The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  She snapped her eyes back to the blouse in the nick of time, before she was caught staring, and told herself not to covet another woman’s boyfriend, especially a woman who’d been so nice. Fabienne smiled as she saw the tiny Eiffel Tower, then her eyes traveled along the Champs Élysées and onto the Rue de Rivoli, before stopping at the breast pocket over the heart where a cross was marked on the Rue de Sévigné in the exact spot where her grandmother’s house, the house Estella would never live in, was located.

  “Your dress is beautiful,” the woman said, eyeing Fabienne with admiration. “Can I touch that flower? It looks so real.”

  Fabienne laughed. “Of course.”

  The woman’s hand trailed gently over the petals of the black leather peonies that adorned Fabienne’s shoulder. “They really are exquisite. You’d never think of leather and peonies, but that just makes them more fabulous.” She sighed, staring over Fabienne’s shoulder. “And look at that one. You could wear it now and it would still be fabulous.”

  Fabienne turned to see a gold dress, one of her grandmother’s favorites. Estella had always said, somewhat cryptically, that it was a dress which had sealed her fate. “It would be,” Fabienne agreed.

  There was a moment of silence after that and Fabienne realized that she was a complete stranger taking up the couple’s time. “Enjoy the exhibition,” she said, moving off.

  The next two hours passed by quickly as she toured the exhibits, unable to stop the thought: how her grandmother would love this. How her father would too.

  She drank champagne and was introduced by the curator of the Costume Institute to people who left her a little starstruck. Mamie wouldn’t have been starstruck, she reminded herself, and she tried to pretend that everyone else was as ordinary as she was. Around one in the morning, she decided it was time to leave; she’d seen enough to be able to give Estella a thorough rundown. She made her way outside and walked down the steps to catch a taxi, behind a couple who seemed to be having some difficulty. The man had his arm around a woman who was moving slowly, clumsily, as if she’d hurt herself, as if every step was agony.

  “Can I help?” Fabienne asked, hurrying forward, unable to watch the excruciating movements without doing something, worried that the couple was about to topple off the steps.

  “We meet again,” the man said with a brief smile and Estella realized it was the couple she’d tripped over earlier.

  “We do,” she said. “What if I take the other side? Or shall I hail a taxi for you?” She touched the woman’s arm when she saw her face: pale, clammy, so vacant that she seemed to have withdrawn inside herself.

  “A taxi would be great,” the man said.

  Fabienne ran down the rest of the steps and waved impatiently until a taxi pulled over, just as the couple reached the sidewalk.

  “Thanks,” the man said, giving her another polite smile, one that didn’t touch his eyes, which were dark now with worry. He helped the woman into the car and, with that, the couple were whisked away into the Manhattan night.

  “How much longer do I have to wait?”

  Fabienne was woken in what felt like the middle of the night but as she blinked her eyes open, she realized it was light outside and that her woolly-headedness was a result of jet lag and a late night.

  “She insisted on coming in.” The nurse, who was pushing her grandmother’s wheelchair into the room, apologized. “I held her off as long as I could.”

  “It’s all right,” Fabienne said, sitting up and leaning over to kiss her grandmother’s cheeks.

  “She’s eaten and ready for the day,” the nurse said before she left the room.

  “Did you enjoy yourself last night?” Estella asked in that familiar voice, a voice unlike anyone else’s, with its strange mix of French and American accents, an inflection that made it seem as if she didn’t come from anywhere on this earth. Which was, Fabienne reflected sadly, how she looked. As if she were no longer part of the everyday, as if she’d already joined Fabienne’s grandfather in heaven, as if even the fingertip hold she had on the world had finally slipped. And at ninety-seven years old, Fabienne supposed she was lucky to still have Mamie at all, and most especially lucky that, while Estella’s body might have all but failed her, her mind was as sharp as ever.

  “It was perfect, Mamie,” Fabienne said. And she proceeded to tell her grandmother everything: what people wore, which clothes had been exhibited, who had come, what had been said, how much praise had been heaped upon Estella Bissette and her legendary Stella line.

  Estella held out an opened envelope. “You were by far the most beautiful though,” she said in a voice full of pride.

  Fabienne slipped a photograph out of the envelope, which must have been delivered that morning by one of her grandmother’s admirers from Vogue. It showed Fabienne on the red carpet in the extraordinary gown that Mamie had designed just for her—one unbroken length of silver silk that had been draped and spiraled around her body, with an enormously full skirt that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a princess, a low neckline and capped sleeves that started at the edge of her shoulders, showing off her collarbones; and the black leather peonies, saving the dress from looking too princessy, fastened in a posy on the left side of her waist, another cluster sitting like a rosette above her right breast. The dress that had made her feel much less like a gauche Australian tripping over people’s feet.

  “I think you’re biased,” Fabienne said, smiling.

  “Your father would have thought so too.”

  Fabienne reached out to take her grandmother’s hand. “He would have loved to have been there last night.” Then the tears, the tears that she’d hoped had finally stopped, clogged her eyes.

  “Oh, Fabienne.” Estella sighed. “I miss him too.”

  Neither spoke for several minutes and Fabienne knew that her grandmother, like her, was remembering Xander Bissette, Fabienne’s father and Estella’s son. The brilliant and loving man who’d never seemed old—his hair was still streaked with black even at age seventy-four—but who’d suffered a massive stroke just one month ago.

  “Your mother didn’t want to come to New York with you?” Estella asked.

  Fabienne shook her head. “I think she was afraid of seeing you. You look so much like him. She’s…” How to describe what had happened to her mother in the month since her father’s death? “She’s crumpled, can barely stand up straight anymore. I’m worried about her. Of course, she just buries herself in work, as always.”

  As Fabienne sat holding her grandmother’s hand tightly in her own, she felt that same sense of attachment that she’d always had with Mamie ever since she was a child—much more so than with her mother—even though she only saw Estella once a year when Fabienne and Xander made the trip from Sydney to New York and then on to France every July.

  “You look crumpled too,” her grandmother said, sitting back in her wheelchair and assessing her. “Too sad for someone so young. And it’s not just your father. Why didn’t that young man of yours come with you?”

  “We broke up,” Fabienne confessed.

  The young man in question, Jasper, had been her boyfriend for the past two years and he wasn’t all that young—was thirty-seven in fact, eight years older than Fabienne. The day after her father died, she’d finally realized that her and Jasper’s interpretations of love were different: that to him it meant someone to wear on your arm at the latest opening, someone consistent in your bed, someone with whom you didn’t have to try very hard because they’d already chosen you and no longer needed to be wooed. Whereas for Fabienne, love meant an intensity beyond all feelings, an unbearable thrum in the air whenever the other person was near; it meant always wanting to slip your hand into theirs. Which she knew was probably a fantasy, that the way her grandmother spoke of love might be something Fabienne would never experience because it was meant for a time long past when things were different.

  “Good. I never liked him,” Estella said decidedly and Fabienne couldn
’t help laughing. “You should go to Paris,” her grandmother continued. “Paris is the place where you find love.”

  “Mamie, people find love all over the world. I don’t need to go to Paris.”

  “The love you find in Paris is different,” her grandmother insisted. “Go for the weekend. Refresh yourself before you go back to Sydney and start your new job. You have nothing to lose by going.”

  “But I came all this way to see you,” Fabienne said gently. Besides, there was something she needed to ask her grandmother about and she wouldn’t be able to do it from Paris.

  “I don’t like to see you like this. I want to see the Fabienne you should be, the woman I felt you would become when I first held you as a baby. You haven’t found that Fabienne yet.” Her grandmother stabbed her finger into the air as she spoke the last few words, as if to underscore them, and Fabienne shivered a little at Mamie’s intensity.

  The Fabienne you should be. Who was that person? And how was she different from the Fabienne she was right now? Yes, she was sad, but her father had just died and she’d broken up with Jasper. What difference would a weekend in Paris make to any of that?

  As she walked into the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, Fabienne knew that her grandmother was much wiser than she. She’d at last relented to Mamie’s insistence that she take a weekend in Paris and she’d only been there a day and already felt better. Even the overnight flight hadn’t tired her. Nothing ever tasted as good as French baguettes and French coffee eaten in one of the sidewalk cafés in the heart of the Marais, near her grandmother’s house, where Fabienne and her father—rarely her mother—had holidayed so many times it felt as comfortable as pajamas, although that was possibly insulting to such a grand and ancient townhouse. And now she would spend the night in her favorite theater, a theater she’d visited so often with her grandmother that it never mattered what was actually playing; just being inside the intimate, lovely space was enough to make anyone feel a beauty that transcended time.

  In fact, tonight, she hadn’t even checked what was on and she discovered, to her surprise, that it wasn’t a theatrical production but a film. A screen had been brought in to the theater to show a documentary about Jean Schlumberger, one of Tiffany & Co.’s celebrated designers who’d also, she read, served with Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces in World War II.

  She located the row shown on her ticket and realized she’d have to step over a couple who were already seated. She shuffled along but they seemed to be engrossed in conversation, the looks on their faces so grave that Fabienne waited a moment, reassuring the usher in French that she was fine, before she said, “Excusez-moi.”

  They looked up at her and she recognized both their faces, struggling for a moment to place them.

  “The Met,” she said at exactly the same time as the woman did and they both laughed.

  “At least I haven’t tripped over you this time,” Fabienne said.

  “I’m Melissa Ogilvie. And this is Will.” Melissa smiled and gestured to the man by her side.

  Fabienne sat down next to Will. “I’m Fabienne Bissette.”

  “Bissette?” Melissa repeated. “We met at an exhibition of Estella Bissette’s designs and you have the same surname. Surely that’s not a coincidence?”

  “She’s my grandmother.”

  “Wow,” said Melissa. “Hence your amazing outfits. I loved the dress you wore at the Met but I’m guessing it was a one-off.”

  Fabienne nodded. “She designed it just for me. It was so beautiful I almost wore it to bed because I couldn’t bear the thought of taking it off.”

  Melissa laughed again.

  “Where are you from?” Will asked. “I heard you speaking perfect French to the usher and you obviously aren’t American or you’d have been telling everyone at the Met who your grandmother was.”

  “I’m from Australia,” she said.

  “And you were born speaking perfect French?”

  Fabienne shook her head and tried not to see how gorgeous he was. She didn’t want to covet Melissa’s husband or boyfriend or whatever he was. “My grandmother is very strong-willed and she absolutely insisted I be taught French from before I could even speak. She drilled me in French verbs and obscure vocabulary every time I visited her. For which I’m very grateful now, although I probably wasn’t at the time. And we came to Paris every summer. Estella has a house in the Marais.”

  “I’ve been dying to have a wander around there,” Melissa said.

  “It’s the most beautiful part of Paris. You should definitely spend a day there. How long are you here for?” Fabienne asked.

  “Just the weekend,” Melissa said. “My brother here is on a mission to take me somewhere new every month.” She paused and looked at Will.

  Fabienne tried to smother her pleasure at discovering Will was Melissa’s brother.

  Will shook his head at his sister but she kept talking anyway. “I have ovarian cancer,” Melissa continued. “Terminal. And I know Will thinks I should just keep it to myself and not depress us all but that’s the way it is. So, as long as I’m well enough, he’s escorting me to places far and wide each month.”

  Melissa placed a gentle hand on Will’s arm and Fabienne saw his face constrict with a terrible sadness.

  “Thanks for helping us the other night,” he said to Fabienne. “That’s the other reason I knew you weren’t American. A true New Yorker would have just stepped over us rather than hailing us a cab.”

  “I hardly did anything,” Fabienne said, wishing now that she’d done more, feeling that her gesture in the face of terminal ovarian cancer in a woman as young as Melissa—she appeared to be in her mid-twenties—was so insignificant as to not be worth mentioning. And she knew, because her own mother had set up one of the first women’s cancer clinics in Sydney, just how swift and vicious ovarian cancer could be.

  “I get back pain from time to time,” Melissa said. “It can be debilitating. And it obviously decided I’d been having too much fun and the only way to remind me of my limitations was to cripple me with such force that I left the gala looking like a drunk.”

  “Everyone must say I’m sorry to you,” Fabienne said. “So I won’t. Instead I’ll say I’m glad you decided to come to Paris. My grandmother believes that Paris can be more therapeutic than the best of medicines.”

  “I’m glad we came too,” Melissa said.

  Will put his arm around his sister’s shoulders and kissed her gently on the cheek. Fabienne’s throat ached and her eyes teared up.

  Luckily the lights of the theater dimmed at the same moment so she was able to wipe her eyes before anyone noticed. Except that she felt Will pass her something and she saw it was a perfectly pressed and folded white linen handkerchief. What man still carried such an item? Her grandmother would be delighted. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Fabienne couldn’t concentrate on the film. All she felt were two contradictory impulses: the crack in her heart for Melissa, who she barely knew, but who seemed so spirited and full of life that in any other circumstance she would have made a wonderful friend; and an intense discomfort at sitting beside Will, an acute awareness of every small movement he made. Since her father had died, all of her feelings seemed keener and more raw and she tried to put it down to that. But she knew it was because she found Will Ogilvie, with his classic good looks, his obvious affection for his sister, and his folded pocket handkerchieves, very alluring.

  At intermission, Fabienne hung back a little, wanting to leave the Ogilvies to their time together, but Melissa leaned across and said, “Have a drink with us. At least that way I’ll get what I actually ordered, rather than whatever the barman can interpret of Will’s terrible French.”

  Will laughed. “You told me the fish last night was delicious.”

  “I was trying to interpret the menu,” Melissa said conspiratorially to Fabienne, “and he told me a dorado was a kind of beef!”

  Fabienne laughed. “A sea-cow perhaps.”

&nb
sp; Will smiled at her and her stomach clenched.

  Stop it, she told herself. You’re behaving like a teenager. “What would you like?” she asked, glad of an excuse to step away to the bar. “It’s on me,” she said as Will took his wallet out of his pocket.

  “Gin and tonic,” said Melissa. Will frowned at her. “I can have a drink. It’s not going to kill me,” Melissa said to her brother with grim humor.

  “Liss,” he said darkly.

  Fabienne slipped over to the bar to avoid a sibling tiff. She realized she hadn’t waited for Will’s order so she got him an Aperol spritz like her own.

  “It’s great,” he said when she handed it to him with an apology. “Cheers,” he toasted. “To new friends.”

  “Do you work for your grandmother?” Melissa asked Fabienne.

  “No. She wants me to. She begs me to every year, in fact. I do work with fashion, but in a different way. I’ve just been appointed,” Fabienne smiled, loving saying it aloud—still not used to it as it had only come about last month—“Head Curator of Fashion at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. It’s my dream job,” she confessed.

  “Congratulations,” Melissa said, clinking her glass against Fabienne’s. “But why don’t you want to work with your grandmother?”

  “Liss,” Will interjected. “You’re being nosy.” He turned to Fabienne. “She thinks she can get away with whatever she likes because everyone feels sorry for her. Just tell her if she’s being a pain.”

  “It’s fine,” Fabienne lied. Her reasons were not something she’d ever shared except in the most secret place inside her head. “I suppose I’m scared,” she said hesitantly. “Of not living up to expectations. My grandmother is a true force of nature. And she’s been successful for so long. I don’t want to be the one to step in and screw it all up.” She winced as she finished. She was oversharing. She’d only just met these people and now they knew more about her than most people did.