Part 4 (1/2)
Laura didn't turn on her agent until they were outside. ”You didn't just do what I think you just did. You didn't just give Ivanah Schmiller the right to say what goes on the line.”
”You seem to think a few million dollars will be easy to come by, because that's what you need.”
”Ivanah Schmiller? Have you seen her stuff? Have you ever even been in a room she designed? It's like a three-ring circus of crushed velvet and chrome. It's like someone vomited animal skin prints. The place she did for the Flusher penthouse? Did you see? She just took a handful of rhinestones and sprayed them all over the marble floor.”
”Calm down.”
”No. I will not calm down. Sartorial is not about carved teak b.u.t.tons and chrome belt buckles. It's not silk animal skins. It's not about tinsel fringe. That's what Jeremy's for. It's about beauty on the inside. It's about not being obvious. You're going to kill this line before it even takes its first breath.”
Sevion was unfl.u.s.tered as he hailed a cab. ”There are two things you need to consider. One, at your prices, you need more beauty on the outside.” A cab stopped, and he opened the door. ”Two, your sister would have gotten that money without the histrionics.”
Laura felt her bottom lip quiver, and as much as she tried to stop it, the snots came, and her eyes developed a mist that enraged her so much, they misted more.
”Don't get upset,” Sevion said gently. ”I know it feels like this is happening especially to you. But it happens with every designer, every time. I have not once seen an exception. Very, very successful designers go through this struggle every season, not just their first line. Why do you think your friend Jeremy kept sleeping with his backer? Because money was easy to find? No, because he knew what he had in her. Ask him now what he goes through without her. I believe he would do it again in a second.”
”I hate this,” she said, wiping away her tears.
”I know. Everyone does. Don't worry. You'll do what you have to do. Just make sure your sister is the one in the showroom with Ivanah, and in the meantime, I'll try to find you something else.”
He got into the cab, and Laura watched it drive away.
She didn't know who else to call. The more she looked at her short list of contacts, the more his name jumped out.
”Jeremy, I know you're busy.”
”I'm home,” he said. ”Tiffany came in sick.”
She had always thought Jeremy was oddly averse to sick people, until she learned he had cystic fibrosis, which meant that a case of the sniffles for a coworker could be nearly fatal for him. She was the only person in possession of his secret, and the only person he trusted to know.
”We never really talked that much about Gracie.”
”You want to talk about that now? Where are you?”
She found herself walking toward the train station, but feared there would be no way to get the conversation done with before she reached it.
”I know she had control over the line.”
”Yeah.”
”Because she had the money.”
”Right.”
She paused. The station was right in front of her, and she wasn't ready to walk down yet. Neither was she ready to ask him tacky questions. ”Never mind.”
”What?”
”Do you miss her?”
Silence. Then a cough. And another. Which meant he was working too hard. She could hear him breathing, and she wanted to cover her too-personal question with a string of jokes and denials. But she didn't. She waited.
Eventually, as she heard the train roll into the station downstairs, he said, ”Sometimes. When I don't know what direction to take. I have no one to ask. She could have managed this expansion brilliantly.”
”But she never would have let you expand.”
”I don't miss that.”
”Ivanah wants creative control.”
There was another long pause. A wave of commuters trudged up the stairs, and Laura stood still, getting engulfed by them.
Jeremy finally asked, ”Do you trust me?”
”I don't understand.”
”It's a simple question.” She'd obviously ruffled his feathers. ”Do you trust me?”
She watched a woman with a stroller in one hand and a baby in the other struggle to get down the subway stairs. Laura reflexively grabbed the front axle of the stroller and pulled without asking if the woman needed help. It filled the moments between Jeremy's loaded question and her answer, which was, ”No.”
She expected repercussions, but got only, ”You trust me, and you know it. Don't worry about Ivanah. Forget her. Get out there and talk about the line. You have a shoot tomorrow?”
”Thomasina's dead.”
”Forget her, too.”
”That's not nice.” She remembered Ruby's reaction to her quick replacement of the dead girl.
”Welcome to having your own business.”
She smiled a little, wanting to tell him that even though she was just down the hall, she missed him and his rough edges terribly.
CHAPTER 4.
Home was no longer an apartment, but a house shared with her mother and sister, which was good. But it was also an hour outside Manhattan, which was not so good. The train ride to Bay Ridge, her new South Brooklyn neighborhood, took an hour, give or take, which was enough time for her to become intimate with every ad, poem, and public service announcement posted in the car. The train she was currently on was dedicated to the new lifestyle brand, Saint JJ, AKA, Jeremy.
The ads overhead, the ads by the doors, and every bit of ad s.p.a.ce in between belonged to Jeremy's brand. The color was a washed out orangey-red that looked like the deepest part of a flame, and the logo, the bags, and hats, even Dymphna Bastille's lipstick, all matched. Nothing in the ads was available yet, but they were already highly coveted items. Laura closed her eyes to shut him out, sure that complete world domination was his for the taking.
Her shoulders drooped. The weight she'd been carrying in preparation for the show was lifted. She almost slept. The show had gone off well, despite the death at the end. The papers would run the story tomorrow, and her pasty face against Thomasina's thoroughbred beauty would be all over the news tonight. Then Debbie Hayworth. And Ruby having a four-hour police interview for reasons that were completely opaque. Lastly, she was practically losing creative control of her own line because she didn't have two nickels to rub together, and the last straw was Jeremy basically telling her to get over it.
She ruminated on how she'd started on a high note, and the whole endeavor had taken a dive after Thomasina's death, as if all the months as a muse for Ruby had just been building up to a fine screw you at the end, a lovely bookend to how their relations.h.i.+p began. On the train ride home, she vacillated between feeling sorry for Thomasina to despising her. On the walk from the train to her block, she wondered why Jeremy was so hot to nail down her trust, and as she crossed the last street, she was about to start beating herself up over Stu when she saw the news van in front of her house.
Of course, they'd tracked her down. What surprised her were the police cars, one black and white, and one Crown Victoria with big lights. The house was a brownstone, connected to its neighbors on both sides, so there was no access from the back unless she wanted to go around the corner, scale a barbed-wire-topped wall, walk through someone's begonias, and fight off the mixed-breed hound to land in her own backyard. That may or may not have been preferable to the knot of reporters that shone their lights in her eyes halfway down the block, but it was too late to know.
She couldn't see any one face past the glare. There seemed to be a microphone near her, which made her want to shut up more than anything. Questions were thrown at her.
How do you feel about Thomasina Wente's death?