The Fame Game Read Free Page B

quitting.”
    He strode over to her and took her by the shoulders. “Sit down … come on, I love you. Sit down. I wouldn’t have an ugly girl around here. They depress me. Come on.”
    “You’re like somebody in brainwashing school,” Gerry said. To her horror she realized she was beginning to cry in earnest. She was glad she had not eaten any breakfast or she might have thrown up.
    “That’s the whole point,” Libra said sweetly. He helped her off with her coat and handed her his monogrammed handkerchief. “I just wanted to show you how I treat my clients to keep them insecure. You see now how well it works. The only reason you were ready to leave is that this job isn’t your whole life like their success is theirs. But I want you to know what I do because you’re going to be very important to me. Your job will be to be sweet and cuddly and pick up the pieces I break. It’s a perfect balance and everybody will be happy. Now sit down.”
    “I have one stipulation,” Gerry said.
    He looked at her with the pleasant superiority of a teacher humoring a first-grader who has just thrown a tantrum. “All right.”
    “You are never, never, repeat, never , to call me asshole again, or any name remotely like it.”
    “All right,” he said, amused.
    Oh my God, he’s won , she thought. He’s won, and I never hated anybody so much in my life. He’s made it seem as if I was ridiculous to mind what he called me. He’s managed to make me feel humorless and square and I don’t even know how it happened . But in a funny way, she admired him. He obviously had many insecurities of his own—that was an understatement—look at him, Lady Macbeth, scrubbing everything and calling his clients the Dirty Dozen: if that wasn’t Freudian, what was? He probably hated everything about himself. She felt almost sorry for him. He seemed to need something in her that she had to give; perhaps her clarity as an outsider. At any rate he was certainly the most interesting man she had ever met. Perhaps she could win him over … perhaps they could even become friends.
    The doorbell rang. Libra looked at her. She fought back a smile and went to the door and opened it.
    There stood a six-foot vision in white suede. He was smiling with capped white Chiclets, and his dark hair was neatly cut in a Prince Valiant fringe above navy blue eyes. He was wearing an immaculate white suede suit with a Mao collar, and white alligator loafers. He had a white attaché case in his hand.
    “I’m here to see the vicious Libran,” the white-suede vision said. “Tell him Mr. Nelson is here, as in Rockefeller.”
    “Hello, Nelson,” Libra said. “Come on in. This is my new baby sitter, Gerry Thompson. She’ll take care of all your needs when I’m not here. Gerry, this is Mr. Nelson, the society hairdresser, my client.”
    “My, she’s pretty,” Nelson said, as if she were not there. “Where’s Lizzie?”
    “In the bedroom,” Libra said.
    “I came to see you, of course, but as long as she’s here I’ll do her hair. I want to welcome you to New York. We’re all so glad you’ll be among the living again.”
    “Not all the time,” Libra said. “I’m keeping the old office too.”
    Nelson clucked. “The Sam Leo Libra Doll—you wind it up and it flies back and forth to California.”
    “Nelson is my personal creation,” Sam Leo Libra said. “You don’t mind if I tell Gerry, do you?”
    “I don’t mind. I owe everything to you.”
    “When Nelson came to me he was just struggling along, with a lot of talent but no way to sell it. He used to wear a black leather jacket with a fur lining with fleas in it.”
    “I never had fleas …!”
    “And he rode around on a big black motorcycle. He was burning hair in a dump in the Village where they played rock ’n’ roll all day and the clients danced when they weren’t having their hair set. I took one look at him in that black leather and I told him: ‘Nelson, you’ll never get anywhere