A Dangerous Dress (14 page)

This one was a pale, very sexy opalescent pink. The pink was quite close to the color of skin, so when you first looked, you wouldn’t be sure where the dress ended and the woman began. The illusion was accentuated by the neckline, which plunged low in front and even lower in back. And the hemline was daringly high in the front and longer on the sides and back. Maybe an Augustabernard. Whoever made it, it was a very provocative dress.

I put the phone back to my ear. Nothing. “Hello?” I said.

“This dress,” Gerard said slowly. “This dress.” Then he said nothing for a while. Finally, he again said, “This dress.” Then he said, “You should buy this dress.”

Yes.
Yes yes yes yes yes

“No,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“No,” he said. “No, I am wrong. This is a very good dress. Now I have confidence in you again. But this is not the right dress. Nathalie requires not the very good dress. Not the almost perfect dress. Nathalie must wear the perfect dress. So you must keep looking.”

Then he hung up.

I
was defeated. Totally utterly miserably defeated.

I didn’t care if Gerard Duclos’ confidence in me was lost or found. I had been kidding myself. I had been kidding everybody. Now there would be no movie—on account of me.

I was going to break my promise to myself. I was not going to save Josh’s lost cause. I felt terrible. Not for me. For Josh. Even if he had been a jerk, walking out and sticking me with the check, that was outweighed by how bad I felt for him, and all the other things I felt for him. If I saw him right now, I would tell him that I had read his script, it was fantastic, it would make a wonderful movie, and I was so sorry I couldn’t find the dress. I might even kiss him, if he would let me.

But he wasn’t there. All I could do was head back to the hotel and admit my defeat. I suppose I could have just called Gerard on the cell phone. But if I was going to ruin their movie, I ought to do it in person. Face up to your failures—that’s what Mom and Dad and Uncle John have always taught me. Especially Uncle John.

The walk back seemed endless. I trudged. Sloshed.
Squish
ed.
Josh
ed. Slogged my way back across the Seine, over an old bridge that a plaque said was the Pont de la Tournelle.

I felt so completely vanquished, I literally could not lift my eyes. All I could do was stare at the pavement as I made myself put one foot in front of the other.

If I hadn’t been so downcast, I might not have seen it at all. But suddenly, on the sidewalk in front of me, there it was: a coat of arms. Like you see on the shield of a knight. Okay I have not met any knights. But I have seen
A Knight’s Tale.
Which is quite a bad movie, but let’s be honest, Heath Ledger is
extremely
good-looking. And as I recall, all the knights had coats of arms on their shields.

The coat of arms on the sidewalk was made of metal. Silver, I think. It had a castle on it. A little castle, like the chess piece. A rook. But the rook is not important. The words are.

The words on the coat of arms said: LA TOUR D’ARGENT. Which was the name on the menu I had found in the suitcase, along with Grandma’s dress.

I looked up from the sidewalk. I was standing in front of a restaurant.
The
restaurant.
Grandma’s
restaurant.

At that instant, no matter how defeated I felt, a little spark lit up inside of me. Through coincidence, or fate, or magic, I had stumbled across the very place where Grandma had . . . well, I don’t know what. But the very place where Grandma had
something.
Eaten dinner, I’m sure, because after all it was a restaurant. There must have been much more to it than that, though. If it had just been a meal, no matter how fabulously delicious, I don’t think she would have taken the menu, brought it all the way back to Kirland, and stashed it away in that suitcase for decades. No, I knew somehow that the restaurant and the dress were linked together. Something special had happened here. Something careless, reckless, gorgeous, sexual. Something
dangerous.

I looked at the restaurant for a long time. Then I turned around and looked back across the Seine. Right there was Notre Dame, soaring up through the rain, the tops of the towers disappearing into mist. Even in my half-drowned state, it was an enchanted view. I could only imagine how magical it must have been for my Grandma when she was a young woman, a girl really.

As I have told you, I learned pretty much everything I could about Grandma’s dangerous dress, and I put all those facts in the paper for my History of Fashion course. But I was never able to learn how she got the dress, where she wore it, and for whom. At this moment, though, I was closer to those events than I had ever been. Maybe they had all happened almost eighty years ago, but they had all happened
right here.
Despite my despair, despite the rain, I felt an incredible connection to Grandma and her wild past, like somebody had just plugged me into an electrical socket. I closed my eyes and let that electricity flow through me.

And, behind my eyelids, here is what I saw.

The rain was gone. The dark purple night sky was clear and the breeze was scented with roses. There was a full moon, which reflected across the Seine and lit up Notre Dame like a floodlight. There were only a few cars on the street, and they were all long luxurious antique things with swirling chrome fenders and polished wood running boards and cut-crystal hood ornaments. The longest, most luxurious sedan of all swooshed to the curb, and a chauffeur wearing an elegant black uniform opened the passenger door with a flourish. A man emerged. He was perhaps twenty-five years old, wearing perfect black tie and tails, and he was devastatingly handsome. When he spoke, it was with a British accent that caressed the words sensuously. “Come, my dear,” he said, reaching a hand into the car. “Destiny awaits us.”

A delicate female hand took the man’s hand—and I knew it was my Grandma’s hand. A perfect small female foot, wearing a graceful rhinestone-adorned slipper, emerged from the dark interior—and I knew it was my Grandma’s foot. I saw the hem of her dress—
my
dress. I held my breath and waited for her to appear.

She started to step out of the car.

T
hat is when the lightning struck.

I am not speaking figuratively here.

I do not know how close to me the lightning bolt hit. Remember, I had my eyes closed. But even through my eyelids, I was suddenly dazzled by the brightness. And just a second later there was a clap of thunder that left my ears ringing.

Grandma, the handsome man, the gorgeous old car—they all vanished. I opened my eyes, then closed them again, but the romantic figures didn’t reappear. The scent of roses had been replaced by ozone, and the clear moonlit sky was once again a torrent of rain.

I wondered if any of it had been real. I think it was. I think, somehow, it was another gift from Grandma. I hoped so.

Real or not, though, seeing that moment from the past fueled the little spark inside of me. Now it was a bigger spark. Although it certainly wasn’t a bonfire of hope. After all, I was still feeling quite completely defeated about the dress, I was out of time, I had nowhere else to look, and my lower half had crossed the line from merely soaked to downright sodden. Not to mention that my sneakers still insisted on
Josh
ing as I walked. But there was a definite midsized spark nonetheless. One that gave me the energy to keep walking.

The Hotel Jacob is only about five blocks off the river, but because the streets in Paris seem to have been laid out by a drunk, I couldn’t walk the five blocks in a straight line. I had to walk two blocks straight, then a short block to the right, then half a block on this little diagonal street, then back toward the river for a block, then turn left. And that would have been the short way. But the sewers had backed up, and the intersection of the little diagonal street and the jog back toward the river had turned into a lake. No matter how drowned and demoralized I already felt, I could not bring myself to wade through it. So I improvised: I kept walking up the little diagonal street another block.

I walked past an open doorway and caught a whiff of food. Suddenly I was so hungry I almost fainted. I realized I hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast. I didn’t want to stop. I was so depressed I didn’t feel like eating. But I felt as if somebody had drilled a hole through my middle, so I went in. It was a bakery. I bought a muffin and handed the girl behind the counter a ten-euro note. She gave me back a five euro-note and change, which I stuffed in my pocket. Then I devoured the muffin. I probably didn’t look very dignified. Sorry. I was really hungry.

I went back out into the rain and continued down the little diagonal street. At the corner I turned right and walked a block. Then I turned back toward the river. I figured I needed to go two blocks in that direction to get back to my regular route. After one block, though, the street I was on split into a fork, two little streets that were almost parallel. In my waterlogged state, choosing between the street on my left and the one on my right was almost more than I could handle. Two roads diverged in a wood. This one or that one. The lady or the tiger.

I chose the street on my left.

Halfway down the block, I saw it: a little vintage clothing store called Jazz. I pulled out Irene Malraux’s list. Jazz was not on it. I almost didn’t go in.

I looked in the window. The display was very 1950s Givenchy. Very Audrey Hepburn. Lovely clothes, but nothing from the 1920s. Nothing that said “Come inside.” But still.

I leaned closer, and tried to look
past
the display to the clothes on the racks. I saw something sparkly. Maybe an old 1920s beaded dress. Or not. But what was one more store? I opened the door and stepped inside.

The place was maybe twenty feet across and twenty feet back, crammed with racks and racks of clothes. Plus there was an old wrought-iron spiral staircase right smack in the middle of the space, running all the way up to the ceiling, with even more clothes hanging from the railing. The only person in the store was a round old woman sitting right behind the window display on a wooden chair behind a little oak desk that was cluttered with ribbons, bolts of silk, pincushions, a huge square glass ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes, and a little black-and-white TV with a flickering picture but no sound.

I looked at my watch. Almost seven. It was still light out, so I wasn’t sure if almost seven fell into the
bonjour
or
bonsoir
category. I decided on “Bonsoir.”

The old lady looked at me, took a drag on her cigarette, and said, “
Bon
jour.” She turned her attention back to the little TV screen.

Since the old lady did not seem at all interested in helping me, I found the beaded dress I had glimpsed through the window by myself. I concluded I had wasted my time, because it was clearly from the 1940s. Pretty, though. And I thought,
Well, if my entire trip here has been a total failure, maybe I could at least buy something fun for
me. So I pulled the dress out to see if it was my size, which it wasn’t. It didn’t matter, though. Hiding on the rack,
next
to the first dress, was another beaded dress, which I hadn’t seen because it was smooshed in. My heart did a little tumble. It was almost definitely from 1928. It was extremely simple. And breathtaking. A veil of black beading over a luminous gray silk slip. Very carefully, I took it off the rack.

My hopes crashed.

It was tiny. I mean
tiny.
You will remember that I said Nathalie Gauloise was a thirty-six, which is the French equivalent of a perfect size four. But this dress was not a four. It was not even a two. It was a size zero. And there was no extra fabric to make it bigger. None. Which meant, not the slightest possibility that this fabulous dress would ever fit Nathalie Gauloise. I almost cried. But only almost. Instead, I took the dress over to the old lady and said,
“Excusez-moi?”

She reached over and turned off the TV. Then she smiled. “You have need help?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. Please.” Then I took a deep breath. I held the gorgeous little dress up in front of me. “Do you have any more like this?”

“This is pretty,” she said.

“It’s very pretty. But it’s too small.”

She took a long breath through her cigarette, then asked, “Is for the film, yes?”

Which as you can imagine took me by surprise. “The film?”

“The film. Duclos.” She narrowed her eyes. “Irene did not send you to see me?”

“No. You know Irene?”

“I am named Françoise.” The old lady squeezed out from behind the little desk, walked up to me and held out her hand, very formally, and we shook hands. “I am the mother of Irene.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. Which I know was not polite. But you never saw two women who looked less alike.

Françoise looked around the little store, then back at me. “This shop have belonged to
ma mère.
My mother. She sold the special things to the special people. Now this shop belongs to me. I sell the special things to the special people. But I am not so young anymore. I tell Irene, if she want, the shop next belongs to her. So she can carry on what we do.” She lowered her voice. “What we do, is very important. It is like . . . a mission.” Then she leaned close and scrutinized my face. Finally she asked, “You have been to this shop before?”

“No.”

That answer seemed to puzzle her. “Your mother have been to this shop before?”

“No.” Then a wild idea occurred to me. “How long has the shop been here?”

She smiled. A little mysteriously, I thought. “A long time,” she said. “Long enough.”

Long enough for Grandma to have gotten her dangerous dress here?

Then Françoise waved her hand, as if to chase away the past. Or maybe she was just shooing away her cigarette smoke. “Irene does not want the shop. She prefers the films. Duclos.
Pwui.
” I am happy to say she only made that sound, but did not actually spit. “She is stubborn, though. This film, I could help her. But she does not call me. She says, ‘I do myself.’ ” Then she patted me on the cheek and smiled warmly. “But you are different. You have the
politesse.
” She sized me up again, then came to a conclusion. “Yes. You are special. So . . . come.”