I'm Your Girl (6 page)

3: Ginger “Psyche” Dane

The phone is ringing, but I am
not
answering it.

Only a few people on earth have my unlisted number, and I don’t want to talk to any of them. If it’s Mama, she’ll be asking about my love life. If it’s Daddy, he’ll be asking me why I don’t talk to Mama—about my love life. If it’s Rosemary, my hopeless sister who married for money instead of love, she’ll be asking when she can get away from her ancient, dusty husband for a visit—so she can ask me about my love life.

The fact is, I don’t have a love life, but they don’t want to hear that. They all want to hear that their Ginger has found the man of her dreams and is going to move from the Upper West Side to a house on Long Island with a picket fence, a bidet, a three-car garage, 2.5 children, and a dog.

The phone rings on, so I bury myself in my down comforter.

I’ll bet they saw the cover. No, Mama and Rosemary don’t read
Maxim.
It’s probably Daddy. He’ll tell me how I shouldn’t flaunt what God gave me, that he can’t show his face in church this Sunday, that he wished I had worn more clothes. But I know he’s proud of what he helped create. He has to be. He didn’t have any sons, but he did have two beautiful daughters, and I’m his baby. Rosemary did some modeling, too, but she quit looking good once she married and gave birth to the requisite male heir to the fortune two years ago. Her marriage is in trouble, but when I bring it up, Rosemary brushes me off with, “You’re not married, Ginger, so you cannot possibly understand.”

I may never get married. Oh, sure, I’ve been rumored into an affair or two on the pages of
People
and
Us
simply because I’m seen walking with or talking to some movie star, pro athlete, or entertainer, but love has never found me. I haven’t exactly had the time for love, what with shoots 300 days of the year on up to five continents. Maybe I should give love my unlisted cell phone number so I’ll be easier to find.

The phone rings on.

Maybe it’s an emergency, though emergencies, as a rule, aren’t emergencies at all in my family. Rosemary will tell me that something’s wrong with Shizzy, her Shih-Tzu: “Shizzy has intestinal distress, Ginger, so could you please come by to hold my hand at the vet?” Rosemary even fainted the last time when the vet removed a single tick from Shizzy’s neck. If Shizzy isn’t falling apart, then Rosemary will try to impress me with her husband’s wealth: “Ginger, I’m going to send the driver to pick you up so we can go spend Fuller’s money.” As far as I can tell, money is the only thing she gets from her husband since he’s pushing seventy. Daddy will tell me about his roses then plead with me to talk to Mama, and Mama, well, Mama will still ask me about my love life: “Ginger, girl, you aren’t getting any younger, so you’d best find a man now who will love you when your titties hit your knees and your behind drags on the floor.”

I should have turned off the ringer before I took my nap.

I crawl out of my comforter to the nightstand and turn over the base of the phone to slide the ringer button to “off,” but as I do, the phone falls out of the cradle to the floor.

Shoot. Now I have to answer it.

“Hello?”

“Psyche, hi, it’s Q.”

Venus Dione’s son, the anointed one
, People
magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” a few years ago, the dread prince of the petticoats who loiters around Aphrodite Inc. waiting to take over the company. Right now, he’s just Venus’s errand boy, probably with a message from Venus for my next shoot.

I haven’t talked directly to Venus in years, and that’s fine by me. She scared me the first time I met her: “You ain’t nothin’ but a piece of meat, a piece of eye candy, girl, nothin’ but a Milk Dud,” she had told me. “So don’t you go thinkin’ you’re a queen or nothin’ cuz I’m the queen.” As sophisticated as she acts in public, Venus Dione is as common as any chair in a beauty salon, and rumor has it that a chair in a salon has more real hair on it than Venus has left on her head.

“Hi, Q.” Isn’t that a kid’s game? I wonder what his real name is. I hope it’s not Q-pid. “What’s up?”

“That
Maxim
cover, ooh, girl, you got it going on.”

I draw the comforter around me even though I know Q can’t see my nakedness. Something about the way he looks at me with those gray eyes of his makes me squirm. “Thanks. It was kind of unexpected.”

“I’m sure it will set a sales record for them. Did you get my flowers?”

I haven’t opened my condo door in two days. The
Maxim
shoot in the Bahamas took a lot out of me. That’s not sprayed water on my body on that cover—it’s my own sweat. Why we had to shoot a close-up on a hot beach in June in the Bahamas is beyond me. And even though it looks as if I’m naked under those towels, I still have everything important covered. I’ve been offered millions by
Playboy, Penthouse,
and
Hustler
to pose nude, but that’s not for me. What God has blessed me with will be shared only with my future husband.

And I hope my future husband doesn’t send me flowers. At first, it was nice, you know, getting flowers from strangers for simply being beautiful. Now it’s a chore. I’m sure Q’s flowers are wilting gloriously just outside the door in the hallway. I get so many flowers and letters from admirers, and I can’t have an e-mail account anymore, not that I have time to go on-line. I used to be propositioned about a hundred times a day on-line, and it seemed as if every male past puberty had me on his buddy list. The millisecond I’d get on-line, I’d get hit with a couple dozen instant messages. How they found out it was me, I don’t know, and I changed my e-mail addresses almost daily. I even changed it once to whitegirl7845, and they
still
found me. Then someone told me that my IP address—my laptop’s address—can’t be changed. So now, I turn off all instant messages and delete most of my mail before reading it.

“Yes, I got your flowers, Q, and they’re beautiful.” I’m sure they are—if they’re outside my door and they’re still alive. “Thank you. Um, where am I off to next?”

“I’d rather discuss it over dinner this time, if you don’t mind.”

Dinner? Q, the duke of drawers, the king of kinky, the prince of—no, I won’t say that word—wants to meet me for dinner? In public? The paparazzi will have a field day, especially after that
Maxim
cover. It is so hard to see your food with all those flashes going off. “Um, Q, do you think that would be a good idea?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean we’d go out, Ginger. We could order in.”

He called me Ginger! I feel a flush come over my face, even though I don’t want it to. Is he asking me out? That didn’t make sense. We’re ordering in, so how could he be asking me out? I’ve had a minor crush on him for ten years, but I haven’t pursued him for fear his mama would put me out on the street. It seems that every woman Q has seen for more than two weeks has vanished from the planet, and I saw the last model he dated in a department store window as a living mannequin.

But my face is so hot! I haven’t had this feeling in…I can’t remember having this feeling. “Um, yeah, Q, that would be great.” But where? I look at the random clumps of clothes on the floor of my bedroom. Definitely not here. “Your place, right?”

“I was hoping…yours.”

My fingers tingle, and I get cottonmouth something fierce. Lord Jesus, help me here. “Oh, I don’t know. My place is a wreck. I haven’t been home in weeks, so maybe not.”

“I’ve already gotten us a pizza, and I’m calling from the sidewalk right under your window.”

I wrap the comforter tightly around me, go to my bedroom window, and look down ten stories to the sidewalk. I see a man holding a pizza box and wearing a baseball cap. “Are you wearing a Yankees hat?”

“Yes. I’m incognito. No one has recognized me yet.”

I look at the nothing I’m wearing. “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll let security know it’s okay for you to come up.”

I can’t be too careful. When I first started out and had Mama and Rosemary living with me, we had a few scary evenings with our backs pressed into the condo door because of several stalkers who got by the doorman.

“Don’t make me wait too long. The doorman is looking at me funny. We wouldn’t want him to call any photographers.”

“He won’t,” I say. But Dwight the concierge might. I’ll bet Dwight makes more money tipping off gossip columnists than working here. I limped in one day last year after stumbling during an aerobics workout, and the
Star
had me as a victim of a mugging the very next day. “The doorman looks at everybody that way, Q. See you in a few minutes.”

I hang up, shut the drapes, and look at my messy bedroom. “He is
not
coming in here, no matter how much he wants to,” I say to the piles of clothes as I head to one of my bathrooms. I have three and a half bathrooms to go with three bedrooms, which was fine when Mama, Rosemary, and I shared the condo, but now…I live in a 2,165-foot, $15,000-a-month cavern with south views of the city, sunset views of the Hudson River, and breathtaking views of Central Park. I should really move out, but I haven’t found the time.

I stop in front of my bathroom mirror. “And he is
not
coming in here either, no matter how much I want him to,” I whisper.

Sorry, Lord. I can’t help it if I’m horny. It’s how You made me. And You made him…beautiful. Q’s not too tall—those basketball players have always made me feel like a midget. Q’s not too uppity—those rappers made me feel as if they were God’s gift to women, and they
weren’t,
with all those tattoos, piercings, and bee-otching. And Q’s not too worldly.

I bite my lip.

Okay, he’s worldly, Lord. Maybe I can, you know, bring him back into the fold, make an honest man out of him.

I bite my lip again.

Then he wouldn’t be Q. Hmm. This could be tricky.

I feel my hands, and they’re sweaty. See what he does to me, Lord? I hear he can be very persuasive, and I’m tired, and weak, and it’s been so long since I was even kissed for real. Posed kisses in magazines do not count.

I throw cold water on my face. It’s only a pizza, Ginger, and you don’t even like pizza, because it goes straight to your thighs. And it’s not like you can throw on a designer dress to eat pizza. I’ll just throw on some sweats, not put on any make-up, and wear a Mets cap.

“He’ll just have to take me as I really am.”

Did I just say, “Take me”? Sorry, Lord. I meant that Q, in all his sexiness, will just have to see me as I am: sanctified sister Ginger Dane, from Athens, Ohio.