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.
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