Fashionistas (25 page)

F
or Christine the bathroom is the last unexplored storage frontier, and she’s covered the tile walls of her shower with white plastic baskets, the sort that suction-cup on. This is where she keeps her Lysol and her Soft Scrub and her Fantastic.

“They all fell,” she says, entering my office and shutting the door. “I’ve had those baskets up for two years and they never once budged and now all six have fallen, even the little one in the corner that holds my loofah.”

Although I’ve cleared the guest chair for her, Christine prefers to stand. She’d rather pace and dodge scattered stacks of magazines that litter the floor than take a seat.

“Then this morning when I opened my door, my doormat was gone.” She looks at me, her eyes wide and blue, and waits for my response.

“Gone?”

“Gone.”

“Someone stole your doormat?” I ask, oddly disturbed. Nobody steals doormats. It’s a violation of the social contract.

“But that’s not all. Get this—when I woke up this morning there was a squirrel in my bed. He was on my comforter staring at me with his beady red eyes,” she says, recalling the experience with a shudder.

I don’t know what to say. These morning mishaps seem unimportant and inconsequential to me, but an inexplicable vehemence has crept into Christine’s voice, making me realize that she thinks she’s listing disasters. To fill the expectant silence, I mutter something always remembering to close your windows before going to sleep.

“You don’t see,” she says, her voice flat. It’s only 10:23 in the morning but I’ve already disappointed her. “These are all signs.”

“Signs?”

“Signs.”

“The squirrel in your bed is a sign?”

She rolls her eyes. “Like a red cow in Israel. It’s a sign that something terrible is going to happen. What do you need,” she asks, her voice scornful of my lack of faith, “a plague of locusts?”

The answer to this question is yes. Yes, I need a plague of locusts. “Nothing bad is going to happen.” I’m trying to treat the matter with the solemnity that Christine feels it deserves, but I’m having a hard time keeping a smile off my lips.

“You can’t dress Jesus up in a bias-cut halter-top silk dress by Givenchy,” she says, “and not expect something biblical to happen. You must be
humble
in the presence of the Lord.”

I know little about the Bible and humility and being in the presence of the Lord, but I recognize panic when it’s striding around my office. “Nothing bad is going to happen,” I say in soothing tones as the door opens.

Sarah enters. She has a huge smile on her face, and although momentarily distracted by seeing Christine in my office, she recovers quickly. “They’re picketing.”

“What?” I ask.

“They’re picketing the building,” she says, barely able to
contain her excitement. This is the first indication that our plan is working. “We’re completely surrounded by irate Christians holding signs that quote scripture. The police are down there right now trying to break it up because the demonstrators don’t have a permit.” She laughs. “Police—can you believe it? This is better than anything I expected.”

Christine gives Sarah a cross look. She sees nothing here to be exultant about. “You should call it off now before the locusts arrive.”

Sarah raises an eyebrow. “What locusts?”

“Go talk to Jane about it,” I say. “It’s her party.”

But Christine doesn’t want to talk to Jane. She’s frightened of her. “Couldn’t you do it?”

The idea is so ridiculous, I almost laugh. “Me?”

“Jane listens to you,” she insists, her hands jumping agitatedly in front of her.

There it is again—this odd assumption that Jane respects me. “I’m not asking Jane to cancel the party. There’s no reason to.”

“But I told you about the squirrel and everything. These are all omens.” She pauses for a moment, as if considering her next move. “And then there’s Allison.”

I stiffen at the mention of the one person who could bring our plan tumbling down. “Allison?”

Christine looks around the room and then leans in. “I think she’s talking in tongues,” she says softly.

Sarah starts giggling. I’m also amused but contain my laughter. Christine is one hundred percent serious. “Speaking in tongues?” I ask.

“She’s excited, almost fevered, and she’s muttering incessantly under her breath. I’ve tried to make sense of it but I can’t. It’s not English.”

Although I’m pretty sure that Allison isn’t speaking in tongues, I realize there’s no way to convince Christine of that. So I placate her with promises. “Tell you what—if Allison is still excited and muttering at four o’clock, I’ll see what I can do.”

Four o’clock is too late to call off the party, but Christine doesn’t notice that. She lets out a relieved sigh. “Thank you, Vig.”

I shrug, as if it’s nothing, which it actually is. Even if I wanted to talk to Jane today, I couldn’t get in touch with her. She’s gone deep into the belly of the beauty beast and isn’t scheduled to emerge until she’s been plucked, exfoliated and coiffed.

Christine leaves and Sarah and I press our heads against the window to watch police officers interact with the picketing crowd. This is how Delia finds us.

“Pretty cool, huh?” she says, looking over our shoulders.

Sarah squeals happily. “I have to get closer than this. Care to come?”

Delia and I both decline and we watch her skip out of the office and down the hall. “Well,” I say, “it looks like things are going according to plan.”

She nods and sits down. “They are, only there’s one small thing.”

Despite my atheism, my heart catches and for a split second I fear that she’s going to tell me about a horde of locusts coming up Fifth Avenue. “One small thing?”

“Remember Australia?”

“Australia?”

“You know, the continent that Jane had Marguerite deported to?”

“Yes, of course. Australia.”

“Well, it turns out that was an act of reprisal,” Delia says, pushing a legal-size yellow notebook across the desk.

I pick it up and try to read it but I can’t. Delia’s handwriting is a series of tight wide swirls. None of it is legible. “What’s this?”

“My shorthand notes. I just got off the phone with
Parvenu
’s editor in chief’s old assistant, Lucy Binders. A very friendly woman. She works in car insurance now.”

Although a large part of me wants to know how she found
Ellis Masters’s assistant twelve years later, I control my curiosity. Delia’s investigative skills are not the point. “What’d Lucy Binders say?”

“That Marguerite is a manipulative scheming bitch and that after her promotion to senior editor, which she got by sleeping with the managing editor, she made all the junior staff’s life hell, particularly Jane’s. She gave her crap assignments, changed deadlines on her so that all her articles were in late and rewrote her copy to make her look inept and incoherent. Five months later Jane was fired.” She flips the page and starts reading from her notes. “I’ve been in touch with a few editors over at Australian
Vogue
but nobody’s talking. Marguerite’s rise through the ranks there was meteoric. She went from senior editor to editor in chief within sixteen months. You’d think
someone
over there would have an opinion but they’re all hush-hush. However, on the bright side, she seems to have no issues with age,” Delia says, breaking down the staff of Australian
Vogue
by age and education.

My instinct is to break into a Christine-size panic. My instinct is to call the whole thing off and run away, but this is now beyond my control. Religious groups are picketing the building and nothing I say will make them go home. “All right. Keep digging. Maybe we can find something on Marguerite that we can use later on if she becomes a problem,” I say, more than a little disturbed by my own expediency. Plotting against Jane was supposed to be a onetime deal, not a new way of life.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, chief,” she says, a bright approving smile on her face. Delia’s happy with my newfound ruthlessness. She thinks it means that I’m inching closer to the dark side. She thinks it means that any minute now I’ll start keeping files on my co-workers.

I don’t really know what it means, but I sincerely hope she’s wrong.

W
hen I arrive at the gallery, Gavin is dismantling the Gilding the Lily exhibit. He’s packing up his Jesus statues as if they’re marbles he can stick in his pocket and take home.

“What’s up?” I ask when I spot him in the corner pulling sheer panty hose off a Jesus in a classic Chanel suit. Everything else is going smoothly—the caterers are setting up the bar, the sound engineer is double-checking the microphones, the protesters are assembling their podium and booing at fashionistas who walk by. Only Gavin is working against the common goal.

I know Gavin heard me—it’s obvious from the way his shoulders stiffen—but he doesn’t look up or answer. He simply balls up the stockings and tosses them into a brown cardboard box. Then he starts unbuttoning the jacket.

The silence and the Jesus-stripping are two very bad signs, but I don’t panic. I hold on to my cool and walk over to Gavin for further investigation. “Hey, is something wrong?”

Gavin turns to face me. His eyes are hot and angry and his lips are pulled together in a tight, straight line. This isn’t the
easygoing, familiar Gavin who made drunken toasts and ate greasy crepes and kissed me on the forehead at three o’clock in the morning. This is frightening stony-faced Gavin.

I put a hand on his arm as a gesture of comfort; he tries to shrug it off. I hold fast, suddenly scared that something truly awful has happened. “Tell me what’s going on.”

He takes a deep breath and says, with more scorn than I’ve ever heard in my life, “Jesus’ New Birthday Suit.”

“Oh,” I say, dropping my hand and taking a step back. I’ve known for more than three months that this moment was inevitable, but somewhere in the
New York Times
-Van Kessel champagne haze, it slipped my mind. I should have warned him about
Fashionista
’s December issue last night. I should have confessed everything while he was giddy from wine and giggling at awful knock-knock jokes.

Gavin sneers. He actually lifts and curls his top lip like a rabid dog and sneers at me. “Oh?”

His anger is completely justified and I don’t know what to say. For several long moments we stand there facing each other—he with a curled lip, me with uncertainty—listening to the speakers squeak and the engineer say, “Testing one-two-three.” “I wanted to tell you—I
meant
to tell you—but I didn’t know how.”

He glares at me and his contempt becomes something almost palpable—it’s another half-dressed statue in the room. “Christ: Trendsetter or Savior?”

I flinch as if struck. The lines on the cover of the December issue were always in bad taste and vaguely embarrassing, but they never seemed this awful. Somehow they’re ten times worse coming from the wronged artist himself. “I’m so sorry this happened. I’m still not even sure
how
it happened,” I say, my eyes making contact with the offending magazine, which is lying half open on the floor. There are footprints on the belly of the bikini-clad cover model. “One minute we’re doing a tasteful spread on your artwork and the next we’re brainstorming article ideas related to Jesus.” I’m trying to
sound calm, but I’m seconds away from dropping to my knees and begging. And not just because I want to overthrow Jane. There’s more than one evil editor in chief on the line now.
Fashionista
promised the New York art scene and the national media a party. We can’t renege now, not without a lot of humiliation and rolling heads. Mine, certainly. Suddenly Christine’s stolen doormat doesn’t seem so innocuous.

Gavin is about to rattle off another December bon mot when Maya arrives. She’s wearing a floor-length black dress and a glittering tiara.

“Hello, darling,” she says, greeting Gavin with a heartfelt kiss on the lips before looking around at the dozens of gleaming Jesus statues. She’s momentarily taken aback by the unexpected beauty of the sight. I can hardly blame her. Gilding the Lily isn’t what I expected, either. It’s not shoddy, over-dressed plaster-of-Paris mannequins grabbing fifteen minutes of attention, but lovely sculptures with exquisite details. She points to one statue in particular—Jesus in Givenchy. “I don’t want to sound catty, but doesn’t that dress make Jesus look fat?” she asks, glowing happily.

Gavin doesn’t respond in kind to her jest. His disappointment in Maya is keen and he stares at her with puppy-dog eyes and a quivering mouth. Maya doesn’t get stony-faced Gavin. She gets sad-faced, on-the-brink-of-tears Gavin. “Loincloth Lust: Resurrect an Ancient Fashion Staple,” he says.

Maya isn’t familiar with
Fashionista
’s December issue, and she stares at him blankly. Although she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, she has an inkling that something is wrong. The caterers and the sound-check guy and the protesters on the doorstep might think everything is okay, but Maya knows better. The air is tense and prickly and she looks to me for an explanation.

“He’s angry about the Jesus articles that the magazine did in honor of this exhibit,” I say.

Maya blinks. “Oh.”

“You’re not going to deny it?” Gavin asks, yanking the
jacket off the statue. It’s a haute couture garment with delicate seams, but he tugs at it as if it’s an old painter’s smock.

“Deny it?” Maya echoes. It’s obvious from her blank look that she has no idea what she’s supposed to be denying. The Jesus package isn’t a living, breathing thing to her. It’s not a page she bookmarked or number she jotted down in her Filofax. It’s just a Post-it note buried under piles of newspaper in her mind.

But Gavin doesn’t understand this. He crumples the jacket and tosses it into the cardboard box. “You knew they were going to humiliate me and you didn’t say a thing. Even last night when we were—” He breaks off here, as if memories of last night are too painful to be remembered now. “You still didn’t say one damn thing about it.”

While he’s busy glaring at Maya, I walk behind him, pull the jacket out of the box and shake out the wrinkles gently. Even if the show doesn’t go on, I can’t leave the jacket in an indifferent ball. I’ve been at
Fashionista
for too many years to stand idly by while a Chanel is abused.

“It’s not Maya’s fault,” I say, impatient with his unfair behavior. “Stop taking it out on her. Blame me. Be angry at me.”

He laughs mockingly. “Oh, I am angry at you. Don’t get me started.”

But I want to get him started. Now that he’s talking to me in full sentences and not cryptic magazine headlines, I very much want to get him started. His rage needs a place to go. I’m the best target. I’m the
right
target. “Look, I’m very,
very
sorry this happened and I’m very,
very
sorry that I didn’t have the power to stop it, but we don’t have time for this. Not now. As soon as the evening is over I’ll do whatever you want to make it up to you. I swear—whatever you want. But we must have the party.” I glance quickly at my watch. It’s already 7:12. In forty-eight minutes glittering debutantes and sarcastic wits will be walking through that door and Chanel Jesus is only half-dressed. “Please,
please
don’t do this,” I say, panic edging its way into my voice. Hysteria is only seconds away.

Gavin dismisses my entreaties with an indifferent shrug. He picks up the discarded issue, rolls it up and waves it under my nose. There is now a blue vein popping out of his forehead. “You’ve made me a laughingstock with this…this—” he sputters for a moment as he searches for the right word “—prurient nonsense. You’ve trivialized everything I’ve done. You’ve turned Gilding the Lily into an elaborate punch line.” He throws the magazine against the wall, where it flutters and falls to the floor. “Do you have any idea how hard I’ve worked to gain respect? Do you have any sort of clue how tough it is for a bloke with a royal crest and a Tudor castle to be taken seriously as an artist? For God’s sake, I even have a bloody Victorian plunge pool in my backyard. Critics love to skewer poor little rich boys who dabble in art.
Dabble.
Well, I don’t fucking dabble. I’m not Prince bloody Charles with his watercolor stamps. This is important to me. This is what I do. It’s not a goddamn three-ring circus for your magazine to shit on.”

I look at Gavin. His blue vein is throbbing and his breathing is coming in short, ragged bursts. His anger is solid and real, but I’m not sure about his intentions. Calling off the party is a magnificent, grandstanding gesture—it punishes me, it shows the editors of
Fashionista
that they can’t treat his work like an elaborate punch line, it assuages his ego—but it might be an empty one. Still, I can’t take the chance. You don’t call the bluff of irate artists who hold your future in the cardboard box next to them. “You can do this,” I say quietly, deciding to give in to the inevitable debasement. I won’t win this battle with logic or threats. “You can slam the door in the faces of eager party-goers and go merrily on your way. Your career will survive, perhaps even flourish because of it—being an enfant terrible has never been terrible for business—but you’ll be ruining me.”

He runs a hand over his eyes and is silent for a long time. Maya watches with her fingers clenched at her side. She wants to help, but there’s nothing she can do to make this
better.
Fashionista
isn’t her fight. She’s only an innocent bystander, a tiara-wearing sedan at a stop sign, which had the bad luck to be sideswiped by drag-racing sports cars. “Damn it, Vig,” Gavin says. He sounds tired.

“I know it’s not fair,” I say, pressing my advantage. I recognize pity when it stands in front of me with weary eyes. “I know you’re not here to do me any favors, but think about it.
Fashionista
can’t hurt you. It’s just a silly magazine with lots of beautiful photographs that people love to flip through. That’s all. We’re something to occupy your hands while you wait for a haircut or for the train to pull into Grand Central. We’re not permanent. We won’t be around in two hundred years when your statues are gracing the entrance to the Vatican. But you
can
hurt us. You
can
punish us. Please don’t.”

Gavin gives in. Maybe if he hadn’t drunk to my success last night or kissed me on the forehead fifteen hours before, he would’ve been able to withstand my pathetic pleading. But he had. And he doesn’t. “All right.”

Maya cheers and throws herself into his arms. “Thank God that’s settled. Now, will someone please comment on my tiara? I wore it to work as part of my article and not one person commented. I’m half convinced it’s invisible.”

Gavin laughs and rushes to assure her that she—and the tiara—are perfect. Then he extracts from her the promise to warn him the next time her best friend intends to make a fool of him. I’m somewhat offended by the wording—it wasn’t my intention so much as Jane’s—but I appreciate the sentiment and remain quiet.

With one disaster narrowly averted, I do a quick inspection of the gallery to make sure
Fashionista
hasn’t inadvertently offended some other crucial party. I even stick my head outside to check on the protest, which is coming together nicely. The three-foot podium is standing solidly and the demonstrators are practicing their chants. God bless them.

I drop by the bar to get a drink. I know I shouldn’t start consuming alcohol until the party is officially under way, but
I can’t resist. Recent events demand something stronger than tonic water. They require vermouth and two generous ounces of gin and a stuffed green olive.

After thanking the bartender, I wander over to Gavin to see if he needs help dressing Chanel Jesus.

“No, I’ve got it under control,” he says confidently as he wraps a scarf around Jesus’ head. He ties it under the chin and slides on a pair of large wraparound sunglasses. Suddenly Jesus Christ looks just like Jane McNeill on a lunch date.

Since there’s nothing for me to do, I walk over to the stage, which is set up for the four-piece band, and sit down on the edge. The room is festive, with white-cloth-covered tables and shimmering votive candles, and alive with expectation. Something is about to happen here. The smell of hors d’oeuvres—baby quiches and tiny crab cakes—wafting in from the kitchen confirms it. We’re having a party.

I sigh deeply, take another sip of my martini and wait for the next disaster.