Lace (57 page)

“Oh yes, I always make it clear that it’s not because I’m ungrateful for the hamburger. I’m frank, but polite.”

“Then I might as well give up and tell you what we
can
do together. I want to quit my job, work with you and expand your office into a small coast-to-coast public relations
business.”

“You
did
say small?”

“Yes. Headquarters in New York and tie-ups with other advertising and PR firms in every major city.”

“What would
they
get out of it?”

“Money. An affiliated office in New York. I’ve spent the best years of my life touring temperamental film stars for Empire and I know how to do it—which means that the local
offices would meet interesting personalities as a change from handling detergent accounts.” Tom signalled for another bottle of Perrier water. “I want to aim for one-shots as well as
permanent clients. I want people to turn to us when their own publicity department is overloaded, or when a star needs special attention; Empire could certainly subcontract to us, if they
don’t feel too sore when I leave.”

“Why should a star agree to be handled by us?”

“If you try and book a tour from New York, it’s mostly wasted effort, because it’s impossible for one office to keep in touch with what’s happening to the media all over
America. But local offices are always up-to-date. They know which guy in town has the most influence.”

“Why me?” Judy asked.

“I’ve been looking around for someone. You can do it.”

“Would I have to drop any of my present clients?”

“No. They’ll be the base we build on.”

“Will I have to put up any money?”

“A little, sure. We’ll need money for decent offices and a staff.”

“Then the answer is no, because I haven’t any money.”

“I could maybe guarantee a bank loan for you.”

There must be something honest about my face, thought Judy. “Where would
you
get the money from?”

“I’ve been investing ten percent of my income in the stock market since I was nineteen years old.”

“I think the answer still has to be no. I’ve only just gotten
out
of hock to the bank, and I kind of like sleeping at nights.”

Three years of running her own business had meant three years of constant financial anxiety for Judy. Naturally, she knew how to handle publicity, but apart from doing Guy’s simple
bookkeeping, Judy had never had anything to do with the business world, and it had been a great shock to find that there were people in this world who didn’t pay their bills—because
they couldn’t or wouldn’t or never intended to pay in the first place. Twice, Judy had been evicted from her studio apartment for nonpayment of rent. On the first occasion the money she
owed had been paid by her former boss, Pat Rogers, who had remained a firm friend. On the second occasion, Pat insisted that Judy hire a new accountant; then she guaranteed Judy a sizable bank loan
and quietly slipped her a couple of minor accounts—a floor polish, and a young, aspiring singer named Joe Savvy.

“No one’s going to sack me for disloyalty,” Pat reassured Judy, “because I’ve just been offered a job writing features for
Harper’s
, so I’m
moving back into journalism at the speed of sound.”

Remembering her struggles to repay Pat’s loan, Judy shook her head and said, “No, Tom, I can’t join you. I simply haven’t the capital.”

“Look, if you prefer,
I’ll
lend you the money, Judy.”

“Why should I put up half the money when I’ve got the clients and you haven’t?” A brazen navy-blue gaze flashed at Tom. “Why can’t you just buy my goodwill
for, say, twenty thousand dollars?”

“You’re joking, of course.” He settled back. She was going to say yes.

They haggled through the vichyssoise and the grilled sole, and eventually, over the honey mousse, they agreed that Tom would buy her goodwill for seven thousand dollars and invest a further four
thousand dollars in the new business.

“But we can’t continue to trade under your name alone,” Tom

said.

“What do you want to call it?”

“How about Local American Creative Enterprise?”

“It’s a bit of a mouthful. . . .”

“Not if you use the initials.”

“L-A-C-E. Neat.”

Even before they’d organised their national network, LACE was showing a profit. “But I can’t understand
why!
” Judy complained one evening in her
office, as she and Tom went over the previous month’s figures. She had just returned from a thirteen-week tour of the country, during which she had finally decided on the publicity offices
she wanted to work with and had come to terms with them. Now she bit her thumb thoughtfully. “I’ve still got the same clients and our running expenses have gone up, but suddenly
it’s paying off.
Why?”

“Put it down to logic and my twelve formative, predatory years in the motion picture industry,” yawned Tom. “It’s nearly ten. Let’s pack it in and go
home.”

“I hope you invested your teenage savings in Bell,” said Judy, picking a telephone bill from the top of the pile and holding it at arm’s length. “That would have proved
logical.”

Tom yawned again. “Nobody really operates on logic, especially not a woman. Logic is merely the ability to rationalize what she’s going to do anyway.”

“And in a man?”

“Man isn’t a rational being either, he’s irrationally controlled by fear.”

“Is that why we’re succeeding? Because you terrify people?”

“Because I’m prepared to be ruthless, sure. If people don’t see you’re prepared to be ruthless, they’ll take advantage of you. You used to let them, I don’t
allow it. That’s what’s different.”

“And your new budgeting system doesn’t hurt.”

Tom insisted that fees be billed in advance and paid within thirty days. They didn’t lift a telephone until the contract was signed
and
the money was deposited in their account, and
they never did two minutes’ worth of work after a contract expired.

Tom’s responsibilities were to make sure that the business paid off, to run the office and to look after their regular clients. Judy’s responsibility was to bring in the business,
handle the major one-shot campaigns and supervise their local agencies. Judy also handled the creative work, planning the campaigns, working with writers and designers, which was the part she liked
best. Once the general campaign had been mapped out and the design work was under way, Judy sent the proposed plan to her regional directors, who executed the campaign locally. A lot of calls were
needed between LACE and the RDs—a twenty-five-city tour needed six hundred phone calls before the tour was over. But the client only made one single call—to LACE.

It was a ridiculously simple idea. And because of that, it worked brilliantly.

K
ATE STILL FAKED
.
Not always, because she could climax with very little trouble if she lay on top for long enough and
wriggled herself into position, but that didn’t always seem to happen and when it didn’t, if Kate couldn’t sleep, she would nip into the bathroom and quickly satisfy herself.

But after she and Toby had been married for six years, something horrible happened—and continued to happen for some time.

On a hot August night, Kate lay in bed reading a newspaper account of Marilyn Monroe’s sad, tawdry death. “Oh, dear, she was so lovable and funny.” Two teardrops of sympathy
wobbled on her lashes and caught Toby’s attention.

“She was beautiful, too. . . . What long eyelashes you have, Kate.”

“Yes, Toby, but colourless. If I didn’t wear mascara, you wouldn’t be able to see them.”

“Would
my
eyelashes be longer if
I
put mascara on them?”

“I expect so . . . darling, it says here that poor Marilyn’s feet were dirty and the scarlet polish on her toes was chipped. Oh, how sad!”

Toby disappeared into the bathroom and emerged about ten minutes later. Casually, Kate looked up, then did a horrified double take. “
Toby
!” Toby was crudely and completely
made-up, like a raddled old dim-eyed dowager.

Kate said, “Oh, do take it off, Toby!”

But Toby smiled oddly, looked at her steadily and said, in a disturbing, high, brittle voice (a bit like Pagan’s mother), “No, I want to make love like this.”

So they did.

She didn’t mention it the next day, but that evening Toby, having had rather a lot of brandy after the
quiche aux épinards
, said sarcastically, “I don’t think
spinach tart is one of your stronger points, darling,” and proceeded upstairs.

When Kate went up to bed with indefinable fear in her heart, she found him lying on their Astrid Sampe turquoise-striped bedspread simpering at the ceiling. His face was fully made-up and he was
wearing her fragile, white lace nightgown.

She said, “Now come off it, Toby, I’ve had enough of this. Please stop it. Please cut it out.”

But Toby sat up, pouted and said in an odd, little-girl voice. “
Why
can’t Toby have nice things like you do?” He pulled her onto the bed beside him and murmured,
“Toby
loves
looking pretty, Toby
loves
dressing up like this, but promise it’s a secret between us, between two girlfriends? A
very
important secret.”

He didn’t take long. It was all over in ten minutes, but it took Kate twenty-four hours to pull herself together again.

And then it happened again, and Kate had another twenty-four hours of the shakes. Inexorably, night after night, Toby “dressed-up,” as he put it.

Within a fortnight, Kate was white and taut from lack of sleep and anxiety, but Toby was blooming. On the following Wednesday he came back from Harrods with a size 48 sheer black
swans-down-trimmed negligee and matching décolleté nightgown.

“I told the assistant it was for my mother,” he said, smoothing it over his lean hips. On Friday night he lashed himself into black garters and fishnet stockings and a frilly black
padded bra that he’d bought on Shaftesbury Avenue. On Saturday evening he wore a red satin, wasp waisted corselet and high-heeled pink pom-pom mules. (“They didn’t have my shoe
size at Harrods, so I got these backless things, but they’re still too small.”)

Kate found the situation as macabre and unreal as her father’s funeral. The rouged cheeks, ever so carefully shaded peach, seemed to symbolize death. And once again—she was
bewildered; what Kate couldn’t understand was the
suddenness
of Toby’s transformation. He had never given her the slightest hint, had always been so severely practical. He had
never so much as worn a frilled shirt to a party, never indicated in any way that he preferred his balls veiled by lace, never by word or deed indicated that he was not a normal heterosexual. Kate
had never for one moment suspected that what Toby
really
wanted in bed was this gruesome farce. One week she had had a husband and the next week she had this horror.

She could not understand what was in his mind, could not understand his odd, trancelike state when he was wearing women’s clothes. What made it even more confusing was that Toby wore two
sorts of female clothing, he seemed to want to pretend to be two different types of women, so poor Kate never knew from one night to the next whether she would find herself in bed with a 1930s
lascivious, black-satin, sophisticated woman-of-the-world, or a demure, white-pantied, schoolgirl virgin. When Toby wore stockings and high heels his muscular, stringy calves somehow stuck out
sideways below the knees, oddly bandy, not like a woman’s but, yes, they
were
like one woman’s legs. That night Kate had the nightmarish sensation that the person panting on top
of her was her mother-in-law, Major Hartley-Harrington’s widow.

Toby refused to discuss the situation, and during the day he seemed to be a different person—that is to say, his normal self. But at night he couldn’t wait to get upstairs, sometimes
dragging Kate by the wrists in a steel grip. His eyes glittered strangely in his masklike makeup: Kate thought he looked like a novelette villain. “You’ve been reading too much Barbara Cartland,” she told herself. But there was no other way to describe that relentless,
breathlessly excited, glassy-eyed expression on Toby’s face. Kate didn’t understand what was happening and she didn’t know what to do.

What
had
she done wrong? Why had this terrible thing happened so suddenly? Was Toby homosexual? If so, why did he make love to
her
? Why should she be so
frightened
of him if
he was turning into a homosexual? Lots of their friends were queer and they didn’t terrify her as Toby now did. What was terrifying wasn’t the makeup or the drag, the padded lace bras,
that monstrous red satin corselet or the way he tried to strap his balls away between his legs (no wonder when he wore high heels he walked so oddly). No, what was so chilling was Toby’s
mincing, simpering, obviously totally sincere mimicry of what he thought a woman was—deep down—really like. It was a travesty, an insult to her sex, and that was what Kate, who had
never heard the word “transvestite,” found so shocking.

She forced a scene and Toby threatened to leave.

Kate gave way.

She forced another scene and Toby gently reminded her that she was a thirty-year-old barren bitch, and would she shut the fuck up. “Oh, aim so sorry, dahling, don’t cray, let’s
kiss and make up, hmmmm? Just a teensy little
kiss
,” he said. And he bent over her and lifted her chin up to his heavily lipsticked mouth. Every pore on his face seemed magnified, as
Mrs. Trelawney’s scalp had been magnified, as the black wiry hair had sprung from her white scalp on that horrible bathroom evening when Kate was still a schoolgirl. Now she saw in similar,
horrid, clarified detail the magenta grease that smeared the fleshy cracks in Toby’s mouth and clogged the shaven bristles on his upper lip. He still wasn’t very good at putting on
lipstick.

As her anguish and shame increased, she still hoped every evening that it wouldn’t happen that night, that Toby’s fixation would disappear as swiftly as it had arrived. Kate longed
to confide in someone, to have Toby’s behaviour explained away, to be reassured, to hear that everybody did it, that such things were part of a normal phase of a man’s development. But
she knew they weren’t, and there was nobody to whom she felt she could unburden her embarrassing story.