The Crasher Page 6

  He nodded okay, to the doctor, too.

  “Good, good. This morning you will see your new look for the first time. I think you will be pleased. In three to four weeks when everything is perfectly healed, your new profile will look as if it has always been in residence.” The doctor examined the bandages. “Very good. In about an hour then.” He paused. “Any questions?”

  “I’ll be leaving today.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

  When the doctor left, the patient smiled. New profile was a good description of what lay ahead. He’d been giving a lot of thought to his profile in general and his name in particular during his layover. Of course, in common with the other patients in the clinic, he was using an alias, one of many he’d used over the years.

  Now he’d made a final decision. Just as he had reduced the large nose he’d lived with all his life, so it was time to reduce his extra-long, difficult to pronounce real name, the one he’d been born with in Georgia, Russia, sixty years ago.

  For the life of respectability that was imminent he would shorten it to one syllable, one that everyone could say—and remember—a name with resonance.

  When he arrived in New York with his new profile, his name would simply be Svank.

  Bumper-to-bumper to the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and Ms. Ginny Walker, eighteen this past December, poked her tongue out at the huge billboard, which nobody could miss and her mother had been raging about for months. It was the first time she’d had an opportunity to study it, so for the moment the intense traffic jam didn’t bother her.

  YOU’RE GOING TO NEW YORK DRESSED LIKE THAT? Charivari, the Manhattan fashion business, was asking the provocative question in fifty-foot-high letters.

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, Madame Charivari, I am,” she thought, “and it may interest you to know, if you catch Elsa Klensch’s fashion coverage on CNN tonight, she will probably describe me as one of those ‘dressed to kill’ at the New York fashion shows today.”

  The ad really upset her mother, who after all was a major player in the fashion business these days, working for Scaasi, one of the few celebrated custom designers left. According to her mother, Scaasi evening dresses were the price of a station wagon, but then, Ginny figured, they did need an awful lot of expensive fabric. His most famous client, Barbara Bush, First Lady until she’d been replaced in January by Hillary Clinton, was apparently svelte in comparison to some of his others.

  Her mother thought the ad was offensive, condescending, but Ginny, after a few minutes staring out of the stationary cab, decided it didn’t bother her. If it made women take a second look in their suburban mirrors before setting out for the big city, she was all for this kind of confrontation.

  It was part of the “say-it-as-it-is” New York challenge, something she felt physically—energizing, yet terrifying—every time she saw the incredible Manhattan skyline just waiting to devour her. It didn’t happen often. Only on the rare occasions, as now, when she crossed the East River by cab.

  The subway was her usual loathsome mode of transport, suffocating, but usually swift, delivering her for the last eighteen months to the drudgery of Pace business school. There, as usual because of her December birthday, she was the youngest in the class; and because of her height, also as usual, she was among the tallest, towering over all the lumpy girls, and, alas, many of the guys.

  They’d moved to Queens in the fall of ‘91, after a disastrous few months in Boston, where to her excruciating embarrassment she’d discovered her father was using “Harvard” in his “business” address, although they’d lived miles away from the college and, of course, had nothing to do with it anyway.

  It had been the worst time of her life, but at least it could go down in Walker history as the year her mother had FINALLY HAD ENOUGH.

  Unemployed, hearing through the pins-and-needles network about an opening for an experienced fitter at Scaasi, Virginia Walker had left the house one morning, glowing references in hand, taken the shuttle to La Guardia, and storming the couture citadel, despite stiff competition, walked away with the job.

  Her mother had announced now she was the one moving on to a “new opportunity”—in New York City—and, thank the Lord, was taking her daughter with her. The Walker School could move, too, with its founder and chairman of the board, or it could stay exactly where it was—in no-win “Harvard” country.

  Ginny had been on cloud nine, thinking they were going to live in Manhattan, but it was financially out of the question—certainly for the first few years, Mother said. She’d felt a lot better when she’d realized that Queens, although a borough of New York, was actually situated on Long Island.

  In People magazine she’d read that it was where Donna Karan, another of her fashion idols, had grown up—“miserably,” nicknamed “Popeye” and “Spaghetti Legs”—for obvious reasons. Describing herself as a “social misfit,” Karan hadn’t joined in the usual school activities, longing for the day when she could focus on something she was good at, fashion designing. Ginny found it comforting. And with a mother also in the fashion business, Karan and she seemed to have a lot in common.

  It was Fashion Week in New York City and if the traffic ever allowed her, Ginny was on her way to see the show of another American designer she was wild about, Calvin Klein.

  The tiny beads of perspiration she kept wiping from her upper lip with her best linen handkerchief had nothing to do with any heat in the taxi. There was no heat.

  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 a
go 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?”