The Home for Wayward Supermodels by Pamela Redmond Satran Page A
Authors: Pamela Redmond Satran
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rich green velvet for Desi, just in case she got inspired.
When I got to the library, they directed me to the reading room, which looked like a set they would build for a movie in which something completely wonderful happened in a library. It had a carved wooden ceiling and tall arched windows, like in an old church, and murals of New York buildings marching all around the top third of the walls, and long polished wooden tables lit with low golden lamps. It made me wish I were a scholar or a writer instead of a supermodel, so I could go there every day.
The first thing I did was type “Jean-Pierre Renaud” into the computer. My own computer was still at home—I figured Mom was holding it hostage to get me to call her, but I wasn’t ready to do that. My one serious email friendship, with Desi, could take place in real life now, and I was feeling strangely liberated without the Web, especially now that all the stimulation anyone could ever need was right outside my door.
Anyway, when I Googled “Jean-Pierre Renaud” and “photographer,” more than five thousand references popped up. He’d had celebrity portraits in the Louvre and wildlife pictures in a French nature magazine. He’d been the still photographer for a Danish movie and shot the wedding portrait of minor Spanish royalty. While I couldn’t find an address or even a website for him, I did find a picture, which hit me so hard I slumped, breathless, in my chair.
I couldn’t help but think of how strangely Alex had looked at me that night, when he was describing what Jean-Pierre Renaud looked like. If I’d had a mirror right then, I would have looked strangely at myself. The fact was, I was nearly a carbon copy of my biological father. Same straight black hair, same stretched-out angular body, same prominent cheekbones and dark eyes and full mouth. The only thing that was like my mother was my relatively discreet nose—but then again, relative to the beak on Monsieur Renaud, Jimmy Durante’s nose would be considered discreet.
He looked…forbidding, with his long dramatic backswept hair and his chic white shirt and black pants, with the cigarette dangling from his fingers and the focused, commanding look of an artist on his face. But he also looked intriguing. What characteristics of this famous foreign man had found their way into me? How much of my love of clothes, my visual sense, my differentness came from him?
I felt a strong pang then for Duke, the man I’d known as my father forever, whom I’d always loved and still did. More than once I’d been on the brink of calling him, but part of what made this so hard was that our relationship had never been based on talking. Rather we’d just be together, sitting in a rowboat fishing, or canoeing down some fastflowing stream, or putting our feet up watching a Packers game. I felt if we could just do something like that together now, it would go a long way toward resolving all the distance between us.
Surely some of Duke had gotten into me too: my taste for fishing, for instance, and my love of nature. But as dear as Duke was to me, the truth was that I’d always been baffled by how I could be such a chatterbox when he was so quiet, why I loved all kinds of design and art while he had (sorry, Duke) no taste at all, how I could be so intense while he was pale and round and mild.
My mom had always explained this by saying I looked like her when she was young, a claim it was difficult to refute since her weight made it hard to tell what she really looked like. I did see a resemblance to the modeling pictures she’d saved from her early years. Especially around the nose.
I thought back now to one photo in particular of Mom. I’d never thought to question it, but now when I considered it, I saw that it held a lot of clues that Mom had indeed been to New York before last month. Number one, it was from Glamour magazine, her one appearance in a big-time publication, and it was obvious to me now that it
When I got to the library, they directed me to the reading room, which looked like a set they would build for a movie in which something completely wonderful happened in a library. It had a carved wooden ceiling and tall arched windows, like in an old church, and murals of New York buildings marching all around the top third of the walls, and long polished wooden tables lit with low golden lamps. It made me wish I were a scholar or a writer instead of a supermodel, so I could go there every day.
The first thing I did was type “Jean-Pierre Renaud” into the computer. My own computer was still at home—I figured Mom was holding it hostage to get me to call her, but I wasn’t ready to do that. My one serious email friendship, with Desi, could take place in real life now, and I was feeling strangely liberated without the Web, especially now that all the stimulation anyone could ever need was right outside my door.
Anyway, when I Googled “Jean-Pierre Renaud” and “photographer,” more than five thousand references popped up. He’d had celebrity portraits in the Louvre and wildlife pictures in a French nature magazine. He’d been the still photographer for a Danish movie and shot the wedding portrait of minor Spanish royalty. While I couldn’t find an address or even a website for him, I did find a picture, which hit me so hard I slumped, breathless, in my chair.
I couldn’t help but think of how strangely Alex had looked at me that night, when he was describing what Jean-Pierre Renaud looked like. If I’d had a mirror right then, I would have looked strangely at myself. The fact was, I was nearly a carbon copy of my biological father. Same straight black hair, same stretched-out angular body, same prominent cheekbones and dark eyes and full mouth. The only thing that was like my mother was my relatively discreet nose—but then again, relative to the beak on Monsieur Renaud, Jimmy Durante’s nose would be considered discreet.
He looked…forbidding, with his long dramatic backswept hair and his chic white shirt and black pants, with the cigarette dangling from his fingers and the focused, commanding look of an artist on his face. But he also looked intriguing. What characteristics of this famous foreign man had found their way into me? How much of my love of clothes, my visual sense, my differentness came from him?
I felt a strong pang then for Duke, the man I’d known as my father forever, whom I’d always loved and still did. More than once I’d been on the brink of calling him, but part of what made this so hard was that our relationship had never been based on talking. Rather we’d just be together, sitting in a rowboat fishing, or canoeing down some fastflowing stream, or putting our feet up watching a Packers game. I felt if we could just do something like that together now, it would go a long way toward resolving all the distance between us.
Surely some of Duke had gotten into me too: my taste for fishing, for instance, and my love of nature. But as dear as Duke was to me, the truth was that I’d always been baffled by how I could be such a chatterbox when he was so quiet, why I loved all kinds of design and art while he had (sorry, Duke) no taste at all, how I could be so intense while he was pale and round and mild.
My mom had always explained this by saying I looked like her when she was young, a claim it was difficult to refute since her weight made it hard to tell what she really looked like. I did see a resemblance to the modeling pictures she’d saved from her early years. Especially around the nose.
I thought back now to one photo in particular of Mom. I’d never thought to question it, but now when I considered it, I saw that it held a lot of clues that Mom had indeed been to New York before last month. Number one, it was from Glamour magazine, her one appearance in a big-time publication, and it was obvious to me now that it
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