Fashionably Late (20 page)

If Karen resented the fact that the journalists seemed focused on her and her life more than her designs, she knew that she simply had to live with it America was the center of the cult of celebrity and name recognition was everything. Fashion designers used to be almost laughable, like hairdressers. But now they seemed to be regarded more as movie stars, and people pranced around them. So Karen played the game because she knew that her high profile was one of the things that made her desirable to NormCo. The telephone rang. Karen didn’t have time to answer it, but she couldn’t help llstening as the message was taken by her machine.

“Karen?

It’s Lisa. I tried you at the office but there was no answer. I’m so sorry about the brunch I know it wasn’t great. I hope you’re not mad.

Let’s talk.” There was a brief pause but Karen could hear that her sister hadn’t hung up. “I miss you Karen,” Lisa said, and then, after a moment, there was the buzz of the thai tone followed by the click of the machine turning itself off. Karen felt yet another wave of guilt.

She should have talked to Lisa. How long had she been putting her off?

But it was harder and harder to. As Karen’s life expanded Lisa s had contracted. How could she explain without sounding as if she were bragging?

Now Karen reached up and took down the stone-color silk knit buttonless cardigan and the matching dress. She put on a new pair of Fogal pantyhose. At twenty-six dollars they were a ridiculous luxury and they snagged If you even sneezed, but for absolute sensuousness and for subtlety of color there was nothing that could touch themţincluding her own fingernails.

Karen usually couldn’t be bothered to put on the little cotton gloves Fogal sold to help you get safely into your hose, but today she did, and slipped into them with only the smallest undignified wriggle at the thigh. They had a control top that compressed her line down to the knee.

The tricks a middle-aged woman had to resort to underneath a dress to get it to move well.

Why was it that every woman in America over the age of consent hated her thighs, Karen wondered, and not for the first time. It was, in fact, a preoccupation of her life and one of the keys to her success.

Knowing how women, all women, hated their thighs or their bellies, Karen designed virtually every bit of clothing around that fact. Now she lifted her arms and slithered into the silk knit, wrapping the sleeves of the cardigan around the waist. The cardigan could actually be worn as a sweater, but neither she nor any of the people who worked for her had ever done it. All of them, and most of her clients, used the matching sweater to camouflage their waists and thighs and hips.

At eight hundred and sixty dollars retail, they made expensive bets ut ey the job. It looked casual, comfortable, but great. And it felt great, too. Clothes had to feel good against the skin. Karen would never do a blouse or dress In Lurexţit would scratch. Now she pulled out the pair of kid-leather shoes that were toned to the Fogal stockings and slipped into the stacked-heel umps. Then she strode to the mirror.

It was great. It was better than great. It was right. Simple, but simple wasn’t easy. Karen knew just how far the right clothing went to not just dress one but to protect one as well. What were all those fucking power SUits that men put on for the boardroom about? Armor, twentieth-century style.

She looked at her reflection. The color was good for herţit enlivened the dishwater brown of her hair. She picked up an envelope purse in just the same tone and slipped her notes into it. Then, as an afterthought, she added the two photos of herself as a child. They had become like her American Ex ress cardţshe didn’t leave home without them. She looked back at herself. The bag looked nice, and the luster of the silk gave the dress a lot of energy, while the sweater camouflaged any weakness she might have. She had to stop for a moment and almost sighed aloud. Funny that her weaknessţwell, the nonfunctioning part of her personţwas actually housed there, somewhere under the belt-tied arms of the sweater. Still, glancing at herself in the mirror, she didn’t look like an unfertile woman. She looked sexy and sophisticated, yet at ease, successful and secure, without being flashy or dowdy. Karen wasn’t young anymore, but she wasn’t quite middle-aged. At least she didn’t feel as if she were.

Yet she never wanted to dress too youthfullyţshe hated that look of desperation. Her clothes reflected that philosophy and she knew her clientele could sense that. After all, they were rarely young girls.

Now, the next big question: Accessories! Karen moved to the bureau.

She rejected the idea of a scarf as too fussy. She designed them but she rarely wore them. At least not as scarves. She wrapped them as belts, tied them around her hair, knotted them around purse straps.

Still, something across the expanse of shoulder and neckline, something to break the line and draw attention to her face, would be nice.

Jewelry, perhaps?

She turned to the miniature chest of drawers that sat on the bureau and it housed her entire collection of jewelry. She didn’t have much real stuff, mostly because she didn’t like it. The only designer whose gold and precious stones she adored was Angela Cummings, but Karen was too practical to spend ten thousand dollars for an inlaid gold cuff bracelet that got in her way when she sketched. Mostly she wore the costume stuff that she herself designed. Now, she took out a six-strand necklace of irregularly shaped gold beads. It had a kind of Cleopatra-in-the-Year-Two-Thousand feel to it, and she clipped it around her neck. Yes, the gold set off the sheen of the silk knit and Karen liked the feel of the heavy beads on her chest. Dressing was a kind of armor. She was girded for battle.

By the time she was ready, Jeffrey was already waiting for her in the limo downstairs. The presentation was going to be held at the NormCo headquarters on Park Avenue at Fiftieth Street. Defina, Robertthe-lawyer, and a couple of key staff members would meet them in the lobby. The moment she stepped into the car, Jeffrey handed her a folder. “You want to go through these numbers again?” he asked.

“No,” she said, and he was smart enough to desist.

She was nervous. This wasn’t like a trunk show, where she knew the kinds of questions she’d be asked and knew the line she was selling.

This felt more like an eleventh-grade algebra test, something she had never been able to adequately prepare for. She had a sinking feeling now, as then, that when she was asked, “What is the value of x,” she would answer wrong.

As if he was reading her mind, Jeffrey said, “Remember, if they ask you what value we place on VIKInc, you can’t give them a number.”

She nodded, tensely. Christ! It was as she suspected all along: any answer she gave for the value of x would be incorrect.

And what was x, exactly? What were they selling today, if they could sell anything at all? Her name? Her freedom? Her staff? Karen considered herself a good merchant, but despite her sales ability she felt out of her league. And confused. This was a male transaction, all about stock shares and cross-collateralizing and ROls and net profit margins. She looked over at Jeffrey. He understood all those pages of printouts. But did he understand how she felt? Was he trying to sell her to NormCo today? Weren’t there names for men who sold their women?

She thought again of Coco Chanel. Coco’s friend Madame de Chevigne had given her one warning: “My child, all men are pimps.” Coco had never forgotten it.

Now Karen took a deep breath. I’m going crazy, she thought. It’s just nerves. I always get like this before a really important meeting.

Paranoid, almost. I was like this when we met with Jeffrey’s father, back when we first expanded the company. And when we met with the factors to borrow money so we could do the bridge line.

They had needed too much money to go to the family. And they weren’t established enough to get it from a bank. So in the garment center, you went to a factor. Factors sometimes loan money without receiving any receivables as collateral. The loans are called “unsecured” loans, and they make lenders very nervous. Well, they made Karen feel pretty unsecure herself. But she had managed to present herself well, show all the orders on the books, and get the money that had, so far, allowed them to deliver on those orders.

But somehow this was different. Karen tried to focus. The difference here was that she wasn’t sure if she actually wanted to get to the difficult goal they were trying to reach. It had all become too hard, too big, and too complicated. She shook her head. Somehow she had always imagined that things got easier as you moved up the ladder. She had hated working for another designer so much that she had gone out on her own. But being her own boss had presented a whole set of different difficulties. Financial ones. Emotional ones. And it was so stressful.

Being the boss of others seemed almost worse than being an employee.

It was lonely. Only Jeffrey kept her balanced.

Now Jeffrey put his hand on her thigh. Even through the two layers of silk knit, she could feel his hand was cool, even cold. Was he frightened? “You’ll be great,” he said. “You’ll knock em dead.”

Despite its coolness, his hand on her leg sent a small electrical charge through her. When was the last time they had really made love?

The night she had come back from Dr. Goldman’s, the night he had said no to adoption.

The limo pulled to a stop in front of the Park Avenue NormCo building.

A statue of a business-suited man with his arm extended stood there.

It was titled “Taxi!” and was, she supposed, meant to be a whimsical bronze reminder of what “the suits” look like at rush hour. But it gave her the creeps. She felt better when she saw Defina’s black face peeping over the arm of the statue. “The only guy in New York who can keep it up,” Defina laughed, patting the uplifted bronze arm. Karen laughed too and slid out of the car, careful not to snag her hose on the limo door. She moved up the wide granite steps with Jeffrey behind her. She walked briskly, her carriage self-assured.

“You don’t fool me,” Defina whispered. “I can tell you feel like shit.

But they can’t. You look great.”

“Thanks, you witch.”

“Sure you don’t want to replace that w’ with a b’?” Defina asked and grinned. “Sometimes I’m so glad I’m not a white girl. At least I don’t go pale when I’m scared.”

Karen grinned back at her. “A little more blush needed, perhaps?” she asked.

“That, or a higher profitability picture,” Defina cracked.

Karen rummaged through her lizard skin envelope bag and pulled out a compact. “Blusher is easier,” she said with a sigh.

They were joined by Robertthe-lawyer, Casey Robinson, Mercedes Bernard, and some people from Robertthe-lawyer’s office.

Robert-thelawyer didn’t just look paleţhe also had a sheen of perspiration on him.

Karen coolly handed him a handkerchief. “Never let em see ya sweat,” she told him, quoting Donna Karan, and then led the way across the marble lobby to the bank of elevators marked with the NormCo logo. She announced herself at the security desk, and when the elevator arrived, she turned to them all, managed a big smile, and repeated the line that Shirley Temple’s mother was supposed to have told Shirley before each movie take: “Sparkle, Shirley, sparkle!” Then they boarded the elevator in silence.

Bill Wolper’s office was, of course, on the executive floor at the top of the elevator bank. Jeffrey took her arm as they stepped out of the elevator and into the hushed, enormous, and very bland reception area that greeted NormCo visitors. Karen couldn’t help but contrast it with their own tumultuous offices. As if reading her mind, Defina gave one look to the gray plush carpet, black upholstered chairs, and granite reception desk and turned to Karen. “Who died?” she asked, sotto voce.

The calla lilies in the four-foot vase were the last funereal touch.

Well, Karen thought, at least form did follow function here. The place was a mausoleum filled with nothing but stiffs.

“This is definitely grown-up,” said Casey Robinson. “And very butch, I might add.”

“Enough, Casey,” Jeffrey told their VP of merchandising. “Remember that you’re hetero today.”

If the office was austere to the point of sterility, the panorama was spectacular: south down Park Avenue with a perfect view of the top of the Chrysler building, and all of mid-Manhattan spread out in a glistening loop. Forty stories down and twenty blocks south there were raucous sweatshops filled with hungry immigrants workingţprobably for subsidiaries of NormCoţat starvation wages. But here, all was quiet and plentiful.

Jeffrey kept his hand on Karen’s elbow and moved them smoothly to the reception desk, announcing them to the soigne middle-aged woman who looked up attentively. The little group clustered together with Karen at the center, rather like a herd of plains creatures protecting their young from wolf attack. Except, of course, that she was no longer young, she thought wryly. Maybe it’s more like the way priests prepared the sacrificial lamb. But at my age I’m mutton dressed as lamb, she told herself, and looked down at her outfit to be sure it wasn’t too young for her. No, she looked right.

Herb Becker walked out of an unobtrusive door and approached them, his hand extended in peace (or to show he held no weapon). Becker was NormCo’s financial guy, a real stiff, who had already spent a lot of time with Jeffrey and Lenny, the JIKInc accountant. Karen had met him only once before. Now he took her hand and swung it up and down as if she were a slot machine about to deliver the jackpot.

“Welcome to NormCo. Bill has been expecting you.” There was a way they all said that name that made it sound like it was more formal than “Mr. Wolper,” or even “His Majesty.” The Englishman, Basil Reed, said it that way, too. How do they do that, she wondered.

“I’m looking forward to meeting Bill,” she said, perhaps a little too sweetly. She felt Jeffrey’s hand tighten on her elbow. She smiled at him. “Shall we?” she asked. The group moved forward as one, and for a terrible moment she thought they might all get knocked over as they tried to clear the unobtrusive door. But they thinned out to single file, although Jeffrey kept his hand on her elbow, walking slightly behind her. It began to annoy her. If he was her umbilical cord to the mysteries of the financial mother-ship, what was she? A baby? A fetus?