smooth, and commanding, had seemed pleasant. But that was what everyone said about Belle – if they didn’t know her. ‘Oh, come on,’ Mercedes said as Karen got ready to leave for the studio. ‘It’s not that bad.’
‘Didn’t someone say that to Marie Antoinette right before the blade hit?’
Mercedes raised her eyebrows. ‘Have you talked to a doctor about this martyr issue?’ she asked dryly. She looked at her wristwatch. ‘Come on. Let’s go. You don’t want to piss these people off by being fashionably late.’
‘Where’s Jeffrey?’ Karen asked as she picked up her coat.
‘He’s in with Casey and the financial guys.’ Mercedes raised her eyebrows. That must mean NormCo people. She paused. ‘He’s not going to come.’
‘What do you mean?’ Karen felt her face go pale, the blood draining down to her heart, which began thumping uncomfortably. ‘He has to come,’ she said. ‘I can’t do this alone.’
‘You’re not alone, Karen.’ Mercedes reminded her. ‘I’m coming with you.’
Karen didn’t bother to be polite. She shook her head. To manage this she needed someone she liked to be with her. ‘Defina,’ she said. ‘We have to get Defina.’ God, this would be too much to do alone. She couldn’t face the ordeal of selling herself, of being herself, and talking not about her clothes but about her life to twenty million people without some support. Why did people care about a designer’s personal life anyway? Didn’t her clothes speak for her?
Janet looked up from her desk and smelled crisis in the air. ‘Defina hasn’t come in yet,’ she told her boss.
Karen felt her hands begin to shake. She would go into Jeffrey’s office. She would stop the meeting. Whatever it was, this was more important. She couldn’t go over there, do this big deal, be examined under Elle Halle’s microscope, without knowing that Jeffrey was rooting for her.
From the beginning, it was Jeffrey who had believed that there was not only more recognition due to her but also more money to be had in the recognition.
He’d been a graduate student studying painting when she was at design school. She was so inexperienced, so very green. She’d never dated in high school – she’d gone to the prom with Carl. She’d been slow to mature. She hadn’t even gotten her period until she was fourteen! So of course Jeffrey had dazzled her. So much so that she had virtually followed him around, doing errands for him and picking his stuff up, a sort of human golden retriever to his elegant Afghan hound. And he was a hound. Jeffrey had liked her and had bedded her, but she had known there was no commitment there. He slept with a lot of girls at school. All the pretty ones, and Karen. Jeffrey had made it clear that she amused him and that they were friends, but there was nothing more forthcoming. Though she adored him, she was smart enough not to ever tell him so and she never expected anything more.
Once she’d graduated, it was only through her efforts that they had kept in touch. He’d never called her, but he seemed pleased to hear from her. When she’d gotten out of school, she’d been lucky enough to snag a job working for Liz Rubin, who was a legend, the first woman sportswear designer to have her own Seventh Avenue company. Karen had started as just one of a half-dozen assistants, but within six months she’d been moved up to Liz’s special assistant. They worked together according to Liz’s hours: sometimes Karen would get a call at eleven-thirty at night and she and the tiny older woman would work until dawn. Karen suspected that sometimes Liz – like Karen’s idol, Coco Chanel – called not because she was inspired but because she was lonely. But if that were the case, the other woman had never opened up. Always distant, always authoritarian, always in control, Liz had taught Karen more in the sixteen months that they worked together than Karen had learned in all her years of design study. Soon only work and Liz made up Karen’s life. It was a busy time, and Karen wasn’t unhappy. Because, though Liz never spoke about her feelings for Karen, Karen felt they were there.
Naturally, during that busy time, Karen had lost touch with Jeffrey. In fact, she’d lost touch with almost all her friends, except Carl. For her there had only been work. One of the reasons Liz had chosen her, Karen always believed, was because no matter what demands Liz put on her, Karen had never said no. She’d always been a hard and willing worker and, as her reward, Liz gave her more and more work to do.
And she hadn’t minded that she got no credit. The idea of her own name on a label had simply not occurred to Karen. After all, she was only twenty-two. She just wanted to do her garments her own way. But that became the rub. Because after the first few months of working closely with Liz, Karen hadn’t been able to stop herself from voicing her opinions. Once she’d gotten over her awe of Liz Rubin, she’d said what she felt, and sometimes her opinions seemed to have gone right for the jugular. ‘That’s boring, Liz,’ she would say, and make a suggestion or sketch an alternative. They’d argue. Karen always figured Liz liked her because of her opinions. She’d been wrong. She remembered the last fight: it had been over button placement on a jacket. Liz, never one to hide her light under a bushel, had altered a design of Karen’s and screamed at her when Karen insisted that the buttons be again placed asymmetrically. ‘It’s just a gimmick,’ Liz had cried. ‘The jacket is a classic. At Liz Rubin, we do classics.’ Karen had looked at her fiercely. ‘Well, I do what’s right. And these buttons, on my jacket, have to slant across the front.’
Funny that a few buttons could cause so much trouble. They changed Karen’s whole life. Liz had fired her.
Karen hadn’t been able to believe it. Because she knew she’d been right. To her it seemed simple – anyone should see it. Especially Liz. Karen just hadn’t thought of the politics and ego involved. She knew the news of her leaving would cause rejoicing among the other assistants, the ones she had bypassed. But it wasn’t just her pride that was hurt. Cold as she was, Liz Rubin had represented something more to Karen than just a job or a paycheck. Liz was like Karen and it was the first time that Karen had ever met anyone like that. Liz had shown her what she could be and it hurt Karen to be discarded that way.
Karen had sat alone in her apartment crying for two days. She had no one to talk to, nothing to do. (There was a limit to how much she could lean on Carl.) She realized then that she had no life, aside from work. She called home, but Belle was no help and Lisa was still just a kid in school who worshiped her older sister. So, in desperation, Karen called Jeffrey, who was sharing a ratty, lower Broadway loft with Perry Silverman. (Jeffrey’s parents had offered him a pied-à-terre on Sutton Place but he felt it was too bourgeois.) Perry and Jeffrey invited her over and had taken her out, gotten her drunk, and comforted her. She was sure they probably also privately laughed at her naive misery. ‘It’s just a job,’ Jeffrey had said. And Karen had tried, despite a tongue made less articulate than ever by all the bourbon, to explain that it was more than that.
‘Why would she fire me?’ Karen cried over and over again. ‘Why?’
Jeffrey had listened and then had laughed. He laughed! But somehow, this comforted her. ‘She was jealous,’ he said, ‘because you were right. She does “classics.” You do originals. And you had the nerve to tell her.’
‘Is that what I did?’ Karen had asked, amazed.
‘Of course,’ Jeffrey said, as if anyone would know that. As if Karen should have. ‘And she resented you for it,’ he added. ‘She used you, but she resented you.’ He put his arm around Karen while she cried some more on his shoulder. Then he took her to bed.
After that night, Karen had not cried again. She spent more than a month looking for a job by day and sleeping with Jeffrey most nights. In some strange way, the loss of Liz was made up for by having Jeffrey in her life again. She told him each evening about her day’s adventures and interviews. She was thrilled when she at last got not one but two offers. She asked him which she should take, then she was shocked when he encouraged her to turn them both down. ‘C’mon,’ he told her, ‘you don’t want to be some no-name house designer. Look what you’ve done already. You did most of Liz Rubin’s