The Crasher (8 page)

No, nerves were responsible for her rare sweat, because she didn’t actually have an invitation to Klein’s show. She was going
to crash by masquerading as somebody else, somebody Charivari would never dare question about fashion standards. She was about
to take on the identity of no less a personage than Elise Marathaux of French
Elle.

It was a piece of cake. First, to look like one of the fashion flock you couldn’t go wrong with black, black, and still more
black. To add the necessary French Elise touches, she’d chosen a pimple-size beret, sheer-as-glass black hose and clunky
black half-boots. The French were mad about clunky half-boots.

Everything had seemed all systems go at home. Now, with the journey taking so long, she didn’t feel so confident. She gingerly
stretched out her legs to examine her stockings for flaws, willing them not to run. Buying them from a stall on Queens Boulevard
had been a major risk.

Next she consulted her compact to inspect the angle of the beret. Her tiresome hair wasn’t helping it stay where she wanted
it to stay. When they got nearer, perhaps she should take the beret off and start all over again. If only they were nearer
… if only she’d brought something to read… if only she’d brought a sketchpad to doodle something for her class tonight.

She dug her nails into her palms. No more
if only’s.
She’d sworn, once in New York, she’d never have to say that to herself again.

She’d encountered fierce parental opposition over her evening classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology, FIT to the initiated,
where she’d been taking as many courses as she could in everything from basic pattern-making to yarn and cloth manufacture,
printing and dyeing.

To pay for the classes, thanks to total family uninterest in her real career choice, which was to be a fashion designer, on
Saturdays and Sundays she sold lamps, china and glass at that other national institution, Bloomingdale’s. It meant she was
“unavailable” to accept any exotic invitations over the weekends, but the sarà, sarà, and in any case those had yet to come
her way.

The taxi lurched forward so suddenly her latest most prized possession, large black-rimmed glasses, slid off her lap onto
the floor and only her outstretched hands saved her—and her hose—from landing there with them.

“Easy, please sir, easy!”

Angrily she used her damp handkerchief to wipe away a minuscule piece of dust from the frames. They carried the Klein name.
Natch!

These days designers were into designing EVERYTHING.

Alex, her best friend, advisor, not to mention first cousin, who ages ago had “loaned” her three hundred bucks toward FIT,
was the one who’d opened her eyes to the ENORMOUS importance and influence of those at the top in the fashion business.

“The most important designers today aren’t those who just ‘dress’ people,” Alex had said deprecatingly, “but those who affect
the way people live, think, behave. Who d’you suppose, Ginny, put all those Monday-to-Friday pen-pushers into cowboy gear
on weekends?”

“Who?”

“Ralph Lauren, of course, changing the look of America.”

He’d shown her a clipping from the
Wall Street Journal,
which stated that Ralph Lauren’s after-tax income was now about thirty million dollars a year and climbing; that Lauren was
a revolutionary—“like another little man, Napoleon, five feet nothing without his built-up heels,” Alex said, “changing not
only fashion, but home furnishings, house, car, and garden design, fragrance, even the shape of bagels.”

Calvin Klein was another Alex example: “Klein never has to ask the price of anything.” It was one of Ginny’s favorite Alex
expressions, especially the way he said it, with a thrilling mix of cynicism, envy and approval.

No, Klein didn’t even have to ask the price of a Georgia O’Keeffe, her favorite artist at the moment. Would Calvin ever know
or, better still, care that they shared a love for Southwestern art?

Ginny looked at her watch. This was turning into a fiasco. She leaned forward anxiously. “Is there any other way you can go?
To get out of this traffic?”

The driver growled something unintelligible, and for the first time Ginny realized he was wearing a turban. Just her luck
to get a Sikh off the boat from India.

Now she was getting worried about the taxi meter. She’d estimated it wouldn’t cost a cent more than twenty bucks from Queens
to Bryant Park, where for the first time some of the
New York shows were being held in a huge tent pitched beside the New York Public Library. Every time she glanced away for
a second, she could swear the meter shot up another dollar.

Although he didn’t know it, Alex was the one who’d decided her to take the plunge and try to crash the Klein show today, because
he’d told her he was going to be there. A tad condescendingly, she thought, he’d promised to tell her “all about it.” Was
he in for a big surprise.

“What you wear says a lot about who you are—or want to be—and so does the way you arrive wearing it. Even Grace Kelly had
to be taught how to emerge ‘flawlessly’ (Ginny loved that word) from car or carriage.” She had never forgotten Alex telling
her that. It was the reason that today, a walking fashion statement, she’d splurged on a cab.

Thank God for Alex. He’d always been her biggest booster, even when she thought she might have gone too far. “Pushing the
envelope”—that’s how he described her most daring designs—although he didn’t hesitate to be a severe critic, too.

A reefer coat she’d made that terrible summer in Boston, out of a new bath towel, had received one of his more scathing comments,
and not just because he knew she’d got into such trouble at home. Her mother had told her, with an almost bare linen closet,
if she wanted to take a shower in the future, she’d have to dry herself with the coat!

Her father didn’t like Alex. Even if they didn’t see him for weeks and sometimes, to her despair, months, every time Alex
called to say he was in the vicinity, her father made the same cracks. “He’s too smooth for his own good” or “He’s always
on to something,” accompanied by a sour expression which spoke volumes, despite the fact that Alex was the only child of his
beloved sister, Ginny’s Aunt Lil.

That was where part of the problem lay, for Lil, or Lillian, as her father always called his sister, had worked for the Walker
School in its early days in California. When it started to move around the country she’d quit, saying she couldn’t uproot
with a young son to take care of. Her father had apparently
always blamed Alex for losing his sister’s services, which just showed what a cockeyed way he had of looking at things.

It was peculiar and cruel, Ginny thought, considering what a sad early life Alex had had, having lost his father in a car
crash when he was only two or three.

Years ago, one wonderful summer when they’d just arrived in Denver, Alex had arrived in a red sports car, all grown up, tall,
dark and handsome, there to “help out” at the Walker School himself. At least that’s how Ginny dimly remembered her father
describing it. Far more clearly, she remembered their disagreements over “the content and substance of the courses” and one
morning she’d woken up to find Alex gone. She’d been brokenhearted, but it was only the first of many rumpuses between her
father and his nephew, and after a while things calmed down and, thank God, Alex would once again pop back into their lives.
As far as Ginny was concerned, it always seemed just in time to guide her in the right direction.

Without Alex’s input, for instance, she wouldn’t have gone so quietly to business school. Both her parents knew that.

They’d been sitting round the dining table in Queens that fall of ‘91, still surrounded by unpacked boxes, in their usual
state of just-arrived chaos when, to her father’s irritation, Alex had turned up.

The touchy subject of Her Future had arisen, and Alex, who knew all about it from Aunt Lil, jumped into the fray with “having
a business degree can be a wonderful insurance, Ginny, no matter what career path you finally take.”

He’d winked to take the sting out of his words and later, helping her with the washing up, he’d whispered, “Give yourself
some time, Gin. Go to the blankety blank business school, get your degree—you know you’re the little Einstein in the family.
Then you can tell the parents to stay out of your life, you’ve done what they wanted you to do, now it’s your move… you can
stick it to ’em.”

The moment she’d heard it from him, business school had
begun to make sense, and she’d said so. Had her father been appreciative? Of course not. He’d been furious that it was Alex,
not he, who’d changed her mind. You didn’t need to be a brain surgeon to understand why.

Jealousy. It was all about jealousy—for lots of reasons, many of them to do with her. Although she knew it drove her father—and
to a lesser extent, her mother—wild, why did she sing Alex’s praises and quote him so constantly? It was easy to answer.

Who had taught her to swim, to dive, to ride a bike, to catch a butterfly, to dry her tears when she didn’t make the square-dance
team (and then make her realize knowing how to cha cha cha was much more cool)? Alex, of course, not her father and not her
mother either.

She’d figured it out a long time ago, reading a book about the formative years—
From Childhood to Puberty.
It was sheer luck that hers had mostly been lived in California with Alex close by.

While her mother went to work and her father was, as she grew up to accept, “busy behind closed doors, not to be disturbed,
writing, studying, working on a new course,” it was Alex who’d shown her how to turn ordinary days into adventures, who’d
introduced her to a world seen through his especially sophisticated eyes.

Ginny didn’t exactly know what Alex did in what he called the Wall Street trenches. Whatever it was, since her eyes had been
opened in Denver to the true worth of the Walker School, in her opinion he was infinitely more qualified to give and sell
advice than her father.

Alex’s own financial situation, as he was the first to admit with a Paul Newman shrug, swung like a pendulum from rags to
riches, riches to rags, but at least when he did make a mint, he’d told her, he didn’t need the services of the good old U.S.
mail. Of course, it was a dig at her father, but she didn’t blame him for that.

The meter was twenty-five cents away from dollar number
fifteen, but at last the traffic was moving; in fact, the cab was zipping fast through the tunnel.

“I can’t make a U-turn, miss. D’you want me to drop you on the corner of Fifth and Forty-second or go up to Sixth and come
down?”

Now he was telling her. But how could a Sikh taxi driver know how essential it was that she arrive exactly at the Bryant Park
entrance and not have to burrow through the garrisons of gawkers always surrounding entrances and exits at fashionable events.

Ginny looked at the meter, then at her watch. Her timing was perfect. Not too early. Not too late. Although her half-boots
were killing her (maybe that’s what Elsa’s “dressed to kill” compliment really meant), she decided she could always limp to
tonight’s class at FIT. The boots (bought by her mother in a Chanel sale) needed breaking in anyway.

“Go up to Sixth and come down.”

No backpack today. She’d read that Anna Wintour, the unutterably chic editor of
Vogue,
never carried a purse, but she was never going to be that confident. Money, powder and a lip pencil were essential. As she
didn’t want to spoil the line of her black wool wraparound coat by adding a pocket to carry those vital impedimenta, she’d
“borrowed” her mother’s evening bag—black, unshiny moire, so it didn’t shout ”
P.M
.”

As the taxi waited behind an idling Mercedes, Ginny settled the outrageous fare (twenty-four dollars plus three dollars tip)
before it finally pulled up exactly at the entrance to the fashion tent.

Despite a hiss and a glare from the turbaned one, she took her time getting out, placing first one long, sheer-stockinged
leg firmly on the pavement, then the other, bending her torso slightly forward, head held high, slightly smiling but—unnoticed,
she hoped—gripping the taxi seat like death to propel herself out of the cab with one graceful movement, without leaving the
coat behind.

It wasn’t easy, but as usual Alex was right about how posture and grace always attract attention. Her arrival was
marked by a few flashbulbs going off and she knew without looking left or right that the gawkers were wondering who she was.
(So, in a funny sort of way, was she, knowing that in a few moments she intended to use the name of someone she’d never set
eyes on.) She’d never been photographed arriving anywhere before, unless you counted the wedding of her mother’s close friend,
Alice Turner. She certainly didn’t.

She approached the newly carpeted (already dusty) steps with the same slight smile as another photographer flashed, and a
perfect candidate for Charivari, in grubby leather jacket and sloppy jeans, murmured, “Sorry, could you give me your name?”

It was a great moment, but she blew it, saying too hurriedly over her shoulder, “Ginny Walker.” Even to her, it sounded like
“gin and water.” Too late she realized she should have practiced using the name of the French fashion editor, her passport
into the show.

It was already ten minutes past showtime, yet she was amazed—and horrified—to find hordes of people, as many men as women,
of every age, color and fashion peculiarity, pushing, shoving, forcing her to rush along with them down a wide entrance hall,
lined with booths offering free Evian, free newspapers and even hair-color forecasts from Clairol.

It was Armageddon. Even if she wanted to linger, to soak up every molecule of her first New York fashion show, it was impossible.
If she stopped short, she was sure everyone would trample her into the floor.

It wasn’t at all what she’d expected. There was no way anyone could see what anyone else was wearing, let alone show off any
fashion style of one’s own. There was no way she could find Alex to see his startled admiration at the way she looked.