Dating Big Bird, page 16
“Oh, my God,” she said, straightening up a pile of suit sketches that were on her drawing table. “Simon’s going to be so relieved. You should have seen him yesterday—calling Gail and telling on you because you’ve been so negligent in your duties.” She headed out of the kitchen toward her office, and I followed. “So what did he think when you told him?”
“Told him? I haven’t actually told him. I don’t want him to know what it is yet.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not exactly something that’s store-bought. It’s a little conceptual, so it’s kind of hard to describe.”
She smacked a new pack of Marlboros against the palm of her hand, then tore off the plastic. “What is it?”
“Well, it isn’t yet. It’s, you know, it has to be made.”
“Custom made?”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
She was rapidly losing patience with my evasiveness. “What the fuck is it already? I don’t have all day.”
“Okay.”
I planted both feet on the floor and made my hands into a frame as if I were one of those cheesy Hollywood producers about to pitch a one-word concept movie:
“Mammo!”
“Excuse me?” she said.
I got into position and repeated my karate-chop stance.
“Mammo!” I said again.
Renee looked at me as if I were a madwoman.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I could see I was going to have to start from scratch.
“You know how all these women who become mothers are always conflicted and tormented about everything? They love being mothers, and they love being home with their kids, cooking and baking and playing with Play-Doh and watching Barney with them, but they also feel kind of guilty about liking it? As if they shouldn’t be such losers and should be back at work and back in shape like they were before they had their babies?”
“Yeah? So?”
“And the ones who do go back to work feel guilty about that, too, because they think they should be home with their kids, cooking and baking and playing with Play-Doh and watching Barney with them, instead of sitting at their desks till seven o’clock at night working like maniacs and afraid they’re going to get fired?”
“Like I said the first time: Yeah? So?”
“Ergo Mammo!”
Silence.
“Where’d you come up with this brainstorm?”
“In Maine.”
“In Maine, huh? What’s the official state bird up there, the white-tailed asswipe?”
“Is it that bad?” I asked, not really wanting to hear her answer.
“I don’t know yet. Keep talking.”
“Mammo is pride. Conviction. Strength. Self-assurance. Whether you’re married with children, or unmarried with children.”
She crossed her arms and shifted her weight onto her other leg. She was intrigued, even though I could tell she was pretending not to be.
“Mammo isn’t just a mom, she’s”—I lifted my shoulders and stuck my arms out in frustration over being so inarticulate—“she’s—Mammo!”
Renee nodded, finally.
“Okay. That’s kind of interesting. Now what does it have to do with Karen’s gift?”
“It is the gift. Mammo on a necklace—in silver letters—on a thin cord—like a choker.” I pointed to the bone at the base of my neck, where I envisioned it would rest.” Mammo the word, the necklace, the idea—is Mother Power. Ipso facto.”
I paused again for dramatic effect.
“See? Mammo—Mother Power—for Karen. For a woman who, despite herself, embodies that.”
She lit a cigarette and thought about it for a second or two.
“It’s a little high-concept,” she finally said.
“Do you think she’ll get it?”
Renee raised an eyebrow. “She invented high-concept.”
“But what do you think?” I demanded.
“What do I think? I think you’re weird.”
She sounded like my mother. “I know you think I’m weird, but what do you think about the idea? About the necklace?”
“I think you want the necklace for yourself because you want to be a Mammo.”
I laughed.
“Am I wrong?” she said.
I laughed again. “No. You’re not wrong. You’re never wrong, Renee.”
“Of course I’m not.” She threw her arm over my shoulders and walked me to the door. “Now get away from me so I can start thinking about your stupid necklace, so you can walk around wearing it and pretending you have a kid.”
Renee agreed to design a prototype of the necklace—a rough sketch and specs on material and font style and size and cord length—so we could take it to a jewelry designer to have it made. Every time she saw me for the rest of the day, she complained about how busy she was and how much more work she had to do than I did, which wasn’t even true. But the next morning she walked by my office with her big black leather portfolio and indicated that I should follow her to her office.
“Hey, Mammo,” she said with her sunglasses still on and barely slowing down as she passed my door, “get in here.”
I jumped up from my desk and ran into her office with my coffee and shut the door.
“It’s very rough,” she said, hovering over me as I looked at the sketch on her desk. For all her bluff and bluster, she was a completely insecure perfectionist who wanted everything she designed to be brilliant on the first try. Which it usually was.
I stepped back from her desk.
“Could you move your hair? I can barely see,” I said, then moved back to take in the drawing she’d laid out on the table. Seeing the word Mammo displayed for the first time since the accidental birthday cake inscription gave me a thrill.
Renee lit a cigarette and began to pace around her office, waiting for me to make my pronouncement.
“It’s great!” I said. “It’s amazing! It’s exactly what I’d imagined!”
“Only better.” She was smiling now, and relieved. She walked back to her drawing table and adjusted the lamp above it. “I really like this font,” she said. “It’s a clean, basic, no-nonsense type. Like the word and the person it describes.”
“Good,” I said.
“I used all lowercase letters, like typewriter-type, because I think that also serves to get the point across. It reinforces the idea of Mammo as a professional woman, yet it’s understated.”
“Good,” I said again, staring at how the word looked in its new typeface:
mammo.
I liked it.
“Now for materials.” She looked at me and squinted at the line of smoke that had just gone straight into her eye. “Since this is for Karen—the woman who has everything and hates everything unless she’s designed it—the materials have to be the best.”
“So not sterling silver.”
She shook her head.
“What about eighteen-karat gold?”
“Her upper lip curled. “I don’t think so.”
“Twenty-four-karat gold?”
Nope.
“White gold?”
Nope.
“What’s left?”
“Platinum.”
“Platinum? Jesus. How much will that cost?”
“A fortune.” She closed her pad and stubbed her cigarette out. “Don’t worry yet. I’ve got a friend who’s a jewelry designer in SoHo, and she has a friend in the jewelry district—and they both love Karen’s clothes. Let’s see if they’d do a trade.”
“Yeah, right. One piece of platinum for five suits.”
“For five hundred suits.”
The following afternoon Renee told me that she’d faxed the mammo sketches to her friend downtown, who was going to get started on designing the necklace right away. Both she and her platinum-pimping associate, she said, would work with us on a trade: service and materials for clothes.
Renee had worked out a rough barter with Annette for Karen Lipps Green Label sample suits and a range of other KLNY merchandise—shoes and sweaters and sunglasses and outerwear, and the rest, she said, I’d have to figure out.
“Chisel open that discretionary promotional budget of yours,” she said. “Or get Simon to chisel open his petty cash budget—Karen makes him spend about twenty-five thousand dollars a day on bottled water, so she’d probably never even miss it anyway.”
She told me we’d see the necklace in about two weeks, have a few days to make changes, and then the designer would need another week to finalize it.
“So unless she dies or something horrible happens to her between now and then, you’ll have your stupid necklace by April twenty-fifth.”
Which would, according to Simon’s hyperprecise calculations, leave only five days to wrap it.
15
An aerial view of the elaborate automative choreography necessary to transport two hundred Very Important Women out of New York City to the south fork of Long Island on a Sunday morning in May would make Operation Desert Storm look like a walk in the park.
On the day of Karen’s shower, black hired sedans, limousines, and chauffeured cars with tinted windows would begin making their scheduled pickups at ten A.M. at various exclusive and often highly guarded addresses around town—mostly on Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, Park Avenue, Central Park West, and Central Park South; a few in SoHo and one or two in TriBeCa—their minibars and backseats stocked with the prerequested necessities of bottled water, diet soda, fruit, and newspapers and magazines, not to mention special lower-lumbar back pillows and the occasional blanket. Fanning out in formation around the city toward the Triborough Bridge and beyond, their cranky and demanding celebrity cargo would be complaining constantly in the backseats about the lack of air or too much of it, since any true New Yorker is loath ever to leave the city, unless it’s to go to the Hamptons, and then, well, they still hate to make the trip.
Even Karen, the guest of honor, who by now was eight and a half months pregnant and uncomfortably big, was dreading it. Not only could she have used that Sunday afternoon in the office (she was still making up for the days she’d taken off following Marissa’s illness), but she also hated surprises. She knew that there was a gift coming to her from the staff, but she still didn’t know what it was—and that was driving her crazy.
“Hi. It’s me. Did I wake you?”
Karen.
I looked at the clock: seven-thirty.
I’d actually been up since five-thirty, trying to figure out how to tie the Lipps-red organza ribbon around the mammo necklace box the way professional gift wrappers did, until I gave up and called Simon at six. He’d walked me through the cutting and threading and tying over the phone like an emergency quadruple bypass.
“Listen,” said Karen, without the pretense of waiting for my reply or apologizing for calling so early. She and I had known each other long enough to be beyond such formalities. “What’s the gift you’re all giving me? I know you’re in charge of it.”
“It’s a surprise.”
“I hate surprises, you know that. I tried to get it out of Simon all week, but I couldn’t crack him.”
An image of Simon held captive by Karen in one of her white upholstered office chairs for hours and hours and refusing to talk flashed into my mind.
“Well, you know how good he is at keeping secrets.” Especially when he doesn’t even know the secret.
“Bullshit. He’s the biggest gossip in the business. How do you think the columns know where I’m eating and what I’m eating every minute of every day?”
So Simon was the leak!
“Anyway, what is it?” I could hear the impatience growing in her voice. “Ellen, listen. I just want to know what the gift is before I open it. You may not know this about me, but sometimes I have trouble hiding my feelings if I don’t like something.”
“I understand. Really, I do. But I just don’t feel right about telling. I mean, I haven’t told anyone—including Simon—what it is.” Only Renee had seen it, late on Friday afternoon when the finished necklace came back finally from the designer. “It would ruin everything for Simon—not to mention the rest of the staff—if I were to spoil the surprise.”
“But why is it such a secret?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Then give me a hint. Was Arthur in on it?”
“No.”
“Gail?”
“No.”
“Is it something for the nursery? Furniture or bedding or another one of those goddamned black-and-white visually contrasting mobiles to hang over the crib? Or is it something to wear?”
“Kind of.”
“Ellen, please.” She was getting exasperated, and I knew I didn’t have much room left to play around with. “What do you mean, ‘kind of’?”
“Okay. It’s something to wear.”
“Clothes?”
I stopped myself from saying kind of again and responded with a definitive lie:
“Yes. It’s clothes. Baby clothes.”
“Finally. Now listen, when are you leaving for the country?”
The country. Only in Manhattan were the Hamptons considered the country.
“Around nine. I’m picking Renee up first. We’re going out there early to help with whatever last-minute things need to be done.”
“Gail doesn’t need any help. She’s had most of Martha’s people up there since yesterday. I’ll call her and tell her you’re not coming early and that we’ll be there at noon. My car is coming to get me at nine-thirty. Tell Renee to be at your building at nine-forty-five, and I’ll pick the two of you up so we can all go together.”
I was still running around my apartment like a maniac when the doorman called to tell me that Renee had arrived. I went downstairs to the lobby, only to turn around once I’d gotten there when I realized I’d forgotten the gift.
Clearly annoyed that she had to be doing anything on a Sunday that involved work and annoyed that we were dressed almost identically in our spring-weight black KLNY capri pants and cardigan twin sets, Renee told me I should go up and change.
“I’m not changing,” I said.
“Why not? We look like we both work at Bendel’s.” Her voice was heavy with disdain. Renee hated Bendel’s because she thought their stores and their merchandise were too aggressively cute and because they didn’t sell men’s clothes. The fact that Karen had once designed for them had always been a sore spot for her.
“Because there’s no time. And besides, what would I change into? Everything I own is a variation of this.” I grabbed at my sweater and pulled on it with frustration. “It’s not like I’m going to go up there, and something pink or green is suddenly going to materialize. The best I’ll do is find something that’s a different shade of black.”
She rummaged through her bag for a cigarette, then swore under her breath when she realized she was out. “Fine. We look like asswipes. I’m going over to the newsstand to get a pack of cigarettes.” She walked off in a huff and returned two minutes later in mid-smoke. When Karen’s driver pulled up in front of my building, Renee put her sunglasses on and pushed me away from the door to the front seat.
“You’re sitting in back with her,” she ordered.
Two and a half hours and about a thousand dollars’ worth of cell phone calls each later, we reached our destination—East Hampton—and Gail’s expansive white Victorian house, which looked as if it had been transformed over the last twenty-four hours into something out of, well, out of a Martha Stewart book.
We pulled into the long gravel driveway, and as the tires crunched along slowly, the three of us sat in silence behind our tinted windows and our sunglasses and took in the scene. Industry people we knew from other design houses and from magazines and retailers were there, as were celebrities and their car-and-driver-entourages. Waiters were already trickling out of the house and onto the lawn with small round trays of sweating champagne flutes.
“I have got to pee,” Karen said, squirming beside me. But she kept her eyes on the Who’s Who of Women milling around on the lawn, as did I: Barbara Walters, Nora Ephron, Lynda Obst, Cindy Crawford, Carly Simon, Katie Couric, Anna Wintour, Donna Karan, Vera Wang, Esther Dyson, Tina Brown, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Gwyneth Paltrow, Liz Smith, Brooke Astor, Jane Pauley, Anna Deavere Smith, Maria Shriver, Binky Urban, Esther Newburg, Kathy Robbins, Lynn Nesbit, Helen Gurley Brown, Gail Sheehy, Katharine Graham, Joni Evans, Erica Jong, Donna Shalala, Rosie O’Donnell, and Susan Sarandon—to name only thirty-one.
And the car hadn’t even come to a complete stop yet.
And I wasn’t even counting Arlene Schiffler.
Karen’s driver pulled around the semicircular driveway in front of the house and stopped just short of the stone steps that led up to the wraparound porch. The three of us stepped out into the bright sunshine, and as Karen took the lead, Renee and I flanked her on either side, the way Secret Service agents flank the President in the protective V formation. A look of gratitude appeared in Karen’s eyes the instant before she turned and headed into the eye of the storm.
In less time than it takes for atoms to collide and release their energy, an epic and gruesome display of air-kissing and ass-kissing erupted as Karen made her way to the house. Even after almost eight years in the business, I still hadn’t gotten used to such blatant hypocrisy: everybody there hated at least one other person there (if not ten other people). More than a few of Karen’s enemies had even been invited, and not only had they shown up, but they’d come bearing hugs and kisses and extravagantly wrapped gifts.
Renee and I immediately extricated ourselves from the crush of bodies and flesh and clashing fragrances and headed up to the porch as quickly as we could, Renee in search of the stiffest drink she could find (“Champagne? Please. I need a vodka”), and me, of course, in search of Simon.
There were flowers everywhere, lining the path to the house, dripping down over the doors in garlands and exploding out of window boxes. The front door was open, and through it I could see more flowers—a big huge arrangement in the center of the foyer, for starters. Gail was in the doorway, a one-woman receiving line, busily greeting guests—or actually, introducing herself to guests, since she didn’t know most of them. When I kissed her hello, she somehow had the presence of mind, despite the chaos and excitement going on around her, to point to Karen’s ass and then whisper in my ear that it was, of course, hidden up against one of the pillars on the veranda.
