VC01 - Privileged Lives

by Edward Stewart

  “You’re doing exactly the right thing. All you need, my little princess, is to get smack back in the saddle.”

  Babe prayed as the limousine drove west on Forty-seventh and south on Broadway. She prayed when the driver stopped and opened the door for her. Getting out, she found she was still horribly awkward with her crutches.

  Billi cleared their way through the stream of humanity. Taxis and construction trucks blocked the Thirty-ninth Street crossing. The air was full of a thousand accents and smells. There was an energy to people’s walks, an animation to their faces. It was as though the city was alive again after a long holiday. People gestured with their hands more than Babe remembered. The population of the city had become more Mediterranean and Caribbean. Faces were darker, sensuality more explicit.

  Billi held open the do-not-open steel-and-glass door of a smoked-glass skyscraper on the corner of Thirty-eighth.

  Babe hesitated, remembering her little boutique on the ground floor of a Park Avenue town house. Do I really want to do this? she thought, and the answer came, Yes, I really want to do this.

  “Sixth elevator,” Billi said.

  On the way up to the twentieth floor, Babe’s ears popped four times.

  Billi steered her toward a door with a huge gold Babethings logo. He kissed his fingers and pressed them over her lips. “Welcome home,” he whispered.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Devens,” the receptionist called out, as though they were old friends, and Babe smiled back, feeling all kinds of uncertainty.

  Billi guided her along a corridor opening onto various complexes of smaller rooms. “We have three floors,” he said, “but this is the main floor. Don’t worry—even I can’t find my way around.”

  To Babe it seemed a hi-tech warren of glossy white mazes. Low, indecipherable voices came from behind closed doors bearing unfamiliar names and titles. There was a muffled sound of activity, like distant traffic. Somewhere a million phones were ringing.

  Billi explained the changes: the expansion into new space, the in-house publicity department, the computerized operations, the new products—perfume, diet programs, videocassettes, how-to-shop manuals.

  Babe listened, nodding, feeling hope and doubt in her heart and praying that only the hope showed on her face.

  People were scooting around in Italian-cut suits and overstated jangling baubles. They looked like teenagers. The median age of employees seemed to be eighteen.

  Billi made introductions, and baby-faced strangers said, “Good to have you back, Mrs. Devens,” and Babe had a pained flash that something once familiar had turned alien, like a beloved child grown into an unknown adult.

  “Come see our cruise line.” Billi took her through the laboratory. The clothes being assembled on a hundred-odd tailor’s dummies looked like costumes for a futuristic Hollywood gangster film, abandoned at varying degrees of completion. “One thing hasn’t changed.” Billi smiled. “It’s all still done in a last-minute dash. God knows how we’re going to get a hundred fifty pieces ready by September.”

  Babe picked up the hem of what appeared to be a Turkish skirt. “Who does our beading now?”

  “It’s still done by hand.”

  “This has to be redone, it’s uneven.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing. A few beads are always dropping off—the work’s done in India and shipped back.”

  “India?” Babe touched another half-finished dress. “Where do we get our linen?”

  “China.”

  “Mainland China?”

  He laughed. “Of course.”

  “And our lace?”

  “Everything’s from China. Linen, lace, silk. The labor’s cheap, knock wood, and they keep their delivery dates.”

  Babe could recall the distinctive touch and smell and look of Irish linen and French lace and Italian silk, textures she had used and mixed as an artist might combine pigments.

  “What does this sell for?” She touched another dress.

  “Twenty-four hundred.”

  She stared at Billi with disbelief. “Wouldn’t we sell more at eighteen?”

  “Babe, our clientele has expanded beyond a hundred of your WASPy best friends. Our hungry customers wouldn’t want anything for eighteen. They’re insecure. Twenty-four guarantees that it’s good. All our pricing’s done by a top market analysis firm.”

  She could feel there was something she wasn’t tuning in on. In their silent way these clothes were telling her that fashion had gone its own independent way while she’d been asleep.

  “We’re selling a hundred times the volume we did seven years ago.” Billi held a door for her. “And that’s just the clothes. Licensing brings in a good third of our gross.”

  “What do we license?”

  “All kinds of goodies. Perfumes, chocolates, wines, gourmet frozen dinners. You’ll have some at lunch. Where you’ll also meet our designers.”

  “Funny—when I went to sleep I was our designer.”

  “And now you’re our star.”

  Billi took her down yet another corridor, stopping to introduce her to people whose names she couldn’t even start to remember. They all seemed to be bursting with projects for designing and publicizing and promoting.

  “My little garret,” Billi announced.

  With its gleaming glass and plastic surfaces, Billi’s office gave the impression of a surgery. On a chrome desk, buttons on two telephone consoles were flashing. On two walls, transparencies hung by steel clips beside illuminated viewing screens.

  Babe leafed through the designs stacked on an easel by the window. The clothes were sharp-edged and aggressive, with jolting contrasts of color and extreme juxtapositions of texture. She stopped at a sable jacket worn with jeans. “Whose are these?”

  “Mine.”

  “You drew them?”

  “No, no, no. I have a cabine of five designers—they submit sketches and fabric ideas. They have twenty-five people working under them.”

  She let the sketches fall back against the easel, thinking of the days when she had run the Babethings boutique and atelier with a total of fifteen tailors and seamstresses and beaders. As she turned she noticed the large black eye of a computer terminal on the table next to the drawing board. “What’s that monster?”

  “State of the art three-D simulator,” Billi said. “We use them to store designs, compose, revise. It’s quite handy. It’ll help your drawing.”

  The computer screen reminded Babe of the surface of a stagnant pond: murky, dark, with infinities of microscopic menace swirling just below. “It won’t help my drawing,” she stated firmly.

  “Babe, chérie, once you get your footing I’m going to see to it that you give progress a try. Now come along. One last stop.” Billi took her down a hallway and swung a door open.

  She stood letting her glance scan the room. Her sense of déjà-vu carried a disturbing adrenal kick.

  “It’s my old office furniture!” she cried. “You kept it!” She gripped Billi’s hand where it lay on her shoulder. “Billi—you angel!”

  She lurched forward, caught her balance, then went slowly around the room, touching the gilt beechwood chairs, the antique French desk, the grandfather clock—all as familiar as the props of a recurrent dream. Placing her crutches against the wall, she sat at the desk and pulled open a drawer.

  “I didn’t dare clean out those drawers,” Billi said. “Though they certainly could have used it.”

  “You’d better not have.” Babe foraged happily through the familiar rubble of pens and doodads and scratch paper and cloth swatches. When she found a picture postcard she gave a delighted yelp.

  “What’s that?” Billi said.

  Babe looked at the postmark. “It’s from Mathilde—from Brittany. She went back for a week’s vacation to that old farm of hers just before I—before my coma.”

  Mathilde had been the matron of Babe’s atelier—a wonderfully capable seventy-year-old Frenchwoman whom she’d hired away from Saint Laurent. “I wonder
how she is. Does anyone ever hear from her?”

  “I heard Mathilde was dead.”

  Babe’s heart gave a little stab. “Oh, no.”

  Billi shrugged fatalistically. “Well, she was old.”

  “How’s work?” Dr.’ Corey’s hands moved over her in slow, careful motions, touching her with rubber hammer, icy steel stethoscope, inflatable plastic tourniquet with crackling Velcro clasps.

  “I’m getting in a few days a week,” Babe said. “Trying my damnedest. But it’s like learning a language all over again.”

  “You’re learning a lot of things all over again. You ought to be getting pretty adept at it.”

  “I wonder,” Babe said. “I’ve been having some trouble.”

  “Trouble with what?”

  “Memories.”

  “Forgetting things?”

  “No—just the opposite. Remembering things.”

  “That’s a good sign,” Dr. Corey said.

  She smelled rubbing alcohol, then felt the cool touch of damp cotton, followed by the jab of a needle in the crook of her arm. She was aware of a slow uneasy warmth spreading outward from the skin puncture as blood was drawn up into the cylinder of the syringe.

  “But these memories are like shadows,” she said. “I can’t get a focus on them. It’s as though they were someone else’s, not my own.”

  “You’re a shrewd observer. The fact is, we all have memories that aren’t our own.”

  Dr. Corey withdrew the syringe, offering her a smile. She wanted to believe that smile.

  “Freud has a case of a nearly illiterate Austrian servant girl. She remembered and recited entire chapters of Leviticus in perfect biblical Hebrew. She’d never studied Hebrew and she could hardly speak her native German. It turned out she’d been employed by a Lutheran pastor. At night while she was sleeping he’d stomp up and down his study, declaiming the passages—ergo her memory. She heard Leviticus without realizing she’d heard it. The girl was considered a prodigy until Freud found the explanation.”

  Babe ran her fingers up and down her arm, touching the little circular bandage Dr. Corey had put over the vein. “But the girl was a prodigy. The memory was hers.”

  The column of the doctor’s neck swelled. His tone became explanatory, as though he were addressing a student. “The memory of the pastor was hers—but the memory of Leviticus wasn’t hers in the same sense. She’d suppressed the pastor but retained the sound, not the meaning, of his nocturnal recitations. Memory is an idiot with one hundred percent retention. Like an old relative who babbles on too long. On the other hand, consciousness and understanding are selective. It’s the selecting process—the selecting out of links—that gives us the impression of uncanny recall.”

  “I’m not following that.”

  “I’ll give you an example. One patient of mine—president of a leading brokerage house—remembers President McKinley’s assassination even though he was born forty years later. What he doesn’t remember is that his grandfather witnessed the assassination and loved to talk about it.”

  “How do you know he heard his grandfather if he can’t remember?”

  “His mother remembers her father telling the child when he was four years old. The shooting terrified the child, but he adored his grandfather. So in his mind he separated the two.”

  “But Leviticus in Hebrew really exists, and McKinley’s assassination really happened. What about things that didn’t happen? Is it possible to think you remember them?”

  “Absolutely. You could remember a dream. And you might even remember it as a fact. After all, in their own terms, dreams are as real as a tree or a Pythagorean theorem or the sound of a violin. Dreams happen. All physical and mental data coexist in the universe.”

  “You sound mystical.”

  “There’s nothing mystical about common sense.” Dr. Corey was silent, as though lost for a moment in some limitless space of conjecture. “Or maybe there is. I’ve never given it much thought.”

  Her eyes came around to him, cautiously. “Could I have dreamt while I was in coma?”

  “During certain stages of coma, absolutely. The mind has to keep busy or it goes crazy.”

  “Why would I dream about a cocktail party with guests wearing joke-store masks?”

  “Because that might just possibly be your considered judgment of cocktail parties. Pay attention to those little warnings your unconscious sends you. Often they’re right on target.”

  Phones were ringing and echoes were spilling in from the corridor; there was an unending chatter of humans and computers and printers as Babe let herself into her office. A rush of emptiness, like an air current, swirled up to greet her.

  She had stacked the sketches of the last three seasons’ cruise lines in five enormous piles on her worktable and desk and chairs. They were part of a program she had worked out for herself to try to recapture her edge. As she stared at the piles she felt an emotion somewhere between hopelessness and defiance.

  She gave herself a five-second you-can-do-it pep talk, hung up her jacket, leaned her crutches against the wall, and sat down.

  She began with last year.

  As she puzzled over the 150 sketches, her eyes tightened into thin, frustrated slits. All she saw was crude stripes and checks, strident op-paisley and industrial-strength colors, willfully eccentric tailoring that would be impossible to execute without sags and cinches. It all seemed to be part of the three-thousand-dollar look.

  She felt a queasy wobbling of her own judgment, as though somewhere in her long sleep she had lost track of how reality was built, of what cause led to what effect.

  She had in front of her the printout of Babethings’ profit sheets: it showed that hundreds of rich young women—and probably some wanting to be young—bought these skirts and jackets and blouses.

  Babe was puzzled. How did designs like these make any woman feel female or beautiful or successful or good about herself? Where was the affirmation? Could Babethings’ customers, the women who had made the company a thirteen-million-dollar grosser, all be fashion masochists?

  I’m cranky, she told herself. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this today. Maybe I should relax and fool around with a piece of blank paper and a plain old caran d’ache.

  She cleared the worktable.

  “Okay—genius at work.”

  She arranged herself at the drawing board in a spirit that was iffy but hopeful.

  She started a design immediately, a pale blue spring dress, but she didn’t care for it and crossed it out. She began another design and again came to a blank wall. Her hand had trouble putting down the shapes she saw in her head. She drew a simple blouse and it was impossible for her to draw the collar. She tried it without the collar and it looked as though a guillotine had chopped it off.

  After an hour she had gotten no further than simple outlines, increasingly simple, it seemed, and increasingly uninspired.

  Finally she had to admit that determination was getting her nowhere. With a decisive slap she closed her sketchpad on the pages of crossed-out designs.

  A sense of utter futility filled her. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go on a crying jag in this office, she told herself.

  As she pushed the draftsman’s lamp away from the worktable, the picture postcard that she had attached to the extendable arm fell to the drawing board.

  Her eye went to the photograph of the old farmhouse in Brittany. At that moment one of those little messengers Dr. Corey had warned her about blipped something from her unconscious.

  She picked up the card and frowned at the partial postmark, piecing together the name of the town.

  Fingers trembling, she opened the phone book and looked up the directions for international dialing. She called information in Brittany and in her best school French asked if there was a listing for Mademoiselle Mathilde Lheureux.

  A moment later the phone was making the French two-buzzes-in-a-row signal.

  A voice answered. “Allo?”

 
A band of surprise tightened around Babe’s throat. “Mathilde—you’re alive!”

  “Bien sûr I’m alive. Who is this?”

  “It’s Babe, Mathilde. I’m alive too.”

  An instant’s astonishment blipped from Brittany up to a satellite over the Atlantic and down to Manhattan. “But they told me you were dead!”

  “They told me you were dead!”

  “Well, what do they know. Chérie, you must take the very next plane and come visit.”

  “I can’t. I’m working. You come visit me.”

  “I can’t. I’m rebuilding the farmhouse. The timbers are beautiful but old. Like me. Three hundred thousand francs to put in steel supports. What can I do? It’s my home.”

  They chatted for almost three quarters of an hour, and when Babe hung up, she felt cheerfulness bubbling in her blood.

  She bounced into Billi’s office. “Billi, guess what—Mathilde’s alive!”

  Billi looked up from his desk. He seemed quite unexcited. “How in the world did you find that out?”

  “I phoned her.”

  “Well, well, imagine that. Is she going to come visit us?”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t persuade her.”

  “Too bad. Would have been fun to see the old grouch again.” Billi steepled his fingers together. “Say, Babe, would you care to give me the benefit of your expertise on something?”

  He showed her a sketch of a pink silk cocktail dress with an extraordinarily long and very high waist, worn with a matching quilted satin bolero. Granted, fashion sketches tended to a sort of impressionistic exaggeration, but the thought came to Babe that this was an attractive sketch of an extremely impractical outfit.

  “One of my designers put a 1954 Chanel on the computer and reworked it,” Billi said.

  “The bolero looks like something Valentino would do,” Babe said.

  Billi smiled. “He did. Two seasons back. We changed the color and shaped the collar a little.”

  Babe felt her lips draw together. “Are we using it?”

  “Well, we have a few gaps in the cruise line, and it wouldn’t be too hard to crash. What do you think? A fond hommage to past elegance?”

  Babe had been trying her best to keep an open mind, to get a feel for what was happening in today’s fashion. But more and more she had a frustrating sense of inability to judge the direction that design had taken, or at least that Babethings had chosen to take. The company designers were making brilliant statements, but the fact that the statement had to be worn by a living woman was simply an obstacle to be ingeniously and expensively conquered.