She calls the number listed at the bottom of the ad.
A well-spoken woman who sounds somewhat matronly and British explains that the job is modeling very expensive lingerie like Chantal Thomass or Rien or Wacoal in a retail venue — the exact word she uses, “venue” — at flexible hours, and at a starting rate of thirty dollars an hour. She asks how old Lainie is...
“Thirty-three,” she says.
“Mm,” the woman says.
Lainie catches her breath.
“It’s just that most of our mannequins are younger,” the woman says.
“What age were you looking for?”
“Well, most of our mannequins are in their early twenties.
O-kay, Lainie thinks, and immediately figures she’s out of the running. Thirty-three. Ancient in the lingerie-modeling trade.
“But I do have a very youthful figure,” she says.
“Would you feel comfortable telling me your dimensions?” the woman asks in her pleasant voice with its mild British accent.
“Thirty-four, twenty-five, thirty-four. B cup.”
“You don’t have any visible scars or blemishes, do you?”
“No,” she says, and wonders if she should mention her wandering right eye, but that’s neither a scar nor a blemish, though it’s been a pain in the ass all her life.
“Tattoos?” the woman asks.
Tattoos? Lainie thinks.
“No,” she says. “No tattoos.”
“Although some of our mannequins do have tattoos,” the woman says. “Discreet ones, of course. A tiny butterfly on the shoulder. A little rose on the hip.”
“I don’t have any of those.”
But I can get one, she thinks. If a tattoo is required, just let me know, I’ll run out and...
“Well,” the woman says, and is silent for what seems an inordinately long time, no doubt studying the statistics she’s written down, no doubt trying to determine whether a thirty-three-year-old woman with a mere B cup and no tattoos is suitable for modeling higher priced lingerie like Simone Perele or Aubade or Gossard.
“You’re not married, are you?”
“No,” Lainie says at once.
“Mm,” the woman says. “Is there anyone who’d be likely to object to your modeling lingerie?”
“No,” she says.
Why would they? she wonders.
“Then do you think you’d like to come in for an interview?”
“Yes, I would,” Lainie says. “Yes.”
She waits.
“What would be a convenient time for you?” the woman asks.
The offices of Buttercup Enterprises, Inc., are in a strip mall on U.S. 41, situated at street level between a pet shop and a garden supply store. Lainie parks her white Geo nose-in, facing a battery of lawn mowers and spreaders, garden hoses on reels, huge sacks of fertilizer and seed, and variously priced rakes, hoes and spades racked against the front window of the store. In the pet shop on the other side of Buttercup, white puppies frolic and a very fat fluffy kitten dozes in the glancing afternoon sun. She raps on the glass. The kitten doesn’t stir.
The flowers painted onto the plate-glass windows flanking the entrance door to Buttercup resemble sunflowers more than any buttercups Lainie has ever seen. She wonders immediately if the company would like her to design a new logo for the window The lettering is none too elegant, either. It is the simplest form of graphic, what graffiti writers called Bubble, a sort of ballooning, overlapping face that any child could master in moments, a totally inappropriate font for a firm specializing in high-style lingerie. She would have chosen something like DESDEMONA (and here she visualizes it in her head) or HARRINGTON (again visualizing it) as more appropriate to the nature of the business.
She does not yet know what the nature of the business actually is.
The man who interviews her is perhaps thirty years old, a good-looking man dressed in a white linen suit and white patent-leather shoes, wearing under the suit jacket a vibrant blue cotton sports shirt, open at the throat, no tie. He looks like he just stepped out of the pages of GQ, his black hair slicked back wetly in a look too fashionable for staid Calusa. Pleasantly, cordially, he offers her a chair in front of his wide desk — ebony top, polished chrome legs and trim — and sits in a black leather chair with the same chrome appointments as the desk, a mate to the chair in which Lainie sits and crosses her legs demurely. She is wearing a straw-colored suit, lighter panty hose, a mossy-green silk blouse, low-heeled sandals of the same color. The office is modestly but nicely decorated, modern prints on the walls, a pair of Chagalls, one Calder. A triangular black plastic nameplate on his desk announces C. WILSON in white letters.
“Call me Chris,” he says, and smiles. “So,” he says, “I understand you’re interested in modeling for Buttercup.”
“Yes,” she says. “But I do have some questions about the job.”
“Certainly,” he says. “What would you like to know?”
“Well, it doesn’t involve any traveling, does it?”
“What do you mean by traveling? You would have to travel back and forth to the venue, of course.”
The word venue again.
“Do you have transportation?”
“Yes, I have my own car.”
“Good.”
“But I meant traveling out of town,” she says. “Would the job entail...?”
“Oh no. No, no, no,” he says, reassuring her with his pleasant smile. “All of the venues are right here in Calusa. Most of them on the Trail, in fact.”
Meaning U.S. 41, the Tamiami Trail, which is good because what she wants to do is spend most of her day in the studio on North Apple, designing toys while she does this modeling thing only part-time. This seems to suit Mr. Wilson quite well... Chris... since the venues are open from twelve noon to two A.M., and she can more or less choose her own work schedule depending on how much time she wishes to spend at it and how much money she chooses to earn...
“It’s all entirely flexible, you see, entirely dependent on you yourself, Lainie... if I may call you Lainie,” he says. “Which is a very pretty name, by the way, if you choose to use it.”
“I’m sorry?” she says.
“Some of our mannequins prefer using different names.”
“Different?”
“Other than their own names.”
“Why?” she asks.
“Personal idiosyncrasies,” he says, and shrugs.
She still does not smell a rat.
By this time in her recitation, Matthew and Frank are way ahead of the pleasantly smiling Mr. Wilson. Even young Andrew seems to have caught the drift. But Lainie, to hear her tell it, is still blissfully unaware.
“We do insist on a minimum of four hours a day.”
Which would be perfect, she thinks. Four hours a day in a five-day week would come to twenty hours a week at thirty dollars an hour, for a total of six hundred dollars a week. Her fixed expenses are something like twenty-five hundred a month, so, actually, this would work, particularly if she could choose her own...
“There should be some lingerie in your size in the dressing room,” Mr. Wilson says.
Chris says.
She blinks at him.
“We stock only the finest imported brands,” he says, “Felina, lejaby, Jezebel, La Perla, I wonder if you’d mind trying something on for me? Just any bra, garter belt and panties, whichever color suits you. There’s matching hosiery in there as well,” he says, “you’ll find it. If you’ll tell Clarice your shoe size...”
Who’s Clarice? she wonders.
“...she’ll bring you a pair of heels as well.”
Smiling pleasantly.
“You mean you want me to... uh... try it on now?”
“If you would.”