The Smart One and the Pretty One (19 page)

She gave an uncomfortable laugh. “I don’t know. It’s not really my kind of thing.” It was a very revealing dress and looked like it would cling embarrassingly. Not her kind of thing at all.

“I assume this is?” He gestured at her current outfit.

“More or less,” she said stiffly. As usual, she had dressed to look respectable in something she had ordered online at a price that was reasonable in colors that were serviceable and a cut that was unobjectionable. Today it was a light blue woman’s oxford shirt over a black linen skirt that was, Ava realized as she now glanced down at herself, noticeably wrinkled after the day’s wear.
They don’t show you
that
in the catalogue
, she thought with a slightly tipsy sense of self-righteous indignation.

Russell studied her for a moment. “You could do better.”

She felt herself flush. “Thanks.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that or that,” he said, indicating the skirt and top in turn. “There’s just nothing
right
about them.”

“You sound like Lauren. She’s always telling me I should be more fashionable.”

“Why aren’t you? More fashionable?”

“I don’t know. I don’t see the point, I guess. It feels like a waste of time to me.”

“You prepare for meetings, right?” Russell said. “Write yourself some notes, read through the materials, think of the arguments you’re going to make ahead of time?”

“Of course.”

“So why not prepare
yourself
in the same way? Put a little effort in ahead of time, so all day long you feel confident and prepared and ready to impress people?”

“I’m not going out in rags,” she said. “You make it sound like I’m running around town looking like Pigpen or something.” She gestured toward herself. “This isn’t scaring people off.”

“Of course not,” he said. “You look fine. Acceptable. It’s just that you’re young and pretty and you have a great figure and—”

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“I don’t know.” She wriggled irritably. “This conversation is annoying me. Can we just go see the movie?”

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“I want to show you something.”

“What?”

“It’s a surprise. Come on.” He turned around and headed back, not toward the escalator anymore, but across the mall.

Ava had to move quickly to keep up with him. She said, “The last time someone surprised me was when Lauren brought me to that restaurant to have dinner with you and your friends.”

“That didn’t turn out so badly, did it?”

She was tempted to tell him how miserable she had been all evening but refrained. “I just don’t like surprises.”

“You are the least girly girl I’ve ever met,” Russell said, still walking briskly, forcing her to match his pace. “You don’t like surprises, you don’t like being fashionable, you don’t like compliments, you don’t like to talk about yourself—”

“Well, it all evens out,” she said, slightly crossly. “You’re the girliest man I ever met. You like all those things.”

“You know,” Russell said, pulling her onto another escalator with him, one that was going down into the parking level, “some men would be insulted by that.”

“But not you?”

“I’m going to change your tone,” he said. “Just you wait. You’re going to thank me when the evening is over, Nickerson.” They got off the escalator and he took her by the hand and led her to his car. Ava hadn’t held hands with a guy in over a year and liked the feel of his fingers, which were warm and dry—but from the absent way he was steering her, she suspected the hand-holding was a practical rather than romantic gesture.

“Are you okay to drive?” she asked as they got settled in his car.

“We’re not going far,” he said, which didn’t exactly answer her question.

But they made it safely out of the garage onto Constellation Boulevard and then down to Olympic, which they took into Beverly Hills. A few blocks up, Russell drove down into another parking garage, one where he had to punch a code into a keypad to open the gate. The garage was empty except for a couple of cars and a security guard sitting near the elevator who narrowed his eyes suspiciously at them until Russell flashed him the ID in his wallet. Then the security guard got up and stuck a key into the elevator button plate, and the elevator door opened. He gestured them inside.

“Wow,” Ava said when they were in the elevator. “High-level security.”

“Well, it’s ten o’clock at night,” Russell said. “Not exactly prime office hours.”

“So this is where you work?”

“Yep.” He punched the button for the seventh floor.

“You’re not on the top floor?” Ava said. “I would have expected the managing director to get the best view.”

“My office
is
on the top floor,” Russell said calmly. “We’re not going to my office.”

“So where are we going?”

“You don’t understand the concept of being surprised, do you?”

“I understand it conceptually,” she said. “I just don’t see the appeal.”

“Get out,” he said, shoving her gently as the elevator doors opened.

They emerged into a small foyer. There was one door in front of them. Russell pulled a set of keys out of his pocket. “It’s good to be the boss,” he said. He selected a key and unlocked the door, then gestured her inside.

“Well?” he said once they had both entered and he had flicked a long row of light switches to their on positions.

Ava looked around the now brightly lit room. “It’s the world’s biggest closet,” she said. They were in a single large, industrial-looking room that was easily twice the size of her entire apartment, surrounded by racks of clothing and boxes of clothing and piles of clothing and even a semicircle of fierce mannequins wearing clothing. There was also an old velvet sofa and some matching chairs, presumably so one could just sit and stare at the clothing.

“We call it the Walk-In,” Russell said.

“Cute.” Ava wandered a few steps. She brushed her hand along a rack of dark blue skirts and looked back over her shoulder at Russell. “Is this where clothes come to die?”

“More like where they come before they’ve been born,” he said. “Although I don’t know how often things get thrown out, so if you made your way to the back, you’d probably find some pretty ancient items. Up here, though, it’s samples from the upcoming seasons and from some of the current lines too.”

“Is it your warehouse?”

“God, no. That’s a thousand times bigger. And in New Jersey.”

She bent down to stir a crate of silk scarves with her index finger. “So what do you use this for?”

“Different things. Publicity mostly—advertising layouts and magazine photo shoots and to show fashion writers what’s coming next. We suits like to look through it now and then to remind ourselves what we’re doing, compare our lines to what other companies are showing, check out how well we anticipated the trends and colors. And sometimes”—he sidled up to her and whispered in her ear—“sometimes we steal pieces to give to our friends who are in desperate need of wardrobe improvement.”

“You wouldn’t be talking about me now, would you?”

“Yep.” He swept his arm in a big semicircle. “Look it over. What would you like?”

“I don’t know.” She glanced around the room briefly and gave a shrug. “It’s all very nice, but I really don’t need anything. Despite what you may think.”

Russell groaned. “You’re insane,” he said. “Any other girl in the world—whatever the size of her wardrobe—would be running around this place like crazy, grabbing every piece in sight. Can you imagine Lauren in here? There’d be nothing left after she got through.”

“She would love it,” Ava agreed. “It’s too bad she’s not the one here right now. But I’m not like her. I don’t get my thrills from shopping. I don’t even enjoy it.”

“Come on,” Russell said. “This is fun. This is kid in a candy store time.”

“Think of me as a kid with diabetes.”

“I’m not letting you leave without picking something out.”

“Fine. If it’ll make you happy and get us out of here, I’ll take a scarf.” She bent over the box again and pulled out a large square of a patterned blue and dark orange silk. “This is nice.”

“No, no, no,” Russell said and tried to snatch the scarf away.

She pulled it back, out of his reach. “What? It’s pretty.” She figured she’d hang it on the back of a chair. It would dress up her apartment.

“Scarves are for women whose necks give away their age. Or for Frenchwomen who really know how to wear them.” He crossed his arms. “You’re definitely not old. Are you French?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Repeat after me:
Après moi le deluge
.”

“
Après moi le deluge
,” she repeated in her execrable high school French.

“Nope—you’re definitely not French. Give me back the scarf.” She surrendered it to him, and he dropped it back in the box. “Just hold on.” He darted down a little alleyway between two racks and after a minute of rustling and clanging hangers, emerged triumphantly with a dark green dress like the one they had seen in the store window. “I know you like this—you already told me so.”

“I said it was pretty. On the mannequin. But it’s not the kind of thing I wear.”

“Just try it on,” he said. “I think it will look great on you. It’s perfect for your coloring, and since you’re pretty small, the sample size should work. But it’s hard to tell without actually seeing it on you.”

“Try it on?” she said. “Now?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

He waved his hand airily. “Just go into a corner. I promise I won’t look.”

She looked around dubiously. “I don’t know . . .”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” he said. “People try stuff on in here all the time. Most days you can’t walk in here without seeing some model or another stripped down to her undies and sometimes not even that.”

“Models also shoot heroin,” she said.

“Here.” He threw the dress at her and she caught it reflexively. “I’ll leave the room, if that makes you more comfortable. Come get me when you have the dress on.”

He headed back toward the door. Ava said to his retreating back, “I don’t want to do this.”

“I’m not letting you out of here until you do,” he said, without even bothering to look back. “I’m going to drag you into the world of fashion, even if it’s kicking and screaming.” He left, banging the door unnecessarily loudly behind him.

Ava held the dress up and made a face at it. The whole thing was ridiculous—what kind of straight guy made playing dress-up part of an evening out? What kind of grown woman let him?

She couldn’t remember when it was that she decided she wasn’t going to care about clothing. As far back as she could remember, Lauren had been obsessed with her wardrobe and would beg their mother to buy her stylish things, but Ava simply wore whatever Nancy brought home for her from the Gap. When the time came to pick a college, she fell in love with Haverford, where the majority of the girls had long stringy hair and dressed in heavy sweaters and baggy jeans and argued about politics late into the night: it just felt like a place where she would fit in. Her last two years there, she had a fairly intense relationship with a guy who was a nature buff and an environmentalist. He criticized anyone who spent money or time on superficial things and reserved his greatest contempt for the kind of girl who wore nail polish (toxic) and makeup (tested on animals). He told Ava that her lack of vanity was what made her beautiful to him. They went hiking together and ate at vegetarian restaurants where the water was always served at room temperature and alcohol wasn’t served at all.

Had Gabe influenced her more than she had realized?

Quite possibly—she had been madly in love with him. Unfortunately, he graduated a year before her and went off to study marine biology in Florida. He broke up with her by e-mail less than a month later. Ava wasn’t as stricken as she might have been: a cute if slightly pretentious guy in her English class had been flirting with her and she hadn’t gotten around to mentioning that she was in a committed relationship.

On her first date with the new guy, she ordered steak and ice-cold beer, and they both tasted great.

But even out with that guy she hadn’t worn makeup or high heels, and didn’t that mean it wasn’t just Gabe’s influence that had made her the way she was? That he had simply spoken to something that was
already
a profound part of her personality? When
hadn’t
Ava believed that all the primping and the fussing and the accessorizing and the decorating were a sign that you weren’t smart enough or confident enough to be truthful about who you were and ultimately appealed only to the wrong sort of guys?

But she was here now, slightly tipsy, in this crazy enormous closet, and the dress was pretty, and Russell had said she’d look great in it. He had also said he wouldn’t let her out of the room until she tried it on, so it seemed to her she might as well get on with it.

With a weird sense of excitement, Ava pulled a couple of racks together to create a little dressing room. Hidden by the clothes, she stepped out of her shoes and unbuttoned her shirt, then slid the dress on before shoving her skirt down and off.

She had to contort herself to reach the zipper in the back. It was a struggle, but she finally got it zipped up and settled the dress into place. The neck was cut so low that it showed the plain white edges of her sensible underwire bra, and the skirt was shorter in the thigh than she was used to. With no mirror, she couldn’t tell how it looked: it wasn’t uncomfortable, but the fit was snugger than anything she was used to and she wondered if she looked bulgy.

She felt oddly nervous as she shoved her feet back into her Aerosole pumps and left the sanctum of the racks to let Russell in.

The second she pushed the door open a crack, Russell was pulling it the rest of the way open. “Let me see.” He came in and studied her eagerly. She backed up a few steps and hugged her elbows, uncomfortable under his scrutiny.

“Very nice,” he said. “Put your arms down, stand up straight, and turn around.”

“I feel stupid.”

“Just turn around, will you? I want to see how the back looks.”