Scruples Two (38 page)

While Sally, Rosa and Dawn were eating hungrily, she took from their hiding place in the closet the two/small suitcases in which she’d brought Gigi’s things that morning. As soon as they’d finished their hasty lunch, she opened the suitcases and removed, one by one, the Christmas presents Gigi had found for her friends. She held up each piece of old lingerie, told them what it was, and then passed it around for them to examine. They handled the old garments reverently, exclaiming over the feel of the fabrics, for everything they wore or modeled was made from cotton or nylon, and none of them had ever owned hand-made lingerie, nor were they familiar with the old styles.

As Sasha read the words of each of Gigi’s cards out loud, she saw the expressions of discontent and petulance and worry dissolve from the faces of her co-workers, to be replaced by the starry-eyed, all-but-trancelike enchantment of children listening to a magical story for the first time.

“Could … I just …?” Sharp-tongued Sally touched the satin of the tea gown destined for Billy with the tips of her fingers, and pleaded with her eyes for a chance to put it on.

“Be especially careful,” Sasha warned her, unable to resist Sally’s look, particularly since she knew how gently each of the girls had been trained to handle the original samples they wore in the showroom. Tall Sally took off her robe and slowly arranged the tea gown around her shoulders, slipping her arms into the lace sleeves and taking a few steps so that the train could fan out behind her.

“My God,” she breathed, “I feel … oh, I can’t even say how I feel … certainly not like mean, horrid old me. Oh, Sasha, do I ever have to take it off?”

“Eventually, I’m afraid.”

“I’m going to read the card again, myself,” Sally said, striking a regal pose. “Listen, all of you.

“She came from an ancient British family and she was christened Mary-Jane Georgina Charlotte Alberta but she insisted on being called Georgie. Her parents brought her up strictly, because she was so frighteningly beautiful … but her riding teacher and her piano professor fought a duel over
her before she was fifteen. The Aga Khan gave her winning tips on long shots for the Thousand Guineas at Newmarket, the heir to a dukedom offered her his heart, his hand and his coronet, a great banker gave her a rope of pink pearls that had taken ten years to collect. But Georgie cared nothing for money or jewels or rich and titled men—she wanted true love and she found it at seventeen with the most charming man in London … a violinist at the Café de Paris. Her poor parents never recovered! She lost true love at eighteen and found it again at nineteen. In fact, Georgie found true love more than thirty times in her life, and each time was more blissfully unexpected than the last. In Venice she found it with a gondolier, in Argentina with a professional tango dancer, in Granada with a gypsy, in New York with a welterweight and in Hollywood with a screenwriter. (Even Georgie’s greatest admirers had trouble understanding that!) Fortunately, Georgie could afford any amount of true love for she had invented and patented mascara when she was eighteen and a half, during a few idle weeks between the jockey and the police inspector. Every afternoon, cozily wrapped in her favorite tea gown, Georgie spent a long hour over tea and tiny sandwiches. The tea tray was brought to her bedroom by the butler. Did anyone ever notice how often Georgie changed her butlers? Or how young and handsome they all were? When a woman performs a public service like inventing mascara, she is entitled to satisfy
all
her fancies. That’s what Georgie thought, and that’s what Georgie did. And did and did. And the butlers did it too. Lucky Georgie!

“I’m going to cultivate Georgie’s attitude toward life,” Sally said, her voice fairly singing as she came to the end of the card. “She knew what was really important. Her butlers couldn’t complain either.”

“She could never have achieved all that with a name like Mary-Jane,” Dawn said thoughtfully, as she eyed the pink Pierrot-ruffled pajamas with longing. While Sally had been reading, Rosa had been lovingly clutching
a
hemstitched white crepe de chine petticoat and matching camisole, both decorated with bows of white satin ribbon, destined for Emily Gatherum.

“Oh, go on all of you and try everything on,” Sasha cried, exasperated at herself for having imagined that she could just show and tell while her friends were visibly aching to put on the lingerie. “Try everything on.
Carefully
. Just give me back the ruffled PJs—they’re too small for any of us.”

Sasha slipped into her own black lace camiknickers as the others were dressing, all of them deliberately holding back the quick movements of their experienced hands so that they could put on the unfamiliar lingerie with caution. They walked about, getting the feel of the garments, and soon they pranced, paraded and capered, admiring themselves and each other with delighted, flushed faces.

In front of the full-length mirrors, four women with glorious bodies; each felt that she had slipped through a little hole in the fabric of time and seen herself as she might have been in another, far more romantic and provocative life, each of them transformed by the aura of belonging within the circle of an endlessly repeatable moment. Gigi’s cards had given them the clues they needed to feel that each garment wasn’t merely an example of antique lingerie but a tangible connection to a piquant, attainable dream, sealed with a promise of timelessness, a dream in which they could so easily imagine themselves starring. They felt sensuously alert to another world, in a graceful and right relationship to an erotic sensitivity they hadn’t known before.

There was a knock on the door. “You ladies decent?” Mr. Jimmy called.

Rosa, Dawn and Sally froze and looked at Sasha in consternation, as if they’d been caught playing dress-up in the attic.

“Stop it, all of you,” Sasha scolded. “It’s still our lunch hour, and anyway, he’s such a darling, let’s give him a treat. Come on in, Mr. Jimmy,” she called. “We’re no less decent than we usually are.”

“In a half hour there’ll be some buyers from Higbee’s and.… what’s going on here?” Mr. Jimmy asked, looking around in amazement. He had never seen his girls with such dreamy, unbusinesslike, happy faces.

“I’m Nora,” Sasha said, stepping forward and kissing him on his forehead, “and tonight you and I have a late date—we’re going to dance and dance till dawn.”

“I’m Georgie,” Sally said, “and I have the feeling that you just may get the job as my new butler.”

“I’m Lola-Antoinette,” Rosa said, wearing Sasha’s white satin pajamas. “And I want to thank you for the emeralds … you really shouldn’t have … but since you did …” She too kissed him on his forehead.

“Hey, come on,” Mr. Jimmy grinned, “are you girls trying to put me out of business? Say, where’d you find these things anyway? I can almost remember.… well, never mind what I can almost remember, I couldn’t be that old.”

“My roommate, Gigi, collects antique lingerie,” Sasha explained. “She’s giving these as Christmas presents. I brought them in to show everybody.… oh, and the cards, you’ve got to read the cards and look at the sketches to understand the concept.” She handed him Nora’s card and he sat down and read it through.

“We may be dancing tonight, Nora, but I’m not shipping out tomorrow,” Mr. Jimmy said, laughing. “Let’s see your card, Sally.” He read it quickly and gave her the smile that had sold five million girdles. “The new butler, huh? Well, thanks for the thought, Georgie. I’ll have to take it up with my accountant.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Jimmy,” Sally cooed. “Georgie’s butlers didn’t stay long … as I see it, her only problem was she wore out her help.”

“Read mine,” Rosa and Dawn both clamored together, waving their cards.

“I wish I could, but I came in to tell you that we’ve got half a dozen buyers coming in who didn’t order enough for Christmas even though I warned them, so battle stations, girls, get ready to show the holiday line again. Hey, Sasha, do you think you could get me together with your friend? I’d like to know a little more about this—and you come too, of course.”

“I’ll work it out,” Sasha said, hearing a tone of interest in Mr. Jimmy’s benevolent voice that made the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

“Let’s do it as soon as we can. I gather that Nora and Georgie went in for immediate gratification, and so do I.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Have you done a lot of writing, Gigi?” Mr. Jimmy asked after he had finished ordering for the three of them in the northern Italian restaurant that he had suggested for dinner.

“No, nothing, not unless you count those cards. Sasha probably told you that I’m in the catering business.… I’m a food person, basically. I started to get interested in antique lingerie a few years ago, but until Sasha’s last birthday I’d never given anyone a piece of my collection—I thought that the white satin pajamas looked like something only Sasha deserved to have. She inspired my first card and my first little drawing.”

“That would be Lola-Antoinette, the lady to whom I generously gave the emeralds—the outfit Rosa was wearing?”

“And it looked just right on her, although we’re completely different types,” Sasha said.

“About how long does it take you to write a card like that?” Mr. Jimmy inquired curiously.

“It depends,” Gigi said. “Sometimes I get the idea right away and sometimes I have to think for a while, but once I get going, about half an hour, if it’s a long one.”

“You did at least six or seven in one afternoon just the other day,” Sasha reminded her. “Maybe more.”

“Christmas pressure,” Gigi said, shrugging modestly. She liked Mr. Jimmy just as much as Sasha had assured her she would. He had the most honest red face she’d ever seen, and an adorable fringe of white hair. He was about her height except that he probably weighed at least a hundred and fifty pounds more than she did. If he had on a red velvet suit he could go to work as the fattest, most cherubic Santa in the bell-ringing business in a second, Gigi thought, watching him drink his second martini. Even his nose had the right red lines in it.

“Gigi …” Mr. Jimmy turned to her abruptly. “This is a business dinner and polite people aren’t supposed to get to the business part until they’ve finished their main course, but to hell with that
—
I have a proposition to make to you.”

“About my antique lingerie?”

“Yes, but much more than that. If I’d seen your old things just sitting on a shelf somewhere, I wouldn’t have had this idea, but the way Sasha and the girls reacted to them and the cards you wrote came together in my head the other afternoon. I’ve been looking around for a way to increase our share of the lingerie market. Competition’s getting rougher all the time, everybody’s ads are getting better and better, but Herman Brothers, big as we are, hasn’t been particularly innovative lately. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and you got me thinking along new lines. What if I found a whole bunch of antique lingerie items that could be expertly reproduced to look like the real thing, sized them all the way up the range from four to fourteen, and created an entirely new collection, using advertising that would employ your cards as copy and your drawings as the illustrations? How does that strike you?”

“But … but … I don’t know anything about advertising,” Gigi gulped.

“I do, believe me, it’s not a sacred mystery. All you’d have to do is write the cards and do the drawings and—”

“Mr. Jimmy, hold on here. Gigi looks through hundreds of garments in dozens of little stores before she finds one that she buys,” Sasha interrupted. “She’s emotionally involved in them, they speak to her. She couldn’t write about lingerie she didn’t have a personal feeling for.”

“She wouldn’t have to. I’d send Gigi out in style with a couple of people to help her and she could find the lingerie herself, or I could send scouts out all over the country to buy exceptional pieces and Gigi could decide which ones she responded to. The collection would always be Gigi’s choice … she’s got the touch. I’d be the one to decide if her choices were too impractical to be reproduced at a price, but basically we’d get together on it and have a meeting of minds, and you, Sasha, could referee the whole process.”

“Wait a minute, Mr. Jimmy,” Gigi protested, “you keep talking about ‘reproducing’ them. The whole point to my lingerie is that everything’s unique, one of a kind, the real thing.”

“Well, they couldn’t be that, Gigi,” he said resolutely. “Not in a huge business like Herman Brothers. There’s no getting around the fact that they’d be reproductions, but look at it this way—they’d be the best reproductions you could ever hope to find, using only natural fibers, real silks, real laces and so on. If they didn’t look and feel like the real thing, they wouldn’t sell. I’m thinking about a very high-end and exclusive line of garments, for carefully selected stores. The reproductions wouldn’t have anything cheap about them, including their price, but we’d be spreading the romance of wearing a piece of almost-antique lingerie to thousands of women who couldn’t have it otherwise, because they don’t know where to find these items. In fact, they don’t even know they want them yet. But they will, they will!”

“Hmmm.” Gigi felt torn between his enthusiasm and her reluctance to broadcast something that had been her private, intimate pleasure, something she shared only with a few close friends in mind. “ ‘Almost-antique’—did you just invent that?”

“I must have,” he said proudly. “Not bad, is it?”

“But, excuse me, Mr. Jimmy, is it honest to call something brand-new an almost-antique?”

“Gigi, I think you’re being a little overscrupulous here,” Sasha broke in. “Nothing is legally antique until it’s over a hundred years old. Your lingerie is mostly about sixty years old, maximum eighty. You don’t call it ‘secondhand underwear,’ do you? But that’s what it is.” Couldn’t Gigi hear opportunity when it came knocking at the door? she thought, her mouth watering at the thought of a new line.

“Girls, girls, let’s not split hairs, we’re getting away from my idea,” Mr. Jimmy said expansively. “I couldn’t do it without Gigi’s choice of lingerie, without her words and drawings. I was thinking of starting small, a collection containing about thirty items. And if the buyers don’t go for it, which, frankly, would surprise me, there’s no risk, because I’ll be putting up all the money to get this thing off the ground.”