Fashionably Late (30 page)

“Look, Mr. Centrillo, I know I didn’t prepare myself properly for this meeting and I apologize for that, but I’ve been very busy. If you can give me a list of what you need I’ll try and get it. If I do, can you find my real mother?”

“Please, Mrs. Cohen. Don’t be upset. I know this is a difficult thing for you to undertake. And who knows? Sometimes I go to the court house or the Bureau of Vital Records and hit, one, two, three.

Sometimes I search for years and only turn up dead ends. Most women who gave up their babies aren’t proud of it. They started new lives, they moved on, they died. Whatever happened to them, they do not necessarily want to be located. I take it that your birth mother never came looking for you?”

Karen sat back against the hard wood of the chair in surprise. It had simply never occurred to her that her mother might search for her.

“Is that possible?” she whispered.

“Well, it depends. In some cases, where the birth mother has much of the information from the time of the delivery, she can have an easier time of it. But she also can run into sealed records. In sixteen states, if the records are sealed, there is absolutely nothing that either you or your birth mother could do to contact one another. Even if you both want to.”

Tears began to overflow Karen’s eyes and run down her face. It seemed so very, very sad. She thought of all the separated mothers and daughters, searching in vain. Smoothly and simply, Mr. Centrillo opened a drawer of his desk and handed her a box of tissues. Just like a shrink. The tears kept on sliding out from under Karen’s eyes. She cried for a long time. She’d been saving these tears up. Finally, she mopped her cheeks and managed a gasp. “That’s so sad,” she said.

“That’s just so sad.” She blew her nose.

Mr. Centrillo reached across the desk, took a Kleenex out of the box, and blew his own nose. Then he sighed gustily. “It is,” he agreed.

They both sat there quietly for a moment, bathed in the sun. After a time, Karen took a deep breath, reached into her bag, pulled out her File-o-Fax and Mont Blanc pen. “Okay,” she said, “tell me what I need to help you do this.”

After they discussed that and fees, Karen had fished around to find the envelope that contained the cash for his retainer. Carefully he wrote her out a receipt. Then Mr. Centrillo stood up and walked her to the door where he paused and, looking down at the clean wood floor, said gently, “Mrs. Cohen,” he took her elbow, “there is one more thing I am going to ask you. Do you know what you are looking for? Because even if we find your birth mother, you may not get it.”

She took his hand. How could she begin to explain all that was going on in her life right now? “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do,” was all she said.

Corman, her driver, stood waiting in the tiny reception area. “It was just half an hour,” he said. “Should I have come in?” She shook her head and let him help her down the stairs and into the car. Defina, as usual, was right. Karen needed all the help she could get.

The morning had been a flurry of phone calls and congratulations from the staff. Everyone who called said the same thing: they didn’t usually watch TV but the other night, on their way out the door, they just happened to tune in to a few minutes of Elle Halle and…. Karen almost had to laugh. And it was almost as fumy to see how Janet and all the other secretaries, Mrs. Cruz, and even Casey were looking at her with new respect. It was as if television had the power to leave a gloss on you after your appearance. Only Jeffrey and Belle seemed immune to television’s cosmetic treatment.

She’d decided to ignore her husband until he gave her an apology.

Despite the sick feeling their fight gave her, she was carrying on BAil.

Business as usual. Which included pinning an uninspired wrap skirt around Tangela’s slim waist while Stephie stood by, watching. Karen surreptitiously checked Tangela a few times to see if the girl seemed high, but she was no more sullen than usual. Karen was about to give her a break when the phone rang. “Who is it?” Karen said aloud.

knowing that Janet had the intercom on.

“Please come ta thuh phone,” Janet said, her Bronx accent heavy as a house.

On her knees, pins in her mouth, both hands fighting with the fabric from hell, Karen didn’t feel like coming to the phone. Janet should know better than this. That’s what she was paid for. “Who is it?”

Karen asked again, annoyed.

“Please come ta thuh phone,” Janet repeated, andţwith a sigh of irritation that had to be audible over the intercomţKaren got up heavily and strode over to her work table.

She was getting too old to sit comfortably on the floor. God, she felt so tired! She snatched up the receiver. “Who the fuck is it?” she asked Janet.

“Bill Wolper. I thawt you wouldn’t want anyone to, yuh know, get nervous aw anything, hearing his name.”

“Oh. Yeah. Thanks. Put him through,” Karen agreed, properly chastened.

Then she tried to pull herself together enough to ensure her sparkle.

After seeing the TV show, was he finally calling with an offer? But that didn’t make senseţ wouldn’t he call Jeffrey? Orhad NormCo decided to pass and he was merely calling her to be polite? She felt the emptiness of rejection hit her in the pit of her stomach. Just because she didn’t want them didn’t mean she wanted a rejection. Well, if they did pass, was she glad or disappointed? The phone clicked and she took a deep breath. “Hello,” she said, packing as much positive energy and enthusiasm as could be put into a single word and pushed through the little holes in the telephone handset. “Bill ! How nice of you to call.”

“Please hold for Mr. Wolper,” a curt secretarial voice demanded.

Shit!

Karen hated when that happened. She’d been outphoned. She tried to gather herself together.

“Karen?” It was Bill Wolper this time. “Hey, I was wondering. Are you free for lunch?”

“When?” she asked, thinking of her overbooked week and the Paris show.

Plus, she was already so tired.

“Today. Right now. Say I have my car pick you up in twenty minutes?”

The man was crazy, plus he had a lot of balls. Wasn’t this like calling a girl up on Friday night and asking her out for Saturday? In Rockville Centre that had been called an “A.T.”ţAutomatic Turndownţbecause even if you had nothing to do, you wouldn’t admit it.

Only a desperate girl said yes.

“Yes.” Karen said, and surprised herself. Would Coco Chanel say yes, she asked herself sternly. But hey, she was no Coco Chanel. She’d made a life out of saying “yes” when other women would have said “no.”

And vice versa. Karen wondered, but only for a nanosecond, if she should try to include Jeffrey, but she didn’t know where to find him, and she knew without asking that wasn’t part of the deal. Fuck him.

Would he be angry to be left out? Would he be jealous or possessive?

Suddenly, she didn’t care.

She could hear Bill’s approval in his voice. “My driver will be waiting for you at twelve thirty. Lutece suit you?”

“Just fine,” she purred. It was only the best intimate restaurant in New York.

Without asking herself anything further, she turned to her niece and her goddaughter. “Show’s over. I’m outta here.” She reached across her work table and into her schlep bag. She pulled out a hundreddollar bill and held it out to Tangela. She hadn’t said a word to her about her fight with Defina, but she wanted to be as kind as possible. “Let me blow the two of ya to lunch,” she said, and Stephie giggled, recognizing her aunt’s imitation of Belle. Karen smiled at the sullen older girl. “Take her someplace nice,” she said. Tangela just reached for the money. “C’mon,” was all she mumbled, and Stephie followed Tangela out the door.

Alone now, Karen pulled out a mirror to survey herself. The news from the front was not good. Her face, rather like a potato to begin with, could look acceptable when gilded with a good moisturizer, a transparent foundation, and a burnish of Guerlaine bronzing powder.

Her eyes were bloodshot, plus she was having a catastrophic hair day, or CHD, as they all called it around the office. Karen shook her head, not that that would bring any fullness to the lank, no-haircut haircut that Jean-Pierre had given her. She’d have to lose that guy and go back to Carl. He understood her hair and was worth the schlep to Brooklyn. And maybe cutting her hair would cheer him up. She had to think of a way to do that. She looked into the mirror.

Karen had never felt really attractive. And she certainly had never been seductive. She was too direct and too embarrassed to act coy, to flirt. But maybe I’m just too insecure, she thought. Maybe my fascination with clothes all comes from that. Clothes could be a distraction from the imperfect face, the flawed body. But why did she feel so unattractive?

Karen thought of Belle. Was it a mother’s job to initiate her daughter into the world of seductiveness and flirtation? Was a mother supposed to teach her daughter how to be female? Belle had certainly focused attention on how Karen looked and how to dress and makeup “properly,” but the attention had been mostly negative. Karen remembered that, like Tiff, she had been humiliated by Belle’s criticism. Was that why she never felt really comfortable as a vamp or successful as a seductress?

But everybody blamed their mother for everything. Maybe it was Arnold s failure that Karen felt. Wasn’t it a father’s job to help his daughter feel attractive? Unlike Belle, Arnold had never criticized.

He’d simply not noticed Karen, at least not in any way that recognized her femininity. Whether he meant to or not, he’d helped to teach her that if she wanted to be noticed she had to work for it. That, along with his own workaholism, helped to make her what she was today.

Karen shrugged. Would her real parents have done a better job? If Mr. Centrillo found them, she’d be able to answer that question. Would she be a different woman if she had been raised by the unwed teenage mom who probably was her natural mother and abandoned by the kid who was her father? Karen told herself she probably would have been worse off and tried to believe it. They’d given her this face and body and she’d have to like it or lump it.

Anyway, now she had to take whatever emergency measures she could to look her best. And if the idea of flirtation made her nervous as hell, she’d have to try not to show it.

Fifteen minutes later, she strode out of the lobby of 550 Seventh Avenue to Bill Wolper’s waiting stretch Mercedes limo, carrying a small batch of mail and memos to assuage her guilt at running off. Her skin was appropriately glossy, as were her lips, though the gloss did stop at her hairline. The hair was at least brushed, but otherwise unsalvageable. There was a limit to what a girl could do in a quarter of an hour when she was on the wrong side of forty. Still, the wheat-colored cotton knit tunic and short skirt she was wearing pulled her together and gave her a nice cleavage, and the wrap jacket in a soft waffle-weave cotton and linen knit was a great texture and forgivingly covered her belly.

Not surprisingly, Wolper’s car was divine. Karen leaned back into the supple and supportive gray leather seat. It was pure luxury. The raucous noise from the street was completely blocked by the tinted windows and the liquid of the Mozart concerto playing on the sound system. For the first time in weeks, Karen tried to relax. This was a hundred times better than the rented limos Karen took. How did I get here, she wondered? I’m just a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn and I’m sitting in one of the world’s most luxurious cars being driven to one of the city’s most luxurious restaurants. Karen shook her head to clear it. So far, despite the high profile she’d gotten in the last couple of years, despite the Oakley Award, or how often she saw her fashions featured in the glossy magazines, she never seemed to take what she had earned for granted. It seemed to her that though the climb had been long and hard and not without pain, despite all the press she’d gotten lately, she was still more the young hopeful than she was the established star. To Karen, the luxury of not having to look at the prices on the right-hand side of the menu, of being able to buy any piece of jewelry she wanted, of never having to go to the bank but always having a five-figure balance in her checking account when she inserted her cash card, all of it was something she didn’t expect.

But what if this is it? Karen asked herself. What if this is the pinnacle and from here on it’s all a slip down hill. She thought of Tony de Freise at the Oakley Awards. What had he said? “See you on the slopes.” I would hate to have arrived and never even known that I had gotten there before it was over, Karen thought. Do you only know you’ve reached the top when you look up at it from the decline? All at once she felt chilled, and asked the driver to turn down the air conditioning. I shouldn’t be going out to lunch, she realized with a shiver. I should be working on the Paris collection. If I blow that, I blow everything.

She sighed. In this business you were only as good as your last collection. Karen’s work had gotten nowhere this morning and she knew that so far this collection wasn’t exciting. When she’d gotten into the business she’d made herself two promises: that she’d dress women beautifully but comfortably, never putting them in ridiculous, clownish, or restrictive clothes, and that she’d make sure her line was simple, so that all of her pieces worked with each other.

It wasn’t easy then and it was getting harder. Elegant simplicity isn’t easy. Most of her art was in knowing how fabricsţbeautiful, sensuous, tactile fabricsţdraped and flowed. She was always on the lookout for a great new fabricţjust as when Lastex first came out in 1934, Chanel showed amazing new clothes in it.

But the structure of Karen’s clothes was her other secret. They were unique because the simplicity of line belied the strength of the cut and seams. A cashmere swing jacket seemed to hang effortlessly from the shoulders, but what work had gone into the bias cut of that swing and the sewing of those shoulders! Her little linen tank tops fit so beautifully because of the almost invisible darts she knew, from years of experience, how and where to stitch. But the same darts had to be cut differently and higher on the silk shantung tank tops. And her slacks!