“What?”
“If the world’s not black and white, can’t it at least be Technicolor?”
Charlotte grinned. “I love you, Vivienne Gabrielle Foret, I really do.”
Three
“Please, Mom.” Vivi turned from her image, from the replicas of her image that went on and on into infinity in the three-way mirror of the fitting room, to her mother. “I’ll never ask for anything ever again. I promise.”
“You wouldn’t care to put that in writing, would you?”
“In blood if you want.”
“Let’s not get carried away.”
“Oh, come on, let’s get carried away.” Vivi twirled around the small fitting room, the burgundy velvet skirt swirling about her long legs, until she came to a dizzying stop against a wall. “Pretty please with whipped cream.”
Charlotte reached out, lifted the price tag that swung from the sleeve of the dress, and read the number again, as if the figure might have changed since the first time she’d looked at it. Forty-nine ninety-five was an unconscionable sum to pay for a dress for a girl Vivi’s age. Even if they had the money, she’d be reluctant. The debate had been raging in her head for some time now. Where did compensating for the hardship and deprivation of Vivi’s early years stop and spoiling her rotten begin? True, the dress was for a special occasion, but Charlotte was ambivalent about that, too.
The grandmother of a girl in Vivi’s class had become obsessed with her mortality. The woman, who was living out her days in a great heap of limestone on Seventy-Ninth Street, was certain that not only wouldn’t she live to witness her only granddaughter’s wedding, or even her coming-out party, but that it would not be held in the family mansion, which, in view of property and inheritance taxes and the cost of help, would by that time have been sold to a foreign country to serve as a consulate or embassy or turned into the wing of a museum. With those bleak prospects in mind, she’d decided that rather than wait, she’d give her granddaughter a dance while she was still alive and kicking and the impressive building with its soaring ballroom still in the family clutches. Charlotte wasn’t sure she approved of dances for fourteen-year-old girls. The idea carried more than a whiff of the unsavory side of Colette. But she wasn’t foolish or cruel enough to try to keep Vivi from going to one when the rest of her class was.
Vivi watched her mother studying the price tag.
“If it’s too much money, I bet Aunt Hannah would give it to me for Christmas. She’s been asking what I want.”
Charlotte dropped the price tag. “It’s not too much money. And we are not a charity case. You’re right, let’s get carried away.”
The smile that cracked open Vivi’s face easy as an egg went on and on in the line of mirror-reflected girls. Later, when Charlotte returned the dress, she’d remember that bevy of euphoric Vivis stretching into eternity.
* * *
Charlotte never would have been blindsided if she hadn’t still been smarting from that absurd encounter with Hannah’s patient in front of the gilt-framed mirror in the foyer. She should have forgotten the incident by now, but it kept sneaking up on her at odd unexpected moments, like some vulgar practical joker with a bag of nasty tricks up his sleeve. That was the only explanation for what happened in the museum that afternoon, not that anything did happen in the museum that afternoon.
In earlier days, when Vivi was small and they were new to New York, they’d spent weekends wandering the zoo or the Museum of Natural History hand in hand, wondering at the outrageously expensive and opulent toys at F. A. O. Schwarz, and ending up at Rumpelmayer’s, where Vivi sat with a hot chocolate mustache on her small face and one of the resident teddy bears tucked beside her. But Vivi had outgrown those childish pleasures as well as weekend afternoons with her mother, unless they were shopping for a dress for a dance or some other momentous event. These days she heard the siren call of her peers. The attraction was normal. Vivi’s guilt was not.
“What are you going to do this afternoon?” she’d ask Charlotte as she put on her coat. Occasionally the question was even more deadly. “Do you want me to hang around and we can do something together?” Even when Charlotte outlined her plans in careful detail—lunch with a colleague from another publishing house, a visit to the Frick to see her old friends the Rembrandts and the Turners—Vivi had a way of hesitating on her way out the door and turning back to look at her mother. Once she’d asked if Charlotte would be okay. That was when Charlotte began leaving the apartment when her daughter did. Striding away from Vivi on the street was easier on Vivi.
That afternoon, they walked down Park Avenue to the building on the corner of Eighty-Eighth Street where Alice and her family lived. The compromise solution to the cheating incident had worked: Alice had been deterred from a life of crime, and she and Vivi were still best friends. Standing on the street under the dark green awning, Charlotte kissed her daughter quickly, told her to have a good time at the movies, and started off. Then she turned back.
“I forgot to ask what you’re going to see.”
“The Last Time I Saw Paris.”
“Have fun,” Charlotte said again, and this time she kept going.
She told herself not to be ridiculous. It was only the title of a movie. Not even the real title. The F. Scott Fitzgerald story the film was based on was called “Babylon Revisited.” Nonetheless, Vivi’s words followed her down Park Avenue and over to Fifth and all through MoMA until finally she gave up trying to see the art and sat on a bench in one of the galleries. The paintings and sculptures and other museumgoers fell away as everything had in the foyer that day, and she was back there.
* * *
The bell above the door to the shop jingles, and she looks up, but she can see nothing. The awning over the window is useless at this time of year. It’s the end of June, and the sun refuses to set. It slants into the shop, blinding her and turning him into a silhouette. She cannot see his face or what he is wearing. He is merely a black outline carved from the brilliance of the evening. But the two young students who are browsing must be able to make him out against the glare, because they move toward the door, each slinking around either side of him, and slip out of the shop into the dazzling setting sun.
Bon soir. The words are almost out of her mouth when he takes another step toward her, and she recognizes the uniform. For more than a year now, they have been marching around the city, swaggering up and down boulevards, scattering people in their wake, shouldering their way into restaurants and cinemas and shops, buying up everything in sight. She cannot keep him out. But she does not have to welcome him. She does not have to speak to him at all. She swallows the greeting and goes back to the book she is reading, though she knows she will not be able to concentrate, not with him in the shop. In the storeroom in back, Vivi whimpers in uneasy sleep.
He asks in fluent but accented French if she minds if he browses. She keeps her head down, her eyes focused on the unintelligible words, and nods her head in a noncommittal way. He begins wandering around the store, taking books off the tables and down from the shelves, leafing through them, putting them back. She keeps track of him out of the corner of her eye. He is returning the books where they belong. He is one of the correct ones.