My Mrs. Brown (19 page)

She thanked the bus driver and exited. Mrs. Brown cautiously held the railing. It was a tenuous endeavor at best.

Stepping onto the sidewalk was like turning on a switch, the roaring sound of the city and the noise in her ears—the noise!—and its vibration moving from her feet into her chest. Secondhand cigarette smoke and the smell of perfumes. The horrific majesty! So this is New York?

Yes, this is New York.

It was bewildering, to say the least. Every person she saw she felt she had seen before in a movie or television show, not that they were all glamorous, recognizable Hollywood star types, but characters, vivacious or gloomy, faces gray or faces painted and powdered . . .

Which way to the crosstown Sixty-fifth Street bus?

She was getting her bearings, looking left, looking right for a street sign, when an exotic creature, half pageant horse, half woman, came rushing toward her on stilts, or were they just very high-heeled shoes? Mrs. Brown was terrified at the prospect of being run down by this fortyish creature charging at her with a crown of brown shaggy hair and thick vampire-sharp bangs that covered almost all her face. When the woman got that much closer, Mrs. Brown saw her eyes, big brown saucers like the girls in those velvet paintings. These eyes were lined with thick clouds of black kohl. The woman wore a pencil-thin midcalf-length blue bouclé skirt and matching jacket with a wasp-tight waist, and when she was very close, Mrs. Brown saw her gold necklace, more like a bib, with dangling glassy stones and silver crosses.

“You! You? You! Are perfect,” she declared, towering over Mrs. Brown.

Perfect?

“How would you like to go to a fashion show?”

“Excuse me? A fashion show?”

“Yes, to a fashion show. Everyone in New York wants to go to a fashion show this week—it's New York Fashion Week—and you, you,
you
are perfect.”

“Am I?”

“Divine, dear. Just divine.” The woman positively beamed.

“When?” Mrs. Brown asked.

“Now, right now, chop-chop, now; now in fact you are late.”

The woman handed Mrs. Brown a ticket to the Robin Hood Is My Sister show—she'd never heard of this label—on which was scribbled the seat number A17, and she said: “Go sit in my seat, and if anyone gives you a hard time just do this: turn a hundred and eighty degrees eastward, then westward, and say, ‘Oh, well, Saint Laurent did it all forty years ago, didn't he?' and then do not say another word. Remain aloof. The secret of success in fashionland. Aloof!”

The woman paused. “Do you blog, dear?”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind. Everyone is a critic. Everyone is an editor. Everyone is a fashion expert. Everyone has a blog. Blogs are the new black. Didn't you know? Haven't you heard? Where have you been, sweetie?”

She paused, but briefly. “Now, hurry up. Off you go to the fashion show. Go be me, the new me. My replacement.” This creature out of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
studied Mrs. Brown's drab outfit of trousers and twinset, and said, “And if anyone, any of those little people who call themselves reporters, or bloggers, asks what the hell you are wearing—and what
are
you wearing?—just tell them it is vintage Comme des Garçons, but all you have to say is Comme, sounds like
comb,
for short.
Hurry!
You're in vintage Comme, and never forget it. The show is about to start. You're late. Will last twenty minutes and then you can go back to going to wherever you are going. You
are
going somewhere, aren't you?”

Mrs. Brown nodded her head. “But where is this fashion show?”

The woman pointed west. When a lumbering delivery truck cleared out of the way, Mrs. Brown could see a portion of Lincoln Center—she recognized it from watching television shows on PBS. As she discovered, the spring fashion shows for next year were happening now, although it was fall—very confusing for the uninitiated—in a series of tents erected on the plaza of the legendary cultural center.

Just twenty minutes? Mrs. Brown wondered if she could spare the time. She checked her Timex watch, twisting its frayed brown band to see its face. It was 12:30. Should she risk it? If the show started at 12:30 and ended at 12:50, she could be on the bus at one o'clock. Why not?

It might be wonderful. The “shows” were something Florida had told her about in great detail on an evening when they were chatting in Ashville. Florida had described the fashion world's spectacle as “Kabuki on Judgment Day.” A yearning to see pretty things overtook Mrs. Brown in that moment.

As if called by some preternatural queen bee into its hive, Mrs. Brown walked west, so plainly dressed, carrying her traveling things in a canvas tote, and entered the big tents with the best of them—the whippet-thin women who made torturous high heels look easier to ride than bucking broncos and the cheerful men in their dandiest suiting and a preponderance of peekaboo bare ankles, God knows why.

Everything that happened next happened very quickly.

It was as crowded here as it was at Pennsylvania Station. Fortunately, it smelt better. The people were like rare birds, different than the people on the bus or the pedestrians on the sidewalks. Here they were plumed in remarkable clothing, either extremely colorful or solidly black, and skinny all, walking on those high heels, storks and robins and parrots and sparrows in this tented aviary.

At the first of two checkpoints into the show, Mrs. Brown was asked to present her seat assignment, written on her ticket. She didn't know the fashion system even remotely well enough to understand the tremendous risk involved here, at least for a person with any modicum of pride and self-preservation. No one would hesitate, in fact they'd enjoy it, to toss her right out when it was discovered that she was not one of them, the intended, the anointed invitee.

Mrs. Brown had been given a ticket to a front-row seat. More tears have been shed over fashion shows' front rows than
placement
at dinner at Versailles. Front-row seats at fashion shows are no more transferable than the sun is in the solar system. It was only because Mrs. Brown was among the last to arrive—and had arrived when all the attention and all the paparazzi camera lights were focused on the entrance made by three sisters starring in a reality television show—that Mrs. Brown was able to sit without ejection by the show's organizers.

There was a program on her seat. In it was the list of “looks,” fashion-speak for outfits on the runway, and the exotic names of the models, such as Spike, Sonny, Elektra, Li, and Comedy. “We were inspired by the idea of Pocahontas on a Russian oligarch's yacht,” the designers wrote to explain their inspiration for the collection Mrs. Brown was about to see.

“The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be happy as kings!” The designers' mission statement concluded with this Robert Louis Stevenson couplet from
A Child's Garden of Verses.

By the way, the intended occupant of this seat, the force whom Mrs. Brown had encountered just minutes ago on the street, was Martha Monn, the veteran proprietress of a boutique in Texas fed up with the fashion system, by which she meant the designers she considered untalented and unoriginal, and by the giddy young bloggers, whom she felt paled compared to her own years of hard work in the fields of fashion, or the work of the established reporters and writers she considered her colleagues dating back to the era before fashion became the New Broadway.

Whether Martha Monn was right or wrong to let her feelings get the better of her doing her job, Mrs. Brown benefited. Here she was perched, possessed by expectation and wonder. There was a moment's calm before a new, great pushing and shoving erupted: a celebrity singer, dressed in a kind of high-fashion igloo—white pouf, white feathers, white fur, white veil, and a choker of motherly pearls—was escorted by a gang of burly security men to a front-row seat across the runway.

Mrs. Brown took notice of the ladies she was seated between. To her right was a skinny slip of a girl dressed like Raggedy Ann. If she was fourteen years old, she was a hundred. To her left was a woman of substance with one bit of whimsy added, a gigantic pair of black-frame eyeglasses with cobalt-blue lenses. Unbeknownst to Mrs. Brown, the young woman to her right was everyone's favorite blogging ingenue, looking a little long in the tooth after a late night and then an early breakfast at Barneys to introduce a new collection of pocketbooks. To Mrs. Brown's left was the esteemed fashion writer from one of France's leading newspapers.

The lights went out, throbbing calypso music started, chased by the sounds of a computer-generated remix of Leonard Bernstein's Mass—then Nelly's pop classic “Hot in Herre,” so take off all your clothes—oh, my—and in an electrifying blaze of light came a parade of some of the youngest, skinniest, tallest women Mrs. Brown had ever seen in her life. If they were not so able-bodied, the thinness would have been repulsive, but instead there was jubilation. They wore flowing, embroidered, semiprecious-stone-encrusted, silky dresses in shades of purple, pewter gray, and dry-blood red bound and gathered with jeweled belts of matching fabric—it was the most extraordinary parade she had ever seen.

Was it great fashion? Were the clothes well made?

“Are you a blogger?” the writer from France asked.

Except Mrs. Brown heard, “Are you bothered?” and answered, “Yes, it is quite loud,” which the writer heard as “Yes, and I'm quite proud,” which she found most curious. Perhaps she was the mother of one of the designers?

It was the fashion show spectacle, and not just the clothes, that dazzled Mrs. Brown. The breathtakingly painted models stomping like championship thoroughbreds ferocious in heels, the blasts of flashing camera lights . . . it was as exhilarating as it was alarming.

Her heart beat fast, her ears hurt, her neck was sore from looking left and then right, keeping up with the jet pace on the catwalk.

Now the music was a remix of Bizet's
Carmen,
the Habanera aria and the Toreador Song both. The models marched one final time up and down. The impact of heels pounding on the runway trembled in her chest like bass drums and tubas do at a parade. When the models completed this final tour, the two young, skinny male designers of the collection appeared, waved rather anemically, and then disappeared. Just then, a beautiful woman unlike any Mrs. Brown had ever seen, wearing a blue-and-white dress with a full pleated shirt, leapt to her feet and raced past Mrs. Brown, shadowed by two bodyguards trying to keep up. Mrs. Brown felt their breeze in her face.

“Ines Spring,” the writer from France said. “The editor?”

Spring clothes? What did she say about spring clothes? Mrs. Brown wasn't sure what she'd heard or what was the correct response, so she smiled. A good smile covers a multitude of uncertainties, especially in a foreign land.

Although the music had stopped, and the romp of models on the runway was done, there still was an enormous amount of hubbub and noise as the thousand or so fashion faithful pushed toward the exit and the next show.

Dozens of people rushed up behind Mrs. Brown, so close. The next thing she knew she was swept up in a kind of massive, high-heeled conga line in fevered pursuit of the exit.

Mrs. Brown emerged from the tent into bright sunlight, like a chick popping out of an Easter egg. There were clusters of young Japanese women photographing other Japanese women, each dressed more outrageously than the next. Several of these women wore black plastic Minnie Mouse ears with Minnie's cotton, red and white polka dot bows—Disneyland's tiaras.

Where was she?

The only thing she recognized was daylight.

Mrs. Brown was struggling to get her bearings. Eventually she recognized she was in the courtyard at Lincoln Center, where she had entered.

No more detours, she told herself, if she was going to get to Oscar de la Renta.

Seeing a policewoman about a hundred feet away, she headed right to her and asked for directions to the bus stop. The policewoman pointed the way to Sixty-fifth Street.

At the bus stop, Mrs. Brown clutched her MetroCard. That melting pot she'd heard New York described as so many times was at a roiling boil. Young men walking little white dogs on jeweled leashes, women in indescribably tight stovepipe jeans and those high stiletto heels, people of all ages leashed to their phones, looking down, and nearly colliding.

By now a couple of teenagers and a young Marine also were waiting for the crosstown bus.

Finally, she saw the bus heading her way, a lumbering lion magnificent to behold. Soon, very soon, Mrs. Brown would be arriving at Oscar de la Renta for her perfect black dress, touching it, putting it on, purchasing it for a sum of money so large it still weakened her to think of it.

The bus stopped, its door opened. Mrs. Brown climbed aboard, and this time when she fumbled with her MetroCard, figuring out which direction it went into the machine, it was the Marine who helped. He helped her again when the bus began to move east, bumping forward and sideways, and Mrs. Brown couldn't find her footing. The soldier put out his hand, she took it, and he helped her to the nearest vacant seat. He took position nearby, standing erect as the bus caught speed and thumped its way across town.

The teenagers who got on the bus at the same time couldn't believe this tableau. Random acts of kindness?

On the seat the soldier led her to, someone had left a copy of the morning's
New York Post.

RATS AT WORLD TRADE CENTER
was the headline. It was a story about union problems at the rebuilding site downtown.

If unremarked before she left Ashville, it most certainly had not gone unnoticed that Mrs. Brown was traveling to New York on September 10, the day before the anniversary of the tragic attacks several years ago. This close proximity to the anniversary of September 11 had topped Alice's and Mrs. Fox's list of concerns for their friend's maiden trip to New York, but Mrs. Brown hadn't been deterred.