Fashionably Late. Olivia Goldsmith

KInc, and they rode the elevator up to the ninth floor together where both of them had keys to open up the floor. On the way up, they passed the showrooms and offices of Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Donna Karan, and Bill Blass. All of the foreign fashion world was there, too: Karl Lagerfeld and Hanae Mori. Five-fifty was the temple of high fashion in the United States. Karen still couldn’t get over the thrill of seeing her name on the elevator directory along with those others.

      But Karen knew what a slippery ride it could be. Back in January 1985, way before she had moved in, the Halston Originals showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue was dismantled. Whatever fixtures and furnishings hadn’t already been carted away were sold to the next tenant, a newcomer in the fashion business named Donna Karan.

      No one thought of Halston anymore. He wasn’t just dead, he was forgotten. He had been the first American designer to sell his name, and in his case it had meant his destruction. A corporate entity licensed Halston everythings, while poor Roy Halston Froleich had been legally stopped from using ‘Halston’ ever again. He’d been well-paid but robbed of his work and identity. Karen thought of poor sick Willie Artech. What would happen to his work and his name? She shivered, and turned to the dark woman beside her.

      ‘Good morning, Mrs Cruz,’ Karen said, and smiled at the short, stout co-worker whose black, glossy hair showed an inch of steel gray at the roots. Karen looked at Mrs Cruz’s face and realized that the woman had had both children and grandchildren over the years they’d worked together, while Karen had remained childless. ‘How’s the new grandson?’ she asked.

      ‘Fat as a little piglet. How are you this morning, Karen?’ Mrs Cruz inquired. She nodded to a brown bag she held. ‘Would you like some fresh pan de manteca?’

      ‘Oh Mrs Cruz. You’re killing me. I’ll wind up fat as a little piglet. I swore I was starting my diet this morning.’

      Mrs Cruz shrugged. ‘You’re thin enough. Coffee?’

      Karen couldn’t resist either the Cuban coffee Mrs Cruz carried in a big, shiny metal thermos or the freshly baked bread. ‘Yes, please. And a thin slice of pan de manteca.’

      Mrs Cruz smiled, pleased. They arrived on nine to find the door already opened. That was unusual. Was a thief loose on the floor or was some competitor going through her designs? Karen had heard of a hundred tricks that magazines and competitors used to snoop, to spy, to get a fashion scoop. One magazine regularly sent pretty girls to apply as fitting models to all the designers, including

KInc. Just last month Defina had caught one sketching a design. Once a sketcher had dressed up as a florist’s assistant, complete with a smock, and delivered a huge bouquet personally to Karen while they were doing a final run-through of the line. He had been sent by a competitor, but they’d never been able to prove it was Norris Cleveland. Now, as word leaked out that she was doing the Elise Elliot wedding, someone could be snooping. Or had NormCo sent a due diligence team over to do a little unauthorized auditing? Or even worse: Did the camera crew that had been working on Elle Halle’s show decide to do a surprise morning visit? Karen wondered for a moment if she had time to put a little blush on before she got ambushed. She decided she didn’t, but she winced at her blurry reflection in the stainless steel elevator walls. The two women shrugged at one another and stepped out onto the floor. The only entrance was here, through the showroom.

      The lights were on and Defina Pompey was standing at a pipe rack of clothes, flicking through each one and rattling the hangers as she moved along. Defina was never there until ten – and sometimes a little later. It had always been a bone of contention between them, but the few times Defina had shown up at nine had convinced Karen she didn’t want Defina earlier. Defina was a night person, and stayed to all hours cheerfully. It was just in the mornings that she was dangerous.

      ‘Aye. Caramba!’ Mrs Cruz muttered and scuttled across the beige carpeting to the door of the workrooms. The Cuban pollo. Defina confused Mrs Cruz in a number of ways and the Cuban was scared of her. For one thing, Defina spoke Spanish with a perfect upper-class Madrid lisp. Mrs Cruz could barely understand it. Why should an American black woman from Harlem be able to speak like that? Plus, all the workroom said Defina knew some strong Santeria magic. Mrs Cruz avoided Defina whenever she could.

      Now Karen smiled cautiously at Defina. The big woman scowled back.

      ‘You’re in trouble, girlfriend,’ Defina growled.

      ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Karen sighed and walked past Defina to her office suite at the corner of the floor. Defina followed her. ‘What’s up? How come you’re in so early?’

      ‘I must have been thinking about the collection for Paris while I was sleeping. It woke me up.’

      ‘Now I know I’m really in trouble. Nuclear holocaust wouldn’t wake you.’

      ‘Well. It wasn’t just the collection,’ Defina admitted. ‘Tangela came in at six this morning and made so much goddamn noise I couldn’t get back to sleep.’ More beautiful even than Defina had been, Tangela was giving both of them a lot of trouble. Karen sighed. If Tangela had been out all night it wouldn’t be a good afternoon in the fitting rooms.

      Mrs Cruz scurried in with two cups, steaming full of cafe Cubano. Silently she put them down on Karen’s work table and scurried out. Karen sank into the glove-leather swivel chair behind her work table and sighed again.

      She had hired Defina just a few months after she’d hired Mrs Cruz, more than a dozen years ago. Defina had been tall, black, beautiful, and hungry. She was still all four, but had put on forty or fifty pounds since then. Naomi Sims had made the cover of Fashions of the Times back in 1967 but it had taken a lot longer for women of color to be accepted on the runways. Out of desperation, when she was broke, Karen had employed Defina as a runway model in her first show, and she’d been the first Seventh Avenue designer to use a black model. Both the clothes and Defina had been a sensation, and they’d worked together ever since: through Karen’s marriage, Defina’s various affairs, through the birth of Defina’s daughter – Tangela was Karen’s godchild – and on and on. Defina ran the showroom and modelling staff now, handling the sales force and sometimes even taking orders. Karen and Defina were more than close: they were a living diary for one another. They remembered the small day-to-day memories of more than a decade of working together, often for ten or twelve or fifteen hours a day.

      ‘Listen, there were plenty of times you stayed out all night back when you were eighteen,’ Karen reminded her. ‘That’s what you do when you’re young.’

      ‘Yeah, but I didn’t let no guy start fucking me on the kitchen table and wake up my mama.’ Defina shook her head. ‘He had her panties off and her bare black ass was pressed down against my white marble-topped table like dough on a pie tin. He’d climbed up onto the table and had his Johnson out when I walked in.’ She shook her head.

      ‘What did you do?’

      ‘I threw his sorry ass out of my house! That’s my house, my kitchen, and my goddamn table. I don’t need to sponge up no funky pubic hairs of his off of it.’ Defina was a big woman – close to six foot tall – and Karen knew she was quite capable of throwing a man out of her elegant townhouse on East 138th Street. She’d done it many times before.

      Now Defina crossed her arms, turned away, and stared out the window. ‘You know the saddest thing? I stopped myself – for only a minute – and wondered if I wasn’t just a little bit jealous. I mean, I know the man is worthless dogmeat, but I doubted myself for a moment. You know, it’s been almost half a year since I got any. Probably be more than that till I do get any.’ Defina shook her head.

      Karen patted her shoulder. ‘Hey, just remember. It isn’t you. It’s New York in the nineties. None of my single girlfriends can find a decent man. If I wasn’t with Jeffrey, I’d kill myself.’

      ‘Well, just