Read Online Spring Collection by Judith Krantz - Free Book Online

in rage and kill someone walkingby on the Avenue Montaigne. Marco hadn’t returned her calls in five days. How
dared
he?
    Why was he reaching for a cigarette he hadn’t had in his pocket for three years, Marco Lombardi asked himself irritably? He hadn’t really wanted one for a year. Why now, when his designs for the spring collection were all decided on, when the actual samples were being finished, did he feel a nervous straining itch to start sketching another replacement collection that would be more circus-like in its unwearable humor than Jean-Paul Gaultier, go further into the vulgarity of strip tease and bondage than Versace, be more pretentiously opulent than Lacroix, more absurdly avant-garde than Vivienne Westwood? In other words, a collection that would create such a shock, even a scandal, that the press would be forced to mention it?
    Marco left his studio hurriedly, before he had time to entertain any more disturbing and unworthy thoughts. He was stopped by his secretary, a middle-aged Frenchwoman, stern of manner and plain of face, who looked up at him sharply.
    “You should start returning these calls now, Monsieur Marco. I have a long list of people who should be called back before tomorrow. Madame Wilcox called again as well.”
    “Tell me,
cara
Madame Elsa, what do you think is the worst thing that will happen to me if I don’t return those calls?” Marco asked in a voice that became a caress as he spoke.
    “I … but you know how important they are,” she said, trying to sound as severe as possible. “And if you don’t answer them today, they will still be here tomorrow, along with many others.”
    “Did you ever see
Gone With the Wind, cara
Madame Elsa?”
    She looked at him warily. He was the least predictable man she’d ever been asked to work for. He’d tried to get her to call him by his first name, but she refused, finally letting him tease her into accepting acompromise that retained some proper formality. But everyone knew that the Italians were children, you had to make allowances for them. Of course she was too clever not to understand that he counted on his looks, this man who was too excessively attractive for his own good, but she congratulated herself that she had refused to become one of his gasping worshipers like so many of the women who worked for him.
    “Of course I saw it,” she admitted, thinking that he should be forced to get his hair cut, as she had been urging him to for months. A serious couturier shouldn’t look like a wild young art student sculpted by Michelangelo, racing around Paris in a tweed jacket, flannel trousers and a scarf flung around his neck.
    “Then you remember the last line of the movie, that tomorrow will be another day, that she will worry tomorrow, something like that? You see, I’m just not in the mood for the telephone.” Marco gave his secretary a smile that told her that he wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone but her, a smile that invited her into his world. “I need to take a walk … I need to escape. Perhaps I am even a little nervous, no, Madame Elsa? Wouldn’t that be natural? Aren’t you a little nervous for me?”
    She nodded, reluctantly. She’d worked in couture too long not to be nervous before any collection, but nevertheless, those phone calls.…
    “But we mustn’t be nervous, must we, you and I?” Marco told her, leaning on her desk and looking at her intently. “Every designer in Paris gets nervous at the same time each season, why be like the others? Come, let’s change the subject, Madame Elsa,” he said, tapping lightly on her arm with an air of gentle command. “How pleasing I find your name. Do you realize that even with familiarity, it sings in my ear, it reverberates?… Elsa … yes, you are fortunate indeed, and so is your husband.”
    “Thank you,” she said, suppressing a gratified smile. “As you know, it was my grandmother’s name.”
    “Old world and gracious. Yes, it suits you.