Possessions (34 page)

“‘Hopes and fears and twilight fantasies—'” Tobias quoted.

Katherine was struck by the words. “Who wrote that?” she asked

“Shelley.” Tobias smiled, grateful for an audience. “From
Adonais.
Would you like to hear more of it?” Without waiting, he quoted, “'Desires and adorations . . . Splendors and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations of hopes and fears, and twilight Fantasies; And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs—'”

“Yes,” said Victoria abruptly, her keen eyes on Katherine's somber ones. “But I thought we were talking about Katherine's career. Katherine, before you do anything else, you must speak to the other important jewelers in town. Herman Mettler may think he's the only one, but I myself often shop at Xavier's and Laykin Et Cie. I'll call first and tell them you're coming. Take your sketches. A pity you have no more finished pieces; it's possible no one would agree with Mettler. Especially if he made such a point of your technique.” Without warning, she struck the table. “Bastard! To praise your technique and then call you ordinary! I remember when he was peddling fake pearls during the depression. I shall buy nothing more from him. In fact, I shall write him a letter. If he thinks he can speak that way to my granddaughter—”

“No, please. Don't do that.” Katherine looked troubled. “I have to make my own way. Craig forced me to do it, but now I really want to.” She smiled. “You did say I needed to be eccentric. And my pieces really weren't unusual. I mean, I thought they were beautiful, but I wasn't trying to be different—”

“You don't need to be different,” Victoria declared. “You must only be yourself, no one else.”

“How about a younger, successful Victoria?” asked Tobias, and the room was silent except for the whisper of the fire.

“I am not trying to force Katherine into anything,” Victoria said at last. “She does not have to be successful for my sake.
But”—she looked at Katherine through half-closed eyes—“you want a place to belong, yet you insist on going your own way.”

“Finding my own way,” Katherine corrected quietly. “I need a place to belong, I need your help, or, at least, your concern and interest and—”

“Love?” suggested Tobias helpfully.

“Love,” Katherine echoed. “It makes me feel wonderful when you swear at Mettler, but I don't want you to swear at him in person. I need to win him over myself, with my work. Otherwise, I'll never know whether I'm any good or not.”

“Even if you fail,” Tobias prompted.

“Of course. I'm sorry,” she said to Victoria. “I know you want me to succeed. But I have to know.”

After a moment, Victoria took her hand. “Be sure to tell me when Mettler puts your pieces on display. I shall be the first to buy one.”

*  *  *

For a month, rumors had drifted through Heath's. Business was bad or the chain was about to be sold or somebody on the fifth floor was playing a hell of an April Fool's joke. Whatever it was, an outside accounting firm had been hired to examine the sales records of all departments, and inventories were being ordered in different departments without warning.

When an inventory of the design department was called, Gil Lister went into a frenzy. “Do the windows!” he ordered Katherine the minute the store closed. “Everything! Merchandise, props, every fucking champagne bottle in the wedding scene! By God, they want an inventory, I'll give them one they'll never forget!”

In the strange, cavelike windows, screened from the street, Katherine stood in the center of a gala wedding reception, with memories of her own wedding flooding over her. She could feel Craig's arm around her waist as they stood in the judge's living room; she could see Leslie and the judge's wife: their witnesses. In the corner a Raggedy Ann doll stared at the ceiling. Craig had said there was no one he wanted, and so they had begun their new family in a strange living room with only Leslie as Katherine's link with her past.

In the curtained window, Katherine walked around the vacantly
smiling mannequins, jotting down department and style numbers of dresses, men's cutaways, shoes, purses and gloves, glasses and bottles of champagne, trays of polyethylene hors d'oeuvres, silk and paper flowers. Long ago she and Craig had given parties, though never very many, and after a while they stopped altogether. Katherine had loved every part of them, planning, cooking, and cleaning for days in advance, grateful to Craig for letting her do it even though he was uncomfortable with groups of people and always breathed a sigh of relief when the last guest was ushered out.

She'd always been grateful to Craig, Katherine realized, standing in the window beside the bride and groom. First because he loved her and married her, and then, over the years, for giving her a home, for taking care of her, for being a loving father to Jennifer and Todd, for building a beautiful house and encouraging her to buy whatever she wanted to make it perfect. She gazed at the mindlessly grinning groom. She had even been grateful for her orgasms. When I had them, she thought; usually I didn't. In the last two years, when Craig had been so rushed and preoccupied, there had been almost none.

But he hadn't known that. He would have been hurt if she'd told him she wasn't satisfied. The groom leered at her, and suddenly the thought came to Katherine—No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't have been hurt at all. He'd have found some way to make it seem my fault.
He would have run from it.

It was as if she'd turned a corner and come upon a familiar view from a different angle. “I have to stop this,” she said aloud. “I'm beginning to sound like Derek.” She hurried through the other window displays, scribbling numbers on her lined paper. With a final look around, she went back into the store and walked through the aisles, so eerily empty, her footsteps echoing as she went down the stairs to the basement.

The display storeroom was empty. “Gil?” Katherine called. When there was no answer she put her clipboard on his desk and stood uncertainly, wanting to go home but afraid to leave anything undone. There was no new paperwork on her desk, but along one wall was a row of merchandise cartons packed with materials they'd removed from the windows the day before, when they created the wedding scenes. Perhaps he expected her to check them. They should have been sent back to
the warehouse that morning, but the driver had been sick and though Lister had been offered a replacement, he had refused, saying he'd wait for the regular man.

I'd better do them, Katherine thought, or he'll sneer at me for being in a hurry to leave.

The dresses and shorts were neatly folded, layered with tennis rackets and hiking gear, and Katherine went through them rapidly, marking them on her master list. But halfway into the second box, she came upon a plastic bag with six Perry Ellis cardigans that had not been used in the window displays. Damn, she thought. If somebody's got new things from the receiving room mixed up with ours, it could take hours to straighten out.

Methodically, she began emptying all the cartons. In the next four, she found merchandise that had not come from window displays or the display storeroom: Francesca of Damon dresses, Anne Klein blouses, ten boxes of Hermes silk scarves. She was about to begin the fifth carton when Lister walked in. He stopped short, a doughnut halfway to his mouth. “What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed. “Who told you to do that? Get away from there!”

Katherine sprang to her feet. “I'm sorry, Gil; I didn't know if they'd been done and I thought—”

“You thought! You thought! You're not supposed to think! You're supposed to do what I tell you and I told you to do the windows!”

“I did the windows! I didn't have anything else to do and—”

“And you didn't wait for my orders! How many times have I told you never to do anything unless I order it? Well? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? But you've never liked that, have you, all ga-ga'd up with your new haircut, and looking down your nose like the queen of Sheba—you and your high and mighty ideas about art and design and window decorating—but I'm the one in charge here, whatever you may think, and your sucking around a certain person on the fifth floor won't help you a—”

“That - is - enough!” Shedding all her caution, Katherine strode across the room. Lister, a gleam of alarm in his eyes, scuttled backwards until he was against his desk. “Leslie is my
friend,” Katherine said deliberately. “But I've never used that in my work here and you know it. I've taken your insults and rudeness and offensive jokes and I've never told anyone about them. I've never told anyone how many window ideas you steal from other stores. I've never told anyone how many of
my
ideas you've used and claimed credit for. Because I needed this job—” My God, she thought; I still need this job. But it was too late; the resentments of the past months were a torrent that drowned out everything else.

“You are a mean, vulgar little man, always trying to prove how important you are by crushing someone. It's usually me, because I'm the closest, but you've made life miserable for everyone who's ever worked with you. You have no artistic sense; you don't even have the tiny bit of talent that nasty people need to make others tolerate them. You have a minuscule imagination and an inflated ability to copy from others and nothing else—”

“That's enough, that's enough, that's enough!” Lister pushed himself off the desk as if it were a diving board and scampered to the other side where he sat in his high-backed leather chair, glaring at Katherine. “Not another word! I knew you would go too far! And now you've done it; you've done it; you've gone too far! You were foisted on me and you've spent half your time on personal telephone calls and lunches—”

“That is a lie.”

“Don't call me a liar! I knew from the first day you were a social climber and a troublemaker and a fraud and now you have the gall to criticize my artistic ability, which has
won prizes—”

“The last one was for a window I designed.”

He began to sputter. “You think you can hide behind McAlister—you think you know so much—you're an unreliable, stubborn, insubordinate bitch, and I want you out of here! This minute! I want you gone!”

Katherine opened her mouth but no words came. Frantically she tried to think of something to say, but all she could think of was pleading, and she could not bring herself to do it.

“Did you hear me? I want you gone!” he screeched as Katherine looked at him numbly. “Are you deaf?”

“You're firing me.”

“Dear God, I have finally gotten through to her. Yes, yes, and yes. You are fired. Dismissed. Terminated. I have wasted enough energy on you; you are untrainable. Get out! Did you hear me? Out! Out! Out!”

The last thing Katherine heard as she walked blindly down the corridor was Gil's high voice, following her with furious syllables.

“I want you gone!”

B
Y
seven o'clock in the morning, the line stretched from the front door of the building down Mission Street and around the corner. The people in front of Katherine and behind her knew each other and as the line inched forward she listened as they compared experiences with the state unemployment system. It's only a bad dream, she tried to tell herself; but the hours passed, the morning fog gave way to sunlight and a mocking blue sky, her feet hurt, and by noon, when she had learned the names of all the people around her, she admitted it was real. She was out of work and almost out of money and she was standing in line to ask the state of California for help.

It had taken her a week to decide. The first thing she had done, the day after Lister's screech followed her out of Heath's, was call Leslie and tell her she had been fired. And Leslie had been furious. But also, distracted.

“Shit, that little fart . . . But, Katherine, you've gotten along with him up to now. Why all of a sudden—?”

“I don't know; I can't even remember how it started. He was screaming at me for something—worse than his usual, I
guess—and I blew up and told him off. And he fired me. I suppose he's just been waiting for me to give him a chance to do it. He said he knew one day I'd go too far; he even accused me of trying to use my friendship with you.”

“Did he.”

“Leslie? What's wrong?”

“My job and my evasive brother. But let's talk about your—”

“No, wait.” Katherine heard the note of alarm in Leslie's voice. “Why is he evasive?”

“How do I know? He's always trying to be cute, but this is something else. Every time I try to talk to him about his work, he scampers away. Literally.”

“As if he's up to something.”

“That's it. Katherine, I'm sorry about Gil; what do you want me to do? I'll give you a reference—and call some people in other stores—”

“What about Heath's? Aren't there any other jobs open? I'd do anything, Leslie.”

“There isn't a thing. Damn, we just filled a job in accounting.”

“Well, I don't know bookkeeping anyway.”

“Listen, can I call you back? I'm up to my eyebrows in problems over here; if you can give me a day or two—”

“Leslie,” Katherine said. “You don't think Bruce is a criminal.”

“I'd rather not. But when I look at the evidence—”

“Real evidence? Solid? He can't be a criminal, Leslie; Jennifer and Todd are crazy about him.”

Leslie laughed. “We'll put them on the witness stand. No, it's not solid. But it's pretty damning.”

“But if you believe in him . . . You did believe in him, didn't you? When you hired him?”

“And even after. Until this business started.”

“But why should that change your mind? You must have had good reasons for trusting him; were you wrong or did he change?”