Chapter 10 fame

ONE

Life with Yvonne in that week before the first show was a mix of chaos and tranquility. We had lunch together every day and one day she showed me where she would be working for a few hours, even leading me into a small dressing-room she had to herself with a curtain across it. We were interrupted, lying on a sofa together half-undressed. The person who interrupted us was Natalie Kromer, a very famous model. She apologized in English and left. I certainly knew about her. The Scandinavian blonde bombshell with big tits for a model. She’d once dated an English pop star and then one of Europe’s royalty, and in so doing had stepped outside the confines of her world, the world of modeling and the rich and infamous, into the world I knew. Unless a model was involved with someone in the music industry or the film industry or was seeing someone extremely famous, I didn’t know about them. They had to be connected to someone, Christie Brinkley to Billy Joel, for example, before their divorce. Natalie was more famous than Yvonne because she had done this, by connecting herself to people who were talked about, a lot, and talking about it to the press. Yvonne never did that, even though she had dated “fame”, more than once.

People outside my world had to be plastered all over the newspapers, magazines and TV shows before I was any the wiser. Elle Macpherson I knew, only because she was Australian.

Yvonne introduced me to Natalie later. I was extremely nervous about meeting someone so famous. I still didn’t realize that Yvonne was as famous as Natalie and the rest. I’m glad I didn’t. I had no preconceived ideas about who Yvonne was; she unfolded herself to me. I didn’t come into our relationship one-sided, me knowing her and she not knowing me. I think that really helped, that I didn’t know the Ice Princess or anything about her.

TWO

In the end, Yvonne chose my dress and my shoes for me. I was extremely embarrassed. The woman who helped Yvonne was a stranger to me and I hadn’t been waxed yet. Yvonne came into the change room with me and helped me select the right dress out of four or so she had lined up. Yvonne talked to the woman about my shape, my size, what would look good on me. They spoke in English, the woman was English, younger than us. She was about twenty-seven, very helpful, put me at ease. But I was not going to let her see me all hairy, only Yvonne. Bit difficult to do a fitting when the fitter was on the outside and I was on the inside.

We chose the dress, the shoes and stockings, with the idea that I would go back later for a proper fitting. It was a very simple short dress of light-grey and dark-pink in a pattern of hazy checks, with very thin shoulder straps. The shoes were dark-grey flats, no heels for me to stumble around in. Yvonne had worked out the jewelry. I would borrow a pair of her earrings and a small bracelet. Nothing else. And a handbag, as my shoulder bag was totally unsuitable. I was given a small, useless bag with no strap. I had to carry it in my hand or under my arm. It would hold a hanky, a lipstick, my key and some money, but no wallet.

The only thing I would contribute to the look was the white gold opal ring that I always wore. I hadn’t brought anything extra with me on my supposedly short trip to Paris. I had my ring, my yellow gold sleepers, my clothes and that was it.

THREE

Yvonne’s place of work for the upcoming show was a golden opportunity for perving at beautiful men and women. People came and went everywhere. It reminded me of the party with its incredible array of accents and languages. Standing back, watching this incredible hive of activity, I saw to my horror a huge lovebite on Yvonne’s left buttock. The dress she was being fitted for, very long, body-hugging, shimmering silver, was so clingy that underpants would have ruined the line of it. Under it Yvonne was completely naked and each time the dress came off, her whole body was visible, including the bite that I had most likely caused. No one seemed to pay much attention to it, including Yvonne, which made me think that this sort of thing must happen all the time. I wondered when I had done it. I just loved to take huge chunks of her flesh inside my mouth and devour her, eat her all up, with Yvonne usually laughing at me, unless it was sex time; that made me remember the bathroom when Yvonne was bent over the basin, taking off her make-up. Maybe that’s where this hickey (okay, bite!) came from. When I’d first heard the word “model” in connection with Yvonne, I had thought about not harming her body because she needed it for her work. But Yvonne had never mentioned it to me, so on occasion I had gone a little wild and devoured her body more than a model’s body should have been devoured.

In this hive of activity, I couldn’t sometimes work out who the workers were, and even who the models were. Yvonne had always seemed to me to be in control of herself; she knew who she was and what she wanted. She had a few lapses now and then, but we were in love, we were close and getting closer, I was getting to her, our relationship was. I would have thought she was inhuman if I hadn’t stirred her up a little bit. But the people I saw there, they were beyond my comprehension. They knew what they were doing, Yvonne knew what she was doing, rushing here and there.

I left. It was too chaotic, too much out of my world and too noisy. My headache had escalated from the usual dull, persistent, tolerable ache to a throbbing mass of jumping-bean brain cells that seemed to have multiplied wildly into one ginormous jackhammer pounding insanely inside my head, wanting to burst the seams and break out of my skull. I went home to pain-killers and a lie down.

I could only handle Yvonne’s world in small doses, and I was a distraction. She worried about me, constantly looking over to see if I was all right and waving or just smiling at me across the room, shrugging her shoulders a little at the irony of us being apart but in the same room, so close and yet so far. I shouldn’t have been there. Boyfriends weren’t allowed so why should girlfriends be any different.

FOUR

The tranquil part was when Yvonne came home. She was tired, pretty quiet, and only wanted to relax, eat, make love, sleep, then get up silently, slip away from me and repeat the whole thing again the next day.

I spent my days either alone with my guide book, wandering around, seeing the sights, or with Peter, who took a couple of afternoons off and showed me the more detailed, need-an-informed-guide places, like the Louvre and the Champs-Elysees with the Arc de Triomphe and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Anything that seemed romantic, like Notre Dame or Montmartre and the Sacré-Coeur, I saved for Yvonne and weekends or later, after the fashion shows.

I managed to see a lot and loved it all; even the sewers were fascinating, but definitely not romantic. It was wonderful to be seeing places and sights so familiar, right up close. I had to keep pinching myself so that I knew I was really here, but Yvonne was always on my mind. I wanted to be seeing them with her. I made a list. If anything looked like it might be too much mob-material, I saw it alone or with Peter. If it was incredibly romantic and not too bad on the people side, I jotted it down.

I kept my second appointment with the beautician. She waxed my legs (shit, did they hurt, but not as much as I thought they would) and under my arms (I was forced to swear out loud). The next day, the skin under my arms came up in huge red, horrible splotches. I rang her and complained bitterly. She suggested I get a bottle of Vitamin E cream to soothe them. My legs were fine, almost completely smooth and completely hair-free, as long as you didn’t look too closely. Even my knees were now hair-free.

Yvonne was very sympathetic about my painful and unsightly underarms; I would have to wear a jacket over my dress to cover them up. I was in pain and they looked dreadful. And I was so pale. Yvonne told me to relax, as everyone would be looking at each other and then at the show, but definitely not at me. Claude wasn’t important enough to worry about, he only gained admission the same way I did, through Yvonne.

The beautician, when I complained, informed me that each time it would get easier. I told her it had better. It was terrible; the redness and the pain lasted for days. She also told me that the fine stubble-effect on my legs would fade in time. The more I waxed, the better it would be. Each day, I sat in the park and rolled the waistband of my shorts down and the legs up, squashed my top up as far as it could go, kicked my shoes off and let the sun do its job. I knew I would end up with strange suntan marks, but I had to start somewhere. Just letting my face feel the goodness of the sun’s rays was enough.

Yvonne became busier as the first show drew closer. She didn’t get home till quite late and didn’t have time to attend to the little extras of life. She began leaving me notes: descriptions of things she wanted me to buy for her and where to find them, things Simone would have found difficult but me easy, like CDs to add to her already massive collection. Simone would have never understood, not the way Yvonne described them. For example: Get the CD with that lead singer from that all-girl group who is now on a solo career. American, sort of beachy-style. You know the one. Get her second CD, not her first, I have that one. And then Yvonne would write down what she thought the name of the song she’d recently heard somewhere was, and some of the lyrics.

I enjoyed spending my time in record shops, spending someone else’s money on whatever took Yvonne’s fancy, which happened quite frequently. Before Yvonne, I would never have bought a CD or an album because I fancied just one song on it. I always had to really like at least ten tracks to feel I’d got my money’s worth.

I also bought myself a pair of sandals ─ mine were really old and scruffy.