Resting bitch face did not change.
“Well, then . . .” she started, clearly discomforted by my body language.
“I’ll get right to it, I can see you are on your way somewhere important. I work for Ford Models, perhaps you’ve heard of us?”
“I have,” I answered, wondering if I truly looked as naïve as she seemed to think I did.
“Yes, well, my name’s Maisie Maxwell and I hate running in heels and I really hate sweating, but I did it for you because I think you’re stunning. Seriously, incredible. Have you modeled before?”
I shook my head no.
“I didn’t think so, you slouch when you walk. Anyhoo, you have to be almost six feet, legs for days, and your skin is magnificent. Here’s my card. Please, please call me. I would love for you to come in for a test shoot. I’ve been desperately looking for someone new. I’m so bored with the Christie Brinkleys and Brooke Shieldses. All-American is on its way out. I want a model with some piss and vinegar. Some homegrown attitude.” Maisie grabbed my hand and shoved her card into my palm.
“Thanks, I think.” I didn’t look at the card. Was piss and vinegar white talk for ghetto?
“Please do call me! I have two kids in private school and God do I need to find the next Naomi Campbell. Not that you have to be Naomi Campbell. Actually, please don’t be Naomi Campbell; rumor has it she’s a bitch of a diva on set. Be whoever you want to be, just please call and cross fingers, maybe you can be my rainmaker. With a mortgage, tuition, my husband’s dental school loans, and a witch of a mother-in-law, I need it.” Maisie tipped her sunglasses down, gave me a thumbs-up, and limped away in serious pain. I allowed myself to feel flattered that some white lady would run blocks in stiletto boots just to talk to me. But I was done making it rain for other people. If I was going to be Maisie’s rainmaker, I was damn well going to make sure it poured on me, too.
Four weeks later I was no longer a nanny; I was on a plane to L.A. for a swimsuit catalog shoot after begging my NYU comparative lit professor to give me an extension on my paper. I told Maisie she didn’t need to come with me, I was pretty self-sufficient, but she insisted. As it turned out, during those forty-eight hours in L.A. I only saw her for about twenty minutes. She spent the rest of the time lounging by the hotel pool flipping through a back stack of Vogues. Apparently white women don’t actually swim, either. On the way home, she confessed she really needed a vacation from her kids. I remember thinking, I love kids, but I’m never gonna have them. They ruin your life. Look at my mama, look at Aunt Viv having to raise me, and now this lady.
I made more money from that L.A. shoot than I had my entire first year at NYU working twenty hours a week as a nanny. To most people it wasn’t much, but to me it was a welcome mat into a whole other lifestyle. I adjusted my NYU class schedule to take the minimum course load to keep my academic scholarship, and also be able to keep up my newfound modeling commitments. I didn’t have the heart to tell Aunt Viv I switched my major to psychology so I could model and still graduate without having to take hard classes; she was too busy bragging to all her friends in the Glide Memorial Church gospel choir that I was studying chemistry so I could apply to med school. The money was just too easy and that trumped a tough course load as well as truth telling.
By what should have been my senior year at NYU I was a full semester behind in credits, but my bank account was growing, and I was booked for my first runway show in Milan. Milan was code for I have arrived in the world of runway modeling. For months, I had been lusting after a fine-assed David Beckham/Taye Diggs combo. He was a newbie model just like me. Between the green eyes, shaved head, disdain for wearing a shirt to cover up his sculpted torso, and the chip on his left front tooth, he took sexy to a whole new level. Somewhere over the Atlantic he finally noticed me. I had spent so many years being good—studying hard, getting good grades, helping Aunt Viv, training mercilessly for track, getting a scholarship, earning spending money—that I had a moment, one solitary moment of wanting to be bad. David Diggs (or was it Taye Beckham?) and I joined the mile-high club, twice, in the first-class bathroom before the plane touched down in Milan. Cordially, he took me to a nice dinner that night, held my hand near some famous fountain, and kissed me at midnight so I felt no shame.
It turned out I was a massive hit in Milan. As hard as I tried to mimic the dour faces of all the top models as they strutted down the runway, I couldn’t do it. The next morning, I was on the front page of the Milan newspaper style section being complimented on my gleaming smile, warmth, and positivity in an ocean of women who look ticked off and hungry. Next thing I knew I was booked for a month of work in Tokyo and heralded as an up-and-coming fashion muse. My mile-high fling and I parted ways in Milan promising to meet again on a future flight, his six-pack abs burned into my memory.
I promptly returned to NYU, quit school, and wrote Aunt Viv a long letter explaining the whole thing, begging her not to worry, telling her that I would make more money in the next ten years without a degree than I ever would after paying off med school loans and thirty years of private practice. Yes, it was fuzzy math, but at twenty-one I was convinced this was a solid life choice. Luckily, this was before cell phones were commonplace, so I never had to hear the depth of disappointment in Aunt Viv’s voice.
A month later I sold off what little I had in my dorm room, packed a bag, and flew to Tokyo to live in a postage stamp–sized hotel room in the Shibuya ward. And that is exactly where I found myself at twenty-one: in a thong, pasties, and a kimono, owning the catwalk and blissfully unaware that I was carrying a baby conceived in a bathroom built for one. As far as I knew it was my life that was just beginning, not the lima bean’s inside me.
But then my pants didn’t fit. Maisie made me pee on four sticks in the Charles de Gaulle Airport to be sure. I spent the next three weeks zigzagging across Europe trying to hunt down my baby daddy. As the hormones raged, so did my anger at my stupidity and his carelessness. I finally tracked him down hunched over a hand-rolled joint outside a swanky hotel in Amsterdam. After I unexpectedly had to remind him who I was, sheer exhaustion and nausea overcame all sensibility and I announced right then and there on the hotel’s red-carpeted steps that I was pregnant. He looked at me with a blank stare. “New York to Milan flight?” I hinted to jog his memory. Blank stare. “Gettin’ busy in the bathroom?” Blank stare. Clearly, I was not the first woman he had seduced with her booty pressed up against the Purell dispenser.
With all the empathy he could muster, Mr. Mile-High said, “Hey, it could be anyone’s baby.” But after I explained to him that I had only had sex with two men in my life and the first one was eighteen months before him, his copper skin turned putrid yellow. And after much yelling back and forth in front of that five-star hotel about responsibility and owning your actions, I’m sure it won’t shock you to find out that Mr. Mile-High wanted nothing to do with something that would ground him for life. And the hotel wanted nothing further to do with the two of us. Pure pride made me walk away that afternoon, stomaching how unfair it was that my life was on a downward spiral and his was only going to continue to get better—care- and responsibility-free. I guess I could have tried to figure out a way to hold him accountable for his baby, but I was twenty-one, in Europe with no friends and no family, and zero clue how I would even go about getting him to acknowledge the baby was his, let alone to help pay for it. And I was not going to humiliate myself and beg him to take responsibility for me and for his baby. I came from a long line of women who had raised babies on their own or, in my mother’s case, had given their baby to their single older sister to raise. In my mind there was no reason I couldn’t do the same.