by Lynda Curnyn
In truth, the only thing I had been thinking of until that point was that I had found my soul mate. Yes, even I had fallen under the spell of that foolish notion once. In fact, I was so enthralled by the idea of Michael and myself as the future golden couple of the Dubrow clan that I was blind to the reality of us. Instead I was focused on the moment when I could tell the world that I was in love—yes, in love—with Michael Dubrow. But that moment never came. Because as soon as I realized that Michael wasn’t dreaming of an “us,” the very notion effectively ended in my mind.
Ironically, there was no drama at the end, despite the strength of feeling I had developed for him during our short affair. No damning speech. Not even a real breakup. I ended things just as easily as they had started over cocktails at a sales conference four months earlier. Not two weeks after our debacle in the Hamptons, Michael and Dianne came to New York for a few days of meetings. When, at the end of the first day of strategizing in the corporate boardroom, he discreetly suggested we sneak away for an after-work drink, which was usually code for “Let’s go fuck,” I politely declined, saying I needed to get to bed early that night if I hoped to be fresh for our next round of meetings in the morning. It was a clever blow-off on my part. Michael Dubrow considered himself a model employer, and I knew he would never argue with good employee behavior. As predicted, he didn’t argue. And after a while, he stopped asking. Soon enough our relationship went from intensely personal to coolly professional. As if everything that had come before didn’t matter. As if he didn’t matter to me.
Now I knew that, on some level at least, he had.
“What in God’s name is wrong with you?” Claudia asked, startling me out of my reverie.
I quickly composed myself, masking whatever dismay might have shown on my face with a lame excuse about not getting enough sleep the night before. I had to. No one knew about me and Michael. Not Claudia. Not even Angela. And whether out of some warped loyalty to Michael, or a desire not to reveal that bit of romantic foolishness on my part, I wanted to keep it that way.
Fortunately, Claudia was too wound up by the evil she saw in our new corporate direction to be bothered inquiring into my feelings.
“You know that little product line we bought from that floundering U.K. company? Sparkle?” Claudia said, referring to the makeup line we acquired a year ago when the idea of getting into a younger market was just a sparkle in Dianne’s eye. “Dianne—and Michael, I suspect—have decided that this line is going to save Roxanne Dubrow.” She rolled her eyes. “The vision is to rename it in a way that subtly links it to the mother brand—hence, the ‘child’ brand revitalizes the ‘mother.’”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Kind of like how Teen People revitalized People magazine.”
Her eyes narrowed on me, as if I had betrayed her by simply pointing out the rationale of the plan.
I backpedaled a bit, not wanting to get on the wrong side of Claudia so early in the workweek. “So does this ‘child’ have a name?” I said with what I hoped was the right amount of disdain in my voice.
“Oh, it does,” Claudia said, turning her gaze full on me. “Roxy D.”
It was good. And I said as much.
“Well, I’m glad you agree,” Claudia said, her tone thick with irony. “Because a full two-thirds of our marketing budget for this year is now being redirected toward making Roxy D a household name—or should I say a dorm-room name.”
“Hmmm,” I muttered noncommittally, while the impact of that sank in. For the past three years, my role, under Claudia’s leadership, had been to develop marketing and advertising that positioned Roxanne Dubrow as the premiere mature woman’s cosmetic company.
“Now they’ve brought in this little chippy from the U.K., and apparently she’s cast a spell over the whole Dubrow clan—or at least Michael. But you know how Dianne listens to everything her brother says as if he were some sort of marketing genius.” This earned another roll of Claudia’s eyes, as she hated the fact that Michael, simply by virtue of his role as heir to the Dubrow crown, frequently imposed his point of view on everything from marketing to packaging to color palettes. He was very hands-on, and though I was loath to admit it, it was one of the things I had admired about him. His passion for the business. His ambition.
“Suddenly Dianne is positively dazzled by the idea that the Roxy D brand is going to lure all those twentysomethings back to the Roxanne Dubrow counters. And she’s wagering big on that assumption,” Claudia finished, naming a figure that had me sucking in my breath.
The last time our department had seen that kind of money was during the heyday of Roxanne Dubrow’s Youth Elixir—not that I had been around to witness that. Created in the early eighties, Youth Elixir was the moisturizer that Roxanne Dubrow had made its reputation on. Youth Elixir promised to refresh, refine and, most of all, restore all the vital moisture that started to seep out of the skin the moment a woman reached the big 3-0. It was a pretty good product. In fact, I might have been tempted to drop $65 for two ounces of the stuff if I didn’t get it by the case for free.
“So what about the Youth Elixir campaign?” I asked, bewildered about where the money for the advertising for this would come. Youth Elixir had been such a perennial bestseller for Roxanne Dubrow that just six months ago, Dianne had advocated making the moisturizer the center of the Spring campaign. During a corporate strategy meeting held right here in the New York office, she had stated that putting the company’s flagship product on the front lines once more would remind consumers of the powerhouse product that had made Roxanne Dubrow what it is today, and hopefully convince new consumers to try it. But apparently that had all changed.
“It’s on the backburner,” Claudia replied, giving me a look weighted with meaning. As if she saw this as the beginning of some end I could not yet fathom. “The idea is that if we successfully lure the younger market to the counter with Roxy D, they’ll eventually graduate to Roxanne Dubrow.”
“Hmmm,” I said again, wondering at the implications of this for me. After all, the Youth Elixir campaign was to be my campaign to run, under Claudia’s leadership, of course.
As if in answer to my unasked question, Claudia continued, “You and I are going to have our hands full over the next few months working on this dreadful new campaign.”
I looked at her, feeling a bit of relief that I was to have a role in the campaign that was to be the company’s lifeblood, judging from the amount of money we were sinking into it. I had seen the careers of product managers of yesteryear shrink to nothing during budget changes. Though Roxanne Dubrow had acquired other brands over the years, I always felt fortunate to be working on the signature brands, especially when budget time came.
“We need to do some testing, develop a new package,” Claudia was saying now. “Line up the talent for the print campaign….”
My mind immediately began to roam over the current crop of models out there. “Well, there’s no shortage of younger models,” I said finally, realizing that the youth fever had already taken over in most marketplaces. That Roxanne Dubrow might, in fact, be a little late in jumping on this particular bandwagon.
“Oh, Dianne has already made her decision,” Claudia said now, and I could tell how much it irked her to receive all her marching orders from on high. “She wants Irina Barbalovich,” she declared.
I quickly wrapped my mind around that. Irina had been embraced by the fashion world ever since she had been plucked from her parents’ farm in rural Russia to walk the runways of Paris at the tender age of seventeen. In fact, in the past six months, she had gotten more magazine covers than Cindy Crawford at the height of her career. Which meant we were going to pay through the nose for her. Now I understood where most of that budget was going. Irina was the next generation of supermodel, and the fact that Dianne hoped to head up our spring campaign with her was big. Roxanne Dubrow usually chose a no-name stunner they inevitably turned into a star. Now it looked like Dianne was hoping to harness the power of the
industry’s latest supermodel. “Didn’t you say they wanted a sixteen-year-old?” I asked, somewhat inanely, still trying to figure out the implications of this for us in marketing. “I think Irina’s closer to nineteen by now…” I continued, remembering a profile I had read of her when she did a recent cover for Cosmo.
“Sixteen, nineteen. Whatever,” Claudia said, waving a hand dismissively, as if anyone under the age of twenty was not worthy of her regard. “She’s the next big thing, and if we don’t bring her on board soon, my dear Grace, we may find ourselves without a campaign at all.”
I didn’t miss the threat beneath her words, but I took it with a grain of salt. Claudia was forever hinting at the annihilation of our jobs. I sometimes wondered if it was the only thing that motivated her to get out of bed and come to work these days.
“We’ll get her,” I said, ready to take on the challenge. After all, there is nothing like a full work life to keep a woman from remembering how empty her love life has suddenly become.
3
“Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.”
—Mae West
If Roxanne Dubrow’s new marketing plan sent a shudder through Claudia, it was like a balm to my soul. As I put together an agenda for the coming month, filled with meetings with New Product Development, entertaining bids from ad firms, talking with the sales reps about in-store positioning, I knew I was going to be okay. Even Lori seemed to shrug off her own personal crisis when I filled her in on what needed to be done for the new campaign. Maybe it was the excitement of seeing the new product that would one day be Roxy D, as boxes of Sparkle had already been shipped in from the Dubrow compound on Long Island for us to review. Or maybe it was the dozen long-stems Dennis had sent, which seemed to ameliorate any wounds his newly announced future plans had caused. For a brief moment, I even hoped for my own long-stems—not that I wanted Ethan back, but a girl did like a man to grovel a bit. Although I hardly expected that from Ethan. One of the few things he and I had in common was a stubborn streak a mile wide.
Besides, I had already begun to build up a wall of indifference to him.
So I was dually armed when I found myself sitting before the one person whose whole purpose, at least for the forty-five minutes a week we spent together, was to probe at whatever feelings she believed I was having.
Shelley Longford, my therapist.
“You broke up with him?” Shelley said after I had blithely related the story of my mishap with Ethan, after spending more than half the session seated in the chair across from her in a tiny, nondescript office on the fourth floor of an equally nondescript office building on W. 72nd Street, relating the more mundane details of my life. The new campaign at Roxanne Dubrow. The fact that I was having trouble getting my super to come up and fix a crack that had begun in the ceiling of my pretty, albeit ancient, bathroom. I think I was starting to bore myself, which probably made me blurt out the news of my breakup.
In truth, I took a certain satisfaction in the shock that wreathed Shelley’s normally composed features. I had been seeing her just four months, and this was the first time I seemed to get some sort of rise out of her. The most I had seen before was a nervous tuck of that shiny dark hair behind her ear, or a narrowing of her dark eyes. Now, after her somewhat harried exclamation, I felt a sort of…triumph.
“Well, what would you have done?” I asked now, knowing she would somehow find a way to turn the question back on me. This therapy business was so tricky, and if it hadn’t been for the endless prodding of the social worker on my case, I wouldn’t even be here. It was so pointless somehow. I had been coming once a week for four months now, sitting across from a woman I didn’t know—and didn’t want to know, judging by the tastefully drab decor of her office, her bad haircut, her aloof manner and the fact that I was paying her $140 for forty-five minutes of relative silence while she asked questions that seemed to have nothing to do with me. Questions that always seemed to lead to one answer—an answer I refused to give her.
“Well, there are a lot of things one could do in a situation like the one you experienced with Ethan,” Shelley began, carefully leaving herself out of the answer as I’m sure she was trained to do. See what I mean? How can you warm up to someone like this?
I raised my eyebrows, stubbornly resisting the impulse to make life easier for her as I waited for her to fill me on all these options I allegedly had now that Ethan Lederman the Third had accidentally let a few of his precious sperm loose in a woman he had been sleeping with for months, yet somehow couldn’t see himself actually propagating with.
“You could have talked,” she said, after a lengthy pause. A pause that cost me quite a few bucks at these rates. I could have invested in the new Stila lip shade with more result.
“About?” I said, not wanting to give her anything.
“Your options,” she said.
“Options?” I began, feeling my temper suddenly—and surprisingly—spike. “Let’s see, what exactly were the options that Ethan Lederman the Third presented me with? Ah, yes. There was the douche—very clever on his part. Made me wonder if he’d ever been down this road before. Oh, and then there was the morning-after pill. That’s right. Get rid of it before it even gets started. Nice clean solution. Better than say, throwing it in the Hudson after it was born….”
When I saw I had not managed to make a dent in that composure of hers, I continued, “Look, the bottom line is he wanted nothing to do with anything real between us. It was all too glaringly apparent that he didn’t want a child with me. That he didn’t want…me.”
This last word came out on a squeak, making me realize how dangerously close to tears I was. I grabbed the arms of the chair to take the tremble out of my fingers. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, a voice inside me chanted. Within moments, I managed to swallow back whatever emotions threatened. But it was too late.
Shelley Longford had seen it all. And I knew exactly where she was going to go with it.
As it turned out, I only had to endure another ten minutes of therapy. Ten minutes of avoiding the truth Shelley tried to gently guide me to, but which I strictly avoided at all costs. I even hated the words: fear of rejection. Her next maneuver was to try and—gently but persistently—tie it all back to my mother. Not my mother, really. My mother was a perfectly nice, perfectly respectable music teacher, now retired and living with my perfectly respectable father in New Mexico. What Shelley wanted to talk about was the woman who gave birth to me. Kristina Morova, who, as I learned three years ago after months of digging through public records, resided a train ride away from me in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. And refused to acknowledge my existence. The only response I had gotten to the certified letter I had finally gotten up the courage to send to her seven months ago was the return receipt with her signature on it. A hastily scrawled “K. Morova” that I had run my fingers over at least a dozen times since I had found it in my mailbox. No note inviting me to meet her at some mutually acceptable location, so that I might get answers to all those questions that had plagued me for most of my life and, for some reason, even more so after I turned thirty. No tearful phone call to express her joy at the possibility of meeting the child she’d given up, for reasons as yet unknown to me, at the age of seventeen.
Nothing.
I had been told ahead of time by the search agency that this was one possible outcome. In fact, this was the reasoning behind sending a certified letter in the first place, so that I could be assured that the letter had been received and that I would, at least, be saved from any emotional trauma caused by a random postal error. Yes, now I knew that whatever emotional trauma I was allegedly dealing with, according to Shelley, had to do with the simple fact that my mother knew I was alive but didn’t want to know me.
I had accepted this realization with the same type of angry calm with which I had tossed Ethan out of my apartment a week earlier. Fuck him, I had thought as I watched him angrily pull on his clothes and make tracks out my fron
t door.
Fuck her, I had thought after enduring the two weeks of complete silence that followed the sending of my letter. Yes, I had been disappointed, but even more, I had been mad. Mad at her for not caring. So mad, in fact, that I had taken a car service out to her modest two-family house in Sheepshead Bay, only to stand outside filled with a desire to take the pretty little planter at the center of her neatly edged lawn and toss it through her front window.
I didn’t, of course.
Instead, I had gotten back into the car, sinking into comfortable anonymity behind the tinted windows, and had gone to see Barbara, the social worker who assisted me with my search. And after listening to me rail for half an hour over everything from Kristina Morova’s impossibly well-kept flower bed to her frailty as a human being, Barbara had finally managed to convince me to do what she had been trying to get me to do since I had taken up my search. Seek counseling.
Not that the sixteen weeks I had been seeing Ms. Shelley Longford, C.S.W., with a specialization in psychotherapy, had made a bit of difference.
Even now as I carefully let myself out of her office after assuring her that yes, I would be there the following Wednesday at six-thirty, I wondered why I bothered.
I was fine really. I had all the information I really needed to know about Kristina Morova. That she was one of two daughters. That there was no real history of disease in her family, other than a few diabetics and some spotty cancer.
I mean, strictly speaking, I really didn’t need to know anything else, right?
“How are you really, Grace?” Angie said as we sat over drinks the following evening at Bar Six, a little bistro in the West Village.
“I’m fine,” I assured her for the third time since we’d sat down, martinis before us. I didn’t want to get into an analysis of the demise of my recent relationship, knowing full well that Ethan had likely not even given it a second thought himself. That was the annoying little difference between men and women. When a man exited a relationship, no matter who ended it, it was as if the woman was erased from his mind. Women, on the other hand, could be borderline obsessive, measuring every perceived slight, every phone call or lack thereof, and coming up with a complex analysis of his emotional makeup.
