Her beauty had been striking since she was thirteen. Men in the street stared at her, others tried to hustle her. She had been well protected and carefully brought up by her mother, who had insisted that her education came before her modeling career. For the first two years of her career, she had attended the Sorbonne part time, and majored in art history and French literature. She was halfway to a teaching degree she intended not to use until she was much older and had no other options. In the meantime, she had recently been the face of a well-known cosmetics line, and before that the face of a perfume. Jewelry houses clamored to have her in their ads, and she had been the primary model for an airline for a year. She never lacked for assignments, and had to juggle them all. She was part of an industry in which she was the commodity she was selling.
Her mother was relieved that so far none of it had gone to her head, despite so much attention focused on her. Véronique treated it like a job she was serious about, and never let herself be distracted, as many other girls did, their heads turned by their own beauty. Her mother always reminded her that external beauty was fleeting and real beauty came from within. It was part of her now, like a hand or a leg. Her exquisite face was just another body part, and it served her well. She didn’t dwell on her looks, and never thought of herself as others did. She was paid well for what she did, like a gift she had received and had done nothing to acquire. She considered her beauty an accident of fate, like a beautiful singing voice, or the ability to paint. Her exceptional looks had turned into a lucrative career.
She had paid no attention to it at all when she was younger, and to her it was simply a job. Modeling had opened doors for her, and she was well aware that she couldn’t take the men who pursued her seriously. She had no desire for a lasting relationship at her age. She had fun with the men she went out with, but their relationships never lasted for more than a few months. She was invited on yachts and on corporate trips by the companies she worked for. She was sometimes paid to go to parties for publicity purposes, and she never lacked for men to go out with. Her current “date” was Lord Cyril Buxton, handsome, from an excellent British family, and twenty-seven years old. He was meant to be working for his father at a bank in London, but spent far more time playing in Paris, and with her, and avoided his family as much as he was able to, much to his parents’ chagrin. Véronique had met them once when she was doing a shoot for British Vogue in London. They were grateful that their son wasn’t dating another greedy Russian model who was looking for a rich husband, but they weren’t warm to her. They wanted him to fast-forward through this stage of his life and get serious about his work and grow up. He had no interest in becoming responsible and giving up his fun life or dating the women they thought he should. They wanted him with a British aristocrat like himself.
Cyril had as little interest in marriage as Véronique did. She wasn’t sure she’d ever marry. It seemed like an overwhelming commitment to her. Her parents hadn’t been married, and it had never bothered her. Her father was American, also an attorney. Her mother had met him while at a legal convention in New York. They had had a passionate affair for two years, until Marie-Helene got pregnant at forty-one, and realized it might never happen again. She decided to have the baby with Bill’s consent. She was forty-two when Véronique was born, and Bill Smith was sixty-one. He had died in a car accident when Véronique was six months old. Marie-Helene didn’t like to talk about it, and never told Véronique the details of her father’s death, only that he had died instantly in a car crash somewhere near New York, when a truck hit his sports car on a rainy night. So she had never known her father, only that her parents had loved each other deeply. She had grown up happily alone with her mother, and Véronique had always said that you couldn’t miss what you didn’t know. She knew her father only from the photographs around their apartment, several in her own room, and the stories her mother told her about him, and how in love they had been. Véronique knew it was true since there had never been a serious man in her mother’s life after him, and she could see from the photographs that he was a handsome man. Once in a while, she wondered what it would be like to have a father, when she saw her friends enjoying a special moment with theirs, but most of the time she was content with her mother, and spending time occasionally with her friends’ fathers growing up. They’d had a brief bumpy time when Véronique was in her early teens, but that ended quickly, and both women readily admitted that they were best friends. They were proud of how close they were, and respected each other.