Katrine and Maren?”
“Hmm,” Cecilia had murmured in response. Didn’t the world love blonds?
She’d come into the cabin to set up a light for Sarah and Santiago in the space where they’d planned to do their touch-ups. And when Sandro, the marketing VP, had poked his head into the room and, finding no models, just as quickly shuffled out, Sarah tsked.
“Quite certain I know who that one’s looking for.
Third time he’s popped up randomly. Anyway,” she’d continued, leaning into Cecilia, and lowering her voice, “the blonds, they don’t age well, pet.
You and I will be much better off. You’ve got more natural protection and us redheads wear hats.
Still, sunscreen. If I can give women any advice, it’s to wear sunscreen.
Hydrate. And don’t smoke. Also, sleep. Sleep is good.
Do you use eye cream yet?” She’d changed tack.
“I’m twenty-six.”
“Start now. I have a lovely new one from Japan, I just gave two jars of it to Jaya. But I’ll ask her to give you one. Start now,” she’d repeated. “Time goes faster than you think.”
“She went to the bathroom,” Marc said now.
“Who?”
“Anouk. I assume that’s who you’re looking for.”
“Actually, I was looking for the waiter, so I could order a drink.”
Marc nodded slowly. “Well, I guess you’re in luck.”
They appeared almost simultaneously. The waiter with a laden tray, and Anouk in a rust-colored halter dress that Cecilia found stunning against her complexion.
“?a va?” Anouk smiled, sliding into her seat.
Cecilia could smell whatever it was she’d used on her skin or hair. Faint notes of amber and spice.
“Senoras, something to drink?”
“Please. A margarita. On the rocks. No salt.”
“Una margarita también. Pero … frozen … y con fresas.” Anouk beamed up at the waiter. “They don’t have these in France,” she commented to Cecilia. “It’s really good. Like candy, non?”
“Like candy. Yes.”
For a moment Anouk held her gaze. A curious expression painted on her face. Part inquisitive, part amused. Cecilia wished that she could read it. That she could better understand the French.
“C’est joli, tes cheveux,” Anouk said, eventually.
“Thank you.” Cecilia blushed, tucking her hair behind one ear. She had worn it down for her.
“I was afraid you weren’t going to come.”
“I never miss a closing dinner. They’re always the most entertaining.”
At some point in the meal, when Cecilia was working on her second margarita and trying to avoid the heaping plates of beans and rice and roasted corn and grilled fish and tortillas that graced the table, Sarah leaned forward around Anouk to check in with her.
“Did Jaya bring the eye cream for you today on set?”
“No. But it’s okay, you don’t have to—”
“Jaya, do you have the eye cream for Cecilia?”
“The what? Oh, bollocks. No. It’s back in my room. I’ll go and fetch it after dessert.”
“Please don’t forget, pet. I promised her.”
“Yes, of course.” Jaya smiled faintly across at Cecilia, and then turned back to Santiago, her hand hiding her face.
The entire exchange made Cecilia uneasy. She did not want to be the one to inconvenience Jaya Clark or disrupt the social hierarchy.
Not that anyone else was paying attention.
Rafaella was laughing at another of Elliot’s jokes.
And Didier had stopped near the opposite end of the table en route from the bathroom.
He’d leaned in to whisper something in Maren’s ear, and Cecilia watched as Maren’s face reddened and she fanned him away.
Something cool brushed up against Cecilia’s knee then, and she flinched.
“You okay?” Anouk’s fingers were near the hem of her skirt. “You went like … somewhere else.”
Cecilia nodded, slow. It was not enough that the model had touched her, but the heady blend of her fragrance was distracting, dizzying even.
“I’m okay.”
Maybe Marc was right. Maybe Anouk was hitting on her.
Cecilia had never been interested in women before.
Not even at Yale, when in her freshman year there was a fallout over a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that posited 25 percent of the student body was gay, resulting in numerous posters and table tents throughout campus declaring ONE IN FOUR.
And as the only one of her roommates without a boyfriend, Cecilia began to wonder if she was “superpicky,” as she had always claimed, or if she was avoiding something more profound.
And not two summers prior, when Andrew had come out to her and made her promise not to tell their parents “just yet … because Jamaicans are notoriously the worst homophobes. But keeping secrets from you, like, literally hurts my heart.”
“I think they already know, Drew,” she had said to him gently, that afternoon when they were strolling in Chinatown on a hunt for li hing mui, the salty dried-plum candies their grandfather used to bring them from Kingston. “And I think they still love you.”
He’d stared at her for a minute, his amber eyes brimming. The sun beating down on his curly head. “Don’t get all mushy on me.”
“You started.”
But by then she was in the throes of first love with Lorry, and any questions she might have had about her sexuality had ceased to surface.
Models were different, though. Models appealed to an aesthetic side of her.
Angles and lines and the play of light. Models were like art, Cecilia thought.
An amalgamation of math and design and whimsy.
A random yet symmetrical array of features and hues and proportions that somehow divinely aligned.
Like what Cecilia would have liked to be if God had waved a wand in her direction.
She wasn’t unattractive. But models, the best of them, were otherworldly.
And Cecilia was very much of this world.
She thought that now, staring at Anouk’s profile.
The razor-sharp jawline and protrusion of her upper lip, the elegance of her straight nose, the length of her neck.
How arbitrary the composition of a face.
How much value could be placed on something one did not control.
She wondered if Anouk felt burdened by it.