Fashionably Late (34 page)

“How about Melody Craig?” Defina asked idly.

“Yeah. Okay. But she’s so white bread. Let’s keep it mostly young, American ethnics. How about Maria Loper?”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t bring Maria. She’s a Hispaniel.”

“Stop it, Defina! No ethnic slurs.”

“Hey, she’s a Latino bitch. It ain’t her race, it’s her attitude I object to. And I swear she’s into drugs. All South Americans are.”

“Yeah, and all blacks got rhythm. Except maybe you. C’mon, Dee!

Enough with the stereotypes.”

“Girlfriend, some stereotypes are tnfe. And I do got rhythm. I just can’t sing.” In spite, Defina began humming the Michael Jackson song again.

Karen thought for a moment. Well, if she couldn’t get the clothes right, at least maybe she could get the models right. They could do a lot for a show. “I’m bringing Maria. And Tangela. And Armie. And Lucinda. I want a real American look, and they all know how to wear my clothes.”

“Armie is too expensive now, and anyway she’s probably booked. Don’t look at me like that! You’re the one who made her popular. And Lucinda can’t do runway. She’s just a fit model. She can’t walk.”

“Then show her how.”

“It ain’t that easy. You know that.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Defina. It isn’t rocket science. It’s only modeling.”

“You try hauling your ass down a runway in front of a thousand pair of critical eyes. See how easy it is.”

“I know it takes a special talent. But I think Lucinda has it. And I like her look. That’s why I hired her.”

Defina shook her head. “Any more fires you want to start tonight?”

she asked. She waltzed out of the rooms once again singing the annoying Michael Jackson tune.

For over a dozen years now, Defina had called Karen a fire starter.

“You just set em and expect all of usţme, Jeffrey, Casey, Mercedes, all of usţ to be your fire department,” Defina grumbled. And Karen had to admit that Defina was rightţand that she, Karen, was happy with the arrangement. A good, creative idea was like a spark, and it did start a fire. Whether it was a new kind of button she had to find or quick money from a factor needed to buy the extra luxe fabric she’d fallen in love with, Karen felt it was her job to coax and nurse and cajole and snatch her ideas out of the ether or wherever they came from. And it was her staff’s job to make those ideas a reality. It took teamwork, and she, Karen, had put together a goodţno, a greatţ team of firefighters. Too bad she was going to fail them now. Too bad she was going to put together a mediocre show, lose her rep and her sales figures. What did Chanel use to say? Something like, “You can’t abandon a collection unless it abandons you.” Well, Karen felt pretty abandoned. She sighed.

Maybe she should sell out to NormCo before it was too late. The dispiriting sketches on the wall seemed to push her toward a sale, now, before she was crucified in Paris. She just couldn’t concentrate. She closed her eyes, and the painting she had seen at the Metropolitan came back to her.

For some reason, Carl’s words over dinner also came back to her then, too. What had he said exactly? That she was the talented one? Well, that wasn’t true, but he had said something else: that she never thought in black and white. Black and white. That was the tune Defina was singing.

Karen stared at the sketches. The silhouettes were good. So were the fabric swatches. The collection was balanced. But it wasn’t new.

She put down her pencil. Now Defina was humming the morphing part of the music from Michael Jackson’s video. “Don’t matter if you’re black or white,” she warbled. The images of the morphed heads came back to Karen.

“Don’t matter if you’re black or white.” Karen thought of the Courbet at the Met again. She knew now what it had brought up. It reminded her of her black and white dream. The dream had been so intense, both so visual and so deeply felt that if she closed her eyes she could almost reexperience it now. How could she have forgotten it?

Well, there was no time for dreaming now. She had to concentrate.

Karen felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. She was getting an idea. A vision. Yes. Yes! She turned to Defina, who’d just come back into the room.

“Okay. Here’s the scoop. We do two shows at the same time.”

“What?”

“We do two Paris shows,” Karen said excitedly. “Two.

Simultaneously.”

“Karen, honey. You’ve lost it. It’s hard enough with all the competition to get them to come to one show.”

“Exactly. That’s why we do two at once. They can’t possibly come to both. See? We know that. It gives us the upper hand. And one show is all blackţthe entire line in black.”

“You never do black.”

“I do now. I do all black at one show and the whole line in white at the other. Exactly the same clothes. In the same order. But one collection in black, the other white.”

Defina blinked. “A bunch of nuns? Penguin shit?” she asked.

“Girlfriend, you are changing your habitsţyou should pardon the pun.”

Karen began to laugh. Dee would catch on. Karen wouldn’t just be proving to Carl that she could think in black and white. This was more than a private joke. The fashion press, the important buyers, and key clients rush all over Paris during the week of the shows in what Elle magazine called “a single, monolithic unit.” Every designer sweats out where to show his line, what time, who’ll show before him, who after.

Now, she’d change all that. What if she threw a party and nobody came?

No good. She’d sweated over it. Here in the U.S. she was a big deal, but in Paris, who’d care? Who’d come to see her? So, what if she threw two parties so nobody could come to both of them! Great!

Of course, it would cause a sensation. It had never been done. And she had never done black. It was the color, the darling of New York fashion mavinsţeveryone from Tina Brown to Grace Mirabella wore little black outfits all the time. But Karen, partly in rebellion, had never used it.

Clients begged for it. The retailers screamed for it. But she’d resisted. It was as if, all along, she were saving it for now. Karen felt her heart beating, felt her face flush.

“This is a hell of a fire you’re starting,” Defina said, but she was beginning to grin. “Booking another location, more models, more invitations, and that’s not to mention getting the clothes, the line ready … ” “Black-on-white invitations to one show, white-on-black to the other,” Karen told her. “We do one show on the left bank, the other on the right. We play Michael Jackson. Ebony and Ivory. And the one you’re humming. And we don’t tell anyone in advance. We let them figure it out.” Karen laughed. “We have two wedding dresses for the end.” Paris shows traditionally ended with wedding dresses. “At the white show we have a white wedding gown and at the black show we have a black one.”

Defina looked at Karen. “I like it,” she said slowly. “It’s got wit.

And it’s good marketing. The buyers love black. I just wish you had thought of it about a month and a half ago.”

“Yeah, and I wish they’d stop fighting in Serbia. You can’t always get what you want, Dee.” She took a couple of Mick Jagger steps across the office. “You can’t always get what you want,” she sang.

“You can’t always get what you want,” Defina sang back. “But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need. Uh-huh!”

The two of them danced around the room singing the boop-da-boop boop-da-boop background vocals to the Stones song.

“I knew you were one smart white girl,” Defina said approvingly.

“Hey! Stick with me and you’ll be farting through silk,” Karen promised.

Defina laughed. “I already am,” she admitted.

“Eeuw! Dee! Gross!”

And right then, there in her messy office late in the evening, Karen felt such joy that for a moment she was struck almost breathless. She saw everything, each sketch, every swatch of fabric, the sheen on Defina’s cheek, the ring of coffee on her Formica worktable, all of it with such a clarity and affection that it almost took her breath away.

Even as Karen experienced it, she knew it couldn’t last and the knowledge had such a bittersweet tinge that she felt as if her heart might break.

“This will knock em dead in Paree,” Defina promised.

“Who needs NormCo?” Karen cried.

Defina looked at Karen, her face intense. “Well, who does need NormCo?” she asked seriously. Before Karen could answer, the phone rang. She turned and went to her desk, lifting the handset.

“Look out the window,” the man’s voice at the other end of the line told her. For a spooky moment Karen thought it might be Centrillo, and that maybe he stood outside, nine floors below, with her real mother handcuffed to his thick wrist. But it wasn’t Centrillo’s warm, comforting voice. “Can you see me?” the voice said, and she realized it was Perry Silverman’s.

“Where are you, Perry?”

“Outside. On the corner. In the phone booth on the east side of ThirtySeventh Street.” Karen looked out the window. “See me?” Perry asked.

“I’m waving.”

She could see him, or someone, waving like a signalman, or more like Gilligan, stranded on his island, waving for rescue. Was Perry drunk?

Was the pope Polish? “I see you, Perry.”

“So, will you sleep with me?”

“I think you missed a couple of steps.”

“Oh, yeah. How about a drink first?”

“I think you already had one. Right?”

“You are one smart Jewish girl.”

Hadn’t Defina just said something like that? Karen looked over at Dee and shrugged. Defina pointed to herself and gave Karen the umpire’s thumb. She was outta there. Karen nodded. It was time for her to go home, too. “What do you want, Perry?”

“Beam me up, Scotty.”

“How about if I come down and take you home?”

“I haven’t changed the sheets.”

“You’re skipping steps again, Perry.” Karen could hear the automated operator’s voice cut in to tell him his time was up. It sounded like the robot knew what she was talking about: Perry must be pretty close to the edge. “I’ll be right down,” Karen yelled over the operator’s voice, hoped he heard her, and hung up the phone. She threw on her raincoat.

“Would you lock up for me, Defina?” she called.

Perry was still standing in the phone booth when Karen got there. He was wearing what had once been an off-white Aquascutum. Now it was very, very off-white. Under it he had on paint-stained Levi’s and a blue workshirt.

“Karen!” he cried out as he saw her, as if they were meeting here completely by chance. How drunk was he? Did he remember he had just called her or was he in a permanent blackout?

Perry walked out of the phone booth toward her. He didn’t stagger, but there was a glazed, distant look to his eyes. He walked up to her, put an arm around her shoulder, his mouth against her ear. He was just her height, much shorter than Jeffrey. “Let’s go make a baby,” Perry whispered.

“Boy, have you got the wrong girl,” Karen told him, and stuck her arm out, signaling to a taxi that was coming across the ThirtySeventh Street intersection. “Get in the cab, Perry.”

“Sure,” he said cheerfully. “Where we going?”

“Spring Street and West Broadway,” she told the driver.

“Great! I live right near there!”

“Really?” she said dryly. “What a coincidence.”

He lost ground in the cab. His head lolled, and he might have fallen asleep for a minute. She had to help him out of the cab, and even with her help, he lurched and almost lost his footing. Only after he stumbled and regained his balance did he freeze, the way she and her friends used to, back when they played “statues” in Prospect Park. For a moment Karen thought he was going to be sick, but he just stood there, seemingly frozen. She had to look closely to see that his shoulders were shaking.

Is he going to lose his cookies, she wondered, but then realized he was crying. She moved to his side and he lifted his face to her, the wetness of his tears catching the light from the bar at the corner. He looked over toward the blinking lights of the bar. “You know, I’m working as a bartender parttime again. Pretty pathetic, huh? I use to do it to make a few bucks when I was in college. Then, when I was painting fulltime it was a way to break the loneliness, the isolation.

But now it’s just pitiful. I’m forty-six years old.” He stared off into the darkness, then shrugged. “Well, I can always write my memoirs. I can call them My Life Behind Bars.” He tried to laugh but it became a strangled noise.

“I can’t paint anymore. I don’t want to go on living without Lottie.

She took all the light with her when she went.”

Karen put her arm around him. He hugged her tight. “It’s so dark.

It’s so dark,” he whispered. She had nothing to say, no comfort to help with this, the greatest pain. So she just held him, the two of them standing in the gutter outside the Spring Street Bar.

“I didn’t know I could love anyone so much,” he wept. “Without my child alive, I don’t see much of a point to living, either.”

Right there, in the SoHo street, two thoughts came to Karen like blows.

Would Belle have mourned this way for her if she had died? And how could she herself go on, without someone she loved as much as Perry loved Lottie?

For a week Karen and Jeffrey had been playing the who-can-come-homelast game. So when she got back to the apartment, totally exhausted, she was surprised to see him sprawled out on the living room sofa. From the foyer she couldn’t see any more of him but feet and legs. She slipped off her shoes so that if he were sleeping she wouldn’t disturb him.

Also, she remembered to hang up her coat.

But he was awake. He had a pile of papers lying on his stomach and a glass with some clear liquid beside him on the floor.

“You’re home early,” she said.

“And you’re home late.”

“Was the game canceled?” He had been planning to take in a Knicks game, or at least that’s the message he had given Janet.

“No, but Perry and Jordan didn’t show, and the Knicks were so far behind that it was pointless. Sam and I called it quits early.” He took a sip from his wine glass.

“Listen, Karen, I’m sorry if I acted like an asshole over the Elle Halle thing … ” Thank God, he was going to apologize! That was all she needed from him to drop her wall.