GOLD DUST WOMAN

On Old Money New York

She looked like cash, a fresh load of cash on a waterbed in a Vegas hotel. I don’t know why she gave me the impression of a Vegas hotel, perhaps it was her metallic voice, or her bronze legs and pearly hair, conjured by some magician in the laboratory of Frédéric Fekkai, but there was something rotten about her as she walked through the doors, amidst a trail of sand and a gust of mould and the metronomical clatter of Egyptian bracelets. I don’t know what it was – perhaps a lost love or a buried husband – but rotten it was all the same, and I was seized by an irresistible desire to touch her.

She came at noon when the clock struck hard, and the doors flew open, and the moneylenders charged like bulls, but I could not see their suits, and I could not hear their racket, because the sound of crisp cotton beating in the wind, when the sun is high and the clouds are plump, filled the room and broke its perpetuity in one grand moment of class: Boom!

It was the suit that told the story of course, as all suits do; an immaculate, white suit with a supernatural lustre and it never moved, nor folded, as if it were glued to her bones. After all, I’d seen hundreds of Chanel suits, coming and going like headless giants — they were all rich girlfriends, or rich wives, or the occasional rich executives, obscenely rich perhaps, but however could not imagine being something else other than mere extensions of some man or some house, or some job, or some suit for that matter, and so they had nothing to do with Chanel. I couldn’t entirely put my finger on it, but I suppose there was a sort of French quality to her, the sort that a very specific breed of people acquire only by birth, for it is something that can never quite be cultivated. It was more than studied nonchalance, yes, much more. For only those who are born in Vegas hotels on waterbeds in loads of fresh cash – like their grandmothers, and their grandfathers and their grandmothers’ grandfathers – through some providential clash of great luck, ancient scotch and spiteful sex can ever wear Chanel as one wears, perhaps, their own skin.

And women in her position – the first patrons of Haute Couture – exchanged allegiances around the turn of the century, abandoning Louboutin and his cheap red soles and returning to Mr. Blahnik, the shoemaker who gave the world a stiletto so silent that I never heard her footsteps. She floated toward the corner sofa, where important people with important business sit, and tossed her bag on the fat red velvet. And not your average Birkin at that, something ordinary priced at ten thousand dollars in calfskin, no, the sack this woman flung around was a four-inch model in unique crocodile leather and subtle champagne hues, selling for somewhere around the price of a new Lexus.

‘Do I look burnt?’ She asked her companion.

On the contrary, her face bared the smoothness of a blade, and to look at her was to wonder if she was the possessor of extraordinary genes or, perhaps more reasonably, an exclusive supply of disinfected air. I never understood her concern.

‘I’m going to Vietnam later with the children, and never coming back’ she added with an immovable face, and suddenly I understood.

Her name was Lauren, and she came there often, and we spoke a few times before she disappeared into a trail of sand and a gust of mould, and quite often I have wondered if she ever was at all. She used to say that wealth was not in your pocket, but in the small circle you keep, the secrets you hide, the unapologetic code by which you live your life and an unlimited vocation for indifference. And I am sure she killed her husband and took all his money, because that is precisely how she wore her Chanel, and tossed her Birkin and twisted her wrists – with an untreatable dismiss of human life. And every time I’d take her order the air was still, and time would slow, and she would always want the same damn thing: pineapple juice…