Estella spent the next day with her head bent over her sewing machine making a dress to wear to a rendezvous she wasn’t sure if she’d imagined. Janie telephoned to say she was going out after work with a man she’d met at the party and Estella thanked God; she didn’t want to have to explain what she was up to. Not when she didn’t even know herself.
She took one short break midafternoon to swim in the pool at the Barbizon, which she tried to do every day, enjoying the meditative sensation of stroking her arms through the water even though she wasn’t a particularly good swimmer. She hoped it would relax her the way it usually did. But she timed it badly; she had the misfortune to bump into the matron as she entered the lift in her bathing suit, a simple white cotton affair consisting of a cut-off man’s shirt that she’d bought for a bargain and denuded of sleeves. To this she’d sewn black cotton to cover her nether regions, resulting in a bathing suit that was streamlined, stylish, and so much more practical for swimming than the heavy, bloated dress-style suits that the other women wore.
“What are you wearing?” Matron snapped.
“I’m going swimming,” Estella said.
“You will not parade around the hotel in that.”
“I’m going to the pool.”
“Cover yourself or you will need to find somewhere else to stay. This is America, not France.”
“I know that,” Estella retorted, before storming away to find the off-cut of black cotton in her room. She tied it at her waist to make a cover-up skirt. Which looked rather good, she had to admit, storing the idea away for later and cheekily blowing Matron a kiss to thank her for the idea when she passed by.
Then, at eight o’clock, she bathed and put on her new dress. Green jersey, long, slim skirt, with a sash that formed a halter-neck, crossed over the bust and then wound around her lower back to tie at the side. At first she’d imagined the ties would simply drape down, but at the last moment, she fashioned them into a blousy flower, like a peony. The dress was backless, a surprise that the classical front did not suggest. It was an homage to the draping and wrapping of Vionnet but using the kind of democratic fabric that someone like Estella could actually afford.
She darkened her lashes with mascara and reddened her lips. She left her hair down, its black waves falling down her back, secured on one side with a rhinestone clip shaped like a star. Her mother had given it to her for her sixteenth birthday. She touched the star, trying again to sense her mother’s presence, to have the universe send her a message about whether her mother was safe but all she heard were the car horns of Manhattan.
Then, before she could ask herself what she was doing, she caught the subway to 52nd Street, having ascertained that Jimmy Ryan’s was a jazz club in the basement of a brownstone that looked more conventional from the street than the music emanating from its belly would suggest.
“Two dollars,” the barman said when she ordered a sidecar.
She winced and pretended to look inside her purse, knowing all too well that she couldn’t afford to spend two dollars on a drink. “I left my money on the dresser,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She pushed the glass away.
“On the house.” The bartender winked.
“Thanks.” She raised her glass, sipping gratefully. And then suddenly, by her side and looking so goddamned airtight she could almost feel her dress wanting to take itself off, she saw Alex.
“You came,” he said, voice familiar from the party but from somewhere else too.
A memory blinded her. She crashed her drink onto the bar. The Théâtre du Palais-Royal. Dancing with a man mixed up in more than trouble; a man who, at the very least, dealt with death and secrets. Alex was the same damn man.
Before she could say anything, another woman entered the club, crossed over to Alex and slipped her arm through his, kissing his cheek. Estella’s gasp was so loud she wondered how it didn’t shatter glasses.
Because this woman looked so exactly like her that Estella could barely tell where she ended and the other woman began. Except this woman was an Estella of sometime in the future that she hoped would never come, an Estella with shadowed eyes. Estella, broken.
Alex took a step back as he looked from one identical woman to the other.
Estella wanted to shut her eyes, to run away, to never have seen the other woman—who the hell was she?—but she couldn’t show a man like Alex and his lookalike paramour how bewildered and frightened she was. “Isn’t this awkward?” she said hotly, tears stinging her eyes, before turning on her heel and leaving the club.
Out on the street when she thought she was safe, she doubled over, hands clutching a brownstone wall for comfort it didn’t give.
Alex had kissed her last night because he thought she was someone else. It explained one piece of the puzzle. And Estella didn’t care to solve any more; all Alex had brought her, from the first night she met him in Paris, was loss and suffering and heartache.