do mattered at all. Lori would either go with him or move on. Life went on no matter how much we angsted over it. This was one of the wisdoms that age had brought me. I took some measure of comfort in the idea that I was free from all the pining that came from being twenty-three. It was all so useless in the long run, wasn’t it?
But as much as I hoped to disregard the pinings of youth, once Claudia dumped the focus group findings on me to review, I found myself deluged in information about what the 18-to-24-year-old female wanted most. At least when it came to her appearance.
She wanted color. Lots of it. Shine, sparkle, glitter.
She wanted to stand out. Be unique.
She wanted to be strong, yet feminine. A lithe athlete in strawberry-scented lip gloss.
She owned an average of two Juicy Couture outfits, spent more time surfing the Internet than she did watching TV and preferred cosmetics called “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” to the more descriptive “Passionfruit Pink.”
I also learned that the person she most aspired to be was Irina Barbalovich.
Which is exactly why Roxanne Dubrow, or more specifically, Dianne, wanted her to be their new face.
And so the wooing began. It was simple enough at first. Not many people in the fashion industry turned down a personal phone call from Dianne Dubrow, least of all Mimi Blaustein, CEO of Turner Modeling Agency and agent to its current star property, Irina.
As with most relationships, the courtship began with food. Lunch was promptly arranged. And because a lot was riding on this relationship, restaurant selection was of the utmost importance. Lori was promptly sent on a mission to uncover Irina’s preferences.
This was not such a difficult mission. The Internet was rife with interviews and sites devoted to Irina. Apparently the entire universe wanted to know what Irina wanted, and I had to assume, since no one knew Irina from any other nineteen-year-old up until recently, this desire was that her hips were slight enough and her abs tight enough to make her irresistible in a pair of low-slung jeans; that her bust-to-hip ratio made her absolutely stunning in most any fabric a designer draped on her.
What Lori uncovered was that Irina was a vegan of the worst kind. Nondairy. Wheat-free. And wholly organic.
Thank God we were in New York City, probably the only place in the world where you could find a restaurant that was up-to-the-moment chic yet capable of creating well-presented plates featuring food that had not been tortured during its lifespan, sprayed with pesticides, kept alive by antibiotics or mishandled in any way, shape or form.
That restaurant was Mandela, a short walk away on Madison Avenue, and usually a month-long wait for a reservation. Unless you happened to be dining with Irina, of course.
Miraculously, or not so miraculously depending on how you looked at it, Mandela just so happened to have an opening during the very two-hour spread that Mimi’s assistant had allotted for Irina to make herself available to Dianne Dubrow and Co.
The reservation was made for six people, according to the hastily scrawled note Claudia had left lying on Lori’s desk, which I had come across while dropping off some files.
Six? It seemed like a curious number. Irina and her agent. Claudia, Dianne and me. Who was the sixth? I wondered.
It certainly wasn’t Lori, because although she had, through her administrative support, probably worked as hard as I had to prepare us for this meeting, she never got to enjoy the perks like Claudia and I did. It could have been Lana Jacobs, though we generally didn’t bring in PR at this point—not until we had the prospective model on board. Mark Sulzberg from Legal? Way too soon for that. It wasn’t like Irina was ready to sign a contract with us yet, especially since we weren’t the only players in the fashion industry vying for Irina’s hand.
It could have been Phillip Landau, the up-and-coming photographer who had first captured Irina for Vogue. The two had become almost inseparable since that career-boosting fashion spread, and their constant camaraderie might have sparked rumors of romance, if not for the fact that Phillip was gay.
Still curious, I popped my head into Claudia’s office. “So who’s going to lunch next week?” I inquired.
Claudia looked up from the issue of W she’d been poring over, whether because she was trend-spotting or simply gathering ammunition for her next shopping spree I wasn’t sure.
“Lunch?” Claudia said, gazing up at me in what looked like a drug-induced fog. She was shopping, I decided. Nothing else could put a glaze like the one I saw in Claudia’s eyes right now like the pursuit of the latest handbag or cut of trouser.
“With Irina?”
Her gaze sharpened up immediately, as if the very utterance of Irina’s name put all her senses on full alert. “Well, Irina and Mimi, of course. Me and Dianne,” she said, ticking off each name on the tips of her manicured fingers. “Michael—”
“Michael Dubrow?” I asked, startled. “Why is he coming?”
Claudia eyed me speculatively. I must have been showing a little more emotion than the situation warranted.
Hoping to dispel any suspicion I may have caused, I said, “It just seems peculiar that the vice president of our Overseas Division is attending a lunch to woo our latest model, don’t you think?” Even as I said the words with the veneer of cool indifference that had become my trademark, new anxiety washed over me. I hadn’t seen Michael at close range for quite some time. Shortly after our affair, he had taken over management of the Overseas Division, which kept him out of the country a lot. When he was in the States, he usually worked out of the Long Island office, and even if he did come to New York, he was easy enough to avoid, seeing as the doors to the family town house in Sutton Place weren’t exactly open to all. The few times I did find myself in meetings with him in our Park Avenue offices, there were enough other people in the room for me to maintain a cool, corporate indifference to him from across the room. But the intimacy of sitting across a table in a restaurant from Michael suddenly seemed like too much to bear. It surprised me to what extent he could unravel me after all this time. Maybe I was getting soft in my old age.
“I believe he’s coming to escort Courtney,” she said, feasting her gaze once more on the magazine before her.
“Courtney?”
“Courtney Manchester. The new director of R & D?” she said, looking at me again. “I guess he feels responsible for her. Or something,” she continued. “After all, he did, in a sense, acquire her, right along with the Sparkle line. Knowing him, he probably wants to claim the company’s new baby as his own so he can reap all the glory once Roxy D takes off.” She snorted. “But I suppose with the amount of money this company is dropping on this product, something glorious is bound to happen.”
As Claudia moved on to her typical rant about how Michael—or even Dianne, for that matter—didn’t know a thing about successfully marketing a product beyond throwing a bunch of money at it, I nodded absently, my mind whirling with the implications of what she had just told me. For a brief moment, I wasn’t even sure what bothered me more: the fact that I suspected Michael was openly wooing his next conquest or the fact that, clearly, I was not a main player in Roxanne Dubrow’s next big campaign. I hadn’t even been invited to this fucking lunch.
Before the steam visibly shot out of my ears, I interrupted Claudia’s tirade with a hurried excuse about a call I needed to make to a sales rep, then headed straight for my office, closing the door behind me.
And while I sat there contemplating the fact that my future at Roxanne Dubrow was not as rosy as I had once thought, I found myself clicking on the e-mail archive where I had filed the semiannual corporate newsletters we received.
Glancing through the file, I quickly located the newsletter announcing Roxanne Dubrow’s acquisition of Sparkle and opened it up, my eyes seeking out the article—and more specifically, the photo of Courtney Manchester I had barely glanced at when it first arrived. But I took it all in now.
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