Dating Big Bird, page 6
Those of us who had been with her since the beginning of her meteoric rise in the fashion business knew Karen’s fierce ambition; her ability to play the master chess game of corporate politics; her obsession with her work and her intolerance of anything and anyone that interfered with it. And we had a hard time believing that she’d mellowed in her second marriage and that the birth of her daughter had softened her and made her see, finally, that there were more important things in life besides money and fame and licensing deals. And skeletal thinness.
Yet it was hard to be sure.
Karen’s husband, Arthur Klein, a short, quiet, balding man famous for collecting art and channeling his family’s vast wealth into philanthropic causes, worked at home and functioned, more or less, as vice-nanny and house-husband—allowing his wife to sustain the same grueling work and social schedule she’d had before the baby. But something had changed. Where once her life had been an open book for self-promotion—homes shot for the architectural/decor glossies; lengthy interviews given for profiles in the women’s magazines; beauty rituals, exercise regimes, and spa vacations divulged and documented to anyone with a circulation over two million—now it was not. Karen had closed the curtain on her life and allowed no one—no journalist, no photographer, not even a staff member—to penetrate the new force field of privacy she’d created. The only thing that was unclear was who she was trying to protect behind that veil of silence: her daughter or herself.
It took a few seconds for Karen to acknowledge me in that tiny elevator, and in that short time I noticed the little beads of sweat that had appeared on her upper lip, making me wonder momentarily if she might not be well. She wiped herself quickly with a tissue and then turned to me.
“How was your trip?” I asked.
“Productive. I’ve found my palette of browns for next fall’s line.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a Polaroid—a close-up of a huge glass display case, inside of which were rows and rows of chocolate. “I came across this chocolate shop in Belgium. I mean, just look at those colors!”
“Great!”
She put the photo back in her bag and turned back to me. “How are you?”
“Fine.”
As usual, she was not convinced.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said, desperately trying to relax the muscles in my face in case they had been fixed into an unwitting grimace. But it was too late. Her eyes were all over me, now.
“Not having any luck with the Bloomingdale’s people?”
“No. They’re fine. Lunch with three of them on Friday.”
“The spread in Vogue fall through?”
I loved working for someone who had so much faith in me.
“No. The shoot’s all set for next Monday.”
“Then what is it?” She continued to examine my face with intense curiosity. Clearly she needed some reason to explain my mood, so I put it in terms I knew she could understand.
“I’m just pissed because I’m late and I really wanted to get in early so I could get started on everything.”
This she could process. The desire to get one’s hands into one’s work—the frustration at being kept from doing so by some hapless force of nature—this she understood.
“I know. I cut my trip short because our nanny is sick and Arthur’s in Los Angeles until tomorrow. I was supposed to get here hours ago, and I would have if the substitute nanny hadn’t been late.”
“What’s wrong with the real nanny?”
“Mumps.” She rolled her eyes skeptically, as if mumps—along with ulcers and pneumonia and cancer—were just another lame excuse in the pantheon of lame excuses that lazy people used to get time off from work.
“What about Marissa? Could she have been—”
“No. She was not exposed. She’s fine.” Suddenly Karen dropped her bags on the floor of the elevator and shoved her hands up under the black tunic, grabbing and pulling at the fabric around her waist.
“These … fucking … leggings!” she said over the snap of an elastic waistband. “I’m going to kill that fucking Annette. I told her these waistbands were too big. Look at this!” She tried to grab a fistful of puckered Lycra but was unsuccessful. Which didn’t stop her. “With all this extra fucking material, I might as well ask three people to join me in here!”
The elevator doors opened, and in one swift, surprisingly graceful movement, she picked up her bags and stormed off toward her office.
Down the hall I could see Simon sitting peacefully at his desk, lazily twirling the ends of his hair around his index finger and then into his mouth, while enjoying what was obviously a personal phone call. But he hung up the receiver the second his otherworldly dog-hearing detected the telltale sound of her arrival—the squeak-squish squeak-squish of one Lycra thigh against the other—and dove toward her office. She slammed the door behind him, then a second later he reemerged and ran past me, his body bent at the forty-five-degree angle of indentured servitude.
“Where’s that fucking Annette?”
I sat down at my desk and contemplated my encounter with Karen. Did she really believe her leggings were too big on her? Or was this just another flagrantly demented piece of her motherhood-denial puzzle? A denial puzzle that, for starters, included never ingesting anything in the office except for bottled water and Altoids and wearing Lycra leggings that were (usually) three sizes too small for her.
The idea that a woman with no pictures of her child anywhere in her office was a mother and I wasn’t made me furious, then sad, but before I could indulge myself further in the deep dark vast well of injustice, I needed to deal with the work on my desk.
It was piled high with mail and message slips and press kits and invitations and newspaper and magazine ads in various stages of completion and all the other detritus that had accumulated the previous Friday afternoon, when I was out of the office for a lengthy lunch with the buyer from Bergdorf Goodman. I slipped my jacket off and onto the back of my chair and tried to get my eyes to focus on all the paper on my desk, but I couldn’t. I felt overwhelmed, the way I always did on Monday mornings.
I swiveled around in my chair and looked out the window.
From this perch on Fifty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue, I had an incredible view of the city south of midtown. Staring at the buildings and at all the teeny-tiny anonymous people with cars and buses swarming around them, I thought about the first time I came to New York to find a job, almost thirteen years ago.
How big everything seemed then. How big everything seemed still, though for very different reasons. Now, instead of facing merely the giganticness of the buildings and the giganticness of the egos inside them, I faced the pressure of my job; the endless sea of work that needed to get done every week and somehow did in spite of my waning interest and passion; how disconnected I felt I’d become in the midst of all this chaos and noise and perpetual motion. The veneer of glamour and allure that my career had once held for me—briefly, and without deep roots—had vanished long ago, and all that was left now was a persistent dread of the day that lay ahead.
I looked at my watch.
It was already eleven.
I picked up the phone and dialed the Pickle.
Naturally my sister answered.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How’s work?”
“Please.”
“I saw the new ads you were telling me about. For the lingerie. The stuff looks great.”
I glanced over at the color ads mounted on boards lined up on the floor along the windows—bras; panties; camisoles; teddies; silk; lace; satin; cotton, smooth or ribbed. If Malcolm had cared, I would have bought one of everything with my employee discount, the way every other single woman in the office had done months ago when the line first came in.
“I’ll send you some,” I said, searching my desk for a scrap of paper to write a note to myself on. “You want black or white or—”
“Don’t bother.”
“Why not?”
“I’m too fat for lingerie.”
I stopped looking. “You are not.” It was truly ridiculous—and frightening—how much time and energy we women spent discussing our collective distorted body image.
“I am, too.”
“Stop it.”
“You have no idea.”
Ever since she and Paul had moved from Boston to Portland so he could be a full professor of American history at the University of Maine and she’d quit her graphic design job and had Nicole, all Lynn ever complained about was her alleged fat.
And her inability to form a complete sentence.
And her fear that she might never be able to hold her own again in a roomful of adults because she had nothing to wear except sweatpants and also because sometimes she suspected people thought she was a loser because she stayed home fulltime with the Pickle and wore sweatpants all the time.
“Lingerie probably looks great on you, though.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Lynn paused, and I knew she was wondering if she should ask about Malcolm or not. But I knew she could tell that I wasn’t in the mood to talk about him. She and my parents worried enough about my personal life—or seeming lack thereof—without my having to confirm their worries on a daily basis.
“Have you talked to Them?” I asked, changing the subject.
“I tried to, but they’re packing.”
“Packing?”
“For the Elderhostel.”
“Another Elderhostel?” Why our parents couldn’t stay home and take up golf like every other retired couple in the world was beyond us. Trips like these meant weeks of preparatory prepacking even before the actual packing—What suitcase should they take? Would they need dressy clothes or just casual? Could they get away with six pairs of shoes each or would they need the seven?—and because I was in the clothing business and was considered an expert on such matters, every trip required numerous phone calls to consult with me on these questions.
But my sister’s perceived weight gain and my sexless sex life and my parents’ packing problems weren’t why I had called.
“So what’s she wearing today?” I asked, getting down to the true purpose of our conversation.
This was a call I made every day, though not at any specific time—just at whichever point I needed to feel connected to a human being. Albeit a human being who was three and a half and still pooping in her Pull-Ups.
As usual, Lynn obliged my question with absolute earnestness. It had become as much a part of her day, I supposed, as changing diapers had, or cutting little tuna-fish sandwiches into tiny bite-size squares had, or whatever other weirdly specific request required her to indulge her daughter. Lynn had never become as hard and as cynical as I had; she accepted my obsession with Nicole without jealousy, without a sense of competition. What was hers was mine—clothes and books and record albums when we were growing up, and now her family. And while I felt guilty at times for placing this extra burden on her, of asking her to indulge me, too—another child, or simply a childish adult—I couldn’t help myself.
I heard Lynn walk with the portable phone from the living room through the kitchen and into the back room where the Pickle, she told me, was sitting on the couch eating a waffle and watching Barney.
Ooof, I swooned, then waited impatiently for my report.
“Well, today she’s wearing her denim shirt and her black leggings and …” For this she apparently had to bend over or lean over or do something strenuous sounding in order to get a better look at the rest of the outfit.
“And …?” I prodded anxiously. This was the part I’d been waiting for, the part I always waited for: the shoes.
“And,” my sister said finally, “her yellow jellies.”
I closed my eyes: denim shirt, black leggings, yellow jellies.
The vision of her little feet inside those little yellow plastic shoes was sharp behind my closed eyes, until I opened them, reluctantly, a few seconds later.
“Thanks,” I said, then sighed; an addict after a fix.
“Anytime. Talk to you tomorrow.”
I hung up, wept, then called the airlines.
Thanksgiving was coming up.
It was time for another visit.
“She’s pregnant!” I said.
“Of course she’s pregnant,” Simon said.
“Light dawns over Marblehead,” Renee added.
The two of them had come into my office several hours after my elevator encounter with Karen—with cigarettes and ashtrays and gigantic monolithic take-out cups of coffee—and Renee had started in on me immediately.
“I can’t believe you didn’t get it. You—the person who’s obsessed with getting pregnant and having children. How could you not know?”
Through the glass windows of my office, I could see Karen through the glass windows of hers—she tucked her bone-straight fudge-colored hair behind both ears: cut and color courtesy of her appointment that afternoon with Frédéric Fekkai with whom she had a standing appointment every four weeks—and sat behind her big huge empty glass desk while Annette showed her a seemingly faulty zipper on a sample pant.
Like most Important People, her office was remarkably neat, bare of any evidence of actual work—files, papers, memos, message slips—containing only the requisite minimalist accoutrements befitting someone in her position: a huge television with built-in VCR for screening our latest ads and analyzing our runway shows; a cordless phone and three sleek black speaker units placed strategically around the office; a long white straight couch and two upholstered armchairs on an expanse of wheat-colored rug; an enormous high-backed ergonomically engineered futuristic leather swivel chair that, when she sat in it, dwarfed her and made her look like a child impersonating a boss; a laptop computer blinking and glowing on the low built-in credenza behind her; an open Palm Pilot in the center of the desk; and a bud vase full of deep-red grease pencils—her signature writing implement—that produced notes that looked as if they’d been written with lipstick.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to come up with a Renee-proof excuse for my stupidity (even though I never could). “She’d been away for a while, so I thought she’d gotten carried away with the Belgian chocolate, but I guess I was just in denial.”
“That’s the understatement of the century.”
“I don’t think anyone else has figured it out either, but I’ve suspected for weeks,” Simon said. “Ever since I noticed that extra finger or two of padding around the hips when she gave me a ride downtown recently. Sitting in the back seat with her, I couldn’t seem to get our body parts not to touch, no matter how much I squirmed or how close I sat to the door. I felt rather—well, suffocation is the word that came to mind.” A shiver seemed to undulate vertically through his wiry body, and he shook himself rid of it.
His reaction didn’t surprise me, though I was sure it had less to do with Karen’s weight than with the fact that Simon seemed to avoid close proximity to all human bodies. And while I was never quite sure about his sexual preference, I came to assume that whichever church he belonged to, he didn’t much like going. Not that he’d have much opportunity anyway, given the fact that he lived with his mother—something he was surprisingly unashamed of at age twenty-seven. “My mother is a saint,” he’d say whenever her name came up—which was all the time, it seemed—genuflecting with his hands in the praying-tower position at his chest. “I revere her.” Which is what he could, on occasion, be overheard to say over the phone during the course of a normal business day about Karen, although when he said it about Karen, one couldn’t help but detect a bit of a sneer.
I turned back to Renee, annoyed. I hated when other people knew things before I did. “Well, so, what, you figured it out immediately? Like, the morning after the fertilized egg implanted itself in her uterine wall?”
“No.” She shifted in her chair, which made me immediately suspicious. Renee was never uncomfortable.
“How did you know, then? Did she tell you?” Even though I thought myself above petty jealousy, I felt myself get hot with indignation at the idea that Karen would confide in Renee and not me.
“No.” She took a long drink from her coffee and played with the tassel on her gray suede loafer. “Arthur did.”
Simon’s neck craned so much, I thought he might pull a muscle. He scampered into the empty chair beside Renee as if we’d been playing musical chairs and the song had just stopped. “Arthur told you?”
She looked at each of us. “So?”
“So?” I mimicked. “Since when are you and Arthur such bosom buddies?”
“We’re not bosom buddies,” she mimicked back. “He was at the Dia Foundation fund-raiser a few weeks ago without Karen, and I asked him why she wasn’t there.”
“And he told you?” Simon assumed he was an equal partner in this interrogation, but I stared him down and he retreated to his chair.
“Well, he didn’t mean to, but it just slipped out. You know how he is.” She snapped her hand open and shut quickly—yap yap yap. “If I’d stood there long enough, which I didn’t because he’s so boring I would have killed myself, he would have told me her bra size.”
Simon raised an eyebrow in disgust. “Which will, again, be ever increasing with each passing month.”
“Of course, the minute he realized what he’d done, he begged me not to tell her that he’d told me. And not to tell anyone else about it, either.”
I threw a paper clip at her, and it landed and stuck in her hair. “Like I’m just anyone.”
“Look, you know how she is. She’s never even brought Marissa into the office. She’d rip him a new asshole if she thought everyone was going to know she was pregnant before she was ready to announce it herself. She’s the biggest control freak on the face of the earth.”
“No, you’re the biggest control freak on the face of the earth.”
“Besides,” she continued despite my baiting her, “there was something about Arthur’s face when he told me how happy they were about it.”
“They?”
“That’s what he said. ‘We are joyous.’ ”
