Fashionably Late (61 page)

“Was he?” Karen asked.

“Wake up and smell the papyrus, Cleo,” Defina said. “He had to be powerful angry to sleep with your sister. A man cheats on his wife for a lot of reasons, but he cheats with his wife’s best friend only when he’s got something to say to his wife and he doesn’t have the balls to say it. I guess he knew me and Carl would turn him down, so that just left Lisa,” Defina paused. “Though didn’t Carl always have a thing for Jeffrey? Maybe … ” “Eeuw, Dee,” Karen said, almost smiling a bit at the idea.

“Sorry, girlfriend. Just trying to cheer you up.”

Karen put her hand out and Dee placed another napkin in it. “People are going to think I’m crazy,” Karen moaned. “Or that I’m having some kind of a breakdown.”

“Hey, at this very minute there are women sobbing in coffee shops all over town. It’s New York, babe. And what some stranger thinks is the least of your problems right now. I mean, you’re dealing with love and death and money. It doesn’t get any heavier than this.”

Karen thought of the Mananas. It did get heavier than this. Somehow Karen’s experience there put everything else in perspective. She thought of Bill Wolper. How could she think he was going to save her?

Or that Jeffrey would always protect her? What had been Coco’s advice?

All men were pimps. How had she forgotten that? But, “Oh God, Dee.

What if the NormCo deal is done?”

Defina smiled for the first time that day. “Well, Cleo, when it comes to papyrus, I got some good news for you.” She smiled and produced a handful of pink message slips. “Your boyfriend Bill has been calling.

I took one call. He’s very eager to talk to you. But personally, I don’t think it’s about a date. I think it’s about this.” Defina reached under the counter and pulled out a thick stack of legal documents. “Taa-da!” she said with a flourish, and fanned the contracts out on the Formica.

“I got Robertthe-lawyer so paranoid that he sent all the copies back.

This must be the first time a Lenox Avenue black girl got the better of a white Park Avenue lawyer,” Dee laughed. “What do you want to do with them?”

“Shred em,” Karen told her.

“You sure you don’t want to go up to Madame Renault’s? She could burn em. With a little extra help, some related parties might feel burned as well.”

“Forget about it. If I’m going to stick pins into people, I’ll do it with my own hands and not by proxy.”

“Well, if you don’t do this deal, Jeffrey and Lisa are going to be punished for sure. They’re counting on this money. So is your mother.

Not to mention Mercedes.”

Karen nodded, silent. “What about you?”

“I’ll be fine. Tangela’s treatment is covered by insurance, I got money in the bank, and all the clothes I can steal.” She smiled, wickedly. “By the way, I had Mrs. Cruz cut me one of the wedding gown styles in size fourteen. I used the brown alpaca. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Jesus! How many yards of alpaca did it take? Jeffrey will have a fit.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Defina warbled. “I don’t think he’s gonna be in charge of inventory anymore!” Then she watched as the tears again began to roll down Karen’s cheeks. “Sorry,” she said as she handed Karen a napkin. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Karen said. “I honestly don’t know.”

Karen hit her apartment like a tornado. If there was anythingţanything, goddamnitţof Lisa’s there she would burn the fucking place down. She would also find any other evidence of this betrayal.

And she’d be damned if she’d spend another minute in a place full of Jeffrey’s things.

When she left Defina she had thought first of going to a hotelţjust checking into the Royalton and waiting to see what happened. But as her anger overcame her shock she changed her mind. She told the cab to take her to the West Side and she had thrown open the door to her place with such force that the walls had shaken.

Sitting on the demilune table was an enormous vase of lilies. Karen moved toward them, mesmerized. From halfway across the room, their scent was strong, and as she got closer it was almost overpowering.

The petals were the palest gold. She reached out to touch one, and the smoothness and color of the petal’s flesh reminded her of the baby’s skin, back at the hospital in the Mananas. Where was that baby now?

A card lay on the tabletop. It was embossed with the double W of Bill’s personal stationery. Without even touching it, she went to the phone and called for a car. “I have a pick-up,” she explained to the dispatcher.

“Flowers to be taken to the maternity ward at Doctors’ Hospital.” Then she took out a card, addressed it to Cyndi, and scrawled a message. ” You ve done the right thing. All yourbills will be paid. Love to you and your son, from Karen.” She called the doorman and had the porter take the flowers away. Then she turned to the painting over the sofa.

She got Ernest’s favorite kitchen knife and slashed Jetfrey’s canvas fifty or sixty times. She knew that she had to start being honest with herself now. No more denial. And the truth was, Jeffrey couldn’t paint.

Maybe he had a flair, maybe he’d had some talent once, but it was slight and long gone. Perry was the talented one.

The painting was a mass of ribbons before she was done. It felt good, but it was only a start. Karen strode into their bedroom and opened Jeffrey’s closet. She pulled out the cashmeres, the melton wool blazers, the alpaca overcoat, the Armani suits, and slashed and hacked and tore away at all of them. Buttons flew across the room, pinging oft the floor like bullets. She, who had always worshiped clothes, destroyed them.

She couldn’t think at first what to do with his shoes. It was not enough to cut the laces, so she filled the bathtub and dropped them in: one by one, she threw in the immaculate Gucci loafers, the butter-soft Cole Han’s, the handmade English brogues. Each of them floated for a moment on the top of the water and then slowly sank to the bottom.

The ties were easy: she merely snipped them in half with her pinking shears. She liked that effect, the pinked sawtooth ending. Maybe she could start a trend in men’s wear. She opened Jetfrey’s bureau and took out dozens of his folded, boxed, and starched shirts. He had always been very particular about his shirts. The pinking shears were good on them, too. On some she simply cut off a sleeve. On others she settled for collar and cutfs. In ten minutes she had enough collars and cuffs to outfit an entire hutch of Playboy bunnies. Karen looked around the room.

It was piled high with the torn bodies from the massacre. She thought for a moment of setting fire to it all but she wasn’t that crazy.

Instead, she went into the kitchen and brought out the Clorox bottle that Ernest stored there. Karen poured the bleach liberally all over the piles of clothing. It was interesting to see the flowers and clouds that bloomed across the fabrics. Rather like a Rorschach.

Maybe Jeffrey and Lisa could have a new game to play together: What does this bleach stain look like?

The phone began to ring, but she ignored it. Who would it be? Jeffrey with an apology? Or perhaps it was Lisa? What would Lisa have to say?

Orţ just maybeţit was another pregnant woman calling Karen to break her heart. Too late. It was already broken. No sale. The answering machine took the call. Bill Wolper’s voice came on following the beep.

Karen almost smiled. If he hadn’t had his secretary make the call, this was important. “Karen, this is Bill. There seems to have been some misunderstanding that I would like to clear up. I’m confused, and I think you might be, too. I’ll be at … ” Too bad. She already knew where he was at. She turned down the volume.

Next Karen started methodically going through the top drawer of Jeffrey’s bureau. The socks, carefully rolled into balls, were easyţshe chucked them out the window. My God, the man must have had fifty pairs of socks!

Well, not any more! Then she opened his jewelry box. There were the sapphire studs and cuff links she had given him. Exactly the color of his eyes. Her own eyes teared up for a moment, but that didn’t stop her. She went to the kitchen and got the hammer out from under the sink, along with the cutting board. She returned to the bedroom and laid the board on top of the bureau, poured the beautiful sapphires onto it, and pounded them to dust. Eighteen thousand dollars worth of dust. It probably wasn’t as satisfying as pounding Jeffrey’s actual eyes out, but it would have to do. In fact, it was quite addictive, and so she pounded the rest of his jewelry until her hand got tired.

In fact, Karen suddenly felt more tired than she ever had in her life.

She wondered if she would have the strength to move at all. At last, with a boneweariness, she managed to make her way through the debris to the guest bedroom. There she fell down heavily onto one corner of the bed.

Her marriage, her home, her family, her work. It all seemed such a failure, so hopeless, so false, so stupid. Hadn’t Defina warned her?

No woman could keep track of it all. Perhaps Jeffrey had once loved her, but if he still did, his love was adulterated with rageţand she hadn’t even suspected. And Lisaţwell, who could tell what Lisa felt about anything? But certainly she was no best friend to Karen.

So that left her a career of making expensive clothes for women who didn’t need them, with an opportunity to expand into slave labor and feed American women’s addiction to “bargains.” Was that what she had struggled for? All the fuss, the work, the hours, the travel, had added up to a sellout to Bill Wolper, the opportunity to put a lot of money in her pension fund, and her name on every rag that NormCo turned out.

She lay inert, too miserable to move, too tired to think of a plan. Up to now there had always been a plan, a next step, a scheme. Marry Jeffrey. Buy an apartment. Start a business, build a house, have a baby, find her mother, sell the business. Always some next step, some achievement or acquisition to focus on.

Now there was none. She’d lived half her life, maybe more, and she’d run out of plans, she’d run out of energy, and she’d run out of love.

Karen closed her eyes.

When she awoke, Jeffrey was standing in front of her. She smiled sleepily. Was she dreaming? Then, painful as a brick falling on her head, she remembered everything.

She scrambled up.

Jeffrey was holding out a Chesterfield coat. It was once a navy blue cashmere with a black velvet collar, but now it had a sort of whitish-gray line of bleach flowers blooming across it and the knife slits on the back made it gap crazily.

“What have you done?” Jeffrey asked.

Karen laughed. “Isn’t that my line?”

“You’ve gone crazy!” he said.

“There you go: taking my line again.”

“Do you know how much damage you just did?”

“Jeffrey, you’ve got the right script but you’re reading the wrong part. We are not going to have an argument about your wardrobe. I don’t give a fuck about your wardrobe! I think I made that very obvious. We are going to talk about what you were doing in bed in Perry’s loft with my sister.”

“Karen, you’re overreacting.” Karen stood absolutely still. She could hardly believe her ears. Always, when they augued, Jeffrey had the upper hand. Jeffrey always kept himself under control while she lost it. Then he would focus the argument on her bad behavior. Did he actually think he could pull that shit now? Tell her she was being oversensitive? Ask her if she was premenstrual? Act as if she were crazy?

“Overreacting? OVERREACTING? My husband was fucking my sister. So far I think my reactions are perfectly normal for a woman in that situation.

They’ve done studies of it, Jeffrey. I looked it up in the library.

This is absolutely normal behavior for a woman in my position . So, I deserve to know a few things.”

Jeffrey turned his head away, took a deep breath, and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He dropped the coat to the floor and crossed his arms over his chest. “What?” he asked.

“Did you fuck up the adoption with Cyndi on purpose? Did you make her think we shouldn’t get her baby?”

“No,” he said. “I was nice to her. Sally thinks that once she saw the baby she would have pulled out no matter who she was with. It happens.”

“Okay. I don’t know if I believe you, but okay. Second question: Did you know about the NormCo blood money?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you know about the Mananas?”

“No. I’m still not sure what you’re tallcing about. Bill called.

There’s been a big mistake. You’ve gotten the wrong idea. This is business, Karen, not some fuzzy liberal charity program. He wants to talk to you.”

“Forget about it. Just answer the question. We’re talking blood money here. We’re talking indentured servitude and the worst kind of exploitation. Did you know Arnold was right?”

“If I’d known, would I have let you go there?”

Karen considered it. He was right. He probably wouldn’t have let her find out if he could help it. But wasn’t that a worse admission than his ignorance? She looked at the man she had married. “Last question: Why Lisa?” her.

Her husband shrugged. “Because she was there,” he sighed.

“What? Like Everest? Who are you, Sir Edmund Hillary?”

“Karen, I’m really sorry. It just happened. It was wrong. It was really wrong. What do you want from me now?”

Karen paused and really thought about it. “I want you to go. Leave me alone.”

“Where can I go?”

“I don’t care where you go, Jeffrey. Go to hell.”

He paused. “Can I call you?”

“No.”

He walked to the door. “I’m really sorry, Karen,” he said, and then he left

Karen sat in her chair behind the worktable in her office. Her door was closed. It was important for her now to feel she had some place, some things that belonged only to her. She felt as if, after all these years of working, this was the only space that she actually owned. She couldn’t go home until Jeffrey was out of the apartment.

And she couldn’t leave her offlce and go out onto the selling floor or the workroom because she was falling apart. Plus, if she stuck her nose outside the door, she would have to tell everyone that the NormCo deal was over. Janet had stopped bothering to give her the messages that Bill Wolper continued to leave. Only he, Jeffrey, and Defina knew that the deal was kaput. Jeffrey was raging. Karen could just imagine Mercedes’s reaction when she found out. And they wouldn’t be the only ones to be pissed. Robertthe-lawyer would have a stroke, Janet wouldn’t be able to make a down payment on her house, Arnold and Belle would have nothing to retire on, and God knows how Mrs. Cruz and the other women in the workroom would take it. Disappointment was difficult to deal with.