Remaining outside the range of the store’s electronic sticky-fingers catcher, on principle, I peruse the interior of Contempo Casuals. Two teenage girls are smearing black lipstick on their mouths. An older woman with stiff blond curls is rifling through the party dresses.
Nothing calls out.
Next door is Suzy’s Sophisticates. But this is hallucination! Two identical girls are coating their lips, the identical blonde fingering shoddy satin.
If I still had my lost juju, my gris-gris, my magic amulet, I might touch it now. Now there might be comfort in its warm and demanding presence over my collarbone.
A new wing of the mall has been added. My heart leaps a little—it’s finally open! Perhaps the dress store of my dreams will be waiting.
The new wing is darker than the rest of the mall. Perhaps the full battalion of fluorescent lights has yet to be installed. The corridor winds a little, narrowing in dimness.
Perhaps it would be better to return to the main thoroughfare. No other shoppers are present and probably the new wing is not open after all—possibly the workmen have simply failed to rope it off as usual.
But then the lights in one shop are on after alclass="underline" it’s called Clothes for a Spur-of-the-Moment Date When You Want Him to Think You’re Fabulous But You’re Not Sure What You Think of Him.
Hmmm.
In the window are several shimmering frocks. The flowered one looks uncannily like a dress I once saw in San Francisco. And the nubbled saffron linen—isn’t that the same dress as the one in New York, when the shop had just closed and there was a plane to catch that night?
Inside the store, elegance and haute, very haute, chic are rife. The walls are midnight blue, the carpet is cream-colored and as thick as a carton of cottage cheese, and the ceiling is decorated with phosphorescent moons and stars. Peculiarly, sprinkled about among the clusters of fancy garments are cages filled with live, small animals: canaries, lemurs, long-haired guinea pigs dyed like carnations.
Is this what happens when you lift a thousand pounds? Life decides to be amusing?
And I haven’t taken drugs for years.
To my left is a gunmetal vintage forties’ jacket with bugle-beaded shoulders—but surely it costs five hundred all by itself, and what about a skirt, never mind shoes and panties and stockings?
“May I help you?”
Standing behind is a guy who looks like an extra from Stormy Weather: cinnamon skin, zoot suit, and snappy fedora. Opaque shades hide his eyes and most of his personality.
“How much is this incredible jacket?” My voice is unable to do anything other than gush in the presence of so many beautiful clothes. “What a fabulous store!”
“For you,” he says, “ninety dollars.”
My body starts to hyperventilate. Damn that cigarette, and that lousy caffeine. “What about that Romanian blouse?” Next to us is this transparent garment, light as a promise, red, yellow, and green flowers obviously embroidered by fairy fingers.
“Fifty-five.”
My stomach queases up. The only thing more stressful than finding what you want is finding what you want for very little money. Wildly, I scan the store—Jean Harlow white satin sheaths, Balenciaga suits, lizard and snakeskin and alligator pumps.
“Nothing in the store is over a hundred dollars.” With unerring cool, he lights a long tan cigarette. “Otherwise we could not sustain ourselves in this ‘mall.’”
Sitting down in a peach velvet chair, I attempt to conquer my nausea and exhilaration. You go on for years and nothing happens to you. Then everything happens at once. Obviously, that’s the story of my life. If only you knew during the dull time that the wild time was coming…
Thoughtfully, the gentleman hands me a glass of iced Perrier.
The ice water restores some sense of order. If you knew what was coming, then it wouldn’t be life, would it?
“Would madam care for me to select precisely what would enhance her exquisite figure and small oval face? Her delicate coloring?” His voice is wonderfully free of sarcasm.
My eyes widen over the brim of the glass and my head nods.
He disappears for a moment and then returns with an item so magnificent you can hardly dare look at it. Vintage twenties, it is a lavender silk evening dress, sleeveless and low-slung. The material is so thin that you could bunch the entire garment in your fist, except for the crystal and indigo beadwork and embroidery, which consist of paisleys and curlicues worked into the subtle, lively pattern of an ancient Persian rug.
“To go with these.” He lays out the entire ensemble: lacy lavender brassiere, silk lavender panties, silk and lace lavender garter belt with, obviously, genuine silk lavender stockings. For my feet, indigo snakeskin pumps, with a very low vamp for extensive toe cleavage. The matching bag has pink stones set in the fastening. Fingerless indigo gloves and a mink capelet in mauve and periwinkle complete the vision.
“How much?” I am unable to remove my eyes from the goods. “How much for the whole enchilada?”
Carefully he cuts a piece of cheese from the hors d’oeuvre table and feeds it to the chartreuse rat in the golden cage. The rat stands on his hind legs and nibbles delicately. “How much do you have?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
I pull up in front of Jacob’s exactly on time. Either the world has changed in a major way, or I have.
And I don’t even know which is easier to believe.
“Miss Pet?” the maître d’ inquires as my snakeskin pumps step inside. “Your table is right this way.”
Across the gloomy red and gold restaurant, Barnett is natty in robin’s-egg linen. The half-crocked expression on his face would seem to testify that he’s been here awhile.
“Lay-dee!” He wolf whistles to excess, then hops up to pull out my chair.
In the baroque mirror, I sneak a look at my reflection. When I took my loot over to Julie’s, she braided and pinned my long brown hair. In addition, she cosmetically treated my wide-set green eyes, big mouth, and tiny nose in what she claimed was a necessary makeup update. I don’t still put white circles around my eyes since nobody in Louisiana has a tan anyway, but the eyeliner was pretty dated.
Okay, it’s true: I look terrific. And the feeling is good too—it is sinking in, a thousand pounds.
“About that money…” The five hundred can come out of my savings, well worth it.
Barnett throws up his hands in the gesture of denial. His red hair dances in the candlelight. “History!”
“But—”
“A business expense,” he drawls. “I can deduct.”
For no particular reason, the remark hurts my feelings.
“What’s your pleasure?” He holds up his own glass, half-full of pale brown liquor. The smell, poignant as childhood, is bourbon.
“Perrier.”
His eyes crinkle with mirth. The waiter materializes and takes our order.
Now that my entrance has been made, now what? This feels like a mistake, the rosy glow of seconds before already on the fade. I could be back on the swamp in my houseboat, feeding the cats, sipping apricot nectar while hearing the evening song of heron and loon, whose words you begin to understand, the sweet melancholy they share with each other.