A Dangerous Dress

by Julia Holden

  And, behind my eyelids, here is what I saw.

  The rain was gone. The dark purple night sky was clear and the breeze was scented with roses. There was a full moon, which reflected across the Seine and lit up Notre Dame like a floodlight. There were only a few cars on the street, and they were all long luxurious antique things with swirling chrome fenders and polished wood running boards and cut-crystal hood ornaments. The longest, most luxurious sedan of all swooshed to the curb, and a chauffeur wearing an elegant black uniform opened the passenger door with a flourish. A man emerged. He was perhaps twenty-five years old, wearing perfect black tie and tails, and he was devastatingly handsome. When he spoke, it was with a British accent that caressed the words sensuously. “Come, my dear,” he said, reaching a hand into the car. “Destiny awaits us.”

  A delicate female hand took the man’s hand—and I knew it was my Grandma’s hand. A perfect small female foot, wearing a graceful rhinestone-adorned slipper, emerged from the dark interior—and I knew it was my Grandma’s foot. I saw the hem of her dress—my dress. I held my breath and waited for her to appear.

  She started to step out of the car.

  22

  That is when the lightning struck.

  I am not speaking figuratively here.

  I do not know how close to me the lightning bolt hit. Remember, I had my eyes closed. But even through my eyelids, I was suddenly dazzled by the brightness. And just a second later there was a clap of thunder that left my ears ringing.

  Grandma, the handsome man, the gorgeous old car—they all vanished. I opened my eyes, then closed them again, but the romantic figures didn’t reappear. The scent of roses had been replaced by ozone, and the clear moonlit sky was once again a torrent of rain.

  I wondered if any of it had been real. I think it was. I think, somehow, it was another gift from Grandma. I hoped so.

  Real or not, though, seeing that moment from the past fueled the little spark inside of me. Now it was a bigger spark. Although it certainly wasn’t a bonfire of hope. After all, I was still feeling quite completely defeated about the dress, I was out of time, I had nowhere else to look, and my lower half had crossed the line from merely soaked to downright sodden. Not to mention that my sneakers still insisted on Joshing as I walked. But there was a definite midsized spark nonetheless. One that gave me the energy to keep walking.

  The Hotel Jacob is only about five blocks off the river, but because the streets in Paris seem to have been laid out by a drunk, I couldn’t walk the five blocks in a straight line. I had to walk two blocks straight, then a short block to the right, then half a block on this little diagonal street, then back toward the river for a block, then turn left. And that would have been the short way. But the sewers had backed up, and the intersection of the little diagonal street and the jog back toward the river had turned into a lake. No matter how drowned and demoralized I already felt, I could not bring myself to wade through it. So I improvised: I kept walking up the little diagonal street another block.

  I walked past an open doorway and caught a whiff of food. Suddenly I was so hungry I almost fainted. I realized I hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast. I didn’t want to stop. I was so depressed I didn’t feel like eating. But I felt as if somebody had drilled a hole through my middle, so I went in. It was a bakery. I bought a muffin and handed the girl behind the counter a ten-euro note. She gave me back a five euro-note and change, which I stuffed in my pocket. Then I devoured the muffin. I probably didn’t look very dignified. Sorry. I was really hungry.

  I went back out into the rain and continued down the little diagonal street. At the corner I turned right and walked a block. Then I turned back toward the river. I figured I needed to go two blocks in that direction to get back to my regular route. After one block, though, the street I was on split into a fork, two little streets that were almost parallel. In my waterlogged state, choosing between the street on my left and the one on my right was almost more than I could handle. Two roads diverged in a wood. This one or that one. The lady or the tiger.

  I chose the street on my left.

  Halfway down the block, I saw it: a little vintage clothing store called Jazz. I pulled out Irene Malraux’s list. Jazz was not on it. I almost didn’t go in.

  I looked in the window. The display was very 1950s Givenchy. Very Audrey Hepburn. Lovely clothes, but nothing from the 1920s. Nothing that said “Come inside.” But still.

  I leaned closer, and tried to look past the display to the clothes on the racks. I saw something sparkly. Maybe an old 1920s beaded dress. Or not. But what was one more store? I opened the door and stepped inside.

  The place was maybe twenty feet across and twenty feet back, crammed with racks and racks of clothes. Plus there was an old wrought-iron spiral staircase right smack in the middle of the space, running all the way up to the ceiling, with even more clothes hanging from the railing. The only person in the store was a round old woman sitting right behind the window display on a wooden chair behind a little oak desk that was cluttered with ribbons, bolts of silk, pincushions, a huge square glass ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes, and a little black-and-white TV with a flickering picture but no sound.

  I looked at my watch. Almost seven. It was still light out, so I wasn’t sure if almost seven fell into the bonjour or bonsoir category. I decided on “Bonsoir.”

  The old lady looked at me, took a drag on her cigarette, and said, “Bonjour.” She turned her attention back to the little TV screen.

  Since the old lady did not seem at all interested in helping me, I found the beaded dress I had glimpsed through the window by myself. I concluded I had wasted my time, because it was clearly from the 1940s. Pretty, though. And I thought, Well, if my entire trip here has been a total failure, maybe I could at least buy something fun for me. So I pulled the dress out to see if it was my size, which it wasn’t. It didn’t matter, though. Hiding on the rack, next to the first dress, was another beaded dress, which I hadn’t seen because it was smooshed in. My heart did a little tumble. It was almost definitely from 1928. It was extremely simple. And breathtaking. A veil of black beading over a luminous gray silk slip. Very carefully, I took it off the rack.

  My hopes crashed.

  It was tiny. I mean tiny. You will remember that I said Nathalie Gauloise was a thirty-six, which is the French equivalent of a perfect size four. But this dress was not a four. It was not even a two. It was a size zero. And there was no extra fabric to make it bigger. None. Which meant, not the slightest possibility that this fabulous dress would ever fit Nathalie Gauloise. I almost cried. But only almost. Instead, I took the dress over to the old lady and said, “Excusez-moi?”

  She reached over and turned off the TV. Then she smiled. “You have need help?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes. Please.” Then I took a deep breath. I held the gorgeous little dress up in front of me. “Do you have any more like this?”

  “This is pretty,” she said.

  “It’s very pretty. But it’s too small.”

  She took a long breath through her cigarette, then asked, “Is for the film, yes?”

  Which as you can imagine took me by surprise. “The film?”

  “The film. Duclos.” She narrowed her eyes. “Irene did not send you to see me?”

  “No. You know Irene?”

  “I am named Françoise.” The old lady squeezed out from behind the little desk, walked up to me and held out her hand, very formally, and we shook hands. “I am the mother of Irene.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. Which I know was not polite. But you never saw two women who looked less alike.

  Françoise looked around the little store, then back at me. “This shop have belonged to ma mère. My mother. She sold the special things to the special people. Now this shop belongs to me. I sell the special things to the special people. But I am not so young anymore. I tell Irene, if she want, the shop next belongs to her. So she can carry on what we do.” She lowered her voice. “What w
e do, is very important. It is like . . . a mission.” Then she leaned close and scrutinized my face. Finally she asked, “You have been to this shop before?”

  “No.”

  That answer seemed to puzzle her. “Your mother have been to this shop before?”

  “No.” Then a wild idea occurred to me. “How long has the shop been here?”

  She smiled. A little mysteriously, I thought. “A long time,” she said. “Long enough.”

  Long enough for Grandma to have gotten her dangerous dress here?

  Then Françoise waved her hand, as if to chase away the past. Or maybe she was just shooing away her cigarette smoke. “Irene does not want the shop. She prefers the films. Duclos. Pwui.” I am happy to say she only made that sound, but did not actually spit. “She is stubborn, though. This film, I could help her. But she does not call me. She says, ‘I do myself.’ ” Then she patted me on the cheek and smiled warmly. “But you are different. You have the politesse. ” She sized me up again, then came to a conclusion. “Yes. You are special. So . . . come.”

  With that, Françoise hauled herself up the wrought-iron spiral staircase, and I followed. At the top was a door. She shoved it open with her shoulders and disappeared into the ceiling. Then she flipped a light switch, and I saw there was a tiny room up there. Françoise and I took up pretty much all the open space. Everything else, all around us, was clothes.

  “Here are . . . the nice things.” She squeezed past me and back down the spiral staircase. Leaving me alone.

  With the nice things.

  23

  Françoise was not kidding. We are talking nice.

  Up in the little room with the nice things, it became clear to me that Grandma’s dress is not the only powerful dress in the world. On the contrary. Clothes are powerful in general. Dresses in particular. And dangerous dresses most especially. Now I felt like I had stepped into a nuclear reactor that was positively pulsating with clothes. It was as if I had chugged about six Red Bulls in the space of a minute. Which by the way you absolutely should not do. Trust me.

  Once my head stopped spinning, I took a more careful look around and saw that no matter how nice everything was, I still had not gone to perfect-dress heaven. Most of the dresses weren’t from the 1920s, and even when they were, the year was wrong, and as I have explained, even a dress from 1929 will not pass as a dress from 1928. Plus I still had to deal with things like size, and color, and condition. But . . . I found a dress. No. I found the dress.

  It was a silver silk satin, cut on the bias, which meant it would cling to Nathalie Gauloise and show her perfect little shape. The fabric just glowed, and it was very sheer, so even though you couldn’t actually see through it, the fit would leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. It had the deepest plunging back I had ever seen on a dress from the 1920s, and a slightly higher hemline than usual, just above the knee, which at the time was extremely daring. A gather of fabric at the left hip was accented by a starburst of rhinestones, which may not sound particularly sexy, but it drew your eye down to the hips. And if I have to explain what is sexy about looking at the hips of a woman with a perfect size-four body who is wearing this clinging shining miracle of a dress with a back that plunges all the way down to that really sensitive spot at the base of the spine, well, there is no hope for you. It was unquestionably a dangerous dress.

  In fact, it was the perfect dress. When I carried it downstairs, Françoise smiled.

  I took out the cell phone and dialed Gerard Duclos’ number, but I couldn’t get a signal. I looked outside. It was still pouring. I looked at the dress. It was still perfect.

  “How much is it?” I asked. There was no price tag on it.

  “This dress is . . .” She thought about it for a while. “Four hundred euro.”

  That is when I remembered that nobody had given me any money or a credit card. I figured I could put it on my Visa ATM card and have the money come out of my checking account, but the idea of laying out so much annoyed me, which I guess showed on my face.

  “But,” said Françoise, “I give you . . . three hundred euro.”

  “Okay,” I said immediately, because this dress was worth a lot more than three hundred and seventy-five dollars. I handed over my card, Françoise swiped it, handed it back to me, and then we waited.

  Finally a paper slip sputtered out of the machine. Françoise frowned. “I am sorry.”

  I knew there was more than enough money in the account to cover this. Not a vast fortune or anything. But more than enough.

  “We do again?” Françoise asked. I handed her the card. She swiped. We waited. Finally she shook her head. Sadly. She showed me the receipt. It was in French, but whatever it said, it was clear in any language that the card had been declined.

  I tried to think what I could do. I needed this dress. Needed it. For my movie. For Josh’s movie. For Josh.

  Françoise looked at her watch and said, “I am leaving . . . now.”

  “Okay,” I said, and dug out my MasterCard. I did this extremely reluctantly. Because I had very real doubts about whether there was enough room on this card. There wasn’t. Then I remembered the euros in my wallet. I could put most of it on the card, and pay the rest with euros. “Try two hundred.”

  She did. “I am sorry,” she said again.

  I was getting desperate. “Try a hundred.” Don’t ask how I expected to make up the rest.

  We waited. Then Françoise smiled. The little slip chugged out of her credit card machine. She handed it to me, and I signed.

  “You have two hundred euro?”

  “No,” I said. Because I didn’t.

  Françoise looked annoyed for just a second, then shrugged. “You have how much?”

  I handed her my wallet. She removed all the euros: four twenties and a ten. Ninety. Then she took out my eighty-seven American dollars, which was worth about seventy euros. One hundred plus ninety plus seventy equals two hundred and sixty.

  I was about to dig into my pocket for the change I got back from the muffin. Only Françoise said, “No. That is enough.” She smiled mysteriously again, and I swear her eyes twinkled. “You and I, we carry on the tradition, yes?”

  She packed up the dress—the dress—like the pro she was, even found a plastic bag to shield it from the rain. As she packed it, I couldn’t help but think that maybe my Grandma had stood in this very spot and watched Françoise’s mother pack up her perfect dress. The thought made me tingle.

  When the bundle was complete, Françoise handed it to me, got up on her toes, and kissed me on my cheeks, right and left.

  “Tell Irene I say . . . hello.”

  Before I could even say thank you, she shut the lights and shooed me outside. We opened our umbrellas, then she waddled away.

  I had done it. Incredibly, impossibly, I had done it. I had found the perfect dress.

  But I still needed one more thing.

  I needed Gerard Duclos to agree with me that it was perfect.

  24

  I ran back to the hotel. Even though I knew I must look like a drowned rat, I went straight to the breakfast room. Gerard was there. Marty. Irene. Pretty much everybody else I had met, but nobody seemed to be doing anything. They were all just sitting and smoking. I think every single person in the room was smoking. Except me.

  I walked up to Gerard and announced, “I found it.”

  “You found it?”

  “I found it.”

  “You did not call.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He frowned. “The first dress was very bad.”

  “I’m sure about this one.” And I was. “I’m absolutely sure.”

  Gerard stood up and looked into my eyes, then turned to Marty and said, “She found it.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” asked Marty. “I’ll go get her.” He scurried off. About two minutes later he came back. “She’s coming.”

  It took another minute. But finally, she came. Nathalie. You’d have thought t
he room was full of photographers, the way she posed and preened on her way in. When she got to where Gerard and Marty and I were standing, she glanced at me, then tossed her hair and put her arms around Gerard and started nibbling on his earlobe. “You have found my dress?” she purred.

  I opened the bag and took out the tissue paper-wrapped bundle. Carefully I unfolded it and took off the paper. I held the dress up. The light in the breakfast room was not great. Even in that dim light, though, even without anybody wearing it, the dress shimmered like it was alive.

  Everybody looked at the dress. I think I even heard a few people gasp. Then everybody looked at Gerard. Everybody except me. Because all of a sudden I saw Josh—my Josh.

  If you are wondering why I was suddenly thinking of him as my Josh, go back and read again about him kissing me. Sure, there was that other stuff, like him sticking me with the check for those expensive drinks, but when I saw him in the doorway of the breakfast room, all I could think was, I kept my promise. I found the perfect dress. I saved Josh’s lost cause. Now everything will be all right. Now he will be happy. With me. We will be happy together.

  Then Gerard did the most unusual thing. He started to cry. Which I did not necessarily take as a good sign. “This dress,” he said. He wiped his eyes with the ratty sleeve of his ratty sport jacket. “This is . . . the dress. The perfect dress. Catherine’s dress.”

  Everybody in the room breathed again. Several people applauded. I tried to catch Josh’s eye, but I couldn’t see him. Because suddenly Gerard was grabbing me. Kissing me. It did not feel like a you-found-the-perfect-dress-and-saved-my-movie kiss. It felt like an I-am-horny-and-want-to-have-sex-with-you kiss. I did not kiss him back. In fact I gave him a pretty good shove.