This afternoon I'm going to the Atelier while Audrey gets fitted for a gown, while yesterday we went to mid-town so that she and her daughter could look at photographs from the Paris collections. We sat in the Style Guru's office and flicked through the Dior book (a lot of Suzy Wong embroidery) then went on to Lacroix's swan song ('it was more like a funeral than a runway show, darling', Chanel ('horrible') and Gautier 'what about these green alligator dungarees?'
'So what do you think, Marion?' asked the Style Guru, kindly trying to include me in something about which I patently had no useful opinion. I shrugged. What could I say? Me, the person he told had 'made his eyes bleed' at the party on Saturday night... My taste credentials are well and truly blown.
He told Audrey he had put aside a couple of suits and a dress from Gautier, a ball dress, a suit and a coat from Dior, and several pieces from Lacroix though there was some doubt as to whether they were going to sell the samples. This is what it feels like to be sitting in Couture Land when you hail from LK Bennett Sale Country. Let's put it this way, you're ruddy glad you didn't wear your Marks and Spencer elasticated fat pants.
It was also hot. New York, back to normal, July humid hot, and a twenty five block walk from the gentle air-conditioned air of Audrey's upper East town house. My dress du jour was bubble gum pink, and so was I by the time I sat down in the Starck chair which was, dontcha know it, plastic. Do you know what happens when you sit on plastic when you're hot and erm glowing and you try to move? It's like having the backs of your thighs waxed without benefit of the Russian woman in an overall.
'What do I think?' I think I'm as out of place as a nun in a brothel (though actually, come to think of it, there's probably quite a speciality market for someone like that). I like looking at the pretty clothes and I'm delighted that Audrey can pick through them like she was buying mail-order t-shirts from the Boden Catalogue but it's so far outside my experience that I can't even find the bus that would take me to Envy. I'm happily stuck in Bewildered. Audrey has been on the front of the New York Times Style Section twice. She is co-hosting three operas at the Metropolitan Opera this season. She is so chic and slim that she could wear a sack (of which I have a whole range in a variety of colours) and still look fantastic while I just have this generous, access all areas, free pass into her life for a few weeks. It's all a far cry from the days when we first met back in the library at St Antony's College in Oxford and we were both married to other men. I knew Audrey when she rode a bicycle with her son strapped on to a little seat at the back - the same son who is eating lunch with us at the table in the tiny garden of her house baiting her, the way sons do their mothers. I'm pleased to see that wearing designer clothes doesn't insulate you from having a fresh kid (of 33) who needles you and can still manage to get under your skin.
I can't believe my luck that we came through the years from my first visit to her house in Cambridge Mass. when I was dating George - the straight man who turned gay in the three weeks of my vacation (I'm that good - in my youth I apparently had the sort of powers that brought men to their knees - in front of other men)- to staying in this amazing townhouse with a Georgia O'Keefe hanging on the dining room wall. ('Did you know dat all dese paintings of hers have a vagina?' asked the Dutch Husband the other night as we ate supper together. I didn't. I had to ask where it was and so of course he showed me. Now that's what you call an intimate friendship.)
So here I am, upstairs on the fifth floor, opposite the room with the Mondrians, lying on the bed, waiting for my lunch to arrive from Dean and Deluca, fetched by Paula after Antonio buzzed me on the intercom and asked me what I wanted and Zena, who has set the table out in the garden, has told me 'zat lunch vill be soived at twelve toity'. My case is packed. I'm but one last supper away from getting on the plane back home to putting American treats in the usual place at Pedantic Books.
How is a box of Hershey's kisses going to cut it as a consolation prize?
BEEP BEEP: 'Marion', comes Zena's voice over the intercom: 'Lunch is soived.'
I'm going to worry about it tomorrow.
