“Rent them out with one-year leases. If the store's a success, you can take back a floor every year. You might be damn glad to have five floors one day.”
“Simon, this is crazy!” But she was so excited, she could hardly stand it. She had never even dreamed of owning her own store, and suddenly there she was, in the midst of it all. They hired architects and Elsie de Wolfe, and within weeks, she was surrounded by blueprints and renderings and drawings, there were samples of marble all over her library, fabrics, wood finishes for some paneling, the whole house was in a whirl as she made her plans, and Simon finally gave her a desk in his office and a secretary of her own to handle all the details for her. Cholly Knickerbocker even mentioned it in his column, and there was an article about it in The New York Times. “Watch out, New York!” the item said, “When Zoya Ossupov, the late great Countess of Axelle's, and Simon Hirsch, with his Seventh Avenue empire, joined forces last July, they might just have started something big!” And the words were prophetic.
They sailed for Paris in March on the Normandie, to buy for Simon's lines, and to select some of the mainstays of Zoya's first collection. And this time she picked all the things she loved, without having to defer to Axelle. She had never had as much fun in her life as shopping with him, and Simon gave her an unlimited budget. They stayed at the George V, and enjoyed a few rare moments alone which were like a honeymoon for them. They arrived back in New York a month after they'd sailed, happy and refreshed and more in love than ever. Their homecoming was marred only by the news that Sasha had been expelled from school. At twelve, she was becoming a little terror.
“How did that happen, Sasha?” She spoke to the child quietly on their first night home. As he had the year before, Nicholas had come to the ship to meet them but this time in the new Duesenberg Simon had ordered before they stopped making them the year before. Nicholas had been wildly excited to see them, and then he had told Zoya the news about his sister. She had worn lipstick and nail polish to school, and she had been caught kissing one of the teachers. He had been fired summarily, and Sasha had been expelled, without hope of being reinstated. “Why?” Zoya asked again, “what could have made you do it?”
“I was bored,” Sasha shrugged, “and going to an all-girl school is stupid.” Simon had paid the tuition at Marymount for her, and Zoya had been so pleased to see her in a better school than the one Zoya had been able to pay for. Nicholas had stayed on at Trinity, as he had before they were married, and he loved it there. He had two more years to finish before he went to Princeton, like his father before him. Sasha had lasted six months at Marymount and now she was out on her ear, and she didn't even have the grace to look embarrassed. There had been only two male teachers in the entire school, the music teacher and the dance master, the rest were nuns, and even then Sasha was able to make trouble. Zoya wondered if it was Sasha's way of punishing her for going away for so long, and being so excited about her new business. For the first time, she had second thoughts but it was too late now. She had ordered all her American lines before she left, and now she had bought and paid for the rest of it in Paris. She had to open, no matter what. And it was a hell of a time for Sasha to be making trouble. But Sasha wasn't the only thing on her mind now.
“Doesn't this embarrass you at all?” Zoya asked, “Think of how kind Simon was to send you there in the first place.” But the girl only shrugged, and Zoya sensed that she hadn't gotten through to her, as she went back to their bedroom and found Simon unpacking. “I'm so sorry, Simon. It seems so incredibly ungrateful of her to have done this.”
“What did she say?” Simon turned worried eyes to his wife. There was something in Sasha that had troubled him in the last few months. She had looked at him