I never knew quite where I stood with him, but I did know that I was falling in love with him. I even knew the exact moment it happened.
He was leaving my house one morning when my neighbor’s dog slipped her leash and lunged at him. Tanisha was yelling for the dog to stop and Agravain, Gareth’s brother and another member of our security team, was half-way up my steps with a can of pepper spray already outstretched. “She won’t hurt him,” Tanisha yelled but I could feel Agravain was already to blast the dog anyway when Artie reached out to embrace the animal, kind of scruffing her fur as she wriggled in ecstasy.
“If that’s not just like a bitch,” Agravain said, because he was that kind of guy.
“What’s her name?” Artie asked Tani.
“Makeda.”
Artie grinned at her, then looked down at the dog. “So, you’re the Queen of Sheba,” he said. “Nice to meet you.” I melted then, and from the looks of Tani, she did too. As for Makeda, the little slut was ready to follow him anywhere, even if there didn’t seem to be any treats in the offing.
I knew I was reaching the point of no return and I was scared. We’d never brought up the “L word,” and even though I prided myself on being an independent woman, I was sure as hell not going to be the one to say it first.
As it happened, I didn’t have to.
I flew to Bermuda to celebrate my mother’s fiftieth birthday and Artie conspired with Nigel to surprise me the night after. He came bearing gifts, including an exquisite pendant featuring the dragon of the Pendragon crest. I wore it to dinner out and a photo of it showed up on TMZ the next morning. Suze texted me the picture with a raft of emojis and a question mark.
Suddenly betting shops were taking odds on when we might get engaged. Just to mess with the press, I took to wearing a signet ring that had belonged to Nigel’s grandfather. Blurry pictures of my ring finger showed up on sites across the blogosphere, drawing rafts of comment. This tickled my stepfather no end, but my mother was concerned.
She wasn’t alone. On one of my increasingly rare visits to Los Angeles, I met Suze for dinner in her Century City condo where she plied me with insanely good Indian take-out and hard questions.
“How serous are you?” she asked, bluntly, scooping up a portion of fiery dal and following it with a mouthful of brown rice.
“Do you mean ‘you’ as in me or ‘you’ in the couple sense?”
“Either.”
“I think I’m in love with him,” I said, and realized it was the first time I’d actually said those words aloud, although I’d certainly thought them more than a few times.
“And what are his feelings on the subject?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I feel like we’ve got a really deep connection, but I don’t know if it’s a forever kind of bond.”
“You don’t know whether he’s ‘Mr. Right’ or ‘Mr. Right Now?’”
My biological clock isn’t ticking, is that’s what you’re asking,” I said.
“Have you even discussed kids?” she asked. “Because you know his family is going to expect you to procreate.” Suze knew I had complicated emotions around motherhood. Being adopted, I didn’t know what kind of genetic inheritance I might be passing along.
“We haven’t talked about it,” I admitted, tearing off a piece of naan and dipping it into the tamarind sauce that had come with our food.
“How long does Arthur usually date people?” she asked, because she knew I would have googled it.
“We’re coming up on my sell-by date,” I admitted. “If I make it to Christmas, it’ll be a record.” I planned to spend the holiday with my mother and Nigel, and I was looking forward to it. By then, my winter collection would be out in the wild, the spring collection would be in the pipeline, and I could take a little bit of a break before I launched into my summer line.
“So, he’s one of those?” Suze said. She didn’t elaborate but I knew what she meant. Everyone has dated “that” guy who always ends relationships just before Christmas or Valentine’s Day because he doesn’t want to buy a gift. Especially not if the girl or guy he is expecting to see a tiny jewelry box under the tree.
“Is he getting pressured to marry?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Anna’s pretty serious with that Italian businessman she’s been dating. Artie’s pretty sure he’s going to put a ring on it at New Year’s, so he’s off the hook for at least a couple of years.”
Suze shuddered. She doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body, though she frets and dotes over all her clients as if they were her children.
“How likely is it you’ll be able to continue your career?” she asked.
“I don’t see a problem. It’s not as if I’m going to be queen.” I had looked it up. There was precedent for the wives of princes working. It was problematic if the wife in question had a career in the public eye, in politics or the entertainment industry or something. But so far, I hadn’t encountered any objections to carrying on with Chez Cherie. Except from the press, some of whom suggested I’d be doing clothes a favor if I stopped designing them.
That actually annoyed me more than just about anything, because there were some designers out there who seemed to take pleasure in designing clothes that weren’t flattering to anyone except their sample size models. Yes, I’m looking at you, Coco Chanel with your boxy jackets that don’t really look good on anyone who isn’t six feet tall and willowy. On the other hand, my whole ethos was making beautiful clothes that made the wearer feel fabulous.
Then three things happened that changed my life.
The first was that Artie asked me to marry him, proposing on the beach of a lovely island owned by one of his friends. He even got down on his knees to pop the question. I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t even speak for a moment, but fortunately, he understood that my hesitation wasn’t rejection, it was something more profound.
“Yes,” I said that night as we made love in the little open-sided bungalow that allowed us to hear the shush of the waves as they hit the shore.
There was a reporter on the plane back to London who recognized me and saw the engagement ring on my finger—a pear-cut emerald set on a simple band of Welsh gold. By the time we landed, there was a crowd at the airport larger than any I’d seen before. We were immediately whisked off to Camelot castle where his parents and sister—along with her brand-new fiancé Umberto—threw us a small party. It was the first time I’d spent any appreciable time with Arthur’s father Uther, and I disliked him more the longer I was in his company. I didn’t like the way his hand lingered over mine or brushed my butt when he “courteously” put his hand at the base of my spine to guide me through a doorway.
But what really repulsed me was the way he shamelessly pawed the Queen, without even trying to disguise his intent. Every move he made screamed, “The minute everyone leaves, I’m going to tap this ass.”
He couldn’t keep his hands off her and walked around the whole night with an erection straining his pants. Everyone else pretended to ignore it, but it was hard to look away when he would rub up against his wife’s back and whisper into her ear while cupping one of her breasts. I was surprised that the palace had been able to keep that sort of behavior on the down low. A picture of him acting like a dog in heat would not have been good for the royal reputation.
Igraine tolerated it, the way you might tolerate the attention of a big, shaggy dog you were fond of, but the raw carnality of Uther’s attentions to her was unsettling.
Queen Igraine was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen who wasn’t a movie star. She had to be pushing fifty, but there wasn’t a line on her face. I wondered if that was due to good genes or good doctors or great magic. She was so beautiful; she didn’t even look completely human and I wondered if she had fae blood.
Beautiful as she was outside, Igraine was an ugly person within. She was a terrible snob who referred to me as “the colonial” behind my back. She called me other thi
ngs as well but made certain that Arthur didn’t hear them. The servants heard her though, and I heard some of them gossiping about it. I never repeated what I heard to Arthur because I didn’t want to get into the middle of a family feud. Artie’s sister Anna treated me cordially enough to my face, but behind my back, she referred to me as an arriviste and a gold digger, as if I hadn’t made my own money through my own hard work and creativity.
Palace staff, and some of Arthur’s intimates, rushed to curry favor with me. Some were quick to share gossip in the guise of “helping me get settled.” I heard one hair-raising story about how Uther had used magic to seduce Igraine, stories that suggested Arthur might be a product of rape. I was triggered by the story, which brought back all my questions of how I came into the world.
When Artie and I had first started dating and the circumstances of my birth became fodder for gossip, it had been unpleasant. I’d never hidden the information that I was adopted. In fact, I was active in a number of organizations supporting adoptees and their families. But once my fashion house had had started gaining traction, I’d been beset by women claiming to have been my birth mother, begging me to reconnect with them. I knew they couldn’t be my mother, but I felt sorry for the women, and at first, tried to engage them. Eventually though, Suze stepped in, sending all of these imposters packing.
My mother had told me what she knew of my birth mother, but that was precious little. Her name had been Isobel and she had been just twenty when she died. Mom had kept Isobel’s driver’s license, so at least I had a mental picture of what she had looked like—a small-boned brunette with blue eyes. I cherished that little scrap of laminated paper and carried it in my wallet everywhere I went.
All sorts of hurtful articles were written, stories that were not kind to the woman who had borne me. Reporters went digging through state birth and death records, trying to unearth the tiniest fragment of information. The address on Isobel’s driver’s license was located and photographed. It was a small apartment in an old house carved up into illegal living spaces and by the time I was grown, it had been abandoned for years, left to rats and the junkies who crashed there. The pictures that were splashed all over the internet showed a place that looked like something you’d post on a Pinterest board devoted to “Haunted Places.”
“Wow,” Suze said when she saw the snaps.
“It didn’t look that bad when I saw it,” I said defensively.
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Ten. I took the Wilshire bus all the way to downtown by myself. My mother was frantic when I finally phoned her to come get me.”
“I’ve seen some of those funky old places,” Suze said . “Black and white tile in the bathrooms. Wooden built-ins. Back in the day, they could have been charming.”
“Back in the day was a long time ago,” I said.
Wild theories about just who Isobel was began circulating. She was a drug addict. She was a runaway from a wealthy family. She wasn’t really dead.
And then the reporters came after Cherie, wondering why she had adopted me when she wasn’t married. What possessed her to tackle an interracial adoption? Was she a lesbian? Was she rejecting the patriarchy? Was Isobel her sister?
I could deal with the slurs against me, but when the press and the public went after my mothers, I saw red.
Chapter 3
Artie tried to protect me. He pleaded with his friends in the press to leave me alone, which only made it worse.
When we traveled anywhere by private jet, we were dragged by the public even though we were careful to purchase carbon offset credits. People who thought nothing of taking their car to a store that was only a quarter of a mile away suddenly turned into eco-warriors, complaining loudly—often profanely and with many exclamation points—on public forums and on social media and in comments to news stories.
I had never used real fur in my collections—but somebody with too much time on their hands dug up a photo of me standing next to some celebutante in a full-length mink coat and turned it into a hateful meme.
I had once used leather, and that became a “thing” too. Boycotts were organized against the stores that carried my ready-to-wear line, even though I had switched to vegan leather for almost all my designs. Sales in the U.S. and U.K. plummeted, but fortunately, China’s middle class loved my clothing. Of course, that was problematical too, what with their human rights record and “social scores.”
All to say, I couldn’t win.
The only person I felt like I could talk to was Suze, who had run into a fair amount of heat for representing some of the badly-behaved people who were her clients.
She also understood how hard it was to find a soul mate when the whole world seems to have rules about status and money and sex. She understood that dating Artie or someone like him was basically my only option. She called it the “Oprah Dilemma.” We’d seen too many of our successful women friends struggle in relationships where they were more successful than their significant others. It wasn’t as much of a problem among the lesbian couples we knew, but anecdotal evidence suggested to us that a fair number of straight men we knew really wanted to be the alpha dog in their relationships.
“Owning your own house is the kiss of death,” Suze used to say, and she had plenty of names to back up her assertion, sexist as it was.
“When you achieve a certain amount of success, the guy you go out with has to have a lot of self-esteem to be okay with you picking up the check if you want to go to Nobu instead of the Olive Garden for dinner. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate unlimited salad and breadsticks, but one of the things success meant to me was that I could afford to eat wherever I wanted.
When I was little, Mom and I ate a lot of meals at fast food places where we had coupons for “buy one, get one free” deals. I was a grown woman before I discovered all steaks didn’t taste like the ones served at The Sizzler. When money was really tight, there were even sometimes when Mom drove us around to different supermarkets so I could get free chicken tenders and cookies and the samples they gave out at Trader Joe’s and Mrs. See’s Candies.
I was always aware that my mother was one emergency away from disaster. I grew up being really, really careful with money. I knew my mother made fifteen dollars an hour, which is good money for many places, but not Los Angeles, where the cost of living just exploded when I was in middle school.
For years, I measured all my purchases against how many hours it would take my mother to earn it. When girls in my school dropped fifteen dollars on a lipstick, I was appalled.
When the press called me a “princess,” because I carried a handbag that cost more than a hundred dollars, it hurt because it felt so unfair. Never mind that the bag was a gift from another designer.
I understood the resentment. It was one of the reasons I’d created my ready-to-wear line because I didn’t believe working women should have to pay a month’s rent for clothes that were made sustainably and were chic besides.
I’d done a fair number of interviews since launching Chez Cherie, and even though I was always careful about what I said, for the most part, I was facing a sympathetic interlocutor. That ended when I got engaged to Artie. The first time it happened, I was blindsided.
The interviewer. Sydney Carton-Smythe, was pretty in a very severe kind of way. Her blonde hair was razor cut and fell in a sleek and shiny curtain just so. I was hideously aware of my own unruly hair that never could hold a curl.
Sydney didn’t bother with small talk but jumped right into the provocative questions.
“Will there be a pre-nup?” she asked, a three-cornered smile playing around her mouth.
“I’d rather not discuss the particulars,” I said, already annoyed.
“So yes, then,” she said, obviously intending to nettle me.
“Sydney, there were ground rules.”
“Ground rules? Really?”
Sydney had found a stash of my baby pictures from somewhere, and she gleefully flashed the
m up on the screen as I sat there trying not to look pained. Of course, she’d found a copy of my high school’s digital yearbook, so not only was my unfortunate sophomore year haircut immortalized, it could be seen from all angles in “candid hallway footage” that acted as filler between individual shots of students.
The only saving grace was that no one had paid much attention to me in high school so there weren’t that many awful pictures of me.
Even so, I wanted the floor to swallow me up.
Gareth, who had accompanied me to the interview, offered me the services of a “bloke” he knew who made his living scrubbing people’s cyber footprints off the internet.
“That sounds like a lucrative specialty,” I said.
“He’s rolling in the filth,” Gareth agreed.
In the end, I decided against taking him up on his offer because I was afraid it would hurt my brand, but I shuttered my personal social media accounts, which had always—on the advice of my mother—been nothing but positive , fashion forward, and frivolous.
When I closed out my Instagram account, for a moment I felt almost panicked. It felt like I was erasing myself from the world.
What was left was images the press and bloggers crafted for their own ends. A picture of me, at fifteen, smoking weed at a party showed up, earning me an email from my mother that was in all caps. I DIDN’T KNOW YOU SMOKED!!!
A picture of me at a bachelorette bash in Vegas appeared as if magic, obligingly donated by someone I’d thought of as a friend. I’d been in her wedding party and paid had five hundred dollars for the ugliest bridesmaids dress ever. It was yellow and made from a shiny fabric that was probably radioactive. I had cut it up into squares to make a quilted jacket for one of my “Boho” collections.
Playing With Fire Page 125
