Spring Collection (17 page)

Justine crept a few feet into the bedroom, turning Rufus’ head firmly toward Aiden with one hand while she supported him with the other, afraid that if she let him go entirely, he’d grab at her with all his ten claws. Nothing happened. She advanced with even greater
care, waited a while and then subsided on the rug next to the bed. What was wrong with the animal, she wondered? Even
she
could smell Aiden from here, and he smelled wonderful, kind of like a warm, just-buttered corn muffin spread with honey. A sleeping man either smelled better than he did at any other time, or he was utterly out of the question. There was no possible medium or neutral way to smell in her experience. Unfortunately there was no way to tell ahead of time.

Minutes passed and Justine began to feel chilly in spite of the cat’s warm, happily pulsating body plastered all over her, his coat keeping her fairly warm. Maybe she should carry him back to the fireplace, put some logs on the fire and sleep on the sofa? Maybe she should look in Aiden’s closet for a robe or a coat and wrap herself in it? Rufus couldn’t stay awake forever—didn’t cats sleep fifteen hours a day? Maybe she should wake up Aiden and insist that he remove his cat? That would be the most direct course to take. But she’d already made one seriously wrong decision about a male animal tonight and she didn’t want to make another.

Just how wrong could it be? Aiden had been a perfect gentleman all evening long. He wouldn’t turn into a cad just because his feline had taken a fancy to her. What could you really tell about a man by his cat? Oh, oh, oh, she was so confused in this strange place! Now Rufus was trying to lick the inside of her ear. This was intolerable, Justine decided suddenly. She stood, leaned close to Aiden’s ear and said loudly, “Wake up.”

Rufus immediately jumped to the other side of the bed, curled up next to his owner and fell into a trance of sleep. Aiden’s eyes flew open; he reached out for her and pulled her down next to him, trapping her in his arms.

“I was just dreaming about you,” he murmured, and kissed her on the lips. “And now you’ve come to visit.”

“For heaven’s sake,” she said, “I just had to get rid of your damn cat.”

“Justine, you don’t need an excuse,” he laughed in joy, kissing her again. “My God, you’re shivering. Where’s your bathrobe? Here, slide under the covers. There, that’s better? Oh, my sweet beautiful darling baby, you’re so cold. Here, I’ll warm you up.”

“It was the cat! He came into my room, he tried to smother me, he made me give him milk, he wouldn’t let me throw him, he likes me better than he does you, he forced me to wake you up.”

“Of course he did,” Aiden said indulgently.

“Honestly!”

“This is better than the best Christmas morning. Oh, God, you taste good.”

“So do you. But it
was
the cat.”

“Silent be, it is the cat.”

“Well, at least you admit it,” Justine said between kisses. He was more delicious than caviar and there was no need for a spoon.

“Everything, anything, you’re so lovely, I adore you, are you warmer now?”

“A little bit,” she said plaintively.

“That’s not good enough, is it?”

“No.”

“You need to be very warm, all over.”

“I think so. Probably. It would be safer,” she said demurely.

“Oh, I’m certain of it. The thing is, you can’t really get warm with that awful slippery thing you’ve got on, whatever it is. It traps the cold air in, so you’d better take it off.”

“You take it off.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” she asked breathlessly.

“I promised I wouldn’t lay a finger on you.”

“You said that
yesterday.”

“Does that … make a difference?”

“Of course,” she whispered impatiently. He was torturing her and he knew it. Cat and mouse. Cat and man. Oh, heavens above!

“Would it be wrong if I said I loved you first?”

“It would be very nice,” Justine murmured primly as she slid out of her long Johns. There was a limit to what she could endure from this man and his cat and she’d reached it.

I
was still dancing when I woke up. It felt as if I’d never stopped, even though I was lying flat in bed. Had I danced away the whole day? I felt good! I felt well! I bounced out of bed, opened the curtains and discovered that it was bright day outside, with flags flashing up and down the Avenue Montaigne, sending the world a message to come out and spend lots of money. I looked at my watch. Just half-past one in the afternoon—seven and a half hours of solid dancing-sleep, preceded by violent exercise, and my jet lag had disappeared. All I wanted for breakfast was a half grapefruit and coffee. I’d discovered the Bains Douche diet! I definitely looked a couple of pounds lighter in the mirror. No wonder that place was mobbed.

I took a shower, washed and towel dried my hair and settled back in bed to enjoy that feeling of virtuously lazy, deeply-taken-care-of relaxation you can only get in a hotel with nothing pressing to do and nowhere special to go. Paris wasn’t going to disappear and I was certain the girls must still be sleeping. None of them had my dancer’s resilience, to say nothing of an iota of my style. Then, just as I settled into a glowing step-by-step review of my performance of the night before, the phone rang.

“Frankie?” It was Gabrielle. I tried to sound as if she’d just awakened me. She didn’t respond with appropriate apologies, but kept right on talking. “Marco
Lombardi has asked that you bring the girls over to his workrooms this afternoon.”

“What!” I exclaimed, going from sleepy to enraged in a nanosecond. “My girls have almost two weeks to work with him, and they just got here yesterday, as you know perfectly well.”

“Nonsense,” she snapped, and that woman has one hell of a snap. “My arrangements were made with Justine, but in the contract there was a written commitment that she would be here with the girls the whole time. Now that contract has been breached.”

“Did Necker tell you to call me? Did he say that?” I demanded, my outrage escalating. The phrase “breach of contract” will do that to me any time.

“He didn’t need to. I haven’t spoken to him today but you know perfectly well that you have a moral obligation to comply with this request, Frankie. Lombardi merely wants to get a feeling for their capabilities, it’s not a question of work. Simply put, Marco needs to know what level of performance he can hope for from them. After all they bear a heavy responsibility for the success of the collection.”

“Three girls out of thirty? Lombardi’s the one who’s responsible, not them.”

“Nevertheless,” Gabrielle persisted, “they’re completely inexperienced and he’s nervous about them. And, Frankie, don’t forget, one of them will work with him for years, but right now they’re total strangers.”

“Listen, Gabrielle, either it’s a breach of contract or he’s asking a favor, make up your mind. Justine isn’t here because she’s deathly ill, so sue me!”

“Morally—”

“Gabrielle, don’t give me morally. It won’t work. I’ll do my best for you because I’m a nice person. However, the girls are probably too wiped out to do anything but rest today. We’re all still jet-lagged.”

“They weren’t too exhausted to go dancing last night.”

I was speechless for a second. I hadn’t expected Albert, our gallant escort, who’d done his share of
dancing, to rat us out, but obviously he reported to a higher power.

“Everyone knows exercise is specifically recommended for jet lag, Gabrielle,” I said with tardy composure. “I’ll check out the girls and let you know in an hour.”

Jeez, I hate blackmail. But Gabrielle had a good point. If I were Marco Lombardi I’d be dying to see the girls. Sure, in theory, he had twenty-seven other models to show on, but in reality probably the only girls he was absolutely certain of were my three.

If Lombardi were established, he’d have a good idea of who he was using by now, especially if the girls liked him personally. If he were one of the major designers the girls would be fighting to do his show. But as an unknown, he must have been kept waiting with a bunch of secondary options for any of the most desirable girls. Why should a supermodel commit to him? Once they get to the head of the line, models love to give the designers as little as they can get away with, say a low-option secondary. Oh, show me a supermodel—a word I loathe but can’t find an absolutely accurate substitute for—without major attitude! Sure they’re hardworking professionals, but they’ve been idolized into taking themselves too seriously, these Michael Jordans and Charles Barkleys of the fashion world.

When we book our top girls for shows, the trick is to get them to convert a low-option second—the first step on the road—into a high-option second and eventually, if they’re having a good-attitude day, talk them into agreeing to a tentative. When they finally decide to turn a tentative into a commitment, sometimes only three days before the show, it’s the model’s equivalent of a shotgun marriage.

If I were a designer I’d show on plaster dummies—or wire hangers—rather than go through that hassle. I’d had enough years of being in the middle. Just thinking about the nimbus of last-minute hysteria generated by spoiled ding-bat, media-darling divas, to say nothing of coping with their horrendous boyfriends, made me disgusted
enough to decide to haul every one of my girls over to Lombardi.

One day, soon enough, they’d turn out to be as difficult to pin down as your cellular phone-toting Brandis, your Shaloms, your Ambers and your Carlas, but today, by golly, I still had control over them. Justine and I often agreed that it was no wonder that poltergeists, when investigated, turned out to be generated unconsciously by teenaged girls.

I called their rooms and told them to be ready to go in an hour. I phoned the concierge and checked on Mike Aaron and Maude Callender, who had every right to witness this. They were having lunch downstairs at the Relais Plaza, the Parisian equivalent of Harry’s Bar in Venice, and I alerted them to the news. I tried to reach Justine at the office to keep her abreast of developments, but mysteriously nobody answered the phone and I didn’t have time to worry about it.

Actually, once I told April, Jordan and Tinker why I’d awakened them I couldn’t have kept them from going. They were dying to see the clothes, but more important, although they didn’t say so, they each wanted to impress Lombardi. He, the designer, might well be the one who was going to pick the girl to represent his clothes, rather than Necker.

Not for the first time I wished that Justine had been able to find out how this game was being played, but Gabrielle had resisted giving us any details. All we knew was that one of the girls would be chosen to win the jackpot, but by whom we had no idea. It occurred to me, while I was tucking myself tenderly into a sublime dark green wool suit that made me look almost sinuous and decidedly omnipotent, that even if I knew the answer there was no way the knowledge could benefit me, since I was rooting for all of them equally.

Two limos were waiting for our party of six, neither driven by that fink, Albert, who had undoubtedly been promoted a day off after his exertions of last night. The trip to Lombardi’s atelier was less than a
block, but it said limos in our contracts and limos we had, although it would have been quicker to walk.

Gabrielle met us in the small lobby and I followed her upstairs, followed by Mike and Maude and finally the girls, with Jordan lagging behind. Another superb performance like last night’s, I wondered? Who taught her that a star will always choose to come on last? Forget “taught”—she’d probably been born knowing. As we filed upstairs I wondered how Lombardi would present himself. I’d seen a snapshot of him in a group in a fashion magazine but it had been taken years earlier. The faces of the assistants to great designers are unknown by and large, since no designer wants to promote anyone but himself, or even, in most cases, is unwilling to admit that assistants exist.

Would Marco Lombardi have adopted the severe, immaculate white smock so favored by many designers, giving them a look that made for a strange combination of Dr. Frankenstein disguised as a Rockwell Kent druggist? Would he do your Calvin Klein-Giorgio Armani plain white T-shirt with a dark jacket number—I think they look like trustees at Devil’s Island—or would he be the exquisitely tailored, suave, gracious grand seigneur like Oscar de la Renta? I hadn’t expected anyone like the man who came rushing down the stairs to meet us.

First of all, the guy was gorgeous. We all—even those of us who haven’t the luck to be Italian—know about Italian men, right? When they’re Renaissance Florentine darkly gorgeous, like Marco Lombardi, there’s nothing more so, unless you insist on Robert Redford in his Navy officer’s uniform, drunk at the Stork Club, sitting on that bar stool in
The Way We Were
—and that, film fans, is a whole other breed of cat to say nothing of ethnic background. Lombardi looked younger than I’d expected, he moved with a dancer’s ease and precision and his beauty was unfair, the kind that any decent, thoughtful woman like me feels is wasted on a man. He was wearing clean, faded unremarkable jeans, an old pink Brooks Brothers shirt, with the top three buttons open, bright red socks and the
most beautifully polished, elegant pair of brown loafers I’d ever seen. The total effect combined the Ivy League with early Gene Kelly and vintage Fred Astaire. He was a dandy, a man who played games with his own clothes. What disarming disguise, I wondered, did he put on when he wasn’t expecting a bunch of Americans? Gay, I thought, but why should I have expected anything different?

In the confusion created by Gabrielle attempting to introduce us in the proper French way and Marco Lombardi introducing himself in a highly excited and enthusiastic Italian way, enough confusion and giggles were generated so that what might have been an intimidating moment happened so quickly and easily that I could feel my girls relaxing in his warmth. Gay, I knew with sudden conviction, was the opposite of whatever this man was.

The girls were dazzled by his charm and warmth. He thought that they were all ravishing, exquisite, that much was absolutely conveyed by his eyes and his hands and his smile. He adored them. They were the most welcome sight he’d seen in years. “Such beautiful girls, three perfections,” he crooned in the sort of full-bodied, old-country Italian accent I hadn’t heard from anyone but an ancient storekeeper who used to sell fruit to my mother. Even though Marco had just met the girls there was a teasing, affectionately naughty, harmless little boy way in which he related to them.