“Dumb,” Ellie said as she took Madison’s arm. “That’s all it is: stupidity.”
“Right,” Leslie said, taking Madison’s other arm as the three of them left the porch and began to walk down the street. “Actually, Ellie liked your story so much that she wants to use it in her next book, so she wants to hear it all over again. She doesn’t want to miss even one of the details.”
“Good thinking,” Ellie said. “I wish I’d thought of—I mean, Leslie is one hundred percent right. So let’s go in here and you can tell us everything in detail. Start where you met us in New York.” She looked around Madison’s back to Leslie. “That’s where she went back to, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Leslie said as she opened the restaurant door.
“What does that mean?” Madison asked. “‘Back to’? You two are certainly acting strangely.?
??
“Leftover hormones from childbearing,” Ellie said quickly.
“Ridiculous!” Madison answered as she followed the hostess toward a table. “I’ve had four kids and the hormones are not left over.”
At that statement, both Ellie and Leslie stopped in their tracks and looked at each other.
Leslie spoke first. “Four,” she whispered.
“And Thomas,” Ellie replied; then the next second they were practically running to get to the table to sit across from Madison.
Ten minutes later they had placed their orders. Ellie leaned across the table and said, “Every word. I want to hear every word about your life from the moment you left the DMV.”
“But you already know most of it, so why—”
“I’ll dedicate my next book to you,” Ellie said quickly.
“Will you put the names of my children in there?” Madison asked, smiling, her face softening.
Ellie looked about her, and as she’d suspected, most of the diners were looking at Madison. At forty, Madison was still so beautiful that she mesmerized people. But Ellie knew that just yesterday, this same woman had walked into shops and restaurants and no one had paid any particular attention to her.
“All right,” Madison said. “I distinctly remember telling you two all of this, but if you want to hear it again, well . . . Let’s see, where do I begin? After I left you two at the DMV, nineteen long years ago, I came up with a plan to distinguish myself at the modeling agency. After all,” Madison said, “tall, gorgeous girls from Montana are a dime a dozen in New York, so I had to do something to stand out.”
Madison saw the way Ellie looked at Leslie at that statement. “Are you two sure you want to hear this?”
“More than I want to call my . . . husband,” Ellie said; then she took a deep breath. “And my son. So get on with it. You’re holding me up.”
“All right,” Madison said, smiling. “I want to call my kids too, and, truthfully, maybe I did leave out some of the more colorful details when I told you about me. So, now, where was I? The first thing I did after I left you two was throw away that dreadful portfolio that my hometown photographer made for me. Poor thing. He meant well, but the pictures really had no pizzazz. Then . . .”
She looked at the other two women with a puzzled expression on her face. “Sometimes you look back at your life and you see things that you did and you wonder why you did them and, even, how you knew to do them. To this day I can’t figure out how I knew to do this, but I looked in a phone book and found the name of a photographer and asked him to photograph me.”
For a moment she paused for effect. “But he wasn’t just a photographer, he was Cordova.”
At this Ellie sucked in her breath; then she looked at Leslie, who was also impressed. Neither woman was involved in the world of photography or high fashion, but they knew this name. It was said that Cordova had single-handedly made modeling into an art form. There were galleries full of his work.
“Anyway,” Madison continued, “maybe I’d read his name somewhere; I don’t know. He was very young, he’d just graduated from some Midwestern university with a degree in photography, and he planned to spend his life taking pictures of fruit. Can you imagine? A talent like his, and on the day I met him, he was taking pictures of oranges to be put in some trade magazine that only buyers for grocery stores would see. But I went to his studio and I persuaded him to take a picture of me wearing only a snake.”
At that Ellie blinked a couple of times; then she said, “Poor Nastassja Kinski.”
“Why would you feel sorry for the actress?” Madison asked as her plate was put in front of her. It was heaped with three kinds of fried seafood on top of a bed of french fries, while Ellie and Leslie were having cold lobster salads.
“Never mind,” Ellie said. “Go on with your story.”
Madison smiled as she picked up her fork. “I remember that day as though it happened last week. And I remember the man who got the snake.” She looked up at Ellie and Leslie. “It was a big snake. A really, really big snake.”
Twenty-eight
1981