Scruples (25 page)

Valentine had started buying
Women’s Wear Daily
from the first day of her arrival in the United States. This newspaper of the fashion industry is completely indispensable to anyone connected in any creative or executive capacity with the enormously important business of selling things to wear. If you are a manufacturer of buttons in Indiana or a maker of tennis shoes in Japan or a fabric designer in Milan or a department-store buyer in Wisconsin or are in any significant way connected to the fourth largest industry in the United States, you are a fool if you do not read
Women’s Wear Daily
. It is the most important daily trade newspaper in the world. In addition it has excellent critics of all the arts, fascinating Washington coverage, important inside glimpses of the film and theatrical world, and consistently revealing columnists. And, finally, it deals with design, with designers, and with the people who wear the prettiest clothes and go to the very best parties all over the world. A society woman who had to choose between
Women’s Wear
and all the fashion magazines and society columnists put together would always pick the newspaper.

Valentine had been able to form an excellent idea of where to go to look for a job by simply absorbing information through
Women’s Wear
, and on the Monday following her unexpected picnic with Spider, she set out, carefully dressed in her most successful and original dress and coat, perfectly accessorized, with her portfolio of sketches under her arm. She knew exactly what she wanted to be—a designer’s assistant.

Any designer of the slightest importance must have an assistant to translate sketches into hard reality, to act as a go-between between the designer and the workroom, to provide a backboard on which to bounce off new ideas, sometimes to provide the ideas themselves. When Anne Klein died, her assistant, Donna Karan, until then unknown, became an overnight heroine as she produced a perfect “Anne Klein” collection. Now she has her own assistants and the business is bigger than ever.

From
Women’s Wear
Valentine had compiled a long list of designers whose work she admired and she had located them through the phone book. The design center of the United States is located in just a few tall office buildings on Seventh Avenue. Just reading the list of tenants in the lobbies took Valentine’s breath away, whatever breath she had left after pushing her way through the crowds on the street, the crowds in the lobbies, all of which were minor league compared with the crowds in the elevators. The heart of Seventh Avenue is a claustrophobe’s nightmare, as busy as all the alleys of Hong Kong crammed together into several nondescript buildings entirely without charm.

Every wholesale showroom has a hard-eye receptionist who looks at a top editor from
Harper’s Bazaar
with precisely the same suspicion with which she regards a Hasidic rabbi collecting for his temple. Valentine, however, had a knack for dealing with suspicious women: Any vendeuse in the French couture can double as a prison matron when dealing with those beneath her. Only sheer affrontery, Valentine knew, stood a chance.

“I am Valentine O’Neill,” she announced precisely, with that air of quiet, taken-for-granted arrogance and the same slight, condescending smile she had observed on so many truly secure clients as they announced themselves at Balmain’s. Valentine exaggerated her French accent. “I should like to see Monsieur Bill Blass.”

“What about?”

“Please tell Monsieur Blass that Valentine O’Neill, the assistant of Monsieur Pierre Balmain, would like to see him.”

“What about?”

“Business. I have just arrived from Paris and I don’t have time to waste, so could you kindly ring Monsieur Blass for me.”

Sometimes it didn’t work; sometimes Valentine was told to come back later, but almost always there was enough authority in her manner and enough devastating luxury in her clothes, enough easy confidence in her posture, to get her into the office of the designer or, more frequently, that of his assistant. Her story of being a former Balmain assistant was not closely questioned. She looked the part so perfectly, in spite of her youth, that she usually got a chance to show her portfolio. Seventh Avenue designers don’t like to overlook any possibilities of new blood. Once they were all hopeful beginners with portfolios themselves, and they know that in any portfolio there is always the chance of finding something good.

But 1972 was a very bad year to be looking for a job on Seventh Avenue with a portfolio full of original designs that leaped totally out of the ordinary. The garment industry had just emerged from the bloodbath of the mid-calf length, and department store sales had never been worse as American women refused to buy new clothes, defiantly clinging to their old pants for a few more years. No one really knew what direction to go in, but anything that looked new and fresh had to be wrong.

“Elliott, I’ve been turned down cold by twenty-nine designers in three weeks. If you tell me not to get discouraged I’ll throw this dead chicken at you.”

Spider had fallen into the habit of going with Valentine on her Saturday marketing expeditions to the Italian street markets on Ninth Avenue. His excuse was that she couldn’t possibly carry all the heaps of provisions she bought, but he also took a deep interest in seeing what she was planning to cook so that he would know what to look forward to. The model he was currently having an affair with kept only skin freshener in her refrigerator. On the nights when he didn’t take his girl out to dinner, he clomped up the stairs to his apartment as noisily as possible. Valentine, who complained that it was not amusing to cook for one person, would wait until she heard his record of Ella and Louis singing “A Foggy Day in London Town” before she slipped a little scrap of paper under his door.
“Pot-au-feu”
it would say or
“Choucroute Alsacienne.”
Elliott was the only person she knew in New York and she saw no reason to eat alone. It was only reasonable.

“It’s not a question of getting discouraged,” he answered her. “I think that you’re simply going about things the wrong way. You want them to hire you on the basis of designs that scare them shitless. I think your stuff is incredibly exciting, but I’m not making clothes for a living and I don’t have to worry about what women in Oshkosh are going to want to wear. You’re ahead of your time and in the wrong country and you’re too pigheaded to admit it. You can’t ram your ideas down anyone’s throat, I don’t care how brilliant they are.”

“So, what do you suggest I do?” She glared at him wrathfully, her eyes gripping his face. “If
I
don’t get a job soon,
you
may starve to death.”

“Low blow! You French bitch! How many times have I begged and begged you to let me pay for these things?” He hugged her, refusing to respond to her anger.

“Today, Elliott, you pay. For everything. And I have a long list.”

“Giving in at last? Good. And since you’re in a reasonable mood, how about another tiny concession?”

“Tell me what it is first—I don’t trust you, Elliott.”

“Make some new sketches. A whole new fucking portfolio. Throw out all your ideas of how women
should
dress in the best of all worlds and just walk around this city for a few days and look at what women are actually wearing, not the terribly rich women, not the poor women, but the in-between women, over eighteen and under sixty.”

Valentine dropped three tomatoes back in a bin, bruising them unmercifully, and looked at him in horror.

“You mean
copy!
You mean base my designs on what women have on their backs already? What a disgusting, vulgar idea—it’s vile, Elliott, I tell you, it’s—”

“You really are such a dummy. How did you ever grow up?” Spider enjoyed indignant females. At least one of his sisters had always been indignant about something. “Now, listen. Just shut your mouth and listen. You go see what women are already wearing and then you make designs that are
better
, but not so
different
that they will have to rethink their whole approach to clothes. People really hate to change—I mean they loathe it!—but the whole fucking fashion industry is based on making ’em change, because if they don’t change, they don’t need new clothes. That’s why you have to do it gently, so that they don’t have to worry about whether something new is too oddball or too freaky or what would they wear it to—or with—or will it make them look too unlike from everyone else. Creep up on ’em—nobody loves a prophet.”

Valentine was sullenly silent. She was torn between her entire conception of fashion as an individual expression of her creative spirit and her immediate understanding of the lightness of what that bastard Elliott was saying. She knew, from the reactions of all the designers she had seen, that she wouldn’t get a job from the sketches she had shown. Even the kindest and most honestly impressed and encouraging of them had told her that her ideas were too different, too impractical. But how she hated to give in! How she hated to tailor her beliefs to mundane reality! For five minutes she concentrated on finding the perfect head of lettuce, while she raged within. Spider, reading her emotions on her face, felt sympathy, but determined not to give an inch.

“Bourgeois, conservative shit!” she flung at him. He laughed. That meant he’d convinced her. “What makes you think you know so damn much about women, Elliott? Look at you! You dress like a bum and you presume to tell me what goes on in a woman’s mind, you slob in tennis shoes!” His confidence infuriated her, particularly since she knew he was right and she had been unforgivably blind not to figure it out all by herself.

“Modesty forbids—” Spider started to answer. She picked up a large bunch of grapes and advanced on him menacingly. He dropped the shopping bag he was carrying and picked her up, holding her easily off the street until their eyes were on a level.

“I know you want to express your gratitude, but I can’t take those grapes, Valentine. Think of Cesar Chavez. But you may kiss me, if you like.” He held her astonished gaze, thinking that her eyes had the color of fresh growing things.

“If you don’t put me down, Elliott, I’ll kick you in the balls!”

“Frenchwomen lack a sense of poetry,” he said, still holding her close. He wondered if he should kiss her or not. He certainly felt terribly much like doing it, and normally Spider never wondered about such things. Any woman he felt like kissing, he kissed. But Valentine was such a prickly pear, such a funny, proud thing, and she was feeling humiliated now, he could tell. A kiss might seem condescending. He lowered her gently to the pavement, removing the grapes from her grasp. Besides, he informed himself, she was his neighbor and his friend, and he wanted to keep that relationship. He didn’t want to fuck Valentine, because if he fucked her, sooner or later the romance was bound to end. Even if they stayed friendly later, as almost always happened with his girls, it wouldn’t be the same kind of friendship as it was now.

“I forgive you,” he told her, “for your lack of poetry, not to speak of your lack of romance, but only because you’re such a good cook. What’s for dinner?”

“I see through you, Elliott. A man like you can’t even be insulted because all you think of is your stomach. Just for that, for dinner we have cold jellied calf’s head.” She started into the Italian butcher shop where skinned rabbits and veal heads hung hideously in the window,

“Aw, Valentine. Come on, that’s not nice.”

“You’ll love it. It’s time you got over some of your narrow-minded provincial American ways. You need to enlarge your horizon, Elliott.”

“Valentine.” He grasped her hand and stopped her dead. “I don’t stand still for blackmail. What’s for dinner?”

Startled, she stopped short and looked intensely at the littered pavement—orange peel, crushed red peppers, scraps of newspaper, bread crusts. What a typical American he was. No gastronomic imagination, taste buds half alive. Still—she felt a curiously warm swell of gratitude toward the big barbarian.

“I’m sorry if I have offended you, Elliott. I didn’t realize you were so hungry. If
tête de veau
is too unfamiliar to you, we will have a simple
côte de porc
in the style of Normandy, cooked with Calvados and a heavy cream sauce, garnished with shallots and apples—it won’t be too exotic for your taste, will it?” She knew this was his favorite of all her dishes.

“I accept your apology,” Spider said with dignity. And gave her a tiny little goose, just enough to let her know who was who and what was what.

For the next two weeks Valentine haunted the city from downtown in Greenwich Village north to the Guggenheim Museum. She roamed the department stores, the better markets, the lobbies of large office buildings, and, of course, the streets, particularly Madison Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Third Avenue, and 57th and 79th streets on the East Side. On five evenings Spider took her on a round of middle-priced but popular places to eat and drink. She didn’t bring her sketch pad, only her eyes and her memory. She wanted to immerse herself in a flood of pure impressions. Then she retired to her apartment for a week, alone with a terrible head cold, aching feet, and a mind reeling with ideas. After a week of almost constant work, Valentine emerged with a full portfolio. Spider flipped through the pages eagerly.