Fashionably Late (58 page)

She mentioned it to Bill.

“You’re right,” he said. “I think it’s a Buddhist thing. You know, reincarnation and all. If you are born to a high station it’s because it’s your karma. It’s because you are reaping the benefits of many lives, well-lived.”

“Sort of like the divine right of kings?” Karen asked.

Bill nodded. He seemed a believer. Somehow, kings always believed in the divine right of kings, but girls from Nostrand Avenue weren’t so sure.

Karen was sure that she liked the Thai people. They were good-looking and hardworking, and seemed very gentle. The factories were clean and well lit. There were no child workers, although some of the young Thai girls looked much younger than their stated ages. Still, it was clear that these factories, at least, were not hideous sweatshops. She had an interpreter, and she got to ask a few questions, but even without the glowing testimonials of the workers, she could see that there was nothing wrong with this setup.

She was relieved, and delighted. Now she could sign the deal and she and Jeffrey and the baby (Marcus? Lucas?) would be able to live well and, she hoped, happily. Their share of the money would be close to thirty million dollars, and after taxes and fees they’d keep more than half of it. For the first time, Karen began to think about the money.

Bill took her back to the hotel at four. “How about drinks on the veranda at seven?” he asked. “And dinner? Tomorrow we fly to Korea, then the Mananas, and then we’re back to the U.S. of A.” Karen nodded.

She was tired, and she wanted to call New York. She smiled at Bill and left him, planning to take a nap and then bathe and dress.

But when she got upstairs to her room there were three messages: two from Jeffrey and one from Carl. She called Jeffrey first, at home, but there was no answer, so she tried Carl.

He answered on the first ring. “Karen?” he asked.

“How did you know?”

“Who the hell else would be calling at this time?” he asked. “Listen, the baby has been born.”

“What?”

“Cyndi gave birth this afternoon at Doctors’ Hospital.”

“Oh my God!” Karen felt her stomach drop. “Is everything all right?

Is she all right? Is the baby all right? Isn’t this much too early?”

“One crisis at a time,” Carl said. “The baby is three weeks early, but he weighed almost six pounds so it’s right on the border of not even being premature. It has no problem breathingţthat’s the big worry with a preemieţ but it seems its lungs are all developed. And Cyndi is fine too.” He paused. “Jeffrey’s back from Milan. Have you spoken to him?”

“No. He wasn’t home. Maybe he’s still at the hospital.”

“I don’t think so,” Carl said. “I took Cyndi to the hospital.”

“You did? What about Jeffrey? Where is he?”

“I don’t know exactly. It took your office a little while to find him.

He came in and said hello’ but he left before I did. Anyway, you should talk to him.”

“About what?” she asked. “Carl, if you are lying to me, if there’s something wrong with the baby, I’ll kill you.”

“I promise you, there’s nothing wrong with the baby. Except…”

“Except what?” she nearly screamed.

“Well, it’s probably just my imagination, but something seems wrong with Cyndi. Not physically, you know. Just well…”

“Is she upset?” Karen asked. “Should I call her?”

“Talk to Jeffrey,” Carl said. “I think Jeffrey just has to kind of calm her down. She hasn’t stopped crying. I mean it’s only natural.

It’s her first baby. This is a hard thing for her.”

“Of course it is. But she is okay and the baby is okay. You promise?”

“I promise, Karen. But call Jeffrey. Now’s the time to talk to him.”

Karen spent the next two hours sitting beside the phone, dialing and redialing her home number. She imagined every possibility: Carl had lied and the baby was dead, or it wasn’t dead yet but it was dying, or it wasn’t dying but it was deformed or blind or retarded. She tried to tell herself to stop, that she was just being morbid, but she couldn’t stop.

It was a quarter to seven, Bangkok time, when she finally got Jeffrey.

She was so upset that she forgot to ask him where he had been.

“Jeffrey, what’s going on?” was all she managed.

“Karen, I think I have some bad news.”

She began to cry silently. She knew it! She felt her heart tighten in her chest and her stomach seemed to go bottomless. “It’s the baby, isn’t it? The baby is sick.”

“No, the baby is fine. It’s just that Cyndi may be changing her mind.

I’m sorry, Karen.”

Her tears stopped, dried up the way a mother’s milk might. “What?”

Karen nearly screamed. “What are you talking about?”

Even from seven thousand miles away Karen could hear the fatigue in Jeffrey’s voice. “I think Cyndi wants to keep the baby, Karen. And if she does there is nothing we can do.”

Karen had called Bill and tried to beg off, but he had heard the distress in her voice. She tried to simply cancel without bothering to explain why. As she lay on the divan, too shocked to cry, too disappointed yet to feel the pain she knew that was hovering, waiting to swoop down on her, to demolish her, she stared sightless out of the huge windows. That was when she heard his knock. She didn’t know if she could get up off the sofa, or if she could get across the room.

But at the second knock she forced herself to the door and opened it to see Bill’s concerned face.

l “What is it?” he said. “What is it, Karen? Has somebody died?”

“No,” she whispered. “It’s worse than that.”

She told him everything. He listened, and then he put off the next leg of the trip, canceling Korea completely, and spent that night carefully getting her drunk. He held the wine glass for her, and she drank like a baby and cried like one, too. He sat beside her on the divan, and wiped her nose and patted her back and poured more wine. He was more sympathetic than she could have imagined. “What a heartbreak,” he said over and over. “What a heartbreak.”

“Only for me,” she admitted. “Jeffrey is probably glad, and I have to figure that this is one less child who hasn’t been abandoned by its mother. This works out best for everyone except me. This is my karma.”

She wiped her eyes again and looked at Bill. “I could never bear to go through this again. I just can’t.” She cried for a while longer. “Do you think I’m making too big a deal about this? Do you think kids are that important?”

“Absolutely. What could compare?” He told her about his two sons and how important they were to him. Somehow, it comforted her. She kept drinking, and he kept talking: about how the elder boy had a weak eye muscle, a lazy eye, and how worried Bill and his wife had been, about the trouble the younger one had had in school until he was diagnosed with dyslexia, and how well he was doing now. Karen thought that Bill was more involved with his kids than most men. He seemed to be grounded by them. He had never mentioned his wife before, and if that relationship was strained or nonexistent, he seemed to comfort himself with the love of his now almost-grown boys. Together, Karen and Bill watched the lights blink off across the river, and then saw the sun rise. Karen could not count the glasses of wine she had drunk. She felt a little dizzy, but otherwise not ill. It was only the pain in her chest that still stabbed with every heartbeat.

They had been silent for a while when Bill turned her face away from the window and toward him. Gently, he bent and kissed her on the mouth.

“You know, Karen, if you want to adopt a child, I could help. I know a lot of people. It doesn’t have to be this hard.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. Even as drunk and muzzy-headed as she was, she saw how Bill made things easier for those in his care. They got private planes, the best hotel rooms, the most delicious meals, and the fastest clearance through customs. They didn’t have to travel on comrnercial flights, and they didn’t have to place ads in small-town newspapers and face endless disappointments to adopt a baby. What would it be like, Karen wondered, to always be taken care of by Bill Wolper?

It was the last thing she remembered thinking before she passed out.

She woke up dressed only in her bra and panties, lying under a silky blan ket. Bill was gone and she remembered very little except his kindness, his arm around her shoulder, and his handkerchief. She was still holding it, crushed in her fist, and it was still wet. Now, her head hurt. She still couldn’t believe the news from New York. But there was nothing she could do except believe it.

She took a long shower and called down to room service for club soda.

She drank it warm because it was the only way she could get it down.

She wasn’t sure how much wine she’d had but she was grateful to Bill for getting her through the worst of the pain. It was already afternoon and the sun was slanting into the room, and she had to close the blinds against it. It hurt her eyes. She took a couple of aspirin and by the time the phone rang she could lift it to her head without the ghastly feeling that her brain was moving against the inside of her skull. It was Bill. He inquired about her health and asked if she felt ready to leave that evening. She couldn’t think why not to, and she agreed.

She couldn’t figure out how all this had happened, but she blamed Jeffrey. He had wanted the sale of the company, but not the baby, so he hadn’t followed through. Why hadn’t he been there when Cyndi gave birth?

Why hadn’t he convinced the girl, given her enough support, assurance, to give up the baby? Jeffrey was a great salesman. It had to be because he didn’t want this baby and never had. Karen decided that it was a sin of either commission or omission on Jeffrey’s part. And she was in a rage.

She also decided that if he gave her the opportunity, she would sleep with Bill Wolper. She knew it was partly out of gratitude, and partly out of anger with Jeffrey, but there was another part as well. She felt that Bill Wolper respected her. He was kind to her, more attentive than Jeffrey had ever been, and he respected her in a way that Jeffrey never had. Despite Wolper’s success, he didn’t look down on her. They were kindred spirits. She felt she needed his support, something she could count on.

When Jeffrey called an hour later, Karen held the secret of her upcoming infidelity between them. It comforted her. Jeffrey explained again how he had been busy with the follow-up from Milan and the New York show and hadn’t made it to the hospital in time. But he repeated over and over how it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had been there. “Karen,” he assured her, “sometimes this sort of thing happens.

You can’t blame Cyndi, you can’t blame me, and you can’t blame yourself.”

But he was wrong. She blamed all three of them. She felt a fury that she could never remember feeling before. If Jeffrey had been in the room with her, instead of a half a world away, Karen would have smacked his face, just as she would have smacked Cyndi’s if she could. She was shocked at herself, but her rage was so enormous that for once she didn’t judge it. She understood why Cyndi couldn’t give up the boy, but it was exactly the same re son why she couldn’t give him up either. Yet she had to. And she knew there wouldn’t be another. She blamed Jeffrey, not only for not being there, for letting this happen, but also for not caring in the same way that she did. She thought of the way Bill Wolper talked about his sons.

Wasn’t there something wrong with a man who didn’t feel that way?

Jeffrey’s voice seemed more than half a world away. “Karen, this may be a bad time, but I wanted to let you know that we have approved the final contract. We’ve air couriered it out to you. You should have it waiting for you at the desk. I know you probably don’t want to think about that right now, but at least be sure to pick up the envelope before you leave for the Mananas.” Karen almost laughed into the phone. It was all Jeffrey could think about: the deal.

“I have a lot to consider,” she told him. “It seems as if you get what you want and I lose what I want. Look, Jeffrey, you’ve been through the contract a hundred times but you’ve never mentioned to me that this deal, if it’s made, will be based on me giving NormCo exclusive use of my name into perpetuity and signing an employment contract for twelve years. Twelve years, Jeffrey. That’s a long time. We’ve only been married for nineteen.”

“So? It’s been a good nineteen years hasn’t it? This could be another good marriage.”

“But I’m the one who’s getting married, not you. You didn’t even mention that part of the deal to me.” She hated to make a distinction between them in business, but there was no way he would understand unless she did. “You know I always had doubts about this deal,” she said. “You told me we should go through the motions, just to see what we were worth, or to raise cash on it. I agreed. But now that the baby’s fallen through it doesn’t mean we accept the sale. That was never something we agreed on.”

“Yeah, but we never expected the price to be fifty-fucking-million-dollars! There are certain things you can’t walk away from, Karen. Not now.

The staff expects the money. Our family expects the money. And Bill Wolper expects it. You can’t walk away.”

“You’re wrong. I can,” she said, and hung up the phone.

She felt sick with anger. All she represented to Jeffrey was a paycheck. Well, Bill Wolper might be getting Karen Kahn in a way that Jeffrey didn’t anticipate. For the first time since she met him, Karen could imagine a life without Jeffrey. Lately, they’d been separated so often they nearly had lived apart. It seemed as if half a world wasn’t far enough away from the man she’d been married to for her entire adult life.

From the air, Saipan looked like paradise. Bill had explained that Geoffrey Beene, Liz Claiborne, Levi’s, and The Gap had all used the Pacific island to make their clothes. It was producing close to three hundred million dollars worth a year. As the plane landed, Karen could see palm trees waving beside the airport tarmac.

As usual, they were greeted by a delegation and ushered quickly into the waiting limos. *We’re going to drive right by our factory on the way to the hotel,” Bill explained. Karen was sad and tired, but she smiled at him.