Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (22 page)

At one minute before ten, Sigrid stepped out of a brass and chrome elevator that was more burnished than a piece of high-tech jewelry and pulled open a glass door etched like crystal with the image of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

Sigrid considered herself above such trite and obvious symbolism—were clients really supposed to feel like lowly caterpillars whose only hope of metamorphosing into exotic butterflies lay beyond these crystal doors?—yet as soon as she stepped inside, she was immediately intimidated by the waves of high-priced glamour that seemed to radiate from the very walls.

The tiny reception area was sheathed in space-expanding mirrors, polished black marble and chrome. The mirrors were subtly etched with fine-line impressions of more butterflies. Some drifted in solitary flight through the middle of one panel; in another, several hovered near the floor.

Every angled surface seemed engineered to reflect and multiply the receptionist’s image. A strikingly beautiful redhead, she was the only color in the room but she burned with it: a flaming yellow jacket over a purple minidress belted with fire-engine red patent leather. It was an eye-jangling combination yet somehow, on her, the blazing cacophony of hot colors worked.

She smiled at Sigrid. “May I help you?”

Sigrid identified herself. “I have a ten o’clock appointment.”

“Certainly, Miss Harald.” She touched a button on the shiny chrome desk top. “Carina? Miss Harald is here for her makeover.”

She touched another button and a section of the mirrored wall slid aside noiselessly. “Go through please, Miss Harald.”

Carina was a platinum blonde clone of the receptionist, dressed in a bright red jumpsuit. She led the way down an all-white hall to a small cubicle which she unlocked before handing the key to Sigrid.

“Please remove your outer garments and all jewelry, especially any wedding or engagement rings, and put on the robe and slippers which you will find inside.” She smiled and fluted in all the right places, but it was obviously a much-repeated spiel since Sigrid wore no rings of any kind. “Then please lock the door and continue down the hall to the preparation area.”

This was beginning to take on the aspects of a visit to the doctor, thought Sigrid. She slipped off her top clothes, taking pains not to disturb the perfect knot of Roman’s red tie, and put on the calf-length white terry robe and cotton scuffs.

The preparation area had aspects of an ordinary beauty salon: five chairs in front of a bank of sinks and mirrors. Again, everything was gleaming white except for the attendants, who wore linen jumpsuits, each in a different primary or secondary color as pure and unsophisticated as a child’s crayon.

Three of the chairs were already filled, one by Anne Harald, who smiled at her in the mirror but said nothing to give away their relationship to the others, which was one of Sigrid’s conditions for coming. Talking was not encouraged at this point anyhow. Carina had pinned a name tag to Sigrid’s robe that gave her first name only. The other three women were introduced as Gillian, Anne, and Phyllis.

“From this point on, Berthelot insists on first names only,” she explained. “He doesn’t wish to be distracted by stereotypes of ancestry. And please be very careful not to mention your marital status or profession either. Only your looks count here.”

As she spoke, she brushed Sigrid’s fine dark hair away from her face and slipped on a white bandeau that held the hair back and framed her face like a bandage. “The first thing we do is strip your face of all makeup.”

“I’m not wearing anything except lipstick,” Sigrid said.

Carina merely smiled and adjusted the white vinyl chair to a reclining position. “Lean back, please.”

Resigned, Sigrid lay back in the chair and closed her eyes as Carina smoothed on warm cleansing cream and then covered her face with a hot towel.

“Ah, that feels heavenly,” said Phyllis from the next chair.

Faces stripped, the four women were led into a circular mirrored conference room where a small ebullient man of late middle age awaited them. Berthelot’s obviously dyed jet-black hair had receded to the top of his squarish head, but what remained was thick and brushed straight back from the hairline to hang collar length at the nape of his neck. His naturally sallow skin was deeply tanned and his dark eyes swept over them with apparent delight and admiration.

“Oh marvelous!” he cried, jumping up and rushing around the table to welcome them. “A Summer, an Autumn, and
two
Winters! Come
mes chéries!
We shall have such
fun
discovering the glorious
you
nature intended you to be!”

It was going to be an awfully long day, thought Sigrid.

In his Greenwich Village apartment, McKinnon was finally doing something about the ill-fitting sliding glass door that led to his small balcony. In summer, the breezes that wafted around his balcony could be delightful: the winter version whistling through the cracks had sent his latest heating bill over the moon.

When the rent-controlled apartment that he’d originally shared with a string of different roommates came up for sale a few years back, McKinnon had bought it. Ever since Leif Harald moved out to marry Anne Lattimore, he’d lived alone here, content with the location, the neighbors, the apartment itself, except when subjected to the annoyances of ownership.

Year before last, when he’d first noticed the drafts, the winter had been mild enough to let him ignore the problem. Last year, he’d simply taped the cracks over with masking tape. This proved effective only so long as he didn’t want to use the terrace. Unfortunately New York could string two or three warm days together even in January and bingo! There went another whole roll of masking tape.

This year, he had launched a two-prong attack: self-adhesive foam weather stripping and heavy-duty insulated drapes. Yet there was still a discernible draft.

Which was why he had spent the last hour down at the lumberyard pricing new double-glazed French doors. He could remember when a new car could be bought for what they were going to charge to take away the old door and install the new; but this time he’d closed his eyes and written a check for the down payment. It was tentatively agreed that carpenters would arrive on the first of April.

In the meantime, McKinnon had stopped off at the hardware store for another roll of masking tape and was halfway through the process of applying it when the phone rang.

“Yeah?” He tucked the phone under his chin and continued taping the door.

“McKinnon? Mac McKinnon?”

“Yeah?”

“Mac, this is Tom Oersted. Remember me?”

“Yeah, sure Tom,” he said, surprised. “Been a long time.”

“Ten years or more,” said Oersted. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine, fine. What’s up?”

Oersted laughed. “Always straight to the point, eh, Mac?”

“And?” He finished taping the top of the door and began on the side.

“I got a phone call yesterday afternoon.”

“Don’t play games with me, Tom,” said Mac. He remembered now. Oersted had always been Leif’s friend, not his.

“It was Leif’s kid. I’d almost forgotten he had one. Little Siga. All grown up now and following in Leif’s footsteps. A lieutenant, she tells me.”

“Yeah, she works for me now.”

“So she said. She told me about Mick Cluett, too. I missed it on the news. Damn shame. He should’ve done his twenty and got out like me.”

McKinnon was silent, the masking tape ignored, as he waited for Oersted to say why he’d called.

“She tracked me down through the Viking Association,” said Oersted. “Wants to talk to somebody who knew her old man. I told her you were his partner, but she doesn’t want to ask you. How come, Mac?”

“Who knows?” he answered.

“So what’ll I tell her? About you and Leif?”

“Whatever you want,” McKinnon said, “so long as you limit it to the things you know for a fact.”

“Listen,” Oersted said hastily, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s water over the dam, but I’m supposed to see her tomorrow night. I just thought you ought to know that she’s asking.”

“Had to happen sooner or later,” said McKinnon. But after he’d hung up, he felt as gray and bleak as the sky beyond the glass door and he wished Oersted hadn’t told him.

“Your lovely skin is like skim milk,” crooned Berthelot. “See how the dusty rose loves you and yet the salmon fights with the blue undertones?”

“Oooh, yes!” breathed Gillian. Despite her New England accent the young woman had been defined as a Southern Summer. (Not to be confused with an Eastern Summer or a California Summer, Sigrid had learned.)

The white circular conference table was littered with swatches of colorful fabrics and trays of costume jewelry that ranged from Social Register restrained to Red Light gaudy as Berthelot analyzed each woman in turn and set her small problems of finding which colors and styles fit within the new parameters he had set for her.

For Sigrid, the worst part so far had been when it was her turn to stand beneath a clear white spotlight while Berthelot peered at her skin, face, and eyes through a magnifying glass and then described her physical attributes one by one.

“Such queenly height! The carriage of an empress. Marvelous facial planes. Wait till you see how we sculpt your face! Clear porcelain skin. Everyone see Sigrid’s blue undertones?”

Murmured assents from the other three women.

“And the grace of your neck. Like a swan. Women would have killed for a neck like that in ages past! Wonderful legs! Never hide them in pants. You must wear full, flowing skirts that make a dramatic statement.”

The man was a cheerleader. Improbable compliments fell from his lips in never-ending variety. Listening to him, thought Sigrid, one would think we’re all Miss America candidates.

Gillian’s young plump body had been praised for its vitality, its harmony of line; Anne’s petite frame brought ecstatic murmurs of “dynamic excitement.” No mention was made of the wrinkles lining Phyllis’s “piquant” face, but “This white hair will have to go. You’re much too young to have your autumn fires quenched. Back to red for you!”

“I was never a redhead,” Phyllis protested weakly.

“Then it’s time you became one,” Berthelot told her airily as he flung a length of copper silk over her head and created an elegant turban.

To Sigrid’s astonishment, she saw that he was right. She couldn’t begin to say why, but the copper did indeed liven Phyllis’s skin and eyes in a way that her white hair did not.

She reached into the pile of fabrics on the table and chose three nearly similar shades of red—one had just enough blue to lean toward purple, one had a hint of orange, the third was equally balanced—and held them against her face, one at a time, comparing them in the oval stand mirror provided for each woman. Maybe it really was like one of those color problems Nauman set for his art students each fall, a visual puzzle no more difficult or arcane than progressive permutations of an ordinary color wheel.

Of course, the names were sheer nonsense, she’d decided. Her coloring was almost exactly the same as Anne’s, yet Anne had been decreed a California Winter while she was an Eastern Winter.

As they paused for lunch, Sigrid tried to imagine what she was going to look like transformed into Berthelot’s idea of a New York February.

If asked to describe himself, Matt Eberstadt would have replied that he was as honest and moral as the next man. Perhaps less concerned about the state of his immortal soul than his wife Frances; but in his opinion that didn’t mean much. Women always sweated the small stuff more than men anyhow. Convenient parking wasn’t an infringement of the law in his eyes, merely one of the minor perks that went with the job, and he didn’t give it a second thought as he pulled into the curb in front of the air terminal and flipped down his sun visor. All he cared about was making sure there was enough police ID on his car to render it immune from tickets or towing while he went inside to meet his wife.