Never Too Rich (2 page)

Edwina felt like dancing; she was always euphoric
whenever she returned home from out of town. New York was a riotous
carnival, shrill and dazzling and electrifying, and she was a New
York woman through and through. And it showed.
How
it
showed. Her careless elegance and unstudied style, her brisk swift
stride, as though she always had a destination clearly in mind, and
her glossy head-to-toenail grooming—in no other city except Paris
or London did she look like she even remotely belonged.

Everything about her was challengingly cosmopolitan
and Gotham to the core: her slender frame and coltish long legs,
her self-assured movements, that imperfect beauty—swan neck too
long, cheekbones too high and striking, mouth too wide and too
large, nose aquiline and assertively noble. In and of itself each
feature was wrong and a tad too aggressive, but as a whole they
dazzled, and not only from the standpoint of physical beauty. Her
indefinable radiance and
joie de vivre
blazed from within,
and beside her, far more perfect beauties were relegated to the
hinterlands of wallflowerdom.

“
Winnie!” she called out, and waved
as she strode into the baggage-claim area.

Despite the flight’s early arrival, there he was.
Winston, her devoted airport fixture, waiting unerringly at the
correct baggage carousel—even though the monitors didn’t yet show
which one would disgorge the luggage. Somehow Winston, with his big
ungainly body, Irish coloring, and wild wisps of white hair, always
knew; she would have laid bets on him.

Sailing toward him, she favored him with her most
dazzling smile. She, better than anyone else, knew a jewel without
equal when she had one. No matter how delayed a flight might be, or
how early it happened to come in, there he was, faithfully waiting.
For Winston, one-man car service extraordinaire, such ordinary
occurrences as traffic jams, illness, accidents, adverse weather,
and mechanical breakdowns were no excuse: nothing short of death
itself could have kept him from showing up at the correct time at
the correct place, and she often wondered how he managed it. Every
time she arrived from the out-of-town fashion shows, with the four
colossal metal steamer trunks chock-full of the one hundred and
seventy or so samples of Antonio de Riscal’s latest collection with
which she staged shows in the department stores of major cities,
Winston would be there—at Kennedy, at La Guardia, or at Newark—with
the stretch-base Mercedes limousine that had been specially
converted into an enormous station wagon capable of handling the
oversize trunks with ease.

On this morning, as always, Winston looked at her
adoringly and reached for the thermos of coffee in the pocket of
his baggy coat. Without her asking, he poured a plastic cupful and
shyly handed it to her. She smiled gratefully, and holding it with
both hands, sipped it slowly. It was just the way she liked it:
piping hot, strong, syrupy, and black.

They did not speak. Winston could hear perfectly
well, though he was mute, and she kept one-sided conversations to a
minimum. Somehow, through facial expressions they usually managed
to make themselves understood.

Waiting for the luggage carousel to start up, Edwina
made a mouth of bored impatience. Just as she knew her airline
seats backwards and forwards, she was all too familiar with the
luggage procedures too. After being coddled with steaming hot
towels and plied with champagne, she had come rudely back down to
earth. First-class service started and stopped at the doors of the
airliner. And unlike the seats, which she could choose, baggage
claim was something she had no control over, and baggage handlers
the world over were a stubbornly egalitarian lot. Whether she liked
it or not, Edwina was realistic enough to know when things were
beyond even her control.

On Seventh Avenue, where she worked, however, there
were those who would have sworn that there was nothing on earth
that could possibly be beyond her control. There, she had the
reputation of being magically capable of moving mountains and
accomplishing major miracles, and she was viewed as that most
male-threatening creature of them all—a woman in command of herself
and the world around her.

“
Eds, you are indispensable, my
darling!” was only one of Antonio de Riscal’s constant encomiums.
“What would I do without you, darling!” was another. And that
sentiment was shared by the great designer’s customers. For when
she wasn’t on one of Antonio de Riscal’s trunk tours, Edwina sold
his designer clothes to store buyers out of the big showroom at 550
Seventh Avenue. Generally, it was two weeks of trunk shows followed
by two weeks of showroom duties, a schedule which she alternated
with Klas Claussen, a rather disdainful and exceedingly smug young
man who was full of his own importance. For this supposed
indispensability she earned a princely $120,000 a year, enjoyed
generous expense accounts and an all-inclusive benefits package,
and could obtain couture clothes (Antonio de Riscal, what else?) at
cost. Her life-style exceeded her salary’s limits, thanks to Dr.
Duncan Cooper, her ex. With her divorce from him five years
earlier, after which she had resumed using her maiden name,
Robinson, she had gotten custody of their daughter, Hallelujah, who
was now a precocious twelve, and although Edwina had refused
alimony payments, Duncan had insisted that she take child support
and had signed over the deed to the big
one-and-a-half-million-dollar co-op duplex in the southern tower of
the San Remo.

It had been an unfashionably friendly divorce,
surprisingly free from recriminations, and instead of tearing them
apart as the marriage had done, the divorce, astonishingly enough,
had made them close friends. Even Hallelujah took shuttling between
the San Remo and her second home across town without acrimony, and
usually with good humor.

To top it all off, when Edwina was away on Antonio’s
trunk tours, Ruby, her cherished live-in housekeeper, stepped in as
a surrogate mother for Hallelujah.

What more could anyone want? Edwina often asked
herself. At the still relatively young age of thirty-two she had
her looks, her health, and was living in a dream apartment in the
undisputed glittering center of the universe. She was success
personified with her vice-presidency in a major fashion empire, an
ex-husband she could count as a friend, and a daughter who
astounded her more with every passing day. What more indeed?

Two things. Just two little things. But she might as
well have yearned for a round-trip ticket to Saturn.

Edwina had always wanted to be a fashion designer
herself, and being the salaried employee of one—no matter how grand
the salary— was a poor substitute for her real ambition. Ever since
she could remember, she had been fascinated by design. By the
tender age of seven she not only dressed her dolls but also copied
grown-ups’ clothes for them from
Vogue
and
Harper’s
Bazaar
out of every scrap of fabric she could get her eager
hands on, and her dolls had been the only ones she knew of who wore
miniature copies of Chanel, Valentino, and Yves St. Laurent. By the
age of twelve she was designing and sewing many of her own clothes.
She’d worn them so proudly, topping them off with huge-brimmed Dior
1950’s-style hats.

Before she’d met Duncan, she’d even gone to FIT for
two years, turning away several other men before he’d convinced her
to marry him. But with marriage and pregnancy she’d put her own
ambitions on the back burner and played dutiful wife and devoted
mother full-time. It hadn’t been until after their divorce, when
she’d been bored halfway to tears, that her hunger reasserted
itself.

By that time she knew better than to jump blindly
into the fashion fray and launch her own line—she didn’t know
enough. So she’d joined Antonio de Riscal, figuring, correctly,
that working in the industry was the best education she could get.
Which was true, to an extent. The only problem was, the opportunity
to
design
never presented itself. Nor would it ever. Antonio
was autocratic. He designed every outfit himself, down to the last
button and bow, and Edwina found herself becoming one of New York’s
foremost business executives instead of the designer she so
hungered to be.

That was one thing she wanted—to break away from
selling someone else’s clothes and designing her own. Long ago,
she’d even come up with the name of her own label: Edwina G.

But the older she got, the more elusive her dream
became. Instead of dreaming of
Edwina G.
during every waking
and sleeping hour, as she once had, now the idea cropped up only
once a day or so. If that much. So much for the dreams of babes and
the lure of a dollar in the hand.

The second item on her wish list seemed even more
elusive. Enjoying a fulfilling love life wasn’t something that just
happened— and you couldn’t go out and shop for it whenever the mood
hit.

The trouble was, there was little time or
opportunity for love in her life. Fashion being the creative
industry that it was, many of the men she ran across were gay—and
those who weren’t were either married or not her type. On the rare
occasions when she did let herself be wined and dined, mostly by
store executives and buyers Antonio de Riscal did business with,
none of them were men she wanted to share even the night with, let
alone a lifetime.

And on those rarest of occasions, when a man she
did
like happened along, her success worked against her. She
was too hardy and competent for most men’s liking. Despite women’s
lib and yuppiedom and all the talk about the importance of careers
in the eighties, most men were still chauvinists at heart. Her
hardiness and competence made her seem that much less feminine in
their eyes. But what choice did she have? she often wondered. She
was who she was, and the responsibilities she bore weren’t for
swooning Victorian maidens. Big business called for big muscle, and
the same men who were turned off because they thought she wore
balls would have been the first men to take advantage of any
weaknesses she showed.

She was damned if she was tough and even more damned
if she wasn’t. So. There were no men in her life.

And except for Ruby and Hallelujah, she had no close
women friends either.

Still, she couldn’t honestly lodge a single
real
complaint. It wasn’t such a tough life, and a less
uncompromising person would have found it quite fulfilling. If fame
and fortune hadn’t exactly swept her off her feet, she had
nevertheless found an exceedingly comfortable niche for
herself.

A buzz jerked her mind from its meandering, and the
luggage carousel finally started up with a jerk. Other passengers
crowded around, pushing and shoving.

And lo and behold! A miracle! Perhaps because of
their daunting size, the four trunks slid out first, monstrous and
ungainly, followed by—was it possible?—her own two suitcases.

Winston lifted them effortlessly off the conveyor
belt, commandeered two skycaps with trolleys, and then led the way
out into the freezing morning to the stretch station wagon, parked
less than fifty feet away.

One good thing about the red-eye: parking close to
the terminal at that hour was a breeze.

Edwina tipped the skycaps lavishly and, eschewing
the back of the chauffeured car as unmitigated snobbery, slid into
the front seat beside Winston. “Home, Winnie!” she said in a glad
voice. “And the trunks go to the showroom.”

She was not stating the obvious. Often the trunk
shows were so tightly scheduled that the moment she was dropped off
at home, Winston would drive straight to Klas Claussen’s apartment
and pick him up, taking him and the trunks back to the airport for
the next flight out. Antonio de Riscal’s 325-million-dollar fashion
empire was run like clockwork which amounted to a miracle, since
Edwina and Klas had also had to fill in for Rubio, Antonio’s number
two in command, who had become too sick to work during the last six
months.

She thought of him now. Rubio Mendez. A cheerful,
natty young Venezuelan. A once-cheerful, no-longer-natty, dead
Venezuelan. Two days earlier, while she had been away directing the
trunk show at I. Magnin’s in San Francisco, Rubio had died in his
Lexington Avenue apartment from AIDS.

He had been cremated almost immediately, and the
memorial service was this afternoon.

With that sobering thought, the sparkle in Edwina’s
eyes died. As though to emphasize her mood, Winston slowed for the
first of the rush-hour traffic into Manhattan.

She’d miss Rubio.

She had liked him. It had been Rubio who had hired
her, three years earlier, against the openly antagonistic protests
of Klas, who had wanted a friend to have the job. She’d overheard
their argument when she’d come out of the ladies’ room and had been
heading for the elevator after her job interview.

KLAS: “You cocksucker, what the fuck do you mean,
you’re going to hire that woman? What is she, another fag hag for
you to run around with?”

RUBIO: “Shut up, Klas. She’s more capable than that
two-bit hustler you’re trying to slide in, and you know it! He
doesn’t know fashion from faggots.”

KLAS: “And what are
her
qualifications, may I
ask?”

RUBIO: “For one thing, she’s a woman. In case you
haven’t noticed, Klas, a lot of the department- and specialty-store
buyers are women. And it’s women who come here for all the couture
fittings.”

KLAS: “If I were in charge, I’d fire you!”

RUBIO: “But you’re not in charge, are you? I am. You
can huff and puff all you want. In fact, you’re lucky I put up with
you. I’ve had my final say, and that’s
that.
Case
closed.”

Needless to say, from her first day on, there hadn’t
been any love lost between Edwina and Klas. She considered herself
fortunate that, as a rule, when she was on the road, Klas was in
the showroom, and vice versa. Rubio’s strategic scheduling usually
kept them out of each other’s sight and hair.