Dead is the New Black (25 page)

She had visited once before, five years earlier, and found nothing in the hallways had changed. The pale yellow paint. The cement floors. The original brass fittings. The grey-painted metal doors. The stark lighting. All meant to give you the impression that you had entered a luxury-free zone of arty rough edges, which in itself screamed luxury.

Laura knocked, and the door creaked open.

The loft was also the same as she remembered, decorated in a style the complete opposite of the hallway décor. The living room was painted aubergine with mustard trim. One wall was papered in plum and moss stripes with gold accents. Damask upholstery with its contrasting shiny and matte patterns hung on windows. A contrasting pattern in the same colors upholstered the couches. Unused copper pots hung in the open kitchen, and the dining room was dark wood and burgundy wool carpets.

The look of this carefully, if over-decorated, apartment was broken up by piles of clothes on the floor, over the back of the couches, on the backs of chairs, as if someone had emptied their closets and drawers so they could sort through what they were keeping and what they were tossing.

Carmella stood at the kitchen bar, staring at an empty piece of pumpkin-colored linoleum, the phone pressed to her ear. She saw Laura in the doorway and waved her in just as she started chattering in Italian. She paced, her tone abrupt, then pleading, then belying the fact that she was rubbing her forehead. Laura sat on the arm of the couch, and Carmella, as if struck by a brilliant idea, snapped up a bottle of wine from the sideboard and pulled an opener from the drawer. She shouted, “No,” into the phone and continued in Italian as she handed the wine and opener to Laura.

More Italian as Laura popped the cork, then a beep when Carmella hung up.

“I swear to God,” Carmella said, sliding two sparkling clean wine glasses from the counter. “Family is like a scourge. They raise you to be who you are, then blame you for it for the rest of your life. Pour me, please.”

Laura poured, and asked, “No work today?”

Carmella fluttered her hand. “Oh, who knows? Sheldon sent everyone away. He comes in and does like this…” She spread her arms wide. “‘Everyone goes home!’ And so we all left. I think Tiffany and Chilly went out for margaritas. Isn’t that sweet?”

“He wanted the office empty when Jeremy came back.”

Carmella shrugged. “He’s been promising me my own line all week, then I realized he’s an asshole like the rest of them.” The pejorative usually sounded classy with the Italian accent, except it now sounded fake to Laura. As if she heard Laura’s thoughts, Carmella spoke in an accent so thoroughly Staten Island, so twanged and deep, that Laura thought she was caught in a horror movie. “So you saw Mario last night, huh? Sorry about your face.”

“Why, Carmella? And how did you do it for so many years?”

Shame sat all over her shrug. “I did it for one interview, just to see what would happen. And I got the job. Three months looking for work, and I get something when I tell some hokey story. Now, I’m finished.”

Laura indicated the piles of clothes. “Where are you going?”

“I’m thinking Los Angeles. No one knows me, but I have a good resume with no accent or stories.”

“How’s Mario taking it?”

“Honestly, I don’t care.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone? You’re talented, you don’t need to lie about where you’re from.”

Carmella poured more wine. “You know Gracie was ready to sign a check to me, and then I could stop working for that asshole.” The word didn’t sound so classy in a Staten Island accent, but it was ten times more descriptive. “Until she found out where I was from. Then, she literally made fun of me at Grotto, in front of everyone. She said no one wants fringed bags and shredded leggings and went on about the stonewashed denim graveyard in my mom’s basement. Oh, and everyone laughed. Ha ha freaking-ha.”

“You were crying in the bathroom. Not Noë?”

“We were both crying, and fighting. Gracie was on Noë, too. I don’t know what crawled up her ass, but Noë was really scared of her that night.” Carmella downed her wine, and Laura realized it wasn’t her first glass. “She said Gracie was trying to ruin everything she and her dad had worked for.”

“Her dad’s a banker.”

“I don’t even care.” She swept her arms over the expanse of the space. “Mario pays for this. Jeremy doesn’t pay me enough to live in Brooklyn, even. I have to move. And…” She paused to drain her glass. “These walls have to go back to white, or we lose the deposit. What do you think? Three coats of primer or four?”

Laura wanted to tell her that, sometimes, the only way to make things better is to make them worse. Sometimes you have to clean up your mess and accept downward mobility for a greater reward later. Maybe a life where you can be who you are. Maybe a life with a boyfriend who doesn’t have a wedding ring. Or a life with a boss who doesn’t degrade you in order to get you to produce.

Then, she saw a jacket draped inside out over the back of a chair. It was wrong in every way, starting with the overlocked seams and ending with the poorly set-in sleeve. Cheap, unevenly dyed buttons were sewn through a twisted half-lining. Laura picked it up and held it by the collar. The fabric was woven too tightly, and the collar rolled at the edge.

“That’s one of Mario’s,” Carmella said. “Can you imagine designing for them?”

Laura shook her head and wished her well on her trip to California.

When she got outside, her face hurt from her chin to the crown of her head. Her neck creaked and stiffened, and her back hurt where she’d been kicked. Whatever wonder drug she’d gotten at the hospital had worn off. She went home with the intention of polishing her resume and making phone calls but, instead, she headed straight for the bed and fell asleep for the next twelve hours.

CHAPTER 25.

The next morning, with every joint and muscle aching, Laura thought seriously about staying home, making coffee, and watching the snow fall out her window. It actually seemed pretty appealing. But then she remembered that she had fabric scissors, a rabbit, and a box of line-scoring supplies under her desk, which wasn’t her desk anymore. She figured, unless they’d changed her code already, she could sneak in while the office was empty, grab her stuff, and go, never to be seen again. On the train, she considered leaving a note, erasing her computer, or snatching some old design sketches for a portfolio. She worried if Mom was going to get paid, and she wondered if she should make a couple of corrections to the Amanda gown, just as an act of good faith for Jeremy.

The elevator door was open, and Laura stood in it, waiting, pushing a button that wouldn’t light. She peeked out into the lobby, looked right, then left, then stepped back again. It still didn’t move. She pressed “Door Close,” which never seemed to work anyway, and found today was no exception. She was just about to get out and take the stairs when André burst into the elevator, bringing a cocoon of cold and snow and the smell of coffee from HasBean.

“Good morning,” he said without cheer. “Nice weather, no?” He shifted his shoulders to secure the huge shoulder bag he always carried. It looked, today as all days, as though it held the
Encyclopedia Britannica
. One had to cut him a wide berth in the office, or his bag would knock you flat.

“The elevator’s not moving,” Laura reported. “I was about to take the stairs.”

“Oh, no.” André waved his coffee cup. “Follow me.”

They walked back into the blustery weather and turned onto 38th Street to skirt the edge of the building. He hooked a right and turned the corner. “This happened once, that time when it rained so hard Broadway was closed. Remember? The basement flooded. We had to take the freight.”

She remembered the day. She’d walked up the stairs. She’d seen enough people in the stairwell that it hadn’t occurred to her to ask how everyone else in the office got up.

Making conversation, she asked, “Did you find a buyer for the co-op yet?”

“Not in a blizzard, no.” His answer was terse. It apparently wasn’t a comfortable subject. “And those buttons?” he asked, changing the subject.

“You’ll have to ask Jeremy. He’ll be back on Monday, too.”

They reentered the building on 38th, into the wide hallway with the dumpsters and boxes. Paint peeled and lights fizzled, and André showed her what she’d never seen, the freight elevator.

“Morning, Olly,” André said. Olly was a six-foot-tall black man who didn’t weigh more than one-fifty soaking wet. He had a moustache and wore a doorman’s uniform that had seen better days. He greeted André and nodded to Laura.

They got into the freight elevator, which had an opening as big as a barn door, or so Laura assumed, having never seen a barn, or its door, before. Quilted moving blankets covered the inside walls of the living room-sized space. Laura would have moved to the back, the custom in the passenger elevators, but felt that would have been rude.

Olly pulled an old steel mechanism on the door, and the huge contraption slid shut with a clank as the locking system slid into place. Then, he put his hand on a brass handle connected to another mechanism shaped like two slices of pizza, pulling it toward him. The elevator moved up, and Laura saw the floors as they zipped by with big red numbers painted on the inside of the passing elevator doors. She felt queasy.

“How long have you been in New York, and you’ve never been on a freight elevator before?” Olly asked.

“I was born here,” she said, “and I’ve been on them in loft spaces.”

Olly laughed. “They slow those down and put doors in the car.”

“And buttons,” Laura added.

“That ain’t the real thing.” Olly let the handle go and dropped the car perfectly on the floor marked ‘4.’ “Fourth floor,” he called, as if the car were full.

They stepped into the dank back hallway, then turned a corner to reach the hallway with the regular elevators.

Complaining about all the work he had to do for the Bergdorf’s order, André bid her good day and disappeared into the showroom. She walked into the design room, which she expected to be desolate enough for her to grab her stuff and go.

Jeremy stood by her table, pinning a boucle jacket on her mannequin. Two yards of the same black boucle were draped over the back of her chair. She saw the yellow laundry marks of the fabric testing service. They prewashed yards of fabric to exact standards to estimate how garments would behave once they were sold. They were the ones who advised companies to put
hand wash
or
dry clean only
on the care labels.

Watching him, back in the office, doing what he always did, gave her a little déjà vu, except for the fact that she knew he wasn’t gay, and was now a little accessible. She suddenly had a silver knife in her chest where her heart used to be, and it turned and spun and twisted her guts around until she thought she might giggle uncontrollably or choke on her own spit.

“Distorni failing shrink testing again?” she asked, fingering the fabric. The texture had turned mealy and stiff, and the loose fit and soft folds of the jacket now stood straight up in the most unflattering fashion.

“I thought it might be you when I heard the door click.” He didn’t look up from his work as he smoothed the grain of the fabric along the line of the body. She thought she might die from loving him right there.

“That fabric’s not going to work on this style,” Laura said, calming words cracking out of her mouth like machine gun fire. “If you need to use it, we need a prewashed style and something more staid, like nineties Chanel-ley.”

“It won’t sell if it’s not sexy.” Jeremy put his hand on the mannequin’s chest to move it. She had a flash of herself as the mannequin and shook it off.

He squashed a handful of fullness from the back waist of the jacket and twisted around to look at the result from the front. “I ordered fifty yards of this crap, and I’m three minutes from shoving it up Terry Distorni’s ass.”

Laura snapped the belt off the jacket and, picking up the fabric scissors she had come in to retrieve, cut the sleeves off at the shoulder.

“You want to talk about Sheldon?” Jeremy asked, picking up the sleeve and pinning it back on closer to the neck as if he had read her mind

She pinned darts into the fullness at the waist. “I just came for my supplies.”

Jeremy pointed his scissors at Carmella’s desk, which was uncharacteristically clean. “What’s the story over there? The drawers are empty.”

“Did you know where she was from?”

“Tottenville, Staten Island. Father’s a concrete truck driver. Mom owns a dry cleaner. Why?”

“Does she know you knew?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, everyone knows now, and she’s not coping well.”

Jeremy put down his scissors and smoothed the sleeve. “How about we talk about you running out of the room after I told you what I have?”

“You think that’s why I ran out?” She shortened the front of the jacket, slipping the pins in, checking for accuracy. Getting the feel from what she was doing, Laura balanced the back of the jacket with the same dexterity.

“I have no idea anymore why anyone does anything, so why don’t you just tell me and get it over with.”