Fashionably Late (22 page)

“You mean I have to give up my satin pumps?” Casey asked.

Defina raised her eyebrows. “I think they like us because we’re a little left of center. Come on, this is the fashion business.”

Karen tried to intervene. “Oh, come on, Jeffrey! You think Bill Wolper hasn’t heard rumors that Halston was a little light in his loafers? Or that he thinks Willie Smith’s early demise was from a heart attack?

Jeffrey, we are not Midwest Corporate America. We’re not even Wall Street. We’re the garmentosţthe crazy gays and ethnics that dress America. Surely even the great, white Bill Wolper has a clue.”

Jeffrey turned to face her, his expression almost savage. He’d gone lividţhis face was almost the gray of his hair. “Goddamnit!” he cried.

“Goddamnit!” And Karen was shocked to see tearsţreal tearsţon his long, dark lashes. “You’re the ones without a clue. Robert and I have spent months setting this up and making this happen. Do you know how we’ve been sweating out the debt load we’re carrying? This deal would put all of usţall of usţ into the Bentley Turbo R category. And instead of thanking me, you’re sniping at the opportunity of a lifetime as if they’re lying dozens deep on the ground. Do you know that right now if our creditors insisted on immediate payment, we’d be forced into bankruptcy? And if Munchin or Genesco or any of the manufacturers decide not to ship our product until their invoices are paid we won’t have any receivables next season? There won’t be a next season. I’m doing a high-wire act here and I don’t have a net. Jesus! You’re all a bunch of imbeciles! No! Worse than imbeciles. Children. You’re a fucking bunch of children.” He turned his back and strode alone down Fiftieth Street toward Lexington Avenue. The group stood there in silence for a moment.

Then, predictably, Robert ran after Jeffrey.

“Jeffrey, wait!” he yelled.

The rest of them just stood there at the corner, paralyzed. At last, Casey broke the silence. “What the fuck is a Bentley Turbo R?” he asked.

No one answered.

At last Defina spoke. “I never knew Jeffrey thought children were even worse than imbeciles,” she said.

Karen felt as if she’d never been so tired. But she’d promised Carl she’d come, and she’d hardly seen him except at the Oakley show, which wasn’t the same as spending time alone together. She was always so busy.

She dozed in the limo to Brooklyn and now awoke as it stopped in front of Carl’s Curl Up and Dye on Montague Street. The salon was on the ground floor of a brownstone that Carl owned and lived in. It was the trendiest place for haircuts in Brooklyn Heights, but in the fashion scheme of things that was only about half a step higher than being the coolest person in Piscataway, New Jersey. The driver held the limo door open for Karen as she stepped onto the cracked sidewalk of the quaint street. Brooklyn Heights reminded her of Georgetown, which reminded her of Cambridge, which reminded her of … well, of all those trendy-but-stilljust-so-slightly-suburban locales.

“I’ll be a couple of hours. Maybe you’ll want to have dinner next door,” she told the driver. “My treat.” Capulet’s on Montague was a sort of yuppie fern bar restaurant. She’d had drinks with Carl in there many times, but the food was mediocre at best. Anyway, the driver shook his head.

“I’ll be fine, Mrs. Kahn,” he told her, so she turned and walked toward the lighted window of Curl Up and Dye. What would it be like, she wondered, if your job were to sit in the deepening twilight and wait. She knew she wouldn’t be able to do it. But maybe it’s very restful, she told herself. Why are you always assuming that other people’s lives are unsatisfactory and other people’s style or job or deportment or accent needs to be improved?

Why? Because I’m crazy, she answered herself, and she rattled the locked door of the salon.

Carl heard her, stopped sweeping, and came to the door. He was wearing black jeans, black Doc Martins, and a white and black T-shirt that said, “CROSS-DRESS MY KEN DOLL.”

“There you are,” he sang out. “Hey, you look a lot like the Oakley Lifetime Achievement Award winner.”

“What a coincidence,” she managed to smile.

He put the broom aside, with a shake of his big head. “Life,” he said.

“One night I’m in the ballroom of the Waldorf and the next I’m sweeping up a stranger’s hair off the linoleum. Cinderella in reverse.” He sighed. “If you want anything done right, you have to do it yourself.”

“Tell me about it,” she agreed.

Carl looked at her in the harsh light of the overhead fluorescents.

“Talk about Curl Up and Dye,” he said. “You look like what the pussy dragged in.”

“Well, at least I’ve come to the right place.”

“Not for pussy, honey,” he smirked, flipped off the light, tapped in his code on the burglar alarm, and put his arm around her. “We’re outta here, Mary,” he said. He reached down and picked up a flashlight. He flipped it on but nothing happened. He sighed deeply.

“A flashlight is something I carry dead batteries in,” he said. “Well, at least it’s heavy. There was a homeless guy crouched on my upstairs landing yesterday. Scared the shit out of me. He was harmless, but you never know.” He hefted the flashlight and took her through the side door and into the little hallway that led upstairs. He groaned as he began pulling his overweight body up each step. “Ooh, Mary! My dogs are barking. This is an overrated job for an overweight guy over forty. It sure takes it outta you.”

They came to the landing and he pulled out a key to get them inside his apartment. Like any time she was stressed out, Karen was starving.

She was grateful to smell something already cooking. In the bay window a small round table and two comfortable chairs were set, the candles already lit.

Carl’s apartment was an almost perfect approximation of a tatty English country house, from the faded cabbage rose chintz slipcovers to the sisal that covered the floors. Old landscapes and botanical prints and heavily varnished dog paintings hung on the walls while the Empire striped wallpaper had faded around them. Everything had a used but homey patina. In the twentyeight years she had known him, Carl never bought anything new. It wasn’t out of cheapness: it was his form of creativity.

He was always finding a vase that could be rewired into a lamp, which then required a lampshade, that then had to be lined with a particular pink silk, not to mention being fringed with the fringe that came off a bedspread he had bought second hand in some nameless thrift shop. He had created a fussy, charming little nest and he had shared it with Thomas, until Thomas died two years ago. Now, looking around, Karen noticed for the first time that somehow the place seemed faded in a tired, not-so-charming way. “Sit, sit,” Carl told her and, with relief, she sank into one of the armchairs pulled up to the table.

There was a tree-level view of Montague Street, the streetlights just turned on, shedding pools of yellow light in the deepening twilight.

“What have you been up to?” he asked. “Win any other lifetime awards this week?”

“No. I just had to do the Elle Halle interview and meet Bill Wolper.”

“Well, ex-cuuuuse me. Did you have dinner with the Queen as well?”

“No. I’m doing that tonight.”

“Oooh, Mary. She’s so nasty! Someday I’m going to regret sitting next to you in Home Ec class.” Carl was the only boy in Rockville Centre High who refused to take shop.

“We met in Drama Club,” Karen corrected. She herself had never taken Home Ec. This was a fight they’d been having for almost two decades.

“Wasn’t Rockville Centre High’s Drama Club a kind of head-start program for homos?” Carl asked.

“If it was, what was I doing there?” Karen asked.

“Oh, you know my theory: you’re a gay man trapped in a woman’s body.

That’s why you’re such a great designer.”

Despite their joking, Carl heard the deadness in her tone of voice. He looked at her more closely. “So, how bad is it?” he wanted to know.

That was the nice thing about Carl: he always knew her temperature. It was so relaxing, not having to explain or pretend.

“Not so great. There’s a cash flow problem, and maybe an offer to buy us out, and Jeffrey’s all bent out of shape and my mother is crazy.

And I’m so tired. I feel like everything’s going too fast and going wrong, even when it’s going right. What would you call that?”

“Fear of success?”

“Feels more like fear of failure. Actually, I feel like my heart is breaking. Any suggestions?” She felt her nose begin to run. She sniffed.

Carl bent toward her with concern. “Read nonfiction,” he advised.

She blinked. “What?” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“What are you reading?”

“Uh. Anita Brookner. The new one.”

“No. Stop immediately. Try Money and Class in America. Lewis Lapham.

Arnold would approve. Very good. Or Naomi Wolf’s new one.”

“Carl, what are you talking about? I’m falling into a suicidal depression and you’re doing Men on Books?”

“Look, baby, I hate to pull rank, but I’ve had my heart broken more often and by more guys than you ever will. Take my advice: now is not the time to be reading The Bell Jar She began to laugh. She always laughed with Carl. Since the time they were teenagersţboth of them too big, too fat, too plain, and too smart to fit in Rockville Centreţthey had always been able to laugh at whatever their problems were.

Carl nodded. “Maybe some food will help your broken heart,” he said.

He disappeared into the kitchen and came out bearing a tray. “Make woojums eat nice hommy. Woojums feel all better,” he said in baby talk and set the tray on a stand beside the window, using it as a sideboard.

“So how much are they offering?” he asked.

“Who?” Karen asked, but she knew what he was talking about and couldn’t help but smile. That was Carl: from baby talk to Wall Street in the blink of an eye. “We don’t know yet. But Jeffrey thinks upward of twenty million.” Karen almost giggled with the ridiculousness, the unreality of the number.

Carl turned and then froze, the platter of biryani in his hands.

“Upward of twenty million dollars? And you’re heartbroken? Honey, you do have a problem.” He put the platter down on the table, brought out a few other dishes, and sat down in the chair opposite her. He reached out for a serving spoon and ladled a portion onto her plate. “Eat,” he said.

“You’ll have to keep up your strength to carry all that money to the bank.”

“But I don’t think I want to sell,” Karen told him. “I mean, we’re having a little trouble servicing our debt, but that’s just cash flow.

And I really can’t think of what I’d do with the money, except maybe put more in our pension fund. I already have two houses. It’s not like I’m hungry or I don’t have a place to live, or we need shoes for the baby.”

Carl’s eyes lit up. “What baby?”

“Forget it. I was just speaking generally. No baby. Definitely no baby.

The latest hot flash, you should excuse the expression: I can’t conceive, I carl’t carry it, and Jeffrey won’t talk about adoption.”

She took a breath and told Carl all about Dr. Goldman. “Anyway, no baby. So why sell the business?”

“Excuse me for mentioning this, but I don’t see the intimate connection between the two. Except that you’re in disagreement with Jeffrey on both.”

She sighed. As always, Carl got it. “Exactly. He wants to sell, I don’t. I want a baby, he doesn’t. And if those weren’t bad enough pressures, Belle is driving me crazy, both of my nieces are acting up, and I keep noticing inappropriate men as possible sex partners.”

“Well, in that last category you’re not alone,” Carl assured her.

“Maybe I’m just overworked,” she said. “God, Carl, it’s hard to believe that I’ve actually gotten even busier than I used to be. I’ve got a design team working on the bridge line, but it’s killing me.

Plus I’m doing the Paris show and I’ve just finished the dresses for Elise Elliot’s wedding. It seems like the harder I work the more behind I get.”

“These all sound like classy problems to me. A lot of pressure, but classy problems. A11 except the baby, and Jeffrey.” He paused then and brightened. “Did you meet Elise Elliot yet?” he asked. “What is she really like?”

Karen rolled her eyes. “She’s like a very rich, very beautiful client.

How do I know what she’s like? You want to know her inseam? I can tell you that.”

“Your life is so glamorous,” Carl said. “Karen Kahn: tape measure to the stars. Are you going to the wedding?” Karen nodded. “Do you think Jackie Onassis will be there?”

Karen took a deep breath. If Carl went off on a Kennedy tangent she’d run screaming down Montague Street. “I think I’m going crazy,” Karen said. “I don’t even know why I do most of the things I am doing.” She took another deep breath. “You know what I’ve thought of?” she asked.

He shrugged. She told him about the urge to find her real mother, the way it simply wouldn’t go away. She talked, Carl ate. It was comforting. It was the only thing that hadn’t changed since she was sixteen years old.

“You know the saddest thing?” she asked finally. He shook his head.

“I’m really sad about the baby thing and I keep getting sadder. I mean, I don’t figure my Oakley Award will keep me company in the nursing home.

I’d love a kid. I think about all the things I’ll never get to do, like buying a first pair of shoes, or the first party dress. And you know, I’m really sad that I’ll never get to wear a bed jacket.”

“A what?” Carl asked, his mouth full.

“A bed jacket. You know, those quilted satin things that women in old movies wore in the hospital after they gave birth. I don’t even know if anyone makes them anymore. And what the hell do you wear under them, anyway? You think all those women were naked from the waist down?

Anyway, I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but I guess I always wanted to wear one. It just seems an important part of the female experience.”

“Yeah, like leg waxing.”

Karen smiled, but her smile was watery. “It’s hard to give up that bed jacket.”

Carl nodded.

“So, what do you think?” she asked, as she always did.

Carl finished chewing and daintily wiped his mouth. “Honey, I think what I always have thought: you’re overworked. You don’t have time to know what you feel about anything. Meanwhile, I think you’re going through a rough patch in your marriage, but hey, who doesn’t? I love you, and I’ll support you in whatever you decide, but Karen, sweety, with this last thing, what do you expect to find?”