Spring Collection (13 page)

After Necker shook hands with April he greeted Tinker. I had wondered which of her incarnations she’d put on tonight; were we going to be treated to a high-fashion diva or the ravishing little orphan dreaming of a rainbow? I’d been too busy being nervous to check her out before now. Ah, the princess bride approached, clad—you couldn’t say “dressed” with Tinker—clad in pure white satin, a short dress as simple as April’s but with long sleeves and a demure scoop neck. She’d fiddled with her hair until she’d produced a sort of casual updo with curling tendrils framing her face, and pinned a few fresh rosebuds in it here and there, making good use of the flowers in her suite. Tinker had obviously learned a lot from the many makeup artists who’d worked on her. Tonight she was all extraordinary eyes and the palest pink mouth, with no other makeup. She looked about twelve, a grave, thoughtful and dangerous twelve you’d marry off in a hurry if you were her parents. There should be a law, I thought proudly, until I realized that for all our efforts with her she still walked badly. Her body language didn’t say triumphantly, “Look at me,” but told you she’d much prefer to be ignored. It wasn’t so much that she was totally awkward but that she had a strong quality of inner tentativeness that made her seem not quite
here
. As she came nearer I spotted the trembling of her lips, the not-quite-hidden fear in her eyes.

And then came Jordan. The others disappeared in comparison. She was wearing a long slender turtleneck tunic and wide-legged pants, both made of dark scarlet crushed velvet, with flat silver slippers and large rock crystal hoops swinging from her sublimely set ears. The other two girls wore their highest heels, which made them inches taller than Necker. Only Jordan seemed lifesized in relation to him. But it wasn’t the sensational outfit that caused her to eclipse the others, it was her attitude. She could have been the hostess and Jacques Necker the guest. She looked so much at home that it seemed impossible that she had just arrived in this room. Although he’d shaken hands with me and the
other girls, Necker kissed hers, which Jordan seemed to find only natural. He might be Swiss, I thought, but he has French reactions.

I was only too happy to keep my eyes down and my nose in my drink while Necker put April and Tinker at their ease by asking them questions about their lives. Jordan, having made her point, drifted away and stood in front of a long desk with a worn red velvet top and lavish, gilded carving decorating its dark wood. Small precious objects were precisely arranged on the desktop, giving place of honor to a small painting of a rearing black and white horse in an elaborate frame. I watched her as she left her contemplation of the desk and walked quietly from one piece of furniture to another, apparently deep in thought and oblivious to the conversation of the others. Was Jordan shy, I wondered? Or just unwilling to compete for Necker’s attention at this point in the evening.

I knew it couldn’t be the furniture that really interested her. As far as I was concerned, the various pieces all looked more or less the same to me. They were all, I assumed, the height of magnificence, yet I found them boring, as if I’d seen them all before. The only thing that kept the room from being overpoweringly grand was the view and I was too nervous to appreciate it.

Eventually dinner was served and Necker placed me at his right, in the place that had been meant for Justine. He casually motioned Jordan to his left and told everybody else to sit wherever they wanted. Over the muted hum of female conversation I heard Jordan speak.

“The painting on the ebony
bureau plat
upstairs, Monsieur Necker, could it be by Jean-Marc Winckler?”

“It is,” he answered, clearly surprised. “The horse belonged to one of the princes of Leichtenstein. How did you guess?”

“I wrote my college thesis on Madame de Pompadour and how a king’s mistress was decisive in influencing the world of decorative art.”

“Yet decorative arts continued to evolve under
another Louis,” he said with an abstracted smile that reminded me so much of Justine that I almost gasped.

“How can one Louis not lead to another?” Jordan laughed. “After Louis XV I studied on my own and eventually I found myself almost as attracted by Louis XV I … I never would have imagined that any private person could own such magnificent examples of both periods.”

“I started collecting when it was still out of fashion,” he explained.

“I didn’t know that Joseph or Leleu could ever be out of fashion. They’re
beyond
fashion,” Jordan said with spirit.

I drank some wine in a silent toast to a hopeless cause. I knew what she was up to, all right, but it wouldn’t do her any good, not when the poor man had just had such a heartrending disappointment. But bless Jordan for making conversation. It took the heat off me. And it was a learning experience. I’d just discovered that I knew
bupkis
about furniture.

Dinner went on too long and I was grateful when Gabrielle suggested, soon afterward, that we must all be tired and want to leave early. It was just past eleven and I couldn’t begin to figure out how many hours it had been since I’d left New York.

There seemed to be a lot of unnecessary giggling in the limo which kept me from falling asleep. Jordan, speaking rapid, and obviously, for me, incomprehensible, French, was making friends with Albert, the dignified middle-aged chauffeur. First Necker, now the chauffeur, I thought in weary wonder as we finally came to a stop. The girls piled out of the car. I opened my eyes. No hotel.

“Where the hell are we?” I demanded.

“Les Bains Douche, as the young ladies requested,” Albert replied, coming to open the door for me.

Even I, cloistered as I am, had heard of the most notorious and, as the girls would say, “happening” club in Paris. “Everyone” went there, from drag queens to
drug dealers to rock stars. It was quartered in a turn-of-the-century bathhouse but there were doubts about how reformed the atmosphere was. Certainly no one went there to get clean.

“Tell them to get back in here this minute!” I shouted.

“But, Madame, they have already been admitted.”

Bitches! I’d kill them with my bare hands. An adrenaline rush got me to the pavement, fighting mad.

“Take off your cap and come with me,” I ordered Albert. “I can’t go in there alone.”

“Madame!” he replied, shocked.

I snatched his cap off his head and threw it in the car. He made a perfectly respectable escort, if a little long in the tooth. I marched him past the three hulking doormen or bouncers or whatever a place like that has to keep out undesirables—or to admit
only
undesirables, depending on your point of view—with the unquestionable authority of an undercover cop, a version of Andy Sipowicz crossed with Serpico.

“Room for two more at your table, ladies?” I asked, glaring at Jordan. The girls were seated right on the mobbed dance floor, obviously the table of honor, and so far they were alone. I could feel the greedy, mesmerized gaze of the entire crowd on them. It was like being in the eye of a tornado.

“Oh, Frankie, we thought you’d passed out cold,” Jordan answered, so help me, without turning a hair, “or we would never have left you.”

“Thanks for your consideration. I’ll keep it in mind when I handcuff you to the radiator.”

“Please, Frankie,” April laughed, “don’t be mean. You were young once, way back when.”

“Oh, you’re looking for it too, are you? Come on, girls, we’re out of here.”

“Surely, just one dance,” a man’s voice said, and I saw a guy grab April by the hand and whirl her away. Another fellow had Tinker on her feet and there were two of them fighting over Jordan. That was all I had
time to notice before somebody or other yanked me up and I was dancing myself.

We got back to the hotel safely, at dawn. Do I have to tell you that I made those girls look as if they were still learning how to do the box step?

W
hat’s with Justine?” asked Carrie, one of the bookers, when the phones fell silent late in the afternoon of the day after Frankie and her charges had taken off for Paris.

“Maybe she inherited money from a cousin she didn’t know she had,” Dodie, another booker, replied. “She was humming something familiar this morning and when I asked her what it was, she looked surprised and said she didn’t have a clue. Later it came to me, a golden oldie called ‘It Might as Well Be Spring.’ Weird, huh? Justine’s not one of nature’s hummers.”

“She could be trying to exercise a positive influence on the weather,” hazarded Johanna, a third booker. “Did you listen to the radio this morning?”

“Blizzard and major freeze expected,” Carrie groaned. “Maybe Justine is one of those people who feels good when there’s a big storm brewing. If it gets any colder than it is already, they should shut down the city out of common kindness.”

“Maybe tomorrow will be a ‘snow day’ like we used to have in school,” Dodie said wistfully. “Remember finding out that you couldn’t go to school so you could watch soaps all day long? God, I miss being a kid on snow days.”

“Go on home, everybody,” Justine said, suddenly appearing in the booking room. “It’s Friday and almost quitting time anyway. Nothing’s going to happen that I can’t handle.”

After her grateful bookers had scurried off, Justine turned off the lights of the office, sat in one of the bookers’ chairs and put her feet up on the circular desk. She loved to be alone here, in sole possession of her domain high above the nearest buildings. There was a wide view from the large windows of the booking room which included a slice of street that cut straight across the city clear to Central Park West. Behind the fanciful silhouetted towers of those fine old apartment houses Justine could glimpse, across the Hudson, the last fragment of sunset fading into the dark plum of a winter sky.

Who would want to live anywhere but on the edge of a continent, Justine asked herself. Who would want to live anywhere but here and now in the last years of the twentieth century? Who would want to live earlier in history, before Novocain, before hair spray, before telephones, before air travel and glossy fashion magazines full of nonsense? Who would want to be a woman in the days when a woman couldn’t build a business on her own, unless she opened a whorehouse? Why did she so rarely take the time to realize how wonderful her life was?

Justine relaxed more deeply in the chair, slumping until she was almost reclining, bathed in a feeling of free-floating happiness. There was really nothing special to account for the quality of her mood, she reflected, unless a rare steak had powers she’d never known about. Amazing what a good cook Aiden had turned out to be—he’d even made a salad—and what a deft hand he had at Gibsons. It
had
been sort of nice to let a man make the drinks and take over in the kitchen. Definitely the sort of pleasant evening a sensible person should permit herself to enjoy every now and then—a dollop of gin, something basically satisfying to eat, a nice long, rambling chat in front of the fire, a kiss good-night—or had it been two, one medium slow, one very quick, or the other way around?

She was glad she’d listened to Aiden when he’d looked around her basement and told her that there
wasn’t a minute to lose in replacing the furnace. He’d called her secretary this morning and reported that his supplier had the right model in stock, so the new furnace should be in by now. Apparently it was a simple process. She’d never planned on such a rush job, but the weather reports were so ominous that Aiden had convinced her of the need for haste.

What, she wondered, would the weather be like now in Paris? Would Frankie be bundled up in one or another of her new coats?

FRANKIE!

Jesus Christ! She’d forgotten to send the fax to Gabrielle!

Justine almost fell out of the chair as the realization hit her. She righted herself, got up in a hurry and started to pace the floor, feeling the sweat break out on her brow. She’d never done anything so completely irresponsible before! Never, ever! My God, what could have come over her? This was utterly, completely and impossibly
unforgivable
. She’d sent her best friend right into the lion’s den without anything to protect her.

Frantically Justine tried to figure out what time it must be in Paris at this moment at just after five in the evening in New York. Add six hours, that made it past eleven at night. Didn’t she have to add in the travel time too in order to figure it out? Her mind wouldn’t work. She’d send that fax immediately, but by now it was too late. Or maybe not, maybe nobody from Necker’s knew yet. Oh, shit, as if Necker himself wouldn’t know she wasn’t there. He’d probably met the plane.

Feeling increasingly incredulous at her own behavior, Justine tried to recapitulate the events of yesterday. She’d been in a terrible, gloomy, evil mood all day, and then, forgetting to send the fax, she’d gone home and calmly had a cup of tea and interviewed a contractor, had an unexpected evening with him and gone to sleep. Today she’d worked all day, with a fax machine no more than twenty feet away, and now,
only now
, at least a day too late, she’d remembered. And it wasn’t as if she needed a fax machine to alert Gabrielle
d’Angelle, she could have phoned her yesterday, right up to the time that Frankie’s plane had landed. The fax was preferable because you could lie more easily on paper than in person.

Somewhere, embedded in all of this, was the reason why she hadn’t sent the fax, Justine told herself, thinking hard. She was a clearheaded woman who simply did not
allow
herself to behave in an irrational way. It must have something to do with her mood of yesterday, something related to that paranoid but recurrent fear that Necker might suddenly materialize physically in the doorway, a notion that had haunted her ever since the search for the Lombardi face had been settled. In the space of a phone call she’d found herself trapped and powerless to deny this chance to her girls.

But not powerless, after all, Justine realized. Not so trapped that she could be manipulated! She’d shown him that, by God!