Fashionably Late

by Olivia Goldsmith

  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-daa!’ she said with a flourish, and fanned the contracts out on the Formica, ‘I got Robert-the-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.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Cut on the Bias

  Karen hit her apartment like a tornado. If there was anything – anything, goddamnit – of 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 hotel – just 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 Marianas. 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 your bills 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 Ernesta’s favorite kitchen knife and slashed Jeffrey’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 off 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 Haan’s, the hand-made 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 Jeffrey’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 cuffs. 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 Ernesta 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? Or – just maybe – it 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 easy – she chucked them out the window. My God, the man must have had fifty pairs of socks! Well, not anymore! 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 bone-weariness, 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 rage – and she hadn’t even suspected. And Lisa – well, 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 gape 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 argued, 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 Marianas?’

  ‘No. I’m still not sure what you’re talking about. Bill called. There’s been a big mistake. You’ve gotten the wrong idea. This is business, Karen, not 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. 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 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 her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  In Stitches

  Karen sat in her chair behind the work table 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 office 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. Robert-the- 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.

  Ha! She almost laughed aloud. Disappointment was difficult to deal with. Now there was a heavy, philosophical thought, she told herself, and one she was learning to cope with all on her own. Karen actually couldn’t tell if she was angry or sad or both. She thought about Jeffrey and felt murderous, until tears welled up in her eyes, at which point she was overwhelmed with self-pity. Thinking of Lisa made her crazy. She could not fathom what the fuck Lisa had been thinking. There were at least three million men on Long Island, and if Lisa didn’t want to sleep with Leonard, why didn’t she try some of those other ones first, before she picked her sister’s husband?

  As she mulled it over, Karen came to believe that Defina had to be right. Both Jeffrey and Lisa were doing more than having it off in that loft bed. Both of them were sending her messages, big time, and even if she wasn’t supposed to receive them like this, so soon, even if they hadn’t planned for her to find out, she knew that they had still been busy telling her things. They hadn’t been fucking each other – they’d been fucking her.

  She wasn’t sure if Jeffrey loved her, but he surely was angry at her. Perhaps he did feel unappreciated; he’d had to deal with the business and financial shit for years while she got the glory. And lately there’d been a lot more of the former for him and a lot more of the latter for her. If it wasn’t that, if he was simply bored with her, if he found her unattractive, or felt their marriage was dying, why hadn’t he just told her and left, or found another woman, a stranger?

  Karen spun her chair around and stared out over Seventh Avenue – the garment district. Rush hour was just ending, but the street was still crammed with men pushing clothing racks. Trucks were blocking the street, and people were rushing around the obstructions. So much energy, so much effort, so many billions of dollars were being spent down there so that people didn’t wear a simple uniform. She looked at the crowd below. Were any of them as miserable as she was? She would have to face some big disappointments and some real home truths. If Jeffrey did love her, then he was also in a rage so black that nothing short of this wounding would even the score. And if he didn’t love her, if he was indifferent to her, then his act was malicious, a truly nasty, cruel gesture. Which was it? Which was worse?

  Because, after considering it most of last night and this morning, Karen simply couldn’t believe that Jeffrey loved Lisa. It wasn’t just her ego or denial that made her so certain: she knew Jeffrey after all these years and – although a woman might never know the exact taste her husband had in mistresses – Karen knew that Lisa was not Jeffrey’s style.

  So, he did this because he still loves me but he’s angry. Or, he did it because he doesn’t love me at all. But if he doesn’t love me, if he hasn’t loved me for a long time, then why hadn’t he left? The only ans
wer was one that kept feeling like a kick to Karen’s stomach: the money. He was staying with her for the money. And there was something about that for Karen, something in that, that was more shaming than anything else. It robbed her of everything – her sex appeal, her brains, her talent. It made her into something worse, for a woman, than a dupe or a wronged female. It made her into a cash cow.

  A little moan escaped her. She covered her mouth and rocked herself back and forth in her executive chair. How many talented women had been fleeced by their husbands? Coco had been ripped off by her lover Iribe, Colette by her husband. No successful woman was immune. Maybe she’d just become a paycheck to Jeffrey. A payoff. She tried the thought on like an ugly garment. She played with it the way she’d tongue a painful tooth. She had loved him so much. His body had been so good to her. So what had it cost her, for each of those times that Jeffrey had sex with her? How much cash had he expected for each of those loveless fucks? Of course, she told herself bitterly, there hadn’t been many of them in the last six months. There were a few times in New York, and an attempt in Westport. And there was Paris. She blushed to think of it. Had Jeffrey thought of Lisa to help him get it up? Somehow Karen didn’t think so, though the idea of it made her sick. And if looking at Jeffrey’s betrayal made her sick, what about her sister’s?

  Karen always had tried to see the best intentions in Lisa’s actions. If Lisa was lazy, if she was self-indulgent, if she was dishonest to her husband and neglectful to her daughters, Karen had always tried to overlook it or give the best possible face to it. Lisa was flighty, she hadn’t found herself, she had a poor self-image. But Defina was right: she, Karen, was the Queen of Denial. She hadn’t wanted to see any of her sister’s faults. Especially her envy and jealousy.