Not many weeks passed, after Nicole’s death, before Necker began to receive twice as many invitations to dinner than he and Nicole had ever received as a couple. He refused them all, occasionally asking several old friends to dine at his house, merely to let people know that he hadn’t become a morbid hermit. He had no interest in remarriage, but he realized that he had been targeted by every important hostess in Paris, each of whom had her own candidate, one of the many, still lovely divorcees or widows of suitable background and interests, to become the second Madame Necker.
It was unthinkable, Parisian hostesses agreed among themselves, that a fabulously rich man, a particularly handsome, alluring, vigorous man who was younger in so many ways than his actual age, should be allowed to draw another breath without a new attachment.
However, Jacques Necker managed to show himself so unresponsive, even rudely uninterested, when it came to that, that all but a very few of his oldest and most optimistic friends had given up arranging his future. Sometimes, in a rare moment in which he admitted his loneliness to himself, he asked himself why he didn’t give in to the matchmakers and pick some perfectly agreeable woman to busy the corners of his life with the bustle of redecoration and the myriad irritations of domesticity known only to the enormously wealthy—someone energetic, he thought, who would consider it minimal to own the banalities of a yacht, a château and a villa at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, someone who planned safaris and skied and would bully him into taking time off and “enjoying life.”
But he didn’t intend to be condemned to repeat the pattern of his life with Nicole, and dining out and entertaining, chatting about nothing with the same three hundred people year after year. Until he learned about Justine, he had been, if not content, at least resigned to spending his small amount of leisure in collecting, reading art history and flying off frequently to Zurich, Amsterdam, Milan or London to see the newest museum and gallery exhibitions or to attend the latest of the annual antiques fairs to which dealers from all over brought their finest wares.
The only way he knew he hadn’t turned into an antique himself, Necker thought, was that his sexual appetite was far from dead. He couldn’t bring himself to keep a mistress, preferring the efficient, if joyless, relief afforded by the most exclusive call girls in Paris. He expended his supercharge of energy almost every evening in violent squash games at his club, often dining there as well, with one of his many squash partners.
The blow Justine had dealt him in not coming to Paris immobilized him for several days. One morning, while walking to the office, he suddenly asked himself why, now that a suitable amount of time had passed, he had not done the natural thing and inquired after her health. As soon as he arrived in his office he called Frankie and asked if Miss Loring’s ear infection had responded to treatment.
“I’m not certain,” Frankie answered, too surprised by the suddenness of his question to make up a lie.
“How is that possible? Don’t you keep in touch on a daily basis?”
“No, actually we don’t,” Frankie said, recovering. “Justine has almost seventy other models to worry about. She knows where we are and that the girls are keeping busy—she counts on me to alert her to any problems, so I don’t need to check in with her every day.”
“Miss Severino, I consider you entirely capable, but it seems to me that with the Lombardi spring collection less than a week away, Miss Loring would find it more important to be here than in New York, where nothing this important can possibly be going on.”
“I don’t know what she could do here that I can’t,” Frankie said hardily. “Tinker doesn’t have a minute to herself all day long, as you know, and Lombardi said he doesn’t want to even lay eyes on April or Jordan until he’s ready to fit them along with all the other models. He’s expressly asked me not to disturb him for any reason. From what Tinker tells me, he’s making new designs like mad and all his associates are working to keep up with him. Marco has his ateliers open and filled with workers night and day. I don’t see what possible good Justine could do over here, except add to the confusion.”
“It’s a question of dignity,” Necker heard himself say pompously. “Miss Loring’s absence fails to reflect her consideration of the importance of the Lombardi contract. I assume she’d manage to come for the collection itself.”
“Oh, certainly! Of course she will, if not before,” Frankie said calmly.
“Are you all keeping busy?” Necker asked, forcing a friendlier tone.
“Now that the girls have finished working with the photographer from Zing, they’re basically killing time … the club scene palled quickly for all of us. Maude Callender, the writer from Zing, and April have been sightseeing all over Paris and Jordan’s usually off doing her thing at museums. Yesterday she spent almost all day again at that museum of decorative arts. That’s become her favorite Parisian spot.”
“Your little group seems amazingly dedicated to culture.”
“Well, what’s left, Monsieur Necker? The girls don’t dare indulge in French lunches or dinners, the cooking’s too fattening, there’s nothing much to buy in the stores except leftover winter stuff on sale. They can’t even shop! All the new movies are in French, even the TV’s in French. It’s too cold to stroll around for long or sit in the parks, Paris doesn’t even have any decent workout clubs … how do women stay in shape here? If it weren’t for the arts, what would we do with ourselves? Everyone in the couture is working in a frenzy of last-minute arrangements this last week but, except for Tinker, my girls aren’t needed yet.”
“Quite true. I hadn’t thought of that. Are you part of the culture brigade?”
“I make it a point to spend as much time as I possibly can at the Louvre.”
“An excellent focus for your energies.”
“Thank you,” Frankie said demurely. “It’s the experience of a lifetime.”
After he’d hung up, Necker drummed on his desk in a wave of pain, unable to collect his thoughts. Frankie Severino, that impossible creature, dared to lie to him, even to complain, and there was nothing he could do about it. It was beyond humiliation, beyond shame, almost beyond frustration. Pure pain, he thought, a pain that he felt as a vast punch in the stomach. It was so real he tried to find it with his fingers so that he could massage it away, so real that he was surprised that it didn’t make him bend over when he walked.
Many tens of thousands of people were busy at this very minute, all working for him, busily turning out goods from textiles to perfumes, people to whom his word was all powerful, yet this impossible twit of a girl, who unquestionably knew the truth, could not be made to reveal a breath of it. He no longer could even try to believe that Justine intended to come for the collection any more than he had believed, from the first minute, that she had ever been sick. It was just as unlikely that Frankie was haunting the Louvre. It was, of course, possible that April and the journalist might be sightseeing but the only thing Frankie said that rang with truth was the brief picture she’d painted of Jordan at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.
The museum was crammed with great furniture and objects, entire rooms preserved and arranged exactly as they had been during the life of the past, and for anyone like Jordan, there would be long hours in which other visitors would be almost absent and she could gaze at her leisure and dream herself back into another world.
Suddenly the thought of Jordan wandering around, peering with fascination into those romantic, evocative rooms, but unable to enter them because of the velvet rope that protected them from the public, touched something in Necker that enabled him to put Frankie’s lies behind him for a while, to allow the pain to retreat.
He could, at least, make Jordan happy for an afternoon, he thought. Jordan’s pragmatic assessment of her position as a black woman had given him a perspective on her maturity and her self-reliance. He understood, after what she had explained to him about the cautious way in which she navigated the world, that she would almost certainly not go into a fine antiq
ues shop by herself to look at things she couldn’t afford to buy. It was only an unusually self-confident white tourist who dared to brave the imposing doors of the fine French antiques dealer, only those who were rich enough to feel at home anywhere and wise enough in the ways of such commerce to realize that one was free to “just look” at the best without the intention to buy. And even they usually came with a sponsor, a client of the house. The flea market dealers of Paris grew rich on the awe inspired by merchants of quality antiques.
Necker had his secretary reach Jordan on the phone and soon made his suggestion.
“I understand from Miss Severino that you’ve enjoyed the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. I know it well but it’s frustrating having guards hovering over me as if I were going to steal something the minute their backs are turned. Would it be fun for you to go to some shops with truly fine things where you can open every drawer, turn over every piece of porcelain, inspect every hinge? Someplace where they don’t expect you to buy?”
“Oh, yes, I’d love that!”
“I can pick you up at three this afternoon. How does that sound?”
“Perfect!”
After he’d made his arrangement with Jordan, Necker, after a moment’s thought, called the House of Kraemer to make an appointment. All three of the Messieurs Kraemer would, most unfortunately, most unusually, be away that afternoon, a secretary told him. They were at auctions in three different cities, but Monsieur Jean, their chief assistant, would be delighted to assist him, to do the honors of the house for Monsieur Necker and his guest, Mademoiselle Dancer.
Normally he never bothered to announce his visits to the Kraemers but this time he phoned in advance because he realized that if he suddenly appeared on their doorstep with the most magnificently beautiful black woman anyone had ever seen, even the great poise of the Kraemers might not be able to prevent the momentary showing of the smallest hint of surprise or curiosity. He couldn’t allow that to happen to Jordan while she was with him. Intelligent and wise in the ways of the world as she was, he found himself feeling strongly protective toward her … a protectiveness mixed with tenderness. He wanted only good things to happen to Jordan, Jacques Necker realized, and fleetingly wondered if she’d become a daughter-substitute to him.
Strange, Jordan thought, that Jacques Necker should have phoned just when she was feeling particularly abandoned. Tinker had been whisked away on her cloud of glory; April and Maude never seemed to be around or available; it was obvious that Frankie and Mike had their own, intense private life together, lucky, lucky them—there was nobody left to hang out with except, Lord have mercy, that old Peaches Wilcox, who was good fun in a crowd, but who gave Jordan a quick dismissive smile when they met by chance in the lobby. It was, Jordan thought, the sort of forgiving facial grimace a famous woman makes when someone doesn’t recognize who she is. Jordan didn’t hold it against Peaches. That was just the way it was.
Jordan had planned to go antiquing this afternoon in any case. She’d walked the streets of the Left Bank and found many of them lined with small, unpretentious shops whose windows displayed wares to tempt the devil. She felt so at home in Paris, she’d received so many glances that frankly admired her for herself without any racial overtones, that Jordan had allowed herself to investigate several of the smaller boutiques and discovered that antiques dealers liked nothing more than conversation.
Like the best of hosts, they gave the impression that they opened their doors to her for no other reason than to meet her and chat. They were so low-key that Jordan had relaxed into a state in which she felt no obligation to buy anything at all. Somehow she acquired a set of charming old dessert plates and four irresistible chocolate cups with matching saucers and a chocolate pot, two vases and a dozen small botanical engravings, but the dealers seemed neither pleased nor displeased when their conversations terminated in a purchase, after the necessary minor bargaining that was part of the transaction.
The whole process was so delightful that Jordan had toyed with the fantasy of living the rest of her life in Paris, of working there until she was too old to model, saving her money like a frugal Frenchwoman and eventually opening a little antiques shop of her own. But even as she invented the dream, she read the newspapers and learned of the strong and ever rising tide of hate against black immigrants from North Africa, of the growing percentage of French who blamed blacks for all the complicated ills of the country.
She definitely had more options at home, Jordan realized, even as she relished walking the streets feeling all around her that special kind of homage that all Europeans accord to beautiful women of any race.
“No shop window?” Jordan asked as Necker’s car drew to a stop in front of the Kraemer hôtel particulier.
“They’re too famous to advertise with even a window. It’s the sort of place you’d never go to unless you knew about it already, yet if you just showed up and rang the bell they’d be perfectly charming to you.”
“So, in that way, they’re no different from other antiques dealers?”
“You’ve been shopping?” He concealed his surprise smoothly.
“In a small way, a tiny way really, on the Left Bank. There’s only so much room in my suitcases and I’ve already used it up. I wonder if they really want my business … is it my imagination or are they faintly let down when I actually buy something?”
“Oh, no, you’re right about that. Imagine spending your life hunting for certain special things, finally discovering these things in the most unusual, unexpected places, persuading someone to sell them to you and then, after all that fun and trouble, having to resell those trophies to make a living. I think it’s a particularly refined sort of torture, but dealers chose it, and the Kraemers have continued to do it for three generations. Of course they’ve kept many of the treasures for themselves, they must or die of broken hearts. Once I told Philippe Kraemer he was as self-punishing as a ballet dancer who chooses to dance in pain all her life, but he merely laughed at me. When you get down to it, he sees everything first. I’m sure he has better things than I do.”
“How about models who starve themselves and spend their life in high heels, walking in agony and making it look like fun? It’s always something, isn’t it? What are the disadvantages of your business?”
“I’ve never thought about it. Perhaps there aren’t any,” Necker said in a startled burst of amusement.
“Lucky man. One yard of fabric is like another, one bottle of perfume like another, you don’t deal in unique objects, except for your couture houses, and if one of your designers doesn’t make the cut, he can always be replaced, right? It’s the name that has to be established, basically to sell the perfume down the road.”
“Precisely. That’s why I’m launching Lombardi. But don’t you want to go in?”
“I’m rambling on like a dealer,” Jordan said with her habitual smiling composure as the chauffeur opened the door of the car. She was dressed in uncompromisingly well-cut jacket and trousers, and a turtleneck sweater, all of them the rich, deep dark brown of bittersweet chocolate. They made a background against which the splendid, unnameable tint of her skin created as vivid a contrast as if she were a very fair skinned woman dressed in black satin.
“Monsieur Necker, Mademoiselle, welcome, both of you, and please come in out of the cold,” said Monsieur Jean, the slim blond assistant who knew so much about antiques that the Kraemers could, when necessary, leave their affairs in his hands.
“Jordan, this is Monsieur Jean,” Necker said in English. “Monsieur Jean, this is Mademoiselle Dancer, who is an amateur of antiques.”
“I’m delighted to meet you, Mademoiselle. May I offer you some tea? A drink?”
“No, thank you. Perhaps later. Jordan, is there anything special you’d like to see?”
“Oh no … I just want to look around,” Jordan answered, in awed astonishment. Never in the world had she imagined that so much priceless furniture and so many exquisite jewels of smaller objects could be
concentrated in one house, in just the entrance to one house—yet not priceless, she reminded herself, since they were all for sale. She had been antiquing on the far fringes of nowhere, she realized, talking to dealers who would themselves be stunned by a single pair of sconces at the Kraemers’.
For an hour, Jordan and Necker wandered at random through the nine salons of Kraemer et Cie. Gradually Jordan felt more and more at home. These armchairs, made for Versailles, were displayed to be sat on by prospective buyers—what woman would buy a chair without trying it out for comfort? This Louis XVI white marble and gilt clock with its three dials and three mounts for candles was meant for daily use, to be consulted for the time, to be lit as she’d light a lamp; the Boulle marquetry inkstand with its palpable sense of statecraft at its most powerful, was an object with a specific purpose, just as was the ballpoint pen in her handbag.
Was this glimpse into the possibilities of possession available to the richest people in the world going to spoil her pleasure in her small finds, Jordan wondered? Was she going to compare her dear little chocolate cups to the black and gold Boulle inkstand and find them wanting? No, she decided, no more than she found her own favorite clothes wanting in comparison to the ten-thousand-dollar evening dresses she’d worn at the last Bill Blass collection. For some reason or another, one thing had no connection to the other.
Jordan sat back, almost reclining, on a deep love seat and half-closed her eyes, savoring with all her senses the special aroma of perfection of upkeep, composed of wood and wax and something indefinable—perhaps the roses that stood in small glass vases here and there—that filled the crowded rooms. Necker was inspecting the edges of the carving on a table behind the love seat. In his still concentration, Jordan thought, he seemed so intense that she had the impression of motion restrained by force. At that moment, a door concealed in the molding of the wall opened, and a man dressed in a dark uniform crossed the room. He saw Necker and stopped suddenly.
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