A Dangerous Dress

by Julia Holden

  Fortunately, I nonetheless managed to grab hold of Celestine’s Helmut Langs, which, also fortunately, stayed on her feet.

  Unfortunately, my bottom half, including my Balenciaga heels and that lovely Lang silk skirt, got quite a soaking in the Seine. Which is not the very cleanest waterway in the world.

  Finally, and most fortunately of all, Celestine, together with several considerably inebriated denizens of the little park, pulled me up out of the river and to safety.

  “You are a crazy person,” Celestine observed when we had finally stopped laughing.

  “I think so.”

  “You are the only person in the world who would do such a thing for me.”

  “I hope so.”

  Later, in the taxi we finally convinced to take us home, notwithstanding my soaking-wet bottom half, she told me, “You are the best friend I ever had.” And I knew she meant it.

  “You too.” And I meant it, too.

  “I would do the same thing for you,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  The thought of Celestine sloshing around the Seine in her Balenciaga and Kors and vintage and Langs made me giggle. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “But there is something you can do for me.”

  “What?”

  “If you see Josh Thomas in our neighborhood, kill him for me.”

  To which Celestine said, “I will.”

  She said it so solemnly, I worried that maybe she would. I suspect the French authorities are fairly understanding when it comes to crimes of the heart, but I’m not sure killing the man who kissed your best friend and then threw away her Grandma’s dress falls in that category. So I said, “Well, maybe don’t actually kill him. But slap him.”

  She smiled at that. “I will.”

  I smiled too. Because I knew she would.

  35

  Then again, maybe slapping Josh was not the very best idea. He was possibly the only person in Paris who might know where Grandma’s dress was. I decided that if I saw him again, even if he was stalking me, I would be brave and demand that he tell me how to find it.

  Only I never saw Josh in our neighborhood again, and neither did Celestine.

  To try to take my mind off the dress, I focused as much attention as I could on my fabulous job. Which, it turned out, was remarkably educational. In only my first four days at Armani Collezioni, I learned quite a lot. For example:1. The more a man thinks that buying a woman a dress will impress her enough that she will take that dress off, the more he will spend on the dress.

  2. You would not believe how many people go shopping for expensive clothes without wearing any underwear. Okay maybe you would believe it. But I couldn’t.

  3. Despite rumors to the contrary, European women shave under their arms like everybody else.

  I loved my new job. I loved being good at it. Even though I was still in mourning over Grandma’s dress, I was having fun. I couldn’t help it.

  Until late on my fourth day at Armani, when this American man came in, followed by his American girlfriend. Maybe it had nothing to do with his being American. Maybe if I spoke French and was helping French customers, the same thing would have happened. But I doubt it.

  The man was not what you’d call a fashion type by a long shot. He was wearing tan Dockers and an ivory cotton crewneck sweater. Maybe J. Crew. And loafers.

  Then his girlfriend teetered in. She must’ve been walking twenty or thirty feet behind him. Which was completely understandable, considering the pair of Fuck Me boots she was wearing.

  I hope I am not shocking anyone. But if you do not know this about women’s shoes, you have led a very sheltered life, and it is about time you learn. There is a whole species of women’s shoes called Fuck Me shoes. They all have two things in common: First, they all have very high heels. Second, they all send a certain very clear message.

  Not all high-heeled shoes are Fuck Me shoes, but all Fuck Me shoes have high heels. There are no such things as Fuck Me flats.

  Incidentally, I should make this clear: As I mentioned, Celestine and I both wore extreme high heels to that very exclusive fashion show. Balenciagas and Helmut Langs. The heels on those shoes were radically high and dangerously sharp. They made our legs look . . . well, it would be immodest for me to say, but suffice it to say there is a reason women wear such painful shoes, and in our case it was an awfully good reason. But they most certainly were not Fuck Me shoes.

  Fuck Me shoes come in many different breeds. One of the rarest breeds is Fuck Me boots. Most boots don’t have high heels. Most high-heeled boots don’t send that certain message. But every so often a pair of boots just cries out for . . . well, you know.

  The girlfriend’s boots cried out.

  I feel bad for just calling her “the girlfriend.” She deserves to be called by name, but I can’t do it. Because it doesn’t matter that they were in the Armani Collezioni store for two hours. It doesn’t matter that the man made her try on sixteen different dresses. All that time, he never once called her by name. So I can’t, either.

  The man’s name is George.

  The girlfriend’s boots looked brand-new. In fact, I felt sure George bought them for her just the day before, and now he insisted she wear them.

  To be fair, they were flattering. Sexy. In a Mistress Eva dominatrix tie-me-up web site kind of way.

  Not that I have ever looked at any such web site.

  Here’s how I know the boots were the man’s idea: The girlfriend told me she had been wearing them for four hours already, and it was only two in the afternoon. Now you must understand: Sometimes women will choose to wear Fuck Me shoes, without being asked. But wearing extreme heels is a very strategic exercise. You have to balance How great will I look? against How long can I stand the pain? Nobody, and I do mean nobody, would voluntarily put on these boots at ten A.M. and plan to wear them walking around Paris all day.

  Because they hurt. High heels hurt, in general. And these boots hurt this woman’s feet, specifically. They hurt her a lot. I was in and out of her dressing room at least sixteen times. She had to take the boots off for almost every outfit. Every time she took them off, she sat down, rubbed her feet, and said, “Oooooooohhh.”

  Typing “oooooooohhh” only conveys so much. I do not mean oh yeah baby that feels so good oh more yeah oh yeah oooooooohhh. No. I mean, oh God help me these boots hurt, let me get them off before they kill me . . . oooooooohhh.

  Every man—especially George—should be required to put on a pair of four-inch Jimmy Choos. And then walk, say, from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame cathedral. Which is only about three miles. Hee hee.

  There is no reason George should have put his girlfriend through bondage boot hell, because she didn’t need the boots to look sexy. She was probably five-eight in bare feet, slender without being skinny. In fact, she was a thirty-six, which you will remember is the same as an American size four. Even though she was so slender, she had nice round tits, not at all saggy. They were so nice, I assumed that George had bought them for her, just like he bought those boots.

  In case you are wondering, I am not telling you about her tits to be prurient. I am telling you because it is highly relevant.

  The girlfriend wore her hair long and straight, the way men like. Bleached blonde, which was the only thing about her appearance I would have changed. I assumed he made her bleach it for him.

  You can tell, I did not like George very much. Here is why.

  His girlfriend tried on sixteen different outfits over the course of two hours, for no other reason than because he wanted her to. He did not care one whit what she liked, or didn’t like. He was buying her a dress to make him look good.

  Number six was the most flattering. It was a fitted jacket and matching short skirt in an extremely dramatic black-and-white diagonal print. Very powerful. Even though I would not have picked those boots for her to wear, or that color blonde for her hair, the combination of her hair, that outfit,
her body in that outfit, and those boots . . . well, she could have walked out of the store and had her pick of the richest, handsomest, most fashionable men in Paris.

  Come to think of it, maybe that was why her boyfriend did not like outfit number six.

  He did not like much of anything, which pretty much made him an idiot. We are not talking about the Salvation Army thrift shop here. We are talking about Armani Collezioni. Plus, he was having her try on the top stuff. The cheapest thing she put on was 1,600 euros, and the most expensive was about 3,800. Two thousand to almost 4,800 dollars. Boyfriend George didn’t like any of it. Until we got to number sixteen.

  What happened next was partly my fault. But you really can’t blame me. Because I had been working with these people for two whole hours. Nonstop.

  At some point, a human being just has to . . . well, you know.

  Pee.

  So I showed the girlfriend outfit sixteen. It was a gorgeous iridescent blue silk dress, with a high neck in front and an asymmetrical cutout back, the cutout dropping diagonally from left to right, so the woman’s left shoulder would be covered but her right shoulder blade would be totally bare.

  Then I went to pee.

  Oh, one more extremely relevant detail about the dress: The zipper was on the side. Not just the zipper, in fact. The label, too.

  I came out of the bathroom feeling much better. Until I saw the girlfriend, walking out of the dressing room.

  She had the dress on backward.

  This actually happens every so often. Particularly with dresses where the zipper is on the side. Usually it does not have serious consequences. But remember how I told you about the asymmetrical cutout in the back? Because she was wearing the dress backward, that asymmetrical cutout was in the front. Which meant that the woman’s left tit was where her right shoulder blade should have been in the dress.

  Which left this perfect, round, not-at-all-saggy tit just hanging out there in all its glory, for the world to see.

  I changed my opinion. The girlfriend’s tits were real. At least she didn’t do that for him.

  She was not entirely comfortable with her tit hanging out. I mean how would you feel? She kept tugging at the dress, trying to hike it up to cover herself. But the dress wouldn’t cooperate. It wasn’t cut that way. For which you can’t blame the dress. When the girlfriend looked around for help, I broke into a run. I reached her and started to say, “Eet eez—”

  Only George cut me off. “Perfect.”

  “But,” she said, “I’m all—”

  “Perfect.”

  “You do not understand,” I said. “Zee dress eez—”

  “Perfect,” he repeated, making it perfectly clear he did not want my opinion.

  He was already lecturing her about how the Riviera and Cannes—he pronounced it cans—are filled with topless Frenchwomen who don’t think twice about modesty, so for once she should stop being small-minded.

  He had made up his mind: This was the dress he was going to buy. The dress he expected her to wear that way. Asshole.

  Even if George wouldn’t let me tell him the dress was backward, I could still tell the girlfriend. I hurried her off the sales floor and back to the dressing room, so she would not have to spend one more second exposed.

  When I got back there, I was trying to figure out how to tell her. Remember, I was still playing French salesgirl. If I was going to break the bad news that she had just been flashing her tit at the whole store for absolutely no reason, I didn’t want to choose that moment to come out of the closet, as it were, about not actually being French.

  I was going to say “Eet eez wrong.” Only I was pretty sure that wasn’t specific enough. So then I thought about “Eet eez backward.” But backward seemed like a very English word, and I didn’t know if a French person speaking English, which was what I was supposed to be, would say that. I was trying out “Zees eez zee front” in my head, when she said:

  “He is just the best.”

  “Excuse me?” I know, I should have said “Excusez-moi?,” but she didn’t notice. Unfortunately, she kept going.

  “George. Isn’t he just the best? He is just the best,” she said. She unzipped the dress and stepped out of it. Now she was standing there almost naked, with both of her tits just staring at me—hi, how are you—and wearing nothing but a G-string that would make a stripper blush.

  And those tie-me-up, tie-me-down boots.

  I was embarrassed. She sure wasn’t, though. She just kept talking the way you would chat with people in a crowded elevator. “He buys me these amazing things,” she said. She smiled. “He bought me these boots, you know.” Like those boots were the one thing in the world that every girl wished for. Then she sighed. Sighed. “He is the best,” she said.

  Let me be clear: There is absolutely, positively no excuse for the way George treated that woman. None. Period.

  But in my personal opinion, there is also no excuse for her loving him for treating her that way. I had helped her try on sixteen different outfits, but suddenly I could not even stand being in the dressing room with her. I left, and never told her about the dress.

  I asked Madeline to help good old George pay, because I knew I might say something that could get me fired. So I let him pay, and let them leave. I was so disgusted with the whole episode, I could only think of one positive result of the encounter.

  I would never see either of them again.

  36

  Now kindly tell me this.

  How was I supposed to know that stupid obnoxious George worked for the State Department?

  Of the United States.

  Or that the fancy party he bought his girlfriend that backward dress for was a formal dinner with the President of France?

  Simply put, there was absolutely no way I could have known.

  First, stupid George never said so. Second, stupid George’s girlfriend never said so. Third, nothing about stupid George’s Dockers looked like State Department issue. Fourth, what on earth was somebody on a government salary doing buying his girlfriend a 3,800-euro Armani dress—which, with the crappy exchange rate, equals almost 4,800 American dollars? Or those Fuck Me boots, for that matter. I mean, is that what we are paying our tax dollars for? I think not. I think somebody at the old IRS ought to be taking a very close look at stupid George’s Form 1040. And finally, a very big fifth, what kind of bonehead representative of our very own United States government thinks it’s socially proper, much less a good idea, to take his extremely attractive doormat of a girlfriend to a formal state dinner with her left tit hanging out of her dress? Would you have known? I rest my case.

  I should also mention that, according to French news reports which Celestine told me about later, President Chirac was actually very happy with stupid George’s girlfriend’s dress. Which, if you consider the abysmal state of relations between the United States and France these days, was something of a diplomatic coup, which should count in my favor.

  But not according to George. The asshole.

  By now you have probably figured out that I did in fact see control freak George and his pushover girlfriend again. In fact, they came in the very next morning, after the state dinner.

  George was mad. Actually, he was way beyond mad. Crazed. Insane. Ranting and spitting and flailing his arms. I will not lower myself to his level and tell you the things he said about me. People should not talk like that, and do not deserve to have such vile insults preserved in print if they do.

  At one point I thought I was going to hit him. I didn’t, though. I was sure Mister Giorgio Armani would not approve. So I just stood there while jerkoff George sputtered all over me.

  The entire time, his girlfriend never said a word. Not one word.

  In the thick of George’s tirade, I glanced over at her and actually caught her eye. We looked at each other for a good ten seconds—long enough for me to be sure she knew the whole mess was George’s fault. He had insisted she buy that dress. He had made her humiliate hersel
f. Now he just needed to shift the blame to somebody else.

  When she couldn’t look me in the eye anymore, she stared at the floor instead.

  Even though I hadn’t done a thing, I felt mortified. It wasn’t enough that George had made a fool of his girlfriend in public; now he had to humiliate me, too. In front of all my coworkers. In front of my best friend. In front of all the customers in the store. Including a very tall, good-looking man who was browsing through the ties.

  Well excuse me for noticing him from the depths of my despair, but he was extremely good-looking.

  Then I forgot about him. Because I heard George saying that if I wasn’t fired, he was going to get the store closed down. I doubt he would have tried that. And if he had tried, I doubt he could have done it, State Department or no. But it was perfectly clear that he would keep on making a huge stink until he got his way. Huge stinks are bad for business. So they fired me.

  Just like that. On the spot. Old George wasn’t satisfied until the rest of the sales staff literally marched me out the door. Every single one of them. Including Celestine. For a minute, I was afraid she was going to hit George. There was no reason for both of us to get fired, so I caught her eye and shook my head no.

  Ten seconds later, I was standing on the sidewalk on Avenue George V. Unemployed. Stunned. I felt like I had run full speed into a wall. The curse of Grandma’s dress had struck again. I was so distracted, I didn’t even hear it when a man’s voice behind me asked, “What just happened?” I just kept staring at the store.

  Then all of a sudden I couldn’t see the store anymore. Because a man had stepped in front of me. A very tall man. A very good-looking very tall man. I was stunned, but I wasn’t blind. He was the man I had seen in the store, buying a tie while George spewed invective.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, with a distinctly American accent. He was at least six-foot-four, and he had to bend down a little to talk to me. He had curly black hair and dark brown eyes, and he spoke softly, like he wanted to be sure his words didn’t hurt me the way George’s had. It was awfully considerate of him. “I saw you in the store.”