The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [59]
His face pinkens in the choke hold of his smile.
“Chas finally clinched it for her just this morning,” he goes on.
Ursula looks over at Javier anxiously, but he seems suddenly to have become preoccupied with a stain on his sleeve.
“Your friend Ed Cabaj is going to use her for the diet-water campaign!”
“What . . . ,” she falters, “. . . what do you mean?”
“You really made an impression on him at that party, Ursula,” Couch continues. “Chas said Ed kept talking about you, saying if only you were a few years younger and so on, or if only Ivy were still . . . you know, compos mentis. And then Chas socked him with the big idea: Why not use Ivy anyway? Think of the publicity! I tell you,” he says with a laugh, “ever since your sister got put away, I’ve been worried about our poor old boss. What with his listening to all this Light Age mumbo jumbo of Javier’s, I thought our blessed Mother Superior was finally losing it. But he’s still the king of all salesmen, we’ve got to give him that. Do we not just got to give him that?”
She turns to Javier, who sits woodenly, staring at the tabletop.
“Show her the pictures, Javier,” Couch urges.
Javier’s head snaps up. “No, James, this isn’t the time for—”
“Yes, Javier,” Ursula says, erecting a smile on her face to match Couch’s. “Show me the pictures.”
“Chas still has them.”
“Oh, stop being so modest,” Couch says, innocent and mischievous by turns. “You’ve still got all the rough sketches. The book’s right in your bag. I saw you doodling away in it an hour ago.”
Javier turns toward her, prepared to say something, but her smile stops him cold. Silently he reaches into the bag at his feet, brings out his sketchbook, hesitates, then sets it on the table.
The sketchbook resembles all his others, except instead of bearing some abstract, conceptual title like Elective Affinities, or Invented Origins, or The New Earnestness, this one is labeled simply Ivy. Ursula opens it. Into the first few pages of the book are pasted a few clippings of Ivy’s magazine and catalog ads. The last clipping is from a newspaper, the photograph of her being led by the police out of Banister Park, covered in slashes of blood and paint, wearing nothing but a short, tattered baseball jacket donated by a homeless man. The next dozen or so pages are taken up with rough and mostly incomplete exercises, Javier getting the hang of the physical language of Ivy, the look in her wide eyes, the carriage of her thin shoulders, her body in the midst of various motions and stances, wearing the outfits from the catalogs. Then, suddenly, a change in theme: a series of highly detailed color-pencil drawings of Ivy in savage outfits—hide skirts, one-shouldered tunic shirts, accessories of feathers and shells. The overall style of these pictures is more or less the one that Ursula developed for the presentation; Javier has dressed Ivy up in all the same beguiling contradictions, the voluptuous toughnesses and bold demurenesses and menacing pastels, but he has also gone on to create for her a series of outfits even more daring, revealing, and seductive than any that Ursula imagined for the savage girl. In one drawing she’s even topless, and almost bottomless as well, wearing nothing but a loincloth, a bone necklace, and bright-red streaks of paint on her arms, belly, and cheeks. A sheen of sweat glistens on her naked chest. Sparks of reflected fire flash in her brazen stare.
Couch snickers, looking over Ursula’s shoulder at the book. “Can’t you just see Cabaj’s eyes popping out at that one? The old goat.”
Sonja stares with her big, dark eyes at Ursula.
“I’ll bet your sister’s pretty happy—will be happy, I mean,” Couch goes on, “when she hears the news.”
Ursula says nothing.
“Don’t you think?” he asks.
She slowly fixes her eyes on Javier, maintaining the smile on her face.
“So . . . how long exactly have you been . . . working . . . on this idea?” she asks him.
“Not . . . I . . . I wanted to surprise you.”
“Oh, you sure did that.”
She looks through