"Hello," she says, playing along. "I'm Marina Gibson."
"I hope I'm not bothering you."
"No, no, I'm glad you came by," she says. "You're a... nice distraction."
"From?"
She pauses. "From thinking about certain things."
Inwardly I'm sighing. "So where's Gavin now?"
She laughs, surprised. "Ah, I see you've memorized your lines." She wipes her lips with a paper napkin, then leans over and tosses what's left of the ice cream cone into a nearby trash bin. "Gavin's in Fiji with a certain baroness."
"Oh, a certain baroness?"
"Gavin's parents own something like-oh, I don't know-CocaCola or something but he never really has any money."
Something catches in me. "Does that matter to you?"
"No," she says. "Not at all."
"Don't look back," I'm saying. "You can never look back."
"I'm fairly good at severing all contacts with the past."
"I think that's a more or less attractive quality."
While leaning against the railing Marina just simply starts talking: the drastic hair changes, the career that semi-took off because of them, the shaky flights to Miami, getting old, how she likes to be shot with the light coming from the left to offset the tilt of a nose broken in a Rollerblading accident three years ago, a club in East Berlin called Orpheus where she met Luca Fedrizzi, the weekends they spent at Armani's house in Brioni, the meaninglessness of time zones, her basic indifference, a few key figures, what the point is. Some of the details are small (the way she would unroll the windows in her mother's Jaguar when racing back from parties in Connecticut so she could smoke, the horrifying bitchery between agents, books she never read, the grams of coke carried in compacts, the crying jags during shoots that would ruin two hours of carefully applied makeup), but the way she tells them makes her world seem larger. Of course during the modeling phase she was always strung out and brittle and so many friends died, lawsuits were started then abandoned, there were fights with Albert Watson, the ill-fated affair with Peter Morton, how everything fizzled out, her mother's alcoholism and the brother who died of cardiac arrhythmia linked to the ingestion of herbal Ecstasy tablets, and all of this leading up to the designer who fell in love with her-platonically-and subsequently died of AIDS, leaving Marina a substantial sum of money so she could quit modeling. We both admit we know someone who signed a suicide note with a smiley face.
At first I'm able to look as if I'm concentrating intensely on what she's saying and in fact some of it's registering, but really I've heard it all before; then, while talking, she moves closer and there's a quickening and I'm relieved. Silently focusing in on her, I realize that I've been activated. I stare into her face for over an hour, asking the appropriate questions, guiding her to certain areas, mimic responses that I'm supposed to have, offer sympathetic nods when they're required, sometimes there's a sadness in my eyes that's half-real, half-not. The only sound, besides her voice, is the sea moving below us, faraway waves lapping against the hull of the ship. I notice idly that there's no moon.
She sums things up bitterly by saying, "The life of a model-traveling, meeting a lot of superficial people-it's all just so-"
I don't let her finish that sentence, because my face is so close to hers-she's tall, we're the same height-that I have to lean in and kiss her lips lightly and she pulls back and she's not surprised and I kiss her lips lightly again and they taste like strawberries from the ice cream and cold.
"Don't. Please, Victor," she murmurs. "I can't."
"You're so beautiful," I whisper. "You're so beautiful."
"Victor, not... now."
I pull back and stretch, pretending nothing happened, but finally I can't help saying "I want to come to Paris with you" and she pretends not to hear me, folding her arms as she Icans against the railing with a sad, placid expression that just makes her face seem dreamier.
"Hey, let's go dancing," I suggest, then check the watch I'm not wearing and casually pretend I was just inspecting a nonexistent freckle on my wrist. "We can go to the Yacht Club disco. I'm a good dancer."
"I don't think you'd like the Yacht Club," she says. "Unless you'd like to dance to the disco version of 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' for hours on end. There's a DJ named Jamtastica too."