Wrong! So wrong!
And, in the words of Mrs. Erickson, “What do you want to work in one of those filthy shops for, anyway? Believe me, I know. My friend Esther volunteers at a thrift shop for Sloan-Kettering. She says the cat fights over a simple Pucci scarf are not to be believed. Go see Monsieur Henri. He’ll set you straight.”
Luke suggested that taking career advice from a woman I met in a basement laundry room wasn’t the soundest thing he’d ever heard of.
But Luke has no idea just how desperate things have gotten. Because I haven’t told him. I am trying to appear sophisticated and full of savoir-faire where Luke is concerned. It’s true he was kind of shocked when all my boxes from home arrived, and we realized there was nowhere to put them. Fortunately, Luke’s mom’s apartment comes with its own lockable storage unit in the basement garage, where I’ve stashed all my bolts of material and most of my sewing supplies.
The clothes, however, went straight to a portable hanging rack I bought at Bed Bath & Beyond and installed in the bedroom, under the Renoir girl’s disapproving gaze. Luke seemed kind of shocked when he saw it—“I had no idea anyone owned more clothes than my mother,” he said—but he recovered himself and even asked me to model some of the slinkier ensembles (as well as, for some reason, my Heidi outfit, which he seemed to get an enormous kick out of).
But what Luke doesn’t know is that if something doesn’t give soon, that outfit, as well as the rest of the collection, are going up onto eBay. Because I am down to my last few hundred dollars.
And though it will break my heart to have to sell the clothes I’ve been collecting for so many years, it would break my heart more to have to admit to Luke that I don’t have the money for next month’s rent.
And while I know he’ll only laugh and say it’s all right and not to worry about it, I can’t help worrying about it. I don’t want to be his live-in mistress or whatever. I mean for one thing that is hardly an effective career path, as we know from Evita Perón. But also, I want to go shopping ! I want to add new things to my collection so badly!
Only I can’t. Because I’m broke.
So Monsieur Henri is my only hope. Because if he doesn’t work out, I’m totally selling off the Suzy Perettes for sure, and maybe even the Gigi Youngs.
Either that, or I’m signing up for a temp agency. I will fax and file for the rest of my life, so long as SOMEONE will hire me.
But as soon as Monsieur Henri (or whoever the guy is who buzzes me in when I press on the bell to Monsieur Henri’s shop) ushers me into the waiting area of his shop, all smiles and graciousness—until I tell him I’m not getting married (yet), I’m there to ask about employment opportunities—I have a pretty good idea it’s going to be the temp agency for me.
Because the middle-aged, mustached man’s face falls, and he demands, in a suspicious, heavily French-accented voice, “Who sent you? Was it Maurice?”
I blink at him. “I have no idea who Maurice is,” I say, just as a tiny, birdlike Frenchwoman comes out of the back with a big smile plastered on her face… until I say the word “Maurice.”
“You think she is a spy from Maurice?” the woman asks the man, in rapid French (which I now understand—well, mostly—on account of having spent a summer in that country, and a semester before that learning it in class).
“She has to be,” the man replies in equally rapid French. “What else would she be doing here?”
“No, honestly,” I cry. I know enough French to understand it, but not enough actually to speak it myself. “I don’t know anybody named Maurice. I’m here because I understand you’re the best wedding-gown restorer in town. And I want to be a wedding-gown restorer. Well, I mean, I am one. Here, look at my portfolio—”
“What is she talking about?” Madame Henri (because that’s who she has to be, right?) asks her husband.
“I have no idea,” he replies. But he takes my book, and begins thumbing through it.
“That’s a Hubert de Givenchy gown I found in an attic,” I tell them, when they get to the page showing Bibi de Villiers’s wedding gown. “It had been used to wrap a hunting rifle, which had rusted all over it. I was able to get the rust stains out by soaking it overnight in cream of tartar. Then I hand-stitched repairs to the straps and hem—”
“Why are you showing this to us?” Monsieur Henri demands, shoving my book back at me. Behind his head is a wall full of framed photographs of before-and-after shots of wedding gowns he’s restored. It’s pretty impressive. Some of them were so yellowed with age, they looked as if they’d fall apart at the merest touch.
But Monsieur Henri had managed to get them back to their original snowy-whiteness. He either had a way with fabrics, or some kind of wicked chemicals in his back room.
“Because,” I say slowly. “I just moved here to New York from Michigan, and I’m looking for a job—”
“Maurice didn’t send you?” Monsieur Henri’s eyes are still narrowed suspiciously.
“No,” I say. Really, what is going on here? “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Madame Henri—who has stood at her much taller husband’s side, peeking around his arm at my portfolio—gives me the once-over, her gaze taking in everything from my perky ponytail (Mrs. Erickson advised me to keep my hair out of my eyes), to the Joseph Ribkoff sheath dress I’m wearing beneath a vintage beaded cardigan (it’s gotten chillier outside since I arrived in New York. Summer isn’t quite gone, but fall is definitely in the air).
“Jean, I believe her,” she says to her husband in French. “Look at her. Maurice would not send someone as stupid as she is to trick us.”
I want to yell “Hey!” in an enraged voice and stomp out of their shop in a huff, since I perfectly understood that she’d just called me stupid.
But on the other hand, I can see that Monsieur Henri has turned the page and is looking at the before-and-after shots I took of Luke’s cousin Vicky’s hideous self-designed wedding gown, which I managed to salvage into something semidecent (though in the end she chose the Givenchy I repaired instead). He actually seems interested.
So instead I say, “I had to do all that by hand,” referring to the stitching on Vicky’s dress. “Because I was traveling at the time, and didn’t have my Singer.”
“This is hand-done?” he asks, squinting at the photo, then reaching for a pair of bifocals tucked away in his shirt pocket.
“Yes,” I say, trying hard not to look at his wife. Stupid! Well, what does she know? She obviously can’t read. Because it says right on my résumé that I’m a University of Michigan grad. Or I will be in January, anyway. The University of Michigan doesn’t accept stupid people… even if their fathersare supervisors at the cyclotron.
“You took out the rust stains,” Monsieur Henri says, “without chemicals?”
“Just cream of tartar,” I say. “I soaked it overnight.”
Monsieur Henri says, somewhat proudly, “Here we too do not use chemicals. That is how we received our endorsement from the Association of Bridal Consultants and became Certified Wedding-Gown Specialists.”
I don’t know how to reply to that. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as certified wedding-gown specialists. So I just say, “Sweet.”
Madame Henri elbows her husband.
“Tell her,” she says in French. “Tell her the other thing.”
Monsieur Henri peers down at me through the lenses of his eyeglasses. “The National Bridal Service gave us their highest recommendation.”
“That is more than they have ever given that cochon Maurice!” Madame Henri cries.
I think calling this poor Maurice guy—whoever he is—a pig might be a bit much.
Especially since I’ve never heard of the National Bridal Service, either.
But again I manage, for once in my life, to keep my mouth shut. There are two wedding gowns on dressmaker’s dummies in the window of the tiny shop. They’re restoration refurbishments, according to the placard in front of them… and they’re exquisite. One is covered in seed pearls that dangle like raindrops, glistening in the sun. And the other is a complicated confection of lacy ruffles that my fingers itch to touch, in order to figure out how they were created.