Fashionistas (16 page)

M
aya is like Typhoid Mary.

She’s being very careful—washing her hands regularly and keeping her hands out of her eyes—but she is still highly contagious and there’s no telling how many co-workers she’s infected.

“I don’t think any,” she says defensively. She’s sitting on her couch with a cold, wet towel over her right eye. The left one is staring at me, red and drippy.

I’m here at Maya’s request. She wants to practice pitching article ideas, but I’m a reluctant, unenthusiastic sounding board. The A to Z Guide to Antioxidants bores me and I quickly change the topic.

“You touch everything,” I remind her. Copy is the center of trafficking. Everything passes through her hands. Every layout and article goes through her infected fingers and flirts with conjunctivitis. It’s inevitable that someone catch it. That’s why they make you stay home from elementary school when you come down with it in third grade.

“I told you, I kept my hands clean. I must have been in
that bathroom like sixty times today.” She sits up and the cold compress slips off to reveal a second infected eye. This one is worse off. It’s so puffy and swollen that it can barely see my disapproval. “I was in there so often I thought about bringing my chair and pencils in and setting up shop next to the sinks.”

“You should stay home then,” I say, the voice of reason. “By the end of the week there could be a dozen cases of pinkeye. Then how will you feel?”

“I can’t afford to take a day off. You know that.”

This is true. When you freelance there is nothing to protect you from yourself. There’s no social safety net and you don’t stay home for anything less than scarlet fever or rubella. “I hope you’re at least going to the doctor.” From her look, I can tell she’s already raised and dismissed this option. “Maya,” I say, outraged on behalf of a dozen magazine editors whose eyes will soon be red and puffy.

She glares at me with her demon eyes. “I looked it up on the Web. It’ll clear up on its own.”

“Really?” I’m doubtful.

“Yes. It’s a viral infection.”

“How long?”

She is absentmindedly playing with the fringe on a throw with her infected fingers, and she will now have to either wash the pillow or burn it like the velveteen rabbit. “Only four weeks,” she mumbles.

The idea of Maya walking around Manhattan looking like a monster that escaped off a B-movie lot for four weeks makes me laugh. “Call the doctor. You might as well get it over with.” Maya is reluctant because her health insurance, with its very large deductible, doesn’t help with everyday scrapes and bruises. It’s for when her appendix bursts or her kidneys fail or when she tears her anterior cruciate ligament in a skiing accident. “An office visit will run you a hundred bucks. A hundred bucks to alleviate suffering is a small price to pay. Plus, you owe it to your co-workers.”

She grumbles a few words that I don’t understand. I consider moving closer, but I don’t want to run the risk of touching anything she’s touched. “What?”

“My co-workers—ha!” she says forcefully. “Think about it. I don’t know where I got this thing from. I haven’t been anywhere except to the office.”

This isn’t quite true. Today is only Tuesday and she’s had a whole weekend to pick up alien germs. I raise my hand to make this point, but Maya isn’t taking comments.

“I probably got it there. I had to have gotten it there. You’re so concerned about saving my co-workers from me and, for all I know, I got it from one of them. Yes, I bet that’s what happened.” She is warming to her argument now. “One of the editors has pinkeye and, instead of washing her hands and keeping them out of her eye and going to the doctor, she’s been passing it along with little respect for human life. Tomorrow I’m going to hunt down the culprit and when I do….” Maya pauses, coughs and looks slightly abashed. “That’s funny.”

“What?”

“I didn’t realize I was so susceptible to mob rule.”

“A mob of one,” I point out.

“Yeah, but if I can get myself so worked up, imagine how easily a passionate speaker and a dozen angry barefooted peasants holding scythes could do it.” She looks disturbed by the idea, as if she just realized she would have been the first person to light a match in Salem.

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“Am I?” She tries to raise an arch eyebrow, but her ocular movements are impeded by the conjunctivitis. A thick mucus tear falls.

“God, I can’t believe they haven’t noticed. The copy chief or the managing editor should have sent you home.”

Maya shrugs. “I work with strangers. Nobody looks at me. Half of them don’t even know my name, even though it’s written on every piece of paper I distribute. They stand behind me and say, ‘hey, hey’ until I turn around.”

“Still, your eyes are freakishly red.”

“It’s not so obvious with my glasses on.” She demonstrates.

The difference is minimal. Like Superman to Clark Kent. “How can’t they notice?”

“Vig, I could go in with a hunchback and horns and nobody would notice. I work with strangers,” she says, sounding wise and old like the village shaman.

P
ieter van Kessel is tall and wiry and towers over everything around him. He’s like the Sagrada Familia church rising over Barcelona and you suddenly feel like a two-story hacienda. His face, though gaunt almost to the point of hollowness, is handsome. He has dark brown eyes, the sort that stare at you steadily and seldom blink, and wears a neatly trimmed Vandyke, as if somehow compelled to wear his homeland on his chin.

“This is what I’m working on now,” he says, showing me some sketches with his signature ruffles. Even though I wouldn’t recognize a Dutch accent if it spit in my face, he speaks without a trace of one. He has no accent at all, like a Canadian, only without the revealing “aboats” and “ehs.”

The interview with van Kessel was ridiculously easy to set up. Because she didn’t want to talk with her mother, Jackie provided me with all her mom’s coordinates—work, home, car, cell—and let me arrange everything. I was happy to remove another person from the equation, especially one as
needy as Jackie. Madame Guilbert was glad to help out and called her friend Hans on my behalf. Hans then called me, delighted by the prospect of appearing in
Fashionista
magazine—clearly he has never read it—and eager to set up a time for me to come by.

Hans is standing over my shoulder now, pointing out the brilliant details of van Kessel’s designs, which their creator is hesitant to do, either from modesty or a fear of appearing immodest. There are two other people in the room—Dezi Conran, a petite woman with agile fingers who is rapidly sewing a skirt, and van Kessel’s wife.

We are in the basement of a Lower East Side apartment building. We’re right across the street from the tenement museum, where they bring you inside and show you the tiny quarters in which a family of ten lived at the turn of the last century. Not much has changed in a hundred years. This space isn’t much larger, and although only van Kessel and his wife officially live here, Dezi and Hans and seven plastic mannequins rarely leave. It feels very crowded.

After hours of poring over fabrics and drawings and stitches and his ideas for the next collection, I suggest we return to the surface for a bite to eat. Outside the mercury has been steadily rising and with it the temperature in the basement. Sweat is pooling in the small of my back and around my collarbone.

Pieter picks a restaurant that is nearby, a dinerlike place that is always packed on nights and weekends. On a hot August afternoon at three o’clock, its booths are empty and the host seats us with an absent smile. Techno music is playing in the background, just below loud.

“If the next show goes well, we’re going to need to find a backer,” Hans says after we order, “but it will have to be someone we all trust, someone who’s not going to use inferior-quality fabrics and will give Pieter creative control.”

Pieter smiles demurely, his modesty with us at the table. “There is no need to jump ahead of ourselves. We’ll see how
the November show goes and then, if it’s necessary, we’ll worry about backers.”

Before you can get the windows at Barney’s, you need to find a financier who will invest in you. Only then will you be able to manufacture your designs, put them in department stores and sell to fashionistas. This is how you build a label.

The waitress comes by to take our order but I barely spare her a glance. I’m too busy scribbling illegibly in my notebook, which I’ve already filled with sketches from the Met and telephone interviews with van Kessel’s former co-workers. When she persists, I tell her to bring me a hamburger.

When the waitress leaves, I ask if anyone has shown interest yet, and while Pieter is shaking his head, Hans jumps in and talks about the nibbles they’ve gotten. Everything is dependent on recognition. If they can get press and buyers to come to their next show, then they’ll be able to create demand for his product.

Hans drops a few names of investment groups and, listening to him, I feel of fissure of excitement. This—Pieter, Hans, the mouthwatering clothes—is going somewhere. It’s going places and here I am, in at the ground floor before the elevator even moves. In three months or six months, van Kessel will be a name fashion people recognize and talk about. In a year he’ll be manufacturing dresses and selling them at Bergdorf’s. This is my story and I don’t want to lose it.
Fashionista
isn’t usually interested in designers unless someone famous is wearing them, but I refuse to be discouraged by reality just yet. I will draw up a proposal and submit it to Marguerite. Already ideas are flying like butterflies through my head. I will do a piece on them now and then another one in twelve months. I will explore the effects of success on a designer and the people around him.

By the time I leave them two hours later, I can barely contain myself. I’m composing sentences in my head and dreaming of outlandish things. I don’t just want to chart Pieter van
Kessel’s experiences for a year, I want to chart them forever. I want to write a one-year-later piece ever year, like they do with sextuplets and in those Michael Apted documentaries.

D
elia comes over to my desk to assure me that I have her full cooperation.

“Alex filled me in on your plan,” she announces loudly, not at all concerned by the possibility that the walls—or the thumbtack boards—have ears, “and I want you to know that I’m ready to serve the cause if there is anything you need me to do.”

I raise my hand and indicate that her first assignment is to lower her voice. Even though Allison is at her desk talking about braised lamb (“That’s exactly what I thought. I assumed I wouldn’t like it, either. You should try it, though—delish!”) I don’t want to take a chance that she’s listening. The last thing I need is for Allison to hear someone calling her plan my plan.

“Let’s talk outside,” I whisper, looking around to make sure Kate and Sarah are not nearby. “Come on.”

She follows me silently through the office. I can tell that she’s bursting to talk about it, and the second we get in the elevator she opens her mouth to speak. I cut her off with a severe shake of my head.

“Sorry to go all 007 on you in there, but I’ve always suspected that the elevators are bugged,” I say, once we’re outside in the bright sunshine. We sit down at the fountain in front of our building with hundreds of other working stiffs in their suits and ties.

“Don’t ever apologize for being too cautious,” says the woman who has spent the past two years successfully hiding things from everyone she works with. “A) There’s no such thing as too much caution. B) I don’t know if those guards in the lobby can hear but they can certainly see. I once took my stockings off during the ride down, and when I got out on the first floor I got a few wolf whistles.”

“Why not use the bathroom?” The man next to me is eating a pungent tuna sandwich and I lean back to breathe in the fresh scent of chlorine, practically throwing myself into the water. The Ivy Publishing fountain doesn’t do any tricks. It doesn’t have a statue or a waterfall or intense dramatic lighting that makes it look like more than a reflecting pool gone awry. It’s only at Christmas when they turn off its three halfhearted jets, drain the pool and put up a large tree that the space has any charm.

“It’s more efficient,” she says, untroubled by the smell of warm, rotting fish. “I try to multitask whenever possible, although sometimes outside factors make it impossible.”

Delia doesn’t look like a fashionista. Her clothes are neat, practical and affordable—light blue knee-length skirt from the Gap, dark blue cotton tee from Bradlee’s—and they lack a sense of au courant catch-up. She bothers with very little makeup and wears the long, thick strands of her dark hair tied back in a French braid. She always carries a boxy leather briefcase that looks like the sort your parents buy you when you get your M.B.A. It even has her initials engraved in Helvetica on the gold-plated clasp. Everything about Delia shouts no-nonsense and efficient, and she seems like just the type of person who would take her panty hose off in the elevator to save time. I’m surprised she let the wolf whistles stop her.

Before getting down to business, I do a quick reconnoiter of the area, swiveling my head toward the tuna and away again, to make sure there are no magazine people eating lunch or smoking cigarettes. I see no familiar faces. “So Alex told you about the plan?” I ask, keeping my voice low. There is no reason to be careless. We are right in front of the building and Jane or Allison or Marguerite could walk by at any moment.

“Yes, and I think it’s brilliant. I think you’re brilliant,” she gushes, although it really isn’t gushing, because Delia is incapable of effusiveness.

“It’s not my plan,” I say, because I don’t want to take credit for things I haven’t done. “It’s Allison’s plan. They just brought me on board to help out.”

Delia is not listening to a word I say. She’s digging into her shoulder bag and extracting an accordion file. She hands it to me. “Here.”

The file is thick and heavy, and since I’m not prepared for the weight, I almost drop it. “What’s this?”

“It’s my file on Jane,” she says, mouthing the last word.

This is not what I’m expecting. “You have a file on Jane?”

She looks at me with perplexed eyes through horn-rimmed glasses. “I have a file on everyone.”

“You have a file on everyone?”

“Yes,” she says, as if this weren’t something that just the FBI did. “I have a file on everyone.”

“You have a file on me?”

“Well, yes.”

“You have a file on Carter?” Carter delivers the mail and fixes the coffee machine when it starts dripping cold water.

“Of course.”

I stare at her, trying to absorb this information. It’s not the idea of Delia Barker with her lightning-quick reflexes jotting down bits and pieces of my life in her Nancy Drew notebook that bothers me. It’s something else entirely. Not only is she doing her job and Keller’s job, she’s also doing J. Edgar
Hoover’s job and the work of a small team of crack special agents. She’s an overachiever in the classic mold and, watching her as she smoothes imaginary wrinkles out of her pristine skirt, I wonder what I’m doing in the magazine business at all. I don’t have this drive or this determination or even this level of interest.

“You have files on everyone, including me and Carter?” I ask again, just to make sure I understand the situation clearly. She nods. “If I give you my complete name and a notarized signature, can I get a copy of my file?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you obligated to under the Freedom of Information act?”

Delia smiles. “The Freedom of Information act only applies to government agencies. I’m a private citizen.”

I try another tactic. “I’ll show you yours, if you show me mine.” Although I don’t know what a file should contain, I’m reasonably confident I could pull together a fairly inaccurate one by the end of the day.

She isn’t interested in making deals and ignores my suggestion. “I’ve only just started a file on Marguerite and will get that to you ASAP. My general rule is to wait two months and then compile information. I don’t have time to make files on everyone and had to draw the line somewhere,” she says with a shrug, as if apologizing to all those people whose privacy she couldn’t be bothered to invade. “It was the most practical solution. However, given the circumstance I believe making an exception for Marguerite is the most logical course of action.”

“Of course,” I say, as if the most practical solution weren’t not to have files on all your co-workers. I open the accordion folder and withdraw a stack of papers. They are mostly photocopies and tear sheets from other magazines. I flip through the pile, pausing intermittently to scan headlines. There is enough reading here to keep me occupied for a week. I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed.

“The information is arranged in chronological order, starting with the minutes of our first one-on-one meeting. I don’t know if there’s anything useful in there but I wanted to give it to you just in case.” She laughs a little giddily and rubs more imaginary wrinkles out of her skirt. “This is so exciting. Really, if you need my help in any way, don’t hesitate to call.”

“All right.” I consider telling her again that the scheme isn’t mine, it’s Allison, Kate and Sarah’s but I don’t. I don’t want her to feel she entrusted Jane’s file with the wrong fashionista. “Thank you again for all this information. I’ll be very careful with it. No spilling coffee all over everything.”

“That’s just a copy. The originals are in my apartment.” She glances at her watch and stands up. “I’ve got to go. ‘Alex’—” she makes exaggerated quotation marks with her fingers “—has a conference call with some West Coast publicists in ten minutes.”

Although the man with the smelly tuna has finally left and the day is suddenly beautiful and inviting, I get up as well. “How do you do that?”

“What?” she asks.

“Be Alex without anyone getting suspicious.”

She laughs. “It’s all him. He’s a perfect darling about being an absolute monster to everyone. Nobody ever wants to talk to him and when I tell them that he can’t make the meeting and sent me to represent him, there’s always a sigh of relief. Nobody questions it,” she says, as the light dings on the elevator.

We get in and, even though we are the only ones here, we fall silent. You can never be too cautious.