“No, I had a few things I wanted to finish up.”
“You wanted to spy on me?” Constance said.
“No. I had no idea … I didn’t realize you stayed so late.” CeeCee held her ground despite Constance’s attempts to shake it. Constance approved of this. She admired commensurate strength.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve found your way back.” Constance returned to her magazine, feigning interest. “Any brilliant ideas?” she said. “I’m open to anything. We need a miracle right now.”
CeeCee did not pause. This was her moment and she knew it. The pomade. Of course, she knew it was not ready. She thought of her sketches and papers and the jars of shea butter and essential oils cluttered on her kitchen counter and in her bag. Still, she knew it was time. Opportunity did not knock twice. Formulating the beginning of her pitch, she smiled and began.
“Actually I’ve—”
Constance stopped her, extending her hand and taking CeeCee’s notebook to see what she was working on.
“I’m working on a pomade for colored women.…” She trailed off to Constance’s non-interest in the subject.
“What’s this?” She opened to a page in the notebook with Egyptian-style drawings. CeeCee stepped toward Constance and saw the drawings and, in perfectly scrawled script, a long list of ingredients. Constance stared at the page. This was not the moment she had hoped for. She swallowed her sentence as she saw Constance devour the list. Coal. Dye. Ink.
“Things that are black,” CeeCee explained. “For the eyes. I was researching Cleopatra. Do you know she used kohl on her eyes for mascara? She also perfumed her sails when she traveled by boat so she could leave or make an impression when she came into port to see Caesar. She used beauty to achieve her political goals,” CeeCee said proudly of her research.
“Yes, like all of us smart gals,” Constance said dryly as she looked at the page with interest. And then at the books in CeeCee’s arms. Hardbound books and soft covers featuring diagrams, endless lists with potential ingredients, history books open to pages of ancient Egyptian men and woman with kohl outlining their eyes. The discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb some years earlier had piqued the public’s interest in Egyptology and reintroduced the idea of primitive cosmetics and coal-black eyeliner. Constance looked at the photography book of many of Tut’s vast array of treasures and the funereal mask: the gleaming gold and dark black slashes around the eyes.
“This is good. This one might have possibility.” Constance smiled, knowing deep down that CeeCee’s idea was a winner and that she held another type of gold in her hand. “Would you mind if I kept this and kept the books? Such an interesting idea.”
“Of course. I work for you. My ideas are your ideas.” CeeCee smiled.
“We shall see.” She cleared her throat. “You know, there’s never enough time!” She smiled at CeeCee. “I’m so glad you believe in working late, too. Two working gals coming in late on a Friday night? I can’t help but admire you.”
CeeCee blushed. “Well, it’s mutual, of course. I mean … you’re an idol to me. Everything you’ve done … everything you do…” She paused, aware she was stammering. “I admire you, Mrs. Wyke. Many of us girls do. You’re giving us all the right to be like the movie stars, to express our personality in the way we look. Who, besides you, is letting everyday girls get to feel so beautiful? And give them economic freedom.”
“Well, you know I’m not the only one,” Constance said, demurring, pointing to an ad for Parfum Empress Josephine on the next page.
“You are. She doesn’t compare. She doesn’t invent like you do.”
“I think quite the contrary, she is rather ferocious in her passion.”
“She’s not like you. She wouldn’t hire a girl like me. A black girl with no—”
Constance stood from her chair, unsettled and passionate and feeling overconfident.
“Don’t do that. You are a woman. A brilliant, talented, caring, beautiful woman who shouldn’t be overlooked because of the shade of her rouge!”
CeeCee stared at Constance. This kindness, this force, was totally unexpected and it took her breath away.
The two women now stood face-to-face.
CeeCee felt the warmth from Constance’s body. Jasmine perfume from the English Garden Collection filled her nostrils. Her soft pink skin, flushed from the booze, her rose-shaped lips, moist and plump.
“Tu as de beaux yeux,” Constance said.
The intense connection overpowered both. They felt a force pushing them toward each other. Their eyes closed and the two sets of lips gently rested on top of each other. They stayed like this, lips touching lips, for several seconds, until they fell, laughing, onto the desk.
The passion and lust that followed was unlike anything either woman had ever known—deeply erotic, wonderfully playful, and electric in its heat. They romped and rolled for hours, carried by lust and secrecy, exploring each other’s bodies like young lovers, discovering the pleasures of another body for the first time. Of course, months later, the innocence and delight of the night would take on a different tinge, propelled as it was by disappointment, admiration, companionship, and a splash or two of gin. But regardless of the factors that thrust these two beautiful women together, it was lasting and powerful for them both. CeeCee had never been touched or desired in that way before, let alone by a woman. It was pure and intimate, devilish and hot. And, of course, sweetened by the sugar of secrecy and the honey of forbidden fruit.
This night would come to bookend Constance and CeeCee’s working relationship, as it marked the end of the professionalism and distance that had characterized it before and the beginning of an intimacy neither had known could exist. Their partnership morphed into something neither woman could have imagined. Their trysts became a weekly event. Meticulously planned and structured, like everything in Constance’s life. Constance went so far as to tell her husband that she had a client who could meet only after sundown. She let him wonder if the client was in some sort of religious cult.
Yet this rigidity, while ideal for Constance, left CeeCee feeling uneasy. For CeeCee, the liaisons grew increasingly predictable, almost rote, and never again captured the passion of that first night. Within a few months, CeeCee began to feel that her time was no longer hers. She often lied to Mickey that she was working late and could not see him. Upon getting home to her apartment, she bathed before he arrived to wash off any scent. Then she started to feel she was divided between Constance’s new project and Constance’s lust. A toy, another product penciled into Constance’s schedule. It had been weeks since CeeCee was able to work on her pomade. And for CeeCee, lust paled in comparison with the force of her ambition.
* * *
It was a Monday evening and the sun had set and the office had emptied. Constance and CeeCee met at the appointed time and were sure to be alone. CeeCee gathered her belongings—her supplies, her notebooks—left her bag in her chair, and walked toward the office of her lover, her boss.
Constance was busy on the phone and didn’t see CeeCee enter. CeeCee took advantage of her anonymity to analyze Constance as a stranger would. Her glossed and lacquered nails held the phone just away from her face, so as not to ruin her cosmetics. She threw her head back when she laughed, or pretended to laugh, and her neck moved gently in and out with each breath. Constance was the string dangling CeeCee from success. To be desired by such a powerful woman was an honor. But to be captive to her would not do.
Constance turned to CeeCee, smiling now, as though she had known she was there the whole time. She was putting on a show of not noticing. Putting on a show. Constance waved alluringly, mouthing, “Five minutes.” CeeCee nodded and went back to her desk.
But CeeCee would not be deterred. She would not give this up. She sat and waited. Five minutes turned into ten. Ten minutes turned into a half hour. She was never one to waste time, and yet here she was, staring at a blank piece of paper in her notebook, sitting in an empty office, doing nothing but wai
ting. Infuriated at herself for her passivity, she turned to her pomade notes. On a lark, the night before in her kitchen, she had added a drop of peppermint oil to the shea butter and coconut oil. She’d mixed and watched the reaction. Then she’d inhaled. The scent was deep and intense, healing and invigorating at once. She had used it on her scalp and the formula had eased the itching. It had actually “relaxed” the irritation the lye had caused. The peppermint had given the treatment and her scalp a cool, calming sensation. She knew this was the secret. Now, at the office, her mind began to race faster than her pen. She felt inspiration. A eureka moment. That airless feeling you get only from a new idea. The water that evaporated as steam may as well have been CeeCee’s spirit rising aloft. She sketched out a logo, as she knew she would need one, just as the Gardiner logo of assorted English flowers in a wreath had served the brand well. She wrote, “CeeCee Lopez’s hair straightener.” No, she thought. “Straightener” sounded too businesslike, too formal, and wasn’t descriptive enough as it related to the product benefit. She thought of other words and in her mind liked the idea of the hair being softer, less stressed. Relaxed, even.
“Relaxed.” She smiled. “That’s it, that’s the idea.” Her spirits soared at the term. She would use the word “relaxer” rather than “pomade” or “straightener.” The fine curls of the capital C she drew became lovely tendrils of silky, relaxed hair. She finally had the idea and the concept. CeeCee’s Relaxer. That was it. She loved it.
“He doesn’t stop. That man can go on for hours.”
CeeCee looked up, shocked. Constance stood in her doorway. Her immediate thought was to tell Constance her discovery. It was time to make her move. But when she spoke, the only thing that came out was:
“What time is it?”
“Late. Thanks for waiting. Let’s make it rapide.” With a swift turn, Constance headed back to her office, her heels clacking on the hallway’s hardwood floor. CeeCee heeded the command and followed behind. She looked at Constance with reignited fire, elated by the night’s events, and that night, when they made love, the two held on to each other as if for dear life.
* * *
Lenny Ryan, the custodian of the building, expected to see an empty office. Sometimes, if the mood struck him, he would take a seat at the famous Mrs. Gardiner-Wyke’s desk, pretending for a moment he was a different sort of man. After all, he was bitter at having to clean a woman’s office. But tonight, there was not the usual empty spot that he found at the desk. For a moment, he watched with shock and a thrill as these two women entangled themselves with each other. Then he coughed.
CeeCee scrambled to cover herself. Constance slipped her blouse on with ease.
“May I help you? This is a private office,” Constance snarled.
“You’re Mrs. Gardiner-Wyke,” he said, repeating her full name out loud as he had seen it in the various articles and magazine covers he had often tidied in her office. He felt emboldened, using her full name in a caustic tone.
“This room doesn’t need attending to.” She stepped toward him like a lioness intimidating her prey. She could take him down, if need be.
“This is a double dose of wrongdoing here,” Lenny said. “You’re married. And she’s a…”
“Stop yourself now.” Constance’s neck, no longer gentle, hardened with rage.
He stared back, defiant. “This isn’t right.”
Pure barbarism flickered in his eyes. He was an older man, striped with veins, but it seemed possible he could harm them both. Even if it was two against one.
“I’m not—” CeeCee choked.
“Not what?” he said. “Not a dyke? Or a spic?”
Constance recoiled in revulsion.
“I want you out of this office right now. My husband will be hearing about this,” she hissed. “I will not have such an invasive and vile person—”
“Mr. Wyke won’t know anything, unless he has to,” said Lenny.
Constance paused, understanding his inference.
“Oh, I see,” she said, exhaling and rising slightly higher. Her mind raced as she thought back to the night she’d had to post bail for her brother, James. She knew that homosexual behavior was considered illegal, and one word to the police or the press could ruin her, socially and professionally.
“Perhaps we can work something out,” she said.
CeeCee blinked and stared at Constance now with the same level of revulsion as she regarded the custodian.
Constance moved back toward her desk, having resumed the tone of a businesswoman.
CeeCee gathered herself and walked toward the door, still zippering her skirt. She inched past Lenny, who did not move but rather kept his eyes on her, as though he too had been promoted from prey to predator.
21
THE DECLARATION
New York City, 1935
She got off luckier than her checkbook thought. Constance had been prepared to write off at least $2,000 to silence the awful custodian. Of course, the vitriol he’d spewed at her when she’d handed him the check should have prompted her to rip it out of his hands and possibly slash her violent red nails across his florid cheek. Instead, she kept it to herself, the incident and the rage, and walked past him and out of the office. The next day, as she strode calmly past the newsstand on her way to her lunch at the Colony, she stopped in her tracks as she saw it. The newspaper bore the face of the woman she detested, Herz. Her smug smile and angular eyebrows looked lurid on the front page. The headline read:
HERZ BEAUTY IS HERE TO STAY
INTERNATIONAL BEAUTY BRAND
PLANS TO OFFER STOCK TO PUBLIC
* * *
How many rubles had it taken for the Daily News to run that on the front page? was the first thought on Constance’s mind. She was so glad she had snubbed that woman at the opera opening benefit. She had been introduced by their mutual friend Avery Fisher, the electronics mogul.
“Constance, have you met the other beauty pioneer, Madame Herz?” he asked her, as the diminutive Josephine had greeted him warmly in her green satin Vionnet, resplendent in a collar of emeralds.
“It is indeed a great pleasure.” Josephine extended a white-gloved hand to Constance, which was immediately rejected by her tall blond counterpart.
“I don’t believe I know or have ever heard of her.” Constance gave a haughty laugh. “Avery, you are quite a card. Van, let’s go inside,” she harrumphed to her husband. “I don’t want to associate with strangers. Or immigrants,” she added for good measure, threw her foxes over her shoulders, and stormed off.
“I’m sorry, Josephine.” Avery shook his head.
“Don’t vorry. She’ll get Herz.” Josephine smiled at what had become a famous bon mot, but the smile masked her fury. And that Gardiner Girl was now a sworn enemy.
The next day, on the other side of town, Josephine knew the truth was more complicated. She sat in her conference room and thought back to her days at her uncle’s shop. How little it took to satisfy the local women with her potions and cream. Before it became all about product introductions, launches, and marketing. She also thought back on her uncle’s stern behavior and his misunderstanding of her goals—his actual thwarting of her goals. But of course, what man had not crushed the dreams of a woman he professed to love? Yes, she had nicked a few bottles to make a profit, but in the long run they were worth less than pennies to her uncle. Now that she was so successful, he had finally written to her for financial help, as she knew one day he would. She’d opened the letter carefully when she saw the Melbourne postage, savoring what she knew would be in the letter. It had been filled with rosy remembrances and platitudes and stressed how much he and Aunt Masha had helped her in the early days, and everything had a sickly sweet glow to the script. Aunt Masha was now sick, the store was failing, and the girls needed money for their weddings. Josephine had read the note with her own level of revulsion and then with great satisfaction. She had finally won. She had immediately sent him a check for $1,000 with a note th
at read, “Dear Uncle Solomon, Everyone gets theirs! Josephine Herz.” That was her style. Cool, calculated, and blunt. Never one not to relish the win.
Sarah Collins, the tawny-haired chief marketing officer Josephine had recently hired, entered the boardroom. The meeting was scheduled for noon, but Josephine was always prompt. She had arrived a half hour early and sat at the head of the table where she always did, thinking about the upcoming board meeting as she reviewed the balance sheets. The numbers looked healthy and profitable and there were new products in the pipeline. Why, then, did she feel the future was always uncertain? The shtetl mentality, the years of scraping by and making do, had never left her. She couldn’t escape it despite her jeweled trappings, which had grown only more extravagant over the years.
“I wonder what you think of this.…” Sarah laid down an industry publication reporting on the new effort from Gardiner Cosmetics. It was a bland feature on the new product line, entitled the “Moulin Rouge Lipstick Collection.”
Sarah had been followed in by a European assistant, who was dark and had a Gypsy-like quality. Who was this new brunette in an ongoing line of nameless brunettes who were arriving daily? My god, was there ever any shortage of these busy brazen young women with their pens and pads? Where did these women come from? Josephine mused. Then, she remembered, many of them came from Eastern Europe, just as she had. With that inbred overbite, this one must have just gotten off the last boat from Minsk.
“Think of what?” Josephine tapped the table with her Van Cleef cabochon ring and turned her attention toward the new, eager young woman standing at the side of the table.
“Gardiner. Look at hers and look at yours.” She placed the morning’s newspaper headline in front of her. “Have you seen the papers?” Sarah placed both stories side by side to illustrate her point, Josephine could see only the vile photograph of herself that she specifically told PR to never use.
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