The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [47]
She takes a breath and steps out of the dressing room. Javier’s eyes widen comically. He sinks to his knees and guides her with his fingers, turning her slowly around and around. Reflecting the ceiling lights, his eyes take on a teary slickness.
“It’s not bad, is it?” she says, amused at his reaction.
“Not bad!” he whispers. “You have to wear it to lunch.”
“Javier, I can’t afford this.”
“This one’s on me,” he declares, getting to his feet.
She laughs nervously. “What are you talking about? This thing is twenty-five hundred dollars.”
The figure stops him in his tracks, but only for a moment. He calls the saleswoman over.
“I’m buying this suit,” he mumbles, extracting a deck of credit cards from his wallet and fumbling through them. “Which is higher? Platinum or titanium?”
“Titanium,” the saleswoman says.
Javier thinks for a moment. “What about tungsten? You think that would outdo titanium?”
She tilts her head. “I don’t know. Is that like radioactive or something?”
“Hey, even better: the plutonium card. Has a real ring to it.”
“I’m not going to wear this,” Ursula insists.
“Then it’ll hang in my closet until the moths devour it.”
The saleswoman enjoys a private smile at the scene before vanishing with his card.
“Look, you’ll need this suit for the presentation,” he says. “You can pay me back when you’ve made your first million. It won’t be long now.”
Despite her misgivings, she’s thankful to be wearing the new suit at Pablo’s, the poshest restaurant she’s ever set foot in. The place is on the roof of the Kermit Roosevelt Jr. Building, at the peak of the city, just across the volcano’s mouth from the Black Tower. Designed to resemble the grounds of a sprawling Colombian mountain villa, the deck has been heavily landscaped with trees, vines, and waterfalls, the sound of which serves to drown out that of the humming bank of giant fans blowing the bitter crater ash away from the diners. Stocky Latino men in suits and sunglasses are planted evenly around the perimeter of the dining area, providing both security and decoration. The day is sunny and temperate, and the polished palmwood tables around them are crammed with power lunchers.
Javier sits next to her so he can discreetly point out the things he observes. In his quiet, serious way he indicates the ruffled yoke of one woman’s blouse, the pagoda sleeves of another’s. The cuts are more fanciful and flowing, he asserts. The men’s suits are still boxy and dark, but this doesn’t bother him because men’s fashion is always the last to change. He observes the new accessories in evidence: a cloche, a cartwheel hat, a pair of ocher-yellow ballerina slippers.
As he talks, he takes her hands in his, and she shakes her head sadly at the contrast between her elegant, onyx-buttoned cuffs and her grubby, nail-bitten hands.
“I’m wasting all our time with this savage thing, aren’t I?” she asks.
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. Can you see any of these people dressing like Tarzan?”
“I can, yes. So can you. Just squint.” He demonstrates. “Try it.”
The two of them, squinting and swiveling their heads around, must look to the other diners like Chinese impersonators, or baby birds.
“No Tarzan outfits so far,” she says.
“Look at the colors. What do you see?”
“Red, yellow, green, blue,” she reports, “. . . violet. . . .”
“Bright colors.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Brighter than you’d expect.”
“I guess.”
“But natural. Not synthetic colors.”
“Yeah.”
“Jungle colors. You see that now, don