Play Dates (43 page)

He’s kicking me in the ass to turn my
Mi
♥
amore
concept into

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Leslie Carroll

reality—and—
da-dummm
!” She drums her fingers on the table.

“Owen’s made a capital investment in the project!”

“Brava!” I cheer, brimming with happiness for her. We clink glasses.

“That’s fantastic! Congratulations, Mia,” Dennis adds.

“And, Claire, I’d like to extend my financial participation to another family venture,” Owen says. “Mia thinks the world of your jewelry designs and told me you’re already establishing an elite clientele.”

“Yes, my burgeoning cottage industry,” I chuckle. “Private-school moms seem to like my designs.”

Owen raises his glass to me. “It’s a good start, Claire. You may not be taking yourself seriously, but it’s an
excellent
start. Those women have money, taste, and influence. And anytime you want to set up a meeting to talk with me, my checkbook is open.”

I feel my cheeks flush and my eyes begin to water. “Oh . . .

oh, my God. I . . . I feel like Cinderella. Thank you.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mia tells me. “And you’re
not
a charity case, and Owen is willing to make an investment in Claire Marsh Originals not because we’re sharing a bed and I make him very happy. So get over that, in case you’re hung up on it. Not the bed part, the charity part. You’ve got talent, a small core of clients even now, and an entré at Barneys when you’re ready. That’s not totally small potatoes.”

I swirl my wine in the goblet. “So,” I say, a bit giddy about all this, “my God, we’re about to plant our own flags on the beauty planet. Who would have guessed that both of us would be
so
taking after Mommy?” I chuckle.

“Well, in some ways, anyway.” Mia looks at our guys. “In other respects, she got it right the first time. Its taken us a lot longer to find our One True Love.”

Chapter 23

Why the hell did I say I’d do this?! Backstage at a fashion show is a fucking three-ring circus. And this afternoon, I mean it literally. Lucky Sixpence’s fall “Big Top” collection (so named because of the trapeze silhouette of most of the garments) is being paraded at Madison Square Garden.

When Lucky found out that the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey people would permit her to stage her fashion show on their circus set, her dream venue for this collection, she was in seventh heaven.

Zoë’s been bugging me for ages to take her to a show, and Lucky Sixpence is kind of like a big kid herself—most times she looks like a cross between a live Raggedy Ann doll and a clown, so I figured this gig would be the most child-friendly one on my schedule. Two more pluses are that Lucky’s a personal friend—whereas my other clients aren’t—in fact Zoë met her at my birthday party, and Lucky loves the idea of little girls being into dress-up. “You’re reaaallly tall for a girl!”

she’d told Lucky. It was not the time to explain trans-gendering.

It was kind of weird getting to the backstage area. The whole maze of hallways below the Garden’s arena smelled like anything

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but
. More like fertilizer, since that’s where they house all the circus animals during the Ringling Bros. run.

“It smells like poopy in here,” Zoë remarked. “I don’t want my sandwich anymore because it’s going to smell like poopy, too.”

She clutched a brown bag in which Claire had packed her lunch since I told her there was no way I would get a break to feed Zoë.

“Yup, it’s animal poopy from the circus,” I told her. “But it won’t smell like that upstairs where they’ll have the fashion show.” I lied. You can’t really get the smell of lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!), as well as elephants, out of the building until the circus packs up and leaves town. Months ago, when she’d set this gig up, I’d asked Lucky if she was sure she wanted to go through with it. “Buyers will gag,” I warned her. She pooh-poohed me and said they’d be having too much fun to care. And she reasoned that her models, even the plus-size ones, who are a lot svelter than real plus-size chicks, never eat anyway, so they’d have nothing to puke in case the faint stench of manure got to them.

One of the large dressing rooms was set up for makeup. At least I had professional lighting ringing the mirrors. I was afraid there’d be fluorescents down here, which would have been a nightmare.

Lucky and I had a final powwow about the look she was going for. She wanted lots of bold color. Real glitter on the eyes and cheekbones, and lips as slick as red patent leather.

Most of her models are larger chicks. Because that’s Lucky’s clientele; size fourteen and up. “Larger” is a relative thing, though. Lucky’s plus-size models wear a twelve. That’s
normal
in
real life
. She does have a few girls, though, who are the usual sticks, like Dalit, a real sabra—Lucky calls her “True Grit”—and Yelena, a platinum blonde Ukrainian who speaks only two words of English: “Diet Coke.” Her mother follows her everywhere to translate everything else. Actually, last time I saw Yelena was at PLAY DATES

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another show and she had learned three more words of American: “Marlboro Light, please.”

Lucky hired ten girls for the show, Yelena, Dalit, and eight plus-sizes. I explained to Zoë that each of them would model a dozen outfits on the catwalk, which in today’s case, is the rim of the center circus ring, specially widened for the fashion show. Zoë will get to see it all from the front row. The plan is for Lucky to send down two girls at once, one heading clockwise, one counter, and they’ll meet in the middle at “six o’clock,” stop, pose, and finish the circle, passing one another until they both meet again at “midnight” and dash offstage to change into their next outfits.

“What if they bump into each other and fall into the sawdust?”

Zoë asked.

“Let’s hope they don’t!” I said. “All of these shows are timed with split-second precision,” I told her. “And all hell always breaks loose, no matter how carefully choreographed you get.”

“What if they put on the wrong thing?” she wanted to know.

“Well, that could happen by mistake, but to try to prevent that, they take pictures in advance, so each of the models knows what she’s supposed to wear in what order.” I showed her how the Polaroids of each girl in every one of her outfits are taped to the cinder-block wall. The outfits are numbered and arranged in order on a rack so the girl can find them right away; and the dressers, who are as fast as any Indy 500 pit crew, can strip them of what they’ve got on and slap on the next getup.

“Why is it called a ‘catwalk’?”

“I don’t know, Zoë.”

“Can you find out?”

“Yes, I’ll find out. But not today, okay?”

What I did find was a folding chair for Zoë, placed it right by my makeup chair, and asked her to stay there, sit still, and watch. Gently, I warned her not to get up and run around because things would get really hectic and she could not be un-

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derfoot. Although I frequently work solo, for a large show like this I hire assistants. So I assigned my two elves to various girls, to start working on their foundations. Once base was blended and applied to every face, I’d talk to them about how and where—and what—colors I wanted on their eyes, lips, and cheekbones. I was short one elf this afternoon. Who the fuck knew where she was? She’d never even bothered to call. I hate that. I seethe just thinking about it. So many kids want to get into fashion for the glitz and the strobes, but they haven’t a fucking clue how to act like a responsible employee. I always want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and say, “This is a
real job
, folks! Either
do it
, or get out of here and go play with your trust fund.”

I hadn’t been working on the first face for ten minutes when there was a catfight. They work the same shows all the time so you’d think they could deal with it, but there’s no love lost between Yelena and Dalit. The mutual malice is a cultural thing.

Dalit thinks Yelena is a provincial anti-Semite; Yelena thinks Dalit is an arrogant Jew. Unfortunately, they’re both right. And just then they were both giving Antonio, the lead hair stylist, heart palpitations, tearing at each other’s coiffures like a couple of junior high schoolers.

“They’re naked!” Zoë exclaimed.

Did I mention that models do tend to run around naked backstage? Nobody blinks. It’s a booty call that no one hears. Given the demographics of fashion show personnel, no one cares that your usually nonexistent tits and scrawny butt are hanging out.

Actually, Lucky’s girls are often better looking in the buff than most models, because they have some meat on them. But Dalit and Yelena are your average human clothes hangers.

“Why are they fighting?” Zoë asked me. She was totally fascinated by these two nude foreigners trying to claw each other to death.

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It was an incredibly vocal display, though none of us understood any of it.

Then two of the plus-size girls got into it, trying to pull Dalit and Yelena apart. The whole room stopped to watch. It was like a bunch of six-foot-tall Powerpuff Girls kicking bare butt.

Yelena’s mother had just joined the action, whacking away at Dalit’s back with her purse, when Lucky entered the makeup room. “What the fuck is happening?” she demanded. “Girls, girls, please!” She clapped her large hands together like a grammar-school teacher outgunned at a playground brawl: an outrageous-looking Miss Jean Brodie whose charges have dis-obeyed her.

Zoë pointed to Lucky. “MiMi, she said the F-word!”

“She’s gonna say a lot worse if they don’t cut it out,” I told her.

“I thought you wanted to watch me do Delilah’s face?”

“I do.” I started to apply traffic-light green glitter to the model’s eyelids. “That’s pretty. She looks like a fairy. Will you do
my
face, too?”

“Not today, Zoë. What I’m doing today can be a lot of fun, but it’s still my job. So even though it’s a treat for
me
that you’re here this afternoon, I have to work, okay? I’ll do your face, I promise, but it will have to be at my house.”

My niece didn’t look too thrilled. But there’s not much I could do about it. By now Dalit and Yelena had been separated and had gone off to sulk in two different corners of the room. “So what the hell was that about?” I asked Lucky.

“Dalit stole Yelena’s boyfriend and Yelena called her a slut,”

Lucky said, savoring the words like a juicy mango.

“She called her a slut? Yelena speaks no English!”

Lucky, though pissed off at the girls’ unprofessional behavior, couldn’t resist dishing. “
Dalit
speaks
Russian
, darling,” she trilled in her Scottish burr. “Along with five or six other languages. And she understands the word ‘slut’ in all of them.”

“What’s a slut?” Zoë asked.

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“A bad word,” I told her.

“What kind of bad word?”

“One you don’t need to learn for another ten years.”

“Mommy always tells me what words mean when I ask her.”

I tried not to let on that I was getting fed up with her constant barrage of questions, and needed to focus. “Zoë, sweetie, MiMi really needs to work now. Are you hungry? Do you want to eat some of your lunch?”

“No,” she said, a bit grumpy.

I knew this hadn’t been a great idea to begin with.

“I’m bored,” she said after about another fifteen minutes.

She’d seen me finish three faces and supervise my assistants through three more.

The pace was picking up backstage. Runners with racks were getting the garments rolled into place. Lucky’s fall collection embraced color with ferocity. “Paisley is the new Black,” she’d proclaimed in
W
magazine last month, sending the department stores’ top buyers into a tizzy. “New York is just an itty-bitty island,” she’d continued boldly, in a pronouncement that threatened to alienate Seventh Avenue. “Darlings, the
rest
of America craves color and pattern. Joy, people! They want Joy!” On the hangers, her clothes looked like Holly Hobbie meets Romanian gypsy, with a dash of Audrey Hepburn thrown in for shits and giggles. The tops and dresses, throwbacks to the seventies, were paired with peg-leg pants in solid brights and jewel tones in every fabric from panné stretch velvet to Thai silk to denim.

With about an hour to go before showtime, Lucky Sixpence began to suffer her usual case of the jitters.

“I’m breaking out in hives, people!” she announced in a ringing singsong. “It’s too dead back here; you’re making me nervous. Let me see some
energy
!” She cranked up the sound on the backstage stereo equipment. I love loud music but I wasn’t in the mood. Of the two assistants who
had
shown up to work with me today, one had become, uncharacteristically, all PLAY DATES

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thumbs, and I had to redo everything she’d done. My other elf was doing a fine job, but was slow as hell, which meant I’d have to finish his faces, too, or the girls would never make it to the catwalk on time.

It’s not easy to be ten places at once.

“See, Zoë, here’s a lesson you won’t learn in school. From the outside, fashion shows look very glamorous, but it’s not like that behind the scenes, right?” I was focused on fixing a face, so I didn’t hear her answer. “Right, Zoë?” I asked again.

I looked up when she didn’t respond the second time.

The folding chair was empty.

“Zoë!” I looked around the room and didn’t see her. “Hey, has anybody seen my niece?!” I yelled. My stomach acid shot up into my throat; I had a sour taste in my mouth. “Yo, people!” No one could hear a fucking thing over the pounding hip-hop blasting out of the speakers. I located the stereo and turned it off.

“Hey!” Lucky said. “We need that!”

“Hey, yourself. I need just two seconds of quiet. Look, folks, has anybody seen my niece, Zoë? Little blonde girl—you all met her an hour or so ago? Is she in here?”