With that, Françoise hauled herself up the wrought-iron spiral staircase, and I followed. At the top was a door. She shoved it open with her shoulders and disappeared into the ceiling. Then she flipped a light switch, and I saw there was a tiny room up there. Françoise and I took up pretty much all the open space. Everything else, all around us, was clothes.
“Here are . . . the nice things.” She squeezed past me and back down the spiral staircase. Leaving me alone.
With the nice things.
23
F
rançoise was not kidding. We are talking
nice.
Up in the little room with the nice things, it became clear to me that Grandma’s dress is not the only powerful dress in the world. On the contrary. Clothes are powerful in general. Dresses in particular. And dangerous dresses most especially. Now I felt like I had stepped into a nuclear reactor that was positively pulsating with clothes. It was as if I had chugged about six Red Bulls in the space of a minute. Which by the way you absolutely should not do. Trust me.
Once my head stopped spinning, I took a more careful look around and saw that no matter how nice everything was, I still had not gone to perfect-dress heaven. Most of the dresses weren’t from the 1920s, and even when they were, the year was wrong, and as I have explained, even a dress from 1929 will not pass as a dress from 1928. Plus I still had to deal with things like size, and color, and condition. But . . . I found a dress. No. I found
the
dress.
It was a silver silk satin, cut on the bias, which meant it would cling to Nathalie Gauloise and show her perfect little shape. The fabric just glowed, and it was very sheer, so even though you couldn’t actually see through it, the fit would leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. It had the deepest plunging back I had ever seen on a dress from the 1920s, and a slightly higher hemline than usual, just above the knee, which at the time was extremely daring. A gather of fabric at the left hip was accented by a starburst of rhinestones, which may not sound particularly sexy, but it drew your eye down to the hips. And if I have to explain what is sexy about looking at the hips of a woman with a perfect size-four body who is wearing this clinging shining miracle of a dress with a back that plunges all the way down to that really sensitive spot at the base of the spine, well, there is no hope for you. It was unquestionably a dangerous dress.
In fact, it was the perfect dress. When I carried it downstairs, Françoise smiled.
I took out the cell phone and dialed Gerard Duclos’ number, but I couldn’t get a signal. I looked outside. It was still pouring. I looked at the dress. It was still perfect.
“How much is it?” I asked. There was no price tag on it.
“This dress is . . .” She thought about it for a while. “Four hundred euro.”
That is when I remembered that nobody had given me any money or a credit card. I figured I could put it on my Visa ATM card and have the money come out of my checking account, but the idea of laying out so much annoyed me, which I guess showed on my face.
“But,” said Françoise, “I give you . . . three hundred euro.”
“Okay,” I said immediately, because this dress was worth a lot more than three hundred and seventy-five dollars. I handed over my card, Françoise swiped it, handed it back to me, and then we waited.
Finally a paper slip sputtered out of the machine. Françoise frowned. “I am sorry.”
I knew there was more than enough money in the account to cover this. Not a vast fortune or anything. But more than enough.
“We do again?” Françoise asked. I handed her the card. She swiped. We waited. Finally she shook her head. Sadly. She showed me the receipt. It was in French, but whatever it said, it was clear in any language that the card had been declined.
I tried to think what I could do. I needed this dress.
Needed
it. For my movie. For Josh’s movie. For Josh.
Françoise looked at her watch and said, “I am leaving . . . now.”
“Okay,” I said, and dug out my MasterCard. I did this extremely reluctantly. Because I had very real doubts about whether there was enough room on this card. There wasn’t. Then I remembered the euros in my wallet. I could put most of it on the card, and pay the rest with euros. “Try two hundred.”
She did. “I am sorry,” she said again.
I was getting desperate. “Try a hundred.” Don’t ask how I expected to make up the rest.
We waited. Then Françoise smiled. The little slip chugged out of her credit card machine. She handed it to me, and I signed.
“You have two hundred euro?”
“No,” I said. Because I didn’t.
Françoise looked annoyed for just a second, then shrugged. “You have how much?”
I handed her my wallet. She removed all the euros: four twenties and a ten. Ninety. Then she took out my eighty-seven American dollars, which was worth about seventy euros. One hundred plus ninety plus seventy equals two hundred and sixty.
I was about to dig into my pocket for the change I got back from the muffin. Only Françoise said, “No. That is enough.” She smiled mysteriously again, and I swear her eyes twinkled. “You and I, we carry on the tradition, yes?”
She packed up the dress—
the
dress—like the pro she was, even found a plastic bag to shield it from the rain. As she packed it, I couldn’t help but think that maybe my Grandma had stood in this very spot and watched Françoise’s mother pack up
her
perfect dress. The thought made me tingle.
When the bundle was complete, Françoise handed it to me, got up on her toes, and kissed me on my cheeks, right and left.
“Tell Irene I say . . . hello.”
Before I could even say
thank you,
she shut the lights and shooed me outside. We opened our umbrellas, then she waddled away.
I had done it. Incredibly, impossibly, I had done it. I had found the perfect dress.
But I still needed one more thing.
I needed Gerard Duclos to agree with me that it was perfect.
24
I
ran back to the hotel. Even though I knew I must look like a drowned rat, I went straight to the breakfast room. Gerard was there. Marty. Irene. Pretty much everybody else I had met, but nobody seemed to be doing anything. They were all just sitting and smoking. I think every single person in the room was smoking. Except me.
I walked up to Gerard and announced, “I found it.”
“You found it?”
“I found it.”
“You did not call.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He frowned. “The first dress was very bad.”
“I’m sure about this one.” And I was. “I’m absolutely sure.”
Gerard stood up and looked into my eyes, then turned to Marty and said, “She found it.”
“So what are we waiting for?” asked Marty. “I’ll go get her.” He scurried off. About two minutes later he came back. “She’s coming.”
It took another minute. But finally, she came. Nathalie. You’d have thought the room was full of photographers, the way she posed and preened on her way in. When she got to where Gerard and Marty and I were standing, she glanced at me, then tossed her hair and put her arms around Gerard and started nibbling on his earlobe. “You have found my dress?” she purred.
I opened the bag and took out the tissue paper-wrapped bundle. Carefully I unfolded it and took off the paper. I held the dress up. The light in the breakfast room was not great. Even in that dim light, though, even without anybody wearing it, the dress shimmered like it was alive.
Everybody looked at the dress. I think I even heard a few people gasp. Then everybody looked at Gerard. Everybody except me. Because all of a sudden I saw Josh—my Josh.
If you are wondering why I was suddenly thinking of him as
my Josh,
go back and read again about him kissing me. Sure, there was that other stuff, like him sticking me with the check for those expensive drinks, but when I saw him in the doorway of the breakfast room, all I could think was,
I kept my promise. I found the perfect dress. I saved Josh’s lost cause. Now everything will be all right. Now he will be happy. With me. We will be happy together.
Then Gerard did the most unusual thing. He started to cry. Which I did not necessarily take as a good sign. “This dress,” he said. He wiped his eyes with the ratty sleeve of his ratty sport jacket. “This is . . . the dress. The perfect dress.
Catherine’s
dress.”
Everybody in the room breathed again. Several people applauded. I tried to catch Josh’s eye, but I couldn’t see him. Because suddenly Gerard was grabbing me. Kissing me. It did not feel like a you-found-the-perfect-dress-and-saved-my-movie kiss. It felt like an I-am-horny-and-want-to-have-sex-with-you kiss. I did not kiss him back. In fact I gave him a pretty good shove.
I looked for Josh in the doorway, but he was gone.
My skin felt hot. Inside, my stomach did a little flip-flop.
Gerard just laughed and put his arm around Nathalie. “So the dress is perfect, yes?”
Nathalie was looking at me in a way I did not care for.
“Yes?” Gerard asked her again.
“Maybe.”
Everybody in the room stopped breathing again.
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’?” Gerard demanded. “The dress is perfect.”
“Maybe,” Nathalie said. “I must wear it first.”
With that, she peeled off her little black T-shirt. She was not wearing anything underneath. Then she unzipped her tight hippy-hugger jeans and stepped out of them. She was not wearing anything underneath them, either.
She raised her arms up and posed. “The dress,” she said. I felt like an idiot. But I did exactly what she wanted. Like I was her personal maid. I positioned the dress over her head and let it slide down onto her body.
“It
is
perfect,” said Irene.
It was. It fit Nathalie as though it had been made for her, clung to her like it wanted to have sex with her. Which was what all the men in the room wanted. Probably some of the women, too.
“Mirror,” Nathalie said.
There was no mirror in the breakfast room. One wall of the lobby was a big mirror, though. So we all followed Nathalie as she slunk out of the breakfast room and through the lobby to the mirror. Watching her move in it was quite incredible. It was a
very
dangerous dress.
She looked in the mirror. Posed. Pouted. Posed. Frowned.
Then she turned to Gerard and said, “I hate it.”
I was stunned. Gerard was stunned. I am pretty sure everybody was stunned.
“But why?” Gerard asked. “It is
perfect.
”
“It is not perfect,” Nathalie said, like it was obvious. “You cannot see my tits.”
Which, by the way, she pronounced
teets.
Let me stop right here and be very clear about this. The way that dress clung to her, you most certainly could see her tits. Every curve. Every . . . everything. You could practically watch her heart beat. But if she meant the dress was not
transparent
. . . well, that’s true. It wasn’t. By the way, if you ask me, this dress was much sexier than if it
had
been transparent.
Nathalie wasn’t asking me. She wasn’t asking anybody.
“My fans,” Nathalie said. “I cannot disappoint my fans. They must see my
teets.
”
Gerard Duclos looked at me. “She says her fans must see her
teets.
” Do not ask me how he said that with a straight face. Incidentally, although I did not know this at the time, I later learned that before being cast in this movie, the only thing Nathalie had ever done was pose for a magazine that is kind of a French version of
Maxim.
Because it is French, the models wear even less than they do in
Maxim
. Apparently Nathalie did not want to disappoint the fourteen-year-old boys who bought that magazine and looked at her pictures while they . . . well, you know.
Ew
.
“I will not wear this dress,” Nathalie said.
“She will not wear it,” Gerard said to me. He looked back at Nathalie.
“Tell her she must find another dress,” Nathalie said to Gerard.
He turned to me. “She says you must—”
“I heard what she said! But she’s wrong. There is no other dress.”
“There must be other dresses,” Gerard said.
“No. Not like she wants. They didn’t make see-through dresses in 1928.”
“What does she know?” Nathalie sneered.
I stood up as tall as I could, which made me a couple of inches taller than Nathalie. I got right up close to her, inches away, and looked down into her pretty little face. “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I know. I am the author of the monograph ‘A Dangerous Dress.’ ”
“She is,” Gerard said.
“Words,” Nathalie said. “Stupid words. Anybody can make up words.”
I wanted to slap her. Instead I said, “I most certainly did not make anything up.”
“Hmph,” said Nathalie.
I looked around for help. Surely
someone
must see that I was right.
I spotted Irene, and for just a second I caught her glance. Then she turned away. I remembered what Françoise had said about her daughter, and I felt as if a delicate thread between the past and the future had snapped, right before my eyes.
Then I spotted Marty. He looked at me. I gave him my Hoosierest pout.
I guess Marty really did want to be a Hoosier. Because he tapped Gerard on the shoulder, cleared his throat, and said, “Maybe she’s right.”
The room went deathly silent.
Gerard swiveled slowly to face Marty. The top of Marty’s pompadour only came up to Gerard’s nose. Gerard stared down his nose. When he spoke, each word dropped out of his mouth like a stone. “Is . . . it . . .
your
film?”
“No,” Marty admitted.
“Whose . . . film . . .
is
it?”
“The director’s film.” Marty recited it by rote, as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance.