She scanned the room for Bess and spotted her surrounded by a crowd of admirers in the corner. Cat tried very hard to remain upright as she made her way over.
“Bess,” she hissed. “The band has blackface makeup on. We have to go.”
“Oh, c’est génial, eh? Comme Josephine Baker!” said an idiotic woman who overheard her.
“No, it’s not génial,” Cat snapped. “We have to go right now.”
Bess turned around and stared at the band. “Wow,” she said simply. “I honestly never thought I would see that in my entire life.”
“Welcome to France,” Cat explained, swaying slightly. “The country where Galliano literally praised Hitler in the Jewish quarter and got a job running Margiela three years later.” She grabbed Bess for support. “Fuck. I think I had too much champagne.”
“This way,” Bess said, picking through the maze of raised cocktail tables toward a back entrance. “I keep seeing the waiters go out here.”
The two women brushed through a narrow hallway filled with plastic crates and made their way past a set of heavy polyester curtains before finding themselves ejected into a small dirt circle filled with cigarette butts and diesel generators.
“Shit,” Bess said, seeing no way out. “Let’s try cutting through the kitchen.”
She grabbed Cat’s hand and led her through another maze of crates into the party’s makeshift kitchen, where the cooking staff whooped and whistled at their arrival.
“Merci, au revoir,” Cat slurred.
“You’re really fucked up, Cat,” Bess said, yanking her through the kitchen. They finally found a side exit closed off by another set of heavy curtains. Cat nodded, her brown eyes closing without permission. Bess looked around quickly and pulled the curtains shut. She pointed to the nearest plastic crate.
“Catherine Celia Ono, I order you to barf your brains out into that box before anyone sees you.”
“Nooo,” Cat whined, almost crying. “I can’t. I hate throwing up so much.”
Bess spun her around, and before Cat knew what was happening, Bess had shoved her manicured fingers right down Cat’s throat. Cat gagged and vomited right into the plastic crate.
“See?” Bess said kindly. “That wasn’t so bad.” She searched for a clean section of curtain and wiped the tears off Cat’s face. “Okay. Ready?”
“I hate you,” Cat replied, her voice soft and not very mean at all.
“I know,” Bess answered, laughing. “But you’ll be thanking me in twenty minutes.” She checked Cat’s face, straightened their dresses, and flung the curtain open. The two women made a mad dash for the nearest hedge, but after ten seconds of walking as quickly as their heels would allow, they both came to a stop. There was no point in rushing. Not a single person was waiting on this side of the tent—all the hubbub was at the front of the party, where Cy Bianco had just arrived. Bess looked around for the park’s green metal chairs, and pulled two up behind a hedge to shield them from the rest of the garden, just in case.
Cat lit a cigarette. She was starting to feel a teensy bit better, though her right toe was numb from the pressure of the narrow stilettos Bibi had jammed her into. She stood up and started walking, slowly at first, then found her stride near the end of the hedge they’d been hiding behind, and turned back to look for Bess, who was still in the chair and hunched over her phone.
“I’m ready,” Cat pointed out, gesturing to her upright body. “You were correct on the barfing front. Let’s go back to the hotel.” She leaned against the prickly hedge, its sharp leaves pressing their pointy, waxy angles into her skin.
“Fuck that,” Bess said. “We need to have our picture taken somewhere before that disgusting blackface shows up on Mania.” She held up her phone to Cat; notifications lit the screen one after another. “We’ve been invited to a hundred parties. Pick one,” Bess insisted, her speech rushed, like she couldn’t quite get the words out quickly enough.
“Great idea,” Cat agreed slowly, tapping her cigarette’s inch-long ash dramatically onto the gravel. The little gray log fell to the ground perfectly intact, like the molted skin of a snake. Cat wanted to step it into nothingness but after staring at it for a few beats decided to let the wind erode it. They scrolled through the invites before they found one from a group of mimes begging Cat and Bess to come join them a few blocks away, in an afterparty for Jonathan Sprain’s runway show, held on the fifth floor of an empty office building.
“That’s the one,” Cat said happily, while Bess summoned a car. They snuck down the line of hedges and out of the gardens before tumbling into a waiting Mercedes.
Paula Booth sat in the lobby bar of Le Narcisse, nursing a glass of wine and working away on her laptop on the final layout of the November issue. She frowned as her finger hovered over the Return button, then let out a long breath.
A mousy-haired woman to her left who had been trying unsuccessfully to signal the bartender turned, mistaking Paula’s sigh for an expression of exasperated camaraderie.
“Am I doing something wrong?” she asked Paula plaintively in English.
Paula looked at the woman, who wore a huge bead necklace, a tweed blazer, and brown jersey trousers over a pair of orthopedic clogs. “It’s Fashion Week,” she explained. “They’re trying to take care of all the people who are here on corporate accounts.”
“My corporate card is as good as anyone else’s,” the woman scoffed. “Note to self: France is exactly as expected.”
“Is this your first time here?” Paula asked. Something about the woman—she was so plain, but she had eyes like a hawk—reminded Paula of what she must have looked like once upon a time, during her own first visit to Paris, and she felt sympathy, maybe even empathy for her: a pair of feelings that bubbled up into Paula Booth’s consciousness very, very rarely.
“Is it that obvious?” The woman sighed, her middle-aged hands, pale and soft, holding the beads on her necklace. “I’m chaperoning my daughters.”
“What do you normally do?” Paula asked, trying to engage her on a positive subject.
“I’m a college professor,” the woman said flatly. “Experimental chemistry.”
“Experimenting in what?”
“Fluid dynamics, propulsion, that kind of thing.”
“You’re…a rocket scientist.”
“Well,” the woman said, a smile appearing on her face, “we don’t say it exactly like that. But, yes. Among other things.”
“You must be horrified at this whole spectacle,” Paula said, gesturing to the scene around her.
The woman laughed. “It’s not what I wanted for my children. But they want what they want.”
“Let me help you,” Paula said, signaling to the bartender with a flick of her fingers. “Treat them like servants—the French worship hauteur. What are you drinking?”
“What are you drinking?”
“I was drinking wine, but I’d change to something stronger. Scotch?”
“Absolutely.”
Paula ordered two double Laphroaigs, neat, in her imperfect but forceful French. The bartender complied almost immediately, and moments later the two women held matching tumblers.