Fashionably Late Page 15

  Rather than discuss it anymore, she turned and joined Tiff, who was sitting alone on the sofa. On the coffee table before the girl there was a plate piled high with three sticky buns that Mrs Frampton had succeeded in heating. As Karen sat down beside her niece, the girl picked up the top bun and greedily bit into it. Karen could see the steam rising from the soft dough, but despite the obvious heat, Tiff kept chewing, sucking air in through her teeth to cool the hot mouthful.

  ‘So, are you excited about the bat mitzvah?

  ‘No,’ Tiff grunted.

  ‘Have you memorized your Haftorah?’ The Haftorah was the section of the Torah that Tiff would have to read, in Hebrew, to the congregation. ‘I couldn’t do it. I never even went to Hebrew school, you know,’ Karen told the girl.

  ‘You were lucky.’

  ‘What are you going to wear?’ Karen asked.

  ‘What difference does it make, when she looks like a pig?’ Belle asked the room loudly. Tiff shot a murderous look at her grandmother and picked up the next sticky bun.

  ‘Put that down,’ Belle told her.

  ‘Make me,’ Tiff said, her mouth full.

  ‘Look how she gets talked to by her own grandchild! Don’t talk when you eat,’ Belle exclaimed.

  ‘Suits me fine,’ Tiff said, and took another bite. The room was silent. All conversation had stopped. Lisa joined them. Karen looked up at her. Lisa, as a compliment to Karen, was wearing one of the sweater-and-matching-leggings outfits Karen had done last year. But Lisa had glitzed it up with a Chanel belt that had about a hundred Karl Lagerfeld studs. Karen knew that finding a style that worked wasn’t easy: look at Ivana Trump. Karen knew Ivana had once paid thirty-seven thousand dollars for a beaded jacket from Christian Lacroix. Of course, that was before the divorce. Lisa didn’t spend that much, but she spent enough and still hadn’t come up with a style, or if this was it, it didn’t suit her. And she should lose the snakeskin boots. Karen loved her sister, but she knew that Lisa lacked two things: an eye and a spine. Karen gave Lisa a look, the look that meant ‘intervene with Belle.’ Not that Lisa ever did.

  ‘Mother, please,’ Lisa pleaded ineffectually.

  ‘Don’t “mother please” me. The girl has no self-control. Look at her! She’s going to make a spectacle of herself. She eats like a horse and her sister eats like a bird! Fat and skinny had a face, all around the pillowcase.’ Belle ran her hands nervously down the flat front of her jacket and across her skirt as if she was brushing away nonexistent crumbs. Arnold joined them and in a quiet voice murmured something to his wife. ‘Don’t start with me, Arnold,’ Belle said resentfully. But when he took her arm, she followed him out to the terrace.

  Stephanie came over and sat beside her aunt. Like her mother, she was a peace-maker. ‘When are you going to be on TV?’ she asked. ‘I just love Elle Halle,’ she added.

  ‘Yeah. She’s a real babe,’ Karen agreed, and flashed a grin at Perry. ‘I think the show is airing in two weeks.’

  ‘It’s so exciting,’ Lisa said. ‘We’re all going to watch it together. Do you want to come over?’ she asked Karen.

  For some reason, the idea gave Karen the willies, so she only smiled noncommittally. ‘Maybe,’ she said. She loved Lisa, but somehow spending time with her had become more and more difficult. Lisa was jobless, Karen was childless, and perhaps they envied one another a little. Karen didn’t know why but it seemed as if Lisa was on a whole different track, living in some other universe that wasn’t even parallel. It made Karen feel both guilty and alone.

  It was funny: she didn’t give a rat’s ass about either Elle Halle or Elise Elliot but everyone else was impressed with that. She did care about the Oakley Award, but no one here had even mentioned it. Karen sighed.

  ‘I’m really excited about my job with you,’ Stephanie said. Karen patted her leg.

  ‘Me too, Stephie.’ Karen looked over at Tiff and watched the girl slowly chew the third sticky bun, while a tear dripped down her cheek. Karen felt a wave of compassion for her. Karen patted Tiff’s thick thigh as well. ‘Do you know what I’ve gotten you for your bat mitzvah?’ she asked Tiff.

  ‘A Kevorkian machine?’ Tiff asked.

  Karen laughed in surprise. The kid was really funny. Maybe Tiff would be all right. She was smart and had a sense of humor. She’d come through this awkwardness. After all, her aunt had. Karen smiled at the girl. ‘No. I got you pearls. You know what your grandmother always says.’

  ‘Yeah. That I’m a fat pig.’

  Karen winced. ‘She says, “Every woman should have a triple strand of pearls.” So here’s what I’m doing: I’m giving you one strand now, another on your sweet sixteen, and a third one when you’re twenty-one.’

  ‘Really?’

  For the first time that morning Karen saw Tiff’s face light up with a smile. It was odd, but for a moment Tiff actually looked a little bit like Karen. Karen bent over and kissed the girl on her soft, plump cheek. ‘Do you want them now?’ she asked, ‘so you can wear them to the ceremony?’

  ‘Yes,’ breathed her niece, so Karen took her by the hand and led her toward the bedroom.

  ‘Can I come too?’ Stephanie asked.

  ‘No,’ Karen told her gently. ‘You can see them in a minute.’

  When she and Tiff came back and joined the others, Tangela and Stephanie crowded around the younger girl. Karen realized it was the first time she’d seen the two young women together all afternoon. Didn’t they like each other? ‘Ooooh, they’re beautiful!’ Tangela cried, fingering the necklace.

  ‘How come you never got me pearls?’ Stephanie asked Karen.

  Were all sisters doomed to envy one another? ‘You never got bat mitzvahed, and you got diamond earrings for your sixteenth birthday. I think you’re in good shape,’ Karen smiled stiffly and got up. She made her way over to the table. She felt drained, exhausted. She’d like to go up to her bedroom and lock the door, lock all of these difficult, troubling, annoying people out. She wondered, for a crazy minute, what would happen if her real mother walked in right now and joined these people. How would the stranger behave? It couldn’t be worse than this. Karen felt so disappointed in everyone. She looked down at the table. She realized she was starving. Well, that’s how she usually reacted to disappointment: by eating. She picked up a bagel and slathered on some cream cheese with chives.

  ‘At the risk of sounding like your mother, you don’t need that on your thighs,’ Defina told her.

  ‘Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?’ Karen asked, and took a big bite.

  Defina patted her belly. ‘This pot don’t have to show her collection in Paris at the end of the month. And nobody around here better be calling nobody black, except me.’ Defina picked up the last of the sticky buns in one hand, took a bite, and lifted the empty plate in the other. ‘Let’s get this shit cleaned up,’ she suggested.

  Karen joined Defina in the kitchen. She rolled her eyes.

  ‘I tell myself that all families are dysfunctional …’ Karen began.

  ‘Honey, some are more dysfunctional than others. No wonder white people been so mean to blacks. We shouldn’t take it personal. They been mean to each other, too. I guess it’s just natural.’ She began to hand the dirty coffee cups to Karen. ‘Your mother-in-law keeps confusing me with the help,’ she said. ‘Should I tell her she doesn’t have the butt to wear the Rykiel?’

  ‘I think not,’ Karen laughed, lining the cups up along the sink. Speaking of help, where the fuck was Mrs Frampton? Karen would have to fire her. ‘I’m not sure I can go back out there,’ Karen said. Her lip trembled. ‘I had really wanted this to go well.’

  ‘Yeah, and I wanted Tangela to become an architect. The secret to happiness is a combination of low expectations and insensitivity. I just know you can manage both if you try harder.’

  ‘You know the saddest thing? I can’t stand the way Jeffrey’s mother dotes on him. Isn’t that bitchy? But she just drives me crazy.’

  ‘Girlfriend, t
hat’s just natural. Remember what Princess Di learned. If you have to live with his mother, even four hundred rooms ain’t enough.’

  ‘I guess it’s a mother-in-law kind of thing.’

  ‘You know what Carl would say if he was here?’ Defina changed her voice to a good imitation of his confidential whisper. ‘They say that Jackie didn’t get alone with Rose, either.’

  Karen laughed. ‘If only I knew who I disliked the worst: Robert-the-lawyer, Sylvia, my sisters-in-law, or my own mother.’

  ‘Go for your mother,’ Defina advised. ‘What the hell. My daughter always does.’ She sighed. Through their pain the two women smiled at one another. Then, in a perfect Yiddish accent Defina asked, ‘You want I should poison them?’ Karen had to laugh. Dee dropped into Harlem street talk. ‘Madame Renault’s recipe. It ain’t too late. They still be eating.’

  Karen never knew what to think when Defina brought up the fortune-teller. ‘Tempting, but not today,’ she told her friend. ‘Let’s just hope the herring does the job.’

  Lisa stuck her head in. ‘Oh, here you are,’ she said. ‘Listen, Karen, I’m worried about you. Could we talk?’

  ‘Not right this minute,’ Karen told her. God, she still hadn’t had a chance to really sit down and talk with Lisa. And when was the last time she’d called her? Karen felt another stab of guilt. She hadn’t even told her sister about Goldman.

  ‘I’ll just excuse myself,’ Defina said discreetly.

  ‘Oh. Great.’ Lisa smiled. ‘Hey. You’ve got lipstick on your teeth,’ she told Defina.

  ‘Really?’ Karen knew what was coming, but Lisa’s eyes popped open when Defina reached up and removed her upper bridge, wiping it on a paper napkin. Then she popped the false teeth back in. ‘Thanks,’ she said, smiling broadly, and turned to go back into the fray.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dressed for Success

  In the insane world of fashion if something happens once it’s a trend, if it happens twice it’s a fad, and if it happens three times it’s a classic. Then, the next day, it becomes old. Right now, Karen knew she was hot. NormCo knew it too. But who knows? Maybe next year, maybe even next season, she’d be as cold as Tony de Freise. Karen had read in WWD that Tony had just declared bankruptcy. It could happen to her. But how could you prepare for that?

  She was as prepared as she could be for the meeting with NormCo except for this – what would she wear?

  Like her mother, Karen was obsessed with her closet, but in a completely different way. She had three closets, actually. One at her apartment, one at the office, and one at their house in Westport. And she had virtually the same spare collection of clothes in each. Coco Chanel, Karen’s idol, kept only a few suits and a pair of trousers in her suite at the Paris Ritz. Karen identified. Unlike Belle or Lisa, Karen kept subtracting, not adding, to her closet.

  Karen was committed to easy dressing. Her catchword in fashion was wearability. She knew that most women had too many clothes, were confused by fashion, and didn’t know how to put things together. Or they picked the wrong look for themselves to begin with. For thirty years Karen had been making over strangers in her head. All the days she rode the New York subway to work, she never got over her disbelief of how women put themselves together. Had that blonde really put on the salmon ruffled blouse along with the red dirndl skirt and said to herself, ‘Yes! This is how I want to present myself to the world.’ Even among her wealthy clients, it was rare that Karen saw a woman who looked pulled together.

  Karen had formulated a few theories about why it was so hard for women to look comfortable and stylish. American women didn’t know how to dress partly because they had too much. She remembered a French woman who had once visited Belle. Chic, elegant, and a Parisian attorney’s wife, the woman had looked in Belle’s closet with horror and asked: ‘But how can you dress well? You have too much to choose from!’ As the brilliant shoe designer Manolo Blahnik had said, ‘It’s all a question of selection, to choose less. That is something Americans do not understand. They think more is better.’

  Karen had observed that French women, even the middle-class ones, wore expensive clothes, but they had far fewer things than Americans and formulated their ensembles much more carefully. Of coure, they learned the hard way not to make mistakes: it was next to impossible to return merchandise in Paris. Can you imagine the attitude?

  Karen’s ambition was to take the chic style of the French and blend it with the greater casualness of Americans. And to a great extent she’d succeeded. What she was aiming for was foolproof dressing, so that American women could have the best of both worlds – the pulled-together chic of the French and the freedom of American coordinates. They should have choice, but not be drowned in fifty different looks and styles, the way her sister Lisa was. Or frozen in time as Belle was. Or married to a single designer, as Sylvia was.

  Almost all the clothes Karen designed were in neutrals – wheat, greige, ivory, bone, gray, brown – colors that were natural, casual, and elegant. Colors that all worked together. Again, Karen thought of Chanel, who said she mistrusted colors not in nature, the colors of ‘bad taste.’ Coco took refuge in beige because it was natural, not dyed. And red, because it was the color of blood. Coco had said, ‘We’ve so much inside us it’s only right to show a little outside.’ Karen had adopted a lot of those theories, although she no longer used red. She’d gotten sick of it during the Nancy Reagan years, and anyway, she wondered if Chanel had preferred it simply because it suited her so well.

  That, of course, was always the argument: that women designers weren’t as good as men because, inevitably, they designed for themselves. Karen knew it was partly true about her. But didn’t male designers design for their mannequins: an impossibly perfect ideal that also didn’t serve the average woman very well?

  It wasn’t just colors, of course. The silhouettes, though they changed, had to be comfortable, had to flow, and yet had to work well with previous collections.

  The problem was, she’d done it all at high-end prices, nothing that the average American woman could afford. Even a bridge line, though cheaper, was still expensive. Karen shook her head at the confusing terms of the garment industry. ‘Bridge sportswear’ wasn’t worn for sports: it was the jackets and blouses and skirts and slacks that yuppies wore to work. And ‘moderate sportswear’ was the code name for the cheaper stuff for the mass market. Bosses wore ‘bridge,’ while their secretaries wore ‘moderate.’ Karen would like to see all the working women given a better choice.

  Now, the NormCo deal would allow her to open a more moderately priced line to go up against the Liz Claibornes and the lousy stuff of a Bette Mayer. In fact, that was what NormCo specialized in. Karen knew the secrets of her cut and style could be adapted for a larger market in less luxurious but still sensual fabrics. That was what the NormCo deal was all about; still, with licensing you lost so much control. She tried to imagine what it would feel like, okaying a collection and then seeing something with her name on it that she’d never designed. She’d have cardiac arrest. Bill Blass had once been asked to put his name on a designer coffin! Karen laughed and shuddered every time she thought about it.

  The other danger was overexposure. Cardin and Halston had licensed so many products that their names lost luster. The fashion world was a fickle one, and very few designers had managed to maintain their cachet as Chanel had done. But then, nothing of Chanel’s was ever licensed. During her lifetime she controlled it all, and the Wertheimers controlled it all since her death. Few had that luxury. You constantly had to walk the line between obscurity and overexposure.

  On the other hand, Karen knew she couldn’t manage to do much more than she was doing now without losing control anyway. She couldn’t grow quickly without a lot of outside money. And if she tried it more slowly with their own money and it failed, well, that was simply a stupid risk she was not prepared to take. The best, as Jeffrey always said, was OPM: Other People’s Money. In this case, the Other Person was Bill Wolp
er of NormCo.

  Karen looked through her closet again. For once, she wished for something in black. If she wore the silk knit, would she look too casual? She’d almost feel safest in one of her signature wrap cashmere sweater sets: her basic dress with matching jacket or shawl, but that was surely too sporty. And maybe too warm. Still, she was the creative one and she wasn’t going to put on a stiff little suit for Bill Wolper or anyone else. Karen believed a suit only looked good on a woman when she seemed naked underneath it. The fact was, she didn’t even own a stiff little suit. Her claim to fame was that she had gotten successful businesswomen out of them.

  It seemed that Bill Wolper had gotten a lot of successful businesswomen out of their suits, too. He’d slept with everyone. At least that was the word on the Avenue. Karen had never met him, but she’d seen pictures of the guy and had been unimpressed. The only attraction she could imagine he had was the size of his checkbook.

  She had shared the elevator with one of the staff of Oscar de la Renta who had filled her ears with gossip about Wolper. But maybe that was simply to turn her off. Maybe he’d heard word of the possible deal. There was a certain amount of envy in the rag trade and right now she knew she was the girl of the moment. Not because of anything so new, but mostly because of her high profile in the press.

  And PR was almost as important in her business as Karen’s designs were. She’d hated to admit to that, but after years of struggling to get exposure, she’d let Jeffrey hire Mercedes Bernard. Karen knew she and Jeffrey had been lucky to woo her away from the magazine. They got her at the right moment: Mercedes was tired of years of high status and low pay. She wanted a score before retirement, and Jeffrey had promised her stock. In the sixteen months since Mercedes had arrived, Karen had been the subject of a major article in Vanity Fair, both New Woman and New York magazine had done a cover story on her, the fashion books had given her a lot more editorial coverage, she’d been interviewed by Charlie Rose and Barbara Walters, and had been on CNN half a dozen times. She and Elsa Klensch were bosom buddies.