The Rothman Scandal (24 page)

“No, no,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I don't have time to talk to Mr. McCulloch now.”

Gregory's dark eyes widened. “You don't have time to talk to Rodney
McCulloch?
Do you know who he
is
, Alex?”

“Of course I know who Rodney McCulloch is. I just don't have time to talk to him right now. I wouldn't have time to talk to the Queen of England if she were calling,” she added, remembering Lulu's line.

Gregory looked crestfallen, and Alex suspected she had hurt his feelings. “It's just that we have a planning meeting at ten thirty, remember?” she said. “I want to prepare for that, Gregory.”

“Alex—” he began.

“Yes?”

“I hope you don't think I said anything to Mona Potter last night. In spite of what she wrote in her column. She kept pumping me, but I told her absolutely nothing. You believe me, don't you?”

“Of course I believe you,” she said. “Everybody knows that if Mona can't get a quote, she just makes one up.”

The light on one of Alex's telephone lines was blinking, and Gregory pressed the button and picked up the receiver. “Mrs. Rothman's office,” he said. “One moment, sir. Let me check.” He pressed the Hold button. “It's Rodney McCulloch!” he said. “Himself!”

She shook her head. “No calls.”

“I'm sorry, sir, she's still in a meeting.… Yes, yes, let me take those numbers.…” Gregory stood there, scribbling, scribbling numbers on pink message slips. “My God,” he said, replacing the phone, “he's given me his entire schedule for the whole
day
. That guy really moves around town, doesn't he?”

She smiled. “He has that reputation,” she said.

“He says that he's to be brought out of whatever meeting he's in to take your call. It's that important.” And he added, “Whatever it is.”

“I have no idea what he wants.”

He hesitated. “I think I know what he wants,” he said.

“Oh? What's that?”

“I think he wants to know what everybody else wants to know. What's going on around here? What's Mr. Rothman up to? What's going to happen? Frankly, Alex, everybody here is very, very worried.”

“Worried about what?”

“Their jobs, for one thing. With this new—woman.”

“Now, darlin',” she said. “There's nothing really to worry about. Everything's under control. Nobody's job is in any danger. Everything's going to be just fine.” Of course she didn't know whether she meant any of this, or whether anything she was saying meant anything at all. She touched her triple strand of pearls. Get through this day, she told herself. Put one foot in front of the other, toes out, chin up. “Now, shoo, darlin',” she said. “I really do have to go over my notes for today's meeting.”

Alex sat alone at her desk, looking at the walls. She touched her pearls again, for luck, for courage. In the little town of Paradise, Missouri, where Alex grew up, no one had ever seen pearls like these. No one had ever dreamed of pearls like these, Steven's pearls, or the Kashmiri sapphire ring with its girdle of diamonds. “Is this your
office?
” her mother had said, disappointed, on one of her increasingly rare visits to New York from that place where she lived now, that place that was known as a “facility.” “But it's so small, Alex. I thought the Rothmans were supposed to be so rich.”

She had laughed. “This is a very cost-conscious company,” she said. “Every square inch of space has a price tag on it. All the offices are small—except for Mr. Ho Rothman's office, which is very, very large.”

It
was
a small office. She was sure her mother had expected to find her in a kind of Donald Oenslager stage setting for
Lady in the Dark
, with Louis Quinze furniture and a gilded French phone on her desk and great swagged Fortuny hangings at the windows—and Alex in a huge picture hat, looking like Gertrude Lawrence—instead of a very ordinary-looking office, with one window and venetian blinds, and industrial-grade carpet on the floor and Alex herself, that day, in tweeds and flats and a pencil stuck behind her ear. Still, she had managed to imbue her small office with a certain theatricality.

At first, the walls had been painted flat white, and for a long time she had studied those bare, white-painted walls, wondering how she could brighten them up a bit. Then, all at once, a solution had presented itself. Strolling down the corridor one day, she had encountered a maintenance man wheeling stacks of old magazines on his dolly. Files, it seemed, were being cleaned out, and back issues of
Mode
, from the date of its first issue in 1874 onward, were being thrown out. They had all been committed to microfiche, and the actual magazines were being discarded to create valuable space. Alex had salvaged the magazines, and had her walls papered with a collage of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
Mode
covers, some of which were extraordinary. They had featured fashion paintings by such artists as Edward Penfield, Paul Helleu, Grace Wiederseim, Harrison Fisher, Kate Greenway, Sir John Millais, and John Singer Sargent. She then had the walls covered with a lustrous clear lacquer. As a result, though she might not have the largest office in the building, hers was easily the most distinctive and colorful. Herb Rothman frowned when he first stepped into the redecorated office. It smacked of the kind of extravagance for which Rothman Communications, Inc. was not noted. But he couldn't really complain. The job had cost the company nothing, and all the materials had been bound for the incinerator anyway.

“Damn,” Lenny Liebling said when he first saw what would become known as “Alex's little jewel box”—“I wish I'd thought of that.”

“You could still do it,” Alex said. “There are hundreds of more covers.”

“I can't do it now that
you've
done it,” he said, pouting. “It wouldn't be original. It would be just copycat. After all, I have a certain reputation for originality to uphold.”

Hundreds of more covers, she had thought at the time, and immediately had the idea of papering the ceiling with more
Mode
covers, and her little jewel box was complete.

She gazed about her jewel box now. All those covers represented nearly twelve decades of work, of an editor's work and thought and imagination. Over the years, there had been a baker's dozen of
Mode
editors. Some had been brilliant, some had been dull. Some had been extravagant, some had been penny-pinching. Some had been innovators, some had been copycats. Some had lasted for just a few months, and others had stayed in their posts for years. There had been editors who had worn huge picture hats in the office, editors who wore turbans, an editor who affected a monocle on a pink satin ribbon, and an editor who always wore white opera-length gloves while she worked. There had been eccentric editors, autocratic editors, despotic editors, and there was even a tale—possibly apocryphal—of a
Mode
editor who had succeeded in making a Philadelphia-bound passenger train back up into Pennsylvania Station because she had forgotten a layout she needed for a meeting. There was the editor who had declared that the bikini was “mankind's greatest invention since the atomic bomb,” and who devoted an entire issue of the magazine to huaraches. And there was the editor who, one afternoon for no apparent reason, put on her Lilly Daché hat and coat, and stepped out on the window ledge of this very office and jumped to her death on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk a hundred and twenty feet below. This room, Alex thought now, was not only filled with the tastes and imaginations of editors. It was also filled with ghosts. And all those editors, with the exception of Steven Rothman, had been women like herself.

But there had never been such a thing as a co-editor of
Mode
. And, she reminded herself, there was not going to be one now.

She walked into the conference room, a slim Hermes briefcase under her arm, chin up, smiling at everyone, greeting everyone, and took her place at the head of the table. Looking around the room, she said, “Where's Lenny?”

“He had a dental emergency,” someone said. “I think he lost a crown.”

“Well, we'll just have to do without him.”

Bob Shaw, the art director, looked up from his usual chair and said, “You haven't lost
your
crown, have you, Alex?”

There was brief, uneasy, and decidedly embarrassed laughter at this not very funny joke, and Alex gave Bob a quick look and wondered if he'd been drinking again. She sat forward in her chair, unsnapped her briefcase, and took out a pad of legal cap and a handful of ballpoints. “I've been thinking about picnics,” she began. “I've been thinking about everything a picnic can be.” She was setting her “What-If” meeting on its track, suggesting a theme.

“Picnics—for a January issue?” someone asked.

“January is a blah month,” she said. “I'm thinking about something upbeat for January, like picnics. And I'm not just thinking about outdoor picnics, though we might do a Caribbean picnic. I'm thinking about picnics as a whole lifestyle for the 'nineties. It seems to me that people aren't cooking elaborate dinners these days. They're picnicking, right in their apartments on the Upper West Side. Have you looked at your supermarket shelves lately? They're full of stuff that's essentially for picnicking. I'm not talking about old-fashioned TV dinners, where you get a slab of meat and gravy, mashed potatoes, and buttered peas in a compartmented tray. I'm talking about really wonderful-looking prepared dishes you can find in supermarkets now—lobster salad en brioche, skewered shrimp, soufflés of all sorts, galantines of beef, duck, even quail and pheasant. Picnic food. I think fashion's in a picnic mood, too—elegant, pretty, but easy and fun—quick, impromptu. I see picnic as a mood, a spirit. The word is from the French
pique-nique
, which means pick-and-choose, suit yourself, and I think we could have a lot of fun with this. Does anyone remember that wonderful scene in
Citizen Kane
, when Kane's second wife complains that she's bored, and so Kane decides to treat everybody to a picnic? They all set off for their picnic in a long string of chauffeur-driven limousines. I imagine we could get a still shot of that, and use it in a fun way in the issue. Any more thoughts on a picnic issue?”

There was a silence. Then someone said, “Ants. It wouldn't be a picnic without ants.”

Alex wrinkled her nose. “I don't think ants are much fun, indoors or out.” She could see that her meeting was starting out badly, and that she was going to have to expend more than her normal amount of energy to keep things on track this morning.

“Speaking of insects,” someone else said, “I remember a summer picnic at my grandmother's house by the lake. We were all sitting around on the lawn, and suddenly my grandmother began to scream. A big spider was crawling toward her. My grandfather, who always carried a pistol, whipped out his pistol and shot the spider. ‘So much for Little Miss Muffet,' he said.”

There was no response to this story, which did not seem to lead them anywhere.

Then Gregory Kittredge spoke up. “That reminds me of a picnic when I was a kid,” he said. “We'd been swimming in the river, and my mother, who had long, dark hair, was sitting on the riverbank, drying her hair. Suddenly a bee landed in her hair, then another, and another, and presently a whole swarm of bees was hanging in her long hair.”

“My God, how horrible!” someone said. “Why wasn't she stung to death?”

He smiled. “My mother is a woman possessed of odd bits of information,” he said. “She explained that bees in swarm will never sting if you don't disturb the swarm. She stayed very calm, and told us all to stay very calm, and in about fifteen minutes they all flew away. ‘They're just choosing their new queen,' she said. Later, she said that having bees swarm in her hair was the closest she had ever come to having a religious experience.”

Alex's eyes were bright. “What a wonderful image!” she said. “You know how pictorial my mind is. Wouldn't that make a great photograph? Bees swarming in a model's hair?”

“You'd never find a girl who'd agree to do it.”

“I have just the girl in mind. Her name's Melissa. She's a beauty, and she's a honey blonde. Doesn't that sound perfect? Honey bees swarming in a honey blonde's hair? I have one of her composites at home, and I've asked her agency in Kansas City to send me more shots.”

“You and your Kansas City models,” someone said.

“I like that Midwest look. They look fresh—”

“And they're cheap.”

“And hungry. Hungry enough to let bees swarm in their hair.”

“But first we've got to find out what makes bees swarm, so we can set up the shot,” Alex said. She turned to Bob Shaw. “Bob, find out what makes bees swarm. If we can pull this off, we could have an unforgettable cover, Bob.”

“Jesus,” Bob Shaw said. “Here I am, the art director of the greatest fashion magazine in the world. And what's my assignment? Find out what makes
bees
swarm!”

“I still can't quite reconcile picnics with January, Alex,” someone said.

“But we'll be showing resort wear. Resorts are picnics in themselves. Life is a picnic, a moveable—”

“No!”
It was Carol Duffy, the beauty editor, who had said nothing at all so far. “No!” she cried again, and pounded her fist on the conference table. “I don't want to talk about any of this, Alex! I want you to tell us what's going to happen. I want to know what Herb Rothman is trying to do.” There were tears in her eyes.

Alex's returning gaze was steady. “We're here to plan our January issue, Carol,” she said. “And the theme is picnics.”

“I really don't want to cry. I'm not going to let you make me cry,” she had said to him years ago in Tarrytown, in the boathouse.