Spring Collection (7 page)

She’d mourned Jimmy well and truly for six months and then started making the rounds that could be counted on to keep a widow in her position busy without having to pretend interest in a lot of boring committee meetings: the villa at Cap-Ferrat for two months in the summer, Venice for September, New York through the holidays, Saint-Moritz after Christmas; and, of course, a few days to rest up at the Texas ranch every now and then.

The essential constants of her life were the spring and fall couture collections in Paris, which was how she’d come across Marco Lombardi to begin with, Peaches thought wrathfully. If only she’d had the sense to stay home in Texas, never messing in the high life, never needing a constant infusion of new French clothes to keep her appropriately dressed, she wouldn’t have known that such a tantalizingly manipulative peckerhead existed. By now she’d be comfortably remarried to some nice guy, predictably ordering her clothes from the trunk shows at Neiman’s, and never knowing the difference between Seventh Avenue and the Avenue Montaigne.

Peaches was dedicated to maintaining her flamboyant allure. She could have gone for chic, and
achieved it by toning down her natural wide-screen looks, cutting the homecoming-queen hair that reached to her shoulders in blond abundance, reducing the wattage of her smile, and taming her natural inclination to buy truly rich-lady clothes.

Hell, you could always be chic if you took the right advice, but she’d be damned if she’d give up sexy before sixty—no, make that sixty-five—and chic and sexy had little to do with each other. Would Marco love her back if she were chic? Peaches shook her head severely at her wistful folly. Marco might love her back if she were twenty-five or even thirty, but otherwise she had to try to be content with what he gave her: the most glorious fucking she’d ever had and a lot of meaningless Italian handkissing. But, oh, Lord, when he bent that dark head over her hand, that incredible head with the curly hair worn deliberately too long, with eyelashes that were equally excessive, with those slightly pouting lips that were too perfectly cut for a man, with his warmly olive skin … 
damn him for not being gay!
If he were gay she could rumple his hair and tease him about his being too handsome for words and forget about him as soon as he left the room.

But no, Marco created an agonizing sexual tension in her that never disappeared except for a few minutes after they’d made love and when she was concentrating on her morning workout. No man had ever had the upper hand with her before, no man had ever made her beg for it. She’d spotted him running up the staircase at Dior over a year ago, and demanded that her vendeuse introduce them, something that apparently wasn’t done from the woman’s surprised expression. Impulsively, she’d invited him over for drinks that same night, knowing that the importance of her guests would be bound to make an impression on anyone, especially a mere assistant designer.

Marco had stayed only a half hour, displaying such quiet self-assurance that every woman in the room had called the next day, enviously trying to find out where on earth she’d found him. As he left he’d asked her if
she’d like to have a hamburger with him at Joe Allen’s some night soon.

And that was how it had started, Peaches thought, as she left the Nordic Track, her heart pounding as it was intended to, and started in on the free weights that were the last part of her two-hour-long exercise routine. He’d told her all about studying at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts and realizing, after a few years, that while his talents might lie in the pursuit of architectural history, he would be better served by his curiosity about the architecture of the human body. He had left the Academy and become an apprentice for the great couturier Roberto Capucci, a designer little known in the United States but considered a superb artist by museum curators in Europe and the Far East.

“Buildings have been constructed in a relatively limited number of basic ways for the single primordial purpose of housing human beings,” Marco had said seriously as he passed her an unwanted dessert brownie in the noisy room full of French Yuppies having an American experience. “Yet clothes, which are just as primordial, come in thousands of varieties. Why do we have so many different envelopes with which to surround the shoulders, the breasts, the waist, the hips, the legs, none of which changes basically over the ages?”

Peaches remembered clearly that she had been unable to form a remotely intelligent answer. Looking at him had blasted a short circuit in her brain cells and turned her into a creature of pure body who only wanted his cock. Years of training in being a Texas lady, years of keeping the most desirable men at the University of Texas in a state of staggering confusion and lust, had stopped her from making an overt move. Some old habits never die. It had taken Marco a whole week to stop toying with her in that deceptively respectful manner and give her what she needed so terribly.

Peaches Wilcox put down the two ten-pound free weights, afraid that she’d throw them through the window of the hotel in rage and kill someone walking
by on the Avenue Montaigne. Marco hadn’t returned her calls in five days. How
dared
he?

Why was he reaching for a cigarette he hadn’t had in his pocket for three years, Marco Lombardi asked himself irritably? He hadn’t really wanted one for a year. Why now, when his designs for the spring collection were all decided on, when the actual samples were being finished, did he feel a nervous straining itch to start sketching another replacement collection that would be more circus-like in its unwearable humor than Jean-Paul Gaultier, go further into the vulgarity of strip tease and bondage than Versace, be more pretentiously opulent than Lacroix, more absurdly avant-garde than Vivienne Westwood? In other words, a collection that would create such a shock, even a scandal, that the press would be forced to mention it?

Marco left his studio hurriedly, before he had time to entertain any more disturbing and unworthy thoughts. He was stopped by his secretary, a middle-aged Frenchwoman, stern of manner and plain of face, who looked up at him sharply.

“You should start returning these calls now, Monsieur Marco. I have a long list of people who should be called back before tomorrow. Madame Wilcox called again as well.”

“Tell me,
cara
Madame Elsa, what do you think is the worst thing that will happen to me if I don’t return those calls?” Marco asked in a voice that became a caress as he spoke.

“I … but you know how important they are,” she said, trying to sound as severe as possible. “And if you don’t answer them today, they will still be here tomorrow, along with many others.”

“Did you ever see
Gone With the Wind, cara
Madame Elsa?”

She looked at him warily. He was the least predictable man she’d ever been asked to work for. He’d tried to get her to call him by his first name, but she refused, finally letting him tease her into accepting a
compromise that retained some proper formality. But everyone knew that the Italians were children, you had to make allowances for them. Of course she was too clever not to understand that he counted on his looks, this man who was too excessively attractive for his own good, but she congratulated herself that she had refused to become one of his gasping worshipers like so many of the women who worked for him.

“Of course I saw it,” she admitted, thinking that he should be forced to get his hair cut, as she had been urging him to for months. A serious couturier shouldn’t look like a wild young art student sculpted by Michelangelo, racing around Paris in a tweed jacket, flannel trousers and a scarf flung around his neck.

“Then you remember the last line of the movie, that tomorrow will be another day, that she will worry tomorrow, something like that? You see, I’m just not in the mood for the telephone.” Marco gave his secretary a smile that told her that he wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone but her, a smile that invited her into his world. “I need to take a walk … I need to escape. Perhaps I am even a little nervous, no, Madame Elsa? Wouldn’t that be natural? Aren’t you a little nervous for me?”

She nodded, reluctantly. She’d worked in couture too long not to be nervous before any collection, but nevertheless, those phone calls.…

“But we mustn’t be nervous, must we, you and I?” Marco told her, leaning on her desk and looking at her intently. “Every designer in Paris gets nervous at the same time each season, why be like the others? Come, let’s change the subject, Madame Elsa,” he said, tapping lightly on her arm with an air of gentle command. “How pleasing I find your name. Do you realize that even with familiarity, it sings in my ear, it reverberates?… Elsa … yes, you are fortunate indeed, and so is your husband.”

“Thank you,” she said, suppressing a gratified smile. “As you know, it was my grandmother’s name.”

“Old world and gracious. Yes, it suits you. If
dresses were still given names, as they used to be, I would baptize my first dress ‘Elsa’ in your honor. Now, I leave you to hold back the barbarians as they pound on the gates.”

“But what if Monsieur Necker calls again?” she asked in alarm. “Or Madame Wilcox?”

“Ah, Madame Elsa, how can you ask? You, a woman of imagination as well as charm? Make up something … I count entirely on your tact. After all, even Monsieur Necker doesn’t expect me to be shut in here all day like a schoolboy when inspiration is everywhere. Tell Madame Wilcox nothing. I’ve disappeared, that’s all you know. A
domani, cara
Madame Elsa.”

Marco escaped his secretary, that superior, righteous and vigilant woman Necker had installed in his office to make sure that he was kept in order at all times. It had taken a few days of observation before he’d discovered her areas of weakness: her still youthful complexion, her well-shaped ears, her slender ankles and her first name. She’d never be of any use to Necker again, for now she took her orders only from him. He could bring a blush to her cheeks anytime he cared to.

Marco’s workrooms and studio were installed in a building on the Rue Clément-Marot, around the corner from GN’s headquarters. As he headed for the street, he suddenly remembered a dress that he had ripped apart yesterday after seeing it on his fitting model. He ran up a flight of stairs to the atelier in which the dress was being resewn by his most experienced hand, the redoubtable Madame Ginette, who had worked at Lanvin before World War II and after the war at Dior, until she’d been lured away to Saint-Laurent. Now, a decade and a half after her well-earned retirement, Necker had persuaded her to come back to work for this particular collection. Marco found her bending over a seam and he took her shoulders gently in his hands as she paused to look up at him, putting down the work.

“So,
ma toute belle
, do we make progress?”

“You know as well as I do that working these layers of chiffon on the bias is slow work,” she
answered, wearily, taking off her glasses with a sigh. “I’m exhausted.”

“You don’t want me to look at the miracle you have wrought?” He ran his finger up her chin and tugged lightly at her ear.

“All you want is to see if I can save this dress,” she grumbled. “When you took it apart yesterday, you might have been more careful, you tore a seam in several places.”

“You’re absolutely right. If I’d given it to you from the beginning it would never have happened. But the seams are a disgrace, admit it,
chérie
. Half of these young girls don’t know their craft. I’m afraid I lost my temper.”

“You’re a wild, crazy Italian,” she reprimanded him, crooningly. “Monsieur Dior would never lose his temper, like a lamb he was, poor man.”

“And Monsieur Saint-Laurent?” he asked, taking her worn hand and inspecting her fingertips.

“Never a cross word. A true gentleman.” And even when Saint-Laurent had been young and the toast of Paris, even when she’d still been susceptible to charm, he’d never been able to sweet talk her like Monsieur Marco, she thought. Oh, these Italians, they should be barred from entering France at the borders. They were irresistible with their eyes, their smiles. Particularly this one.

“You have beautiful hands, Madame Ginette,” Marco said reflectively. “They show why your work is perfect.”

“They are just hands,” she said, flurried. “An old woman’s hands,” she added, trying to draw away. He held them firmly.

“No, you don’t realize—when you’ve worked with beauty, year after year, the hand reveals it.” He released her hands slowly, touching each fingertip in turn, and brushing it with a light kiss. “Now, may I see that seam?
Bravissimo!
Exactly what I’d hoped for—you’ve rescued it. This dress will be the hit of the collection.”

She straightened up with melting pride and smiled at him shyly.

He made her feel young again, bless him. But to rip a seam! Ah well, he was full of passion, this Italian, but he needed a haircut.

“For certain! Those were the days. Until tomorrow,
ma toute belle
, I count on you.”

As he took the staircase down, Marco thought that it would be at least a week before Ginette started threatening to leave again, speaking of her fatigue and her advanced age. Perhaps two weeks, if he was lucky, because he needed her skills. When it came time to fit the samples on the models that tiresome old hag would be invaluable.

He should have taken his coat, he realized as he walked a few blocks. It was so sunny that he had been fooled into thinking it might, just for once, be warm in this city, but no, it was a true Paris cold, mean and damp under the deceptive sunlight. He turned into a little Italian restaurant where he sat at the empty bar and ordered a double espresso.

Oh Christ, he needed a rest! A change! And a rest or a change were the last things he could hope for in these next few weeks before the day on which his dreams either became true or he was shown up to the fashion press as a failure. Shown up before every important journalist and buyer from all over the world, shown up before CNN, shown up before
Vogue
and
Zing
and
Bazaar
, before the
New York Times
and
Le Figaro
and eventually before the smallest newspaper in the tiniest provincial town sleeping deep in the countryside of
la France Profonde
.