Billi kissed her on the cheek and held the front door. The black Mercedes limousine stood idling at the curb, eight feet away.
A pulse of uneasiness beat in Babe’s throat as she took her first unsupported step on concrete.
The driver touched a gloved hand to the brim of his cap and swung the passenger door open. “Good evening, Mrs. Devens.”
She turned to smile at him. In that instant of inattention one leg shot out from under her. She slammed painfully against the door. Momentum propelled her forward, and a split second later she had landed on the floor of the limousine.
The driver quickly helped her up. She stood blinking, angry and humiliated and not quite believing what had happened.
“My God, Babe, are you all right?” Billi possessed an aristocracy of face that usually hid whatever was going on in his mind, but at this moment, concerned and solicitous, he was watching her with undisguised pity.
Babe shook her head. “I’m fine.”
Billi bent to help her brush off her skirt. “No rips, no tears on you or the suit?”
“I’m fine.”
“No wonder,” he exclaimed. “You forgot your cane!”
“How foolish of me.” Babe’s vision was filming and she did her best to hold tears at bay.
Billi snapped his fingers. “Carlos, be good enough to get Mrs. Devens’s cane? It’s in the house.”
On the approach to the armory, the car had to maneuver around clots of stopped limousines. Gawking crowds pushed against police sawhorses. Police patrolled on foot and on horseback, struggling to keep order.
Searchlights mounted on wheeled platforms strafed low-hanging clouds, and as Billi took Babe’s hand to help her to the curb, dozens of flashbulbs popped. “God save us from New York’s brigade of professional event watchers,” Billi shouted.
With his help and the help of her cane, Babe climbed the red-carpeted steps.
Inside, extraordinary-looking women milled about with their escorts. They had obviously dressed to make a statement, but the clothes Babe saw struck her as loud and careless, probably overpriced as well, and they made her feel like a limping refugee from a time capsule.
People swarmed to Billi in flurries of adulation. “You remember Babe Devens,” he kept saying, “my partner.”
Yes, they remembered Babe. Hi, Babe. But they loved Billi. Billi, phone me and let’s set up that lunch… Billi, when are we going to have dinner? … Billi, you owe me a Michael Feinstein after that hideous Lohengrin!
Kiss kiss.
Darling’s and chéri’s and caro’s peppered the cooing and shoving. Babe kept smiling and nodding, fighting to keep her balance and fighting to keep the fight from showing. To reach their seats Billi had to pull her through wall after wall of fashion hangers-on.
By the time they found their places in the center bleachers, Babe’s breath was harsh and hurting in her chest.
She had reserved the seats next to them for Ash, but Dunk arrived with Countess Vicki instead.
“Ash is still in detox,” Dunk shouted. “She can’t even have visitors yet.”
“So you’ll just have to put up with me.” Countess Vicki planted a kiss on Babe’s cheek. “You look glorious, Babe, as always, and so sweet and sentimental in that frock.” She leaned across to scream at Billi, “Also liebe Billi, der Tag ist jezt, nicht wahr?”
Billi smiled. “Ja, ja.”
When the building lights dipped, a wild wind of applause gusted through the armory. There was a moment of darkness and stiff silence and then, with a thirty-speaker blare of recorded music, banks of stagelights came up, flooding the runway.
The first mannequin came strutting out, hands on hips.
“Billi!” Countess Vicki screamed. “Su-blime!”
Babe frowned. The mannequin was wearing an outfit of skintight blue satin pants with passimetrie swirling around the buttocks. She had pump heels, a low-cut lavender silk blouse with four oversized loops of oversized fake pearls and a big scoop-brim blue fedora squared over her eyes. She was wearing craters of black eye shadow and too much lipstick, and her hips moved with a hard, angular syncopation to the fender-beat music.
A creamy-voiced British actor delivered the amplified voice-over.
Applause mounted as the mannequin strutted to the end of the runway.
Before she had even turned, the second mannequin bounded out onto the runway. On her pencil-thin red-stockinged legs, swathed in yards of fuschia boa from her neck down to her ripped-off gray sweatcloth exercise tights, she looked like a pair of burning stilts holding up a cloud of acid rain.
Once the fifth mannequin strode onto the runway, Babe found that the dresses and ensembles overlapped in a discordant blur. Though tradition had it that you viewed only one mannequin at a time, Billi put as many as twelve on the runway at once. For Babe the effect was bewilderingly like a Broadway show—too much movement, too many lights, too much music.
She squirmed as Billi’s eighty-five mannequins filed on and off the runway, their outfits progressively more hostile and aggressive, and it all began leaving her with a taste of mega-hyped insincerity.
The big outfit of the line—the one that got the greatest applause and that seemed to be the clearest statement of the house’s esthetic—was a chartreuse blazer of crumpled silk linen. The jacket had been loaded with beading and more passimetrie than a Turkish dress uniform, and it was falling off the mannequin’s shoulders, too big even to be called oversized. The dress underneath, shocking pink, was much too tight and almost pornographically short, and the heels on the black pumps were four inches—far too high.
By some miracle of luck or coordination, the mannequin was managing to keep her balance. Incredibly, she was chewing gum, and her face was set in a theatrical sneer.
“Well. Babe,” Billi cried over the mounting applause, “what do you think of our little girl?”
It took Babe a moment’s shock to recognize that the mannequin was her own daughter. “Well, Billi, you certainly have turned things inside out.”
“What the hell else is tradition for?” he laughed.
The one tradition he had stuck with was to close the show with a wedding gown.
The lights dimmed suspensefully and came up again on a runway that was, for the first time since the evening had begun, empty. The speakers blared an eerily electronic Bridal Chorus.
Billi’s tallest, skinniest mannequin slithered into the light, glistening as though she were oiled.
Babe sat rigid, not moving. What she saw went through her brain like a knife.
A sheath of black leather—cut tight down to the pelvis, flaring into a skirt below the knees—covered the mannequin from neck to ankles. Around her throat she wore a diamond-encrusted ankh, fastened upside down to a platinum-link chain. Billi’s designers had studded the gown with steel zippers and outcroppings of black crow’s feathers. For the veil they had used miles of black illusion, for the boots, black-dyed baby lamb.
Babe’s blood was beating a drum in her head. The image of a steel-mouthed mask flashed before her.
“The bride wore boots!” Countess Vicki yelped. “Billi, I want that gown—the count and I are going to confirm our vows this spring, and that is going to be the look!”
The next few moments passed like caterpillars crawling over Babe’s skin.
Applause exploded and a spotlight swept the bleachers, searching for Billi and finally, when he rose, escorting him down to the runway through a congratulating roar of high-fashion color and gemstone.
Bowing, Billi exuded pride and satisfaction. Letting his eyes drop half closed, he spread his arms wide, embracing the crowd.
The dinner afterward was at Lutèce, and Babe did her best.
The buzz at the tables was that Billi’s line was glitzy, sexy, funny, compelling, expertly paced, slick, ironic, full of Hollywood decadence and offbeat charm, sure to be a winner.
Everyone said Babe must be so pleased for her company, and she made a pleased face.
Champagne was served with the meal. The guests toasted Billi and Babe, and somewhere down the line of toasts someone made a speech about Cordelia’s wacky charm.