by Judith Gould
Before she’d met Duncan, she’d even gone to FIT for two years, turning away several other men before he’d convinced her to marry him. But with marriage and pregnancy she’d put her own ambitions on the back burner and played dutiful wife and devoted mother full-time. It hadn’t been until after their divorce, when she’d been bored halfway to tears, that her hunger reasserted itself.
By that time she knew better than to jump blindly into the fashion fray and launch her own line—she didn’t know enough. So she’d joined Antonio de Riscal, figuring, correctly, that working in the industry was the best education she could get. Which was true, to an extent. The only problem was, the opportunity to design never presented itself. Nor would it ever. Antonio was autocratic. He designed every outfit himself, down to the last button and bow, and Edwina found herself becoming one of New York’s foremost business executives instead of the designer she so hungered to be.
That was one thing she wanted—to break away from selling someone else’s clothes and designing her own. Long ago, she’d even come up with the name of her own label: Edwina G.
But the older she got, the more elusive her dream became. Instead of dreaming of Edwina G. during every waking and sleeping hour, as she once had, now the idea cropped up only once a day or so. If that much. So much for the dreams of babes and the lure of a dollar in the hand.
The second item on her wish list seemed even more elusive. Enjoying a fulfilling love life wasn’t something that just happened— and you couldn’t go out and shop for it whenever the mood hit.
The trouble was, there was little time or opportunity for love in her life. Fashion being the creative industry that it was, many of the men she ran across were gay—and those who weren’t were either married or not her type. On the rare occasions when she did let herself be wined and dined, mostly by store executives and buyers Antonio de Riscal did business with, none of them were men she wanted to share even the night with, let alone a lifetime.
And on those rarest of occasions, when a man she did like happened along, her success worked against her. She was too hardy and competent for most men’s liking. Despite women’s lib and yuppiedom and all the talk about the importance of careers in the eighties, most men were still chauvinists at heart. Her hardiness and competence made her seem that much less feminine in their eyes. But what choice did she have? she often wondered. She was who she was, and the responsibilities she bore weren’t for swooning Victorian maidens. Big business called for big muscle, and the same men who were turned off because they thought she wore balls would have been the first men to take advantage of any weaknesses she showed.
She was damned if she was tough and even more damned if she wasn’t. So. There were no men in her life.
And except for Ruby and Hallelujah, she had no close women friends either.
Still, she couldn’t honestly lodge a single real complaint. It wasn’t such a tough life, and a less uncompromising person would have found it quite fulfilling. If fame and fortune hadn’t exactly swept her off her feet, she had nevertheless found an exceedingly comfortable niche for herself.
A buzz jerked her mind from its meandering, and the luggage carousel finally started up with a jerk. Other passengers crowded around, pushing and shoving.
And lo and behold! A miracle! Perhaps because of their daunting size, the four trunks slid out first, monstrous and ungainly, followed by—was it possible?—her own two suitcases.
Winston lifted them effortlessly off the conveyor belt, commandeered two skycaps with trolleys, and then led the way out into the freezing morning to the stretch station wagon, parked less than fifty feet away.
One good thing about the red-eye: parking close to the terminal at that hour was a breeze.
Edwina tipped the skycaps lavishly and, eschewing the back of the chauffeured car as unmitigated snobbery, slid into the front seat beside Winston. “Home, Winnie!” she said in a glad voice. “And the trunks go to the showroom.”
She was not stating the obvious. Often the trunk shows were so tightly scheduled that the moment she was dropped off at home, Winston would drive straight to Klas Claussen’s apartment and pick him up, taking him and the trunks back to the airport for the next flight out. Antonio de Riscal’s 325-million-dollar fashion empire was run like clockwork which amounted to a miracle, since Edwina and Klas had also had to fill in for Rubio, Antonio’s number two in command, who had become too sick to work during the last six months.
She thought of him now. Rubio Mendez. A cheerful, natty young Venezuelan. A once-cheerful, no-longer-natty, dead Venezuelan. Two days earlier, while she had been away directing the trunk show at I. Magnin’s in San Francisco, Rubio had died in his Lexington Avenue apartment from AIDS.
He had been cremated almost immediately, and the memorial service was this afternoon.
With that sobering thought, the sparkle in Edwina’s eyes died. As though to emphasize her mood, Winston slowed for the first of the rush-hour traffic into Manhattan.
She’d miss Rubio.
She had liked him. It had been Rubio who had hired her, three years earlier, against the openly antagonistic protests of Klas, who had wanted a friend to have the job. She’d overheard their argument when she’d come out of the ladies’ room and had been heading for the elevator after her job interview.
KLAS: “You cocksucker, what the fuck do you mean, you’re going to hire that woman? What is she, another fag hag for you to run around with?”
RUBIO: “Shut up, Klas. She’s more capable than that two-bit hustler you’re trying to slide in, and you know it! He doesn’t know fashion from faggots.”
KLAS: “And what are her qualifications, may I ask?”
RUBIO: “For one thing, she’s a woman. In case you haven’t noticed, Klas, a lot of the department- and specialty-store buyers are women. And it’s women who come here for all the couture fittings.”
KLAS: “If I were in charge, I’d fire you!”
RUBIO: “But you’re not in charge, are you? I am. You can huff and puff all you want. In fact, you’re lucky I put up with you. I’ve had my final say, and that’s that. Case closed.”
Needless to say, from her first day on, there hadn’t been any love lost between Edwina and Klas. She considered herself fortunate that, as a rule, when she was on the road, Klas was in the showroom, and vice versa. Rubio’s strategic scheduling usually kept them out of each other’s sight and hair.
But she’d done well and proved her worth; her trunk shows were consistently the most successful. This last one had culminated in I. Magnin’s unheard-of two-million-dollar order, the biggest to date from a single store.
Small wonder, then, that when the symptoms of Rubio’s illness increasingly manifested themselves, Antonio had begun to drop hints that she, and not Klas, would be filling Rubio’s shoes . . . that when the time came, she, not Klas Claussen, would be promoted to become Antonio’s all-important and prestigious number two. And although Antonio had never gone so far as to say so outright, Rubio had. A scant month ago he’d bravely told her, “I’ve talked to Antonio, Girl-Girl, and it’s all settled. As soon as I kick the bucket, you’ll get kicked upstairs. See? We’re both going to get kicked somewhere.”
And they’d both had a good long cry.
Now, as she stared ahead at the bumper-to-bumper traffic and the gray towers of Manhattan, crystal clear and sharply defined in the distance, a little thrill raised the skin on Edwina’s legs and prickled the hairs on her neck. She would be filling Rubio’s vacated number-two spot.
The thrill drained away as swiftly as it had come. Damn that disease! Why did life have to be like this?
Under normal circumstances, a rise up the corporate ladder and the prospect of a fifty-percent raise would have dazzled her, but Rubio’s death having made it possible left a very, very bad taste in her mouth.
She hoped Antonio would have the grace to wait a few days before making her appointment official.
Chapter 2
Antonio de Ri
scal was on the prowl. It was only eight-thirty in the morning, and already he was horny as all hell.
He growled to himself as he lit a cigarette with a slim gold Dunhill lighter. Why couldn’t his libido shape up? On the very morning of Rubio’s memorial service, here he was standing on the southeast corner of Thirty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue ogling the crotches and buttocks of the black and Puerto Rican boys pushing the hanging garment racks laden with coats and dresses.
A deadly disease was stalking the streets, but his penis couldn’t seem to get the message.
As always, Seventh Avenue was a madhouse. The chaos and congestion spread up and down the avenue and the narrow one-way side streets of the Garment Center, where belching trucks making pickups and deliveries snarled the traffic hopelessly, and porters pushing racks of unprotected bolts of fabric or finished clothing made you wonder how on earth anything clean ever got to the stores. And, as though there wasn’t enough confusion, union pickets were marching up and down the sidewalk in front of one manufacturer, while shrill shouts and blaring horns and wailing sirens and dope peddlers selling joints and coke and crack bewildered the mind. The scene brought to mind an industrial casbah in hell.
Antonio de Riscal was tall and lean and sleekly predatory, as out-of-place amid the raucous grime as a diamond in a mud pit. His body was aristocratically elongated and streamlined, which made it a perfect clothes hanger for beautifully tailored suits. His features were as polished and artful as his manners: prominent cheekbones, green-gray eyes, and a ski jump of a nose set on a copper-tanned face. His nails were manicured and buffed, and even his bald pate with its fringe of silver and black hair looked prosperous.
“Watch your back!” someone shouted behind him, and he jumped out of the way just as a rattling garment rack bore down on him.
He felt a flush of hot anger. The bastard! he thought, his hands clenching at his sides. They always seemed to seek out the best-dressed pedestrians to run down!
Suddenly his irritation disappeared and was replaced by a roaring hard-on of heroic proportions.
Hel-lo! And what is this? he asked himself. As the rack that had nearly run him down rattled past, he caught sight of the porter pushing it.
Sweet mother of mercy. How old could he be? Eighteen? All of nineteen? And with practically no hips to speak of.
But thick, muscular thighs—oh, yes, he had those. And under the thick quilted jacket—more muscles, surely. And he strutted so cocksure, with those washed-out, torn Levi’s so tight that the thick outline of prick and the glorious bulge of balls were blatantly displayed for all the world to see.
Antonio, whose one major weakness was that he sometimes thought with his penis instead of his brain, now once again let himself be guided solely by his crotch. Throwing caution to the four winds, he tossed his cigarette into the street and began to follow the hunk.
He has tight buns too, he thought, his blood surging and roaring. Yes, yes, he’s very yummy, and he knows it too. Nobody was born with that stud walk, with those lean hips swinging, and that crotch thrust forward like a beacon. That walk was studied and perfected.
And what was he? Puerto Rican? Or maybe half black?
And what could he possibly earn? Minimum union wage?
Antonio considered the effect that waving a Ben Franklin in front of the boy’s nose would have. Might it make him forget, for a few minutes at least, that he was straight?
At Thirty-seventh Street the garment rack rattled noisily across Seventh Avenue, and Antonio was jaywalking at the porter’s heels, happily oblivious of the honking horns of oncoming traffic.
Then, on the sidewalk, the garment rack came to such an abrupt stop that Antonio collided with the young man.
Before he could mutter an apology, a darkly handsome face with brooding black-olive eyes turned and glared belligerently. “Hey, man, wassa matter?” the boy yelled. “You followin’ me?”
Antonio, forgetting momentarily the accolades just heaped upon him by the fashion industry’s weekly Tobe Report, which had proclaimed him to be “the premier American designer,” who dressed and personally fitted America’s richest women, including three former First Ladies, who headed his own 325-million-dollar fashion empire, which had grossed $420 million the last year alone, whose after-tax personal income in 1987 had been somewhere between eighteen and nineteen million dollars, and who had won more Coty awards than any other single designer in the nation, was suddenly reduced to feeling very foolish, very embarrassed, and very humiliated. Which made him feel only that much hornier.
He cupped his hand and coughed delicately into it. “I . . . ah . . . excuse me . . .” he said softly, but made no move to scurry off.
“What are you,” the kid snarled contemptuously, “a fag?”
Antonio reveled in humiliation and discipline, and now he felt the creep of a guilty flush as he stammered softly, “I’m sorry if I made a nuisance of myself.”
Antonio watched the young man’s eyes narrow. He seemed to be deciding whether to ignore Antonio, scare him off, or play him along. While he was doing that, Antonio kept staring blatantly at him. He just couldn’t tear his eyes away.
The boy was handsome, in that rough street-wise kind of way that Antonio found so appealing. The boy was just his type—hell, the boy was the personification of his type.
He was worth more than one bill, Antonio thought desperately. Two bills. Three.
“How would you like three hundred dollars?” he croaked softly.
The kid stared at him. “What?”
Antonio took a deep breath. “I’ll give you three hundred dollars if you’ll come back with me for half an hour,” he blurted.
The kid grinned suddenly. “You mean, you wanna pay to get fucked?”
Antonio nearly swooned. He nodded eagerly. “I’m just two blocks away.”
The boy shrugged. “All right. Why not?” Then his voice hardened. “But I gotta make some deliveries first. I’ll meet you here at ten.”
“Okay.” Antonio could barely speak, he was so excited. His mind was flying. At ten-fifteen he had an appointment for a fitting; he’d simply have his secretary make the rich bitch wait until he’d finished with the kid. He’d smuggle the boy in and out of his office by the fire stairs. That was easy enough; he’d done it often before. “Ten o’clock,” he said dreamily.
Just thinking about it very nearly made him cream.
Antonio virtually floated back to 550 Seventh Avenue. He whistled to himself all the way up in the elevator, and didn’t drop the tune until he was past the lavish reception area with its Napoleon III decor and almost at his office door.
At the desk directly in front of it, like a grim sphinx, sat his secretary, Liz Schreck.
She was anything but decorative—a tough plump woman of no style who schlepped in every morning on the BMT from the far reaches of Queens with an alligator bag in one hand and a clear plastic shopping bag printed with daisies in the other. As though to compensate for her shortness, her aggressively orange-dyed hair was wrapped tightly atop her head like a towering coiled snake, and she resembled nothing so much as a cross between a piranha and a goldfish.
She was in her early sixties and was one of the most efficient secretaries in the city. She didn’t take anything from anyone— including her boss.
“Good morning, beautiful sight for sore eyes.” Antonio flashed his best white enamel smile as he drifted into his office.
“What’s good about it?” Liz rasped, lighting up her tenth cigarette of the day. “Our morning’s overloaded with work and the afternoon’s shot because of the memorial service. Tell me what’s good about that.” She squinted at him through a cloud of blue smoke.
He paused at the door. “By the way, the ten-fifteen fitting—”
“Doris Bucklin, yeah, yeah, I know.”
“Since it’s too late to change the time of her fitting, and I . . . will be busy with something, have her wait in reception until I buzz you to let her in. Until then, I do n
ot wish to be disturbed.”
He thought fleetingly of the kid. All hard muscles and bulging crotch. In an hour and a half, I’ll sneak him up the back stairs and in through the emergency exit. We’ll be balling right in my office, and the old bat will be none the wiser.
He could barely contain his excitement.
Liz fixed him with a glare. “Is there anything else?” she asked tartly.
“That’s all.”
“That’s plenty.” She flushed angrily. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know. It’s always me the customers come down on, not you. Like I’ve messed up the scheduling somehow.” She sniffed primly. “I don’t know why you make appointments if you’re not going to keep them.”
He sighed as he went into his office and shut the door. Sometimes he wondered why he put up with Liz. She sure knew how to take the sunshine out of anyone’s day.
If you didn’t watch it, she would castrate you before you even knew what had happened.
Chapter 3
Edwina loved coming home.
The San Remo at 145 Central Park West was one of New York’s indisputable architectural crown jewels, rising for seventeen floors of substantial prewar splendor before splitting into twin butter-colored stone towers of eleven floors each. Its Central Park-facing facade was ornately handsome, embellished with rococo stonework and balconies. The terrace-laden spires seemed to scrape the feathery white clouds scudding swiftly across the pale wintry sky. Inside, the palatial lobby, generous room sizes, high ceilings, and wide hallways bespoke a more gracious era.
“Good morning, Miss Robinson,” the silver-haired doorman greeted her as he rushed out to open the Mercedes’ door. He wore a stately dark gray uniform with pale gray piping, and tipped his black visored hat to her.
