Saskia’s Tea Party

The Alexandria Hotel is getting a new look. Well, you residents knew that already and the scaffolding is a dead giveaway, but in a corridor on the 4th floor is a glimpse of what is to come.

Yes, the hallways are getting a royal treatment: true red, oxblood and chocolate brown walls, and a narrow fleur-de-lis-inspired carpet that lets the long hidden mosaic tile borders on the floor shine.

When lurking in the lobby, you may notice white painted walls with a kind of floral relief visible from certain angles. Well, that was the brilliant result of a rather unrefined renovation of the Alex a few decades ago. The floral relief is actually damask fabric painted white.

The newly painted walls in the 4th floor hallways recall the opulence and shifting color tones of the original damask, but with a distinctly modern take. The red walls are a statement. They are a jubilant, “Welcome Back” to the early days when the Alex was grand and downtown, as it is becoming again, was the place to go in L.A.

The designer is hard at work on his plans for Charlie O’s. One can only speculate, with this sampling of his vision, what will become of Bukowski’s old watering hole.

She wonders if it is because she can tie a sailor’s knot. She wonders if her downcast eyes, her silence at all hide her fondness for the rack and the screw. Another one from Holland Park, like the other one from South Ken, upon simply shaking hands and then crossing paths at a Mexican fisherman’s restaurant on the boulevard, he looks at her as if he knows they are cut from the same cloth. He, with his shorn hair and suit befitting Sir Alex Ferguson, looks at her with such plain desire it is a wonder Costas, a bottle of tequila teetering on the edge of the table, says nothing to his business partner. The Greek is usually quick to the punch.

The Marquess had her decade on the Isles. She knew her sharp features called the attention of the Anglo-Saxons. She suspects the subtle projection of a submissive with a penchant for domination escapes every controlled gesture. The Greek knows dance and passion. The Englishman knows the essay of a sigh.

Today, her silence layered upon the former disinterest in the developer’s posh London digs and Marlborough and Leeds-shaped mind layered upon the sullen mouth of a woman who has not slept for days, awakes in the Englishman desire. Since she and the Greek wrapped their tongues around their own dark language, the Marquess had not encountered a gaze such as this. Or had she simply not noticed the persistent gaze she was well practiced in catching, devouring, and leaving, again for the first, second, third, fourth time, the fortress of a man in love with the cage in ruins. Ozymandias, she thinks, alas, we meet again.

His stare wets her skin as Costas presses his linen against her silk, guiding her out the door.

A sleeping Loki guarded the door to the designer’s atelier. She did not notice the tigered tabby, but she recognized the wet scent of canned fish soaking into into dry cat food. Not that it was an overwhelming stench, but the chords of scent hung like so many bunches of grapes in the city summer air. Behind the smoke of sandalwood was also the scent of warm steel of a small spinning motor, hot cotton, and working hands.

She fingered the silks of Gatsby and Garbo inspired frocks and wondered yet again what kind of dress, exactly, she would ask the woman she had not met to make.

Stella came to greet her from back, grand orange and red ropes of hair mingled with wiry gray strands sprouting from her head. A transplant from Iceland, a recent transplant from New Orleans, not because of Katrina, she settled with her 10 century old charm around her neck in downtown.

She admired the pleats in a man’s black velvet overcoat. The double fold fanned when the fabric moved, but otherwise lay flat against the body. “You need seams like this when you are on the run from people who want to steal your beautiful coat.”

She described the precise flow of silk she imagined and Stella responded well. “I will make you a dress that you will wear to every celebration the rest of your life. Even when you are 70, it will fit,” she said.

She laughed at the woman who was one part more mystic that she was flesh. Credible in ways The Secret is not. Having slowly seen her hips grow and breasts grow and thighs grow from a 2 to an 8, from 14 to her 20s, the thought was charming but impossible.

Stella noticed her shaking shoulders, and her blue eyes shone. “Your brain is the computer of your body, if you say it will happen, it will be so. I still fit into the dresses I wore in the ’60s. Tight, narrow things. It is not lying, you are merely stating what will be and what you will make happen,” she said, her voice pitching and cracking with the remnants of Iceland. She wondered if every Icelandic woman, as every Swiss girl in her 20s she had met sounded like little girl sated with milk chocolate, had a voice like wood, wax and unseasonal winter thaw.

Stella pointed to her necklace, the stick figure of woman, arms outstretched. “This is 1000-years old. If a woman wanted to attract the attention of a man and he paid her no mind, she would affix this symbol to his coat and within a few days, a sudden, inexplicable attraction would come to be. In all my clothes, I have sewn this symbol. I am spreading this power.”

A designer should be more than a technically proficient architect for the body. For the task at hand, she needed a bit of Nordic mysticism in her seams.