Spring Collection (39 page)

I promise you that even as she uncharacteristically burbled at me about the happiness and joy she felt, I could hear her mentally planning the wedding, deciding on what particularly becoming shade of off-white I should wear and beginning to worry about my leaving work as soon as I gave birth to our first child.

I didn’t tell Justine not to worry about something that hasn’t even been mentioned yet. I’ve had the same thoughts myself, I have to admit. Then I catch myself up short and change to the take-each-day-as-it-comes plan that Mike and I seem to have mutually adopted. This tacit agreement must have been made at some moment when I wasn’t quite myself, because it doesn’t
sound
like me, it doesn’t ring even the faintest inner bell. However, I’ve learned that I can’t trust myself to
be
myself lately. Thinking straight is getting harder and harder, and my job of keeping the girls under close surveillance, if not house arrest, has become as impossible as herding cats.

Of course I had to tell Justine about my conversation with Necker and his expectation that she’d be in Paris for the collection. Her abrupt silence at receiving this news made me decide not to add that I’d assured him that she’d be here. Okay, I’m a coward, but I knew that Necker didn’t believe me anyway, so doesn’t one lie cancel out an omission?

As the spring collection draws nearer I’ve made it a point to see Tinker daily and check on her. The only time to catch her is during a break in her tango lesson because I certainly can’t interrupt her in the sacred, strictly-off-limits mystery of Lombardi’s atelier, nor can I count on being around when she drops into the hotel at the most unexpected hours for a change of clothes and a long hot bath. Apparently Tom’s studio isn’t big on luxury sanitation but after Tinker’s finally free to leave Lombardi’s, and it’s always far too late at night, she rushes off to be with her painter. I can imagine how she’d feel if I barged in on them.

I’m still not happy about this Tom Strauss although he doesn’t fit the profile of your typical degenerate
model chaser. He’s not a playboy or a spoiled rich man’s son or an older millionaire; he’s not a photographer, a photographer’s assistant, a model agent, a designer or involved with the production of any kind of film; he doesn’t have a Porsche, a title or a rich business associate who’s dying to invite her to dinner in his apartment. In other words he’s not the typical horror your bumpkin model always manages to dig up from under a paving stone in Paris, but it’s almost impossible to believe that he’s not interested in exploiting her in some way or another. Exploitation is what happens to models. All the time. Would he be so crazy about her if she weren’t a model? Would all those wildly sexy women have thrown themselves at Picasso’s feet if he’d painted houses?

Señora Varga’s dance studio is on an almost inaccessible little street off another little street somewhere between the Place de la Madeleine and the Gare St.-Lazare—thank heaven for the one car and driver still left to us. La Señora, a small, stick-thin woman, must be at least fifty-five and looks as if she had never left Buenos Aires. She wears a tight, black, mid-calf skirt slit amazingly high up on her lean, muscular thigh, and a glittering black blouse. Her sleek dark hair is parted in the middle and drawn back into the classic chignon, ornamented with antique jeweled pins.

Although the Señora has the best posture I’ve ever seen, she barely comes up to Tinker’s shoulder, and as they dance, with Tinker leading, I can tell that Tinker is dancing far,
far
above her innate ability, or, rather, lack of ability. She was born without a trace of the dancer’s gene. To my trained eye, even as the Señora takes her backward steps, the knowledge in her muscles of where she should be next, is
leading
Tinker, without Tinker realizing it. No matter how hard she might try, Señora Varga is too powerful a dancer to merely follow anyone with a little control or training as Tinker, and I doubt that she’s ever taught a woman to lead before.

Of course they’re doing the American tango. Even a good dancer would need six months of steady work to
get anywhere with the Argentine tango. I can’t help but wonder just how, or even
if
, this one dance is going to change Tinker’s walk. Yes, it’s dramatic, arrogant, and mannered, but how will it translate onto the runway?

Every day Tinker’s usual pallor becomes more pronounced. Her miraculous way of becoming what the eye is searching for is switched on while she dances, but it disappears as soon as we have the three minutes of time together that I’m allowed each day. I see a fragile, agitated, blindly determined girl who isn’t getting nearly enough sleep, a girl who’s overexcited, over-challenged and overcourageous. Oddly enough, she’s never been more beautiful. Those gleaming Moonriver eyes are brighter than they’ve ever been—almost feverish—and she’s thrilled about the clothes Lombardi is making. We haven’t had time to discuss them in detail—the stern Señora doesn’t allow her pupil enough breathing time for that—but Tinker’s convinced that he’s working with great inspiration. I hope she’s right and it’s not just a case of being in love with herself as well as Tom Strauss.

I’ll meet Tom tonight at Peaches’ party. Apparently la Wilcox, an old friend of Necker’s, has invited lots of people to meet everyone who has anything to do with the Lombardi collection, from Necker on down to models’ boyfriends. It’ll be the first time that Mike and I will be going anywhere in public as a couple. I can’t wait.

She would never have believed this disgusting madness could endure, Peaches Wilcox thought. She’d been raped in her own bedroom by Marco Lombardi, he’d humiliated her and hurt her physically … and yet she wanted him, more ruinously than ever. She was obsessed by every second of the scene that had taken place a few weeks ago. Over and over again she found herself moaning, not at the rape itself, but at the fact that she’d been so angry afterward that she hadn’t let him satisfy her. Each time she repeated to herself his last words, “I’ll make you come now, with my mouth,
the way you adore it,” she felt like flaying herself for not haying allowed it.

Perhaps that one final orgasm would have freed her from him, Peaches thought, perhaps it would have filled her with enough self-disgust at her weakness, her self-abasement, to put an end to her craving. But to have been left high and dry … bad choice, old thing, she said to herself. You saved what was left of your dignity and doomed yourself to whatever is the female equivalent of unfinished wet dreams. Peaches McCoy Wilcox of the sovereign state of Texas did not relish waking up in the middle of the night to the savage letdown of several crucial seconds before she was about to come in her sleep.

Peaches was trying to think of a face-saving way to revive her relationship with Marco when the memory of the party she’d idly promised Frankie and Mike sprang into her mind. It was the perfect answer to her problem. Marco automatically would have to be included in a party for the girls even if she had truly never wanted to see him again, especially since she was inviting Jacques Necker.

Peaches and the Neckers had run with the same set in Paris. She wasn’t ashamed to admit that not too long after Nicole’s body was cold, she’d cast her eye on Jacques—you’d have to be a fool not to. But it hadn’t done her any more good than it had done two dozen other women she knew. Yes, that big, blond and, as far as she was concerned, extremely sexy Swiss would have made her the best possible second husband. She’d have cured him damn quick from being married to his business. Jacques would be passionate, if you could ever get him in bed, her infallible instinct told her, but it was not to be. Of course it was strictly his loss, Peaches philosophized, that he’d chosen to turn into a tycoon-monk, when life held so many other possibilities, but then the Swiss, unlike the French or the Italians, weren’t a nationality anyone could generalize about. Perhaps he’d been really in love with Nicole?

Peaches wrenched herself away from the knowledge that in a few hours she’d see Marco again, and considered her guest list one last time. She’d invited some fifty people: all her closest French friends who weren’t away skiing; those of her best American friends who had already gathered in Paris for the precollection week; Dart Benedict, that dear man, who’d just called to say he was in Paris, and of course, the three girls, Tinker’s unknown Tom Strauss, Frankie, Mike, and Maude. She’d told Jordan and April to bring their own escorts, but they’d both said they’d rather come alone. She didn’t see any need to invite men for them. It was hard enough to forgive them for their youth, without going to the trouble to fix them up.

She was really a remarkable woman, if she did say so herself, Peaches ruminated. She’d spent hours with these young girls, each of whom was far more beautiful than she’d ever been on her best day of her life, and she’d managed to endure it. She’d watched keenly the heedless way in which they inhabited their long, long slim limbs, the careless, carefree way—which amounted to arrogance in her opinion—in which they accepted their gifts of grace and beauty, and yet she almost genuinely liked them.

Yes, that was one of the things money
could
buy, the comforting realization that the girls wouldn’t keep those looks for long, and they’d never have the money to properly maintain them. Chances were they’d run to fat, after depriving themselves of a decent meal for years, and start to sell real estate, like most of the ex-models she’d known. You could just about count on the fingers of two hands the girls who were still working at twenty-eight, and Tinker, the youngest of them, was already eighteen, whereas, ten years from now, she, Peaches, would still be going strong, God and Dr. H., willing. Once you’d faced up to forty-seven, fifty-seven, with increasingly vigilant upkeep, didn’t look all that terrible. Youth was equally over in both cases.

Yes, Jordan, April and Tinker were doomed, if they were lucky, to a future of suburban life and child
raising, with nothing but a lot of yellowing tear sheets to remind them of their glory days, not that they’d want to be reminded. Of course, lightning might strike and one of them might marry well, but that wasn’t as easy as it sounded, Peaches thought with the relish of one who had succeeded.

If she had to say which of the Loring gals she envied the most it would be ol’ Frankie, who didn’t depend on how she looked to keep working. Frankie had charm and jazz and a blazing personality that would keep her alluring long after gravity took its toll.

Just what, when you came right down to it, would she give to be instantly reincarnated as young and beautiful as April or Tinker, Peaches asked herself? To be a girl who could have Marco with a lift of her eyebrow? Not a penny more than four hundred million dollars, she decided after long speculation. That would leave her with a hundred million, or a minimum of at least six million dollars to spend annually after taxes, enough income to live on very well if she didn’t go crazy acquiring jewels or art. Lordy, she could even sell the ranch if she had to, it just ate money and she was so rarely there.

Of course the greatest beauty among the three girls was Jordan, but no matter how much youth and beauty Jordan possessed, Peaches wouldn’t pay a dime to be reborn black. No, not even if talent were thrown in. There were just too many cards stacked against you, it was too tough a row to hoe. She wasn’t being racist, just realistic, she ruminated, as she set about arranging for the caviar, the fresh foie gras, the crabmeat mousse, the white Norwegian smoked salmon—no, she wouldn’t call room service, she decided, but the banquet manager himself. She intended tonight to be an occasion that would bring home to Marco a fresh understanding of just what he had almost lost.

There was a moment, like a distinct click, that happened in the course of every large party she’d ever given, after which Peaches could legitimately relax. It
took place when enough people had been introduced to each other—she was very clever about introducing people flawlessly—so that they were well mingled and talking easily. That was usually the time when the majority of her other guests were crowding into her rooms too quickly to expect to be introduced, unless there was a special reason why she should lead someone from one group to another.

It was at that precise instant that she considered a party successfully launched: people could be counted on to introduce themselves to each other; like would discover like; anyone who was stuck in a conversation could easily drift away to another part of the room, and basically her job as a hostess was over. Her staffs were always drilled in every nuance of food and drink. From now on Peaches was as free as any other guest at her own party, and it amused her to drift from group to group, never letting anyone pin her down, picking up tidbits of gossip and information and flattery from a multitude of sources.

This party, however, didn’t promise that moment of relaxation. Marco Lombardi, although he didn’t know it, was the only guest of honor on her secret agenda and in her mind’s eye the only important click would come when he realized that he must win her forgiveness.

All the rest was background, Peaches thought as she finished dressing. She had devoted the day to every beauty treatment in her considerable armory and she radiated natural health, her widescreen, mature glamour enhanced by the most expensive professional attention. Almost all, if not all, of her French women friends would be wearing elegant black in one form or another, Peaches knew, as would her visiting Americans—it was still the one way never to set a foot wrong, especially in Paris, and nothing would ever replace it.

Peaches decided to stand out in Saint-Laurent’s latest, timeless white dinner suit. It had been tailored for her compact, superbly toned body at a cost of twenty-five thousand dollars, yet its jacket and trousers,
made from a thin wool and trimmed with white satin lapels and cuffs, were so strictly cut that she could wear all her diamonds with it … well not all of them, Peaches decided as she reluctantly removed a favorite lapel pin the size of a zinnia. Around her neck she wore five diamond necklaces in graduated lengths, designed, as she had collected them one by one, in a way that allowed them to fit into each other until they looked like one wide collar. There was a resplendence of diamonds at her ears, and three wide cuff bracelets on each wrist; hundreds and hundreds of carats of the most rare and valuable of all diamonds, those certified D flawless. Peaches knew that none of her guests would be inspecting her with a jeweler’s loupe, but she had never settled for less. She wore only one ring, her forty-two carat, square, cushion-cut engagement ring.