Authors: Maggie; Davis
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 eminent 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.
“They’re not saying a word,” Sam whispered. Nannette, not comprehending her English, only shrugged. The next model went out and Brooksie levered herself past a rack of clothes to help Sam peel off the green silk and lower the first of the bouffant cocktail dresses over her head. “Brooksie, what’s happening?” Sam hissed.
Then, haltingly, they heard the first clapping begin. The first rows where the great powers sat,
Vogue, Bazaar,
the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
began to applaud. They kept clapping. And the sound grew.
“Watch your hair,” Brooksie warned, shoving Sam toward the door.
Thank God for Alain des Baux and her new hairstyle; the Raggedy Ann cut would never have worked with Claude Louvel’s magnificent, ultra-feminine cocktail designs. Exhausted since Brooksie’s telephone call that morning and now so keyed up she was running on nervous energy, Sam went out to model a raspberry chiffon dress in a daze.
The applause filtered back to the room where the models were changing and a new sense of excitement charged the air. With the growing realization that something was happening, Nannette, Sylvie, Brooksie and the models frantically trod over clothes hangers and facial tissues, wading through the discarded originals they were too busy to hang up. After the cocktail dresses, Ulla announced the evening gowns.
Rivers of perspiration running down between her shoulder blades, Sam was zipped and hooked into the last number that was to have been Sophie’s, an amazing off-the-shoulder white moire silk with a vast skirt glittering with seed pearls and crystal beads. Brooksie touched up Sam’s hastily piled and twisted hair with hair spray and managed to shoot some of it into Sam’s eyes.
“Are you all right, kid?” Fatigue and excitement had reduced Brooksie’s voice to a hoarse rasp. “We’re almost to the end—you
are
the end, Sammy! Can you see?”
“Only with one eye,” Sam whispered despairingly. Nannette was on her knees, pulling the great stiffened skirt into manageable folds. Sam felt as though she could barely hold up the weight of the dress; her shoulders sagged. “Here goes nothing,” she told them.
At the entrance to the salon Sam visibly staggered with weariness and the bulk of the extravagant ball gown. The dress weighed at least forty pounds and she’d never even tried it on before; she felt that she lumbered out into the salon like a battleship underway, her mind a blank, no longer able to think.
She turned slowly in front of Ulla at the microphone and could hear the beat of clapping hands in her ears like a hailstorm.
Is this what you wanted, Sammy?
some voice from inside her head asked.
She turned slowly in the ballooning, sparkling gown, breathing in gasps, one eye still tearing from the jet of hair spray. Yes, this was what she wanted, she answered the voice. If everything in Paris had been dreamlike since she’d arrived, this moment was the greatest, most impossible dream of them all.
At the finale, the best numbers in the retrospective show were to file out, stand in a row and accept the accolade. By some miracle, it
was
an accolade, Sam realized, shivering uncontrollably. And it was still a dream as the clumsy models from the second-rate agency found their way out to stand beside her. It was a dream, because surely the front row of the American press, the Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue buyers, hadn’t stood up. She was dimly aware the members of the French press were slowly rising too.
The heavy pearl-and crystal-encrusted dress kept her immobile; she felt as though it would take Nannette and Sylvie both to carry her back to the dressing room. In all that was going on, she knew that Chip was standing at the outer door to the landing, leaning against the doorjamb, watching her with intense, black eyes.
The crowd in the salon stood and clapped, a standing ovation. It couldn’t be happening, but it was. Because the front rows were on their feet, Sam couldn’t see the old, tattered aristocrats of the Maison Louvel regulars huddled toward the back, but she knew they were there. At the French windows at the end of the room, a tall figure stood, homburg hat in hand, the shoulders of his hand-tailored suit speckled with rain. There was no mistaking the angle of that leonine, platinum head or the unmistakably handsome face.
Jack Storm was there.
Chapter Eighteen
“Sammy, oh, Sammy, where’s my beautiful cowgirl gone? Look at you, baby, you’re magnificent!” Jack Storm’s large, well-manicured hands were braced at the sides of her head against the fitting-room wall, gently imprisoning her, his famous blue eyes inches from her own. “You’re a queen, a goddess—I can’t get over it!”
The surging crowds in the corridor pressed against the door and Jack held it shut with one elegantly shod foot. He had grabbed Sam and pulled her inside one of the Maison Louvel fitting rooms at the back of the salon; now his familiar tanned face, sleekly tailored body in a charcoal-gray suit, and mane of platinum hair were even more overpowering than she remembered.
“Sammy, what a fool I was to think I could let you go. It’s been hell without you these past few weeks. I’m going to take you back with me, kid. I’m asking Marianna for a divorce.”
Over his shoulder Sam could see them reflected in the tiny fitting-room mirrors: a tall, urbane man, his expensive suit lightly spattered with rain and a willowy young woman with a hectically flushed face and bare shoulders wearing a full-skirted white ball gown that sparkled under the fluorescent lights.
Someone banged on the door, calling out over the uproar in French. It was Sylvie, looking for Sam.
“Jack, I’ve got to get out there.” Sam avoided his eyes. She wasn’t reacting to Jack. She was bone-tired, the weight of the ball gown dragging at her relentlessly. There was too much confusion. “Can we talk about this later? They’re looking for me in the salon.”
“Let them wait, sweetheart. Dennis and Peter Frank are out there, let them take care of it.” He lifted his hand to cup the side of her face. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? The whole thing with Marianna is winding down. It has been for years, I knew that before you left. It’s you I want, beautiful; come back to me, Sammy.”
It was what she’d been waiting for months to hear, she thought, staring up at him. Jack wanted her. She supposed everything she wanted was now, miraculously, within reach—marriage, a family, even her career. It just wasn’t sinking in.
“Jack, I really have to go,” she tried tiredly. “Look, this is kind of a bad moment.” She managed to get her hand up between their closely pressed bodies to brush back a strand of the looped pearls in the braid that had come loose. They were dangling at the side of her face. “I have to get out there and meet the press. We’ve worked so hard. You don’t want all this to slip through your hands, do you?”
“I couldn’t care less, baby.” His mouth hovered over hers, his brilliant blue eyes filling up her vision. “I’ve got to dump this Maison Louvel thing anyway, Sammy. The silk mill and the finishing plants are the targets, not this. The international division’s overextended right now, especially with our bad Western wear market.” He tucked the loop of pearls back over her ear, smiling. “But this retrospective show, what you did here today, is going to let the whole world know we’ve been here, darling—it was fantastic. Jackson Storm was in Paris. We did our thing for the whole industry to see, thanks to you.”
Samantha was still watching the dream figures in the mirror with a feeling of unreality. “Jack, didn’t you even get to look at my proposal? The idea I wrote you about Jackson Storm International opening a couture house in Paris?”
“I always pay attention to everything you do, Sammy.” His mouth was nuzzling the top of her pearl-decorated hair. “So what about this proposal?”