by Annabel Lyon
The queen left her in the change room, bearing away the green-and-orange knit dress. Sara stood for a long time in her underwear, waiting.
When she finally came out, the queen had rung up the hideous dress and was wrapping it in black tissue. Sara wondered if this was the price of trying on the deWinter. It worked like that down here—the queen read her mind and set her tests. Three tests: the peacoat, the scarf, and now this thing.
Sara paid and took the now-familiar Simenon bag. “I want to try it on,” she repeated, instead of saying goodbye.
La petite rouge and la petite noire, that’s what they were called in the spring of 1971. The designer was the legendary Paul Destry; the dresses came from one of his final collections. He was interested in the physics of clothing, planes and curves in motion. He had always been melancholic and disappointed in his own work. He refused all interviews, even after the dresses became famous, and subsequently abandoned fashion to dedicate his last years to mathematics. Shortly before his death in 1974, in the “Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées,” he published an article on the configuration of ferns, a little-known precursor to Mandelbrot’s 1980 articulation of fractal geometry.
The red was the popular one. It was a boat-neck shift, slightly asymmetrical and severely cut. The drop from shoulder to hem was sheer. And yet it flattered, oddly; according to Sara’s secret book, Saint Laurent himself was supposed to have bought one just to slit the seams and see where the curves were hidden. The red was rubies in blood. Women got married in it; women wanted to be buried in it. The black was less popular. People found it harsh.
The dress fell out of fashion abruptly, in August of 1971, when the photographer Paul deWinter was arrested for the rape and murder of one of his models. They had just finished a shoot inspired by Persephone in the underworld. The model was seventeen and didn’t know the myth. She looked like a baby owl. DeWinter berated her for being old and fat, then followed her home and ate pomegranate with his coffee for breakfast the next morning, the very pomegranate from the shoot, while her body cooled in the next room. He then photographed the corpse: the model’s own petite noire pushed up to the waist, thumb-bruises on the throat. There: Persephone in hell.
The photos were shown at trial and the dress got its name. French intellectuals claimed the photos as art. French women held chic parties to burn their deWinters. It was the seventies. Ten years later, the dress had a brief revival on the London punk scene, for the shock value. Then it disappeared.
Black was a child’s idea of sophistication, the author wrote. An American’s idea. The little black dress—stupid! Coco Chanel was a peasant. For her mother’s funeral, the author made a point of wearing white, like a Viet woman. It was a philosophical issue. The author approved of the petite rouge, and wore hers even after the scandal. What had the dress done? she wanted to know. Nothing, that was what. Then, unsentimentally, she had sold the dress to a collector. Probably a fetishist, a pervert. He’d paid through the nose, anyway.
That was all right, Sara thought. She had her inheritance. She, too, could pay through the nose.
* * *
—
“Have you booked your ticket?” her mother asked on the phone.
It was early evening in Toronto, mid-afternoon in Vancouver. A three-hour difference. Sara lay on her bed, holding the phone to her ear. “Not yet.”
“I’ll book it for you if you give me your dates.”
“No,” Sara said. “I mean, I’ll do it.”
“No thank you,” her mother said.
“How’s Mattie?” Sara asked. Her mother sighed. Sara stretched and yawned mightily, silently. “I’ll book a ticket tomorrow.” I’ll try the deWinter tomorrow.
“How are your classes?”
“Good. Classes are good.”
“I hope you’re picking up a proper accent.” Her mother spoke just enough honeymoon French to correct Sara and Mattie when they pronounced the final t in “croissant.” “Proper” meant “not Québécois.”
“One of my professors studied at the Sorbonne.”
“Did he?” Sara could hear her mother’s pleasure.
“She. How’s Mattie?”
“The same. Her accent must be lovely. What does she teach?”
“Actually, I owe her a paper tomorrow,” Sara said. “On Jean Genet. I have her for theatre.”
“You’re studying theatre now?”
“French theatre,” Sara said. “It’s still French.”
“David will be happy to see you,” her mother said. “He’s taken Mattie out quite a few times since you’ve been gone. To the movies, mostly.”
“Has he?” Sara said. “That’s nice of him.”
“I tease her about her gentleman caller. If it were anyone but an Oriental I wouldn’t encourage it, but those people—”
“All right,” Sara said.
“They’re known for their propriety, at least. He’ll be wanting to pick up where you left off, I suppose?”
“Not necessarily.”
Her mother sighed again. Sara detected relief. “You need to see him at least once. To thank him for all the time he’s spent with Mattie. Those people are very particular about observing the courtesies.”
Sara did not say which people?
“You’ll put a stop to it,” her mother said. “Mattie will miss him, but that can’t be helped.”
After she said goodbye to her mother, Sara reread the chapter set in Saigon, the chapter about the author’s torrid affair with a Chinese man before the war. They would contrive to send each other notes—cet après-midi à cinq heures, left in the toe of a shoe—and the author would lie to her mother and sneak away to get fucked. She was fourteen. The chapter was a catalogue of clothing torn: silk torn, satin torn, muslin torn, schoolgirl-cotton torn. She mended these clothes herself with her little sewing kit, tiny stitches like an elf would make. If her mother noticed, she didn’t let on. He masturbated her so long and hard she got a blister on her clitoris. He once bit her breast so she bled—skin torn—and then that too became a game.
There were lessons there, the author wrote. Skin as fabric, fabric as armour. The hot soup of sex and love and fear. Clothes as costume and code. Her prose became vague here, in the philosophical French way, lyrical and explicit and willing to shock, yet vague and repetitive, obsessive.
Sara decided she would see David Park as soon as she got back to Vancouver, just as her mother had requested.
* * *
—
The day after her phone call with her mother, Sara returned to Simenon.
“It will not fit you,” the queen said.
“It will.” Three months of toast.
“You are too tall.”
“I’m not.”
“You can’t afford it.”
Sara didn’t deign to answer that one.
“It’s a museum piece.”
“It’s a dress.”
The queen flicked a finger irritably at one of the mermaids, who fetched the deWinter and bore it to the change room on both arms. Again, the queen entered with Sara. She stripped to her underwear, but the queen flicked her finger.
“You know the name of the dress, but not how to wear it,” she said. “You must be naked. That is how this dress is worn.”
“I know.”
“You know because I tell you.”
Sara stripped off her bra and panties and allowed the queen to shiver the dress over her raised arms, her breasts, her hips. It was clinging and cold.
“Ha,” the queen said. She looked unhappy.
* * *
—
Sara did not buy the deWinter on that visit, or the next. She stayed away from Simenon for a couple of weeks and when she returned she pretended she was over it. But the queen knew. Sara had come just before closing on a Saturday, on a whim,
hot like a fuck-addled schoolgirl who couldn’t stay away any longer. The queen looked at her over the top of her spiked glasses and said, “Alors.”
First, though, there would be wine. One of the mermaids locked the door and turned the sign around while the other got a bottle of crémant and glasses. They would be closed Sunday and Monday and it was their habit, the queen said, to toast the coming weekend. Sara was invited to join them.
“Cherches-là,” the queen said to the first mermaid, who fetched the dress and laid it across Madame’s desk where they could all consider it while they drank. The bubbles bit tenderly at Sara’s tongue. This was not champagne, only sparkling. Sara knew without knowing that there was champagne in that back room also, only not for her. Probably caviar, too, and cheese veined with edible gold, and pâté of brandy and prune and human baby, to be nibbled on water crackers. Not for her, even though she was buying the dress today, and they were celebrating.
Now the queen asked the mermaid named Ghislaine to refill their glasses, and the mermaid named Élodie took a large book from beneath Madame’s desk and opened it to a black and white photograph of the model Annick M. wearing the red deWinter. Sara stood beside her and they leafed through the big glossy book together, while Élodie exhaled tinily at each photo. She couldn’t imagine what kind of room this exquisite creature could possibly go home to. Maybe she lived in the back of the shop with the champagne. Maybe she and Ghislaine subsisted on grapes and Veuve Clicquot and swing-danced together in the shop at midnight and serviced each other with their pink tongues after, and slept on fox furs.
The bottle was empty. Ghislaine opened another. Sara was drinking too much, but not more than the others, she thought. The queen pushed her glasses up onto her hair to squint at the radio on her desk. She adjusted the dial and sounds fell like raindrops. Not swing at all, but a complex, rhythmic, pentatonic plinking. Sara could hear the musicians’ fingertips on the drums, the slight adhesion before the release. She could hear everything.
“Gamelan,” the queen said, to her enquiring look. “From Indonesia.”
It was decided, not with words, that Sara would try the dress on again. She turned to the change room but the queen said, “No, why?” So she stripped there in front of everyone and let them ease the dress over her head, all three together, and then there was more wine, and the question of shoes, and it was decided there were no suitable shoes in the shop, but Ghislaine or was it Élodie found a catalogue and searched until she found a picture the queen approved, and a call was made to put them on hold for Sara, who swore she would buy only them and the next day did, and Élodie or was it Ghislaine, the one with the brown eyes tinged with red-gold, helped her back into her own clothes while the queen sat at the desk and handwrote a receipt for an amount that Sara could have spent on a trip to Paris (she had been costing this out, recently, wondering if she could pull it off without having to tell her mother), and then they were helping her back up the stairs and pushing her gently out into the night, colder now than when she had come, saying they would have the dress delivered to her, one did not carry a dress like that in a bag through the street like a common piece of shopping, and then Sara was walking into the night with the queen’s instructions echoing behind her, drink a large glass of water when you get home, for Sara was drunk, though not too drunk to understand that they were afraid of her losing the dress in the back of a taxi. That irony would remain with her through the long future of her addiction: that she would continue to understand people long after she had lost the capacity to speak without slurring or make herself, in any remotely attractive way, understood.
* * *
—
The photographer Paul deWinter (claimed the author of Sara’s pillow book) was a close friend of the dress’s designer, Destry, a portly little bespectacled fellow indistinguishable from a thousand other portly little bespectacled fellows from wartime photographic portraits, except that he was a genius with a surname that might as well have been Couture. The author had met them both and found them eerily intimate with each other, and largely aloof with everyone else. Not sexual intimacy, but something stranger, stronger. (Stronger than sex? Sara had wondered, youngly.) Eerie because they belonged to different eras, though the designer couldn’t have been more than ten years older than the photographer. Black and white versus colour; cravat versus love beads; alligators versus espadrilles; plumply smooth-shaven versus nailed-Jesus lean. Nineteen-fifties versus nineteen-sixties; genial versus impulsive, mannered versus crude, and so on and on. You could be that simplistic, the author said, if you wanted. But it was the similarities that she noticed the day of her photo shoot, two years before the murder. A penis in the pants was a penis in the pants, and a man screaming at you by the swimming pool of a private villa was a man screaming at you, whether he was pinning you or lighting you up. Their eyes burned, both of them. M. Couture smoked. Well, they both smoked, but Paul deWinter had a needle and a spoon too. M. Couture was, by that time, terminally ill. He coughed yellow clots into a hanky, died just a couple of years later, and was accorded a state funeral. His hands were soft and he sewed her into the dress by hand, gently. It was (she recalled) grey, and ethereally ruffled. Paul deWinter, with his ugly Dutch accent, was sulky because she wasn’t a blonde, but he got the job done; got her a cover, in fact. She looked like a bird. It was 1969. The murdered girl was a blonde.
“But their strangeness!” the author wrote. “I will give you an example. During the shoot, Paul took a phone call, from the elder brother in Rotterdam, it turned out. (There had been three deWinter brothers: the youngest, everyone’s favourite, had died in a motorcycle crash. The eldest was a staid professor of early music. Paul was the middle child.) Come home, the music professor said, Moeder is dying. I knew this because Paul hung up the phone and told us right away and the two of them smiled and shrugged in perfect understanding. It was regrettable, but it was not possible. No moeder, dead or alive, was going to interrupt their work.”
* * *
—
Sara landed in Vancouver on a December afternoon. She had wanted to take a taxi to the West side, to extend her solitude by those twenty minutes, but her mother and sister were waiting inside the terminal. Sara knew what it had cost her mother to suffer the price of airport parking. Both their faces lit when they saw her, her sister’s with joy, her mother’s with joy and hellfire. Mattie ran to her and gave her a long hug, then stroked the arm of Sara’s green-and-orange dress appreciatively.
“Yes, new,” Sara said.
She hugged her mother, and then the three of them went to wait at the luggage carousel. Her mother insisted on procuring a cart, and fussed over the arrangement of their coats and purses on it while they waited.
“All of it?” her mother asked that evening, after Mattie had gone to bed and they were sitting in the living room. Sara had refused the sherry her mother had offered her—though she wanted it—because it was sherry, and because it implied permission. The tiny glass of blood in her mother’s hand looked good now, though.
“Most of it.”
She had expected her mother to cry, or yell. But by the time she went to bed, Sara had merely agreed to move back into her old room and begin courses at the University of British Columbia the following September. She would have the spring and summer to, as her mother put it, “recover herself.”
“You’ll have to give us a fashion show,” her mother said as Sara leaned down to kiss her soft cheek goodnight. “Mattie and me.”
* * *
—
David Park would not have sex with her, though he was breathing hard. “You aren’t yourself,” he told her.
“I’m more myself than before I left.”
They were sitting in his car, the very next evening.
“You spent your inheritance on clothes?” he said. “How is that even possible?”
“Think of it like art.” Sara smoothed the silk of her
skirt over her thighs, reached to put her seat belt back on. David started the engine. “Like if you spent all your money going to concerts.”
“Then I’d be an idiot. Plus, it’s not art. It’s clothes.”
Sara looked at her lap.
David reached across her to open the glove compartment. He pulled out an envelope and gave it to her. “I’m giving a benefit concert tomorrow. My church is organizing a fundraiser for new immigrants. I want you to bring your family.”
“Thank you.” Sara looked at the tickets in the envelope, politely. “I’ll be sure to wear something nice.”
* * *
—
After the performance, Sara’s mother bundled Mattie into her coat, pulling it tightly around her. Anger crackled between Sara and her mother, but then David came over and they had to pretend they’d had a lovely evening. They spoke for a few moments about the program. Sara’s mother said she recalled seeing Itzhak Perlman perform the Sarasate in London in the eighties, and compared David’s performance favourably to that one. David kissed Mattie’s cheek, making her blush. When David left them to greet other acquaintances, they went outside. Other families lingered on the sidewalk, exchanging wishes for the new year. When their cab came, Sara helped her mother and sister in and then slammed the door. She knew her mother had been expecting her to go home with them; had been waiting for the privacy of the car to resume their argument. Sara went back into the church foyer, drank two overpriced plastic cups of cold red wine too quickly, so that by the time David was free of his admirers and relations she felt soft and ready for him. But he wasn’t smiling. “What was Mattie wearing?”
Sara shrugged.
“She looked ridiculous.” David handed Sara her coat, but didn’t help her with it. “Everyone was staring. You could see her—everything, underneath. She must have been freezing.”