his bulk crossed the last part of the Waldorf dance floor and he enveloped her in his big embrace.
‘Brava, brava, brava!’ he boomed, and smacked kisses on both her cheeks.
‘Grazia,’ Karen responded, exhausting all of her Italian vocabulary with that single word. It had been agony for her to learn French, which Jeffrey had insisted she do for her career. Karen was no Defina when it came to languages. She still spoke English with the heavy, adenoidal tones of Nostrand Avenue (where her family lived before her father could afford Rockville Center).
‘So how did you achieve this enormous success?’ Carl asked in a mock announcer voice, holding up a butter knife from the table setting as a faux microphone.
‘I guess I just kept my nose to the grindstone for a long time,’ she answered, too modestly and sweetly.
‘Oh, is that what made your nose like that?’ he asked. ‘Let’s get a picture of it.’ Carl popped out a tiny camera. He handed it to Jeffrey. ‘Yo, Defina. Get over here! I want a picture with the stars of the evening.’
Defina smiled and obliged, but Karen saw Jeffrey’s expression tighten. Why hadn’t Carl asked her husband too? Sometimes Carl could be incredibly undiplomatic. Karen was always aware the Jeffrey could be made to feel like an appendage, when the truth was he had made all her success possible. But to Jeffrey’s credit he obligingly held up the camera and squinted.
‘The Three Musketeers and their mid-life crisis,’ he said as he flashed the picture.
‘Isn’t that a book by Dumas?’ Carl cracked.
‘I think so,’ Defina said. ‘But I can never remember if it’s Dumas père, Dumas fils, or Dumas the Holy Ghost.’
‘Hey, guys, you’re confused,’ Karen explained. ‘Even I know that it’s Casper the Holy Ghost.’
Jeffrey shook his head at their foolishness. ‘Could you behave like celebrities instead of tourists for just one evening?’ he asked.
‘Speaking of celebrities, I saw John Kennedy Junior in the lobby,’ Carl whispered. ‘I nearly passed out. I swear, he is a real and present danger to the gay community. The boy could cause cardiac arrest.’ Carl began breathing hard with actual or feigned excitement. It was difficult to tell with Carl. ‘Oh, to be Daryl Hannah for just one night!’ he cried.
Karen rolled her eyes at him. ‘Behave,’ she warned. Carl was obsessed with the Kennedys, or pretended to be. He was probably the only person in the country who could name all the Kennedy cousins of this generation. It was a parlor trick he did, kind of like naming the wives of Henry the Eighth or the seven dwarves, except it took a lot longer.
By now most of the people in the ballroom had taken their seats, and Carl joined the Karen Kahn team at the table. He picked up a glass and when one of the waiters brought champagne, he cleared his throat and got serious. ‘Let us all toast this year’s winner of the coveted Oakley Award,’ he saluted. Karen was touched. Then, on cue, everyone at the table pulled out a slice of toast and lobbed them across the table at her – even the sedate Mercedes. Then they all collapsed in giggles. All except Jeffrey.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. He obviously hadn’t been privy to the gag. ‘A food fight at the Waldorf Astoria?’ He shook his head while Karen couldn’t stop laughing. Tears came to her eyes and she had to use a napkin to make sure she didn’t blot her mascara.
Suddenly the mistress of ceremonies, Leila Worth, began speaking from the podium set at the corner of the stage. ‘If I may ask for your attention,’ she cooed over a sound system that had to be set on supermax to be heard over the braying and whinnying of the mavins of couture. The fashion crowd was a loud one. At last they settled down.
The next part of the evening was a blur to Karen. There were the inedible couple of courses of food and the blah, blah, blah of several speakers who talked about the Oakley Awards and the industry and fund-raising. There was the buzz of conversation that rose to an almost unbearable din between each speaker, and the predictable music – some Lester Lannin knock-off band. Then the lights dimmed and Leila Worth got back behind the podium.
‘Tonight we are gathered to honor an American fashion great.’ Goose pimples ran up Karen’s arms and down her back. Was that her? She looked down at her plate of untouched chicken divan and wild rice. She was a fashion great? She didn’t know if she was thrilled, embarrassed, or upset. Maybe all three. Did Coco Chanel, Karen’s idol, feel ambivalent when she was fêted? Probably not, but then Chanel was a fashion great. Karen sat there feeling like both Miss America and an imposter. She tried to focus again on Leila’s words. After all, you didn’t get a Lifetime Achievement Award every day.
‘In the last twenty years, American fashion has become the fashion of the world,’ Leila was saying. Karen wondered how the French and Italian designers in the room felt about hearing that! If it wasn’t completely true, it was more true than it had ever been before. America was the place that had created a system that could move a designer’s vision out to virtually every corner of the world. It had taken three decades, but the Oakley Awards had been one of the mechanisms that had focused the attention of the fashion magazines and buyers on American designers. Leila could be excused the hyperbole.
‘Nobody represents American fashion, nobody knows American women, better than the designer we are here to honor tonight. In the last decade, the continuous flow of beautiful, luxurious, and wearable clothes has never stopped coming. No one has a greater mastery of form, a deeper understanding of the subtleties of color, and no one has been more industrious or creative in her search for the right material, the unique material, the original material, as Karen Kahn. Here are some examples.’
The spot focusing on Leila went black, and from out of the wings the parade of tall, gorgeous women began. Leila’s disembodied voice continued, describing some of the designs and their importance or originality. Now, in the semi-darkness, Karen knew what to do with her eyes. She drank in the spectacle – a collection of the work she had done in the last decade. Karen nodded at the big-shouldered sheath dress and matching knit jacket, the unconstructed blazer and sleek cropped pants, even the bias-cut silk knit evening gown, though evening wear had never been her strongest suit. The clothes on the models moved, they reflected the light, and they seemed both a decoration and an organic part of the beautiful bodies they draped. That was the trick, the riddle, that Karen was always trying to solve – how to conceal, reveal, and yet also be a natural extension of a woman’s body.
With most of these clothes, she thought, she had succeeded, and just for once, for this delicious moment, she could sit there and be happy with her work. She was no wunderkind – hell, she was hitting middle age – but if she felt that she’d been overlooked for years, now that she was finally being recognized she’d just consider it fashionably late. Karen could sense that the audience felt her vision, and when the last number – the previous season’s rich cocoa cardigan and legging outfit in wool with a simple chiffon undertunic – swirled off Leila called out her name. Karen rose effortlessly and walked across the gleaming empty dance floor to the stage.
The ovation sounded thunderous, but so was the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears. She hoped her hair looked all right; she knew that the satin pants and cashmere jacket she was wearing, the latter trimmed in satin banding, would catch the light and throw it back to the audience. She ascended the steps and turned toward the audience. The spots blinded her, but she was prepared and tried to look out at the darkness behind them without wincing. Leila hugged her, and the applause surrounded the two of them, a clichéd tableaux from every award ceremony that had ever come before. Karen looked over the room full of everyone who was anyone in the fashion world.
‘Thanks, friends,’ she began.
Jeffrey and she were getting ready to leave when Willie Artech approached their table. Willie was another designer, slightly younger than Karen, who also had been juggling an emerging Seventh Avenue business. About five years before he had been the hot guy, but underfinancing and missed delivery dates – an absolute mortal sin in the rag