paws on her, and sniffed her face and hair, whining happily and wagging his
tail.
She hated the new look. When they had turned her to the mirror, she’d seen a
pathetic old maid trying to pass for a pretty, vivacious young thing. The styled
hair was simply not her. It only emphasized that she was basically a plain, drab
woman. She would never be sexy, charming, with-it, or any of the other things
that the new hairstyle tried to say she was. It was rather like fastening a
brightly colored feather duster to the back end of a turkey and attempting to
pass it off as a peacock.
Because she did not want to hurt Travis’s feelings, she pretended to like what
had been done to her. But that night she washed her hair and brushed it dry,
pulling on it until all the so-called style had been tugged from it. Because of
the feathering, it did not hang as straight and lank as it had previously, but
she did the best with it that she could.
The next day, when Travis picked her up for lunch, he was clearly startled to
find that she had reverted to her previous look. However, he said nothing about
it, asked no questions. She was so embarrassed and afraid of having hurt his
feelings that, for the first couple of hours, she was not able to meet his eyes
for more than a second or two at a time.
In spite of her repeated and increasingly vigorous demurrals, Travis insisted On
taking her shopping for a new dress, a bright and summery frock that she could
wear to dinner at Talk of the Town, a dressy restaurant on West Gutierrez, where
he said you could sometimes see some of the movie stars
who lived in the area, members of a film colony second only to that in Beverly
Hills—Bel Air. They went to an expensive store, where she tried on a score of
dresses, modeling each for Travis’s reaction, blushing and mortified. The
saleswoman seemed genuinely approving of the way everything looked on Nora, and
she kept telling Nora that her figure was perfect, but Nora couldn’t shake the
feeling that the woman was laughing at her.
The dress Travis liked best was from the Diane Freis collection. Nora couldn’t
deny that it was lovely: predominantly red and gold, though with an almost
riotous background of other colors somehow more right in combination than they
should have been (which apparently was a trait of Freis’s designs). It was
exceedingly feminine. On a beautiful woman it would have been a knockout. But it
just was not her. Dark colors, shapeless cuts, simple fabrics, no ornamentation
whatsoever—that was her style. She tried to tell him what was best for her,
explained that she could never wear such a dress as this, but he said, “You look
gorgeous in it, really, you look gorgeous.”
She let him buy it. Dear God, she really did. She knew it was a big mistake, was
wrong, and that she would never wear it. As the dress was being wrapped, Nora
wondered why she had acquiesced, and she realized that, in spite of being
mortified, she was flattered to have a man buying clothes for her, to have a man
take an interest in her appearance. She never dreamed such a thing would happen
to her, and she was overwhelmed.
She couldn’t stop blushing. Her heart pounded. She felt dizzy, but it was a good
dizziness.
Then, as they were leaving the store, she learned that he had paid five hundred
dollars for the dress. Five hundred dollars! She had intended to hang it in the
closet and look at it a lot, use it as a starting point for pleasant daydreams,
which was all fine and dandy if it had cost fifty dollars, but for five hundred
she would have to wear it even if it made her feel ridiculous, even if she did
look like a poseur, a scrubwoman pretending to be a princess.
The following evening, during the two hours before Travis was to pick her up and
escort her to Talk of the Town, she put the dress on and took it off a half