Mandarin Plaid
Page 31
“But I don’t care about that! I don’t care about my career, if it means losing him!”
“He does.”
“What?”
“He cares about your career. And you do, Genna. He knows how much you do. He doesn’t want you to have to make that choice. He’s made it for you.”
“That’s what he said.” She was almost whispering. “He said he was leaving because he loved me.”
“I think that’s true.”
“But …”
I said nothing. When she spoke again, it was in a stronger, more controlled voice. As she had the first night we’d met in Andrew’s loft, she pushed away weakness and focused on strength. “There’s more, isn’t there?” she asked. “More than he told me and more than you’re telling me.”
“What he’s done is right,” I said, gentle again.
“I don’t know,” she said, and I could almost see her shaking herself. “I don’t know how to think about this. But John’s letter asked me please to go through with my show. For him. And I’m going to. And that’s another reason I called.”
“Another reason?”
“John left a list. Things I’d better not forget to do. Brad is being terrific, doing most of them. He’s been almost living at the studio since Friday, just working all the time. He was wasted as a secretary. I never knew that until now.”
Good, I thought. Good going, Brad.
“But there’s one thing on John’s list I need help on,” Genna said. “From you.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Now that … Well, without Andi, I have no one to wear the gold gown.”
The meaning of this did not sink in. “The gold gown?”
“You saw the fabric in the studio the first time you came up. I said the color would look great on you, remember?”
“On—Genna, you’re not serious. You want me to wear the gown? In the show? That can’t be what you mean.”
“Why not?”
“Because I walk like a truck!”
My mother stuck her head around the corner again.
“You don’t,” Genna said. “You walk like someone who’s going somewhere she really wants to get to. That gown would flow beautifully with your walk. For shoes we could—no, barefoot! God, what a great idea! You can wear it barefoot. Oh, Lydia, please?”
I said no. She said please. I said no. My mother watched.
Genna wore me out.
My mother, with no idea what was going on but with that mother’s sixth sense for something that would please her more than it did me, smiled.
So there I was, the following Tuesday, in a small bedroom at the back of a huge, high, window-wrapped loft with views in three directions of two outer boroughs and another state. I was frantically trying to zip the gold gown without ripping it while the five other models—the five real models—and the makeup people and the hairdressers and the young men whose job it was to find your shoes and bags and jewelry all ran back and forth like stampeding cattle.
Where we were it was complete chaos. But when it was time for someone to go out onto the just-built runway, somehow the curtain would part and the model, carrying the right bag, sporting the right pin, topped with the right hat and wearing the right shoes, would sashay out as though for all the world she had nothing else to do but stroll down this wooden tongue between the rows of seats.
Full seats. Genna was a hit. The fashion press was all here, and all the A-list types and hangers-on. Genna was in shock, as one after another of the people she’d sent tickets to with very little hope actually stepped out of the funky freight elevator. Her shock grew as she heard them wildly applaud one creation after another.
I was in shock, too, but a different kind. I couldn’t believe I had agreed to do this, to go out there in front of all these people who rated clothes and makeup and bodies for a living, and stroll all the way to the end of a hundred-mile runway, turn around a couple of times so people could get a really good look at everything that was wrong with me, and then stroll back.
All these people. Fashion editors. Wholesale buyers. Magazine writers. Ladies who lunch.
Photographers, like my brother Andrew, who in his film-can-stuffed Abercrombie and Fitch fishing vest crouched at the side of the runway, one camera pressed to his face and another, plus two more lenses, dangling around his neck.
My mother.
Bill.
“Genna,” I said, peeking through the curtains as another woman swept easily past them, displaying lots of attitude and not tripping over anything, “I can’t.”
“Of course you can,” she said, disbelieving. “You go into basements where people are waiting with guns. This can’t make you nervous.”
“You have no idea,” I said.
She sighed. “I wish John were here. He worked so hard for this …”
“For you, Genna,” I said. “All the work he did was so you could have this.”
“I miss him so much,” she whispered, not looking at me.
“I know,” I said.
To distract her, and also to try to keep my mind from noticing what my body was about to do, I asked a question I had meant to ask when we first met, but never had. “Why do you call your line ‘Mandarin Plaid’?”
Genna turned away from the curtain. Her eyes were a little shiny, but she smiled. “I chose that name years ago, when I first started to dream about a line of my own. Because there’s no such thing. In three thousand years of textile design, with so many complicated fabrics and all the complexity of Chinese design, we never used stripes across stripes: plaid. The simplest pattern of all, but it never came to us.”
I was about to say something, but I’ll never know what it was, because at that moment one of the frantic young men stage-whispered, “Gold! Go!” and the curtain was open for me.
So I went. No jewelry, no bag, no shoes. Just Lydia, walking like I was on my way to somewhere I really wanted to get to, seeing a blur of faces and hearing a roar of applause. The applause was for the dress, not me. I knew that. My job was to be here and invisible at the same time, to just keep going no matter what happened around me, to keep the illusion alive. I worked on that. Somewhere in that blur and roar I knew Bill was grinning and clapping, and somewhere else my mother. Without looking, I tried to find them.
MANDARIN PLAID. Copyright © 1996 by S. J. Rozan. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For Willy and Simon
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is grateful to
My agent, Steve Axelrod
My editor, Keith Kahla
every writer should be so lucky
Jim Finney, Royal Huber, Ellen Kornhauser, Jamie Scott, Lawton Tootle, and Betsy the Plotmeister Harding
Susanna the Other Plotmeister Bergtold
Helen Liu and Beebee Lam, who let me in
John Leffler, who loaned me books both seminal and germinal
Steve Blier, Hillary Brown, Bart Gulley, Sally Helgesen, Julia Moskin, and Max Rudin, who put up with a lot for this one
Sui Ling Tsang, a great coach
Deborah Peters, a great genius
and
Helen Hester, because, and Nancy Ennis, anyway