Spring Collection (51 page)

Peaches’ taste in men goes way beyond kinky, if you ask me, but if it makes Marco’s life a misery, why not? I haven’t forgotten what a malicious snake she was to me about Mike, but now that her venom will be channeled toward Marco, I can afford to feel mellow about it. There’s a couple I feel will be around for a bit, until Peaches tires of him. He’d better not lose any of that Renaissance hair, he’d better not get fat, he’d better not have an uncharming minute or an unsuccessful collection. Most of all, because of what I suspect about our Peaches, he’d better be ready to get it up—and keep it up—at a snap of her imperious, diamonded fingers. Alas, I’ve never heard of a man yet who could flex that particular muscle on command.

But back to Jordan. She failed to join in our conversation during dinner, she seemed to be sleepwalking and daydreaming simultaneously, polished by silence, and I had the feeling that she was immensely sad to be leaving Paris where her life had taken such a new direction. She and April would be back soon, of course, for the Lombardi ready-to-wear collection in March, but no show would ever equal the drama she’d just gone through.

Since Jordan was exactly Tinker’s height, and their measurements were the same, she’d had to show all of Tinker’s outfits as well as her own. I sensed such a deep weariness in her that I dropped in, uninvited, to help her pack since of all of us, she was the only one who’d
bought so many antiques that she’d had to send a bellman to buy her an extra suitcase at the last minute.

“Promise me you’ll go to bed early,” I asked her. “You seem desperate for a decent night’s sleep. Your eyes look feverish to me.”

“Okay, Mom,” she agreed, “but I’m really not tired, my mind’s racing—I bet I’ll be up all night.” I made sure she was in her nightgown and ready for bed before I left her. I even tried to talk her into drinking a glass of warm milk, but Jordan balked at that, pushing me out of her room before I could tuck her into bed. Then Justine came back from dinner with her father and the two of us drifted off to our rooms and settled down for the night, worn out by too many decisions, too many emotions, too much excitement.

A few hours later, when I was deeply asleep, just at that moment when the mind and body are finally totally at rest, I was aroused by a combination of pounding on the door and ringing of the doorbell. I didn’t remember where I was for a disoriented minute and then my first thought was that the hotel must be on fire. I flew into my bathrobe, and opened the door the smallest possible crack, expecting to see the corridor filled with smoke. Instead, at eye level, I saw Jordan’s gorgeous bare legs kicking to get free, trapped by an arm covered in a man’s jacket.

“What the fuck!” I gasped, opening the door wide and gaping at Jacques Necker, holding Jordan struggling in his arms. “Let me go, you oaf!” she cried, hitting him with her fists. “Put me down!”

“I needed witnesses,” Necker said to me, carrying Jordan into the sitting room like a blond King Kong, sounding as if he were making a perfectly normal request. Justine staggered through the doorway.

“Papa? What are you doing here?” she asked groggily. Jordan fought harder and harder to get free of his unrelenting grasp, muttering curses.

“Two witnesses, excellent. That makes it official. Jordan and I are getting married.”

“Monsieur Necker,” I said soothingly, drawing on
all my experience with dealing with wigged-out, complaining, fit-throwing, should-be-committed models, “that’s very interesting, very, very interesting news. It’s nice, really nice as it can be. But wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you sat down and told us about it slowly,
very, very slowly
, with all the details? Maybe you’d be even more comfortable if you put Jordan down, so I could give her a sweater, look, she’s freezing, she’s shaking, now you wouldn’t want her to catch cold, would you, Mr. Necker?”

“I’m laughing, you idiot,” Jordan managed to croak out, “not freezing.”

“You’re a big help,” I hissed at her. “It’s not funny.”

“I can’t believe it! How could this have happened, what’s been going on here, for heaven’s sake?” Justine looked intently back and forth from Necker to Jordan, weighing up what she saw in their faces. “It’s impossible! It’s crazy it’s
 … I don’t get it
 … but … whatever … hell, I don’t know, it just
feels
right!” Justine cried finally, flinging her arms around both of them, kissing them at random all over their faces like an overexcited dog. “Papa, you have incredible taste! Jordan, you’ll make him so happy. Damn, I wish I’d been here to watch this whole thing developing between you two.”

“If you’d been here,” Jordan said, suddenly serious, “it would
never
have happened, not in a million years. Thank you for not coming sooner, Justine.”

Were all three of them insane? Necker loosened his hold on Jordan so he could include Justine in his hug. I stood, looking at the happy group, trying to make sense out of this loony scene. Necker and Jordan? For real? He glanced at me, and read my mind.

“Jordan incapacitated me for any normal life, Frankie,” he explained with a great big, astonishingly sweet smile. Well! How about that? First time he’d called me anything but Miss Severino. First time he’d really smiled at me. Someone had loosened this guy up, and it wasn’t Justine.

“Incapacitated”—there is more than one way to declare your love, I guess, and looking at the illumination that was Jordan, I realized that my ability to empathize hadn’t been working with her. She hadn’t been desperately tired, she’d been desperately and unhappily in love. And I hadn’t seen it coming, not for a minute, even though all last week I’d watched them set off on those cultural excursions of theirs. Had they been to the Louvre too? Maybe, but something tells me it wasn’t the same Louvre Mike and I had frequented every afternoon. Necker was too proper and so, in her own grown-up, sophisticated way, was Jordan.

So there’s your “Love Boat” complement; Jacques, as he now insists I call him, and Jordan, holding his hand in her sleep; Maude lovelorn and loveless; April and Kitten and whoever takes Kitten’s place, and so on and so forth, I’ll bet, for years into the future; Tinker, who jumped ship; and Justine and Aiden, the contractor, who still remains to be inspected but can’t possibly be half as … well, let’s agree on it, no way can he be anything like half as
divine
as Mike, who’s up in the cockpit showing the pilot how to fly the plane.

The only person Jacques asked to come along with us to the airport was Gabrielle d’Angelle. He told her about his forthcoming marriage; news that you would have thought should have provoked some reaction bigger than her startled congratulations. While he gave her a list of things to supervise for him during his trip to New York, Gabrielle seemed to be working out the answer to some kind of vexing long-standing question. Yet when Jacques, almost casually, told her that he was promoting her to executive vice-president of La Groupe Necker, she broke down, literally bursting into tears of joy, and didn’t stop for ten minutes. She pulled a real weeper. I believe Gabrielle must be the most dedicated, least romantic career woman I’ve ever met in all my years of working with women. You can’t generalize, not even about the French, can you?

Of all of these recent romances, please notice, I’m the only one who’s engaged to her long-lost true love—
no quickie romance for me—and, as it happens, the only one with an engagement ring.

While he was running around yesterday, taking more pictures of the girls, Mike found time to nip into Van Cleef and buy me a ring that’s embarrassingly big, if you’re the kind of person who’s easily embarrassed by mere material possessions and I find, to my surprise, that I’m not. I guess that must have something to do with learning to wear Donna Karan.

Justine wants to give our wedding reception at her house and I want to have it at Big Ed, because she’ll have enough to do getting married herself, to say nothing of whatever sort of ceremony Jordan and Jacques are planning after he meets her parents. Gracious! If it weren’t for weddings, what would happen to the American economy?

The event I’m looking forward to almost more than getting married is the tenth reunion of my class at Abraham Lincoln High School this spring. Two weeks ago I’d been planning on skipping it. Almost every one of my nine hundred or so classmates could be counted on to drag a spouse or partner of some persuasion to this particular reunion, and I didn’t know anyone I cared to bring.

But when I show up with Mike Aaron—the legendary star who’s never been forgotten—and they find out that I’m Mrs. Mike Aaron—
Caramba!

Okay, call me a show-off, call me ostentatious, call me pretentious, but how can I resist a chance to prove to all those fellow students who teased me about being too skinny to look good in a leotard and tights, that even a kid with a big nose, who wore her hair screwed up in a bun, whose finest feature was her big feet—that even Frankie Severino could grow up to accept, with grace and dignity and passion, the heart and hand of the once and forever prince of Brooklyn?

J
UDITH
K
RANTZ
began her career as a fashion editor and magazine article writer. Her first novel,
Scruples
, was an immediate top bestseller, as have been all her subsequent books—
Princess Daisy, Mistral’s Daughter, I’ll Take Manhattan, Till We Meet Again, Dazzle, Scruples Two, Lovers
, and
Spring Collection
. Her latest novel is
The Jewels of Tessa Kent
. She lives in Bel Air and Newport Beach, California, with her husband, movie and television producer Steve Krantz.