Spring Collection

by Judith Krantz

  “Of course I saw it,” she admitted, thinking that he should be forced to get his hair cut, as she had been urging him to for months. A serious couturier shouldn’t look like a wild young art student sculpted by Michelangelo, racing around Paris in a tweed jacket, flannel trousers and a scarf flung around his neck.

  “Then you remember the last line of the movie, that tomorrow will be another day, that she will worry tomorrow, something like that? You see, I’m just not in the mood for the telephone.” Marco gave his secretary a smile that told her that he wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone but her, a smile that invited her into his world. “I need to take a walk … I need to escape. Perhaps I am even a little nervous, no, Madame Elsa? Wouldn’t that be natural? Aren’t you a little nervous for me?”

  She nodded, reluctantly. She’d worked in couture too long not to be nervous before any collection, but nevertheless, those phone calls.…

  “But we mustn’t be nervous, must we, you and I?” Marco told her, leaning on her desk and looking at her intently. “Every designer in Paris gets nervous at the same time each season, why be like the others? Come, let’s change the subject, Madame Elsa,” he said, tapping lightly on her arm with an air of gentle command. “How pleasing I find your name. Do you realize that even with familiarity, it sings in my ear, it reverberates?… Elsa … yes, you are fortunate indeed, and so is your husband.”

  “Thank you,” she said, suppressing a gratified smile. “As you know, it was my grandmother’s name.”

  “Old world and gracious. Yes, it suits you. If dresses were still given names, as they used to be, I would baptize my first dress ‘Elsa’ in your honor. Now, I leave you to hold back the barbarians as they pound on the gates.”

  “But what if Monsieur Necker calls again?” she asked in alarm. “Or Madame Wilcox?”

  “Ah, Madame Elsa, how can you ask? You, a woman of imagination as well as charm? Make up something … I count entirely on your tact. After all, even Monsieur Necker doesn’t expect me to be shut in here all day like a schoolboy when inspiration is everywhere. Tell Madame Wilcox nothing. I’ve disappeared, that’s all you know. A domani, cara Madame Elsa.”

  Marco escaped his secretary, that superior, righteous and vigilant woman Necker had installed in his office to make sure that he was kept in order at all times. It had taken a few days of observation before he’d discovered her areas of weakness: her still youthful complexion, her well-shaped ears, her slender ankles and her first name. She’d never be of any use to Necker again, for now she took her orders only from him. He could bring a blush to her cheeks anytime he cared to.

  Marco’s workrooms and studio were installed in a building on the Rue Clément-Marot, around the corner from GN’s headquarters. As he headed for the street, he suddenly remembered a dress that he had ripped apart yesterday after seeing it on his fitting model. He ran up a flight of stairs to the atelier in which the dress was being resewn by his most experienced hand, the redoubtable Madame Ginette, who had worked at Lanvin before World War II and after the war at Dior, until she’d been lured away to Saint-Laurent. Now, a decade and a half after her well-earned retirement, Necker had persuaded her to come back to work for this particular collection. Marco found her bending over a seam and he took her shoulders gently in his hands as she paused to look up at him, putting down the work.

  “So, ma toute belle, do we make progress?”

  “You know as well as I do that working these layers of chiffon on the bias is slow work,” she answered, wearily, taking off her glasses with a sigh. “I’m exhausted.”

  “You don’t want me to look at the miracle you have wrought?” He ran his finger up her chin and tugged lightly at her ear.

  “All you want is to see if I can save this dress,” she grumbled. “When you took it apart yesterday, you might have been more careful, you tore a seam in several places.”

  “You’re absolutely right. If I’d given it to you from the beginning it would never have happened. But the seams are a disgrace, admit it, chérie. Half of these young girls don’t know their craft. I’m afraid I lost my temper.”

  “You’re a wild, crazy Italian,” she reprimanded him, crooningly. “Monsieur Dior would never lose his temper, like a lamb he was, poor man.”

  “And Monsieur Saint-Laurent?” he asked, taking her worn hand and inspecting her fingertips.

  “Never a cross word. A true gentleman.” And even when Saint-Laurent had been young and the toast of Paris, even when she’d still been susceptible to charm, he’d never been able to sweet talk her like Monsieur Marco, she thought. Oh, these Italians, they should be barred from entering France at the borders. They were irresistible with their eyes, their smiles. Particularly this one.

  “You have beautiful hands, Madame Ginette,” Marco said reflectively. “They show why your work is perfect.”

  “They are just hands,” she said, flurried. “An old woman’s hands,” she added, trying to draw away. He held them firmly.

  “No, you don’t realize—when you’ve worked with beauty, year after year, the hand reveals it.” He released her hands slowly, touching each fingertip in turn, and brushing it with a light kiss. “Now, may I see that seam? Bravissimo! Exactly what I’d hoped for—you’ve rescued it. This dress will be the hit of the collection.”

  She straightened up with melting pride and smiled at him shyly.

  He made her feel young again, bless him. But to rip a seam! Ah well, he was full of passion, this Italian, but he needed a haircut.

  “For certain! Those were the days. Until tomorrow, ma toute belle, I count on you.”

  As he took the staircase down, Marco thought that it would be at least a week before Ginette started threatening to leave again, speaking of her fatigue and her advanced age. Perhaps two weeks, if he was lucky, because he needed her skills. When it came time to fit the samples on the models that tiresome old hag would be invaluable.

  He should have taken his coat, he realized as he walked a few blocks. It was so sunny that he had been fooled into thinking it might, just for once, be warm in this city, but no, it was a true Paris cold, mean and damp under the deceptive sunlight. He turned into a little Italian restaurant where he sat at the empty bar and ordered a double espresso.

  Oh Christ, he needed a rest! A change! And a rest or a change were the last things he could hope for in these next few weeks before the day on which his dreams either became true or he was shown up to the fashion press as a failure. Shown up before every important journalist and buyer from all over the world, shown up before CNN, shown up before Vogue and Zing and Bazaar, before the New York Times and Le Figaro and eventually before the smallest newspaper in the tiniest provincial town sleeping deep in the countryside of la France Profonde.

  Why hadn’t he ever realized, in his flood of ambition, that no one was judged to the harsh public degree that a new couturier was? A fledging actor could play his first part without anyone knowing about it unless it was a success. A potential tennis champion could lose an early match without fearing ridicule from all sides. But every woman considered herself a judge of clothes.

  Fashion had become the world’s most written about, most photographed spectator sport and each new collection was greeted with a chorus of praise or jest or indifference from the editor-in-chief of Elle to the shopgirls who worked at the Prix-Unique. He could just imagine them abandoning their counters to bend over the photos in the papers with the same serene yet beady-eyed, judgmental gaze adopted by those valued couture clients who were ritually seated in the first row next to the runway.

  “Lombardi?—hmmm—never heard of him, somebody new I guess. What do you think? Yes, I agree, not my style, even if I could afford it. Oh, just look at Claudia in that cute little Chanel jacket … now I wouldn’t mind having one like that, would you? You could even wear it with jeans.”

  Now that the moment he worked toward all of his life was almost upon him, was it possible that he couldn’t handle it, Marco asked himself, enraged
at the scornful, dismissive words he’d conjured up. Was this the way other designers before him had felt before their first collections?

  There was no way to know, no one to ask, for designers, like rival opera singers or two prizefighters before a boxing match, didn’t get together to share their inner feelings with each other. He tried to imagine the great designers having a fit of insecurity, as he was doing now, and failed. Saint-Laurent, of course, he’d made a fetish out of his ritualistic nervous attacks, the martyr to fashion, the tormented Christ-figure dying over and over for the sake of each new collection, but there was only room for one such genius.

  Marco ordered another espresso, glad that he was still alone, that no one had yet arrived for a before-dinner drink. There were three dozen things he should be doing on this winter day that had turned to twilight outside the window, a hundred details he should be inspecting, and, yet, for the love of God, he didn’t even know who the three new models for his show would be. What excuse did Necker have to impose on him three green girls when he absolutely needed the security of using none but experienced models who made anything look good, supreme girls the photographers would automatically focus on. But no, Necker had chosen to meddle, declaring a contest as if it were the Judgment of Paris all over again. How could Necker have dreamed up such a criminally stupid stunt?

  He could kill Necker! All Marco’s apprehension was suddenly channeled toward the man who had put him in this position. What right did that Swiss bourgeois have to impose his own taste on the presentation of the collection? Did his financial backing give him a free rein to call all the shots? He was the one who decided to show the spring collection in the great, cloud-frescoed space of the spa and beauty salon that had been built under the Ritz, where the vast pool could be covered over and the gigantic room could be turned into a venue for any kind of party or exhibition.

  “It must be a real gala, Marco,” Necker had announced. “We’ll show at night, black tie, followed by a buffet. That’s the only way to start with an unknown. The press and buyers have such impossible days merely covering the established designers that they’d never be able to fit you in otherwise. At collection time hype and megalomania take over. A more distinguished approach is necessary.”

  How the devil did Necker know? He was a businessman, a successful businessman but a mere businessman, an owner of fabric mills, a buyer of other people’s talents, a merchandiser, a hawker of the fleeting illusion of hope wrapped in perfume bottles—not a designer, for the love of God, not an artist who had to reach into his own guts and imagination and find a way to create something new.

  Ah, but Necker was smart. He gave the son of a bitch that. Smart enough to make sure that he, Marco, the engine that pulled the train, was kept short of fuel. Of course there was no way in which he would have been able to suitably launch a major collection on his own; he needed enormous funds to back him.

  “You’ll get your salary, Marco, a very large salary, you have to admit. But I have no intention of giving you a piece of the profits. In the first place, there may never be a profit. GN is taking a calculated risk in backing someone new. This is a speculative risk for me, an investment that may fail. I’ll lose money on the couture, like everyone else. Each dress we sell will cost more to make than you can charge for it. You know the couture only exists to get publicity. The ready-to-wear will take several seasons to prove how successful it may become and the perfume, if there is to be one, may be years away. Marco, I admire your talent, but business is business.”

  All his life Marco had been a wage slave, assisting and designing for others, and this was his only chance to have his own label, so he’d taken it, of course, as Necker knew he would. He’d never forgive the Swiss for his refusal to allow as little as one crumb from the table to fall into his hands. Where would fashion be without the handful of men and the few women who had creative talent?

  He caught himself trying to find a cigarette in his pocket. In another minute he’d be ordering a pack from the barman. These hours of freedom, instead of calming him, were proving counterproductive. What he needed was a woman, Marco realized suddenly. How long had it been? Two, perhaps three weeks since he’d had the time to spare for sex?

  Yes, a woman, an uncomplicated woman who would not need one word of the endless seduction the harpies at work required every day. A brief, brutal relief from nervous tension, the kind of animal release only a whore could give you, and he never used whores. An appraising look came into his eyes as Marco mulled over the possibilities available to him with the kind of close attention he’d give to the menu in a new restaurant.

  After a few seconds he sighed with resignation. He didn’t have the time to bother finding anyone except Peaches. She had wearied him for at least six months, her attempts at possessiveness angered him, her utter availability made him disdain her. Even now, when she should be following her enviably worldly schedule, when she should be in New York for a dozen galas, she was shamelessly hanging around Paris trying to reach him. Was it possible that she was the same woman he had once, for only an evening, imagined to be, if not out of his reach, at least difficult to attain? A woman with whom he had bothered to make the kind of quasi-intellectual conversation designed to impress? Yet how could he have expected that Dior’s best customer, a woman world famous for her wealth and social standing, would be so easy, so avid, so lacking in the dignity he considered proper to her age?

  Nevertheless, Marco decided, physically she was exactly what he had prescribed for himself, an open pair of thighs with no questions asked. He made a quick phone call to make sure that she was in her suite and in a minute he was on his way to the Plaza, right around the corner.

  Peaches felt pleased with herself as she put down the phone. She’d told Marco to come right on over, in a sweet, level voice, but she hadn’t told him that she was giving a cocktail party for a good-sized group of visiting Texans, some of whom were already in the large sitting room scarfing up her caviar.

  Instead of the discreet personal maid who normally ushered him into the suite, a white-coated butler opened the door as he rang, and a waiter took his scarf.

  “Madame Wilcox is in the large sitting room, Monsieur,” the waiter said. Marco had imagined that Peaches would be lounging expectantly in the smaller sitting room, by the flattering light of her artfully small lamps, wearing one of the hundred elaborate dressing gowns she possessed. He was taken aback when she came toward him, leaving a cluster of her compatriots by the fireplace. She was very Catherine the Great tonight, wearing a red velvet dinner suit with a closely fitted, gold embroidered jacket, its cuffs and wide skirt both trimmed with bands of sable.

  He took her hand and kissed it on the inside of her wrist, knowing that not one of her guests would realize that his gesture indicated a degree of intimacy that should never be revealed in public.

  “Champagne?” she asked, with her flashing, red-lipped smile, as if she’d seen him five minutes earlier.

  “Why didn’t you warn me you had guests?”

  “But Marco,” she said, opening her beautiful eyes in mock surprise, “every one of these old gals is a good potential customer. You have all evening to charm them, we’re going on to dinner later.”

  “I’m not here to sell dresses.”

  “Really?” she retorted, as if surprised, leading him into the room. “Come on in and say hello to the Andersons, Selma and Ralph, from Fort Worth, and these lovely folks are Betty Lou and Hank Curtis from Houston. This is Marco Lombardi, everybody, he’s a dress designer and you’re going to be hearing a lot about him.”

  As he shook hands with the Texans and heard Peaches greet another couple who were just entering the room, Marco promised himself that he would leave in three minutes, simply slip out of the room, and walk down the hall to the elevator without even saying good-by to Peaches. He asked for a Scotch, drank it quickly and accepted another.

  Peaches, Marco noted, as he was introduced to more of her guests, was enjoying this to the same
degree that her friends ignored him, too delighted to see each other to bother wasting more than a quick smile on some unplaceable foreigner. Although he spoke French with fluency, and his infrequent mistakes were always regarded as charming, he had never felt equally at home in English, a language he knew he spoke with a distinct Italian accent and a sometimes imprecise grasp of grammar. Standing slightly apart from the others, Marco observed Peaches flaunting her fake indifference as brilliantly as the great and indisputably genuine diamonds at her ears. Oh, yes, she knew perfectly well that she made her expensively gowned friends look drab and provincial in contrast to her vividly blond presence. He found himself in a state of sudden fury as he surveyed her, the center of everyone’s attention. So she thought that he would stick around through dinner with these creatures, did she? He crossed the room and took her by the elbow, drawing her to one side.

  “I want to speak to you.”

  “That’s not possible right now, can’t you see that?”

  “I’m going into your bedroom. Follow me.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” Peaches said, her eyes sparkling with malice.

  “Do you want a scandal?”

  “Don’t be silly, Marco.”

  “I’ll make one this instant and your friends will tell everyone in Texas, I promise you.”

  “That’s blackmail!”

  “Follow me, I warn you,” he repeated, and wove his way across the large room, across the entry, through the smaller sitting room and into her bedroom. A few minutes later she joined him there, flushed with triumph.

  “Are you happy now?” Peaches asked, as if speaking to a child. “What exactly do you think you’re proving besides appallingly bad manners?”

  “Close the door behind you.”

  “I’m going back to the party,” she said, turning away.

  Swiftly he pushed her aside, locked the heavy door and gripped her hand so tightly that she gasped in the astonishment of pain.

  “I’m going to fuck you. Now. Here.”