Spring Collection (23 page)

“You mean you don’t have a sex life at the moment?” Maude asked carefully.

“No, that would be like lots of girls in the business. I’d just be looking for the right guy. I mean … I’ve never had one,” April said slowly.

“Well, you’re so young.…” Maude ventured, seeing the pain and confusion on April’s face.

“That has nothing to do with it. I’m almost twenty, more than plenty old enough. It’s something else and it’s something I don’t understand. I like men well
enough as people but I don’t feel attracted to them, you know, physically. Maybe I’ve dated the wrong guys, but if I give one of them as much as a single good-night kiss, and there’s no way to get out of
that
, they’re all over me! It’s disgusting. I listen to my friends talk and you’d think that boys … men, whatever you want to call them, are the most thrilling, desirable creatures in the world. I don’t
get
it! I’ve never gotten it!”

“Have you ever given one of them a real chance?”

“A couple,” April admitted, shaking her head at the memories. “I forced myself. I let them—oh, you might as well know, I
almost
let them make love to me but I couldn’t go through with it. They promised to use condoms as if the only possible reason I wouldn’t want to was fear of getting pregnant or HIV—I couldn’t tell them that the reason I made them stop midway was I couldn’t stand the thought of the whole … messy … thing. Oh, if only I hadn’t even tried! They were so horrible about it afterward. I guess I can’t blame them. Cock tease was the least they called me but, damn it, I hadn’t
planned
to be a cock tease, I just thought I had to give it a chance and maybe I’d get turned on, like everybody else, but I didn’t and I couldn’t.”

“So you’ve never.…”

“No. And I don’t want to! I don’t care if that’s not normal, that’s the way I am. Of course people expect that one day I’ll get married just like everybody else. My mother’s probably got the wedding planned already, but I can’t see it ever happening. Thank God I’m still young and they haven’t put any pressure on. But you’ve never married, have you, Maude? How did you manage that?”

“I let nature take its course. If you wait them out, people eventually accept you as an unmarried woman and deal with it. Of course it’s easier if you’re not a raving beauty.”

“Now you’re the one who’s being fake modest,” April teased, suddenly very much at ease, now that she’d told her secret and Maude hadn’t seemed surprised or shocked. “You have such a great look! It’s
different, it’s stunning, it’s terrifically becoming and it’s all your own. I wish I had the guts to dress like you.”

“You never know. You might surprise yourself.”

Yes, thought Maude, you might surprise both of us. She’d set out to learn more about April and she’d succeeded brilliantly, she congratulated herself, while she tried, and failed, to beat to the back of her brain the intoxicating knowledge that every one of the women she’d loved deeply had been a minor approximation of April’s type. Not one of them had been the true, pure thing. Not one of them had been April.

J
acques Necker and Jordan Dancer strolled through the gardens of the Petit Trianon, from which the Château de Versailles was invisible. The winter sun was high in a cloudless pale sky, and it was warm enough for Jordan to throw back the hood of her long red coat.

“This is my favorite place of all,” Necker said, “because it’s so lacking in pomp. That lovely little pavilion over there, the Belvedere, is where Marie Antoinette was sitting when a pageboy come running to warn her that the Parisians were marching on the palace. It was the last happy moment of her life. She never saw these gardens again. Today it seems impossible that it happened over two hundred years ago.”

Jordan stopped on the path and listened to the sounds of birds in the bare trees. In the distance gardeners worked quietly, preparing the ground for spring planting. “It’s so quiet,” she answered, “it’s almost unearthly, especially after Paris … I feel as if I’ve stepped into Marie Antoinette’s world. It makes me shiver—I guess it’s because we know how it ended. But tell me,” she asked, puzzled, “why didn’t we visit the Château de Versailles itself? I thought that’s where we were headed when you phoned this morning.”

Jordan’s puzzlement went much further than that particular question, she thought as she asked it. She could hardly tell this all-powerful businessman that after she’d received his invitation to Versailles she’d
spent an anxious hour wondering about it, or indeed that she was still of two minds about the wisdom of having accepted. She’d been trying to make a major impression on Jacques Necker from the beginning but all she’d wanted was to stand out and win the contract. He was enormously attractive, no question about that, but the last thing she wanted to do was get involved with him. Nothing would be more unbusinesslike. If, God forbid, this outing was going to lead up to his making a pass at her, it would be deeply embarrassing to them both. Yet how could she have refused his invitation?

“To me the gardens are the essence of Versailles,” Necker said. “The château itself is monumentally sad and empty. There’s no life there, in spite of the grandeur. After the Revolution the furnishings were confiscated and sent far and wide, the tapestries and pictures ended up in a museum, and whatever little is there now is an attempt at restoration. If there are ghosts, and I firmly believe there are,” Necker said slowly, “they’re here, in the gardens, not in those vast, echoing staircases and corridors.”

“Are we ghost hunting,” Jordan asked, “or are you a nostalgic royalist? Would you like to see the monarchy restored? Are you one of the people who support the Pretender to the throne of France, with all those happily married children that make every other reigning royal family look pathetic?”

“Where on earth do you get this arcane information?” Necker smiled at Jordan with amusement. Her short curls were tumbled by a slight breeze and all the pale sunlight in the sky of the Ile-de-France seemed to be trapped in a frame around her warmly glowing face. Against the intricate background of bare branches Jordan looked as if she could start a fire by just standing in one place and twirling.

“Mostly from
Hello!,”
she answered, “an English magazine where they cover the European royalty beat very seriously. It’s fun to look at the pictures and decide that the Queen of England should have her hairdresser
shot at dawn or that the new queen of Belgium should burn her entire wardrobe. But I don’t just criticize, I’m also a groupie—my pet is Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret’s daughter, who wore floppy pants to a royal wedding and stole the show. Ah, me, it’s all fairy-tale time.”

“Do you have a taste for fairy tales?” Necker asked as he thought that this expedition was almost as painful as it was pleasurable. He should have been here with Justine, watching her walking in this well-loved place, he should be asking Justine these questions, he should be getting to know his daughter instead of this nice young creature whose background was as strange to him as his must be to her. Still, a daughter substitute was better than nothing at all in his present state of misery, and she was the only one of the girls who had any interest in French history.

“Beats reality, nine times out of ten.”

“Let’s sit down on that bench for a minute,” Necker suggested. “Are you going to be warm enough? It’s fairly sheltered here.”

“Even if I weren’t, I’m ready to sit,” Jordan answered, glad to stop walking. Necker didn’t realize what a brisk pace he set. “I bet the ladies of the court got all the exercise they needed just jogging from one place to another … how did they ever have the strength to change their clothes five or six times a day, to say nothing of dancing and flirting and playing cards and social climbing?”

“Probably because they were so competitive with each other they didn’t dare slow down.”

“Sounds a little like my work,” Jordan laughed. “Except for the flirting and the cards and the social climbing.”

“Tell me something about Justine Loring,” Necker asked, abruptly, unable to hold back another instant. “Is she a good person to work for?”

“I think she’s the absolute best,” Jordan replied. “It’s really a shame she got sick and didn’t come, I
know you’d have liked her. Still, we’re in good hands with Frankie.”

“Why do you say she’s the best?” he persisted. “What makes her that?”

“I trust her totally, she never gets flustered, clients can’t intimidate her and she doesn’t play favorites. She’s a strong, committed advocate for her girls.”

“Do you think she’s a happy woman, Jordan? Do you get the feeling that she’s fulfilled in her life, or that there’s something missing for her? I mean as a human being?”

“I can’t possibly answer that,” Jordan said, surprised at the tenor of his questions. “Justine doesn’t let us in on her emotions, Monsieur Necker, she’s not into her personal drama, she’s essentially a reserved woman. She’s deeply interested in each one of us but she doesn’t give us any reason to gossip about her.”

“Why did you say you trust her?” he asked sharply. “What’s she ever done in particular to make you feel that way?”

“Trust’s a funny thing, some people inspire it and some don’t. I’m not saying I’m an infallible judge of character. Justine has one of the best reputations in the business, but that’s really all I can tell you about her for sure. Frankie’s her best friend, so if you want to know more about Justine’s private life, she’s the one you should be asking.”

“I like to know as much as I can about the people I do business with,” Necker told her, responding to the faint question in her voice. “It can be helpful in many ways.”

“Well there is one other thing that means a hell of a lot to me—Justine will suggest that clients see me even when they haven’t specifically requested ‘a woman of color’—that’s the preferred expression they use these days. Most other agencies will tell you that the clients have to ask for you in so many words before they’ll send you anywhere, but Justine is trying to get me every break she can.”

“A ‘woman of color’?—I hadn’t heard anything
after ‘African-American.’ I thought that was the final official word on the subject.”

“I’ll bet there’s never going to be a final agreement on that. People are going to be struggling forever how to say
it
without giving offense to one person or another.”

“Forgive me,” Necker said hastily, “I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just that for a Swiss, well, of course we have the Italian and the German and the French Swiss, but—”

“But you’re all white. Lucky little Switzerland.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve offended you.”

“No way!” Jordan protested, smiling at his typical reaction. “It happens to be one subject I have plenty to say about and I’ve almost never found a white person who feels comfortable talking about it with me.”

“I’m comfortable, and I’m interested.”

Jordan scrutinized Necker and found a frank and direct curiosity in his eyes, the kind of curiosity most people who felt it would politely hide. She realized that she now felt secure with him. Nothing he’d said indicated a sexual interest in her. His air of command didn’t disconcert her, nor his habit of asking questions and expecting answers. She respected this man and trusted him enough now to be open and take him at his word.

“Now take ‘Black’ for instance,” Jordan said, “—sometimes used without a capital B—lots of people, like me, continue to insist that they’re black Americans, not African-Americans, because they’re so culturally distant from Africa, their ancestors have lived so many generations in the United States,
way
longer than most other Americans, that they can’t feel emotionally African. On the other hand, I’m not black
enough
for a lot of my fellow black Americans.”

“Now I’m totally confused.”

“No more than I am. The other day I was reading an English magazine targeted at black women and it said that and I quote, there were about ‘thirty-three different shades of black skin, from the palest ivory to the
blue-black.’ The mind reels! Who was appointed to count those thirty-three different shades and how
on earth
did they do it? Then, in the same magazine, they have a story about Roshumba, who’s a top black model and they call her a ‘Real Sister’ because she sports a very short Afro and because she has a fairly negative attitude about some of the black models who’ve told her that they’d agree to have long straight hair or a nose job to get on the cover of
Vogue
. As if a white model wouldn’t be willing to do the same thing without feeling disloyal to the Scotch or the Italian in her. Probably without meaning to, I think Roshumba—which means ‘beautiful’ in Swahili, no less—has set herself up as a high priestess of being
righteously
black. She hasn’t had to compromise personally, she’s gorgeous just as she is with three
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issues to prove it. So now, as if it isn’t tough enough I have to contend with being considered less-than-righteously black—not a ‘real’ sister!”

“Can’t you be—oh, maple syrup or apple cider or very foamy cappuccino or tea with milk or a dry sherry or—”

“I take it that’s Swiss humor, Monsieur Necker? At least you didn’t say milk chocolate.” Jordan shook her head at him with a dance of mischief in her eyes. “Now you’ve got me doing it—a fine single-malt Scotch with lots of cream in it comes pretty close, wouldn’t you say, although a single-malt-Scotch drinker would never put even an ice cube in the stuff.”

“I meant that question,” Necker protested. “Don’t evade it.”

“The answer is that it’s a waste of time to worry about your particular slot on the color chart, because you can’t do anything about it. However, even if I try not to worry, I’m totally
conscious
of it. You’d think that just being black was enough to have on your plate, but no, the shade of your skin does matter enormously.” Jordan was trying to be as precise as she would be with her father, since she knew that nothing less would satisfy Necker.

“Why is that? Is lighter always considered better?”