CHAPTER 3.
Ruby was a perfect grouch when Laura met her outside the precinct. She could tell as soon as her sister grumbled a h.e.l.lo.
"You okay?"
"Yeah, I"m fine. I"ve been in the precinct for hours, and all they gave me to eat was donuts. They treated me like I was a criminal or something." Ruby ran to the next subject like flipping through a magazine of things that bothered her. "And Thomasina, she"s dead. Oh, man, I really am going to miss her. She was such a good friend." Ruby stopped walking as if grief took the coordination right out of her.
"I"m sorry, Ruby. I know what she meant to you."
"No, you don"t." Ruby put her head down and walked faster, then abruptly stopped. "She has a shoot with us tomorrow."
"Rowena"s doing it," Laura said.
"You replaced her?"
"Yeah! Lucky thing because-"
"Who made you? Did you hatch?"
"What? It"d cost a fortune to cancel."
"I"m going home." Ruby stormed toward the subway.
Laura tried to follow, but found herself falling behind. "You"re going to Isosceles with Pierre and Bob," she cried. "Pierre needs you to be nice."
"No." Ruby stopped before descending the stairs. "I cannot deal with meaningless talk right now. I can"t talk about money and clothes and stuff that doesn"t matter. So you go, okay? Can you go for me?" Laura caught up, and Ruby took her lapels, pulling down as if to drag her to the sidewalk. "Please. Go for me. All you have to do is make sure Bob"s wife stays out of it, okay? Just whatever he wants her to do, say no and you"re good."
Laura had never met Ivanah Schmiller face to face, so she"d never come upon that rule, and she had no idea how to enforce it.
"Please," Ruby implored, "I"ll do something so nice for you."
"You have to go. Pierre said."
Ruby stopped talking as they went into the subway. Her face was dark and closed, lips pursed, eyes slightly scrunched. When they got past the turnstiles, Laura headed for the stairwell to the uptown platform, and Ruby went toward the downtown, where a train rumbled into the station.
"Ruby!"
"I"m going home."
"You can"t!" Laura shouted over the noise of the train. She followed Ruby and grabbed her sleeve, but her sister yanked herself free without even looking back and got onto the downtown R before the doors snapped shut. Laura watched the train pull out of the station.
Ruby sat in a window seat and put her head in her hands.
Laura returned to the showroom to find Corky in a huff.
"I need someone here," he said. "I"m not an octopus." He held up the Rye and Rockland blouses, rocking them back and forth to ill.u.s.trate how hard it was to take things off and put them on the racks at the same time.
"I"m sorry. Is anyone else coming?"
"Unlikely." He threw himself into a chair and took out a cigarette.
"You are not lighting that in here," she said.
"Ruby and I had a whole shtick set up. I can"t shtick by myself."
"She"ll be back tomorrow. She"s just having drama time." Laura looked around for something to do, but everything seemed in pretty good order. "Where are the shoes?"
"Back behind." He waved his cigaretted hand. "I had no time."
Back behind were the words used to describe the sliver of storage s.p.a.ce behind the display cubbies. It only held one rack and probably violated every safety code in the book. She went back behind and found hangers askew on the bar of the rack, tangled in waterfalls of grabby knots. She hated hangers. If she could reinvent them, she would, but had no better arrangement.
"Did you not show any of these styles?"
"Yeah, because when they came back late from the Ghetto, I had time to steam them, put them out, and pimp them by myself."
"You"re being a real snot."
He got up and helped her yank out the rack from back behind. Hangers clacked, bent, dropped, and pulled the clothes out of shape. The shoes were tangled in boxes on the bottom two bars, and one box spilled rented Louboutins all over the floor. She bent to retrieve them.
"I have to get these back before dinner or they start dinging our deposit." She paired them off and put them on the table.
Corky, for all his huffiness, was the picture of helpfulness, and they had the first box sorted in record time. He pulled the s...o...b..xes from the top of the cabinet and packed while she untangled the hangers.
A phone buzzed.
Laura and Corky sprang into action, rifling through bags and pockets for their personal devices. After checking her phone, she dropped it back in her bag, then saw Corky sliding his own back into his front pocket.
But a phone definitely buzzed. They looked at each other, then around the room as though they were in a haunted house and had just heard a phantom behind the picture frame.
"It"s by the rack!" Corky exclaimed.
The buzz stopped a second after she located the source in a box of shoes under the rack. At the bottom of the box was a leather Lacroix tote with uptrending bellows pockets all over it.
"Cute," he said. "One of the girls, probably."
"Should I open it?"
"No, you should leave it and let it draw the owner here by the power of Christian Lacroix."
She rolled her eyes and opened the bag. It was spanking clean. Amazing. Not a dustball, wadded-up tissue, a hair, a crumb, or even a book of old, useless matches. In comparison, her bag looked like a repository of human detritus.
She located a jar of lavender face cream (no label), a worn leather wallet (no brand, oddly), a cellphone (the latest), a notebook, and a bag of makeup. "It"s the wallet or the cellphone. Which is less intrusive?"
"Oh, honey, be intrusive. The cellphone."
She opened the wallet. It was old style, with a little folder for pictures and cards, a billfold, and a display for credit cards. She slipped a black American Express card out of the pocket. "Sabine Fosh. Jewish? Did we have any Jewish girls?"
"Only Catholics," he joked, bagging and boxing shoes like a factory worker.
Laura knew he couldn"t stand visible disarray in the showroom. She flipped through the wallet: pictures of no one she recognized, all towheads, a wedding photo from the seventies, an old couple in front of a cake, a frequent flier card for an airline she couldn"t identify. One guy in his twenties appeared twice.
She poked at the cellphone screen. She recognized Roquelle Rik"s number. "Her agent, repeatedly. She called Ruby a lot. Jeez."
"How"s she holding up?"
"Bad."
"I"ll take her for a manicure after this week. Cheer her up."
"We have seven hundred left in the bank. It"s on Sartorial."
Corky looked pleased.
The phone blooped with a message from Bobcat. She had no idea who Bobcat was, and there was only one way to find out. Without consulting Corky, because she was ashamed to be doing it, she listened to the message.
"What are you doing?" he exclaimed.
"Being intrusive."
"Baby Bean. I"m back, and I missed you. You"re right about everything. I sent something home for you."
He trailed off with a last "I know..." and that was it. Not helpful. She was down in the mire of intrusiveness, so she figured she might as well listen to another message. There was only one more. Obviously, the girl didn"t save a year"s worth of messages until her box overflowed like Laura did. She tapped and listened.
It was in another language, and the guy talking was stompin" mad.
"Do you know what language this is?" She held it up for Corky. It sounded like wecken ick eeber eer.
"Not Spanish," Corky said.
"I think it"s German. This has to be Thomasina"s."
She tossed the phone back inside and stuffed the bag in an overfull drawer. "I"ll call the cops and have them come and get it. Just leave it out here. I have a nightmare dinner at Isosceles in twenty minutes."
"Oh, chic. Can I come?"
"It"s with Bob Schmiller and his wife."
"Have a great time," he said, handing her a box of rented shoes.
Isosceles took up half the first floor of the Flatiron Building and, seen from above, was shaped like its name. It was so dark that the staff left little lights by your fork so you could read the menu. Pierre had gotten a seat by the ice fireplace, a pit of broken gla.s.s with blazing gas jets underneath that looked like the Arctic Circle on fire. Laura thought it was absurdly on-the-nose and decorator-y, as though designed to be designed, instead of placed where necessary as part of an organic whole. It was cool so that people would say "cool," not because it was necessary. But that was the problem with half the designs she had seen since opening SartSand. Her mind started pulling things apart only seconds after her eyes saw them, and the constant critique in her head got on her nerves and impinged on her enjoyment of details like a stupid pit of flaming tempered gla.s.s.
Also, her mood was soured by the whole Ruby/Pierre/Bob/Ivanah debacle that was about to occur and the raised eyebrow Pierre gave her as he stood to say h.e.l.lo.
"Ruby"s not coming," she said.
Bob Schmiller, who looked more like a linebacker than an angel backer, stood up when Laura approached. He"d been a heartthrob receiver for USC, then a heartthrob rookie receiver for the New York Giants, then a player with a busted collarbone, then a bootstraps tale of a master"s degree in finance and a way of sniffing out the right stock market bets. Laura figured the collarbone was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Ivanah didn"t stand. She patted her yellow hair, which stood high on her head with painted enamel clips and combs, and smiled at Laura in such a stiff, perfunctory way it came off as a snarl.
Bob leaned over, the bulk of his upper body the result of too many hours in the gym, maintaining the football player build. He smiled like the charming guy he was and poured her some wine.
Pierre sat and placed his napkin on his lap. "So, did Laura tell you that they"ve been writing orders all day? Barneys co-op spent how long in your office?"
"About two hours." She didn"t mention that most of it was spent stabbing Ruby in the back, and no orders had been written that day. Not one pair of pants. Not one jacket. Not even one of the scarves they cut out of extra fabric ends left on the marker. That wasn"t how the business worked. The way it worked was you broke your brain telling someone about the clothes and talking about production lead times, and then you sat around for a month while they sorted their money. Because buyers were given a certain amount of play money to a.s.sort their floors, and they wanted to see everything before they gave you a dime. The best Corky was going to be able to do by Monday, after all the shows were done, was to get promises. Those were the projections Yoni was waiting for, and apparently, Sevion thought Bob didn"t know that.
He was wrong. Bob smiled at Sevion and turned right back to Laura. "Let"s stop with the bulls.h.i.t." She was initially very relieved to hear that because it was what she wanted to say from the beginning. "You"re asking for more money. But I bought this company for my wife, and she"s not happy. And if she"s not happy, I"m not happy." He put his arm around his wife. Ivanah tried to look coy, but came off looking predatory.
Sevion shifted in his seat, and she wondered if he was thinking, as she was, that it might not be the best day for a business dinner, with or without Ruby. But Laura preferred laser attention and direct questions to obfuscation and social dancing. "How can we make you happy?" she asked, choking on the words.
Pierre made a last ditch effort to wrest control of the conversation from her. "Ms. Sidewinder is excited to review us. She said it"s in the cards for the next issue, which is tomorrow."
Bob ignored him. "I"m concerned about my ROI. We charted this out, and since your matching backing fell through, I"m looking at a loss."
"Can"t you take it off your taxes?" Laura had no idea what she was talking about, and Bob knew it.
"I already have tax efficiency built into my business."
Ivanah put down her gla.s.s and spoke in her thick Eastern European accent. "This wastes time." She pulled a small leather folder from her bag. "My husband invested in your little company because he thought it would complement my interiors. He did not invest because he believed in you, in particular. This was not for you to do whatever boring thing. You already started, so he let you do what you wanted, but that stops today. Now you will follow my sketches."
The ridiculous charade of Laura"s good mood shattered. There was only one road, the road of flashy c.r.a.p, the road Jeremy had walked with Gracie, where she got to dictate what was what because of her money. Laura didn"t know whether to let things take their course, which everyone seemed to do, and let Ivanah have what she wanted at the expense of her vision or hold fast to her vision and lose the company.
Ivanah opened the file and handed it to Laura. The only surprise was the skill with which the sketches were drawn. They were gorgeous depictions of velvets, damasks, and sparkly trims in jeweled pinks, purples, and blacks. She could see before she even picked up a piece of paper that it was a beautiful line, just not for her.
"This is what you want my company to be?" Laura asked.
"My husband"s company."
"I"m thinking globally," Bob said. "As a business driver, we may have to restructure to improve our value."
"Why don"t you start your own company?" Laura tried to sound encouraging instead of surly, as though she"d just had the most awesome idea, ever. Pierre kicked her under the table.
"It"s too late," Bob said. "It is what it is."
Ivanah"s body language told Laura just how annoyed she was with her husband. "He told me he was buying a company that did things close to what I need. But he has no sense outside the numbers. He thought you were attached to Jeremy. This is what I wanted. And here we are."
"Well, no," Laura said, "that"s not how it was told to me. And the fabric"s ordered already." She lied before she even thought about it, and then built on the lie. Dangerous. "We have an eight-week lead time on some of this stuff. We can"t change it now."
They all looked at Pierre Sevion, who had been texting his little heart out. He glanced up with a blithe look on his face. "I don"t think there"s anything here we can"t work out. A touch here and a touch there can bring all of these to the next level. We add a few pieces that represent luxury and indulgence. And next season, we start from scratch with a new, fantastic vision that is a collaboration between extravagance, craftsmanship, and commerciality."
"Commerciality stayed home," Laura said, referring to Ruby, who had the sharpest sense of what would sell.
For the rest of the dinner, Bob stayed upbeat about the "new organization," Ivanah tried not to look like a gloating victor, and Pierre tried to make lemons into peach pie.
Laura felt as though she was giving away the farm.