He didn’t open it right away. “I understand you’re a family friend of the Smiths?”
“I am. Oliver Smith and I became acquainted at the Grand Central School of Art, where I teach illustration.” She’d dropped the mention of the school right away on purpose. Mr. Whittlesley was doing the Smiths a favor by agreeing to see her and was probably expecting some breathless, inexperienced girl.
He harrumphed.
“How many women illustrators do you use?” she asked.
He shook his head and untied the ribbons of her portfolio. “Not many.”
“Right. Georges Lepape, Charles Martin, Paul Iribe.” The names flew off her tongue; she’d practiced this speech in front of her mirror this morning. “How many of them have worn a Chanel gown?”
He laughed and looked up. “I hope none of them.”
“That’s where I can help you sell magazines. I want to invite women inside the world of fashion, not just aspire to it. They should look at your cover and understand what it feels like to wear a fox fur stole. The softness on the back of the neck, the luxuriousness.”
He opened the portfolio to her mock cover of the blue dress. A lithe woman with a secret smile on her face stood in front of a Parisian café. The background was faint, the emphasis on the lone figure. With her cocked hip and caved shoulders, she resembled a treble clef, all curves and movement.
“A Peggy Hoyt.”
“Yes.”
His eyes traveled from the woman’s face to her hands, along the vertical feathers in the dress and back to her face.
He carefully moved it to the side. The illustration beneath showed a woman in an enormous fur coat and matching cloche, wearing mustard-colored long gloves. The lining of the coat, which peeked through the draped sleeves and the kicked-up hem, was a shocking scarlet that matched the woman’s lipstick and ruddy cheeks. The overall effect was of the woman being quite happily devoured by the coat.
Mr. Whittlesley stared hard at both, going back from one to the other. Winter and summer. Summer and winter.
Clara didn’t move, didn’t breathe.
He picked up his phone and barked into it. Within ten seconds, another man walked in. The introductions were so fast, she didn’t catch his name, but he leaned over Mr. Whittlesley’s shoulder and whistled.
“Can we bump July?” asked Mr. Whittlesley.
“We could. We should.”
Mr. Whittlesley looked up at Clara. “We’ll take them both.”
Clara sold both on the spot and promised to come back in two days to sign a contract for more.
As she approached her building, she spotted Oliver waiting outside, smoking a cigarette and pacing like an expectant father. A surge of joy spread through her, for having found him. They spoke the same language, of parental disappointment and artistic ambition. His support, right when she needed it most, had changed everything. She walked up to him and kissed him on the mouth, not caring that her landlady was staring out of her first-floor window.
“We did it.”
“You did it,” he answered.
They went upstairs, giggling like children, and she slid off her dress, remembering the image Levon had described as they danced, of a dress pooling on the floor. She pushed the thought of Levon aside.
Oliver sat on the bed, watching greedily. At first, his caresses were careful, too careful for her reckless mood, but with her encouragement, he grew bold until she matched him, touch by touch, wave by wave.
CHAPTER NINE
November 1974
The next day at work, Terrence presented Virginia with her very own clerk’s blazer. She stuttered out a thank-you but inside reeled with shame. If any of her old acquaintances saw her, she’d be the laughingstock of the Upper East Side.
Her urge to clean, though, overrode her humiliation. Now that the brass trim that circled the booth had been buffed to a shine, the marble underneath looked dingier than ever. She’d brought in the marble cleaner she’d used (or, more specifically, her cleaning lady had used) in her old Park Avenue apartment and did a quick patch test. With a little elbow grease, a creamy pink hue, like a baby’s bottom, emerged from the brown grit. The situation was too tempting to pass up, so she spent the morning half-bent over, spraying and rubbing until her back ached, hoping that Dennis wouldn’t stop by and catch her scrubbing away like a charwoman. She occasionally popped up to scan the crowds, adjust her shift dress, and try to appear nonchalant. God, she hated that word.
She straightened up, needing a break. Totto gave a high-pitched yelp and almost fell off his chair from fright, while Terrence just laughed.
Totto fixed her with a stare. “What the hell are you doing out there, crawling around the floor?”
She held up the spray can and rag. “Cleaning.”
He shook his head. “There are people who do that already. Jesus.”
Doris made a face. “That rag is disgusting.”
“I know, right? And I’m only halfway done.”
“Why you want to touch anything out there is beyond me,” said Doris. “You’ll catch some kind of bug.”
“The plague, probably,” added Totto. “Why are you cleaning the booth? The better it looks, the more people will show up, asking questions, which means more work for us.”
Terrence shushed him. “Maybe by then, you’ll have learned the answers to some of the questions, instead of passing the buck to me all the time.” A weary look crossed his face. “Uh-oh. Here she comes.”
Virginia watched as a woman dressed in a black-and-white Chanel suit clicked over to Terrence’s window. She looked like any other Upper East Side matron, except for the fact that an enormous parrot perched on her right shoulder, while another, slightly smaller one, balanced on the top of her pillbox hat.
“Do you know anything about birds?” the woman asked Terrence with a clipped English accent. The larger bird stretched out one wing, and Virginia marveled at the gradation in color of the feathers, which started out teal near the chest and progressed to a deep sapphire blue at the tip.
He nodded. “There are approximately 372 different species of parrot.”
“Thank you.” She turned and walked away, the shoulder with the parrot slightly lower than the other.
Virginia stared in amazement. “Who was that?”
“The Bird Lady,” answered Terrence. “Stops by once a week, I toss out some random fact, and off she goes.”
“Who is she? Why does she do that?”
“Makes her happy, I guess. Trust me, she’s on the low end of weird characters we encounter.”
“Wow. You must see a lot.” Virginia let herself back into the booth and put the cleaning supplies away. “Between all of you, you could write a book about this place. Terrence has been here since the forties, right? How long for the rest of you?”
Winston whistled. “I’m next, here for twenty years. Then Doris, how long have you been here, you lovely woman, you?”
Doris’s caustic side disappeared; she even batted her eyelashes at Winston. “Seventeen, you old flirt, you.” She dropped the charm and pointed at Totto. “He’s the newbie.”
“No. She’s the newbie.” Totto pointed at Virginia.
As Doris and Totto launched into the inevitable bickering, Virginia pulled out her handbook but couldn’t concentrate. After all her worrying, Dennis hadn’t shown up at all. Maybe he’d had a tough day at work, fighting to build his new skyscraper, or maybe he’d had to go down to court. A pucker of disappointment rose in her.
The Bird Lady had stationed herself at the top of the West Balcony. Other than from a few small children who stopped and stared, she garnered hardly any notice. The birds’ feathers were a jolt of color against the faded afternoon light and reminded Virginia of the painting she’d found at the art school. When she’d gotten home last night, she’d tucked the painting inside an old art portfolio of Ruby’s to keep it safe. This weekend, she’d take it to a frame shop.