However, taking the elevator began to make sense as it continued to rise. Evidently “upstairs” was the top of the house, which had looked, from the street, as if it were at least five stories tall. As the elevator stopped, much too soon, I managed to squeeze between the girls like one of those characters in a Western who hunkers down inside a group of horses. There was a confusion as all five of us tried to be polite and let everyone else go first, which was exactly the effect I’d been hoping for.
We finally sorted ourselves out and, since there was no way I could postpone it any longer, I pulled myself together and prepared to meet Justine’s father. I looked up, rather bravely, if I say so myself, but I didn’t see anyone in the vast room that stretched dimly forward toward a wall of solid glass two stories high from floor to ceiling. Beyond the wall, perhaps a thousand feet away, was a section of the base of the Eiffel Tower, brilliantly illuminated by floodlights.
The girls and I were so stunned by this unexpected iron giant out of Jules Verne, so amazed by seeing it floating so close to us, that at first we stood there and gaped. It was like part of the most enormous Tinkertoy you could imagine. The sight was irresistibly wacky in its scale and drama, and the girls all rushed, magnetized, toward the wall of glass and craned their necks up, exclaiming to each other. I stayed close to Gabrielle. Time enough to look at the view after I’d delivered the medical bulletin.
“Jules,” Gabrielle said to a butler, “where is Monsieur?”
“I don’t know, Madame.”
“Go tell him his guests have arrived.” She was clearly surprised not to find him waiting. I had a flash. Necker was as nervous about this as I was. He was hiding out the way I had in the elevator. No, better! Necker was as nervous about this as Justine would be if she were here. So I had nothing to be nervous about! I was just the messenger.
Well. That bit of logical thinking made me feel a little better. Then, Necker entered the room and I felt, suddenly, a whole lot worse. His expression was utterly composed but my curiosity made me glance quickly at his eyes. I saw a look so full of joyous expectation mixed with timidity and humility and hope, that it broke my heart. He stopped dead inside the doorway, instantly looking away from me toward the girls at the window and then back to me. He walked rapidly toward Gabrielle.
“Where is Miss Loring?” he asked her.
“Miss Severino will tell you,” she replied.
“Miss Severino?” He shook my hand automatically. “Is Miss Loring delayed?”
“Yes, that’s correct, Monsieur Necker, she’s delayed. That is, she’s delayed in New York, not in Paris. I don’t understand why she hasn’t let you know, there’s obviously been a communications failure, but Justine’s sick, really ill, with a middle ear infection. The doctors wouldn’t let her travel under any conditions, she’s on antibiotics up to the gills. She made me promise to tell you how sorry she was that this happened at the last minute. She intends to get over as soon as she can travel. In the meanwhile, she sent me instead—”
“She is not in Paris?” There was no question in his flat words although he’d framed the statement as if it were, as if he hadn’t quite understood me.
“No.”
He didn’t buy it. I knew that right away, although I’d put my best into the explanation and I’ve always been a gifted liar. Anyone but Necker would have believed me. That complicated look in his eyes had died although his expression would never have told anyone that he’d just had a body blow.
“She sent you ‘instead’?” He repeated my words in a monotone as if they were only about a minor question of delegation of authority.
“Why yes, of course, I’m Justine’s second in command, so obviously it had to be me. It was such a rush, getting packed at the last minute, I hadn’t expected to leave New York, you can imagine.…” I ran out of gas because I couldn’t find anything at all to say that would give him hope. I looked helplessly at the utter desolation in his eyes.
“So. I see. That’s a shame, isn’t it? I sincerely hope she gets better soon. And, in any case, you’re here, looking charming, and you’re most welcome in my home. I trust they’ve made you comfortable at the hotel.” He took a deep breath and gave me a brief formal smile that hurt to look at. “Now, let me get you something to drink, Miss Severino, and then you can introduce me to the young ladies.”
Wow, I thought, as I followed him, I knew where Justine got that unearthly calm, that self-control. It was pure Necker. Man, if this guy had been my long-lost Dad, I’d jump into his arms, no questions asked, all the past forgiven and forgotten, and not just because he was rich but because he had so much class. To say nothing of being one of the best-looking men I’d ever seen at any age.
By this time the girls had noticed Necker and were coming down the length of the room. I suddenly remembered that this was, for each of them, a highly competitive moment. None of us knew what part Necker would play in choosing the Lombardi girl, but we had to assume that it would be a major one.
First came April, moving with an easy, unstudied grace. She’d picked her dress cleverly; a bare, but somehow demure, black silk slip dress with a graduated string of pearls that showcased her exquisitely well-bred look more emphatically than anything elaborate. Her sudden smile flashed, but not too broadly, her amazing hair was pulled straight back from her face and flowed simply down her back like Alice in Wonderland’s. I thought that if there were a young Grace Kelly today, this was how she would have been dressed for an important meeting with her future mother-in-law. Oh, proper, perfect April!
After Necker shook hands with April he greeted Tinker. I had wondered which of her incarnations she’d put on tonight; were we going to be treated to a high-fashion diva or the ravishing little orphan dreaming of a rainbow? I’d been too busy being nervous to check her out before now. Ah, the princess bride approached, clad—you couldn’t say “dressed” with Tinker—clad in pure white satin, a short dress as simple as April’s but with long sleeves and a demure scoop neck. She’d fiddled with her hair until she’d produced a sort of casual updo with curling tendrils framing her face, and pinned a few fresh rosebuds in it here and there, making good use of the flowers in her suite. Tinker had obviously learned a lot from the many makeup artists who’d worked on her. Tonight she was all extraordinary eyes and the palest pink mouth, with no other makeup. She looked about twelve, a grave, thoughtful and dangerous twelve you’d marry off in a hurry if you were her parents. There should be a law, I thought proudly, until I realized that for all our efforts with her she still walked badly. Her body language didn’t say triumphantly, “Look at me,” but told you she’d much prefer to be ignored. It wasn’t so much that she was totally awkward but that she had a strong quality of inner tentativeness that made her seem not quite here. As she came nearer I spotted the trembling of her lips, the not-quite-hidden fear in her eyes.
And then came Jordan. The others disappeared in comparison. She was wearing a long slender turtleneck tunic and wide-legged pants, both made of dark scarlet crushed velvet, with flat silver slippers and large rock crystal hoops swinging from her sublimely set ears. The other two girls wore their highest heels, which made them inches taller than Necker. Only Jordan seemed lifesized in relation to him. But it wasn’t the sensational outfit that caused her to eclipse the others, it was her attitude. She could have been the hostess and Jacques Necker the guest. She looked so much at home that it seemed impossible that she had just arrived in this room. Although he’d shaken hands with me and the other girls, Necker kissed hers, which Jordan seemed to find only natural. He might be Swiss, I thought, but he has French reactions.
I was only too happy to keep my eyes down and my nose in my drink while Necker put April and Tinker at their ease by asking them questions about their lives. Jordan, having made her point, drifted away and stood in front of a long desk with a worn red velvet top and lavish, gilded carving decorating its dark wood. Small precious objects were precisely arranged on the desktop, giving place of honor to a
small painting of a rearing black and white horse in an elaborate frame. I watched her as she left her contemplation of the desk and walked quietly from one piece of furniture to another, apparently deep in thought and oblivious to the conversation of the others. Was Jordan shy, I wondered? Or just unwilling to compete for Necker’s attention at this point in the evening.
I knew it couldn’t be the furniture that really interested her. As far as I was concerned, the various pieces all looked more or less the same to me. They were all, I assumed, the height of magnificence, yet I found them boring, as if I’d seen them all before. The only thing that kept the room from being overpoweringly grand was the view and I was too nervous to appreciate it.
Eventually dinner was served and Necker placed me at his right, in the place that had been meant for Justine. He casually motioned Jordan to his left and told everybody else to sit wherever they wanted. Over the muted hum of female conversation I heard Jordan speak.
“The painting on the ebony bureau plat upstairs, Monsieur Necker, could it be by Jean-Marc Winckler?”
“It is,” he answered, clearly surprised. “The horse belonged to one of the princes of Leichtenstein. How did you guess?”
“I wrote my college thesis on Madame de Pompadour and how a king’s mistress was decisive in influencing the world of decorative art.”
“Yet decorative arts continued to evolve under another Louis,” he said with an abstracted smile that reminded me so much of Justine that I almost gasped.
“How can one Louis not lead to another?” Jordan laughed. “After Louis XV I studied on my own and eventually I found myself almost as attracted by Louis XV I … I never would have imagined that any private person could own such magnificent examples of both periods.”
“I started collecting when it was still out of fashion,” he explained.
“I didn’t know that Joseph or Leleu could ever be out of fashion. They’re beyond fashion,” Jordan said with spirit.
I drank some wine in a silent toast to a hopeless cause. I knew what she was up to, all right, but it wouldn’t do her any good, not when the poor man had just had such a heartrending disappointment. But bless Jordan for making conversation. It took the heat off me. And it was a learning experience. I’d just discovered that I knew bupkis about furniture.
Dinner went on too long and I was grateful when Gabrielle suggested, soon afterward, that we must all be tired and want to leave early. It was just past eleven and I couldn’t begin to figure out how many hours it had been since I’d left New York.
There seemed to be a lot of unnecessary giggling in the limo which kept me from falling asleep. Jordan, speaking rapid, and obviously, for me, incomprehensible, French, was making friends with Albert, the dignified middle-aged chauffeur. First Necker, now the chauffeur, I thought in weary wonder as we finally came to a stop. The girls piled out of the car. I opened my eyes. No hotel.
“Where the hell are we?” I demanded.
“Les Bains Douche, as the young ladies requested,” Albert replied, coming to open the door for me.
Even I, cloistered as I am, had heard of the most notorious and, as the girls would say, “happening” club in Paris. “Everyone” went there, from drag queens to drug dealers to rock stars. It was quartered in a turn-of-the-century bathhouse but there were doubts about how reformed the atmosphere was. Certainly no one went there to get clean.
“Tell them to get back in here this minute!” I shouted.
“But, Madame, they have already been admitted.”
Bitches! I’d kill them with my bare hands. An adrenaline rush got me to the pavement, fighting mad.
“Take off your cap and come with me,” I ordered Albert. “I can’t go in there alone.”
“Madame!” he replied, shocked.
I snatched his cap off his head and threw it in the car. He made a perfectly respectable escort, if a little long in the tooth. I marched him past the three hulking doormen or bouncers or whatever a place like that has to keep out undesirables—or to admit only undesirables, depending on your point of view—with the unquestionable authority of an undercover cop, a version of Andy Sipowicz crossed with Serpico.
“Room for two more at your table, ladies?” I asked, glaring at Jordan. The girls were seated right on the mobbed dance floor, obviously the table of honor, and so far they were alone. I could feel the greedy, mesmerized gaze of the entire crowd on them. It was like being in the eye of a tornado.
“Oh, Frankie, we thought you’d passed out cold,” Jordan answered, so help me, without turning a hair, “or we would never have left you.”
“Thanks for your consideration. I’ll keep it in mind when I handcuff you to the radiator.”
“Please, Frankie,” April laughed, “don’t be mean. You were young once, way back when.”
“Oh, you’re looking for it too, are you? Come on, girls, we’re out of here.”
“Surely, just one dance,” a man’s voice said, and I saw a guy grab April by the hand and whirl her away. Another fellow had Tinker on her feet and there were two of them fighting over Jordan. That was all I had time to notice before somebody or other yanked me up and I was dancing myself.
We got back to the hotel safely, at dawn. Do I have to tell you that I made those girls look as if they were still learning how to do the box step?
7
What’s with Justine?” asked Carrie, one of the bookers, when the phones fell silent late in the afternoon of the day after Frankie and her charges had taken off for Paris.
“Maybe she inherited money from a cousin she didn’t know she had,” Dodie, another booker, replied. “She was humming something familiar this morning and when I asked her what it was, she looked surprised and said she didn’t have a clue. Later it came to me, a golden oldie called ‘It Might as Well Be Spring.’ Weird, huh? Justine’s not one of nature’s hummers.”
“She could be trying to exercise a positive influence on the weather,” hazarded Johanna, a third booker. “Did you listen to the radio this morning?”
“Blizzard and major freeze expected,” Carrie groaned. “Maybe Justine is one of those people who feels good when there’s a big storm brewing. If it gets any colder than it is already, they should shut down the city out of common kindness.”
“Maybe tomorrow will be a ‘snow day’ like we used to have in school,” Dodie said wistfully. “Remember finding out that you couldn’t go to school so you could watch soaps all day long? God, I miss being a kid on snow days.”
“Go on home, everybody,” Justine said, suddenly appearing in the booking room. “It’s Friday and almost quitting time anyway. Nothing’s going to happen that I can’t handle.”
After her grateful bookers had scurried off, Justine turned off the lights of the office, sat in one of the bookers’ chairs and put her feet up on the circular desk. She loved to be alone here, in sole possession of her domain high above the nearest buildings. There was a wide view from the large windows of the booking room which included a slice of street that cut straight across the city clear to Central Park West. Behind the fanciful silhouetted towers of those fine old apartment houses Justine could glimpse, across the Hudson, the last fragment of sunset fading into the dark plum of a winter sky.
Who would want to live anywhere but on the edge of a continent, Justine asked herself. Who would want to live anywhere but here and now in the last years of the twentieth century? Who would want to live earlier in history, before Novocain, before hair spray, before telephones, before air travel and glossy fashion magazines full of nonsense? Who would want to be a woman in the days when a woman couldn’t build a business on her own, unless she opened a whorehouse? Why did she so rarely take the time to realize how wonderful her life was?
Justine relaxed more deeply in the chair, slumping until she was almost reclining, bathed in a feeling of free-floating happiness. There was really nothing special to account for the quality of her mood, she reflected, unless a rare steak had powers she’d never known about. A
mazing what a good cook Aiden had turned out to be—he’d even made a salad—and what a deft hand he had at Gibsons. It had been sort of nice to let a man make the drinks and take over in the kitchen. Definitely the sort of pleasant evening a sensible person should permit herself to enjoy every now and then—a dollop of gin, something basically satisfying to eat, a nice long, rambling chat in front of the fire, a kiss good-night—or had it been two, one medium slow, one very quick, or the other way around?
She was glad she’d listened to Aiden when he’d looked around her basement and told her that there wasn’t a minute to lose in replacing the furnace. He’d called her secretary this morning and reported that his supplier had the right model in stock, so the new furnace should be in by now. Apparently it was a simple process. She’d never planned on such a rush job, but the weather reports were so ominous that Aiden had convinced her of the need for haste.
What, she wondered, would the weather be like now in Paris? Would Frankie be bundled up in one or another of her new coats?
FRANKIE!
Jesus Christ! She’d forgotten to send the fax to Gabrielle!
Justine almost fell out of the chair as the realization hit her. She righted herself, got up in a hurry and started to pace the floor, feeling the sweat break out on her brow. She’d never done anything so completely irresponsible before! Never, ever! My God, what could have come over her? This was utterly, completely and impossibly unforgivable. She’d sent her best friend right into the lion’s den without anything to protect her.
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