"I"m sorry she died."
Ruby twirled some pasta, then pushed her plate away. "She was so nice to me. And she valued me and bought me things. She treated me better than any man I"ve ever been with, and she respected that I wasn"t ready to come out with it, and she was a total lesbian. Total. Modeling was the only thing she had that was her own, which is why she had the freak-out on the runway, but I can"t tell you how bad she felt. She had all this money and showed me her bank account and said, "What am I going to do with all this money if I don"t give it away?" She was paying the rent and would have paid yours too, but you"d never have taken it. You keep talking about fair. But how was it fair that she had so much, and we"re always hurting?"
"That"s my point-"
"No, it"s mine. Because when you talk about fair, it"s about how you have less, and how you"re going to take less because of some idea that you refusing help balances the books. But it doesn"t. Taking Thomasina"s money balanced the books. Throwing it back at her does nothing. It continues a cycle of unfairness."
"I cannot believe you"re sitting here talking about a cycle of unfairness when you got what you got because you got these pounds of unfair gifts, like being tall and beautiful and still approachable and so freaking sweet people love you right away."
"And your gifts? How is it any more fair that you were given all this talent that you get to use to make money? And she had beauty she used for the same thing? Some people get neither. So, what should I do? Not love someone, then, to keep everything equal? G.o.d, when did you get so about appearances? She was good to me, but like a grown up. She didn"t act like some stupid puppy, like a guy. It wasn"t, I don"t know, gamey? Like she just knew how I felt even before I did. And it wasn"t creepy or anything. She was all in. Once she had me and she knew it, she didn"t pull a punch."
"Don"t get graphic, Ruby."
"Oh, shut up. I"m not getting graphic. I"m just saying. She was... I don"t want you to get mad, but you will. Well, she kept buying me things, and one day, when we were going to talk to Jimmy about the rent?"
"Like every day in April?"
"She said, "Let me take care of it.""
"You didn"t." She felt the world was about to fall apart. She paid the rent from her patternmaking side thing, Mom paid from her retirement, and Ruby paid from her magical savings, which she suspected she was about to find out were pretty magical in that they didn"t exist.
"Well, of course I said no," Ruby continued, "but then she showed me a bank account, one bank account, and you can"t believe how much was in there. She said, "All the money does is make more money." And what was she supposed to do with it? She could have bought the house from Jimmy, and it wouldn"t have made a dent. So why wouldn"t I just let her pay so we could have a good time together instead of me worrying and her feeling guilty?"
"You let her?"
"I would have let her pay the whole thing, but you would have known then."
"And did Mom know?"
"Yeah."
The compa.s.sion Laura had felt minutes before was gone. Her feelings could only be described as an overall emotional shutdown followed by a boiling rage that burned white hot from the inside out. So intense was the sensation that the backs of her thighs tingled, adrenal glands firing as if she were the slowest camper in a bear attack. It was fight or flight. Fight or flight. Fight or flight. The path out the door looked good, but Ruby was right there and ready for a verbal beating.
"You know what they call that?" Laura asked, pulling a longer, sharper scalpel than she intended. "When you have s.e.x with someone and take money?"
"Don"t you even!"
"Well? You never thought about that? It never occurred to you while you were "falling in love" or whatever, that this rich b.i.t.c.h could spare a little for you in exchange for-"
"Shut up!"
"You never showed any interest in women until you go broke, and then it"s Thomasina Wente?"
Ruby stood up and wielded her finger like a weapon, jabbing and thrusting, speaking through tight lips with a voice that cut at the edges and bulged at the centers, her volume just below the threshold for making a scene. "You tell me you didn"t want to have Jeremy because he"s gorgeous and rich. There"s no present in that package, and you know it."
Laura slouched. Her sister didn"t know she"d kissed Jeremy, making the words even more hurtful.
Ruby, seeing her opening, continued, "You judge women by how much money they make and how hard they work. And you think Thomasina was privileged and didn"t work hard, but what you don"t know is that she judged herself as harshly as you did. She felt completely inadequate. Why do you think half these girls are the way they are? It"s because they know what they"re doing is too easy, and inside, they"re not fulfilled, and they"re scared all the time they"re not good enough, and they don"t know how to get better. You"d throw up and starve yourself too, just to feel like there was a job to do and you were doing it. You especially. You"d turn modeling into a seventy-hour-a-week gig."
"I feel terrible now. Are you done?"
"No."
"Can you at least tell me about White Rose? Or Pandora? Or whatever, instead of telling me how hard it is to be a model? Because really, I"m convinced. If society would just give them the opportunity to clean toilets for a living, they"d take it in a second."
"G.o.d, you make me so mad!" Ruby looked as though her adrenal glands were the ones firing on all cylinders.
Though Laura didn"t feel bad for egging her on, she did detect the need to dig the conversation out of a hole while she was on top. "What was going on with Thomasina and Bob Schmiller? I thought they were sleeping together, but then..."
Ruby laughed so loud it was an interruption.
"What?"
"Even if Thomasina had ever slept with a man in her life, which she never did, Bob wouldn"t be that man. Oh, my G.o.d, what on earth made you think that?"
Laura told her about the phone message and the trip to Germany. Then she told her about Meatball Eyes and her job as Ivanah"s a.s.sistant.
Ruby sat down, seemingly cowed. "You"ve been trying to help me this whole time."
"Well, yeah. What did you think? I was going to let Uncle Graham and Detective Cangemi do all the work? I mean, talk about paper pushing."
"I should have told you everything right away. I was trying to protect Thomasina, but G.o.d, that was so stupid." She rubbed her eyes.
"Was the White Rose Foundation legit? Or was it a tax haven or something?"
"Tax haven? Do you even know what that is?"
"Rubes, if you don"t stop dodging and start talking right now, I won"t forgive you. Ever."
So Ruby told the story and twirled her spaghetti, shoveling it in with bread while lunchtime came and went, and the room cleared out like a bathroom with an overflowing toilet.
While Laura had been working the past six months, doing patterns for Jeremy and putting together her own line, Ruby had also been busy.
Indeed, she had been doing what she was partnered to do: generate good will, attend parties as the smiling face of the company, and hobn.o.b. She had also been falling in love, which Laura forgave her for because, unlike her, people didn"t usually plan their personal lives around a convenient time for their business.
Her lover, closeted lesbian supermodel Thomasina Wente, who had knocked her off a runway six months earlier for motivations that got more and more complex the more Laura learned about her, had been trying to set up a post-modeling life. The woman"s mid-thirties were creeping up on her like a centipede that looked small and slow until it got close and one realized it had a hundred legs to run with, and she didn"t want to be known as an heiress gifted with money and looks who lived and died by both of those. She wanted to make a mark, which Laura saw as an ego trip worthy of someone with the heiress"s gifts, at the same time as she felt the sting of bitterness that Thomasina"s money and beauty allowed her to do more of what Laura thought she should be doing herself.
Coming from what used to be a poor country smack in the middle of one of the richest continents in the world, and having lived off the backs of the poorer cla.s.s, Thomasina wanted to do something that fell within her power. Had she been a farmer, she would have taught them to farm. If she had been a plumber, she would have gotten the slums fresh water. But she was a model, and thus, she wanted to help beautiful, poor girls become beautiful, rich girls.
"They"re not just poor," Ruby said. "They get pulled into prost.i.tution when they"re twelve. I mean, internet p.o.r.n sites are all Eastern European girls, and the former East Germany is the worst."
"You are talking about a bunch of c.r.a.p you don"t know anything about."
"And you do? Why don"t you look into it before you shoot it down? Because who was Thommy p.i.s.sing off? I mean, she told me she had girls she pulled out of the worst situations. There was a fourteen-year-old who had been bought by three brothers-"
"What did she do with them?" She interrupted to avoid gory details, which she didn"t need keeping her up at night.
"She brought them to safe houses like convents, and she was trying to set it up so they"d be placed in jobs here. But there were people who didn"t want her doing it because they make a lot of money grabbing girls off farms and on their way to school."
"You told the cops all this?"
"Of course."
Laura was comforted for a second. Maybe two. Then she realized the cops weren"t going to do anything based on the ranting of an accused designer, and Uncle Graham"s fondest desire would be to get Ruby off and move along to the next billable hour. Maybe that should be Laura"s fondest desire. Maybe she should just go back to the drafting table, do her work, and let Thomasina"s attempts to unravel all her bad press die with her.
"Are you going back to the showroom? Corky"s totally overwhelmed."
"Yeah. It helps to be busy."
"Is there anything else you want to tell me?"
"Not that I can think of. But I promise that if you ask another question and I can answer it, I will. And right away. And without leaving anything out."
"Okay, go away. I"m tired."
They hugged, and Ruby trotted toward Broadway. Laura headed for the 40th Street office, thinking maybe she"d work on Fall or prep Spring production. She pa.s.sed the jobbers with their windows of slinky, out of style fabrics, and the sandwich places inserted between them. She walked the line of shadows in the sidewalk, avoiding cracks like a kid, getting in the way of everyone in a hurry to get where they were going. Laura wasn"t in a hurry, she had something on her mind, and it was the erasure of an a.s.sumption she"d been making.
If Ruby was to be believed, and she was because she wasn"t so blind or stupid as to dismiss Thomasina"s affair with Bob if she thought there was the slightest possibility it had happened, then the message meant something totally different than she"d thought.
"Baby Bean. I"m back and I missed you. You"re right about everything. I sent something home for you."
If she skipped the obvious romantic implications of "Baby Bean," the I missed you really didn"t have to be anything more than a missed meeting. It could refer to a missed meeting at Marlene X or something the day before, not necessarily a romantic yearning.
You"re right about everything. He was returning from the former East Germany, where both his wife and Thomasina were from. Was there some different idea of the reality out there that had caused a disagreement between Ivanah and Thomasina? And Bob had gone to check the details? For him to take off to Europe, it must have been something for which he had either a financial or emotional investment.
I sent something home for you. Maybe not a gift. Maybe a person. Maybe he"d sent someone back to be Ivanah"s a.s.sistant.
Meatball Eyes must have been the latest girl to get a job on the White Rose repatriation program. Bob and Ivanah must have been investors. Bob went to check stuff out in Europe while Ivanah trained Meatball to be a bad interior designer. How many were there, and what were they doing? She guessed if she were a more important person, she could go to the State Department and ask a few questions, but she was a small fish, and she"d likely wind up answering many more questions than she asked.
She called Ivanah with a white lie prepared. Buck Stern picked up.
"Hi, Mister Stern?"
"Buck, please."
"Okay. I hear Ivanah"s birthday is this weekend. We wanted to surprise her."
"I believe Mister Schmiller has something prepared in the way of a dinner."
"Yeah, okay, but I was talking to Senator Machinelle and she wanted to ama.s.s her clients for a bigger thing. I was wondering if there was someone I could talk to about contacting them? Getting them all in the same room, well, it would be a party, that"s for sure."
He gave a little laugh. "Let me give you her a.s.sistant"s number."
It was that stinkin" easy. When she called the number from a bench in Central Park, watching the garmentos go by, a young girl with an accent answered, "The Ivanah Schmiller office."
"Hi, um, this is Laura Carnegie. I was looking for Ivanah"s a.s.sistant?"
Pause, then, "Oh, we met."
"At Baxter City?"
"Yes."
Laura performed an involuntary and embarra.s.sing fist pump. "I was wondering if I could talk to you about a surprise party for Ivanah?"
Meatball Eyes gasped with delight. "I love this! We can meet, but I"m going to be in East New York all day looking at a s.p.a.ce. This is for the artist, Franco Finelli. The sculptor, he is gorgeous, have you met him? And rich, too. He makes big, big coffee cups with coffee in them. Ten feet high."
Good G.o.d, Meatball Eyes was a chatterbox. She was going to be a fantastic fount of information.
"I"ve never been to East New York. Why don"t I meet you out there?"
"Oh, it is absolutely awful! I can"t wait! I"ve been here two weeks, and already everything is so exciting!"
CHAPTER 17.
Laura often forgot there were areas of the city in the last reaches of the train system, like fingers straining to stretch south and east. She would call it the subway system, but the farther out she got, the more she took her ride above ground. The Outliers. The Edges. The blank, white places on the map that may as well have been Baffin Bay. They were suburbs that weren"t really suburban by any other standard in America. But in New York, it was as close to sprawl as had ever been built. The only way to get to the address Meatball Eyes listed was to take the L train to East 105th Street, which she had never heard of, and walk a mile or take a bus. It was going to be a long ride to get to a juicy conversation that would be loaded with details. The prize was certainly worth the cost of admission, but she didn"t want to go out there alone. The reason everyone forgot the double-fare zones is because poor people lived in them.
"Hi, Stu," Laura said into the phone as she made her way to the blue trains. "What are you doing for the next couple of hours? I have a potential story on philanthropic immigration."
"You just made that up," he said.
"No, you did."
They met at the 14th Street platform. He was leaning on a pole, and when her train pulled in, his hair blew all around. He hadn"t cut it in months, and while she blamed Tofu for everything about how he"d changed, she forgot about the girlfriend just then and appreciated the man"s hair. It made him look like a little boy, even with the scruff on his jawline. Having kissed Jeremy, she felt as attractive as she ever had, which gave her the distance she needed to see him, and every other man, as if they were hers to be had, long-necked girlfriend or no.
Then Laura noticed that particular girlfriend standing on the other side of the pillar. Once she thought of taking the trip out to meet Meatball Eyes, she"d been looking forward to the adventure, and to some answers about Thomasina"s life and death. She also admitted that she"d been looking forward to a couple of hours with Stu, whom she didn"t realize she missed until she saw his blond hair flying around in the train"s wind. The trip to East New York was looking less and less like fun as the seconds ticked by.
"Hey," Stu said. "You remember Tofu?"
Tah-fuh. Of course. Laura tried not to sneer because the girlfriend looked so cheerful and happy. "Of course. Good to see you again."
"I can"t wait to see you two in action. Stu"s been talking about what you guys did with the Gracie Pomerantz murder, and I thought it was so exciting!"
"I didn"t do anything," Stu said. "It was all Laura."
Tofu smiled, in what seemed an indication of encouragement, but her eyes were cold, hard stones.
"I looked up the address," Stu said as they traversed the tunnels to the L train. "It looks like an old strip mall. Cutting edge, that guy."
Laura grumbled. She didn"t care anymore. Stu and Tofu were holding hands. She was more annoyed at herself for caring than either of them. She"d given him up, so she had no business wanting to blow a two-foot hole right through his skinny little girlfriend.
"I read about East New York," Tofu said. "It"s so far, and I can"t believe it"s even in the city, I mean, a borough. That"s really where the poorest of the poor live. It"s like that"s where the ninety-nine percent happens, isn"t it?"