Gibbon's Decline and Fall (13 page)

A
CHILL SPRING MORNING IN
New York, with the bag ladies gathering, one from here, two from there, lines and files of them, making their way along the avenue, there dispersing into the invisibility the city grants, two here, three there, down a little alley, into a recessed entrance, a hobble of hags, a dilapidation of old dames, an assembly of anility, hanging around
.

One cluster, then another: click of heels on morning pavement, little hammers gently tapping; a soft laugh
.

Emily. Jennie. Have you met our guide?

The one being introduced has tender eyes, a gently curved mouth, hair and body hidden under shapeless garments, like the rest of them, anonymous, and yet, oh, the power that flows from her. So much. So sweet. Like wine, or a marvelous drug that has not yet been discovered. One like themselves, to all outward appearances, yet the inward self shows to anyone who looks
.

Well met, a murmur. Well come, and bless you
.

She is with them only briefly, before moving on elsewhere, leaving one woman whispering to another: Oh, Sarah, aren't we lucky, having a guide? Somehow I thought she'd be wearing armor. Like St. Joan, don't you know?

I imagine she wears what she chooses. Something she chooses carefully. Her own garb, always, for her own reasons. Not because of
fashion.

Laughter again, wry and accepting, as sets of heels go off tap-tapping
.

Where is it? The place?

Just down the street. There on the corner, where the red carpet is, and the awning. We're early. We won't all go in at once
.

Why did we pick this one?

It was on TV, on the E channel. They do a show on the latest in fashions. We voted on this one as the worst
.

I'm glad it's not far. These shoes! And this girdle! Are they really necessary?

Some asperity: We're the mission leaders, and we'll seem more in character wearing them. We're supposed to be respectable small-town buyers
.

A ladylike snort: I had a shower at the shelter to smell in character. How do you like my dress?

Salvation Army?

St. Vincent de Paul. But I thought not bad
.

Not bad at all. And the others?

All of them got cleaned up for the occasion. Edna shoplifted panty hose for her bunch. Rose's group went to the beauty college, for a makeover. They're waiting, see, in the alley there. And by the crosswalk. And in the coffee shop. And coming down the street on the other side
.

Aren't we elegant! So many! Must be thirty of us
.

Oh, there are lots more of us than that, hundreds and thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands for the final array.…

I've been wanting to ask …

So? Ask!

Will we die, then?

A long pause in which thoughts simmer, almost invisible, like heat waves rising from pavement
.

I don't know. She has never said. But, then, what else do we have to do with our lives? Ah?

So many of us
.

So many, yes. But this little affair won't take many. This is only a divertissement!

They wait. Soon the guide returns. They hear her voice whispering to them, an intimate sound, like the shush of their own blood
.

These are the words to remember: Even a great storm starts with a few drops, a spatter, a wet spot touching an age of dust, a mutter of thunder breaking a conspiracy of silence. So, hearing
this thunder, the world pricks up its ears; smelling this rain, the world widens its nostrils and scents a change in the wind
.

Already the first drops are falling. Already the thunder growls on the horizon. But we do not want them to forecast the storm—not yet. We want them to be preoccupied with other ideas, with amusements, with jests. We are here today to divert their attention from what's coming
.

So near the end, and they still don't know what's coming?

They still don't. No. So let us amuse them, let them look at us, let them laugh at us old ladies and what we do, let them mock us and point fingers and sneer; let them write columns about us for a little while longer, while the clouds gather
.

The voice falls silent. The women swirl and regroup, pass and repass, murmuring to one another:

There's the place. There's a guard out front. Do you have the invitations?

Here they are. Harriet got them. She joined the cleaning crew at the print shop. She got enough for all of us
.

Who's the man talking to the guard?

That's Rene Raoul. The designer himself. New Yorker magazine did a special on him. They call him the crown prince of fashion
.

Rene Raoul, née Robert Weiss, lets himself back through the bronze doors of Chez Raoul, recently identified by the cognoscenti as New York's most exciting new fashion house. His eyes sweep the foyer, all
très chic
, and the showroom, recently redone in ebony and magenta. His stable of models is already assembled in the dressing room with the handlers. The girlies are having their little egos massaged, their little hysterias calmed, their bony little bodies stroked, their foxy little faces made up. Though it will be almost an hour before the show starts, there are already a few buyers scattered around the room, yawning over the coffee and croissants he has furnished. One of them is Liz Porter, the fashion editor of
Fatale
. He stops to drop a kiss on her wrinkled cheek.

“Dear Liz,” he murmurs.

“Dear Bobby,” she murmurs in return with a wink. Not that she lets on. Bobby has been Rene Raoul for almost five years now, and his accent is good enough to fool most people. “How's Hank?”

“Hank, my dear, is in Barcelona, if you can believe that.”

“Chasing olive-skinned young bullfighters, no doubt.”

“He swears he's true to me,” this with a pout. “Though I'd imagine you're right. How's Esmee?”

“Her usual temperamental self. Quieter than usual lately, to tell the truth. She thinks she's getting old, but aren't we all? What do we have on the agenda today?”

He simpers in self-mockery. “Liz, sometimes I'm too naughty! This time I'm almost ashamed of myself. Boredom, I think. I'm showing some absolutely ridiculous outfits today. It's amazing what one can get women to wear!”

She gives him a warning look. “Not all women, love.”

“Well, no, of course, not all. Some women are just too smart for their own good.” He twinkles at her. “Still, most women aren't like you, love. There's one model back there who's been putting her little fingies down her froat for a whole week, just so she'll fit into the evening dress she's showing. It's ridiculous even in size four. Any bigger than that, one would look like Dumbo's mama. Now, who in hell's that?”

He is looking at the curtained arch where two elderly women are presenting their invitations. Liz glances at them without interest. “Buyers for small-town department stores, I should think. Someplace like Unfortunate Falls, Montana.”

He giggles. “I've got to get back. If I don't watch the babies, they'll sneak diet Cokes, and then they'll have to pee right when they should be changing.”

The room settles into virtual somnolence while the audience assembles. The coffee urns in the foyer do a steady business. The caterer's people restock the trays of croissants, get out more butter, more marmalade. More old women arrive, some quite well groomed, a few who look, so Liz thinks, as though they'd slept in an alley. The room becomes crowded.

Music finally, then gentle applause, and Raoul himself at the lectern, wearing horn-rims and a charming smile, still the wunderkind, the young man who had taken Seventh Avenue by storm.

“Ladies and gentlemen: Refer to your lists, please. The first garments in our ready-to-wear line are our Avenues of the World selections, based on ethnic themes. First, from Morocco …”

Liz looks and makes notes, now and then glancing around at the other watchers. The old women, those who look like small-town buyers, aren't taking notes. They are interested, no doubt about that. They seemed fixated on the models, but they aren't taking notes. Not on the chiffon harem trousers
with the studded leather short shorts beneath; not on the knit tank tops with the armholes cut deep to show the sequin bra; not on the minikimono with the gold-chain obi. Liz looks at her own list in surprise. All she's done herself is say no, no, no. She can't get a column out of that!

But, my God, no woman on the runway weighs more than ninety-five pounds dripping wet! Size four, size six, they look like children dressed up in Grandma's old Halloween costumes. Breastless. Androgynous. Sylphs. Not human women. Ordinarily, they can look marvelous wrapped in an old tablecloth, but even they look ridiculous in these clothes.

She rubs her forehead fretfully. Thinking about it calmly, she has to admit the collection isn't any worse than last year's, and last year she'd found things to comment on and approve of. Or even the year before! But this year … this year she can find nothing to … nothing to think of wearing. All she can think about is what Bobby said about the models “putting their little fingies down their froats.” The words evoke a faint nausea, which she seems unable to shake.

So what has changed? Not Raoul née Bobby. It has to be Liz herself. God, is she getting old? Esmee says Esmee is, but Liz? Liz the immortal?

There are murmurs. Rene looks up from his lectern, eyebrows raised, finding the audience restive. Doggedly, he goes back to the script: “And from Norway we have …”

Out comes the model, hair bleached white with sprayedon black stripes, cut in a ragged shag barely an inch long, stick-thin body dressed in a bulky orange-, white-, and black-figured Scandinavian sweater cut off at the level of her crotch, and beneath it, so far as Liz can see, a narrow ruffle of black chenille disclosing a gold-lamé string-bikini bottom, the costume set off by thigh-high shiny gold plastic boots with three-inch heels.

“Ah, fer crisake,” says an old voice in a tone of outrage
.

Raoul looks up again.

“Ladies,” one of the old women yells above the noise. “All right, ladies!” Her voice is mocking, edged
.

Women rise and began milling around. Shopping bags rustle. A solid phalanx of old dames is suddenly on the runway, moving purposefully toward the dressing room. Raoul stutters to a breathless silence. The lectern goes over with a crash. The microphone screams with feedback sound. Without even thinking about it, Liz
steps up onto her chair, then onto the runway, following the crowd, where the story is
.

The dressing room stinks of turpentine and is full of the sound of liquid sloshing Women are emptying cans and bottles all over the racks and the loose clothes lying about, over the boots and shoes standing ready. One of the old ladies opens the back door, onto the alley
.

“Out,” she says, and the other old women begin herding the models before them like sheep, like geese, seeming not to hear the treble honks and baas, the magpie curses. Then they are all outside in the alley, including Liz, while behind them the dressing room whooshes into flames and a high-heeled boot goes through the back window in a cataract of tinkling glass
.

Liz tries to get away, get to a phone, but the women won't let her go. She is trapped behind a solid phalanx of large, heavy bodies, most of them, Liz notices for the first time, wearing sneakers and planted like trees, roots way down, not moving an inch
.

The fire bursts upward, taking the roof. The old women break their phalanx. The models dart off in all directions, full of shrill complaint. Liz, suddenly released, runs for the street, for the phone, for the fire alarm as the last sneakered woman slips out of the alley and disappears onto the streets.

Liz finds Bobby-Raoul in the smoke-filled space outside the front door, screaming obscenities amid a small crowd of those who had been inside. No one missing. So far as Liz can tell, no one is injured, no one burned.

Raoul turns to her, grabs for her, tears of impotent rage on his face, and they stand on the sidewalk, clinging together while the store burns and Raoul yells and red engines howl themselves to a halt, and finally some official with a fireman's hat says it's definitely arson, as though they hadn't known that all along!

What does the sign on the sidewalk mean? the fireman asks.

That's when Liz first notices it, spray painted on the concrete:

 
STRENGTH AND HONOR ARE HER CLOTHING!

 “What does that mean?” the designer screams in her ear.

“I think … I think it's from the Bible,” she says. “Proverbs. Something like that.…”

Meantime, far down the streets, a soft shuffle of feet on the
sidewalk, sneakers and anklets, shopping carts retrieved from alleys, old hats sheltering old eyes, pushing off into the city as sirens go screaming by, one going this way, one that, a pair here and there, just bag ladies, out for the day, bothering no one
.

What's next? one asks another
.

The Scalawag shoe place. Tomorrow
.

Will she be with us again?

She's always with us. She always has been. We just forgot
.

William Carpenter arrived on the thirtieth floor of the Carpenter building, slightly mellowed by the two drinks he'd allowed himself while lunching with his tax man at the club, but not so detached that he didn't notice something not quite right with the office staff. Carpenter and Mason Advertising had something untoward going on.

“Afternoon, Mr. Carpenter,” said the receptionist, quickly glancing at the phone, as though commanding it to ring, which it promptly did. She answered it with an expression very much like relief. So. She'd wanted not to meet his eyes, not to talk to him, not to take part in their usual thirty-second flirtation, wanted him to get on by, out of her vicinity. Storm warning. Interesting.