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She looked at her niece. The girl really was adorable. She had that lovely fresh coloring that couldn’t be faked later either with makeup or lighting. Only youth and health brought that. And she had a perfect size-eight body. Karen considered for a moment. Was she a perfect size eight? Maybe Stephanie could fill in as a fitting model. Tangela was sometimes such a pain. In the Seventh Avenue world there were two very different kinds of models: fitting and runway. Fitting models didn’t have to be young or beautiful (though it didn’t hurt), but their bodies had to be perfectly proportioned. They were used as mannequins and from the original – cut to their measurements – all sizes were made simply by adding or subtracting inches. Since fit was all important, a good fitting model, one with the right proportions, could work steadily and earn a lot of money. The wrong fitting model could ruin a whole line. In his early days, Ralph Lauren had designed with his wife, Ricky, in mind. He used Buffy Birrittella, a petite girl like Ricky, as a fitting model for all his shirts. Even when they were sized up, the shirts never fit any woman who wasn’t proportioned like Buffy. Meanwhile, Susan Jordan, easily over forty, was still used by three of the designers in 550, and her opinion about what felt right and what didn’t could make or break a design.
Yet you never saw poor Susan in a show. She just didn’t have the look and never had. Poor Tangela had perfect proportions but lacked the look. She could make a good living as a fitting model, but she wanted more.
Runway models (who sometimes were also used in showrooms) didn’t have to have quite such perfect proportions, but they had to be attractive, young, and with a look or attitude that put them across. Karen had learned from shows how important it was to have the right girls. The right girls could make magic – they could make bad designs look good and old things look new. That’s why the hot models could get the money they asked for.
Karen looked at her niece appraisingly. Maybe she’d do as a fitting model. She’d have Mrs Cruz measure her. Stephanie had no confidence, no attitude, but she might make a good fitting model. Maybe it wasn’t just guilt, charity, and nepotism that had brought Karen to hire her: the girl might be useful. But what in the world would Karen do with her now? On her first morning, shouldn’t her aunt take Stephanie out for breakfast or, at the very least, give her a tour? But Karen simply didn’t have the time. She looked at her watch. She’d already lost more than an hour of prime design time. She paused. Maybe Janet was in. She buzzed her secretary and gratefully smiled when Janet’s thick, nasal voice came in over the intercom. ‘Could you come in here?’ she asked, and smiled up at Stephanie.
Janet came in behind the girl.
‘Stephie, you know Janet, don’t you? Janet, schedule half an hour with Stephie for later in the morning. Could you take her now and show her around? Then bring her in to Mrs Cruz to have her measurements taken.’ Very casually, Karen added, ‘Maybe you’ll help out in the fitting room. Is that okay, Stephie?’
The girl nodded, her eyes big. Karen smiled. ‘You’ll just spend the morning in the showroom and the afternoon watching me work with Tangela. She’ll explain a lot about what we do. Okay?’ Stephanie nodded her head again and Janet ushered her out.
Now, Karen stared at the ruined pages on the pads in front of her. She tore them off, threw them away, and closed her eyes for a moment. She picked up the pencil and stared at the pads again. She knew it. Nothing. She waited. Still nothing came.
She had developed, over the years, a handful of tricks to corral inspiration. She’d thumb through fashion books or collections of paintings. (She’d used lots of Renaissance dress ideas.) Or she’d walk – sometimes for dozens and dozens of blocks – and stare at what people wore and how they wore it. (The awful was sometimes more inspiring than the good. People’s mistakes were interesting to Karen.) Or she’d go to her exercise class – somehow when she got her body moving she’d connect with a different part of her brain and images simply formed. Or she’d go to her own closet. Not to see what she had, but to see what she lacked. It was difficult, of course, to fill in the negative space. To imagine what she needed rather than what she had. She’d found that was the key to an important piece of clothing: the long jean skirt that she had created five years ago came from her staring into the closet and it had become a classic. So had the tent dress with the matching ten-pocket vest. And all her signature stuff in sweatshirt material. If all else failed, sometimes she’d go on shopping jaunts with Defina. They’d do a lot of looking, a lot of talking to sales clerks, and a lot of watching the other shoppers.
Maybe that’s what she could use today to get a kick start on her creativity. She hadn’t slept for hours after the argument with Jeffrey, and she already felt tired, as if the day was almost over. She couldn’t just drag herself through it, either. She had the meeting with NormCo to prepare for, and the ever-present pressure of the new collection and the Paris show. Plus a trunk show coming up in Chicago and dinner this week with a reporter from Women’s Wear. Worst of all was the major interview on the television show. That Elle Halle thing. Karen had already sweated out a segment on a Barbara Walters special, but this was an hour-long show! It was Mercedes’s idea of following up on the Oakley Award. Oy vey!
Janet, who was young and still in awe of Karen, was bustling around outside her door. Now the girl knocked and stuck her head in.
‘I just wanted to remind you that Mrs Paradise and Elise Elliot are coming in again today.’
Shit! Elise Elliot, a great star during the Audrey Hepburn era, had made a huge comeback in the critically acclaimed work of director Larry Cochran. Now they were to be married. That he was almost thirty years younger than the bride caused a great deal of talk both in Hollywood and in New York, towns that had seen everything. Now, after years of living and working together, Larry had joshed that he was going to make an honest woman out of Elise. She – a newsmaker for two generations – knew the event would be a circus for every photographer and cameraman that could crawl out of the woodwork.
She had come to Karen for help and it wasn’t easy to give. Elise Elliot knew all there was to know about clothes and was used to getting her way. Though wealthy, she still watched every penny. And she, as all great beauties, mourned the fading of her looks, the softening of her face, and was attempting perfection one last time. She’d been driving Karen crazy with the fittings.
‘Oh, Jesus!’ Every time Karen used any expletive, Janet – a nice Catholic girl from the Bronx – cringed. But the other inheritance from Janet’s parochial school upbringing was that she was the only kid under thirty who could spell – the nuns were good for teaching something other than guilt. They had also instilled in Janet the ability to cope with Karen’s ever-changing schedule. Yes, the sisters at Our Lady of the Bleeding Ulcers had prepared Janet well. They’d prepared Janet to take aggravation.
‘Do you want me to reschedule?’ Janet asked. ‘I told them it was tentative. They said they were flexible.’
That was a lie. Elise Elliot was as flexible as a cement block. A sophisticated, charming, slim, and beautiful cement block, but a cement block all the same. ‘No,’ Karen told Janet. After all, you couldn’t reschedule a legend. Elise Elliot had been a movie star for close to thirty years. Karen’s designs would get great coverage, guaranteed to make ‘Star Tracks’ in People magazine, but the whole thing had become a pain in Karen’s ass, and if Annie Paradise, the writer, hadn’t asked, Karen would never have done it. But Annie had recommended Ernesta to her, and Karen was so grateful, she’d do almost anything to oblige.
‘You know that the camera crew is coming this afternoon.’
It was too much! Jesus, when did it start to get easy? ‘No. I didn’t know that. I thought they finished up everything but my interview with Elle Halle. I thought yesterday’s taping of Jeffrey was the end of that.’
‘They say they just want some background. You know, the showroom and the workroom. Maybe one more fitting.’
‘Goddamnit!’ Karen couldn’t tell them no, either. Why was it that the bigger she got the less control she seemed to have? ‘Tell Mercedes to handle them. They always create chaos. Tell them I am not available.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ Janet backed away.
She had to get out of the office, Karen decided. She would clear her desk, then hope that Defina got into a better mood, and the two of them could schlep around to Saks or maybe they’d call a car and go all the way to Paramus. Karen preferred to shop the suburban malls than the less reality-based New York stores. She got more ideas there, somehow. For now, she’d give up on ideas. Karen gathered the pads together and was just dumping them into the wide, flat drawer where she stored them when Jeffrey walked into the room. ‘Hi, honey,’ he greeted her cheerfully.
Karen blinked in surprise. Men killed her. They really did. Didn’t he have a clue? She was still upset by their talk last night. Hurt and disappointed. And she was angry about this withholding tax business. She’d told him not to do that again. Jeffrey had pushed her to expand the company, but he’d assured her they’d have enough backing to do it. This was one more thing to make her crazy, but if she got into now they’d have another fight and she hadn’t gotten over last night yet.
How come he was acting as if nothing had happened? Didn’t he understand what last night had meant to her? Didn’t it hurt him too? Or was he just being brazen and trying to ‘tough it out’? Sometimes, when Jeffrey knew he was in the doghouse, he did use that tactic. It always left her feeling confused and vulnerable. Should she act as if nothing had happened? Should she pitch a fit? Or should she be cold and risk being accused of being overly sensitive or bitchy? Not knowing what to do, Karen figured she’d go for the tax stuff. It was easier than the baby stuff.
‘Jeffrey, what about withholding? Are we in trouble again?’
Jeffrey blinked. It was the only sign he ever gave of being surprised. ‘No, we’re not in trouble.’
‘Has it been paid?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Why not? Isn’t it due?’
‘Karen, why don’t you let me run the business? You knew that if we tried to do the bridge line we wouldn’t be able to repay our loans unless we managed to get through a couple of good seasons. Well, we’ve got the orders, but we don’t have the cash flow, and the factors are giving me a little trouble. I’m just trying to finance the piece goods you’re buying like a mad woman and pay the manufacturers enough to keep them shipping. We knew the loan was going to go up before it came down, but we didn’t know it was going to go up this much, or that our receivables would get paid on a ninety-day cycle. So if I have to borrow from Peter to pay Paul, it’s only temporary. We have to keep the factors happy and confident. The IRS is never happy, so what’s the difference?’
‘The difference is, that’s not our money. The staff already earned it. You said you wouldn’t do this again.’
‘Well, I am. Don’t look at me like I’m a criminal; I’m doing it for you. Look on it as a temporary loan from your beloved staff, negotiated by your beloved husband.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’d like to start to go over the numbers with you before the NormCo presentation,’ Jeffrey said pleasantly. ‘Then you’ll understand this better. We could go over it this weekend, but you’re doing that stupid brunch.’ Karen had invited both his family and her own out to their house in Westport. She had to do it: she hadn’t invited them to the Oakley Awards and hadn’t had any of them over in months. With her niece’s bat mitzvah coming up, she felt obligated to do some family thing before that extravaganza. Jeffrey looked down at his sheaf of papers. ‘I know you don’t enjoy going over these numbers.’
Now she’d never get to work, Karen thought with a pang. ‘That’s okay,’ she said.
‘This afternoon looks good for me,’ he said. ‘It’s important that you understand all the figures, just in case you’re asked. It would hurt our credibility if you wound up looking like window dressing.’ The man was incredible. Business as usual. Last night had never happened, or meant nothing.
‘Jeffrey, I’m not an idiot and I’m not window dressing,’ she snapped.
He waved his hand. ‘Oh, you know what I mean. I don’t want them to think that you don’t have a clue about the business end and are just some flighty designer.’
She looked at him steadily. ‘Why should they think that?’ she asked. ‘Is that what you think?’
‘Of course not. I know it.’
She didn’t like his joke. ‘I’ve got work to do,’ she said coldly and buzzed for Janet. ‘Send Defina in,’ she told Janet. ‘I’m ready for her.’
Jeffrey knew he’d been dismissed and he didn’t like it. ‘Just be ready for me at noon,’ Jeffrey told her. ‘We have a lot to go through.’ He turned and tried to slam the door, but wisely, years before, Karen had put an air compressor on the hinge. No one was going to slam the door on her, in her office, she figured. She could just see Jeffrey stalking past Defina in the hallway. He ignored her.
‘Spread the joy,’ Defina cried out to him as she hustled into Karen’s office. ‘Glad I’m not married, when I take a look at you two this morning,’ she said cheerfully. ‘What’s coming down?’
‘Men. You can’t live with ’em …’
‘And you can’t live with ’em,’ Defina finished for her. ‘So, what’s next?’
‘When the going gets tough …’ Karen began.
‘The tough go shopping!’ Defina exclaimed, finishing Karen’s sentence again. Defina grinned and waited while Karen grabbed her purse and put on her lipstick.
‘One thing I know,’ Karen said. ‘I’m not going to be back here to see him at noon.’ At Janet’s desk, Karen paused for a moment. ‘Cancel the models, see if you can move Miss Elliot’s fitting to tomorrow, and tell my husband he can forget about the NormCo presentation rehearsal. I’m out of the box until three.’ She walked down the hall with long strides, Defina at her side.
‘Girlfriend,’ Defina said approvingly, ‘you are every husband’s nightmare: a wife with her own Gold Card.’
At the elevator, the new receptionist called out to her. it’s your sister,’ she said. ‘Will you take the call?’
Oh shit! Karen realized that she still hadn’t called Lisa. One more thing she had to do. ‘Tell her I’ll call her from the car phone,’ Karen barked, and she and Defina stepped into the steel box of the elevator.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_ca006723-c7b3-5553-8ef5-9c53c5266b7e)
Fashion Cents (#ulink_ca006723-c7b3-5553-8ef5-9c53c5266b7e)
Lisa closed the front door and breathed a sigh of relief. The abortion of the morning was, at last, over. It hadn’t been worse than usual – it was just that the usual was bad enough. She had managed to ignore the absolutely indecent shortness of Stephanie’s skirt and the positively gross broadness of Tiffany’s ass while stopping the two of them from squabbling any worse than they absolutely had to in front of their father. She had managed to get Leonard out the door and even weedled a couple hundred bucks out of him by telling him she was having the Mercedes lubed. Fuck the Mercedes; she would spend the money on her own maintenance. Not that two hundred bucks would do much, but she was always short of cash and at least now she could carry something in her pocketbook.
Lisa turned and walked down the hallway of their four-bedroom colonial-style house, pausing at the door of the breakfast room. She surveyed the remains of the meal. Stephanie, as usual, had eaten nothing, while Tiff, also as usual, had cleaned not only her own plate but her sister’s and her father’s. Lisa had seen her do it in the reflection of the glass-paned doors. She hadn’t said anything. She couldn’t take another traumatic scene. She shook her head. The kid was already a size fourteen and she wasn’t even thirteen years old. She would look like shit at the bar mitzvah.
Lisa winced, imagining the satisfaction the bitches at the Inwood Jewish Center would have over that. And there was no way Lisa could control it or do anything about it. Both she and Leonard would be humiliated, but she knew from experience that diets and trying to force or reward Tiff were useless. They had already sent her to weight-loss camp two years in a row now and Tiff had managed to gain weight at both of them. Had she gnawed tree bark, and was tree bark fattening? Lisa still didn’t know how her daughter had done it. Neither did the last camp director, who had ‘suggested’ to Lisa that she should try counseling for Tiff and not return her to camp this year.
Lisa turned away from the table. Camille, her housekeeper, would be in at nine and she could clean up the mess. The sight of the congealed egg yolks drying on the plates made Lisa feel sick and out of control. Well, so what? So she couldn’t control her preteen daughter. So sue me, she thought. But Lisa could control how she looked and she knew that she was going to look better than anyone else at the bat mitzvah. It would be an opportunity to shine. One of the problems in her life, she admitted to herself, was that while she had wonderful clothes, she didn’t have enough fabulous places to wear them. The affair would be an occasion where she could really show herself at her best.
Today she had to find shoes. While she had promised herself that her last pair of Walter Steigers would be her absolute final shoe purchase, she had been lucky enough to find a Donna Karan pants suit on sale at Neiman-Marcus when she’d shopped there with Belle. It was fifty percent off, God’s way of saying she was meant to have it. It was a fabulous color for her – a sort of soft wine shade in a heavy silk broadcloth. With her dark hair and the gold buttons of the suit as contrast, the color gave her a fabulous glow, and Lisa already had the exact shade of lipstick to wear with it. The only problem was the shoes.
She did already have a maroon pair of suede Manolo Blahniks, but the heels were a little too high for a pants suit – she hated that tarty spike-heels-with-slacks look – and, anyway, the maroon didn’t have the soft mauviness that the Donna Karan suit had. It would be a push to wear them together and Lisa despised that kind of dressing. The ‘well-it-almost-goes-so-what-the-hell-look,’ she called it. It would be better to wear black shoes than the maroon ones. But Lisa had tried the suit on with the three different pair of black shoes she had – a snakeskin, a silk faille, and a patent leather pair – and none of them really worked. So today Lisa planned to find the right pair of shoes.
She dressed carefully. It was important to look good when you shopped, she thought. Because if not, you wound up buying anything out of desperation to change how bad you looked, and that was when you made mistakes. Over time Lisa had learned to dress properly for her various shopping expeditions: to wear pantyhose and heels if she was going to shop for a dress, not to have complicated belts and waistbands if she was going to be doing a lot of trying on, and to be sure to put on enough makeup so that the horror-lighting in the try-on rooms didn’t make her feel suicidal. If there was advice Lisa could give to every woman in America it would be, ‘Wear a good foundation if you’re going into a mall.’
After she showered and rolled up her hair, Lisa carefully applied her makeup and then went to her closet. It wasn’t as extensive as her mother’s because Lisa simply didn’t have the room. And Lisa’s closet was as chaotic as Belle’s was anally neat. But Lisa followed a different fashion method anyway: she, unlike Belle, didn’t wear the same style year in and year out. She didn’t save things for ten seasons. She didn’t take up hems and then take them down again. Lisa was constantly adding to and discarding from her closet and at any given time her style could change dramatically. And it did.
It was a funny thing: just when she would feel that she had what she needed and was comfortable or satisfied with her wardrobe, she would open a magazine and see a whole new look. Sometimes she’d simply throw the Vogue or Elle aside, but the image would stick with her and eventually she would find herself nervously going through her clothes: silk sweaters sliding off their hangers, trousers with and without cuffs, suede jackets, tweed blazers, tube skirts, knit dresses – a riot of colors and textures and styles. But her things would seem dated, old, dull. They just would have lost their stylishness, as if it had evaporated overnight, the way an expensive perfume would if left uncapped. All the lovely silks and wools and linens would seem obsolete – the colors too strong, or the pastels too washed out, the silhouette too wide, or perhaps too tailored. The new pictures from the magazines would work their seductive magic on her. She had to have those clothes. Nothing else appealed.
Lisa would fight the feeling, sometimes for a week, sometimes for longer, but getting dressed every day would become torture. She would feel archaic – like one of those scary old women she would see from time to time, the type who were all dressed up in the hairstyle and clothes of some bygone era, some time, perhaps, when they were loved. God, Lisa hated their dated, pathetic look! And then she would eventually be forced into the mall, where she would just pick up one or two outfits of the new style, promising herself they were all she was going to buy.
But when she would get home and stuff the new purchases next to the other clothes in her brimming closet, she would see just how impossible the old stuff really was. Sometimes she wondered if she didn’t have that multiple personality syndrome – had Sybil bought some of these clothes? Lisa just couldn’t live with the old stuff. It was awful. So she’d begin buying again, upgrading everything. It seemed as if it were a never-ending process.
Leonard had lost patience years ago. He said, ‘Fashion is just a racket to sell clothes to women.’ Like most men, he didn’t understand. To be honest, he simply wasn’t making the kind of income he once had, but then who was in the nineties? Still, even if his patient load had dropped a bit and even if payers were slow, he was cheap at heart. And, Lisa thought, maybe a little bit envious. Since they’d married he’d lost most of his hair and gained a bit of a paunch. She hadn’t varied from her size six. She wasn’t sure Leonard wanted her looking too good. And he certainly didn’t want to see her look good if it cost him more than a dollar.
If she had known that he was going to behave that way, she never would have married him. But she comforted herself with the thought that she’d done as well as she could for a brunette. Her mistake was that she hadn’t traded up a decade ago, the way some of the women she knew had. So here she was, still stuck in Inwood, with a dermatologist, when it could have been Park Avenue, and a thoracic surgeon. Lisa sighed.
If she just had more money, she could live decently. But how could she make money? She was not like her sister. Karen was good at making money and Lisa was good at spending it. Of course, she did own some stock in Karen’s company, but Leonard had explained to her over and over again that she couldn’t sell it because the company was privately held. Lisa didn’t know why that should make a difference, but apparently it did. So now she just regarded the stock as worthless paper, and when she got desperate for money, she cleaned out her closet and dragged a pile of stuff down to the resale shop. One month she got a check for seven hundred and fifty-nine dollars that way. Of course, the stuff she had sold had cost her ten times that, but she wouldn’t wear it again, anyway. And she had bought a great alligator purse with the money. It wasn’t exactly the purse she had wanted – it was a compromise, even at seven hundred dollars.
It felt as if everything in her life had been a compromise since her marriage. Lisa had been the prettiest girl in her high school and she had longed to get out of Rockville Center, a town without any distinction, and move to one of the Five Towns. Her insistence meant that she and Leonard had started in a garden apartment in Inwood and, when the time came to upgrade to a house, Leonard had insisted on staying there to continue establishing his practice. But Inwood was the least exclusive (which to her made it the least attractive) of the Five Towns. She might as well be living in Siberia. Lisa hated that moment when, in talking to another woman or buying something in Saks, she had to give her address and hear the pause that lasted for just a fraction of a moment. Then they’d say, ‘Oh. Inwood.’ She didn’t dress or look like a woman from Inwood. She looked like a woman from Lawrence, whose husband was a surgeon. She could feel herself being demoted. Among the descending class order of Lawrence, Woodmere, Cedarhurst, Hewlett, and Inwood, Lisa still longed for the exclusivity of Lawrence with the passion she reserved for a Calvin Klein dress.
Now, with a sigh, she turned from the rainbow collection in her closet to the phone beside the queen-sized bed she still shared with Leonard. She hated to sit on a dirty, unmade bed. She lifted the phone and stood next to the bedside table. Karen had looked awful last night, her face puffy and her skin pasty. Lisa was concerned. Karen had promised to call. Why hadn’t she? Lisa would just give her another quick call.
She dialed Karen’s office main number – she could never remember extensions, even Leonard’s private line. She asked for Karen, and the girl at the desk recognized her voice. ‘Is this her sister?’ she asked. Lisa, pleased, told her she was. ‘Well, she’s on her way out the door, but I’ll stop her for you.’ Lisa didn’t bother to say thank you; she knew the kid was just trying to rack up a few brownie points with both of them. Lisa tapped her foot and waited until Karen came on the line. Lisa loved her sister but sometimes, without even trying, Karen made Lisa feel as if she had disappeared. Like by not calling her back last night. Or by letting her eyes glaze over at dinner when Lisa told her about the details for the bat mitzvah. Waiting for her sister now, Lisa got that feeling, the bad one, as if she was turning transparent. For a moment, she flashed on Marty McFly in Back to the Future and the way he had begun to disappear when it looked like history would change and he would never be born. He’d been playing the guitar when his hand dissolved. She looked down at her own hand holding onto the phone. It was solid. She was here; she did exist. And, in a minute, Karen would be talking to her.
But the voice that came on was only the secretary. ‘She says she’ll call you from the car,’ the girl told her.
Lisa put her tongue between her teeth and bit the tip, though not hard enough to really hurt. ‘Fine,’ she said, and hung up the phone. It was okay, she told herself. Karen was busy. She had a big business to run. But Lisa felt her energy drain out of her, like dirty water down a bath drain.
Sometimes she felt as if other people’s lives were much more real than her own. Enervated, she turned back to the arduous task of getting dressed.
Who would she be today?
‘Is everything organized for the trunk show?’ Karen asked Defina once they were in the limo.
‘Funny you should say that. I got the list right here with me.’ Defina pulled a printout from her huge Bottega Veneta purse. Like most women in New York, Karen and Defina carried what Karen called ‘schlep,’ bags,’ either huge sack-like purses or a shopping bag that was made out of leather or canvas and carried along with a purse. Some day, Karen thought, she’d like to design a perfect schlep bag that would have enough room to hold all the crap that women carted around with them, yet would not ruin the line of their clothes.
‘Where are we going?’ the driver asked.
‘Good question.’ Defina turned to Karen. ‘Where are we going?’ she echoed.
Back in time, Karen wanted to answer, to the seventies, when women still shopped in what the fashion world called the B-hive – Bonwit’s, Bendel’s, Bergdorf’s, and Bloomingdale’s. Back when my ovaries still worked, when my job thrilled me, when I had the choice about having a baby. But Bonwit’s had closed, Bloomingdale’s had been sold, Bendel’s had been relocated, and several of the stores had been found guilty of price fixing and had to pay off consumers from a class action suit. Nothing was what it had been. There was no sense looking backward. ‘Let’s do the new Barney’s,’ Karen exclaimed. ‘Madison and Sixty-First Street please.’
In the seventies, Barney’s had still been Barney’s Boys Town, a huge retailer specializing in men and boys’ suits and owned by the Pressman family. It was still owned by the Pressmans, but Barney had retired long ago and Fred, his son, had passed the baton on to his sons Gene and Bob. Only last year they had made the gigantic move from their Chelsea neighborhood to the Madison Avenue venue they held now: at the northernmost end of the department store archipelago and at the delta to the river of boutiques that flowed up Madison Avenue along with the one-way traffic. Barney’s was the hot spot to shop. ‘Let’s watch the women in Barney’s and then do Madison Avenue.’
‘Can we have lunch at Bice?’ Defina asked. The restaurant – pronounced ‘Bee-chay’ – was the hot spot right now among the fashion crowd, but Karen hated the loud room, despite the great food.
‘God, it’s only ten after ten. How can you be thinking of lunch already?’
‘I like to plan ahead,’ Defina said. ‘That is my job. So? How about Bice?’
‘Okay,’ Karen agreed.
The limo made a left onto Thirty-Fourth Street and began driving east toward Madison. Karen leaned back and looked out through the protection of her dark glasses and the tinted windows of the car. Despite the double-dip of tinting, the people in the street looked mostly hideous. There were as usual both ends of the New York street fashion spectrum: there were the women who believed somehow they were invisible on the street and could dress in torn sweats, hair clips, and last night’s makeup. What did they do if they ran into a friend? Karen wondered. At the other end of the scale were those who seemed to dress for the street as if it were their theater. There weren’t many of them out there. Thirty-Fourth Street was where New York City’s middle class, or what was left of it, shopped. But the days of glory, when Gimbel’s didn’t tell Macy’s, and Orbach’s sent secret sketchers to the Paris collections so that they could have line-for-line knock-offs faster than anyone else, were long over. Gimbel’s was closed, Orbach’s was gone, and even the grand old dowager B. Altman’s had disappeared. Now only Macy’s held the neighborhood together. Karen watched as streams of people in brightly colored, badly fitting coats and jackets pushed their way in through the revolving doors at the Herald Square entrance. Karen got an idea.
‘Stop the car,’ she said.
‘Shit. I knew it! There goes Bice.’
‘Can you keep the car here and wait for us?’ Karen asked the driver, ignoring Defina’s grumbling.
‘Lady, Jesus himself couldn’t park on Thirty-Fourth Street. And if I circle, it might take me forty-five minutes to get around the block.’
‘Okay,’ she told him. ‘This is it then. We’ll take a taxi from here.’ She opened the door before he could get out.
‘That’s gotta be the shortest limo ride in history,’ Defina grumbled. ‘Karen, Macy’s is two blocks from our office.’
‘I didn’t know we were coming to Macy’s,’ Karen told her.
‘Yeah, and I wish we weren’t,’ Defina looked around and shook her head. Karen had to admit that the homeless scattered along the railings of the little park and the newspapers and litter blowing across the wide street didn’t make the area look attractive. ‘Honey, you sure you didn’t get Madison Avenue confused with Madison Square Garden? One is a beautiful street full of things you got to have and the other is the place where honky Long Island hockey fans beat each other to shit. We are near the latter, not the former.’
Karen ignored Defina and started walking toward the north entrance to Macy’s. ‘I want to see how the other half lives,’ she said aloud.
‘Well, sheesh, honey, if you take me out to lunch at Bice I’ll bring you up to Harlem.’ Karen gave Defina a look and the two of them pushed their way into the department store.
Macy’s was a bazaar, a souk, an agora. Ever since there had been marketplaces, humankind had been working itself up to the diversity and complexity of Macy’s Thirty-Fourth Street. Karen turned to Defina. ‘Real people shop here,’ she said, and headed toward the escalators.
The main floor, where space was most costly and traffic densest, was a confusion of accessories, specials, and the small, high-markup items: makeup, jewelry, and the like. Karen walked past two long counters of mid-priced purses. The selection was staggering, but unimpressive. She stopped for a moment and picked up a black leather purse. It was a nice envelope shape but someone had killed it by tacking fringe along the bottom. She flicked the fringe with her finger and turned to Defina. ‘Why?’ she asked. Defina shrugged. They walked on and took the escalator. As they moved up toward the second floor, Karen could get a panoramic view. The place was enormous and there had to be hundreds of people engaged in the business of buying and selling. They were mostly women and they were on the neverending quest of looking good.
Karen’s eyes moved toward the down escalator and the endless descending parade of people facing her as she and Defina moved upward. As always, she was entranced by the way women had put themselves – or had failed to put themselves – together. There was a young businesswoman wearing a bright green suit, a color that only a key lime pie should wear, and a teenager in an interesting combination of plaids and denim. Karen learned a lot simply by trolling the malls and keeping her eyes and ears open. Now, at tenon-seven in the morning, the women shoppers already moving through Macy’s had the desperate eyes of early-morning drunks. An elderly woman in a bone-colored Adolfo knit reached out to a mark-down rack. Her nails were three-inch talons, painted a color that could only be called ‘traffic-cone orange.’ She wore lipstick to match. Karen nudged Defina.
‘You know what you have to give me if I get like that?’ she reminded Defina.
‘A total makeover?’
‘No. A bullet to the brain.’
