Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [60]
“It looks terrific, Paris,” she said, moving around in it experimentally, “but I’m afraid if I move too much my tits’ll fall out.”
“Finola, if you had any tits they still wouldn’t fall out, not the way that jacket’s cut.”
Despite herself Finola laughed.
“Touché, as they say here,” she replied. “And now can I go?”
“Where? To get a boob job?” Didier de Maubert slammed the door behind him, laughing as he caught Finola’s glare. “Sorry, sorry, chérie, I didn’t mean it. I just heard the end of the conversation, that’s all.”
Didier de Maubert, nattily attired in the white suit that was his uniform summer and winter, was Paris’s colleague, assistant, and general dogsbody. Which meant that he took care of the “business end,” leaving Paris to get on with creating the line. Didier wrote the checks and kept an eye on their finances; he found contacts for buttons, threads, suedes, and satin and got the best prices. He hounded suppliers, fought with the models, he praised the seamstresses, fixed the coffee, made sure Paris ate dinner every night, and dried her tears when she cried from fatigue and the pressure.
Didier had known Paris since she was seventeen and studying design at art school. He had been twenty-three then and had just started a little ready-to-wear line of summer pants and shirts. The clothes had had a jaunty nautical look that had caught on with the summer holiday-wear trade and he’d found himself suddenly successful in his first venture. Since then “Didi’s Designs” had had its ups and downs; some seasons he was successful, others less so, but he had managed to keep his head above water in a fickle business, and the friendship with Paris that had started in a sidewalk cafe patronized by them both had held firm.
It had, of course, remained only a friendship because Didi was, as the gossip columnists phrased it, “a confirmed bachelor.” He told Paris long ago that it was probably because his sexual interests were of the alternative sort that their friendship had lasted. “With a woman as beautiful as you,” he’d told her, “any other man would have become your lover before now.”
Didi had watched Paris’s progress—or lack of it—from the time she emerged from the safe cocoon of art college and the frustrations of the couture houses to try to make it on her own. He’d listened to her worries about money and he’d offered to put in a word for her at any of the big ready-to-wear houses that were always on the lookout for innovative new designers, but she’d been afraid of being swallowed up in that vast, impersonal world, of losing her touch and her individuality by giving it too soon to someone else.
Had Didier ever had sufficient capital to spare he would have financed Paris’s couture line himself, but there had never been enough to capitalize a second business. When Paris had returned from Hollywood with her story and her sisters’ ten thousand dollars and her ambitions, Didi had offered to help.
Didi slung onto a rail the plastic-swathed garments he’d just picked up from the specialist outworkers.
“Here’s something to cheer you up,” he called.
Paris pulled off the plastic covers and examined them.
“Didi, they look wonderful.”
The row of long linen skirts—oyster sashed with peach suede, frosty-blue with violet, gray with amber—hung next to toning silk blouses cut like wide-cuffed sweatshirts. Pants in the same heavy linen, cropped at the calf, were to be worn with the oversized suede jackets. Even on the rail the clothes looked young and exuberant, and Paris’s spirits began to lift.
“That’s the first lot completely finished,” she commented. “Thank God. I was beginning to think nothing ever would be.”
“I told you it would all work out.” Didi grinned, looking at his watch. “Paris, we must check on the accessories, and then we have to make a final decision on the location for the show. We just can’t leave it any longer.”
They had whittled down the choice of venue for showing