Queen Of Babble: In The Big City

Chapter 6

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), American inventor

Wedding Gown Restoration Specialists.

That’s what the sign on the door says.

Well, that’s certainly me. I mean, that’s what I do. Not just wedding gowns, of course. I can restore—or refurbish—just about any garment. But wedding gowns are where the real challenges lie. And where the money is, too, of course.

Only I’m trying not to obsess about money. Even though it’s really hard not to obsess about something that you seem to need so much of just to exist in this town. I mean, I have seen what some of the other tenants of Luke’s mom’s building are wearing when they come down the elevator. I never saw so much Gucci and Louis Vuitton in my life.

Not that you need Gucci and Louis to exist. But you need money—a lot of it—to lead anything like a normal life in Manhattan. If by normal you mean no splurges on cabs, movies, or lattes, and that you make your own breakfast, lunches, and dinners.

And okay, I can easily live without the latest monogram-canvas Louis Vuitton tote.

But it seems kind of harsh that I can’t even pop into the nearby falafel place for a quick bite. Not that I am eating carbs, thanks to the size of my butt, or that there is a falafel place anywhere near the vicinity of the Met, which there most definitely is not, residences on Fifth Avenue being almost literally MILES from any affordable eateries and/or grocery stores. In fact, Fifth Avenue is like a wasteland, nothing but million-dollar apartments, museums, and the park.

I actually envy Shari her walk-up with Chaz. Sure, there are no Renoirs in it, and the floors slope toward the windows, and there’s only a portable stand-up shower that leaks and the enamel on the claw-foot tub is so stained it looks as if someone might have been murdered in it.

But there’s a totally cheap sushi place right across the street! And a bar with dollar Bud Lights at happy hour like two steps from their stoop! And a grocery store half a block away that delivers… for FREE!

I know I shouldn’t complain. I mean, I have a doorman. AND a guy who runs the elevator. And a view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Luke’s mother’s windows are all double-paned, so you can’t even hear all the horns and sirens on Fifth Avenue.

And I’m only paying a thousand dollars a month for it. Plus utilities.

But I’d give it all up in a minute if I could just have a freaking caffè misto every now and then and not feel racked with guilt about it.

Which is what brings me to Monsieur Henri’s, not four blocks from Mrs. de Villiers’s pied-à-terre. It’s one of Manhattan’s premier wedding-gown restoration and preservation hot spots. Anybody who is anybody has Monsieur Henri restore, refurbish, and preserve her wedding gown. At least according to Mrs. Erickson from 5B, whom I met in the laundry room last night (the plumbing in Mrs. de Villiers’s building is too old to allow each apartment to have its own individual washer and dryer, and the cost of renovating would raise the maintenance fees even higher). Anyway, she told me that adding half a cup of vinegar to the rinse cycle saves you from having to spend extra money on fabric softener. And she should know. I mean, she had on a cocktail ring with a diamond about as big as a golf ball. She said she was only doing her own laundry because she’d had to fire her maid due to drunkenness, and the service hadn’t found her a new one yet.

So when I ring the bell to Monsieur Henri’s place, I am fairly confident that for once, I won’t be completely wasting my time. Mrs. Erickson had looked to me as if she’d know about wedding-gown restorers—the angle I am now pursuing, since the whole costume-restoration and vintage thing wasn’t working out. I have, in the past two weeks, been to every vintage clothing store in the five boroughs… none of which was hiring.

Or so the managers claimed. Several saw my college degree on my résumé, and said I was overqualified. Only one of them was interested in looking at my portfolio of refurbished vintage clothes, and when he was through, he said, “This might impress people back in Minnesota, but around here our customers are a little more sophisticated. Suzy Perette just doesn’t cut it.”

“Michigan,” I corrected him. “I’m from Michigan.”

“Whatever,” the manager said, rolling his eyes.

Seriously? I had no idea people could be so mean. Especially people in the vintage-clothing community. I mean, back home, thrifters are very supportive of and caring for one another, and it’s about quality and originality—not the label. Here, in the words of one of the store managers I met, “If it’s not Chanel, no one cares.”

Wrong! So wrong!

And, in the words of Mrs. Erickson, “What do you want to work in one of those filthy shops for, anyway? Believe me, I know. My friend Esther volunteers at a thrift shop for Sloan-Kettering. She says the cat fights over a simple Pucci scarf are not to be believed. Go see Monsieur Henri. He’ll set you straight.”

Luke suggested that taking career advice from a woman I met in a basement laundry room wasn’t the soundest thing he’d ever heard of.

But Luke has no idea just how desperate things have gotten. Because I haven’t told him. I am trying to appear sophisticated and full of savoir-faire where Luke is concerned. It’s true he was kind of shocked when all my boxes from home arrived, and we realized there was nowhere to put them. Fortunately, Luke’s mom’s apartment comes with its own lockable storage unit in the basement garage, where I’ve stashed all my bolts of material and most of my sewing supplies.

The clothes, however, went straight to a portable hanging rack I bought at Bed Bath & Beyond and installed in the bedroom, under the Renoir girl’s disapproving gaze. Luke seemed kind of shocked when he saw it—“I had no idea anyone owned more clothes than my mother,” he said—but he recovered himself and even asked me to model some of the slinkier ensembles (as well as, for some reason, my Heidi outfit, which he seemed to get an enormous kick out of).

But what Luke doesn’t know is that if something doesn’t give soon, that outfit, as well as the rest of the collection, are going up onto eBay. Because I am down to my last few hundred dollars.

And though it will break my heart to have to sell the clothes I’ve been collecting for so many years, it would break my heart more to have to admit to Luke that I don’t have the money for next month’s rent.

And while I know he’ll only laugh and say it’s all right and not to worry about it, I can’t help worrying about it. I don’t want to be his live-in mistress or whatever. I mean for one thing that is hardly an effective career path, as we know from Evita Perón. But also, I want to go shopping ! I want to add new things to my collection so badly!

Only I can’t. Because I’m broke.

So Monsieur Henri is my only hope. Because if he doesn’t work out, I’m totally selling off the Suzy Perettes for sure, and maybe even the Gigi Youngs.

Either that, or I’m signing up for a temp agency. I will fax and file for the rest of my life, so long as SOMEONE will hire me.

But as soon as Monsieur Henri (or whoever the guy is who buzzes me in when I press on the bell to Monsieur Henri’s shop) ushers me into the waiting area of his shop, all smiles and graciousness—until I tell him I’m not getting married (yet), I’m there to ask about employment opportunities—I have a pretty good idea it’s going to be the temp agency for me.

Because the middle-aged, mustached man’s face falls, and he demands, in a suspicious, heavily French-accented voice, “Who sent you? Was it Maurice?”

I blink at him. “I have no idea who Maurice is,” I say, just as a tiny, birdlike Frenchwoman comes out of the back with a big smile plastered on her face… until I say the word “Maurice.”

“You think she is a spy from Maurice?” the woman asks the man, in rapid French (which I now understand—well, mostly—on account of having spent a summer in that country, and a semester before that learning it in class).

“She has to be,” the man replies in equally rapid French. “What else would she be doing here?”

“No, honestly,” I cry. I know enough French to understand it, but not enough actually to speak it myself. “I don’t know anybody named Maurice. I’m here because I understand you’re the best wedding-gown restorer in town. And I want to be a wedding-gown restorer. Well, I mean, I am one. Here, look at my portfolio—”

“What is she talking about?” Madame Henri (because that’s who she has to be, right?) asks her husband.

“I have no idea,” he replies. But he takes my book, and begins thumbing through it.

“That’s a Hubert de Givenchy gown I found in an attic,” I tell them, when they get to the page showing Bibi de Villiers’s wedding gown. “It had been used to wrap a hunting rifle, which had rusted all over it. I was able to get the rust stains out by soaking it overnight in cream of tartar. Then I hand-stitched repairs to the straps and hem—”

“Why are you showing this to us?” Monsieur Henri demands, shoving my book back at me. Behind his head is a wall full of framed photographs of before-and-after shots of wedding gowns he’s restored. It’s pretty impressive. Some of them were so yellowed with age, they looked as if they’d fall apart at the merest touch.

But Monsieur Henri had managed to get them back to their original snowy-whiteness. He either had a way with fabrics, or some kind of wicked chemicals in his back room.

“Because,” I say slowly. “I just moved here to New York from Michigan, and I’m looking for a job—”

“Maurice didn’t send you?” Monsieur Henri’s eyes are still narrowed suspiciously.

“No,” I say. Really, what is going on here? “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Madame Henri—who has stood at her much taller husband’s side, peeking around his arm at my portfolio—gives me the once-over, her gaze taking in everything from my perky ponytail (Mrs. Erickson advised me to keep my hair out of my eyes), to the Joseph Ribkoff sheath dress I’m wearing beneath a vintage beaded cardigan (it’s gotten chillier outside since I arrived in New York. Summer isn’t quite gone, but fall is definitely in the air).

“Jean, I believe her,” she says to her husband in French. “Look at her. Maurice would not send someone as stupid as she is to trick us.”

I want to yell “Hey!” in an enraged voice and stomp out of their shop in a huff, since I perfectly understood that she’d just called me stupid.

But on the other hand, I can see that Monsieur Henri has turned the page and is looking at the before-and-after shots I took of Luke’s cousin Vicky’s hideous self-designed wedding gown, which I managed to salvage into something semidecent (though in the end she chose the Givenchy I repaired instead). He actually seems interested.

So instead I say, “I had to do all that by hand,” referring to the stitching on Vicky’s dress. “Because I was traveling at the time, and didn’t have my Singer.”

“This is hand-done?” he asks, squinting at the photo, then reaching for a pair of bifocals tucked away in his shirt pocket.

“Yes,” I say, trying hard not to look at his wife. Stupid! Well, what does she know? She obviously can’t read. Because it says right on my résumé that I’m a University of Michigan grad. Or I will be in January, anyway. The University of Michigan doesn’t accept stupid people… even if their fathersare supervisors at the cyclotron.

“You took out the rust stains,” Monsieur Henri says, “without chemicals?”

“Just cream of tartar,” I say. “I soaked it overnight.”

Monsieur Henri says, somewhat proudly, “Here we too do not use chemicals. That is how we received our endorsement from the Association of Bridal Consultants and became Certified Wedding-Gown Specialists.”

I don’t know how to reply to that. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as certified wedding-gown specialists. So I just say, “Sweet.”

Madame Henri elbows her husband.

“Tell her,” she says in French. “Tell her the other thing.”

Monsieur Henri peers down at me through the lenses of his eyeglasses. “The National Bridal Service gave us their highest recommendation.”

“That is more than they have ever given that cochon Maurice!” Madame Henri cries.

I think calling this poor Maurice guy—whoever he is—a pig might be a bit much.

Especially since I’ve never heard of the National Bridal Service, either.

But again I manage, for once in my life, to keep my mouth shut. There are two wedding gowns on dressmaker’s dummies in the window of the tiny shop. They’re restoration refurbishments, according to the placard in front of them… and they’re exquisite. One is covered in seed pearls that dangle like raindrops, glistening in the sun. And the other is a complicated confection of lacy ruffles that my fingers itch to touch, in order to figure out how they were created.

Mrs. Erickson was right. Monsieur Henri knows his stuff. I could learn a lot from him—not just about sewing, either, but about running a successful business.

Too bad Madame Henri is such a—

“This is a very stressful job,” Monsieur Henri goes on. “The women who come to us… to them, this is the most important day of their lives. Their gown must be absolutely perfect, and yet delivered on time.”

“I’m a total perfectionist myself,” I say. “I’ve stayed up all night to finish gowns when I didn’t even have to.”

Monsieur Henri doesn’t even appear to be listening. “Our clients can be very demanding. One day they want one thing. The next day, something else—”

“I’m completely flexible,” I say. “And I’m also very good with people. You might even say I’m a people person.” Oh, God. Did I just say that? “But I would never let a client pick something that isn’t flattering.”

“This is a family-run business,” Monsieur Henri says with sudden—and alarming—finality, closing my portfolio with a loud snap. “I am not looking to hire outsiders.”

“But—” No. He is not turning me away. I have to know how he made those ruffles. “I know I’m not family. But I’m good. And what I don’t know—I’m a very quick learner.”

“Non,”Monsieur Henri says. “It is no use. I built this business for my sons—”

“Who want nothing to do with it,” his wife says bitterly in French. “You know that, Jean. All those lazy pigs want to do is go to the discotheque.”

Hmmm. Her own sons are pigs, too? Also… discotheque?

“—and I do all my own work,” Monsieur Henri continues loftily.

“Right,” Madame Henri snorts. “That’s why you have no time for me anymore. Or your sons. They run so wild because you are always here at the shop. And what about your heart? The doctor said you’ve got to reduce your stress levels, or you’ll have a stroke. You keep saying you want to work less, leave the shop to someone else to run sometimes, so we can spend more time in Provence. But do you do anything about this? Of course not.”

“I live right around the corner,” I say, trying not to let them catch on that I understand every word they’re saying. “I can be here whenever you want me. If, you know, you want to spend more time with your family.”

Madame Henri’s gaze locks onto mine. “Perhaps,” she murmurs, in her native tongue, “she is not so stupid after all.”

“Please,” I say, fighting down an urge to yell,If I’m so stupid, would I be living on Fifth Avenue? Because, of course, people who judge you by what avenue you live on are stupid. “Your gowns are so beautiful. I want to open a shop of my own someday. So it only makes sense that I’d want to learn from the best. And I have references. You can call the manager of the last shop I worked in—”

“Non,”Monsieur Henri says. “Non,I am not interested.”

And he shoves my résumé back at me.

“Who’s stupid now?” his wife demands tartly.

But Monsieur Henri—perhaps because he’s seen the tears that have suddenly sprung up in my eyes… which, I know. Crying! At a job interview!—seems to soften.

“Mademoiselle,” he says, laying a hand on my shoulder. “It is not that I don’t think you have talent. It is that we are a very small shop. And my sons, they are in college now. This is very expensive. I cannot afford to pay another person.”

And then I hear four words come trickling out of my mouth—like spit does, while I sleep—that I never in a million years would have guessed I’d ever say. And immediately after I’ve spoken, I want to shoot myself. But it’s too late. They’re already out there.

“I’ll work for free.”

God! No! What am I saying?

Except that it’s seemed to work. Monsieur Henri looks intrigued. And his wife is smiling as if she’s just won the lottery or something.

“An internship, you mean?” Monsieur Henri lowers his bifocals to look at me more closely.

“I… I… ” Oh God. How am I going to get out of this one? Especially since I’m not even sure I want to. “I guess so. And then when you see how hard I work, maybe you could consider promoting me to a paid position.”

Okay. There, that sounds better. That’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll work like a dog for him, make myself indispensable. And then, when he can’t do without me, I’ll threaten to walk away unless he pays me.

I’m pretty sure this is not the most effective strategy for getting a job. But it’s the only one I’ve got at the moment.

“Done,” Monsieur Henri says. Then he whips off his bifocals and holds out his hand for me to shake. “Welcome.”

“Um.” I slip my hand in his, feeling all the calluses on his fingers and palm. “Thanks.”

About which Madame Henri observes in smug French, “Ha! She really is stupid after all!”