Lace (17 page)

It made her feel a bit more French and a bit more grown-up. After all, she was now seventeen years old and she had been in Paris for two whole days. She was completely fascinated by the city, by
the superb chestnut-lined boulevards, the glittering boutiques, the elegant, scented women, the wonderful mouth-watering restaurants and the cheerfully noisy apartment of Maxine’s family,
where Judy was staying for a week or two until she found a job and a place to live. She wasn’t going to think about that yet; today she was going to pretend that she was able to lead the
carefree, protected existence that Maxine, Pagan and Kate were able to lead.
One
day, Judy promised herself, she would live like that
always
, not just for a few days.

“Now for the Latin Quarter,” Maxine said. They hurried down the streets, still snow-covered in February, and clattered under the wrought-iron art nouveau lilies of the valley that
decorated the entrance arch of the metro at Palais Royal. They plunged down the steps and past the fat old flower seller huddled on a stool, a gray shawl around her head. A blast of welcome heat
carried upward the fragrance of Gaulois cigarettes, yellowing newspapers, bad drains and garlic.

“We’re late. I told Guy we’d meet him at twelve,” Marine worried, as they emerged into daylight at the end of their journey. “Not that he’s likely to be on
time, especially not for
me.
Ever since we were children he’s been conscious of the fact that he’s three years older than me. We only saw a lot of each other because our mothers
were close friends at school, so he had to put up with me.”

She hurried along the Boulevard St. Germain, tugging Judy with one scarlet glove; the American girl dawdled to peer down the winding streets that branched off the main boulevard.

“What sort of clothes does Guy make?” Judy asked.

“Mostly suits and blouses, with a few light coats.”

“Does he sew them himself?”

“No, no, he has a cutter and a seamstress. They work in one room and he sleeps in the room next to it. He’ll soon have to look for an
atelier,
but they’re unbelievably
scarce if you have no key money—and Guy hasn’t.”

“Then how does he pay the seamstress and the cutter?” asked Judy.

“His Papa refused to help him because he said that fashion was an occupation for
pédérastes
, so Guy got money from a few private clients. At the start he went to my
mother and offered to dress her in four outfits a year for a modest annual advance payment. She accepted and sent him to her friends and
they
all signed up, even my Aunt Hortense.”

Judy was still bewildered by the thought of Maxine’s Aunt Hortense, who was unlike any aunt she’d ever met—or any other adult, come to that. The previous evening
Aunt Hortense had taken them to dine at Madame de George, an elegant meal that had transported Judy from Rossville forever, as she ate quails’ eggs, artichokes, guinea fowl and a dessert that
tasted like frozen brandy. After the sumptuous meal, the lights were lowered and the floor show began, with a
frou-frou
of pink ostrich plumes covering—just—the pudenda of a line
of unusually beautiful showgirls, all tall, elegant, slim-hipped and high-breasted. Suddenly, Judy noticed their wide shoulders, biceps and muscular forearms. Her mouth fell open. She
couldn’t believe her eyes. She pinched Maxine and said, “Are those . . . er . . . girls . . . er . . .
men
?”

“Yes,” Maxine giggled.

“I’m amazed that your aunt would bring us to such a place.”

“She wanted you to see something
oo la la!
” Maxine laughed. “And this is the least naughty of the naughty Paris nightspots. Aunt Hortense likes to
épater les
bourgeois
—she can’t stand pompous people and she likes to shock the smug.”

“I’ll never understand you Europeans.”

“Aha, but
we
understand
you
, we know what shocks you,” said Aunt Hortense. Her voice reminded Judy of gently drifting snow, raindrops splashing on an old stone
fountain, the well-bred chink of china and weathered leather riding boots. Judy sensed that Aunt Hortense, while raising hell, would never raise her voice. She had a large, craggy face with a huge
thrusting nose above a wide mouth drawn back in a permanent, deceptive smile, and her eyelids were painted emerald to match her emerald satin cocktail hat. She was tall, imperious and forbidding
until she fixed you with her oddly enchanting wide smile.

Hurrying through the snowy streets, eventually the two girls reached the steam-misted glass walls of the café Deux Magots, where they sat down at the only empty table and ordered hot
lemon punch.

“
Merde
, I mean ferk, no one I recognise,” wailed Maxine. “It’s different in the evening. I once saw Simone de Beauvoir having a row with Jean-Paul Sartre. And I
once saw Juliette Greco. She always wears a black sweater and pants—an odd wardrobe don’t you think?”

“Saves making a decision in the morning,” said a small, wiry blond boy wearing a black sweater and pants. He sat down in the empty seat beside her. He looked like an unmasked cat
burglar—small with a slightly hooked Roman nose, a wide sensual mouth and a shock of hemp-coloured hair. “Heavens, the difference. . . . Your face, Maxine. . . . I would only recognise
you from the rear. And you’re so svelte that I could use you as a model.” He unwound the long black scarf from his neck and ordered three
croque-monsieur
, the fried ham and
cheese sandwich that is the staple diet of French students.

“What’s been happening to you?” Maxine inquired.

“I’ve been living here on the Left Bank in the Hotel de Londres for over a year, being a master couturier, but nobody seems to have noticed.”

“How did you become a master couturier?” Judy asked, plunging right in. “How did you get out of your
service militaire
?”

“I had TB when I was fourteen so the army didn’t want me. Papa was furious, of course, but Mother was enchanted when I joined Jacques Fath because I no longer insisted on making
dresses for
her.
She said it was so tedious being fitted by me—I stuck pins in her!” He giggled.

“
How
did you suddenly jump out of school and into the studio of a world-famous couturier?” Judy asked.

“Frankly, I got the job with Jacques Fath because my mother knew the head
vendeuse.
When I wasn’t picking up pins, I spent every spare moment sketching the Fath clothes. As
publicly as possible, you understand—I can draw wonderfully.” He blew a straw at Maxine.

“When my first year was up at Fath, they took me on as a studio sketch artist, and when my second year was up, I was promoted to designer’s assistant. Not assistant to Fath himself,
you understand, but to one of his menials.” He poured wine for all of them. “My job was to translate Fath’s sketches for the workrooms, then sort out the decisions until the
toile
was made, then look after every zipper and button until the garment was ready for the first model fitting. Naturally, we never had anything to do with the clients—the
vendeuses
dealt with them. . . . Maxine, you shouldn’t eat
croque-monsieur
at such a rate if you want to keep this amazing new shape.”

“But how did you learn to make clothes?” Judy persisted. She wanted to know everything.

“Oh, I don’t know, I just
did
it.” Guy shrugged his shoulders.

In spite of his careless pose as a newly hatched genius, the real secret of Guy Saint Simon’s success—apart from his talent—was the obsessive interest in fashion that had led
him to spend every spare moment with the Jacques Fath tailors and cutters, learning to cut with the skill that had evolved over generations and had been passed on—only by example—from
man to man (the tailors were always men, the women worked as dressmakers).

“But you
can’t
‘just start,’” objected Judy.

“Well, I made some
proper
suits for my mother and she wore them. I thought she was doing it just to please me, but then all her friends wanted to buy the same suits.
So—
voilà!
—I was in business! Now tell me what
you
intend to do with yourselves.”

“I want to be an interior decorator and study in London,” Maxine said, “but I don’t dare tell Papa yet so I’m going to try and get Aunt Hortense to intercede for
me.”

“And I’m going to get a job here in Paris as an interpreter,” Judy added, sounding far more sure of herself than she was. She knew that the job competition in Paris was almost
as fierce as the traffic, and that French working hours were long and poorly paid.

“Then she’s going back to New York,” said Maxine gaily, “to get a job in some glamorous international company where she can use her languages and eventually, of course,
marry the boss!”

“Can we see your clothes, Guy?” Judy asked, wanting to change the conversation.

“But of course. You might both marry appalling old millionaires and become my best clients. But not today; I have to see my button-maker in ten minutes. Meet me after work tomorrow, six
o’clock at the Hotel de Londres. I’ll take you to dinner at the Beaux Arts afterward, because it’s St. Valentine’s Day tomorrow and all the students will be having a
terrific party. . . . What’s wrong? . . . Why are you both looking so odd? . . . Have I said something to upset you?”

“No, no,” said Maxine hastily, “it’s just that we had a bit of trouble at school last year on St. Valentine’s Day. We . . . er . . . got back from a dance later
than we should have done.”

“Well, you won’t be bothered by such childish things anymore,” said Guy, waving for the bill and not noticing the girls’ uneasy silence.

Outside, a weak winter sun was shining, the wind had dropped and it wasn’t nearly so cold. The two girls drifted along the cobbled
quais
, by the stone parapets of the Seine, past
the secondhand book carts and the dark green stalls.

“Does Guy like girls?” asked Judy as they walked over the Pont Royal. There had been something about the way he moved his hands.

“I don’t know. Perhaps not, I’ve no idea. Either way, you mustn’t fall for him, you know. I want to leave you with someone to look after you, someone to take the place of
Nick—a brother, not a lover, for the moment. I don’t want you to feel alone in Paris.”

“Can’t I have both?”

“But of course, you won’t be able to avoid it in Paris. Just wait until the spring when the chestnut trees are flowering. Look, there are already some snowdrops here in the Jardin
des Tuileries.”

The girls hurried through the gardens, then turned left toward the Avenue Montaigne, becoming increasingly excited as they neared number 32, the salon of the greatest couturier in the world,
Christian Dior.

A cloud of perfume enveloped them as they entered the pampered warmth. Aunt Hortense, whom they were to meet, was nowhere to be seen so they wandered around the boutique, fingering exquisite
silk blouses in sugar-almond colours, eyeing the unbelievably fragile lingerie and stroking the suede gloves.

To Judy’s relief she was ignored; but the
vendeuses
fluttered around Maxine, who was wearing her navy Dior overcoat, so she daringly decided to try on a couple of things. She put on
a floor-length jackal coat, watched by an indulgent saleswoman who knew that this child had no intention of buying, but that nevertheless somebody had bought her clothes from Dior. Then she slipped
on a white cotton nightgown trimmed with narrow green satin ribbon that cost the equivalent of her allowance for three months. She had just discarded it and purchased a pale blue lace garter
belt—three weeks’ allowance but worth it—when Aunt Hortense swept in and they went off to claim their reserved seats from the big antique reception desk.

Had Aunt Hortense not been a regular customer, the elegant receptionist would have courteously asked her name, address and telephone number, then written them in the big leather visitors’
book; she would also have asked who suggested they visit the house of Dior. This procedure helped to sort out the spies and time-wasters from the genuine customers. Commercial spies rarely tried to
get in after the opening of a collection because they had all the information they needed by the third day of the show, but smartly dressed women (sometimes genuine customers like cosmetic tycoon
Helena Rubinstein) often visited the collection with a less well-dressed “friend,” who was really a dressmaker—and whose second-rate shoes, bag and gloves invariably proclaimed
the fact.

“So comfortable here,” said Aunt Hortense, as they were seated in the pale gray salon in the front row of delicate gilt chairs, “although I have never understood why men think
women enjoy shopping. It is a painful ordeal that has to be endured in order to acquire new clothes. The pain comes in two parts—choosing the right garment, then making sure that it fits. . .
. Oh, the arguments I’ve had with fitters! So I come to Christian Dior because I
dislike
shopping. One isn’t demoralized at a couturier, as one is in a shop where they urge you
to try on clothes that make you feel fat, awkward and ugly.”

“Or complain that you’re not a stock size, in a way that makes you feel like a freak,” agreed Judy.

“Or intimidate you, so that you end up buying something expensive merely because you don’t look as dreadful in it as the other things you tried on,” Maxine added.

“Quite so. It’s easier to go to Dior. You pay more, but you never waste your money and you always look your best. Ha, here comes the first model!”

The audience concentrated keenly, like buyers at a horse auction, as each haughty, elegant model appeared, held a pose and then drifted back through the gray velvet curtains.

“How can that girl
possibly
have such a tiny waist?” Judy wondered, as a raven-haired model appeared in a pale gray flannel coat cinched with a wide silver-gray calf belt.
“Where does her food go?”

“If you remove the belt,” Aunt Hortense murmured, “you’d find that there was no flannel underneath, only silk taffeta joining the top to the skirt. That’s why her
waist looks so tiny. But she shouldn’t carry her furs so carefully. Pierre Balmain says that the trick to wearing mink is to look as though you’re wearing a cloth coat, and the trick to
wearing a cloth coat is to treat it as if it were as precious as mink.”