The Crasher (18 page)

On the subway going home she began daydreaming again. This time she was in Arthur Elgort’s studio, one of
Vogue’s
most chosen photographers. “Adorable, wonderful, fantastic,” he screams. “You’re just the face Lancôme is looking for to
replace Rossellini.”

She climbed the stairs to the loft with nonstop applause in her ears, modestly following her “bride” down the runway, a particularly
innovative one in gunmetal satin with a bouquet made of pastel leather “roses.” Flowers deluge her as a headline flashes:
THE COUNCIL OF FASHION DESIGNERS ELECTS GINNY WALKER DESIGNER OF THE YEAR.

The reality of no fresh food in the fridge and no energy left to call for takeout extinguished her fantasy life as she unlocked
the door. Without taking off her raincoat she threw herself on the bed she’d shared so many times with Ricardo less than a
year ago. As soon as she was the real tenant she’d loan or sell the bed to Barbara at the showroom, who was moving to an unfurnished
studio. She’d buy herself a waterbed, supposed to be good for soothing exhausted bodies. She was exhausted all right.

She closed her eyes. The phone rang.

Six-thirty
P.M
. in New York. Half past midnight in Milan? She stared at the instrument, willing herself not to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Ginny! How’s my favorite designer? What are you wearing?
What did you design for that old thief Gosman today? Where are you going tonight?”

“Alex!”

As she heard her cousin’s voice, all tension and tiredness disappeared. “Alex!” she cried again. How she wished it wasn’t
just his voice in the room. How long had it been since his last call? Weeks and, like now, it had come at a particularly low,
depressing moment.

He’d been in Paris, she remembered, and hearing her flat tone, he’d flooded the wires with his unique brand of sunshine. “It
sounds as if it’s raining in New York. You’d better come to Paris,” he’d said, as if it was as easy as catching an uptown
bus. “I may be able to get you something with Givenchy. I hear he desperately needs a new première d’atelier flou… you know,
the key pair of hands in charge of fluid fabric, as opposed to the tailoring type. I’ll check it out, call you back and help
you get a ticket.” He hadn’t called back, not until now, and, of course, no ticket had materialized.

She was growing up; she hadn’t given Alex’s suggestion more than two seconds’ thought. She’d given up expecting miracles from
anyone, but especially from Alex. Nevertheless, there was still no one who could change her outlook on life so immediately.

Before she could reply to his rapid-fire questions, he asked another one. “What are you doing on Monday?”

“When is Monday?”

“The day after this Sunday, little donkey head.” His warm, wonderful chuckle came over the line so clearly, she bit her lip,
realizing how much she missed hearing it. “Are you busy?” he went on.

She was rarely busy, except at work, but ironically only yesterday she’d been asked for a date on Monday, when the wizard
of Oz had arrived in the showroom without an appointment.

“Just passing by… hear such great things about you,” he’d said, and then, like his most powerful lens, he’d looked her over.
She’d been half amused, half flattered that for whatever
reason he still had a thing for her. Later that afternoon, he’d called to say he was covering a fancy charity event on Monday
and would she like to join him at the press table?

She’d said no automatically, regretted it, thought about phoning to say she’d changed her mind, then in the frenzy surrounding
the changes to 854 had forgotten all about it until now.

“Well?” Alex’s impatience was loud and clear. “Well?” he said again. Aunt Lil had proudly told her mother he was so successful
now, he wasn’t prepared to wait for anything. “If he wants something, he wants it NOW.” What else was new? Alex had always
been like that.

“No, I’m not busy,” Ginny replied slowly. “Why? Where are you? D’you still want me to fly to Paris? To see Monsieur Givenchy?”
She laughed, but there was a tinge of sarcasm in her voice. Alex didn’t seem to notice.

“No, I’m in London, leaving tomorrow. I have to go to a black-tie charity ball in New York—for DIFFA, Design Industry Foundation
for AIDS. Not your usual old boiled-chicken-on-a-plate Plaza do. It’s downtown, but strictly A-list. I want to show you off
to the kind of chic, original women who’ll have their tongues hanging out when they see your clothes. Get busy with the old
needle and thread, Ginny, m’dear. You must really look fabulous. I’ll call you when I get in tomorrow.” Ginny stifled a giggle.
Was she still daydreaming or did Alex now have a distinctly British accent?

“Are you still there, old girl?”

Old girl? This was hilarious.

She couldn’t wait to see what Alex would be wearing to match his new hoity-toity vowels. Spats? Plus fours? A monocle? Nothing
would surprise her, but whatever he wore, he’d still outshine everyone.

For five minutes after she put the phone down, Ginny was ecstatic; then reality socked in. Was this one of the few promises
Alex was going to keep? Why should this call be different from any of the others?

Ginny flicked through her limited wardrobe. She didn’t have anything anywhere near resembling a ball gown, let alone a
fabulous one. She could devote her weekend to creating one, but would she really have an opportunity to wear it? A ball gown
was one article of clothing she didn’t need on her beat.

For the first time in months she thought about Poppy Gan. Poppy had never called her after their strange meeting at Mr. Chow’s
and she’d had much too much Ricardo on her mind to think about calling Poppy.

Somewhere a delicate shoot of ambition stirred, like a tender perennial bud breaking through after a hard, cold frost. Perhaps
Poppy Gan would be at the A-list DIFFA benefit. Perhaps not, but there would be other Poppy Gans there, perhaps even
Vogue’s
editor in chief, Anna Wintour, who was known to like downtown more than uptown.

As pessimism alternated with optimism about Alex keeping his word, Ginny forgot she’d ever been exhausted. She liked to nibble
during the early stages of a design, so she went to the fridge. There were only two shriveled oranges and a bottle of witch
hazel inside. It didn’t matter; her mind was turning so fast now, she didn’t have time to be hungry. She was remembering something
special, hanging with other Gosman relics in a storage cupboard at 554, near where the lugubrious sample pattern maker, Moses
Akkaroff, stood making muslin sample patterns all day long.

In minutes Ginny was in a cab on the way back to Seventh Avenue. Was it still there? The old Gosman copy of a Christian Dior
sheath in Halloween pumpkin-colored sateen? It had to be—and it was.

She tried the dress on, first the right way, then back to front, so its décolleté neckline swooped down her back, exposing
every vertebra, to hover just above the cleft in her buttocks, while the tiny buttoned-up back became the demure Victorian
front, giving no hint of what lurked behind. She started to work in earnest.

To hell with Alex. To hell with DIFFA. Whether she went to the ball or not, this was a fascinating project. She stayed up
working all night, having more fun than she could remember having in a long, long time.

Alex confirmed the date the next evening. He sounded jet-lagged and irritable. “What are you putting on your body?”

She described the dress, adding just to provoke him, “I went into Axman’s, the tony butcher’s shop around the corner, and—”

“What the hell for?”

“I asked if I could buy the huge cream-colored paper chrysanthemum hanging in their window, just above the baby lamb chops
in their little paper cuffs…” Ginny paused dramatically, imagining the look of disbelief on Alex’s face. “I thought I’d wear
it on my head at the ball. It’s exactly the right shade and—”

“Absolutely not,” Alex roared. “Not with me as your escort you don’t. Ostentation is O-U-T. I thought you knew that.”

“From brass to class?” asked Ginny innocently. She’d just read the phrase in
Women’s Wear Daily.

“Yes,” Alex replied grudgingly. “The word to aim for is—”

“Civilized,” they said together.

He allowed himself a short guffaw. “All right, Ginny. So we’re both reading the same trades now. So you know you don’t go
around looking like a lamb chop, or a spring chicken either.”

He was in a very different mood when he arrived to pick Ginny up. “Ravishing.” He appraised her thoroughly, front and back.
“Absolutely gorgeous, Gin, my dear. Now, I wonder what your mentor has brought you to wear instead of a paper flower. Shut
your eyes.”

He guided her to face the papier-mâché mirror over the fireplace (which Mr. Landlord from Dublin warned could never receive
a fire unless she wanted the place to burn down). Ginny felt Alex’s cool fingers on her neck. For a second they were Ricardo’s
fingers and a rush of sex blazed between her legs. It went as soon as she opened her eyes, gone with the sight of the astonishing
necklace, fitting like a collar, around the high neck of her Walker-Gosman-Dior triumph of a dress.

Diamonds, they looked like diamonds, but, of course, they couldn’t be.

“Oh, Alex, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful, but you shouldn’t have—they look incredibly ex—”

“On loan, Ginny, m’darling, so don’t get too attached to them. They’re on loan from Harry Winston. I want you to show them
off tonight; no one could do it better.”

He twirled her around and she felt radiant, ready for anything, as full of anticipation as, not so long ago, she’d felt all
the time. How wonderful it was to have Alex back; how beloved the necklace made her feel.

For a second Johnny thought Dolores had come to join him after all. Through the crowd he caught a glimpse of a tall, slender,
dark-haired girl, laughing up at a tall, handsome guy with English-looking sideburns.

As he moved toward her, he realized it was a hopeful figment of his imagination. This girl, in such a sweet, decorous, unlike-Dolores
dress, didn’t look like his wife at all; she didn’t even have any bosom to speak of.

He smirked when the girl turned her back to him. What a perfect dress to describe a woman… two-faced, misleading, totally
deceptive, because while the front was pure Miss Goody Two-shoes, pearl-buttoned to the neck, the back, so low-cut it only
just missed the crease in her behind, was straight out of a bordello.

Johnny yawned. He was tired, that was his main problem, tired because of too many restless nights after too many rows with
Dolores, tired of slammed doors, locked doors, empty apartments, let alone empty refrigerators. When and where was it going
to end?

Although nowadays he often turned up alone at events like this one tonight, he’d noted he was rarely asked, “Where’s your
wife? Where’s Dolores?” the way most people began a conversation when one half of a couple appeared without the other, particularly
a relatively newly wed couple. It disappointed him and, for some reason, tonight added to his depression.

How long had they been married? Not even eighteen months. He swallowed a sigh. There was no sign of Dolores
getting pregnant again, if—and it was an if that troubled him more and more these days—she ever had been pregnant that January
of ‘93, when he’d proposed and promised to help take care of her debts. She’d lost the baby because of all the stress, she’d
said, stress caused by people clamoring to be paid, not willing to be patient. He’d believed her then. Did he believe her
now? He didn’t know what he believed anymore.

He would feel guilty for the rest of his life that his mother had managed to wheedle out of him what a financial hole he was
in, trying to persuade him to delay the wedding. He would forever feel that in tying the knot, in some way he’d hastened her
death. Adding to his guilt had come the shock of learning she’d left him virtually everything, to make sure that with Dolores
on his back, he wouldn’t sink like a stone.

To his horror, he felt his eyes misting over. He missed his mother, much more than he ever dreamed he would. She’d been his
anchor, and from her letter, written to him just before she died, he knew now that for years he’d been hers.

“Like your column, Johnny… going to write about us tonight?” A stranger was grinning expectantly at him, as if they were
lifelong friends. Who “us” referred to, he didn’t know or care. He grinned back and moved on.

People he didn’t know were accosting him more and more these days, not in the awed, respectful way he’d seen strangers approach
his father, but as if they knew him and liked him because they read his column. He liked that. He liked that a lot, providing
they didn’t want to enter into a discussion about why they did or didn’t agree with his point of view.

Thank God, he liked his job, was crazy about it, in fact; although with his mother gone, it appeared he had no one to tell
who would be remotely interested.

So far
Next!
seemed to like him, too, although at the last lunch with Steiner, his boss, he’d implied he was looking for a big cover story
from him “one of these days.” Steiner and he both.

He hadn’t taken the bait, hadn’t even blinked an eyelid to give away the fact that at last he thought he might be on to
something. He was far too cautious even to admit it to himself. One step at a time… Rosa Brueckner style.

At least he could thank Dolores for Rosa, or Rosemary, to use the name she’d been christened with. Working on a story about
modern-day heroines for
Next!,
just for the hell of it, he’d persuaded Dolores, on one of the days they weren’t snarling at each other, to try Rosa’s old
number in California. To his amazement the number still worked and the next day she returned the call.

Dolores had reluctantly introduced “her husband” over the phone; he’d congratulated Rosa on the
Time
piece, said he wanted to include her in something he was working on for
Next!
and in February, when Rosa, now using her real name, Rosemary Abbott, had business that brought her to New York, they’d met.