the other side of the ramp. Trying to forget about Melody. A different pose at the top of the t. Hands on hips, staring out into the crowd. Civil servants on lunch, teenagers skipping school, senior citizens with nothing better to do. All staring back at me. What do they see, anyway? They’re not looking at Stacey—he doesn’t exist anymore. Fashionable metallurgists have broken me down, smelted me, moulded me, sculpted me, into a model. A representation of an object. Perfectly to scale, proportioned in all dimensions. Worthy of imitation. Exemplary. Designed to be followed. Or maybe I’m still there. Essentially Stacey, but made up, dressed, camouflaged, disguised by the art of powerful illusionists, obeah men. Maybe the disguise is really my own. I’m a chameleon. A mimic, like a stick insect, like those yellow-and-black-striped flies that pretend to be bees. I have a recurring nightmare in which I walk down an endless runway. The audience is restless. I attempt to smile, can’t stop smiling, face frozen, an impossible rictus stretching from ear to ear, but no one’s fooled. The audience sees through my face, howls at the deception, rushes the stage, tears me to bloody ribbons.
Another pause, another halfhearted pant turn, as I await my replacements. Thinking of what to tell Melody. Then Sandor and some girl I don’t know, tuxed and gowned, emerge from the tent.
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes the wonderful set from Merriweather’s.”
Applause. My time’s up.
“And finally, bridal fashions from June Jenny’s and Tuxaco.”
As I hit the stairs, I catch Sandrine’s eye. I follow her gaze over my shoulder, see the beach chair still at the top of the t. Too late. I’m already on my way down, wondering now if Zoë left it there on purpose.
Back inside I start to hang up my clothes, only doing up the important buttons. My collars are ringed with brown sweat, armpits soggy like cereal.
“Keep them on, put them back on!” Tairhun screams. “The finale! Everyone on together when they announce the winner.” He wipes his face with the bandanna draped around his neck. With twelve models furiously changing in a small canvas tent, it’s unspeakably hot. But most of us are sweating from the tension.
I stare at the other male models. Otto, Sandor, and three other guys I’ve worked with but forgotten their names. California blonds, slick-haired Greeks, All-Canadian quarterbacks. Square jaws, undulating abs, even when they aren’t flexing. The stuff of shaving-cream ads and truck commercials. I glance at myself in the small mirror. From this angle I look like a badger. Not like the black guys you see in magazines, videos, those ebony princes with strong noses, bald Negroes with chiselled features. I don’t stop traffic. I’ve been dumped by my last three girlfriends.
I’m a mediocre model. Blessed perhaps with fair mulatto skin, fine features, a ski-jump nose, full lips, Barbie-doll eyelashes. With no chance of winning. Yet here I am, the coloured clown in this lunchtime cabaret, ready for my final tumble. Here because of what? Not because of the money. For three years now I’ve grinned and jigged at every mall in town. Eight-foot-long runways. Freeze modelling, heckled and jeckled by grubby kids, old ladies touching me—is he real?—hockey players flinging boogers from a safe distance, trying to make me laugh. Shoots for National Wildlife magazine, direct-mail catalogues, government brochures, posters for the Tulip Festival. Grocery-store mockups and neighbourhood flyers and isn’t-he-cute family-friend dinners and “I saw you in oh, what was it again” run-ins at the bus stop. I’m in a model’s purgatory, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The poster boy of mediocrity. Mediocrity’s a one-mall town—comfortable and predictable. Every road a dead end.
“Don’t forget the props in the bag by your name tag,” Tairhun says. “Briefcases or purses, kids. Briefcases or purses.”
I rummage through my bag. Cindy’s purse, I see, is orange. She looks at me, looks away. Knowing that, for her, it’s already over. All around I hear the whispered prayers of the has-beens and never-will-bes. No time to pray. A minute and a half to change.
TWO
I have always lusted after white girls, ever since I was old enough to wash my own sheets. Megan Fegan, taller and a little wider than her sister, Lara, but just as easy. Mo, who used to pay for everything. Agi Popescu, the Romanian cosmetician who just had to see me at least three times a week. The girl who worked in the little card store at Pinecrest Mall, whose name I’ve forgotten. Rhonda, whose breasts bounced over me like pink water balloons. Cyanne, who came after me one night with a fork.
This girl must have been a model at some point before she gained the weight. Dark hair, pale white skin. Asleep. A baseball cap, SEX DRIVE, pulled low over her eyes. A copy of the Tao Te Ching has slipped between her thighs. She reminds me of Melody’s ex-roommate, who I desperately wanted to sleep with. A little thicker, much of it in the right places. Once the bathing suits stopped fitting, the agency must have put her out to pasture answering phones and faxing pictures of the younger girls who haven’t yet discovered the pill. I can hear the tico-tico-tac of her headphones from the doorway.
I’m in a small round room with plenty of light streaming in from a large concave window. There’s a gnarled iron table in the centre, and a bench, upholstered in mock Kente cloth, runs along one wall. Facing me, behind the girl, is an enormous white placard, FEYENOORD in yellow lettering, and underneath it in black, PARIS, NEW YORK, MILAN, LOS ANGELES, BUENOS AIRES, TORONTO. The last city is tacked on, seemingly, as an afterthought. And all around the sign are pictures of Feyenoord’s finest, plastered peanut-butter-thick on the walls, hurled at crazy angles to stick where they may.
None of these girls are nude, though many are a nipple shy or a shadow away. The girls are blond mostly, some brown, a few red, an occasional yellow or gumball-green. I see one black girl wearing face paint and a buzz cut, body harder than algebra. Girls crouched in corners, chained to rainy streetlamps, covered in webbing, fur, smoke, scarves. Girls with angel wings, devil horns, boxing gloves, and attitudes. One girl, pale, almost translucent, wearing nothing except a sailor’s hat made of newspaper perched on her hearse-black hair. She’s palming her small breasts, her mouth open, exposing a sliver of tongue, pierced. White teeth. Her naked pubis lurks out of view, cloaked in shadow. She glows like an erotic angel.
“You know, I could make you a copy.”
The girl at the desk, awake now, arches an eyebrow, though most of the sarcasm was lost in the plucking. It’s possible she was the naked sailor.
“You’re late. Almost an hour,” she says.
“I thought...Mr. Manson told me twelve o’clock.”
“Chelsea? He’s lost. I make the bookings. When I say 11:00, that means 10:45. He went out to lunch. Everyone’s out to lunch except me.” She sizes me up. “This won’t take long. Let’s go in the back.”
I hoist my satchel and follow her dumbly, wheeling my suitcase down the dimly lit corridor. Along the right wall are tables littered with black-and-white prints, loupes, and guillotines. On the left, an office and a plushly decorated bathroom with the biggest mirror I’ve ever seen. In front of us, a glass door. On it, a tiny piece of paper taped to it: DO NOT ENTER. BOOKINGS IN PROGRESS. She opens the door.
“I’m Rianne. Have a seat.”
She pulls a rolling chair toward me, sits down herself at a circular desk with four evenly spaced computers. The walls are lined with comp cards—cardboard ones. The good kind. Rows of portfolios on the shelves. Each book with the model’s name labelled plastically to the spine.
“Your book?”
I
