“Well?” she asked when she couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. “Do I get the job?”
The directress didn’t answer. Instead, she turned and submitted Alex to a long judicious study that was even more nerve-racking than her examination of Alex’s draping skills.
“Where did you get that outré outfit?” Marie Hélène’s nose was pinched, as if she’d gotten a whiff of Brie that had turned.
Imbued with a steely self-assurance that was partly inborn and partly a legacy from her mother and twin brother, who’d thought the sun rose and set on her, Alex refused to flinch under the unwavering stare. “I designed it myself.”
“I thought that might be the case.” The woman’s tone was not at all flattering. “My brother prefers his employees to wear black. He finds bright colors distracting to the muse.”
“I’ve read Armani feels the same way about maintaining a sensory-still environment,” Alex said cheerfully.
The directress visibly recoiled. “Are you comparing the genius of Debord to that Italian son of a transport manager?”
Realizing that insulting the designer—even unintentionally—was no way to gain employment, Alex quickly backtracked.
“Never,” she insisted with fervor. “The genius of Debord has no equal.”
Marie Hélène studied her over the silver rim of her glasses for another long silent time. Finally the directress made her decision. “I will expect you here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. If you do not have appropriate attire, you may purchase one of the dresses we keep for just such an occasion. As for your salary...”
The figure was less than what she’d been making at the nightclub. “That’s very generous, madame,” she murmured, lying through her teeth.
“You will earn every franc.”
Undeterred by the veiled threat, Alex thanked the directress for the opportunity, promised to be on time, picked up her portfolio and wound her way back through the maze of hallways.
As she retraced her steps down the Avenue Montaigne, Alex’s cowboy boots barely touched the snowy pavement. Having finally breached the directress’s seemingly insurmountable parapets, Alexandra Lyons was walking on air.
“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,” she sang as she clattered down the steps to the metro station. Her robust contralto drew smiles from passing commuters. “I love Paris in the winter, when it drizzles.... Or snows,” she improvised. “Boy, oh boy, do I love Paris!”
She was still smiling thirty minutes later as she climbed the stairs to her apartment.
The first thing she did when she walked in the door was to go over to a table draped in a ruffled, red satin skirt that could have belonged to a cancan dancer at the Folies Bergère, and pick up a photo in an antique silver frame.
“Well, guys,” she murmured, running her finger over the smiling features of her mother and brother, whose life had been tragically cut short when his car hit a patch of ice and spun out of control on the New Jersey turnpike six years ago. “I got the job. I hope you’re proud.”
Alex missed them terribly. She decided she probably always would. They’d both had such unwavering confidence in her talent. Such high hopes. Alex had every intention of living up to those lofty expectations.
When she’d left New York, two days after her mother’s funeral, she’d been excited. And nervous. But mostly, she’d been devastated.
As the plane had reached cruising level thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic, she’d collapsed and to the distress of the flight attendants, who’d tried their utmost to uphold the Air France tradition of esprit de service—even bringing her a glass of the cognac strictly reserved for first-class passengers—she’d wept like a baby.
For the first time in her life, she’d been truly alone. And though she’d been raised to be independent, deep down inside, Alex had been terrified.
Now, against all odds, she’d achieved the first part of her goal. She’d gotten her boot in Debord’s black glass door. Next, all she had to do was prove to the designer she was worthy of the opportunity. Once Debord recognized her talent, she’d be bound to win a promotion.
Could she do it?
Her full lips curved into a wide grin. Her amber eyes, touched with golden facets that radiated outward, lighted with Alex’s irrepressible lust for life.
“You bet,” she decided with a renewed burst of her characteristic optimism.
Chapter Two
Paris
February 1982
Alex’s knees were aching. She’d been kneeling in the close confines of the cabine for hours, laboring under the watchful arctic eye of Marie Hélène.
Alex was grateful to still have a job. Last week, at the season’s défilé de mode held in the gilded splendor of the Salon Impérial of the Hôtel Intercontinental, Debord had experienced the fashion media’s ugly habit of chewing up designers and spitting them out.
“Fashion for nuns,” American Vogue had called his totally black-and-white collection. “A tour de force of hideous taste,” Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune declared, attacking the designer’s androgynous black jersey for its dismal, breast-flattening style. “A cross between Grace Jones and Dracula,” Women’s Wear Daily said scornfully. Its sister publication, W, gave the collection a grade of S—for scary—and said Debord’s depressing black shrouds looked as if they came right out of the comic strip Tales from the Crypt.
After the disastrous showing, the femmes du monde, accustomed to making twice-yearly pilgrimages to this revered salon, deserted the French designer, rushing instead to Milan and Debord’s long-detested rival, Gianni Sardella.
Surprisingly, Sophie Friedman, daytime television producer and wife of Hollywood mogul Howard Friedman, paid no heed to the fashion mavens. On the contrary, she amazed even the unflappable Marie Hélène by ordering six evening dresses and twice that number of daytime suits.
Considering that each garment was literally built onto the client, Mrs. Friedman and Alex had spent most of the past week locked in the cramped fitting room together.
“I think it makes me look fat,” Sophie said, raising her voice over the classical music played throughout the building.
“It is only the white toile that makes it appear so, Mrs. Friedman,” Marie Hélène assured her smoothly. “Once it is worked up in the satin, you will discover that black is very slimming.”
“Do you think so?” Sophie ran her beringed hands over her substantial hips, tugging at the material. Alex bit back a curse as the pins she’d just inserted pulled loose. The zaftig woman looked unconvinced. “What do you think?” she asked Alex.
Alex was unaccustomed to being addressed by a customer. A mere draper, she was in the lower echelons of the profession.
But Sophie Friedman had already proved herself to be one of Debord’s more eccentric clients. Unwilling to accept the idea that man was meant to fly, Sophie eschewed airline travel. The first day in the fitting room, she’d explained how she’d taken a private Pullman from Los Angeles to Grand Central Station, then the QEII to Cherbourg, thence to the Avenue Montaigne by Rolls-Royce.
The woman might be eccentric, Alex thought. But she was no fool. “Madame is correct about black being slimming,” she hedged.
“So I won’t look fat?”
Alex didn’t want to alienate Marie Hélène. Those who dared question the directress were summarily dismissed. Without references.
A tendril