Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  He is looking at the curtained arch where two elderly women are presenting their invitations. Liz glances at them without interest. “Buyers for small-town department stores, I should think. Someplace like Unfortunate Falls, Montana.”

  He giggles. “I’ve got to get back. If I don’t watch the babies, they’ll sneak diet Cokes, and then they’ll have to pee right when they should be changing.”

  The room settles into virtual somnolence while the audience assembles. The coffee urns in the foyer do a steady business. The caterer’s people restock the trays of croissants, get out more butter, more marmalade. More old women arrive, some quite well groomed, a few who look, so Liz thinks, as though they’d slept in an alley. The room becomes crowded.

  Music finally, then gentle applause, and Raoul himself at the lectern, wearing horn-rims and a charming smile, still the wunderkind, the young man who had taken Seventh Avenue by storm.

  “Ladies and gentlemen: Refer to your lists, please. The first garments in our ready-to-wear line are our Avenues of the World selections, based on ethnic themes. First, from Morocco …”

  Liz looks and makes notes, now and then glancing around at the other watchers. The old women, those who look like small-town buyers, aren’t taking notes. They are interested, no doubt about that. They seemed fixated on the models, but they aren’t taking notes. Not on the chiffon harem trousers with the studded leather short shorts beneath; not on the knit tank tops with the armholes cut deep to show the sequin bra; not on the minikimono with the gold-chain obi. Liz looks at her own list in surprise. All she’s done herself is say no, no, no. She can’t get a column out of that!

  But, my God, no woman on the runway weighs more than ninety-five pounds dripping wet! Size four, size six, they look like children dressed up in Grandma’s old Halloween costumes. Breastless. Androgynous. Sylphs. Not human women. Ordinarily, they can look marvelous wrapped in an old tablecloth, but even they look ridiculous in these clothes.

  She rubs her forehead fretfully. Thinking about it calmly, she has to admit the collection isn’t any worse than last year’s, and last year she’d found things to comment on and approve of. Or even the year before! But this year … this year she can find nothing to … nothing to think of wearing. All she can think about is what Bobby said about the models “putting their little fingies down their froats.” The words evoke a faint nausea, which she seems unable to shake.

  So what has changed? Not Raoul née Bobby. It has to be Liz herself. God, is she getting old? Esmee says Esmee is, but Liz? Liz the immortal?

  There are murmurs. Rene looks up from his lectern, eyebrows raised, finding the audience restive. Doggedly, he goes back to the script: “And from Norway we have …”

  Out comes the model, hair bleached white with sprayedon black stripes, cut in a ragged shag barely an inch long, stick-thin body dressed in a bulky orange-, white-, and black-figured Scandinavian sweater cut off at the level of her crotch, and beneath it, so far as Liz can see, a narrow ruffle of black chenille disclosing a gold-lamé string-bikini bottom, the costume set off by thigh-high shiny gold plastic boots with three-inch heels.

  “Ah, fer crisake,” says an old voice in a tone of outrage.

  Raoul looks up again.

  “Ladies,” one of the old women yells above the noise. “All right, ladies!” Her voice is mocking, edged.

  Women rise and began milling around. Shopping bags rustle. A solid phalanx of old dames is suddenly on the runway, moving purposefully toward the dressing room. Raoul stutters to a breathless silence. The lectern goes over with a crash. The microphone screams with feedback sound. Without even thinking about it, Liz steps up onto her chair, then onto the runway, following the crowd, where the story is.

  The dressing room stinks of turpentine and is full of the sound of liquid sloshing Women are emptying cans and bottles all over the racks and the loose clothes lying about, over the boots and shoes standing ready. One of the old ladies opens the back door, onto the alley.

  “Out,” she says, and the other old women begin herding the models before them like sheep, like geese, seeming not to hear the treble honks and baas, the magpie curses. Then they are all outside in the alley, including Liz, while behind them the dressing room whooshes into flames and a high-heeled boot goes through the back window in a cataract of tinkling glass.

  Liz tries to get away, get to a phone, but the women won’t let her go. She is trapped behind a solid phalanx of large, heavy bodies, most of them, Liz notices for the first time, wearing sneakers and planted like trees, roots way down, not moving an inch.

  The fire bursts upward, taking the roof. The old women break their phalanx. The models dart off in all directions, full of shrill complaint. Liz, suddenly released, runs for the street, for the phone, for the fire alarm as the last sneakered woman slips out of the alley and disappears onto the streets.

  Liz finds Bobby-Raoul in the smoke-filled space outside the front door, screaming obscenities amid a small crowd of those who had been inside. No one missing. So far as Liz can tell, no one is injured, no one burned.

  Raoul turns to her, grabs for her, tears of impotent rage on his face, and they stand on the sidewalk, clinging together while the store burns and Raoul yells and red engines howl themselves to a halt, and finally some official with a fireman’s hat says it’s definitely arson, as though they hadn’t known that all along!

  What does the sign on the sidewalk mean? the fireman asks.

  That’s when Liz first notices it, spray painted on the concrete:

  STRENGTH AND HONOR ARE HER CLOTHING!

  “What does that mean?” the designer screams in her ear.

  “I think … I think it’s from the Bible,” she says. “Proverbs. Something like that.…”

  Meantime, far down the streets, a soft shuffle of feet on the sidewalk, sneakers and anklets, shopping carts retrieved from alleys, old hats sheltering old eyes, pushing off into the city as sirens go screaming by, one going this way, one that, a pair here and there, just bag ladies, out for the day, bothering no one.

  What’s next? one asks another.

  The Scalawag shoe place. Tomorrow.

  Will she be with us again?

  She’s always with us. She always has been. We just forgot.

  William Carpenter arrived on the thirtieth floor of the Carpenter building, slightly mellowed by the two drinks he’d allowed himself while lunching with his tax man at the club, but not so detached that he didn’t notice something not quite right with the office staff. Carpenter and Mason Advertising had something untoward going on.

  “Afternoon, Mr. Carpenter,” said the receptionist, quickly glancing at the phone, as though commanding it to ring, which it promptly did. She answered it with an expression very much like relief. So. She’d wanted not to meet his eyes, not to talk to him, not to take part in their usual thirty-second flirtation, wanted him to get on by, out of her vicinity. Storm warning. Interesting.

  Down the deeply carpeted hall, on the way toward his own sanctum, he saw doors shut that normally stood open and heard behind them an irritated buzz, like bees getting ready to swarm. Outside his office, however, Maybelle Corson was much herself, as she gave him her meager smile and a handful of messages: Bettiann had called, his lawyer had called. Nothing about the buzz, so it wasn’t something Maybelle knew about.

  Nonetheless, the buzz was there. Even inside his office, as he returned calls and scribbled notes to himself, he could feel the tension. Carpenter and Mason Advertising occupied the twenty-fifth through the thirtieth floors, and William had always been able to tell the temper of the office just by listening to the hum that came through the walls, the echoes in the ducts. This afternoon there was something frantic going on.

  “Maybelle?” he said, pressing a key.

  “Yes, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “Come in, will you?”

  She slid through the door like an eel, smooth as silk, her dark-colored, high-necked, long-sleeved dress with its neat collar
and cuffs like something out of the forties or fifties.

  “What did Bettiann want?”

  “Just to know whether you’d be home for dinner.”

  “Call her and tell her yes. Now, what’s going on out there?”

  She shook her head slowly, not to dislodge a hair of that tightly moussed coiffure. “I’m not sure, sir. There seems to be a good deal of whispering behind closed doors. It started this morning, shortly after we opened.”

  “Find out.”

  “Yes, sir.” She oozed out once more, nose twitching busily, already on the trail. Maybelle Corson had her sources. A clerk here, a secretary there, a junior staff member somewhere else. She cultivated them, maternally. She got them little promotions or little raises or better desks, nearer windows. She handled little matters, like sexual harassment, without making a court case of it. Then, when Maybelle needed to know what was really going on with this account executive or that layout department, they told all.

  He dug into the messages. General Motors’s sports vehicle, El Tigre, wasn’t selling well, the ad manager wondered if it might be the new ad campaign. Ditto the ad manager for Forever Young, a new line of skin products. Hell. William hadn’t liked either campaign; they’d felt wrong, somehow—too pushy, too sexy—but that’s what his people had come up with, and that’s what the clients had bought. He didn’t second-guess his people unless he had to, and he never second-guessed clients.

  His buzzer. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Carpenter?”

  “Come in, Maybelle.”

  She oozed in once more. “Everyone’s chattering about riots, Mr. Carpenter. Evidently it started with a New York fashion house being burned yesterday, and then several Scalawag shoe outlets were burned this morning, and the TV says it’s being blamed on the advertising—”

  “What!”

  She came closer to the desk, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “Scalawag stores in Chicago, New York, Boston, Miami, and Washington, D.C., have been burned. Just the stores, no injury to people. There may be others, as well, but those are the ones we’ve heard about. Mobs of women invaded them and trashed them, sir. They left signs taking off on the campaign slogan: ‘Scalawags, the Walk of a Woman.’ ”

  He stared for a moment in disbelief. “Signs?”

  “Well, graffiti. Saying various things, sir. ‘The walk of a woman, away,’ was one. And, ‘The walk of an angry woman.’ ”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

  “Get Vitorici in here. And Liz Johnson. And ask Webber to handle my Spinsoft appointment.”

  She scurried out, not so smoothly this time, lines between her eyes. “Leave the door open,” he called. “Send them in as soon as they get here.”

  Which was only moments. Vitorici arrived almost at once, as though he’d been launched from a cannon. He looked worried, tie awry, his usually polished surfaces abraded. His assistant, Liz Johnson, slipped through the door only moments later, her egglike cheeks smudged, hairdo perforated by pencils, mouth screwed up.

  “All right,” said William. “Let’s have it.”

  They looked at each other, her eyebrows raised, his squirming like caterpillars, she shrugging, he lip chewing, both shifting uncomfortably. Vitorici elected himself spokesman.

  “I’ve been trying to get better information, Bill. The whole thing is rather sketchy at the moment. At first we thought it was like the college bombings, or like the women being shot on street corners, but in this case the perpetrators were women. We’ve thought of lesbian protests, maybe, or a buyers’ strike, or some kind of consumers’ demonstration. Perhaps we’ve totally misread the buster generation.”

  “Are you saying this is an age-related thing?”

  Vitorici looked around, got no help from Liz Johnson. “Well, the … the perpetrators are all … elderly. And the campaign was aimed at the teen-to-twentyish woman, which means any woman wanting to look that age. Women agile enough to manage the shoes, I mean.…”

  “He means four-inch heels aren’t for everyone. Or platform soles,” said Liz in a crisp, no-nonsense voice. “You may recall I advised against that ‘Walk of a Woman’ approach. The visuals, that whole fashion-show sequence with the extreme clothes and makeup. I also complained about the quasi-rock bump-and-grind music.”

  “Bump and grind?” Vitorici yelled. “Do you know how much we paid for the right to use that song? It won an Oscar!”

  “It won an Oscar as a romantic ballad, but then the production people had it rearranged as stripper music,” she snarled. “And the director had the models twitching their bottoms like belly dancers. I also objected to his using anorexic models with no breasts or hips who look as though they’ve just been released from a gulag.”

  “Enough,” William muttered. The two shut up, he red in the face, she very pale. “Has anyone claimed responsibility? Has anyone issued a statement?”

  Liz answered. “No one was arrested. They all got away. It was very well planned, just like the thing in New York yesterday. Noon news broadcasts said the fire departments in the various cities had received a communiqué, but they didn’t quote it.”

  William let out his breath explosively, unaware he’d been holding it. “We’d better talk to Scalawag. Who’s their sales manager? Mierson?”

  “You’d better talk to more than Scalawag,” said Liz grimly. “If this is happening to them, I’d worry about Seal-sleek Swimwear—and the Lovelace lingerie account, and the new Forever Young skin-care line—”

  “Why them?”

  “In my opinion the ad campaigns are equally insulting, for one.”

  “You worked on all of them,” Vitorici yelled.

  “I got outvoted on all of them,” she hollered with equal vehemence. “The female viewpoint was not considered germane.”

  “One thing at a time,” snarled William. “Set a meeting with the Scalawag people first. And as soon as the rioters, trashers, whatever, are identified, send someone to talk with them. I want to know who put them up to this.”

  “Who put them up to it?” asked Liz, eyebrows raised.

  “Who put them up to it,” he asserted. “We could chase our tails all over the place looking for motivations that aren’t there, when the whole thing may have been planned by the competition.”

  “Euro-boot is hiring rioters to lower Scalawag’s market share?” Her question trembled on the verge of laughter.

  “Do it, Liz.” His voice was threatening, not a voice he usually used with his people.

  “Of course, Mr. Carpenter,” she said coldly. “Immediately.”

  Damn. Now he’d offended her, and if it turned out she’d been right … damn.

  As they left, Maybelle was hovering at the door. She’d obviously listened to it all.

  “Yes, Maybelle?”

  “It’s not my place to comment, Mr. Carpenter, but I don’t think it’s a conspiracy—”

  “Not your place,” he snarled. “You’re right, Maybelle.”

  “Yes, sir.” She went out, silently fuming. So let him find out for himself. Up until a month ago Lilian, Maybelle’s youngest daughter, went to the mall every chance she got, after school, on weekends, hanging out, spending what money she had on clothes and shoes. Not Scalawag, of course. Cheap imitations of Scalawag was the best she could do, prancing around with her bottom swinging. Then she stopped going. When Maybelle asked why, she said it was boring. She said none of her friends were going anymore. She said she was through spending all her money on stuff.

  “Stuff?” Maybelle had asked, openmouthed.

  “Mother. I only did it because everybody else did. We’re all through. We’re saving for cars, for college, for something useful.” She’d looked up patiently, smiling kindly on old Mom, as though their roles had been reversed, leaving Maybelle at a loss.

  “Where did you get this approach to life?”

  “I don’t know.” Lilian had shrugged. “It just makes sense.”

&nb
sp; Four daughters, and this was the first time one of them had ever left Maybelle speechless.

  Let William Carpenter find out for himself. Let him figure out what the hell was going on!

  Arrangement on a desk. A Steuben bud vase holding a spray of green orchids. A gold-and-onyx-mounted desk calendar at current date, April 9, 2000. Two boxes of stationery: one informal, with flowers—Bettiann Carpenter—one printed in businesslike dark gray on pale taupe—Mrs. William Carpenter, Eleven Foxtail Lane, Dallas, Texas. A complicated phone with a built-in directory. Two pairs of glasses; one bifocal, one for reading. An old, cheap address book, the cover scuffed, the corners worn, open at the D’s, Decline and Fall Club. A silver-framed signed photograph of a grinning redhead in cap and gown: Love to Aunt Betty, I made it, Stace. Another of a beautiful though sulky-faced youth: To Mom from Junior—the word “Junior” underlined and in quotes—Who would have been just as angry and dissatisfied and depressed if he’d been named anything else—as William frequently pointed out.

  The desk had been crafted of solid black walnut to fit the alcove where it stood. The carpet had been special-ordered from Afghanistan. The pieces of furniture that had not been custom-made were collector’s items. The fabric in the drapes was pure silk, loomed in Italy. The convex mirror above the credenza in the hall was eighteenth century, ornate yet dignified, reflecting a fish-eye image of the paneled, book-lined room, the desk and its occupant, Bettiann Carpenter née Bromlet, fifty-some odd but looking at least fifteen years younger. And damned well better, considering what it cost William to keep her svelte and well maintained. Good thing William had inherited all that oil money. Even on his salary he might not be able to afford her otherwise.

  She stared across the room at the dwarf in the mirror, ignoring the distorted body and face to peer at the flawlessly arranged hair. Apricot Ice, the hairdresser had said. Carrot Puree, it looked like. William would have a fit, if he noticed at all. Sighing, she turned back to the desk.