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  She looked at the other two women with a puzzled expression on her face. “Sometimes you look back at your life and you see things that you did and you wonder why you did them and, even, how you knew to do them. To this day I can’t figure out how I knew to do this, but I looked in a phone book and found the name of a photographer and asked him to photograph me.”

  For a moment she paused for effect. “But he wasn’t just a photographer, he was Cordova.”

  At this Ellie sucked in her breath; then she looked at Leslie, who was also impressed. Neither woman was involved in the world of photography or high fashion, but they knew this name. It was said that Cordova had single-handedly made modeling into an art form. There were galleries full of his work.

  “Anyway,” Madison continued, “maybe I’d read his name somewhere; I don’t know. He was very young, he’d just graduated from some Midwestern university with a degree in photography, and he planned to spend his life taking pictures of fruit. Can you imagine? A talent like his, and on the day I met him, he was taking pictures of oranges to be put in some trade magazine that only buyers for grocery stores would see. But I went to his studio and I persuaded him to take a picture of me wearing only a snake.”

  At that Ellie blinked a couple of times; then she said, “Poor Nastassja Kinski.”

  “Why would you feel sorry for the actress?” Madison asked as her plate was put in front of her. It was heaped with three kinds of fried seafood on top of a bed of french fries, while Ellie and Leslie were having cold lobster salads.

  “Never mind,” Ellie said. “Go on with your story.”

  Madison smiled as she picked up her fork. “I remember that day as though it happened last week. And I remember the man who got the snake.” She looked up at Ellie and Leslie. “It was a big snake. A really, really big snake.”

  Twenty-eight

  1981

  NEW YORK

  Madison was standing outside the door of the DMV in New York, and for a few seconds she was so disoriented that she didn’t know where she was. But when she turned her head and saw her own reflection in the window of a bakery, she gasped. It had been a long time since she’d seen that face.

  She kept staring at herself, seeing her face as others saw it. When she’d been twenty-one and had lived with that reflection all her life, Madison hadn’t paid much attention to it. In fact, most of the time, she regretted her looks, as they stood in the way of her achieving anything beyond the beauty that so interested other people.

  But now, at nearly forty, Madison had had enough time to know what a gift she’d been given. And she knew that she should have valued that gift.

  Part of her was still that girl, fresh from Montana and feeling homesick and alone. Part of her wanted to go home and wanted an excuse to do so.

  But now, years later, Madison also knew what was out there. She knew what awaited her at home.

  And this time, she was going to change her life.

  There was a wire trash basket on the sidewalk, and propping her heavy tote bag on it, Madison began to look inside the bag. There were candy bars, two little plastic bags filled with cheap makeup, a hospital magazine, a tiny box that she knew contained a necklace her mother had given her when she was five, and there was the portfolio of pictures that had been taken in Montana.

  Opening the portfolio, Madison looked at the photos in disbelief. Nineteen years ago the world at large knew a great deal less about modeling than it did now. Was that good or bad? she wondered, then decided that she didn’t have time to ponder philosophical issues. However she came by the knowledge, she knew that these were not photos that would get her inside the inner sanctum of the people who could get her bookings.

  Thinking back to the first time she’d been here, she remembered the horrible time she’d had in the modeling agency’s office. The receptionist was a little snit of a thing, ugly inside and out, and she took pleasure in making the beautiful girls in the office wait. After she’d looked at Madison, wearing her summer dress with its ruffles down the front, she’d flipped through the book of photos of Madison posing picturesquely by a tree; then she’d made a snort that could be heard three floors away. Every hopeful girl in the office had smiled, for they knew that Madison had probably just lost her chance in the modeling world.

  And now, Madison remembered how angry she’d been at that receptionist. How dare she set herself up as a judge? Madison had thought. Madison’s anger had made her look down her nose at the woman and let her know what she thought of her.

  Big mistake. Later Madison had been told that the receptionists were the first lookers and the agency heads trusted their judgment.

  “You don’t photograph well, do you?” the woman had said, then handed the portfolio back to Madison with a little smirk on her face.

  Now Madison was embarrassed to remember her arrogance, ashamed to remember how she’d stormed out of the office in a rage.

  The same sort of thing happened at two other agencies, but by that time Madison had a chip on her shoulder that was as big as a Montana mountain. All her life she’d been told that she was smashingly beautiful, but to have her features taken apart and commented on . . . It had been too much for her. So when Roger had called, she was glad for the excuse to get out of the city and go back home.

  But this time she was going to do things differently, because now she knew what awaited her at home.

  Looking back in her bag, Madison removed the box that held the necklace from her mother; then she tossed the candy, the makeup and the portfolio into the trash bin. She took out a little bank book that showed how much money she had. There was almost seventeen thousand dollars in the account, and she knew that more than half of it was from her father.

  Looking at the little book, Madison smiled. Nineteen years ago, the fact that her father had handed over ten grand to his illegitimate daughter had made her furious. He didn’t acknowledge her as his, but he did send her his dirty ol’ money.

  But Madison was older and wiser now, and she understood a great deal more about the world. She understood about passion and how you could do things in a moment that you could spend the rest of your life regretting. And Madison knew that there were fathers who wouldn’t have sent money no matter how much they had.

  Now, she looked at the money her father had given her and thought of it as a gift. And she thought about what her hometown had done for her too. Years ago she’d been angered that they had “made” her go somewhere she didn’t want to go and had tried to “force” her to become something that she didn’t want to become.

  All these things had become rage inside Madison, and she’d made sure that she’d repaid everyone by not doing what they wanted her to. She’d spent the town’s money and her father’s money on Roger. And while she was in New York, she made sure that she got no bookings for modeling. Later she’d returned to Montana and she’d told her old high school friends that New York had been a cold, hard place and that she hadn’t wanted to live there. Her friends had wanted to hear that, but the merchants who’d paid her way had sighed and looked away from her. It was no wonder that until after the divorce, Madison rarely visited her hometown. But by the time of the divorce, all the things that had happened to Madison showed on her face and her body, so no one ever again talked to her about modeling.

  So now she had a chance to change things. Now she was a different woman. Now she’d learned the value of an opportunity.

  There was a telephone booth nearby, and there was a battered yellow pages hanging on a chain below it. Quickly thumbing through the pages, Madison found the listings for photographers—and there it was. “Michael Cordova.”

  Years ago someone had asked Madison if she’d ever been photographed by Cordova. Madison had smiled and said that when she’d been in New York, no one had heard of Cordova. It had been a young girl who’d asked—her mother was a high school friend of Madison’s—and she’d looked at Madison as though to say that she was very old.

  Later, while sittin