Fashionably Late (48 page)

Karen was swept with anger so quickly and so fiercely that she nearly bit her tongue. “Lisa, I have to go. I’ll see you at the run-through tomorrow,” was all she said, and she hung up the phone.

Karen had another incredibly busy day in front of her, but after a quick morning visit to the hospital she got in to the office and at nine o’clock exactly she took the time out to call Mr. Centrillo and give him the new information. “Will that help?” she asked. “Is it enough?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Cohen. It may not be enough, but at least it’s a start. I promise you, we’ll do our best with it. I may have to try a few different avenues.”

“Listen, I’ll be going away on vacation for a little while.” Karen didn’t want him calling her private line while she was in Paris.

“Really? Where are you going?”

“Lake George.” Where the hell had that come from, she wondered? She’d never been to Lake George in her life. She was going crazy. Should she tell Centrillo that she felt her mental health depended on him?

Somehow, she felt he already believed that, so she simply said, “Thank you.”

“You have a nice day,” he said. “Try to take it easy.”

Karen almost snorted. The day ahead of her seemed fifty hours long.

By lunchtime all of the VIKInc staff were gathered in the showroom, which had been converted to a makeshift auditorium. Someone, probably Casey, had even brought in a lectern. Karen couldn’t imagine standing behind it. It was too authoritative. Belle would like a lectern. In fact, now that Karen thought of it, Belle seemed to go through life with an imaginary lectern before her, giving all her pronouncements the added weight of a judgment from behind a podium.

Karen’s hands were clammy, but she couldn’t put this off any longer.

She had agreed to go ahead with the sale, rumors were running like rabbits through the staff, and she was going to have to inform all of the employees what was going on. She had decided to bestow stock on everybody who had been with her for more than a year. She had, against the advice of Robertthe-lawyer and in the face of Jeffrey’s disapproval, taken twenty percent of the company, a little less than half of her shares, and distributed it. That left her thirty percent, but with Jeffrey’s thirty percent that was a safe majorityţcontrolling interest for the short time until the actual transfer of stock to NormCo. Jeffrey and Robertthe-lawyer had had to accept her decision.

She wouldn’t do the deal any other way. If her conscience bothered her, if she worried, as Arnold’s daughter, about some of NormCo’s methods, she soothed herself by knowing she was making her workers well-off and that now, with Arnold’s illness, he and Belle would need the money.

Diluting her share was no big deal, really. How much money did she need?

There would be enough for everyone. It meant that most of her staff would be receiving their choice of cash or NormCo stock at the buyout.

So, she told herself, it was good news for everybody, especially senior staff, who would be making what Jeffrey kept resentfully calling “a bundle.”

But Karen knew that most people resisted change and were afraid of it.

So she wanted to make sure that she broke this news in the kindest, gentlest possible way. Jeffrey had planned to do it, but Paris had gotten in the way. She would speak instead, then Robertthe-lawyer would outline the buyout procedure, while Lenny, their accountant, would distribute folders to each of the employees that outlined their personal financial package. Karen wanted to make sure that everyone was as comfortable as they could be with the change, and assure them all that their jobs were secure. When Robertthe-lawyer stood up and asked for order, Karen managed to get to the front of the group without stumbling.

But she couldn’t get herself behind the lectern. Instead, she pulled over one of the showroom tables and perched on the edge of it.

“First of all, I would like to say that I’m sorry Jeffrey isn’t here to share this news with you, but as you all know, he’s in Paris getting things organized. He was the one responsible for making this happen.”

Was that true, she wondered, but didn’t have time to consider it. She took a deep breath. “So, anyway, listen,” she said, and then self-consciously thought: God, I sound so Brooklyn. Oh, well. I yarn what I yarn. “I know many of you have heard rumors, but I wanted to wait to talk to you until I knew for sure what was happenirlg. We have been tendered an offer by NormCo to buy us out.” She paused. There was a murmur from the back, where the sewing staff sat. “It doesn’t mean that they would step in and manage our business or change it.

What it means is that we’d have a chance to expand our business in a lot of ways we never could before. For me, it means that things could be very exciting: I can do a lot of lower-priced clothes and a line of active sportswear that I’ve been dying to do. For you it will mean some extra money. Depending on how long you’ve worked here, it could mean a lot of extra money.” There was another murmur, but this time a higher-pitched one. Karen saw Mercedes break into a rare smile. “And as far as your jobs are concerned, we would continue as we always have.

I know that I couldn’t have gotten where I am today without the help of all of you, and I hope that all of you like where we have gotten today.” She paused to let that sink in. “I’m going to let Robert and Lenny explain the rest of this stuff, but I’m going to sit right here, and if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.”

Robertthe-lawyer stood up and walked to the lectern. A slide appeared on the unfurled screen behind him. He told the group a little about NormCo and a little about their offer. He explained the choice between cashing in and holding NormCo stock. He sounded competent and friendly.

If he still harbored resentment over Karen’s plan to give some of the money back to the staff, he certainly didn’t show it. In fact, he almost made it seem as if it were his idea. There was enthusiastic applause when he finished. Then the packets were distributed with the formula for each employee. Lenny stood up amid the rustling of paper.

Karen heard the gasps as people began to look through the packets and understood the only number that mattered to them in all of that photocopied, collated pile: their bottom line. By doing it this way she would be giving away millions of dollars, but wasn’t that proportionately correct? After all, she and Jeffrey would become really wealthy. And, as she explained to Jeffrey and Robertthe-lawyer, she’d have to go on working with this staff. She couldn’t bear to spend the next dozen years with resentful, unhappy people. Bill Wolper had said the same thing to her. And wasn’t this the only thing that Arnold’s daughter could do?

The rest of the meeting was brief. Lenny droned on about capital gains and tax liabilities for a little while. But once people had seen their package, the murmur among the staff couldn’t be quieted. When Lenny finished, Karen stood up.

“So that’s about it,” she said. “Of course, it makes me a little nervous to try anything new, but I know most of you won’t believe that.”

There was scattered laughter, especially from the women in the sample room, who had been forced to try new things over and over again.

“Anyway, part of the deal is that I have to stay on for the next twelve years. So if you’re sick of me now, it’s a good time to bail out.”

There were more laughs and then Mrs. Cruz stood up. There were tears in her eyes.

“Thank you, Karen,” she said, and she began to clap. The applause grew until the whole room was filled with it. One by one the other staff members stood up until everybody was standing, applauding Karen. She felt herself blush, and tears filmed her own eyes. Boy, she sure seemed to be doing a lot of crying lately, for a woman who never cried.

So, maybe all of this was working out the way it should be. These people had depended on her and she’d come through for them. She thought of all the money she was keeping and hung her head in gratitude and shame.

Karen’s announcement put everyone in a kind of hyper mood. People were happy, but their minds seemed to be elsewhere. It didn’t help the work load. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong in the final prep for the Paris show.

Karen’s only hope at the run-through was that the old show biz superstition about dress rehearsals was true for fashion shows: when dress rehearsals were fiascoes they guaranteed the success of the actual production. Now Karen stood amid the chaos “backstage” and was ready to pull her hair out. Or else she would pull out Tangela’s hair.

Or maybe Maria Loper’s. Defina had managed to book the extra girls they would need for the two shows. It had been last-minute, and they would take extra work to get into shape, but they’d be fresh and they looked right.

Final alterations were being made on their ensembles. Ironically (or maybe predictably) it was the two most experienced models who were doing nothing but complaining: about the difficulty of the schedule, the music choice, about everything, and it was lousing up the timing as well as bringing down the spirits of everyone. Backstage was a shambles. The new clothes were strewn everywhere. Mrs. Cruz would have a fit. Defina was actually in charge of the show itself, but Karen always liked to be there to give the final adjustments to the way something draped and to add orţmore oftenţremove an accessory or piece of jewelry. Now, though, after close to three hours of it, Defina had blood in her eye and told Karen to go sit out front.

“I’m only trying to help,” Karen told her. “The show is running thirtyeight minutes too long already. I’m trying to help. You know what they say: designers solve other people’s problems.”

“Girlfriend, you’re an artist. Artists create problems. And right now you’re one of my problems. Get your ass out front and see what it looks like from the house.”

Karen knew when it was best not to mess with Defina and this was clearly one of those times. Both of them were frazzled to the max and Karen decided not to push the envelope. She walked out in front of the makeshift wings that Casey had rigged and sat down beside her mother, Lisa, and Stephanie. Carl, who had come in to do hair, sat a few rows back, gossiping with Casey. There were another couple of dozen people watching the run-through, some of them taking notes andţat this pointţmost of them yawning from exhaustion. Many had been up all the night before, resewing hems and tearing out seams. Karen had insisted that they run the black and the white shows simultaneously, to make sure the models would mirror one another during the actual separate events. But she hadn’t realized the difficulty in getting one girl to change her style to match another’s. Tangela and Maria, who opened and closed the shows, seemed to insist on doing the opposite of one another. If one swooped, the other robot-walked. If one boogied, the other sashayed. An icy wind seemed to have surrounded the two of them and it was hard to see the fashion through the breeze.

Karen sat in silence beside her mother and sister. Tiff had refused to come. Arnold was resting easy and would be released tomorrow. He’d been quiet when Karen called him. She just wished her mother and sister would be as still. Since Lisa and Belle had heard about the deal and gotten their portfolios, both had developed an instant new interest in the business. Now they watched as three different numbers were modeled, each in both black and white. Squinting her eyes, moving her head, Karen actually liked what she saw, but the presentation was lackluster at best. Goddamnit! When she’d finally gotten the clothes right, the models and production were wrong. And the production had to be as good as the product. Because buyers and the fashion press were exhausted and overwhelmed by the dozens of shows they crammed in during fashion week.

Most of them would have already spent a week in Milano, seeing Armani, Versace, and the other Italian giants. Paris had to be spectacular.

The great shows were ones that created an excitement, a fairyland that even the most jaded of journalists, the most difficult of buyers, could not resist. This show was far from irresistible.

Vivienne Westwood’s shows were magic. So were John Galliano’s and sometimes Jean-Paul Gaultier’s. That the clothes were often unwearable wasn’t really the point. They were original, exciting, witty, and fun.

Afterward, after the press had gone wild, the buyers usually found a very different collection in the showroom, clothes that their clientele would actually buy and wear. But at the shows it was attitude and choreography and some exaggeration that were so important. A mediocre collection could get rave reviews if the energy was high enough and the models pulled it together. To get the best from each girl, Karen never asked them to model anything they didn’t likeţ somehow they would ruin the outfit otherwise. In the same way, she knew Mrs. Cruz distributed sewing the designs according to the seamstresses strengthsţsome preferred the simple lines, others pleats. Watching the collection now, Karen was sure that it workedţit might even be her best show everţbut no one would ever notice unless these girls got their shit together. Karen sighed.

Defina came out from the mayhem backstage to grab a glimpse of what the show looked like up front. She stood beside Karen’s chair and watched glumly. Carl came up and sat behind them. One of the models appeared in the empire drawstring dress. The girl had a suburban teenage delinquent look on her face. It was a good dress, and she was built for it, but she stared down at her own feet, both sulky and awkward.

“Isn’t she a bit much?” Carl asked the back of their heads. “You haven’t decided to design for Amy Fisher have you?”

“Better than designing for Mary Jo Buttafuocco,” Defina snapped. She pursed her mouth. “The amazing thing is that she was in love with Joey before she was shot in the head!” She turned toward Carl and lowered her voice. “Someone else may get shot in the head if they don’t shut up. I don’t think Karen needs any criticism right now.”

“Who was criticizing?”

“I must be mistaken, because I thought it was you.” She smiled at him, as if all had been forgiven. Then she turned back to the end of the sluggish parade of models. Her eyes never left them, but she spoke to break the tension. “Hey, Carl, speaking of Amy Fisher, what do you get when you cross Joey Buttafuocco with a Harvard graduate?” He shrugged innocently. “Ted Kennedy,” Defina told him and got up and began to walk across the showroom to the stage. Carl paled.