“I made it with the countess in mind. I was thinking we should develop a couple of variations to show her when she comes.”
Madame dropped the sleeve as though finding it repulsive. “You tell me she likes clothing that is theatrical, then you try to entice her with this? You are wearing”—she moved her hand through the air as though struggling to find words—“a sheet! You are like a child who takes from the bed a sheet to wrap herself and pretends she is a goddess of ancient Rome.”
“It’s faille.”
“I know it is faille, and from my own supply. Vous pensez que je suis stupide? I don’t care if it is gold leaf. You haven’t made something notable of it. You’ve just hung it from your shoulders.”
“That’s not true. I worked very hard on this outfit, and I learned a lot making it. I designed it with hardly any seaming. I cut the jacket on the bias—”
“I see very well what you did. You minimized and rolled the hems. You completely eschewed interfacing and lining and other critical elements. Do you think I could not do this if I wanted to? You haven’t invented anything new.”
“No, but I don’t believe it’s widely done.”
“Of course not! Who would wear something like this? A lady needs a properly structured garment—and properly structured undergarments,” she added pointedly, “if she is to feel properly dressed.”
“It is highly structured—in a different way. The fabric does the work. You have to see how it moves when it’s not wet. You’ll love how it drapes. You’re the one who taught me to pay close attention to how fabrics perform.”
“It is one thing to understand the idiosyncrasies of a textile. It is quite another to be under its thrall. One doesn’t sacrifice dignity for the feel and drape of the fabric on the skin. A lady does not get dressed in order to feel naked.”
Maybe that was true, I thought, but was that so different from dressing to feel like a woman?
We had argued so long at the door that the damp fabric had begun to dry and anger had heated me through and through. I stood sketching at the closed windows, my drawing board propped against the long ledge. I would rather catch influenza than give Madame the pleasure of seeing me slink off to change and come pussyfooting back in something she deemed respectable.
The fabric, as it released its dampness, lifted away from my skin. It shifted as I drew, even as I filled my pages with harsh and rigid strokes.
Occasionally as I swiveled to pluck a piece of conté from the box on my worktable, I caught Madame watching me. Once, I heard her sigh.
Eventually, Madame swore quietly, got up from her table, and disappeared into the depths of the bulging racks and overstuffed shelving units that crowded her end of the studio. I could hear her restacking things. I heard her sliding wooden crates. When I paused in my sketching I thought I could hear her fingernails rub against cardboard as she dug through boxes. In the long pauses between movements, I pictured her running her hands over fabrics, lifting them to test the weight, feeling their movement in her grip and on her wrists—for I didn’t believe that even Madame could escape their thrall. Surely no one becomes a designer without a sense of wonder and want.
Madame Fiche emerged with a rectangle of white material folded neatly in her arms. She crossed the studio to stand on the other side of my worktable and held the fabric out to me. “Here.”
I wiped my hands on a rag. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“It is Japanese silk chiffon,” said Madame. “Perhaps the last piece in all of New York.”
“And?”
Madame cursed, low and filthy. She grabbed the top layer of fabric, lifted it, and in a swift and forceful motion snapped the entire yardage into the air.
The power of her movement passed like a wave through the weave, sweeping it open in a rippling flash of white. The silk captured the air below it and floated down, shimmering, falling as silently as snow, blanketing my table and streaming from it onto the pitted floor. Through the fabric on the table rose the form of my scissors, the screw at the joint of the scissors, my box of conté, the sticks of conté left lying outside the box, my key, the hole at the head of my key.
The chiffon was so delicately woven that it took on the finest imprint of whatever it touched, clinging like a lover to a lover. Yet where it draped from the table, it seemed made to caress only the air and to seek only its own soft folds.
“Oh,” I breathed.
Madame took several steps back. “Eh bien. Make something.” She crossed the studio, pulled her raincoat from the hook, and left.
The studio was magical in the moonlight; I hadn’t seen this before.
I had put down my sketch pad when the rain finally ceased for good, and opened the windows to let in the night air. It drifted in, past me, releasing the faille from my torso where the postures and perspirations of work had pressed it to my flesh, reminding me of that afternoon’s soaking and of warm honey on Consuelo’s skin.
I stretched my aching arms, left my table to extend my legs, and took in the smells of my workplace as I walked: the heavy scent of humid wool, the acerbic edge of chemical dyes, the decades of thick, oily lubricants that permeated the wood and the air.
My table was directly across from the door. Behind my chair was the long bank of windows, almost floor to ceiling, divided with bare metal frames. It was here that the silver moonlight came in. It bent over the radiators below the ledge, curled over the back of my chair, and reflected in the varnish of my tabletop. It arced across the floor and flowed as far as the sofa and the upholstered chairs, leaving Madame’s worktable on the other side of the studio in leaden darkness.
Somewhere in the depths of the building, rhythmic sounds of machinery changed their tune: a low background rumble was joined by a circular rise and fall. If I were a dancer, I would move to such sounds—iron cogs and creaking gears, turning belts, pistons rising and falling, toiling away.
I crossed the moonlight to my table, to my sketch pad. I thought of Antoine lifting off in his envelopes of silver metal, mere air holding the churning, laboring motors in the sky. I thought of Consuelo’s slender hands on my sheath of silk, the sliver-thin chrysalis between my body and the world. I thought of the body, of my own body, and I drew through the hours of the night. The paper was damp under my fingertips. The pencil was slick in my hand.
18
Waiting, like being kept from one’s calling, can drive a person mad. Here at the airport, it has driven the mother and twins away. Three hours in, I feel like I’ve moved up three spaces in line. There is no line, of course; there is no flight. But if a single plane taxis up to this airport, by God, I’m going to get on it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to Expo; the whole idea of a world’s fair makes me sad; but now that the heavens and Pan Am try to stop me, I will not allow the chance to be taken from my hands.
Two young sweethearts peel themselves off the floor and off each other. They mosey over (all the time in the world) to take the empty chairs, chatting drowsily in Quebecois accents. Their parents will be worrying. Even my mother still frets.
In New York, I had grown up largely out of her sight, growing unbridled—but not out of control—at the Alliance. In Montreal I outgrew Mother’s capacity to understand me. For the first time, I was something of an expat: lonely, reeling, grieving, and aggrieved. In the mornings, I would sit with my father in the cemetery. In the afternoons, I would join Mother for meager biscuits and tea. I came to live for the evenings at the café in Old Montreal, waiting on tables, pleasing customers, moving, always on, always wanted. All eyes on me.
In the darkness at the end of my shifts, doors locked, tables clear, I would remove my apron in the clattering, spattered kitchen, and the dishwasher—a wounded veteran at thirty—would tell me tales from the battlegrounds. Soon all but the final threshold of my chastity was being eroded by his chapped hands.
Mother knew I had talent but would not have been disappointed to see my ambitions pushed aside for a normal life with a good
man. But now I was not only unmarried but undomesticated. In Montreal I was becoming unfocused, uncontrollable, un-Canadian. Better if I’d stayed in New York, where it wasn’t as frowned upon to see a girl act so free. By the time she brought home Women’s Wear Daily, Mother had already asked when I might be ready to leave.
It had been weeks since Antoine told me he’d be going to Montreal for a few days. I sat near a window at the Alliance Française, staring out at the northeast corner of East 52nd and Second Avenue, having a drink. Was this what it had been like for his wife when his plane had been late returning, when his radio had gone silent, when the missions he flew took him halfway to his grave? All the while knowing that—no matter how great her despair, how many her tears, how her heart grieved to imagine her husband lost or dead—if he were to be found, if God guided him home, he would return undeterred to the cockpit again.
No wonder Consuelo was a mess: tormenting Antoine while professing her love, playing at a simpler life with Binty, amusing and soothing herself with fashion and (I took a long swallow of wine) with me.
I had been dropping by the Alliance regularly after work. Sometimes I came with Leo, mostly I arrived alone. I had to be seen by the membership; I needed to be remembered and respected here. But the conversations I had initiated had done nothing to advance my career. The expats couldn’t think of me as a fashion visionary: I was my father’s little angel, a good little teacher, the girl Émile had carried on his shoulders, who had steered him by the ears.
Little girl. They wouldn’t think that if a certain famous author, an older and discerning man, could be seen dining with me, tête-a-tête—not to conjugate the English for avoir but to collaborate on our own translation of amour. Little angel? If they could see what I used to get up to with Antoine!
The room grew warm. I crossed my legs at the knee.
Usually these days I ordered a first drink and jotted notes about my day to look busy while I waited to see if Antoine would show up. Sometimes I ordered a second or third while I watched East 52nd Street. Antoine could steer clear of the Alliance to avoid me, if that was how it was, but eventually I was sure to glimpse him visiting his friend Bernard Lamotte.
I had been to Bernard’s once, a year ago. By then, my meetings with Antoine had become more frequent and less productive, and I had become progressively more impatient for the next. Often we would take our lesson outside, strolling the streets. We would watch pigeons crowd against each other in the squares, Antoine giving each bird a name and personality, speaking their parts in pigeony tones. Once he cajoled me into a game of hide-and-seek with the squirrels in Central Park. I squeezed some English into each of our adventures. After all, I was his tutor; I could hardly pretend our outings were dates—until Antoine asked me to accompany him to an upcoming soirée.
“How can you say no to one of Lamotte’s parties? He is the sweetheart of the artistic community here. Your own uncle has commissioned him to create murals for his restaurant. You must meet him. You will like him; it is impossible to dislike Bernard Lamotte. You will come?”
I hesitated. Should a tutor go to a party with her student?
“I shouldn’t push you,” said Antoine. “Forget I asked. We will keep our regular lesson. Let’s meet at the side entrance.”
On the appointed evening, at the Alliance’s East 52nd entrance, he hooked my arm and led me directly across the street. We stood in front of a graceful old building with a restaurant on the ground floor.
“We’re having our lesson over dinner?”
He grinned. “We are going above the restaurant, to Le Bocal.”
The Fishbowl?
“It is what I call Bernard Lamotte’s studio. It’s just here.” He pointed out the name beside the door. “The party has started.”
“But I’m dressed for teaching.”
“Then come as my teacher. You would do me a service to translate at my side. So many of Lamotte’s friends are American.” His argument would have been resistible if not for his boyish pout.
The door at street level was not locked. Antoine led the way up the narrow staircase and around a bend. Emerging into the finely conceived main room at the top of the stairwell felt like entering the outdoors: the space was so harmoniously designed as to seem a creation of nature. The ceiling was high, the walls white. At the building’s southern face, three soaring arched windows crosshatched with metal frames caught the oblique lights of Second Avenue in their panes. Everywhere I looked, there was another half-hidden pocket of space: the juliette balconies with wrought iron details revealed through the two open windows; the intimate mezzanines along each of the brick side walls—internal balconies where one might sit to take a long, quenching view of the art that lined the walls. Through the windows I studied the view of the Alliance for a while, then turned to examine the back of the room. To the right of the door through which we had entered, a wide central staircase led to an open second level capped with a large skylight. Spaces layered here, too: an elevated walkway rimmed the floor, leading forward to the mezzanines and back to corner stairs and a shadowed door. As Antoine came up behind me and put a hand on the small of my back, I caught a glimpse of yet another room, on the far side of the grand staircase: its door was being closed on the sight of a man kissing a woman, her head bent back, her throat arched. It could have been a picture, or real, or a projection of my own absurdly hopeful heart. I took a glass from Antoine. We touched goblets, red to red, and brought them to our lips.
The party was in full swing. Jazz swooned. Men and women mingled and laughed. Some were beacons of beauty my age, in their prime; all seemed magnetic in their charismatic uniqueness. They propped against tables that were crowded with cans of brushes and layered in dabs and blobs of paint, as though unconcerned that their clothes could become ruined. They moved across the room surrounded by paintings on every side, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, bright cigarette pinpoints reflecting in the windows that fronted East 52nd. Dried sausages hung from a painting above a table that was laden with cheeses and breads, olives and antipasto, and carved with initials and autographs. Another painting was festooned with a string of garlic. At a small metal table near the fireplace, a solemn man in an expensive European suit leafed through a stack of illustrations while, not three feet away, a woman in a tuxedo stood against a wall, arms akimbo, as a similarly outfitted man carefully traced her outline onto a large sheet of paper tacked to the wall, layering his androgynous lover’s shape into numerous others that peeked from behind her form.
The host came over, wearing a neckerchief and a Greek sailor’s hat, smiling a charming gap-toothed smile. “So this is Mademoiselle Mignonne,” he said. “I am Bernard—or Lamotte, as you prefer. I know your uncle, your mother, and your father, may he rest in peace. I have heard much about you and your brother. I am astounded that we’ve never met.”
Antoine said, “Mignonne rarely goes out. She is always hard at work. Can you imagine, Lamotte? She hardly knows the meaning of play!”
“Ah, then it is good that she has come on the arm of a child. You know, my dear, Saint-Ex only looks like a mastodon; he may be older than you and I, but he is really just a boy.”
Antoine beamed as Bernard veered off to greet new guests. It was true, what Bernard had said: in many ways Antoine was more youthful than I was. I spun the wine in my glass and imagined the room swirling, too—with my date and me in the center, gazing into each other’s eyes.
I thought: I will kiss him tonight.
I took his arm and he led me around the room to make introductions. André, Celina, James, Kathleen … The names were numerous. Some were familiar: several were well-known artists, and there was a recognizable actor or two. Someone had brought their child to the party. I was crouched chatting with the little boy, Norman, when a perfectly polished red-haired woman approached Antoine and Bernard. She faced Antoine, staring brazenly up into his face.
“I’ve wanted to meet you for an awfully long time,” she said in English.
“Netta Corelle,” said Bernard. He explained in French, “She is an actress.”
Netta turned to Bernard. “Tell Mr. Saint-Exupéry that I am in love with him.”
Bernard smiled noncommittally.
She put a seductive hand on Antoine’s lapel. “Tell him I am inviting him to take me home.”
“Married to a powerful director,” said Bernard in French. “Don’t be a fool, Saint-Ex.”
“Did you tell him?” the woman asked.
Antoine’s face had flushed. His expression seemed half confused, half intrigued, and just a little too pleased.
I drank down the rest of my wine and stood up.
Netta Corelle shot me a dismissive glance and turned back to the men. “I mean it, Bernard. I’ve read everything he’s written. Tell him I love him.”
“Antoine,” I said, “I hear there’s a terrace. Will you show it to me?”
With an apologetic smile at the actress, Antoine took his leave.
Grasping my hand, he said, “It is a rooftop with a garden. Wait until you see it!” He brought me to a door half hidden by a curtain in a corner. We made our way up steep stairs, my hand small in his, and through a glassed enclosure with a wind chime hung on its door. On the rooftop, I made out the outline of a brick barbecue or broad chimney in a corner. Other shapes were chairs, a table suitable for a café patio, and fat metal structures—rounded and squarish conduits and pipes—that gleamed dully in many angles of moonlight. Bernard was growing things in pots and narrow beds. Plump shrubs ringed the roof’s perimeter. Across the street were the windows and flags of the Alliance Française.
“Come to the edge,” said Antoine.
The air was crisp and clean. Dozens of stars glimmered overhead.
“ ‘A sky as pure as water bathed the stars,’ ” I quoted—the first words of Antoine’s novel Southern Mail.
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