Fashionably Late (63 page)

She looked to the back of the room. Defina stood, leaning against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest. Their eyes locked and Defina nodded her head. It was time to start.

“You all know that I have an announcement to make,” Karen began. She was surprised to hear that her voice wavered. She cleared her throat.

“When we met and went over the NormCo deal,” she said, “I had every intention of moving ahead with it.” There was a murmur, but she continued. “I would like to be able to say that we are going to move ahead. But we’re not.” The murmur grew to a buzz and Karen didn’t push against it. She gave them a moment and then, raising her voice, she continued. “Quite a lot of things have been brought to my attention that make it impossible to accept the NormCo offer. This was a decision I had to make for all of us. But I felt that I did not have a choice. In the final analysis, the deal that NormCo offered me was one that I think would hurt us all in the long run. It seems clear to me now, despite their promises, that it would have meant moving jobs out of here and eventually shutting down a large portion of this operation.” The murmur started up again, but Karen continued. “Of course, this means that the money that we had all expected won’t be forthcoming and that, I know, is a disappointment to everyone.” She bit her lip and paused, scanning her audience. Mercedes Bernard stood up abruptly, and though she was as controlled as ever, Karen could see that she was furious. Mercedes turned and walked out of the room.

Many eyes followed her.

Karen looked through the audience. Only Casey was smiling. Well, he’d always felt threatened by the deal. The rest of the staff looked either angry, stunned, or confused. Karen caught the eye of Mrs. Cruz.

Her brown, wide, wrinkled face showed no expression, but she nodded to Karen. It was a gesture of such generosity that Karen almost lost it, and then felt such a swell of gratitude that she could hardly stand.

“That’s not all the bad news,” she said. “We are also going to have to undergo a serious reorganization. We have to find a way to finance and service the debt we incurred when we started up the bridge line. Now that you’re stockholders you should understand that. I can’t tell you what the reorganization is going to entail, because I honestly don’t know. But I promise you that as soon as we figure out how we are going to proceed, I’ll share the plan with you.” There was no point in telling them that without Jeffrey they had no fiscal management and that she herself didn’t have a clue as to how they were going to finance themselves or anything else. She would just have to do the best she could. So would they.

“If any of you feel that you no longer want to be associated with the firm, I will understand, although I will be extremely disappointed. I don’t think I have any more to tell you or any answers to your questions right now. But I will arrange for a time to meet separately with anyone who wants to. In the meantime, Defina Pompey is available to answer questions.” Yeah, like people weren’t afraid to talk to her!

Karen took a deep breath. “Thank you for coming, and just let me say one more time how sorry I am if I have disappointed you.” Then she couldn’t help it.

Her eyes filmed over with tears and she had to walk as quickly as she could out of the room, down the hall, and into her office.

Karen had barely had time to mop her eyes before the door was thrown open by Mercedes. Karen spun around from the window. Mercedes, always pale and neat, was absolutely livid. Her black hair stood out around her head as if she had either run her hands through it like a mad woman or it had been electrified. For a moment Karen had time to think that the usually stylish Mercedes looked like a cross between Morticia Addams and the Bnde of Frankenstein. They were appropriate analogies, because Mercedes quickly started a horror show.

“What the fuck have you done?” she asked, her voice almost as deep as Linda Blair’s dubbed one in The Exorcist.

“I did what I had to do, Mercedes.”

“You did what you had to do? Well, I did what I had to do and in the last eighteen months I made you. I’ve gotten you over a dozen magazine covers this year alone. There was that five-pager in Vanity Fair.

There was the personal profile in Mirabella. Not to mention all the coverage of the line. I booked you with some new angle on every goddamned TV show that mattered. I got Paris to happen. I made you a commodity. I cashed in every chip. And now you are telling me that I can’t cash out?”

“Mercedes, there were no guarantees.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of comfort? I am fifty-eight years old. Do you know how long it took me to work my way up from the back rows to a front seat at the shows? Thirty years! I covered the industry, I knew everyone, and I sold you the benefit of that. Now what? I’m not the kind of woman who can live comfortably on a Social Security check and a partial pension from the magazines. They never paid shit! I made you, Karen, and you owe me.”

Despite her exhaustion, despite her sadness, Karen felt herself getting angry. Why was it that everybody thought her success was due to them?

Jeffrey had made her, Liz Ruben had made her, Bill Wolper would make her (in both senses of the word), and now it was Mercedes. Karen took a deep breath ready to say she didn’t know what when Casey stepped into the room.

“Fuck you, Mercedes,” he said. “What the fuck do you know? You had the easy job. You got Karen coverage just at the time when everyone was panting for it. I’ve been here from the beginning, when she and I had to push a cart in the snow over to Bloomingdale’s to show them the first line. We showed it in the freight elevator and we sold the whole thing to Marvin Traub. So fuck you. Karen would have got where she is with help from any flack. Don’t overdramatize.”

Mercedes narrowed her elegant, long eyes. “Who asked you, you little faggot?”

“I think that will be about enough, Mercedes. Unless you want to call me a nigger bitch before you get your skinny ass out of here,” Defina said, joining the group and closing the door on Janet and the cluster of secretaries who stood, gaping, outside.

Mercedes looked over at Karen. She took a deep breath as if she were ready to try again. “You know that what I say is true…” she began.

But Karen was sick of it. She’d had enough. “Mercedes, it’s time to go.

Casey, would you help Mercedes pack up her desk?”

“My pleasure,” Casey smiled. He escorted her out.

Karen, shaken, looked over at Defina. “She looked at me as if she wanted me to die,” Karen said. “God, what an experience.”

“Yeah,” Defina nodded. “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.”

* Karen had worked so hard for so long, but she wasn’t sure what she had worked for. Certainly not for this. The darkness outside seemed ominous, threatening. She felt that there, on the ninth floor, she was floating in space, connected to no one. If she wasn’t connected anymore to Jeffrey, she was truly alone.

Karen had spent all the afternoon and evening in Jeffrey’s office, going over the financials with Casey and Lenny. It had been exhausting, depressing, and confusing. Had she been guilty of too much dependency on Jeffrey? Had she made that typical woman’s mistake of letting her husband do the “man’s work”? But in the world of fashion there were very few businesses that didn’t operate the way the two of them had. Yves Saint Laurent had Pierre Berge, Valentino had Giancarlo Giammetti (and those two couplings had been marriages), Calvin Klein had Barry Schwartz, Christian Lacroix had Bernard Arnault. Even that master of merchandising, Ralph Lauren, had Peter Strom. And all of those guys were men, operating in a tough man’s world. Despite that, if the designers hadn’t had the help, the support, and dedication of their brilliant partner businessmen, they would have closed their doors after a season or two. The rag trade demanded too much from a designer, there wasn’t time to both create and manage a business.

Surely she had been no worse than other overworked creators. But now, figuring out where VIKInc stood and coming up with a solution that Jeffrey had not been able to find, was an incredible extra burden, and one she was afraid she couldn’t carry.

She knew that in 1988, one of Lacroix’s best years, his sales had grown by four hundred percent but he had lost eight million dollars. The books that Lenny had laid out indicated that with the success of the bridge line VIKInc might do the same thing. She felt overwhelmed, and without coming to any conclusions, she sent Casey and Lenny home.

Karen was, at last, aloneţalone with nowhere to go. She didn’t want to go back to her apartment. She stared out the big windows of Jeffrey’s office at the headlights moving down Seventh Avenue. She tried to imagine her future, alone, without Jeffrey.

Karen had never spent much time in this office. It was Jeffrey’s domain. She had kept clear of the finances, the bankers, the factors, and accountants whenever she could. Now, though, she walked across the carpet and sat down in the easy chair that stood at right angles to the sofa. It was the chair Jeffrey always took during meetings. It smelled like Jeffrey in some undefinable way. Was it his soap? His shampoo? He never wore aftershave or any other perfume. The chair just smelled of Jeffrey. And, held in the arms of his chair, smelling his scent, despite her anger, Karen felt an unbearable wave of longing for her husband.

The presentation to the VIKInc staff had been so hard. Running the business was so hard. How would she do it without Jeffrey’s help? Was Jeffrey right? Would it be impossible to keep JIKInc running unless she sold out to someone? And without Jeffrey, without VIKInc, what did she have?

Tears of selfpity squeezed out of the corners of her eyes. She wept silently. Once she had begun crying, it seemed as if she would never stop. Only weeks ago, she’d believed she was a woman who never cried!

But clearly, she didn’t have a clue who she was, or who her friends were. It felt as if she had worked so hard and achieved so little. No family, no marriage, no children, no business. The center would not hold.

There, in the darkened office all alone, Karen felt as if she could not do without Jeffrey. Not in business or at home. She’d been married late, she’d become successful late, and it seemed to her that she couldn’t bear to give it up now, so soon. She’d have such a long, long time to get old alone. Was there some way their marriage could be salvaged?

Perhaps Defina was right when she said that Jeffrey was only reacting to her. Wasn’t his action, his terrible betrayal, just a way to cope with her absence, with her growing fame, with the baby problem? Hadn’t sheţMiss Goodie-Goodieţconsidered cheating on him?

She was hurt, and still very, very angry, but she felt that if she lost him she lost so very much: after all, she had grown up with him. All of her history was with him. And the idea of going on alone frightened her.

Would she be one of those women, women of a certain age, who attended the social events of the industry with a gay man on her arm? Would she wind up, like poor Chanel had at the end, alone, loveless and childless?

Karen took a deep breath and drew that Jeffrey scent deep inside. It was hard to believe that she had considered Bill Wolper as any kind of partner. What a lying pig! He was everything she hated about men in businessţtheir greed, their hardness, their profit-at-any-cost mentality. For a moment, the darkness of the office became the darkness in the Saipan barracks. But here there was only darkness, not the sound of rats scuttling, not the stench of sewage and filth and hopelessness.

She thought of Arnold, the contemptuous way he talked of “blood money,” and that reminded her of the trail of blood on the dirty hospital floor and she shuddered. What would happen to all those people, all those suffering souls? What would happen to the baby? She had already sent a check to Mr. Dagsvarr but she felt that it wasn’t enough. Yet what else could she do?

Karen felt as trapped as a prisoner in a cell. She wasn’t a social worker. She was a womanţa middle-aged womanţwith a pleasure in, a talent for, design. But how could she go on? And how could she stop?

Perhaps she could forgive Jeffrey. It was possible. Other women had forgiven erring husbands. If he had only slept with her sister to hurt her, it was possible that there was a way to forgiveness. She wondered if it was an act of cowardice or bravery, and she also wondered if she could find that way.

And even if she couldn’t forgive him, they had to discuss the business, they had to make plans and begin to face the future.

She lifted the phone and slowly dialed the number Jeffrey had left her.

Jeffrey answered, and at the sound of his voice Karen felt her heart begin to pound. “Jeffrey, it’s Karen. We have to talk.”

Karen was waiting in Jeffrey’s office for him. For a while she had continued to sit in the darkness, but knowing that he was on his way up from SoHo she forced herself to get up out of his chair. She turned the awful overhead fluorescent lights on and went to the mirror behind the door to see how bad the damage was. She needed a tissue. Hell, she needed a week’s bed rest, a good facial, an excellent therapist, a face-lift, and trustworthy legal counsel. But all of that wasn’t realistically possible before Jeffrey’s arrival.

She went to the credenza behind Jeffrey’s desk and she looked, for a moment, at the picture of them taken on the night of the Oakley Awards.

She had to avert her eyes or she’d begin crying again. She reached into the first drawer, looking for tissues. There were none. She looked in the next two drawers. What was it? Didn’t men blow their noses? In the bottom drawer she found some paper napkins from the take-out place on Thirty-Eighth Street. They would have to do. But when she lifted them up, she saw a locked box. Somehow, the cheap tin case seemed very un-Jeffrey-like. What would he keep in a ten-dollar strong box like that? She reached in and picked it up. For a moment, despite her certainty to the contrary, she was frightened that it might contain love letters or pictures of Lisa. She steeled herself to open it. She’d break into it if she had to. Because she had to know. She had to know whether Jeffrey loved her sister.