Sheer, page 16
“Autonomy,” I pushed back. “They both express female autonomy.” I had stumbled upon an old issue of Ms. magazine at a vintage store a few weeks back and was happy to recycle an argument I had read there if it suited my cause.
“I don’t think our customers will get the reference,” Ellen said. “And white isn’t exactly a slimming color, you know.”
“Noted,” I said.
“You’d do well to run these things by me first.”
There was a new tension in my relationship with Ellen. She accepted my decisions with increased reluctance. A layer of distrust seemed to undergird her words. Hadn’t I done everything she had asked when it came to Chip and my sexuality? I had swallowed my pride, kept Reveal afloat, maintained discretion. By her standards, I was the consummate leader.
I wondered if Ellen was simply trying to claim relevancy. So long as there was something about my choices that required critique, she could convince herself that she had an important role to play in my life. My decision to move out continued to sting. Ellen was lonely. Most of her friendships with those other Park Avenue ladies were empty games of one-upmanship and Donald was hardly a true partner.
My twenty-ninth birthday was in November of the same year that Reveal turned five. Ellen threw me a dinner party at a brasserie in the Meatpacking District to celebrate this final gasp of my twenties. We were seated at a central banquette, surrounded by the din of inebriated chatter, platters of icy fruits de mer scattered before us. Ellen was at the center of the table. She clinked a salad fork against her flute of champagne and stood up.
“Thank you all for joining me to celebrate Maxine’s birthday!”
There was gentle clapping from the gathered guests, among them Elizabeth, who was seated beside me.
“Reveal has had a banner year. Here’s to the next five.”
More scattered whooping.
“To Maxine,” Ellen intoned, as she held her flute outward and looked me dead in the eye, “to Maxine, on your twenty-ninth birthday. You have accomplished so much.”
A few awws circled the table.
“You are so devoted to Reveal,” Ellen continued with a crisp smile, “When I was your age, a woman’s priority was finding a husband. How lucky you are to have other options. Anyway, I know you will never allow anyone to distract you from our mission. Your toughness makes me proud.”
While I appreciated Ellen’s sidestepping of the husband issue, the mention of “anyone” felt gently threatening. Was I supposed to be celibate now, too, on top of emotionless? I don’t remember whether I said anything in response. Most likely, I plastered a grin across my face. Next to me, Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed.
In the year and a half since I had hired Elizabeth, she had become a confidante. This surprised me as much as it did anyone else. True to her interview, Elizabeth had little interest in aesthetics. Her first couple of months on the job were a montage of terrible outfits: scratchy and boxy skirt suits in a palette that can only be described as “dystopian landfill.” One evening, I left the office at the same time as Elizabeth. In the glaring light of the building’s elevator, my fashion feedback was uninhibited.
“Where do you like to shop?” I asked Elizabeth.
That professional, capable smile spread across her face. “Nowhere. I don’t like shopping, at all.”
“I can tell,” I told her.
“I’d be happy to buy my outfits from Helmut Lang or Dior Homme if you give me a separate clothing allowance. I’m not spending what little I earn on fashion.”
I was shocked that she knew where I bought my suits.
“Don’t mistake disinterest for ignorance,” she said. “I know my stuff. I choose not to participate.”
Elizabeth’s answer impressed me. When the elevator dinged at the lobby, I realized I didn’t want our conversation to end.
“Are you doing something right now?” I asked.
“I’m not,” said Elizabeth.
“How about a post-work cooldown? On me.”
“Lead the way.”
We went to a bar a few blocks from the office. Elizabeth ordered a gin and tonic. I had a Scotch neat. We stayed for two rounds. Over the course of those drinks, there was nothing notable, from the outside, in our exchange. I asked Elizabeth about her background, what she had studied in school, experiences at previous jobs. In turn, she inquired about my creative development, my passion for beauty, the challenges I faced as a woman entrepreneur. The topics we covered went no deeper than a surface interview.
However, Elizabeth was anything but superficial. She really listened. I could tell from the concentration across her forehead. She didn’t glance at her watch or at our surroundings, not once. There was none of the insecurity that so many women have, the concave slouch of the shoulders or the stiffness of a neck that ossifies into a posture of preemptive attack. Destroy another woman before she has the chance to uncover your weaknesses. Elizabeth didn’t operate like that. She was confident because she was free of artifice. She didn’t pretend to be better than she was.
That first night became a weekly routine. Drinks turned into phone calls and text messages and meals on the weekends. Benign conversations about work and outside interests meandered into more personal territory. I didn’t worry that my friendship with Elizabeth would confuse our professional interactions. She was an adult and I trusted that she would never spend time with me out of pity or corporate advancement. Her demeanor was so open, so completely at ease. I was safe with her.
In that initial elevator ride, Elizabeth didn’t just upend my expectations around who she was. She showed me another way to function: you don’t have to live and breathe your job to care. Still, Elizabeth’s example of a healthy work-life balance is not one I have ever mastered. I don’t believe that a person in my position has that option. My work resonates with customers because of how much I pour into it. The image of an artistic founder is part of Reveal’s allure. Flush and Glow and everything else we offer—they are extensions of me. Rather, they are extensions of who the public and my investors wish me to be. Who I am really is another matter.
* * *
—
My father called me a few weeks before my thirtieth birthday. He had a new cell phone, whose number I didn’t recognize, so I couldn’t screen his call as I had others over the past few years.
“Maxine,” he said when I answered.
My stomach clenched at the sound of his voice.
“It’s been a while,” he continued. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said icily. Like he cared how I was. “How are you?”
“Good, good. I’m planning to retire in a few years.” My father was sixty. “Slowly winding things down now.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I should run. I need to get to an appointment.” It was a Sunday morning and I was still in my pajamas.
“This early on a weekend?” he asked.
“No days off,” I told him briskly.
“I meant to call last year when I saw that Fortune story,” he offered. “You looked good. It sounds like work is going well.”
I felt a flush of pride, though it hardened into anger. “Yes, contrary to your prognosis years ago, I’m doing very well on my own. Turns out I didn’t need that college degree or corporate career. My ideas are better than anything that already exists.”
“I’ve only ever wanted you to succeed,” said my father, a quiet pain filling his voice. “For you to be happy.”
“You wanted me to have your version of success, your idea of happiness. I wanted something different.”
“Are you happy?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. “I have a thriving career and I’m changing the beauty landscape. The pursuit of creative excellence makes me happy.”
My father cleared his throat. “Who do you share this happiness with?”
“Myself,” I said fiercely, though I was curious about his question. Unlike my mother, my father had never pushed the idea of a boyfriend or a husband. I wondered if he knew who I was and if his avoidance of the boyfriend-husband issue had been his expression of this hunch. In another world, he and I might have had a conversation about this. What did I have to lose? I was already estranged from my parents. What further harm could my revelation have caused? But in this world, Reveal’s entire existence rested on my shoulders and my primary investors had made clear that my image was the most important factor of success. I couldn’t afford to trust someone who had previously doubted my choices.
“Your mother and I would like to take you out for dinner to celebrate your birthday,” my father said.
“The last dinner didn’t go so well,” I replied.
My father sighed. “Think about it,” he said.
“Maybe we could do something for Christmas,” I relented. “I really do need to go.”
“Okay, Maxine. I’ll call you again in a few weeks.” He sighed again. “We won’t be here forever.”
On Christmas Day that year, I met my parents for lunch at a restaurant in Midtown. We pushed our food around our plates in circles. My dad asked polite questions about Reveal. My mother asked pointed questions about my perpetual singledom and my preference for pantsuits. They both looked smaller and more lined than I remembered. When we parted ways outside the restaurant, my father patted me on the shoulder.
“Let’s do this again next year?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
I imagined that other world, the one in which the three of us had open and nonjudgmental communication and I could trust that my parents would love me no matter what. That world was a fantasy and I saved my dreaming for Reveal.
Ahead of the Game
There is nothing that compares to the sensation of a woman’s face beneath your fingers. It is the most miraculous feeling on earth. In that moment, a woman is a vessel of vulnerability, trusting of your skills. She believes that the makeup you will rub, brush, pat, blend across her skin will make her shine. Your touch will render her whole.
The continued rise of Reveal brought an end to my private makeup artist business because the payoff was too slim to justify the time. Relinquishing this aspect of my selfhood was painful. Those hours with my clients were a form of love.
Severed from this formative part of my identity, I poured myself even further into Reveal. Over the next couple of years, we moved into fragrance, something Chip insisted on because he had been advised that perfume equaled sales. The margins were so high because the perfume’s synthetic ingredients were cheap; the packaging cost more than the product itself. Two blond celebrities, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, had launched signature scents to great success. Reveal followed their lead in 2005 with a range of musky eau de parfums, inspired by the nether regions of a frisky ballet dancer, not that this is public knowledge. The scents were a hit. We also launched Glow for Body, a moisturizing cream highlighter in multiple shades that women could daub on their clavicles and shoulders and down the ridged line of their shins. For the holiday season, we created a limited-edition dry oil spray that combined the shimmer of Glow with the heady musk of our fragrances. It was so successful we added it to our permanent lineup. By 2006, Reveal was a total-body operation.
At the same time, I was testing formulas of Glow for Eyes, a cream eye shadow with a mica-inflected powdery finish that I hoped to package as a stick. I handed out samples to all the girls in the office and made them wear it to dinner, on the weekends, out dancing, even to the gym to see how well it held up to sweat and oils on the eyelids. We had yet to land on a formula that didn’t crease.
I needed a new hero, too, separate from the Glow category. The marketplace was now saturated with copies of Flush and Glow. I was feeling the pressure for my next hero to innovate. The harder I strove to dance around the idea of a skin-toned product, the more I realized that my avoidance was the biggest indicator that this was where I needed to focus. There’s a reason that flesh-colored makeup is called “foundation” or “base”: it is the crux of a woman’s entire routine, the first layer of defense a woman has between her unadorned self and the public, which is eager to pounce on any perceived flaw.
In 2006, fake tans proliferated courtesy of beet-dyed lotions and full-body airbrushing sessions. Tom Ford had left Gucci and had just launched his own beauty line with a single fragrance heavy on patchouli, vanilla, and black truffle. That same year one of the only out lesbians on television signed a two-million-dollar contract for a daytime talk show with a clause that required she keep her hair long. The messaging was clear. Women needed to be jet-set bronzed, high-end edible, and very, very straight even when they were very, very gay.
Elizabeth and I had drinks one night at a bar on Mercer Street that was a favorite neighborhood watering hole because of its unexpected 1990s-bachelor-pad decor. Cowhide rugs. Boxy leather seating. Mirrored tables. SoHo in the mid-aughts experienced a major luxury boom. Big-name European brands consumed the independent boutiques and galleries that had filled the area’s cast-iron buildings through much of the ’90s. A thin film of artistic grunge remained in pockets of the neighborhood, but it was one swipe of a designer mop away from extinction, replaced by the sanitized shine of new money.
We sat across from each other at one of the cocktail tables in the back. Elizabeth clicked through emails on her BlackBerry, between sips of her gin and tonic. I had tried, in vain, to convert her away from this collegiate go-to beverage. My BlackBerry was on the table. I couldn’t look at another email about quarterly numbers, sales projections, and vendor lists. The struggle to procure enough raw materials to fulfill our manufacturing needs was a constant headache. I caressed my glass of whiskey and let my eyes wander.
A woman sat on a leather barstool, alone but seemingly not lonely, and flicked through messages on her own smartphone. Her long legs were bare; her tanned calves gleamed against her suede minidress. Her dirty-blond hair was in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. She was deep in thought over whatever message was on her phone. When she finally glanced up, I made sure her dark eyes went directly to mine.
Elizabeth’s eyes landed on me, too.
“Did you see that email from Ellen about Saks?”
I ignored her and Elizabeth followed the direction of my gaze.
“Hmm,” she said. That was Elizabeth’s way of saying, I don’t approve, but there is nothing I can do so expressing disapproval would be a waste. It wasn’t the source of my interest that bothered Elizabeth, rather it was my refusal to choose one woman, to settle down and approximate a monogamous, committed lifestyle. Elizabeth was single herself because she found dating exhausting, though she hoped to marry a worthy man eventually and build a child-free partnership with him. The issue she took with my extracurricular activities was the extent to which they drained my resources.
“It’s an ongoing distraction,” she’d lectured me once.
“Exactly,” I told her. “That is the point, to distract me from life’s suffering.”
“I’m not suggesting you become a spinster like Ellen demanded. Isn’t it time to find one person and stay with them? Quality over quantity.”
I shrugged in reply. It was a rhetorical question anyway. Elizabeth knew I had spent my most recent birthday in a Lower East Side hotel room with three bottles of champagne, a tin of caviar, a bag of Frito-Lays, and two naked thirty-something women whom I would never see again.
“Think of how much more productive you would be,” Elizabeth had pressed, “with the extra time you waste on whatever it is that you’re doing.”
“What makes you think I’m not productive in bed? Glow would not exist without my nocturnal endeavors. Neither would our fragrances.”
“If we had a product for every woman who cycled through your bed, you and I would be multimillionaires.”
On this night at the Mercer Street bar, Elizabeth followed up her “Hmm” with a deep sigh and a toss of her brown hair. She reached for her half-empty gin and tonic and finished it.
“I guess this would be my signal to depart.”
“You don’t have to leave right now,” I protested.
“Are you inviting me to join? Because otherwise, I’ll postpone the inevitable.”
“Would you accept the invitation if I extended it?”
Elizabeth glanced again at the dirty-blonde, then back at me.
“She’s gorgeous, but you are not my type.”
A more honest wingwoman there never was.
“I appreciate that. Your drink’s on me.”
“I should hope it is,” Elizabeth said. She stood up from the table, slung a purse over her arm. “See you tomorrow, killer.”
Elizabeth disappeared out the bar’s door. A server came by to clear her glass and she indicated my near-empty tumbler.
“Another round?”
I looked at the dirty-blonde to see if she was watching me. She was.
“Yes, I’ll take another, thanks. And I’m changing my seat.”
The server disappeared and I walked over to the woman. She was enveloped in the scent of vanilla and tobacco.
“I thought I’d come introduce myself before you leave. I’m Max.”
The woman held out her smooth hand and I shook it.
“Sasha. I’m not leaving. Why don’t you join me for another round?”
An hour and one cab ride later we were at my Flatiron apartment. The frenetic glow of New York beamed in through my windows as I eased Sasha out of her suede dress and tried to guide her through the otherwise dark studio toward my bed.
“Let’s stay here,” she murmured.
We were pressed against my bare walls. Goose bumps rose on my arms, from Sasha or the cool plaster against my skin, I’m not sure. She had the firm body of a fitness acolyte because she taught Spin classes to help pay her way through law school. She kissed me and tugged at the waistband of my pants. I pushed her gently in the direction of my sofa, a few feet away.
