Susan Phillips - Glitter Baby

His pain hit her like a slap. She touched his arm. “I’m sorry. Really.” He pulled his arm away, and as they ran back to the house in silence, Fleur wondered what kind of person his former wife had been.

Jake’s thoughts were following a similar path. He’d met Liz at the beginning of his freshman year in college. He’d been on the way home from basketball practice when he’d wandered into a rehearsal at the university theater building. She was onstage, the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, a tiny, dark-haired kitten. He asked her out that same night, but she told him she didn’t date jocks. Her resistance made her even more appealing, and he began hanging out at the theater building between practices. She continued to ignore him. He discovered she was taking a playwriting class the next semester, and he fast-talked his way past the prerequisites into the same class. It changed his life.

He wrote about the men he’d met when he was doing odd jobs in Cleveland’s blue-collar bars. The Petes and Vinnies who’d gradually taken the place of the father he didn’t have, the men who asked him about his schoolwork, and laid into him for cutting class, and one night, when they found out he’d been picked up by the police for trying to steal a car, took him into the alley behind the bar and taught him the meaning of tough love.

The words poured out of him, and the professor was impressed. Even more important, he’d finally drawn Liz’s attention. Because her family was wealthy, his poverty fascinated her. They read Gibran together and made love. He began letting down the walls he’d built around himself. Before he knew it, they’d decided to get married, even though he was only nineteen, and she was twenty. Her father threatened to cut off her allowance, so she told him she was pregnant. Daddy whisked them to Youngstown for a fast ceremony, but when he found out the pregnancy was a sham, he stopped the checks. Jake lengthened his hours working at the town diner when he wasn’t in class or at basketball practice.

A new graduate student enrolled in the theater department, and when Jake came home, he found him sitting with Liz at the gray Formica kitchen table talking about the meaning of life. One night he walked in on them in bed. Liz cried and begged Jake to forgive her. She’d said she was lonely and not used to being poor. Jake forgave her.

Two weeks later he found her down on her knees working over one of his teammates. Her innocence, he discovered, had been shared with legions. He took the keys to her Mustang, headed for Columbus, and enlisted. The divorce papers reached him near Da Nang. Vietnam, coming so soon after Liz’s betrayal, had changed him forever.

When he’d written Sunday Morning Eclipse, Liz’s ghost had come back to haunt him. She’d sat on his shoulder whispering words of innocence and corruption. She’d become Lizzie. Lizzie with her open, innocent face and the heart of a harlot. Lizzie, who bore no resemblance to the beautiful giant of a kid running beside him.

“I was wrong about you. You’re going to be a great Lizzie,” he said, not meaning it. “All you need is a little faith in yourself.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Absolutely.” He reached out and gave her hair a quick tug. “You’re a good kid, Flower Power. If I had a sister, I’d want her to be just like you. Except not such a smart-ass.”

Jake watched as Belinda gradually won over every male on the set, from the lowliest crew member to Dick Spano to Jake himself. She was always there if someone needed her. She ran lines with the actors, joked with the grips, and rubbed away Johnny Guy’s stiff neck. She brought them all coffee, teased them about their wives and girlfriends, and pumped up their egos.

“The changes you made in DeeDee’s monologue were pure genius,” she told Jake in June, during the second month of shooting. “You dug deep.”

“Shucks, ma’am, it weren’t nothing.”

She regarded him earnestly. “I mean it, Jake. You nailed it. When she said, ‘I give up, Matt. I give up.’ I started to cry. You’re going to win an Oscar. I just know it.”

What touched him about Belinda’s enthusiasm was that she meant every overly effusive word. After a few moments with her, whatever bad mood he might have been carrying around vanished. She flirted shamelessly with him, soothed him, and made him laugh. Beneath the balm of her hyacinth-eyed adoration, he felt like a better actor, a better writer, and a less cynical man. She was fascinating, a worldly sophisticate with a child’s eager passion for everything bright and shiny. She helped make Eclipse one of the best sets he’d ever worked on.

“Years from now,” she proclaimed, “everyone here will be proud to tell the world they worked on Eclipse.”

No one disagreed.

Fleur dreaded going to work more each day. She hated hearing Jake and Belinda laugh. Why couldn’t she entertain him like her mother did? Being on the set was torture, and not just because of Jake. She hated acting even more than modeling. Maybe if she were better in her part, she wouldn’t feel so dispirited. Not that she was awful or anything, but she was the weak link in a great cast, and she’d never been satisfied with being anything but the bravest, the fastest, and the strongest.

Belinda predictably pushed aside her concerns. “You’re being way too hard on yourself, baby. It’s those awful nuns. They gave you overachiever’s syndrome.”

Fleur gazed across the set at Jake. He mussed her hair, dragged her out to shoot baskets with him, yelled at her if she argued with him, and treated her exactly like a kid sister. She wished she could talk to Belinda about her feelings for him, but her mother was the last person she could ever confide in about this.

Of course you’ve fallen in love with him, Belinda would say. How could you help it? He’s a great man, baby. Just like Jimmy.

She told herself she hadn’t exactly fallen in love, not eternal love, anyway. That had to work two ways, didn’t it? But her feelings had grown more complex than a lust-crush. Maybe she simply had an advanced case of puppy love. Unfortunately she’d directed it toward a man who treated her as though she were twelve.

One Friday evening, Dick Spano had a party catered to the set. Fleur put on three-inch heels and a crepe de chine sarong that she tied at the bust. Every man on the set noticed except for Jake. He was too busy talking to Belinda. Belinda never gave him a hard time, never challenged him. No wonder he loved being with her.

Fleur started counting the days until they left for location in Iowa. The sooner this picture was over, the sooner she could return to New York and forget about Jake Koranda. If only she could come up with a plan for what she wanted to do with her life once this was all behind her.

Dick Spano rented out a motel not far from Iowa City to house the actors and crew and to serve as the production’s command post. Fleur’s room had a pair of ugly lamps, worn orange carpeting, and a reproduction of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte bolted to the wall. The painting’s cardboard center curled in like a potato chip. Belinda wrinkled her nose as she studied it. “Lucky you. I got fake Van Gogh sunflowers.”

“You didn’t have to come with me,” Fleur said more sharply than she should have.

“Don’t be cranky, darling. You know I couldn’t stay behind. After all those miserable years in Paris with nothing to do but drink, this had been a dream come true.”

Fleur gazed up from the stack of bras she was putting away in the bureau. Even in this drab hotel room, Belinda looked happy. And why shouldn’t she? Belinda was living out her dream. But this wasn’t Fleur’s dream. She fixed her eyes on the bras. “I’ve been…sort of thinking about what I want to do when this is over.”

“Don’t think too hard, darling. That’s what we pay Gretchen and your agent for.” Belinda rummaged through Fleur’s cosmetic case and pulled out a hairbrush. “We’re going to have to make a decision soon, though, about the Paramount project. It really is tempting. Parker’s sure it’s right for you, but Gretchen hates the script. One way or another, we need to close the Estee Lauder deal first.”

Fleur took a pair of running shoes from her suitcase and tried to sound casual. “Maybe…we should wait awhile before we do anything. I wouldn’t mind taking some time off. We could travel, just the two of us. It’d be fun.”

“Don’t be silly, baby.” Belinda eyed her reflection in the mirror and fingered a lock of hair. “Maybe I should go lighter? What do you think?”

Fleur abandoned all pretense of unpacking. “I’d really like some time off. I’ve been working hard for three years, and I need a vacation. A chance to think some things over.”

She finally had Belinda’s complete attention. “Absolutely not.” Belinda slapped down the hairbrush. “Dropping out of sight now would be career suicide.”

“But…I want to take a break. It’s all happened so quickly. I mean, it’s been wonderful and everything, but…” Her words came out in a rush. “How do I know this is what I really want to do with my life?”

Belinda looked at her as if she’d gone crazy. “What more could you possibly want?”

Fleur couldn’t jump into another movie right away, and she hated the idea of more modeling, but she felt herself faltering. “I-I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure? I guess it’s a little difficult to find something else to do when you’re already sitting on top of the world.”

“I’m not saying I want another career. I just…I just need some time to think about my choices. To make sure this is really what I want.”

Belinda turned into a cold, distant stranger. “Do you have something more exciting in mind than being the most famous model in the world? Something more glamorous than being a film star? What are you thinking about doing, Fleur? Do you want to be a secretary? Or a store clerk? Or how about a nurse’s aide? You could clean up vomit and scrub out bedpans. Is that good enough for you?”