Satin Doll

by Davis, Maggie;

  “Brooksie, keep Sophie here, will you?” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t let her move until I get the hem in that dress pinned up.”

  Sam ran down the steps and found Chip getting off the elevator on the main floor. Oh God, not now, she thought, groaning. He was dressed in his gray suit, carrying his sample case. He stared as Sam strode past him, taking in the dirty condition of her clothes, her harried expression.

  “Go away,” Sam muttered. She didn’t need the tremors that attacked her whenever she laid eyes on him. She was only vaguely aware of the two women who got off the elevator behind him.

  “I’d like to speak to you a moment,” he said, following her into the salon.

  “Oh, damn, what a mess,” Sam cried, stopping at the door. The rug cleaners were packing up their equipment. The ugly green carpeting underfoot was cleaner, but soaking wet. “It’s a swamp in here!”

  Why had she decided to get the rugs cleaned? Steam cleaning meant they ought to be able to walk on the carpet in a few hours. This French-style shampooing resembled the Everglades. Samantha sank into the nearest chair and stared at the floor.

  The technician from the electronics shop was arguing loudly with the cleaning crew, gesturing toward the microphones, apparently complaining about the condition of the carpet and its effect on his equipment.

  “Nannette and Sylvie are ready to help.” Chip was standing in front of her, broad-shouldered in his salesman’s clothes.

  “What?” Sam muttered.

  She couldn’t pay any attention at the moment; she was too busy trying to estimate her prospects twenty-four hours before the showing with the room in this condition. They didn’t look good. The potted palms rented from the florist made the big, shabby room look vaguely like a run-down funeral parlor, Sam thought somewhat hysterically. At least the chairs were in place, four rows on the left side of the room for the French press, five rows on the other for the American press and behind them the rows for assorted European editors. They planned to serve champagne—no food, because the show would be over by noon and the next event on the Syndicale schedule was a luncheon at the Crillon sponsored by the fur house of G.R. Fischelis.

  Nannette and Sylvie were back? She looked up at Chip, the words finally percolating through her fog. He was still standing there watching her. “What did Nannette and Sylvie come back for?” she blurted.

  “They decided to help after all.” Chip jerked his head in the direction of the standing microphone and speakers placed behind a row of potted palms. “You expecting to use that equipment? Couldn’t you afford a more modern setup?”

  “You got them to come back, didn’t you?” Sam got to her feet. “Will you stay out of this? I’ve got enough problems without you—”

  The two women were watching her questioningly. “Oh, God,” Sam groaned. “Tell them yes, thank you. Thank you,” she babbled, “thank you.” She patted Sylvie on the arm. Nannette stuck out her hand and she shook it. Sam knew why they’d walked off the job. Solange Doumer was sabotaging everything she could find. The language barrier didn’t help.

  She swallowed her pride. “Thank you, too,” she said, turning to Chip. She was not quite sure what was going on, why he would want to help her, but she told herself she would figure it out later. “Do you really think you can help with the damned sound equipment?”

  “Let’s have a look at it,” he murmured, walking away.

  Sam sat down in the first row of folding chairs, her legs stretched wearily in front of her, watching Chip’s lithe figure with its crop of gypsy-dark hair kneeling in front of the amplifier. He began to twiddle the knobs. She slumped in her chair, biting her lips. As she looked across the salon, she saw thin trickles of water edging down the panes of the tall French windows. Rain. She hadn’t thought of that.

  If it rained tomorrow, that would cut the crowd. If there was going to be a crowd. Pray, Samantha told herself, closing her eyes. It will all come together somehow. Besides, praying is the only thing left.

  She had no way of knowing then that she would remember for the rest of her life just how that particular prayer in the salon of the Maison Louvel one rainy summer afternoon would be answered.

  Le Showing

  The Show

  Chapter Seventeen

  The jangle of the telephone bell dragged Sam up from exhausted sleep. “Mmmph,” she muttered reaching for the telephone on the night table.

  “Sammy, oh, Christ, wake up! This is important.” The voice on the other end of the line was so hoarse, so full of stress, that she was instantly jolted awake.

  “Brooksie,” she mumbled. She rolled over on her elbow to see the lighted dial of the clock radio but couldn’t make out the numbers. “I’m awake, I’m awake.”

  It was the day of the showing. D Day. Armaggedon. Sam blinked her eyes, trying to will herself awake. She had dreamed wild dreams all night long of being at home again in Shoshone Falls, the same thing she had always dreamt when she was troubled and overtired. There had been ghosts in her dreams, too—black-hooded figures on the marble stairs of the Maison Louvel. Restless, problem-filled dreams. “Brooksie?” she said thickly. “What time is it?”

  The voice on the other end was still screeching excitedly. Sam held the receiver out at arm’s length and frowned. “—shot himself last night with that fancy little gun, the pearl-handled Beretta Rudi gave him! He’d moved out of Lisianne’s place a couple of days ago and into that beautiful house in Passy that Rudi spent a fortune fixing up. Rudi was over at Mortessier’s late last night working with his models and when he came home he found him! Oh, Jesus, Sammy—in the bathroom!” Brooksie wailed. “He was just lying there with the gun in his hand and blood all over the bathroom floor, and he’d taken some soap and written on the goddamned bathroom mirror”—Brooksie’s voice rose to an anguished shriek—”‘Ça n’en vaux pas la peine!’”

  “What? He did what?” None of this was making any sense. “Stop yelling, I can’t understand you.”

  “Damn you, Sammy, you want me to spell it out for you? It means ‘It’s not worth it!’ Nobody can understand what Gilles meant—like, did he mean that he was in love with Lisianne, but he had to give Rudi what he wanted because of his job? Or did he mean it wasn’t worth it, because it was driving him nuts, that he couldn’t make up his mind between the two of them? Oh God, the poor kid! Oh Jesus, the poor, poor bastard!” Brooksie burst into loud sobs. “I can’t stand it! I really can’t stand it! He was so damned mixed up!”

  Sam sat straight up in bed. “Brooksie—is somebody hurt? What are you trying to tell me? Are you all right?”

  It took a minute for the voice on the other end to calm a little. “Sammy, don’t you understand a word I’ve been saying to you? It’s on television. I’m looking at the news right now on French television! Jacques—I mean, somebody I know at one of the big couture houses called me just a few minutes ago. He woke me up with it—it was like a bomb! Of course, they’re not going to say on television what I’ve just told you. They’re saying it was an accident. But Rudi telephoned somebody at Galanos’s before he called the police, and poor little Rudi was so freaked out he spilled the whole story, that he had come home and found Gilles on the bathroom floor with the gun still in his hand. Oh jeez, that’s all it takes! In a few hours it will be all over Paris, that Gilles Vasse shot himself!”

  Sam was still confused. “Brooksie, Rudi Mortessier didn’t shoot Gilles Vasse, did he?”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. When she spoke again, Brooksie’s voice was deadly calm. “Sammy, Gilles Vasse shot himself sometime last night. Rudi didn’t find him until about two this morning, when he came back. Get it straight, will you? Half of Paris has been telephoning each other. The whole damned city’s hysterical! The reason I’m calling you, now,” she said very slowly and deliberately, “is because Rudi’s canceled his show. The whole thing is down the tubes. The show was mostly Gilles’s clothes, anyway. Now Rudi is out at the hospital, and some people have
gone to stay with him. They say poor little Rudi is out of his mind.”

  Sam sank back into the bed, still clutching the telephone, unable to speak. Paris’s famous triangle had taken a turn nobody could have predicted.

  “Nothing’s ever happened like this, never,” Brooksie went on. “Jeez, there hasn’t been anything this big since Yves St. Laurent was drafted into the French army and had a nervous breakdown! Most of the fashion editors are probably filing their stories on Gilles Vasse back to the States right now, but as soon as they get their work out of the way, they’re going to want to get together and compare notes. The fashion crowd,” Brooksie ended somberly, “is like that. God, they won’t stop talking about this for years!”

  Hospital? “Brooksie, is Gilles Vasse still alive? What about his girlfriend—Lisianne?”

  Brooksie didn’t hear her. “Listen, kid, do you know what this means? Everybody we sent invitations to is going to show up over there at the Maison Louvel. You’re going to have your damned crowd, Sammy.” The voice on the line was grim. “I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do with them, but with the Mortessier show canceled the press is going to descend on you like a crowd of vultures. You better send somebody out to buy some more champagne. No, wait a minute, make that hard booze. Get some bottles of Scotch and vodka. A lot of them are going to need a stiff drink when they get there.”

  “Brooksie,” Sam tried desperately, “did you say Gilles Vasse is in the hospital? Is he—is he still alive?”

  “He was the last time I heard,” Brooksie answered.

  Then she hung up.

  The crowds began arriving early, some almost an hour ahead of the announced time of ten o’clock. A summer thundershower hung over Paris, and the international fashion press corps arrived with umbrellas and dripping raincoats that soon filled up the first-floor landing, the overflow having to be carried up by Sylvie and Nannette to the next floor. And still they came, Sam saw, watching from the crack of the partly opened door to the changing room off the salon: Jan Gorsach of Associated Press, Aurelia Petrovich and Snooky Hastings of UPI features, Kitty O’Hare of the New York Times fashion department, Tricia Sileo of the Washington Post, Greta Hargis of the Los Angeles Times-Mirror News Services, Gardner Belanger and Susan Train of Condé Nast-Vogue, Irma Dahlgarde of Bazaar, Jane Pauley of NBC, Joan Lunden of ABC and the buyers from the only American department stores ever represented in Paris showings—Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman of New York.

  The French press arrived, typically, a little later. At nine-thirty they began to trickle in, wet and dripping and full of stunned, voluble excitement: Tanya Gold of Elle magazine, Bebe Colombert-Zinn of Paris-Soir, two junior reporters from Le Matin, Chou-Chou Malot representing the French government radio and television, and the editor and assistant editor of Marie-France magazine.

  The press did just what Brooksie Goodman said they would do. They formed excited clumps, exchanging the latest updates about the Gilles Vasse story that had swept Paris in the early morning hours. At a quarter to ten, the Maison Louvel was jammed and there were no more seats. Chip arrived in a yellow rain slicker, and Samantha fell on him with a mixture of relief and undiluted joy. She didn’t even bother to ask why he was there.

  “Oh lord, we need you,” she cried. “That damned Solange Doumer wouldn’t show up, would she? Can you help us get some chairs from the offices on the third floor?” When he turned away, she grabbed him again by one slippery raincoat arm. “Sophie isn’t here, she’s hours late. Do you—” It was hard to ask Chip this but she had to. “Do you know where she is?”

  He gave her a brief, black-browed stare. “She’ll be here, love, if she said she would.”

  That was no answer. She stared after the tall figure in the yellow motorcycle slicker. Did that mean Sophie had been with him, or didn’t it?

  The models’ changing room was damp, crowded chaos. It was all Samantha could do to keep the noise down so that it wouldn’t be heard in the salon. Nannette had left a pressing iron on the skirt of a bouclé knit and scorched it. The dress had to be dropped from the show. The mannequin who was scheduled to open with it spoke only French and didn’t understand the order of the lineup with the knit eliminated. Sylvie had to scream over the noise to try to explain it to her. The models were having problems with their hair in the humid weather; several were close to tears. Nannette and Brooksie were trying to sort out the clothes by numbers, yelling instructions to each other, and Ulla, the narrator, had lost a page of her script.

  Fortunately, Sam noticed, checking at the changing-room door again, that the crowd outside was not ready to settle down. The French and European press and media people were supposed to be in the chairs on the left, the Americans to the right, but at five minutes to ten they were still milling around, helping themselves to drinks at the bar, loudly comparing rumors on Gilles Vasse. Chip was setting up more chairs, and the tape of background music from the 1950s was running, although it could barely be heard since the noise level in the salon was deafening.

  Still no Sophie.

  “What are we going to do about her numbers?” Brooksie shouted, dragging Sam to the rack where Sophie’s dresses were hanging. “Look, she closes out every category, suits, dresses, evening wear. You just can’t pull them out of the show at the last minute. There’s nothing left!”

  “She’s late,” Sam tried to tell her. “She’ll show up.”

  Brooksie pulled her close so that she could yell in her ear. “Get your head on straight, Sammy. This thing isn’t going to work. We’re down the tubes!”

  “No, we’re not!” Sam reached for a tray of bobby pins on the dressing table and began to pin up her hair. “We need to stall for time. I’ll go tell Ulla to start getting the crowd quiet.”

  Sam went to the dressing-room door and opened it to signal to Ulla but got no further than raising her hand. She froze.

  They were coming into the crowded salon of the Maison Louvel like an ominous flock of gathering crows with their canes, their limps, their waterlogged shawls and black drapery. The ducchessa was there with her frail granddaughter Catania, the storklike old Hungarian Countess Hortobagy was not far behind the wizened Marquise Alphonsine L’Espinous, and the Princess Monte Matese carried a sinister-looking, ancient attache case she used instead of a handbag scavenged from some trash heap. All Maison Louvel’s regular customers. All looking like they had spent the night in some tunnel of the Paris subway. And they kept coming.

  The tattered aristocrats started seating themselves in the precious front row of seats. They were, Sam knew without needing to be told, a final gift from the directrice of the Maison Louvel, Madame Solange Doumer. Right behind them came the rain-wet figure in windbreaker and jeans of the teenage Medivani princess and her two bodyguards.

  Lord, they were going to ruin everything unless somebody could get the Maison Louvel regulars out of the front seats! Sam leaned up against the wall of the changing room, hemmed in by two models in bras and panties who hadn’t yet put on their clothes. “Do something,” she told Brooksie. She wasn’t going to give up, she kept telling herself. “Get Nannette out there and move them somehow. No, wait,” she cried, clutching Brooksie’s shoulder. “Send Sylvie. I need you and Nannette to help me get into Sophie’s numbers.”

  “What?” Brooksie shouted. Her round face was a mask of disbelief.

  “I’m the only one tall enough, and I’m Sophie’s size.” Sam started unzipping the back of the beige silk dress she’d bought at Laure’s boutique. “Thank God I got rid of my Sam Laredo hair.”

  It was ten-fifteen.

  Later, Sam was to remember that the opening moments of the Claude Louvel retrospective showing were not as bad as they could have been. At ten-thirty the salon quieted enough for Ulla to step to the microphone and begin the opening announcement, a history of Mademoiselle Claude’s brief career as a Paris designer. It was ten minutes more before most of the assembled fashion press corps took their seats, five minutes more for the emin
ent powers, Kitty O’Hare of the New York Times and Bebe Colombert-Zinn of Paris-Soir, to give up their discussion in the middle of the room and part, each to their respective sides. The tape had to be started over again. The programs were distributed by an exhausted Sylvie.

  At ten-forty Ulla began the fashion narrative in an almost impenetrable, heavily Swedish-accented French and English, and at last the voices of the international press corps and electronic media softened to a low murmur.

  The thunderstorm banged and flickered outside, the rain beat relentlessly against the ancient windows and the high humidity in the close-packed salon reduced the models’ makeup and carefully styled hair to sticky messes. But the last of the stubborn wrinkles, the awkward seam bulges that the presser hadn’t been able to subdue, faded from Claude Louvel’s collection of brilliant designs, restoring their beauty.

  The suits opened the retrospective, the dazzlingly once-again-fashionable sailor suits and boxy jackets with slit skirts, and the carefully selected echoes of Paris’s famed old “New Look” with nipped waists and puffed shoulders in brightly colored, braid-trimmed worsteds. The day dresses followed with whirling, bias-cut skirts in soft silks and chiffonlike woolens that managed, by some miracle, to hit that part of the tape playing a medley of Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes. In the atelier, Nannette zipped a shaking Sam into the green silk crepe that was to have been worn by Sophie and gave her a push to the door.

  Sam stared at the sea of faces and stumbled a little on the first glide out into the walk space in the front of the microphone. Ulla, unaware of the last-minute substitution of Sam for the missing Sophie, lapsed into startled silence, which helped to heighten the drama. As Samantha took the gathered skirt of the green crepe in her hand and whirled, trying to remember the few things she knew about a mannequin’s routine, she lifted her eyes to the more than a hundred or so faces turned to the front of the salon. One could hear a pin drop. When she swept back to the dressing room, Nannette was waiting just inside the doorway.