A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

When she got to the job, Leone raced up the stairs to the dressing-rooms as though she were pursued by devils. Those same stairs she had come bounding down so buoyantly at seven the night before. So much had happened to her in-between, her whole life had been altered. Here too, the place had changed almost beyond recognition from its workaday look. The huge alabaster vase at the back of the ground-floor corridor was filled with fat, puffy chrysanthemums in deftly blended tones of orange, rust, and copper. The glass doors leading into the display-room stood wide open, with a uniformed attendant stationed outside to collect invitations, and a discordant buzz of voices coming from inside, punctuated intermittently by the chirpy, twittering sounds of a small stringed orchestra tuning up. On the stairs and in the lower hall, there was a long roll of blue-velour carpeting that began on the floor above and stretched like a rivulet of escaping fountain-pen ink right down to the front door-sill. It stopped there so abruptly you almost expected it to continue out into the street beyond, but it didn’t.

There was no one in sight at the moment who could clock her lateness, only the impudent lift-boy, at Prussian-stiff attention before his cage and not at all impudent today. On the stairs she narrowly missed running head-on into a butler or caterer of some sort carrying a hamper of champagne-bottles, who was coming down them just as she hurled herself up. An agile swerve, and the collision was averted.

Everybody was already in the dressing-room and in their places when she came hustling in. The “daytime-wear” group were all dressed already and ready to parade on out. Leone’s own group, the “evening-wear” group, were all undressed already and having their faces made-up by a man in shirt-sleeves with a portable kit on his lap, untroubled by all the nudity about him. Renard did nothing by halves. He had it all jotted down on a chart with which she had supplied him; each triangular combination of mannequin’s complexion, color of gown, and make-up required to go with them, had been worked out days before.

Paradoxically though, while he gave each face that came before him the expert touch it needed and passed it on improved, a bluish growth showed on the lower part of his own, hairs sprouted at right angles out from his eyebrows and from the pits of his ears, and the creases ridging his forehead were emphasized by grime that looked as if soap had not disturbed it for weeks. But then he wasn’t to go on public view, in one of the greatest selling competitions in the world.

One arm recurrently out to the wall to help her keep her balance in the jostling crowd around her, Leone stripped, literally down to the skin — for a Paris original always carries along its own indicated foundations — stuffed her personal things into her locker, pinned a towel around her waist, for the sake of comfort on the hard-surfaced wooden bench if not modesty, and sat down to wait her turn, elbow resting on the mirror-shelf in back of her and head propped in her upraised hand.

When the make-up man had finished work on her, he brushed off some excess powder that had fallen over her breasts with a completely impersonal swipe of the hand that set them dancing for a second or two.

A moment later the hairdresser took over, began switching her head this way and that as if her hair was taffy that he was pulling.

Suddenly the head of the establishment, Renard herself, stood behind her, studying her face and hair-do in the mirror before them both. Leone’s that is. She nodded approval, gave an upward hitch with one finger. Leone stood up. A brassiere was brought, attached.

“She’s too hefty,” Renard complained. “This number calls for a moderate bosom, not a pair of ostrich-eggs like that. Tighten it up a little.”

Leone’s eyes crossed briefly and inadvertently as the already tourniquet-like constriction was redoubled around her.

“Hold it in. Hold it in. Breathe in!” Renard said sternly, giving her a slap across it.

Leone went “ifffff” like the up-swing of a bicycle-pump handle.

Then finally, like the rains of April it was named for, the creation, the original, descended on her and drenched her in slanting streaks of bead-raindrops and fuming mists of silver-gray tissue. And the magic that Renard always wrought had come to pass. A bewildered, skinny, dead-for-sleep girl became a thing of mystic allure. Every man’s dream of Woman, that dream he never overtakes. Every woman’s dream of herself, that she never achieves.

Everyone’s hand was on her. They backed away, they closed in, they pulled, they pushed, they tucked, they tugged, they smoothed, they crimped. They could do nothing with it. It had been perfect to begin with.

Surrounded by a cluster of people still busily fussing at her, she was led out to the top of the stairs and poised there, as though they were about to throw her headlong down to the bottom.