2. Once Upon a Vision #3
“I honestly didn’t do anything. About the sketch. It’s something that just popped into my head.”
“I dunno, kid. I dunno. But we’ve all been trying, and for the life of me, I didn’t see that dress as a wedding gown until you said it.
And I’ve seen it in all the colors Chiara tried.
Now that she knows what direction this is going, I think she’ll try ivory once again.
Though something might be missing. She’ll figure it out now, and maybe it will free up her mind and her creativity enough to move on to the new spring collection.
Though, perhaps Frankie should be doing a better job of nurturing her wife’s muse. ”
The last comment was mumbled more than said out loud, with Aoife walking to the far corner of the studio, affecting an air of extreme involvement with a piece of ivory silk.
Vi decided that some things were better left alone.
She had poked the bear a bit too much today as it was.
She liked Aoife, who was jovial and funny and so far kind to her.
Vi didn’t have many friends, and with the summer and fall months of this internship looming ahead, she wanted to do well. For her father, for herself, and maybe a little bit for the woman upstairs, who was somebody’s wife and whom Vi had no business thinking about.
* * *
In the end, her first errand turned out to be getting lunch.
Vi almost raised an eyebrow at the list of dishes being rattled off to her from the top of her supervisor’s head, and decided not to ask why they didn’t simply order delivery.
Gopher . She’d known what she was agreeing to when she’d signed on. It was time to go and do her job now.
She was relieved she hadn’t mouthed off to Aoife about the delivery situation, because the bistro a block away did not, in fact, actually deliver.
That alone was strange, but once she stepped into the small space—that looked more like a hole-in-the-wall truck stop in the middle of Nowhere, Indiana, than off the Rue de Rivoli—many other things seemed even more peculiar.
The man behind the counter had a scraggly mustache and an air of invincibility that made him appear like a direct descendant of Napoleon himself. He raised his head from a badly battered copy of what looked like The Catcher in the Rye and gave his facial hair a rather theatrical spin.
He did not bother with French.
“Are you Madame Chiara’s new raccoon?”
Vi decided that she wouldn’t bother to speak French either. Though she immediately wanted to rub that air of Gallic superiority off his face. Her English noble half—direct descendents of William The Conqueror—wanted to remind him of the Battle of Agincourt.
“It’s gopher .”
He very demonstratively puffed his lips at her, and she wondered if the bistro wasn’t on candid camera, because surely he had to be playing to an invisible crowd.
“Same thing. The lunch order is ready. Since you are new and English, I can’t trust your taste to be of any quality, so I made the house special for you. The rest have their usual orders packed.”
Vi raised her eyebrow at the needless memorization Aoife had subjected her to, then decided that there were more important matters at hand.
“I’m only half English.” She straightened to her last inch, throwing back her shoulders, and looked down on him from her almost six feet. “My Savoy side has not offended the French, to my knowledge.”
He paused the twirling of his mustache and cracked a small smile. “We would’ve beaten them into submission if they’d dared.”
“That’s what you said about the Russians in 1812 and the Brits at Waterloo in 1815, and how did that turn out for you?”
He stared at her and then began puffing out again with patriotic pride.
But before he could argue that the Russians didn’t actually defeat the French in 1812, and it was in fact the cold weather and hunger that had caused so many of them to perish on the march back from Moscow, Vi shook her head at him and lifted her hands palms up.
“Never mind, just… Why did Aoife make me memorize the order if you had already completed it?”
Vi looked at the two bags on the counter in front of her, noticing that the man was giving her an appraising, lecherous look now. That raised her hackles immediately.
“The food smells good, I’ll give you that. But if you’ve been dealing with the Lilien Haus crowd long enough to know their specific order without me having to rattle it off and still can’t recognize a lesbian when she walks in, I got nothing for you, brother.”
To his credit, he didn’t startle this time nor fluster. He shrugged, and then his face took on a blissful, faraway look.
“Lesbian, schmesbian…” He actually sighed loudly. “Chiara Conti is a goddess. You foreigners don’t appreciate beauty if you think we French can’t deify a woman who looks like that. She doesn’t have to be straight. She just has to be . I’m a beauty connoisseur.”
Then he leaned in and offered Vi his rather large—for such a scrawny man—hand. She responded on instinct and found his handshake to be strong, firm, and warm. His eyes looked directly into hers and he simply said, “Zizou. Like the greatest football player that ever played for France.”
“Vi. Genevieve. Like my great-grandmother who slept with the future king of England, and as she got older, retold the story of that night at every party to the profound embarrassment of the entire family.”
As they both dissolved into laughter, Vi grabbed the bags and exited the bistro, thinking she might have just made another friend.
* * *
Her day was a blur after lunch. For a person who proclaimed herself to be a ‘one-woman-show’, Aoife had a very well thought-out task list for Vi that made Vi feel productive, despite most of those tasks being menial. Still, it was good to be doing something and be appreciated for it.
As the evening descended on the warm and slightly suffocating Paris June, Vi hurried down Rue Saint-Honoré, trying to outrun the rain that would surely split the tumultuous sky at any moment.
She stumbled, almost going head over heels on her own shoelaces, and as she crouched down to tie them, juggling her messenger bag and the papers she was delivering for Aoife, she heard something right as the clouds finally opened to release the first rivulets of a summer shower.
A meow. A tiny, pitiful—yet all things considered rather demanding—meow. She turned around, still crouching, and that’s when she saw it. Him? Her? A rather dirty, small thing of undetermined color that could have been anything between gray and black.
The animal looked back at her and meowed again, the sound even more obnoxious than the first time.
Vi, who was getting soggier by the second, just managed to stuff the paperwork into her bag, certainly mangling it in the process, and as she extended a hand towards the creature who was lounging on the wet sidewalk as if it was a throne, it swiped at her hand, fortunately missing it entirely.
Vi yelped at the unexpected attack but still made a grab for the cat who struggled in her hold and tried to bite her, meowing even louder and, to Vi’s ears, even more demandingly. That’s when Vi noticed the rather mangled back paw. Shit. What should she do?
And then, amidst rain and thunder and water running all over her Chucks, a window opened across the street and Chiara’s shout shook her out of her indecisive stupor.
“Ms. Courtenay, bring her here!”
* * *
“How did you even know she was a her ?”
Vi ran a towel over her wet hair and said a small prayer that her blazer had kept most of the rain away from her white shirt. As it was, only her shoes, her hair, and her dignity had suffered any lasting damage.
Chiara was running the towel over the no-longer-mewling or struggling cat, who was drying quickly and revealing a very interesting chocolate color to its fur.
“She has been creating a ruckus under my window for half an hour. It sounded all sorts of disdainful. Arrogant even. But also quite majestic. Only a woman would do that.” Gentle hands examined the cat’s back paw and the crease on Chiara’s forehead deepened.
“I’d have gone to her sooner had I known she was in trouble.
Judging by the meows, I just assumed she was spoiled. Now I’ll have to call the vet.”
Vi raised her eyebrows.
“You’re keeping her?”
“Well, I can’t exactly throw her out. She needs help.
Afterwards, we shall see, right, piccola ?
” Chiara leaned down, and her nose touched the cat’s who allowed Chiara to nuzzle her.
Vi goggled. The cat who’d wanted to strip several layers off Vi’s skin was rather docile with Chiara. Well, of course.
“I don’t actually think ‘piccola’ suits her, though. She looks to be fully grown despite her diminutive size. And the tiny legs.”
“I’ve never seen this breed. Or the color.” Vi extended her hand again to try to pet the now-dry cat, only to have it swipe a paw at her once again.
“Ah, ah, ah, play nice… Binoche, that’s your savior right there.” The cat struggled out of Chiara’s hands and sat down on the towel to wash herself.
“Binoche?” Vi was pretty sure she’d misheard. “That’s a strange name for a cat. And it rhymes with brioche.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Vi wanted to take them back, to sink through the floor. Why did things just escape her lips like that?
The cat gave Vi the dirtiest look possible and turned away from both women, continuing her task. Chiara’s expression mirrored the cat’s.
“You philistine! Juliette Binoche is the national treasure of French cinema. And she happens to have starred in—”
“Chocolat!” Vi smiled widely, pleased with herself for remembering and following Chiara’s thought process behind naming the cat, who clearly didn’t want anything to do with them, despite her injury.
“Well, maybe not all is lost with you.” Chiara’s lower lip actually turned down in a pout, the beautiful mouth arranging itself into an irresistible expression. Vi, for the second time in as many minutes, gawked.
Chiara reached for the cat, and Binoche allowed herself to be picked up. For a minute, the woman and the cat just looked at each other, and Chiara sighed.
“An end of my half-year-long creative block, a concept for the new collection, and a cat. All in one day. You’re an overachiever, Ms. Courtenay. What am I to do with you?”
Despite not looking at her, Vi felt the words seep into every fiber of her being, their warmth, their slight hauteur.
When Chiara finally did turn away from the purring cat, her pouting lips twitched with exasperation, then turned upwards in a smile, and Vi figured Chiara could do absolutely anything with her. Anything at all.