I could never have done this at twenty-one, Madison thought, but now his tone and attitude were a relief to her. She was having difficulty trying to pretend to be a young girl. “I want you to take pictures of me.”
“I don’t do fashion,” he said, not bothering to look at her. “Look in the yellow pages. You can find a hundred photographers who’d love to shoot you.”
Madison wanted to say that she only had three weeks in which to change her entire future, so she didn’t have time to beg. “If you can push the button on a camera, you can take fashion photos,” she said, and more annoyance than she meant to show came out in her voice.
“You’ve got b—”
“Determination,” she said quickly. “And obviously more belief in you than you have in yourself. What do you lose if you fail? You go back to taking pictures of fruit? But if you make a star of me, what can happen to you? Did you buy that camera used?”
For a moment she held her breath. Would he throw her out? He turned the crank on the camera, shot again, then turned the crank again. He didn’t look up at her. “You pay the costs of film and developing.”
“Deal,” she said instantly.
She’d taken a cab to his studio so she wouldn’t arrive sweaty, and while in the cab she’d made a sketch. She felt bad that she was copying something that someone more original than she was going to do, but she’d made a simple drawing of a woman lying on her side, with an enormous snake wrapped around her.
“Someone once told me that he’d like to see a girl wearing nothing but a snake.”
The photographer didn’t respond to that, just kept on shooting pictures of his oranges. He had an assistant, a mousy little man, who stood on the sidelines and loaded the cameras.
“A big snake,” Madison said into the silence.
Turning, he looked at her. “I don’t do porn.”
At that Madison drew in her breath. “Give me a break, will you? I’m a tall beautiful girl from Montana, but tall, beautiful girls from Montana are on every corner in the modeling world. I need something to make me different. No porn, but art. Shocking art. Can you do it or not? If you can’t, tell me so I can stop wasting my time.”
For the first time, she saw interest in his eyes, and she held her breath to see what he was going to say. “You have a head on your shoulders, don’t you?”
“Old head in a young body, but I’m marketing the young part. Nobody pays to look at the old part.”
When she saw his smile, she knew that she had him. She wanted to dance around in triumph, but she made herself stand still and wait. It was his turn to act now.
She handed him the sketch she’d made. He looked at it for quite some time, then he took his wallet out of his back pocket, removed a credit card, and handed it to his assistant. “Get me a snake.”
The young man looked at the plastic card in horror. “Where do I . . . ?” he whispered, unable to finish the sentence.
“It’s New York, so find me a snake, a big snake. Have it here at nine tomorrow morning.”
Cordova then turned his attention to Madison and looked at her as though she were a piece of merchandise. “You have fat hips and one eye is larger than the other.”
Madison smiled. She’d been told this before, but that time it had made her furious. “Then you’ll just have to light me so the flaws don’t show, won’t you?” she said.
He didn’t answer, but she could see that his eyes were twinkling. I think he likes me, she thought.
“Who does your makeup?” he asked.
“Have any friends?” she asked, hope in her voice.
“Actually, I do. Be here at six tomorrow morning. You’re going to take some work.”
Again, in the past, a remark like that would have insulted her, but now she just smiled. “Right. Better tell your friend to bring a trowel and a bag of cement. It’s going to take a lot to make me look as good as your oranges.”
He tried to keep one corner of his mouth from turning upward, but he couldn’t. “Go. Get out of here. Get some sleep. Maybe your eyes will even out. And do something about that dress. It makes me sick just to look at it.”
Madison turned toward the door and by the time she reached it, he was already back at his camera. “Thanks,” she said, but he didn’t look up at her.
Once she was outside, she looked in her bag and saw that she had a key and, thankfully, the address of the cheap downtown hotel where she was staying. If she hadn’t written it down, she knew she wouldn’t have remembered the address after all these years.
When she reached her little hotel room, she pulled all the clothes she’d brought with her out of the closet and the rickety chest of drawers. Mrs. Welch, who owned the only clothing store in Erskine, had donated an entire wardrobe to Madison to take with her to New York. “It’s difficult to get things in your size, but I did it,” she’d told Madison the day before she was to board the plane.