Fashionably Late

by Olivia Goldsmith

  She knew that in 1988, one of Lacroix’s best years, his sales had grown by four hundred percent but he had lost eight million dollars. The books that Lenny had laid out indicated that with the success of the bridge line KInc might do the same thing. She felt overwhelmed, and without coming to any conclusions, she sent Casey and Lenny home. Karen was, at last, alone – alone with nowhere to go. She didn’t want to go back to her apartment. She stared out the big windows of Jeffrey’s office at the headlights moving down Seventh Avenue. She tried to imagine her future, alone, without Jeffrey.

  Karen had never spent much time in this office. It was Jeffrey’s domain. She had kept clear of the finances, the bankers, the factors, and accountants whenever she could. Now, though, she walked across the carpet and sat down in the easy chair that stood at right angles to the sofa. It was the chair Jeffrey always took during meetings. It smelled like Jeffrey in some undefinable way. Was it his soap? His shampoo? He never wore aftershave or any other perfume. The chair just smelled of Jeffrey. And, held in the arms of his chair, smelling his scent, despite her anger, Karen felt an unbearable wave of longing for her husband.

  The presentation to the KInc staff had been so hard. Running the business was so hard. How would she do it without Jeffrey’s help? Was Jeffrey right? Would it be impossible to keep KInc running unless she sold out to someone? And without Jeffrey, without KInc, what did she have? Tears of self-pity squeezed out of the corners of her eyes. She wept silently. Once she had begun crying, it seemed as if she would never stop. Only weeks ago, she’d believed she was a woman who never cried! But clearly, she didn’t have a clue who she was, or who her friends were. It felt as if she had worked so hard and achieved so little. No family, no marriage, no children, no business. The center would not hold.

  There, in the darkened office all alone, Karen felt as if she could not do without Jeffrey. Not in business or at home. She’d been married late, she’d become successful late, and it seemed to her that she couldn’t bear to give it up now, so soon. She’d have such a long, long time to get old alone. Was there some way their marriage could be salvaged? Perhaps Defina was right when she said that Jeffrey was only reacting to her. Wasn’t his action, his terrible betrayal, just a way to cope with her absence, with her growing fame, with the baby problem? Hadn’t she – Miss Goodie-Goodie – considered cheating on him?

  She was hurt, and still very, very angry, but she felt that if she lost him she lost so very much: after all, she had grown up with him. All of her history was with him. And the idea of going on alone frightened her. Would she be one of those women, women of a certain age, who attended the social events of the industry with a gay man on her arm? Would she wind up, like poor Chanel had at the end, alone, loveless and childless?

  Karen took a deep breath and drew that Jeffrey scent deep inside. It was hard to believe that she had considered Bill Wolper as any kind of partner. What a lying pig! He was everything she hated about men in business – their greed, their hardness, their profit-at-any-cost mentality. For a moment, the darkness of the office became the darkness in the Saipan barracks. But here there was only darkness, not the sound of rats scuttling, not the stench of sewage and filth and hopelessness. She thought of Arnold, the contemptuous way he talked of ‘blood money,’ and that reminded her of the trail of blood on the dirty hospital floor and she shuddered. What would happen to all those people, all those suffering souls? What would happen to the baby? She had already sent a check to Mr Dagsvarr but she felt that it wasn’t enough. Yet what else could she do?

  Karen felt as trapped as a prisoner in a cell. She wasn’t a social worker. She was a woman – a middle-aged woman – with a pleasure in, a talent for, design. But how could she go on? And how could she stop?

  Perhaps she could forgive Jeffrey. It was possible. Other women had forgiven erring husbands. If he had only slept with her sister to hurt her, it was possible that there was a way to forgiveness. She wondered if it was an act of cowardice or bravery, and she also wondered if she could find that way. And even if she couldn’t forgive him, they had to discuss the business, they had to make plans and begin to face the future.

  She lifted the phone and slowly dialed the number Jeffrey had left her. Jeffrey answered, and at the sound of his voice Karen felt her heart begin to pound. ‘Jeffrey, it’s Karen. We have to talk.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Fashion of the Times

  Karen was waiting in Jeffrey’s office for him. For a while she continued to sit in the darkness, but knowing that he was on his way up from SoHo she forced herself to get up out of his chair. She turned the awful overhead fluorescent lights on and went to the mirror behind the door to see how bad the damage was. She needed a tissue. Hell, she needed a week’s bed rest, a good facial, an excellent therapist, a face-lift, and trustworthy legal counsel. But all of that wasn’t realistically possible before Jeffrey’s arrival.

  She went to the credenza behind Jeffrey’s desk and she looked, for a moment, at the picture of them taken on the night of the Oakley Awards. She had to avert her eyes or she’d begin crying again. She reached into the first drawer, looking for tissues. There were none. She looked in the next two drawers. What was it? Didn’t men blow their noses? In the bottom drawer she found some paper napkins from the take-out place on Thirty-Eighth Street. They would have to do. But when she lifted them up, she saw a locked box. Somehow, the cheap tin case seemed very un-Jeffrey-like. What would he keep in a ten-dollar strong box like that? She reached in and picked it up. For a moment, despite her certainty to the contrary, she was frightened that it might contain love letters or pictures of Lisa. She steeled herself to open it. She’d break into it if she had to. Because she had to know. She had to know whether Jeffrey loved her sister.

  But the box wasn’t locked, and it was filled not with letters but with slides. Karen held the first one up to the light. It was a painting, one of Jeffrey’s paintings she supposed. But one that she had never seen before. It was a nude, but not like the ones in Westport. It had something of Jeffrey’s style, his brush work, but this one was different. It wasn’t good, but it was felt.

  The woman, thank God, wasn’t Lisa. Karen took a deep breath and held the second slide up. It, too, was of a nude, and again it wasn’t Lisa. Karen scrabbled through the box. There were several dozen slides. When had Jeffrey had the time to do all this new work, she wondered? After looking through all the slides again, she realized that all the nudes seemed to be of the same blonde woman. Somehow, Jeffrey had managed in these paintings to gain a delicacy, a vulnerability, that she had never seen in his work before. Or maybe it was the woman. Maybe the woman in the paintings had that vulnerability. It was hard to say if the allure came from the pose, from the woman, or from the brush work. Though completely different in style, they reminded Karen of the wonderful private Degas, the ones of women bathing or stretching themselves. The woman’s face rarely showed in the slides. There were several of her back, two of her in partial profile, and three where her arm was raised, obscuring all but her cheek and the tip of her nose. Karen stared at the profile. Why had Jeffrey kept these a secret? These were the better paintings. These were his future. What had she found?

  Somehow, the secret of these glowing slides seemed more serious than Jeffrey’s liaison with Lisa. Karen knew that Jeffrey had always considered himself an artist, and she had considered him an artist as well. This box of slides should not have been a secret withheld from her. Jeffrey was doing new work. It was exciting work. Maybe not great, but better than he had done since college. Why would he keep it from her?

  A sick feeling began in the bottom of her stomach. She had been upset, angry, and outraged over Jeffrey’s actions. But those feelings were strong, righteous ones. They gave her the energy to tear up his clothes and throw his things around. They gave her the energy to talk to her staff, to make plans, and to fight. But this Pandora’s box did something much worse: it truly frightened her.

  Beneath the tin box were paper
s. Karen took them out. There was only Jeffrey’s birth certificate, a few clippings from Business Week and the Wall Street Journal with pictures or quotes of Jeffrey’s. Nothing much. Certainly nothing to be upset about. She told herself she was overreacting. After all, with everything that had happened in the last three months, when had Jeffrey and she had time to talk about anything as delicate as these paintings? But she kept looking through the papers. When she found the agreement of rental with an option to buy Perry’s loft she looked at it quickly. Then she stopped.

  She wasn’t good with legal papers, God knows, but it looked as if cautious Jeffrey had given Perry a nonrefundable hundred and fifty thousand dollars against a purchase price of eight hundred thousand! Was he crazy? Jeffrey had agreed to buy Perry’s loft? She thought of Perry’s goodbye visit. His ‘mi casa, su casa’ remark. So this was how he was paying for rehab! This was why he had given her the key and said his house was her house.

  Now the fear in her stomach began moving up to tighten her chest. What was Jeffrey doing? Was this just another surprise in an apparently endless list of surprises for her? She shook her head. Beneath the lease/buy agreement, there was a plan of the Westport house and a copy of the contract to build it, as well as a photo of Jeffrey and his father from some time shortly before his dad died. Karen put it aside, and paused for a minute, looking over all the clues here. It seemed as if Jeffrey had put together a cache of his accomplishments, and of the things he loved. The tin box was like a kid’s runaway bag. Had he planned to run away? She turned over the papers and slides randomly. Then she saw the other photo.

  It was a recent shot – she could tell by the color of Jeffrey’s hair. He was standing in a street somewhere. It looked like Lower Manhattan, maybe Tribeca. And he had his arm around a woman. Thank God, it wasn’t Lisa. The woman in the photo was a tall, elegant blonde, much more what Karen would have thought of as Jeffrey’s style. Karen stared at the picture. In it, Jeffrey was gazing at the woman, mirroring the expression she must have had on her face. Karen recognized the look. She felt tears rise again to her eyes. How long had it been since Jeffrey had looked at her in that way?

  The woman’s face was obscured by her hair and a shadow, but Karen could see part of her profile. There was very little visible, but somehow what Karen could see was tantalizingly familiar. It was, she was sure, the woman from the paintings. Karen stared and stared at the photo as if, in time, it would come to her. Then, just as she was about to get it, Jeffrey’s private phone began to ring insistently. Karen kept staring at the photo. The phone kept ringing. Bill Wolper had finally gotten the message and had stopped leaving any. So who was it? Was it Jeffrey? Was he going to cancel his trip up to see her? She was afraid to answer it, to find that out. At last she got up, the photo still clutched in one hand, and with the other hand she lifted up the phone. It was Robert-the- lawyer. ‘Karen, I’m so glad I got you. I tried everywhere. Then I thought of this number. Look, we have to talk.’

  ‘It’s eleven o’clock at night, Robert. And I never have to talk to you again.’

  ‘Karen, you have to listen. My life is on the line here. The firm has invested a lot of time and money. Karen, if you don’t make this deal, I’m out on my ass. They’re blaming me. Wolper is on the warpath. I’m going to take the fall. Throw me a bone, Karen. Give me something to go back to them with. Even if you won’t do NormCo, let me get you a perfume deal. Unilever might be interested. Or I could take you public. I know it’s not like the eighties, but it could still be done.’

  ‘I can’t talk to you now,’ Karen said. ‘I have to talk to my husband.’

  ‘Listen, Karen, I didn’t want to get involved with his private business. I’m not that kind. I didn’t want to know about his affairs. Business is business; your personal life is your own. But he put me in a position here. You know what I mean. And he is family. But I want to make it clear that my loyalties are to you.’

  ‘Fuck you, Robert,’ she said, and hung up the phone. She sat there. Affairs? Was there more than one? What was going on?

  And then Jeffrey came in.

  He looked rumpled, and it was so unusual to see him anything but perfectly groomed that it surprised Karen. His almost white hair was mussed, and one of his cuffs was unbuttoned. Very un-Jeffrey-like. Somehow, it touched her and gave her confidence. If he was taking this so hard, perhaps there was a chance …

  ‘What should we do?’ she asked him.

  ‘We should make the deal with NormCo, if we still can. I don’t think it’s too late.’ His voice was flat, dead.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about business,’ Karen said.

  ‘All we’ve got is business.’

  It felt like a kick to her stomach. She was right, when she had figured that Jeffrey didn’t love Lisa, but what had made her believe that he still loved her? She must have been crazy, desperate. Just another wife calling her soon-to-be ex-husband in the middle of the night. Affairs. Robert had definitely used the plural. Had she really thought she and her husband could reconcile? She was still playing Cleopatra, Queen of Denial. But now she was ready to know what had gone on, who the woman was, when he had done the paintings, how long since he had cared about her. All of it. She was ready – in fact, she had to know it all.

  But Jeffrey only wanted one thing. ‘Karen, you have to believe me. There’s no way the company can survive without NormCo. It will only be a matter of time. I’ve looked at all the options. This is the only one. And no matter how you feel about me, no matter what I’ve done, you have to do the NormCo deal. It’s your future, too. Otherwise you’ll be out of business in less than two years.’

  She didn’t know that she could feel even more frightened than she had already felt. Losing Cyndi’s baby, losing Jeffrey, and losing her company was more than she could take in or imagine. Her hands began to tremble and the tremors ran up her arms. The more she tried to tighten her muscles, the more they seemed to rebel against her. She could believe that Jeffrey was angry with her, or that he wanted to hurt her. But to imagine, to think, that he simply might not love her anymore felt like a kind of dying. Well, it must be true. Better get used to it, she told herself. The old gullible Karen, the Karen who lived in fear and lies and denial was dying. But who would replace her?

  ‘I have other options,’ she said, hoping a front would work. ‘I could license more. Or get a perfume deal. Or go public’

  ‘Not without me,’ Jeffrey said. ‘They’d pick your bones. Anyway, you don’t have time. You don’t have the cash flow. You’d wind up without the company and without your name and without any money to cushion you. Look what happened to Norris Cleveland, and to Tony de Freise and Suzanne Rowans. I know the market. I know the business. I can protect you. You can’t do it alone, Karen.’

  ‘It looks as if I may have to,’ she said.

  He sighed and shook his head. ‘Come on. Can’t we be grown-ups about this?’ he asked.

  ‘What is it you want, Jeffrey?’ she asked in a quiet voice.

  ‘I want my life back, Karen. I gave you these years. Isn’t it enough? I stopped painting. I concentrated on you. I made you. I gave you my name and then I made that name famous. You got to do what you wanted. You got to design your clothes. Now it’s my turn. We sell to NormCo, I get my cut, and I get my life back. I get to paint. I get to be me. I stop being insulted by all the assholes who think that I’m just an empty suit. I take the money and run. And you get to do what you want: you can keep on designing clothes.’

  And then, right then, the fear hit her with all the force of a door slammed in her face. She knew, she absolutely knew, that Jeffrey didn’t love her. ‘You were always going to leave me,’ she said. ‘You’ve been planning all this for a long time. You set the deal up so you could leave in comfort. You bought the loft in your name. But you needed more money. You wanted to sell me into slavery.’

  ‘That isn’t true. It’s the best possible deal. But things happen. People change. You made me change. How do you think I felt while you
were playing creator in your workroom? You cut and draped and lived and died on every goddamn design. Meanwhile, I’m handling cash flow and dealing with the bank. And the irony is that I’m the one with the talent. Every stupid magazine and newspaper, every television show, focused on you. They all believed that you were the creative one. It almost made me laugh. Well, you’ve had your turn. Now I suggest we do the deal, we get an amicable divorce, and move on.’

  And then she saw just how much he hated her. How he had always competed with her. At first he had wanted to keep her in the back room while he ran the company, but now he blamed her even for that. She knew that he had run away from painting because he’d never be great, but he didn’t have to admit that as long as she was his excuse for martyrdom. And now, when he and Mercedes had decided to use her, to make her name bigger than ever, to sell her off for profit, his ego couldn’t take her fame. She saw how every achievement, every accolade she received, had diminished him in his own eyes, diminished him and enraged him.

  ‘You’re jealous,’ she said. She was completely surprised. He had always told her that he was the talented one and she had believed him, never questioning. But hadn’t Perry and Carl and Defina tried to tell her the truth? She just had never wanted to see it. She was more comfortable, happier in the belief that her husband was greater than she was. ‘You’re jealous,’ she repeated.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snarled. He looked at her. ‘What is there to be jealous of?’ he sneered.

  She didn’t answer him. She held out the photo she still had crumpled in her hand. ‘What the fuck is this?’

  Jeffrey looked at the picture and she could see the color drain out of his face. ‘Where did you find that?’ he asked.

  ‘Karen Kahn, girl detective,’ she said.

  ‘So you know about June?’

  For a moment, she thought he meant the calendar month. Had this affair, or whatever it was, started then? But it wasn’t a month – it was a person he meant. And then it all made sense. It was June. June Jarrick. It was her in the picture, June he was buying the loft for. It was June all along. She’d been his fiancée back in the days when he was still an artist, then married Perry on the rebound, and left Perry after Lottie died. June, a classy wealthy woman from his own circle, a socialite who liked to marry artists. That’s why she’d shown up at Tiff’s bat mitzvah. That’s why she’d been in Paris! Karen remembered the glimpse of June at the Plaza Athénée. Those times Karen had tried to reach him, those nights at ‘poker games,’ ‘going over NormCo numbers …’ Karen blushed with shame. June would bring Jeffrey back his youth, would nurture his art. That was the role she liked to play, but this time she’d get to play it with a very wealthy man, one she’d once loved and lost. Somehow, without another word from him, Karen knew everything. The pieces fit so perfectly. The last thread was tearing from the web of lies, and Madame Renault was right. It felt to Karen as if she were bleeding.