by Tucker Shaw
“What about vintage?” I ask. “Maybe we should go to a consignment shop, one of the fancy ones. We could find an old Givenchy there. I mean, wouldn’t an original Givenchy, one that could have been made by Givenchy himself, be better than a current one that he had nothing to do with?”
“No way,” Bryan says. “Think about it. Audrey never wore old clothes, except in movies sometimes. She always dressed au courant. Do you think she’d be wearing a 1960s outfit if she were alive today?”
“He makes a point,” Trina says. “She really was ahead of her time, not behind.”
“I do,” Bryan agrees. “I mean, her dresses look vintage to us now, but they were modern at the time. Besides, haven’t we had enough of a retro moment? You know, standing outside Tiffany’s in period costume? At six in the morning? Which, may I add, corresponds to three A.M. in Bel-Air.”
“Yes,” I say, but I’m not so sure. I always prefer vintage clothes. And I can’t imagine Audrey in Versace.
We make our way through the crowded lobby and toward the front door. “Pardon us,” Bryan says to a threesome of gray-haired women in bouclé jackets and big globe sunglasses walking arm in arm through the lobby. He thrusts out his arm to hold us back while the women pass. They’re laughing together, like ancient friends.
“That’s us one day,” Trina says.
“I’m the one in the middle,” Bryan says. “With the leopard-print scarf.”
We flank Bryan, tucking our arms into his elbows, and step in unison toward the exit.
“To Barneys!” Bryan says.
Just before we reach the door, a figure steps in front of us. A small, roundish girl, wearing a black T-shirt that doesn’t quite cover her stomach, which is spilling out over a pair of black jeans. She’s short, maybe five feet. A camouflage hat covers her eyes, and a purple JanSport pack hangs off one shoulder. I almost trip over her foot.
“Gemma?” says the girl, reaching out to catch my fall.
The three of us stop. I cock my head backward and tighten my grip on Bryan. “I’m sorry?”
“Bryan?” the girl says, pointing at Bryan.
Bryan takes a slow step backward. “You must be mistaken.”
“I’m not mistaken,” says the girl. She thrusts her hand into her backpack and pulls out a piece of paper, a photograph of Bryan in a pair of postman shorts and a blazer at his junior class picnic, printed from his Facebook page. “It’s you.”
Trina takes a step forward. “What’s this about?”
“And you,” she says, fumbling in her knapsack. “You must be Trina.” She holds up a photo of Trina, a selfie she took in her uniform from the Copper Corral.
Trina turns to me and scrunches her eyebrows. “Is this on the itinerary?”
I don’t answer.
“Do I call for security, or do you?” Bryan asks. He clears his throat, ready to shout.
“No! Wait, don’t,” says the girl. She holds up her hand. “Can I talk to you guys for a minute?”
“My mother told me never to talk to strangers,” Trina says.
“I’m not a stranger.”
“Who are you and what do you want?” Bryan asks.
“I’m sorry to surprise you like this,” says the girl. She takes off her camouflage hat and looks at the floor. “I’m Telly.”
“What?” Trina says. “Could you repeat that?”
“Telly. My name is Telly. From your Tumblr page? Oh Yeah, Audrey!?”
“Oh, my God,” I say. “It’s you.”
10:15 A.M.
I’m sorry for all the stuff I posted on the Tumblr page,” Telly says after we have all filed out of the Four Seasons and onto the Fifty-seventh Street sidewalk. “I’m really not that, you know, mean. I just, I don’t know why, but sometimes I get—”
An ambulance whizzes by, siren blaring, drowning Telly out before she can finish her thought. The sidewalk is full of tourists and ladies who look like they’re heading for the salon. A pair of girls in high pigtails saunter past. A pair of young guys in jeans with snaps on the pockets follow them.
“Sometimes you get what?” I ask, stern.
She hooks her thumbs into her JanSport straps and looks across the street. Ice-blue eyes, pale skin. I can tell she’s a beautiful girl, a bit younger than we are, but she seems exhausted.
“You just get what?” Trina barks. “Stupid?”
“Stupid? Or jealous?” Bryan says and looks down at Telly’s muffin-top. “I can’t imagine why.” He raises his eyebrow in a harsh, snarky way, and it makes me feel bad for Telly.
“I said I’m sorry,” Telly says. “I’m trying to make up for it.”
“For what?” Trina says. “For being a moron? Good luck with that.” She steps toward Telly, straightening her back to make herself look even taller than she is.
“I don’t do it on purpose,” Telly says. “I don’t know if you’d understand. But it’s, like, when I see really skinny girls like Audrey Hepburn or whoever I just get—”
I really want this moment to end. I want the three of us to get back to our perfect day, itinerary or not. It’s all been going so well. And I don’t like seeing this side of Bryan and Trina. It feels almost cruel.
“Look,” I say, hoping to speed this moment up and get out of here. “We accept your apology, Telly, we really do. But we have things to do and not a lot of time. No offense.”
“Wait a minute, Gemma,” Bryan says, slowly removing his tortoiseshell sunglasses. “Not so fast. I’m offended.” He turns toward Telly and waves his sunglasses in her face. “What did you just say? ‘Skinny girls like Audrey Hepburn or whoever’? What do you mean, ‘whoever’? This is Audrey Hepburn you’re talking about!”
“It’s OK, Bryan,” I say, surprised that he wants to get into this. “Why don’t we just go?” I take his forearm.
“Well?” Bryan asks.
Telly looks up at Bryan. “Listen. I didn’t get it at first, but now I do. When I first came to your Tumblr page all I saw was another super-skinny girl in fancy clothes and it annoyed me. But then I started wondering why the three of you were so obsessed with her and I eventually looked her up.”
“And?” Trina says.
“And I learned about her. And I rented some of her movies. And I read her biography.”
“And?” Trina says again.
“And now I understand,” Telly says.
“Understand what?” Bryan says.
“That she was amazing. Is amazing. I mean, all that work she did for UNICEF. Did you see the Life magazine photos of her in Ethiopia during that famine in the 1980s? Holding those starving children like they were her own?” Suddenly Telly is talking fast. “I did a paper on her for my world history class last week. I know, you aren’t usually supposed to write about movie stars for history class, but I’ve never been a big fan of history class anyway, so I convinced my teacher to let me write about celebrities and humanitarian work and how when famous people get involved with a cause, it influences other people to get involved, too. More money gets raised and more people get help. Audrey Hepburn is the perfect example of that. I mean, I know I used to hate her for being so pretty and everything, but when I looked at what she did, I became a fan. I got an A on my paper, which was the first A that I ever got in history. Anyway, she was one of the first famous people to acknowledge tragedies. And to get so close to them. I mean, way before Angelina Jolie. Audrey really cared about other people more than herself. Who cares about her clothes?”
“Who cares about her clothes?” Bryan asks with astonishment, getting angrier with each word. But Telly doesn’t take a breath.
“I even read this one book when I was working on the paper and she was quoted as saying something about how her greatest ambition wasn’t to be a movie star, it was to be a mother. I mean, isn’t that the total opposite of pretty much every other celebrity in the universe? All anyone ever thinks about these days is how to be the next reality star or whatever, and they’re all just so fake, and not that I’m, lik
e, dying to be a mother anytime soon, but I would like to be able to make a difference in someone else’s life. Maybe it’ll be a kid of my own or maybe it’ll be another kid who needs help. I don’t know. Studying Audrey Hepburn really opened my eyes to that kind of thing. To being there for other people.”
As she’s talking, I’m watching her eyes, and I can see that she means what she’s saying. Maybe she talks a lot, but she talks like someone who has something important to say and needs to say it. Telly sounds like someone who is almost . . . I don’t know . . . wise. Someone who’s learned something about life and gets it. Like she sees beyond Audrey Hepburn’s obvious beauty and straight into something deeper.
Telly takes a breath. “It’s what matters most, you know,” she says. She nods at me, as though she’s saying it just for me to hear. “Being there when others choose to walk away.”
“Dahling!” Trina yells, interrupting Telly. “You’ve made your point. You like Audrey Hepburn. Congratulations. We have to go.” She turns to me. “Aren’t we on some kind of schedule?”
“I guess we are,” I say. I wrinkle my forehead as if to say to Telly, I’m sorry.
“Wait another minute,” Bryan says, grabbing Trina’s arm. “I want to know exactly how this girl found us in the first place.”
Telly reaches back into her knapsack and pulls out her smartphone. “Instagram.” She swipes her finger across the screen—first a picture Trina took of me playing the grand piano (#fourseasons), then the pancakes (#dinerbreakfast), then a photo of me and Bryan out on Fifth Avenue from this morning (#hollyandpaul), then a selfie under the Tiffany’s sign (#diamonds).
“That’s a cute one,” Trina mutters, pointing at the selfie. “Still, it’s kind of stalkery for you to have all these. It’s disturbing.” She scowls.
“I’m not stalking you,” Telly says. I can tell she means it. “I’m really sorry.”
“You said that already,” Bryan says. “The question is, what exactly is your point? What do you want?” He looks her up and down again. “Fashion tips?”
“That’s enough,” I say as I see Telly wince. Bryan softens.
“I don’t want anything. There’s just something I thought you’d want to know about. Look at this.” Telly holds out a newspaper, folded open to a small article next to a photograph of Audrey Hepburn. “Right here, at the top of the page.”
Bryan swipes the paper from her and starts to read.
HEPBURN WARDROBE TO BE AUCTIONED TODAY
Call her the eternal muse. The ultimate fashionista. And now, the saleswoman of the year.
Audrey Hepburn’s personal wardrobe—45 pieces kept in cold storage by her estate since her death two decades ago—will be auctioned off at an exclusive sale today at noon.
The items on the block range from a simple pillbox hat valued at $4,000 to the iconic black gown worn by Hepburn in the opening credits of Breakfast at Tiffany’s—a gown Sotheby’s expects to fetch north of $100,000.
Many of the lots are one-of-a-kind pieces created by famed French couturier Hubert de Givenchy, the flamboyant designer who frequently called Hepburn his muse. Givenchy, now 86, lives in France.
All the profits from the auction will go to UNICEF, the United Nations charity that channels aid to impoverished children around the globe. It’s an organization Hepburn was closely associated with. Sotheby’s hopes to take in more than a million dollars by the end of the afternoon.
“On their own merits, the clothes would be beautiful,” said Steven Kolb, Executive Director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. “But what makes them so special is that they belonged to one of the most fashionable and beautiful women in history, Audrey Hepburn.”
“We expect aggressive bidding,” said a source close to the sale. “Audrey Hepburn has international appeal, and French design from the mid-century is hot right now, especially in Asia. I bet a lot of this stuff will end up in Japan and China.”
“Wow,” I say. “What I wouldn’t give to see that. Can you imagine being in the same room with the hat she wears when she says ‘How do I look?’ to Paul on her way out the door to go see Sally Tomato in jail?”
“No kidding,” Trina says, her face softening to a smile. “Or that trench coat she wears at the end, when she goes looking for Cat, the cat, in the alley in the rain?”
“Right?” Telly says. “Or that pink dress she’s wearing when she finds out what happened to Fred? Remember? When she’s starting to date the Brazilian, José da Silva Pereira, who of course dumps her after she gets arrested for taking the weather report from Sally Tomato . . .”
I look at Trina. “She clearly knows her stuff,” I say.
“What’s your point?” Trina says.
I take Trina’s arm and Bryan’s, and we form a little circle a few steps away from Telly. “Look, I’m just saying, I think we should go.”
“But what about the itinerary?” Trina says.
“We can change it,” I say. “Just a little. Just enough to go to the auction. I mean, it’s spontaneous. Don’t you think Audrey would have gone? I mean, Holly. What do you think, Bryan?”
“Of course we should go,” Bryan says.
“She’s not coming, is she?” Trina asks. She and Bryan look over at Telly, who is tapping on her smartphone. Her backpack starts to slip off her shoulder and she hoists it back on.
“I think we should ask her to come,” I say. “I think she’s nice. I mean, we wouldn’t even know about the auction unless—”
Trina raises an eyebrow and looks over at Telly, then at Bryan, then back at me. “If she promises to use fewer words,” she says, loudly enough for Telly to hear.
“Sorry,” Telly says, stepping closer to us. “I just sometimes, I don’t know, get kind of mixed up about what I want to say and how I want to say it and—”
“Stop!” Trina says. She holds her finger up. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“I’ll try,” Telly says. She shrugs and smiles. It’s an honest smile, like she’s relieved.
Bryan is already on his phone. “Hello, Sotheby’s?”
10:35 A.M.
He tries for twenty minutes, but Bryan can’t get on the Sotheby’s guest list—even a platinum card has limits. But he convinces us we should try to go anyway. “Let’s just show up. If we act like we belong there, maybe they’ll let us in. And if not, we’ll just pretend we’re with someone else, someone who’s already inside.”
“Like who? How are we going to know who’s inside?” Trina asks.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” he says. “You can get in almost anywhere if you call yourself a ‘personal assistant,’ you know. Just pick a fancy name, like Dalton or de La Croix. ‘I’m Ms. Dalton’s assistant,’ Try it.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“I know it’s not on the itinerary,” Bryan says. “But, Gemma, have you ever crashed an auction before?”
“Um, no?”
“Trina?”
“No.”
“And what’s the theme for our day?”
Trina and I nod. “Right,” she says.
“What’s the theme?” Telly asks.
Trina and I just look at each other and smile.
“What’s the theme?” Telly asks again. “Guys?”
“Should we tell her?” I say.
“Let her figure it out,” Trina says. “It’s a test.” She smiles at Telly. It’s a half smile, but it’s something.
“We’re at least going to try,” Bryan says. “What’s the worst that can happen? They kick us out and we go back to plan A: Barneys. Are you with me?”
“Yes, sir,” Trina says with a mock salute.
“I’m in!” I say, thrusting my hand in the air.
“What’s the theme?” Telly asks.
11:15 A.M.
I am bewildered and astonished and so excited—just hours ago I was standing in a shared bathroom in a cheap hotel, and now I’m driving through the Upper East Side in a huge black SUV from the Four
Seasons. Bryan asks the driver to take a roundabout route, pointing out some of the most expensive shops in the world as we drive past: Armani, Valentino, Chanel. Names I’ve only read in magazines but never knew I’d ever see.
“Maybe we should just stop at Barneys,” Trina says. “You did say no vintage, and obviously everything at the auction is going to be vintage.” She’s joking, of course.
“Um, I think this qualifies as an exception, right, Bryan?” I say as we pass Barneys.
“Girls, focus, please. What we’re going to see is way beyond ‘vintage.’ These are museum-quality pieces. And I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I have a feeling the stuff will be too pricey even for me. I mean, even I have my limits.”
“Bryan, you disappoint me,” Trina says. “Where’s that good old Bel-Air optimism?”
I smack Trina on the arm. “It’ll be good inspiration,” I say. “For when we go shopping later.”
“I’m not going in,” Telly says.
“What?” I say. “Why not?”
“Look at me!” Telly says. “I’m in jeans. I have a JanSport backpack on!”
“You? What about me, dahlings?” Trina asks. “I’m in yoga pants. Would Audrey Hepburn ever wear yoga pants to a public event?”
“If she did,” I say, “she’d make them look fabulous. Just like you do.”
Trina scowls. “No, seriously. Yoga pants!”
“She’s right, Trina,” Bryan says. “Yoga pants look rich, like you’re rich enough not to care. Like you’re just fitting in this auction between a visit to the nutritionist and a pedicure. Like pawing over a bunch of dresses worn by the most beautiful woman in history is a big yawn.”
“Uh-huh,” Trina says, obviously not believing him.
“But what about me?” Telly says. “I’m in jeans, and I feel like a slob and . . . forget it. I’ll just wait out here. You guys go in.”
“You’re coming,” I say. “We wouldn’t even be here without you.”
Bryan grabs Telly’s cap. “Give me that.” He stuffs it into her backpack. “Smooth down your hair. Who has a rubber band?”
