Catwalk (Sample Excerpt)

Chapter 3

   In the shower I scrubbed myself clean, trying to rid my body of the filth from the night before. A mixture of cigarettes, alcohol, vomit, and the confusion of the night swirled in my head. I granted myself the pleasure of sitting at the base of the tub, letting the water beat down on me. The drops proved cathartic, allowing me to banish the images that cycled through my brain: that steady look in Vincent's eyes, him putting his hands all over me, the horror of my reflection, the patch, little men dancing on the tiles ... feeling duped somehow, foolish.

     Dizzy and weak, I felt the weight of my bones soar exponentially when I raised an arm or lifted a leg to dry off. As I climbed out of the tub, the lump in my throat slunk down into the pit of my stomach with dread (and fear) of what was to come. Jonnie had gotten me an appointment with a booker at Icon, her New York agency. His name was Clive Loreaux, "the man who's launched a thousand faces." If someone was going to make it happen for me, he was, she said.

     I laid out my go-see outfit, the skirt suit that I wore to visit my agent back home. It was tailored and conservative and offered me clean, straight lines. It projected the image of someone who had it all together—an image I certainly could use at the moment. But staring at the gray and charcoal pinstripes, it made me feel cheated, aged beyond my years. This wasn't the image I wanted to project here in a new city, where nobody knew me, and nobody expected anything from me.

     "Leave the blazer at home," Jonnie said. "Trust me, you won't need it."

***

     In the lobby of Icon, I looked out the window, watching taxis, busses, and ambulances roll by, observing all the commotion in the eerie silence of the glass office. A dreary day unfolded before me as a rain cloud descended on 32nd street. Passersby took shelter under awnings and covered bus stops. I fidgeted with my hair, twisting the ends round my finger, a nervous habit left over from when I was a kid. The elevator opened and a woman of Amazonian proportions emerged. In a New York minute (which I assumed is however long it takes for someone to give you the onceover), she pinned me to the wall with her beady eyes, checking my hair, skin, face, breasts, waist, hips, and legs just before brushing past me, her Rapunzel-length locks whipping across her back. Deciding get the rest of the harassment over with, I entered the waiting room and took my seat as Jonnie walked ahead to meet with an agent.

     It was a large, minimalist space, with bleachers for chairs and a cement slab floor. The walls sported framed magazine covers and posters of models dating back to the late '70s. Girls filtered in and out of the office carrying portfolios under their arms like badges of beauty.

     A model's portfolio, or "book"—as those in the biz casually referred to these pictorial shrines — is essentially her resume. Jonnie said that in New York a girl could show up to a go-see with puke in her hair from a drinking binge the night before, but if her pictures looked good, so did she. The selection of photographs in a model's portfolio, then, was absolutely critical to her success. Ideally, one's book included beauty shots of the face, body shots of the figure, and photographs of one's range, showing versatility. Some girls were perfect for commercial work, like catalogs and magazine ads. Others were "editorial" types, prime subjects of art-house magazines and haute couture clients. I guessed that I was more commercial, not exactly the edgy type, but I knew that to be a true success, I had to pull off both genres.

     "Catherine Watson?" a voice called, jolting me out of thought. I stood up.

     A tall, sleek Italian woman named Isabel with coarse, curly black hair and wiry black eyeglasses shook my hand and asked me to follow her. We walked into a conference room that overlooked Penn Station on 33rd Street. On the table were stacks of composite cards—the calling cards of the modeling world—dispersed in tiny stacks. I handed her mine.