Time Squared, page 28
This was her life now, and Eleanor didn’t know how to explain to Robin how much she loved it, and that she intended to keep it. Being a professional. Her own woman, flying wherever she chose whenever she wanted. Reaching the Tuileries, she savoured the elegant trees, the perfect puddles on the gravel walks, and the Parisians in low impeccable boots stepping delicately around them.
She also assessed the boots. Good leather. No interest in the buckle. Eleanor was always working, always thinking in terms of her aunt’s business, always trying to help; this when she suspected Robin found fashion to be entirely frivolous.
She did, too, but she also loved it and stood by the clothes they made. Clara Crosby supplied clothing (fantasies, aspirations, solace) to people who couldn’t afford the arty and expensive couture of Paris. They were a fashion-forward company. Her aunt defined her target client as a slightly edgy college-educated girl working in a job she thought was beneath her. Given the recession, that was a growing market. And Clara Crosby was growing its market despite the latest crash, her aunt being a genius at both sales and design.
“I was born for this time,” she would say, having built her business from a home dressmaking shop through a store in the Village into a thriving multinational. The only person at Clara Crosby half as versatile as her aunt was Eleanor’s boss, Georgina, the head of marketing, and Eleanor had no idea what Robin would make of her. Everyone still referred to Georgina as the countess, even though she’d transitioned and left her drag queen days behind.
Her line: “Years of dying onstage have taught me what kills.”
There was so much transphobia out there, so much racism and homophobia, so many fetid corners of the internet that churned out replicant Murdo Crawleys. Eleanor knew Robin wasn’t like that, but if he worked up a grievance against her job, she couldn’t predict how it would play out. Knock-off Crawleys attached themselves like leeches to the walking wounded, and that was one way to describe Robin, who had taken a bullet in the leg at Kandahar and suffered through three months in Mosul.
There must be a stronger word than terrified.
Eleanor ducked into the Louvre, hoping to distract herself by visiting the Mona Lisa. They were cousins five hundred years removed, given the Leonardo sketch her father had picked up as a student on Portobello Road. Now she found poor Lisa suffocating behind security glass, neglected inside her crowd of fans. Velvet ropes fed a line of tourists toward her, but most of them barely glanced at her before taking selfies. It was worse every time Eleanor came, and now scientists wanted to dig up Leonardo’s skull to do a forensic reconstruction, hoping to find out if the Mona Lisa was a self-portrait in drag. Eleanor valued privacy, something she shared with Robin, who had been awarded medals she’d only heard about from his mother. She and Robin weren’t thoroughly at odds. They loved each other deeply, and Eleanor longed to have him back in her bed the way a desert longs for rain.
Shying away from the selfies, Eleanor retreated to the European galleries, drifting past the Renaissance Italians into the gallery of early French art. She stopped in front of the Ingres painting of Joan of Arc, whom she’d never met, although she had an idea that she would one day. Joan wore armour in her portrait and a virgin’s beatific smile, maiden and warrior all at once. Eleanor realized there were only ever two roles in her hallucinations: the Maiden and the Universal Soldier. She and Robin played those parts, time after time.
A week after he’d phoned, Eleanor had taken a stab at confronting her visions, if that’s what they were. It had been a joke (but not really), visiting an expert on past-life regression that the Stick was consulting. Gordon Stickley had found his métier as her aunt’s chief handbag designer. He put everything into it: the traumatic stint in the Gulf War that had awakened him to archaeology, the archaeological studies that had awakened him to boxes, the collection of inlaid Persian boxes and Chinese calligraphy boxes and Russian nesting dolls that he’d slowly amassed: all these things reverberating off his too-many years as a closeted gay man. He was particularly good with clasps.
Pretending she was only mildly interested, Eleanor had asked to meet his therapist. Three days later, the Stick had taken her to a large block of rent-controlled apartments near the East River. A woman with a strong Bronx accent buzzed them up, and when she opened her door, Eleanor met a short hawk-nosed woman swathed in scarves with thick lines of kohl around her eyes.
Her first glance at the woman gave Eleanor such a strong sense of déjà vu that she barely registered Gordon Stickley’s introduction. Instead she caught a thunderclap glimpse of the Stick in a dark cellar wearing an English-cut suit from the 1840s or ’50s. (Eleanor knew clothes.) He distinctly said “mosaic,” and Eleanor realized she was in the cellar with him, fighting off a familiar yawn of boredom at the Stick’s well-meaning windiness.
“Where are you?” the therapist asked.
“At your table?” Eleanor replied, not entirely certain how she’d got there.
The therapist fixed her with kohl-rimmed eyes. Eleanor knew what she meant but felt reluctant to confuse the Stick with her British vision. A recent regression had revealed that he’d been a cowboy in the Wild West during roughly the same period.
“The reason I zoned out,” Eleanor said. “I think I met you in England. In the 1840s.”
The invisible opened its eyes to look at her. Eleanor wasn’t sure why she was doing this. A recklessness to her mood. Throwing the dice.
“And?” the therapist asked.
“You were telling our fortunes. At least, you told my friends’ fortunes. You said the spirits didn’t care to speak to me.”
The woman took this in. So did the universe.
“And who were you, back in the 1840s?”
Eleanor wasn’t sure how far to trust her. “I have these dreams. Maybe they’re more like images. They don’t have those warped narratives of real dreams. They’re mainly just moments. Glimpses. I came here to try to find out what they are.”
“Who are you in the dreams, then? You’re going to have to give me something.”
“I’m just me. Usually living in an English country house. Sometimes London.”
“You like Jane Austen movies?”
Eleanor did, it was true. It was possible she was just suggestible. But she didn’t think so.
“What makes Gordon’s regression so convincing,” the therapist went on, “he wasn’t broadly successful as a cowboy. He never rustled cattle. Bad guys tended to rustle it away from him. And as far as bad guys go, they weren’t even all that bad.”
The Stick looked both proud of himself and abashed.
“So in these country houses,” the therapist asked, “were you ever a maid?”
The woman was right. In all of her hallucinations, dreams, visions, Eleanor had lived a well-appointed life. Her real childhood in Connecticut had been nothing out of the ordinary. Suburban middle class. And if she had done well, if she and Kate were now sharing a loft in Tribeca, if her career was flourishing and Kate about to have her first solo show—all of this was owing to step-by-step hard work, much of it on the part of her exceptional aunt.
Eleanor couldn’t remember any dreams about a past life as a hunter-gatherer or a subsistence farmer, which is how most people had lived throughout history. It made her wonder if her glimpses were the remnants of wish-fulfillment fantasies she’d had when she was sick.
Maybe she was still sick. Maybe that was the real problem. It terrified her.
“Are you all right, Elle?” the Stick asked.
Eleanor felt the universe lean in on her, listening so closely she couldn’t bear it.
“I don’t think I’m sick,” she said. “I think I’m cured. But I have these fragments, and when you said past-life regression, I thought I’d give it a try. You know?”
The therapist seemed to accept this. Or at least, the universe did. “So if you look very, very closely at the table where someone told your fortune, what do you see?” she asked. When Eleanor hesitated: “Say it without thinking.”
An unstable surface. A glimmer. Pixilation.
“It’s giving me a headache,” she said.
“All right, we’re leaving,” the Stick said, standing abruptly. “Sorry, Eunice.”
At least she’d tried.
* * *
Her aunt came down to breakfast before the designers, leaving Ms. McBee to unpack her clothes. This was a working trip for the designers, but her aunt often handed out a couple of tickets as treats. Eleanor had no real reason to be here, and Ms. McBee’s housekeeping duties were so light that her aunt was essentially giving her a week off.
“Maybe we can have a wee croissant sometime,” Ms. McBee had told her, always on the watch, as Eleanor had passed her aunt’s open door.
Yet here was her real treat: Stansfield Mowbray coming out of the elevator wearing Baby in a sling on his chest. Eleanor always felt such delight when she saw Stanz, an inexpressible welling of relief; she didn’t know why. It was true he’d survived a bad accident. A slightly ludicrous accident: earbuds in place, Stanz had stepped into a crosswalk without looking and was hit by an ambulance. At least he’d got immediate medical care.
Margaret Darcy strode out of the elevator behind Stanz, already on her phone, her aunt’s chief designer, blessed with a seeing eye into what their clientele would kill for, or what they would kill for in six months. Eleanor suspected that Mags was planning to quit and start her own label, the one person capable of challenging Clara Crosby. But she and Mags had grown closer after the accident, or at least declared a truce. They’d agreed over his hospital bed that Stanz hadn’t suffered any cognitive damage, despite what the doctors feared. Stanz was still Stanz, even if Eleanor felt he’d always suffered from a mild cognitive impairment (he just wasn’t that smart) while Margaret believed he was perfect.
Designer Mags Darcy meeting top model Stanz Mowbray at a Clara Crosby fashion shoot. Pierced by Cupid’s arrow, one of those stories. Mags falling hard and Stanz surprising everyone by catching her. His accident a year later, Mags eight months pregnant. The pirate’s scar across his cheek that looked as if it would revitalize his career. But Stanz had decided to stay at home with Baby while Margaret went back to work. His decision. New priorities, which made him happy. Made them both happy.
Now Mags was being gleefully brutal on the phone while Stanz walked up to their table, waving Baby’s tiny hand in his big one. Eleanor put out a finger and Baby grasped it, looking as stunned as his father.
“You need to practice,” Stanz told her shyly. “I hear Robin’s coming home.”
Eleanor froze and Stanz saw it, clearing his throat.
“The scariest thing I’ve ever had to do was cut Baby’s fingernails for the first time,” he said. “I guess Robin would have something to say about that. But I did it, and the thing is”—as Baby finally put Eleanor’s finger in his mouth, and Stanz glowed, and Eleanor glowed—“life can work out, you know?”
* * *
They divided into two minibuses, with Eleanor opting to go to Galeries Lafayette, planning to do some shopping. But as they left the bus, poor spotty Lilian Browne (head designer, casual wear) put a hand on her arm.
“My budget got cut,” she said.
Eleanor knew that Lily was in her aunt’s bad books, her fall casuals having tanked, one particularly baggy-assed jodhpur selling only two units worldwide in four weeks. (“I love the comfort of diapers,” the countess had said. “Me and Gandhi and nobody else.”) The cut meant that Lily was forced to buy fewer clothes and take more photographs. Yet everyone knew she had to produce a runner this season, launch a trend or she’d be gone. Eleanor loved fashion, but it was a nasty business. Lily had broken out terribly, her eyes beseeching above her spots.
“You want me to screen you?” Eleanor asked, deciding that she could shop any time.
“And if you see anything good,” Lily said. “Although I should warn you, my target girl isn’t Clara’s edgy type. Mine just wants to like herself.”
They started work on the concourse level. Eleanor headed into Prada first, browsing the racks, reminding herself to flip slowly and unprofessionally through the hangers, pulling out a jacket that honestly caught her eye. When Lily came in, Eleanor waited until she saw that she was interested in a piece, then picked out a pair of trousers and asked the shop girl about a belt in worse French than she actually spoke, which prolonged the conversation as she positioned herself to block the girl’s view of Lily taking her picture.
“Peut-être pas,” Eleanor said, returning the trousers to the rack. The shop girl stared like an offended cat as they left without buying anything.
Eleanor’s aunt had a trick of piling garments she liked on the counter before taking pictures semi-openly, challenging a shop girl to toss her out and lose a big sale. Afterward, she and Mags would go through the pile and reject half. Yet for all their gamesmanship, they spent like oil barons. Mags’s best friend, Aggie Moreland (formal wear), was shopping here today as well, with her platinum card and two juniors, each of whom could buy with her permission. And while Lily’s budget had withered, it was still big enough that a clutch of bags hit against her thighs as they walked up to the second floor.
They were followed by a security guard, which Eleanor found unfair. Despite what Robin thought, they weren’t going to steal anything. Eleanor kept an eye on the guard as they worked their way through Miu Miu, Balenciaga, Chloé. In Stella McCartney, Lily held out a blouse, not casual wear, but Eleanor could see how she could adapt it. Interesting sleeves.
She took a pair of high-waisted trousers from the rack, approaching the shop girl and saying again in bad French, “Avez-vous une autre ceinture pour ces pantalons?”
The girl didn’t have another belt. Stella had put a belt on the trousers, and it was the belt Stella wanted to put on the trousers, and therefore it was la belt.
“Hey! ” the security guard cried, pointing at Lily.
Dropping the Stella, Eleanor grabbed Lily’s phone and kicked into a run. She managed to duck ahead of the guard, even though she had to skitter along in ridiculous heels, something she seemed to have done before. She kept close to the storefronts, then darted down a narrow hall toward the ladies room, which she hadn’t known was there. Yes, she had. No, she hadn’t. She hadn’t, but knew to yank the door open on its pneumatic hinges, leaving the door to close slowly on its own, picturing the way the guard would find it closing when he got there.
Eleanor could see it. She could see him see it, fretting about whether to call a female guard or wait her out. It was as if she’d fallen into a past life and couldn’t get out, compelled to slip through the fire exit across the hall, forced to make sure the steel door closed, impelled to take off her heels and run silently downstairs.
The door banged open, as she knew it would.
“Au voleur!” she shouted, along with the guard.
Juggling her shoes and Lily’s cellphone, Eleanor felt propelled forward, slipping down a couple of steps but righting herself, of course. She didn’t bother trying to disguise the screech of the exit door as she threw it open at the concourse level. Why should she? Feeling chased or pulled or manipulated—that was the word—manipulated by something other than her fear of being caught, Eleanor ran through the crowded concourse, then felt her back forced against a pillar to put on her shoes—left—right—before she was pulled forward again.
Dodging and weaving, Eleanor saw a reflection in a shop window of the guard going up on his toes exactly the way she knew he would. When she finally reached an entrance, she ran outside, forced to zig-zag between jammed cars, horns honking, before arriving on the other side of the road and running around a corner, where she had to lean against a cold stone building. She had to. She had no choice.
Then Eleanor went blank. The world grew muffled, dense, and she had no idea where she was or what had just happened. Couldn’t believe what just happened. Didn’t believe it. Girls only got chased through high-end shopping malls in movies. And it had happened twice, as if her life were a bad movie and someone had hit rewind, wanting to laugh at her again. It was enough to finally make her snap.
“Stop it!” she yelled. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone, please!” Falling into a crouch, her voice failing as she whispered, “Please, please, please.”
A couple rounded the corner. A special couple; she remembered them very well. An old man with white hair and a black beret and an old woman with black hair and a white beret.
“Elle est folle,” the man told the woman. She’s crazy.
“Elle est americaine,” the woman replied. She’s American.
As if the joke hadn’t got old.
* * *
At dinner, Eleanor told her aunt she was flying home in the morning.
“You don’t have a headache?” her aunt asked, immediately worried.
Eleanor shook her head. She couldn’t sound crazy. Had to prevaricate.
“With Robin coming home,” she said. “At least if he makes it home and there isn’t a last-minute disaster. Or he doesn’t change his mind. I don’t know. It all seems so up in the air and so stressful that I’m losing it. I need to get out of here. I want to go home and talk to Kate.”
Talk to Kate. That wasn’t a lie; it was what she wanted. Eleanor felt immensely relieved to think of it. Kate had been framing her pictures for her upcoming show, but they were almost done. She was also trying to help Teddy Denholm, who had finished his debriefings by the air force and the government security services after escaping captivity by the Taliban.
