The Secret (17 page)

*   *   *

Sal knew our designer, Larkin Albert, of course. One day the three of us sat down over lunch at 21.

Albert had become a great deal more—how shall I say it? He had become more skilled, more artistic, more subtle, in his cross-dressing. He sat there in 21, smooth and self-confident, assured that no one in the room guessed he was a man. He wore an ivory jaquard suit: padded shoulders, button-front jacket, slim miniskirt. It was entirely appropriate to 21. His makeup was understated. His wig was styled to expose half his forehead and his ears and earrings. I can’t guess what he used to suppress his beard and other hair, but his face and legs were as smooth as any girl’s.

Sal asked the question I would not have asked. “Tell me, Lark, have you had the operation?”

“No, for Christ’s sake,” Larkin said in an amused, velvety voice. “What would I do for fun, if I…? Well … Sal, I’m not one of
those
guys! So far as
doin’ it
is concerned, I’m as straight as … well, as I suppose you two are.”

“I guess there are all kinds of guys,” said Sal.

“You better believe it,” said Larkin. He glanced across the room. “See the suit with the big Bloody Mary?”

He had used the term “suit” aptly. Nixon vest. John Dean haircut. Rep tie. Wing-tips. Smoking a cigarillo. This … creature said
Wall Street,
said
broker,
said
lawyer.
It could have worked in the Nixon White House.

“She’s a broad,” said Larkin. “She hasn’t noticed me, but I’ve noticed her, and I’m here to tell you she’s a first-class piece of tail.”

“Explain this to me,” I said.

Larkin smiled. “You’re sitting here. Sal’s sitting here. Of the three of us, I’m the only one’s who’s
charged!
Man, if one of you groped me, I’d come! And Mary Beth over there—which is her name—is
wet.
I mean, she’s ready! We may be the only ones in the room who are having a really good time.”

“You don’t wish you were a woman?” I asked.

“Are you kiddin’? Hell, no, I don’t wish I were a woman. And Mary Beth doesn’t wish she were a man. Guys … I get off by dippin’ my wick—and I don’t mean by dippin’ it between the teeth of some fag.”

We changed the subject. Sort of. Larkin led off.

“Listen to me, guys. I’m wearing a pair of silicone boobs. I don’t mean implants. I mean silicone boobs in my bra. If I took off my bra, they’d fall off. But if I let you see them through a sheer bra, you’d think you were looking at real boobs. You could feel me up, and you wouldn’t immediately feel the difference. If one of you felt me right now, through my dress and all, you’d
swear
you had your hands on real tits. These little babies are imported from Germany, and they cost me five hundred bucks a pair. Well, shit, man, why doesn’t Cheeks sell silicone tits?”

It was something Giselle would have objected to. She loved merchandise that showed off a woman at her best. Anything that dishonestly enhanced her, Giselle did not like.

“The krauts got a patent on these things?” Sal asked.

“Can you patent false tits?” Larkin asked. “I don’t know, but I doubt it. If you can, it must be easy enough to put together a different chemical combination that would do the same thing in a different way. I can’t think it would be too difficult.”

It was a departure for Cheeks, the first of a series that would change the nature of the business.

The German company did not in fact have a patent on their silicone breast enhancers. What else to call them? But they manufactured them beautifully, and we signed a contract to import them at $186 a pop. We sold them for $400.

They came in a variety of sizes, ranging from rather thin ones that changed a girl from an A to a B, all the way to the kind that Larkin wore, to give a person with no tits at all a luscious bustline. They could not have changed, say, Larkin into a Dolly Parton. But they very convincingly changed him into a believable woman.

“Hell,” Larkin had said. “When the word gets around that we sell these, we’ll sell fifty to women for every one we sell to a man. I guarantee it.”

The ratio was more like ten thousand to one. Millions of women wanted bigger tits, but they didn’t want two things: first, they didn’t want to wear those hideous pads of rubber and kapok called falsies, and, second, they didn’t want surgery.

What a business! But it was, as Giselle would have emphasized, a departure for us.

I put my foot down against one thing. Silicone boobs, maybe. Rubber cocks, no. Sal and Larkin couldn’t see the difference, but I could and vetoed merchandising fake penises.

I consented to the sale of a device called an Arab strap. It was a contraption of straps and buckles that went around the penis and down under the balls, holding the penis up in an unnatural erection, caused chiefly by the constriction of the veins in the shaft. In point of fact, the thing was a little bit dangerous. Interfering with the circulation of the blood was not the world’s greatest idea, and after a short time I banished the Arab strap from Cheeks stores.

32

We continued to import about half our merchandise, most of it from France but an increasing amount from places like Hong Kong and Manila and Singapore. What we didn’t import came from contractors hired by Charlie Han. He was an important element of our success.

Charlie had become almost a partner in Cheeks. He was not just a small-time sweatshop manager anymore. He was an entrepreneur, running a score of sweatshops through layers of subcontractors. We hadn’t made him that. He had many customers, and he sewed into his clothes the labels of some of the most prominent chains of stores in the nation. He also sewed in the labels of important designers.

What is more, he was not just the maker of underwear and swimsuits; his laborers assembled blouses and skirts, jeans and jackets, dresses and suits.

He didn’t do business any longer from a table in a coffee shop. His office was in a building on Twenty-seventh Street—isolated and well insulated from the grimy lofts where his employees worked under the tyrannical supervision of his managers. He had the kind of smarts that Buddy admired, and he had used them to grow.

By now Charlie could have made a colorable case that he didn’t know the working conditions in his shops—and in fact he would, when he had to.

And if he could make the case, we could make it. This was the deal. This was the way it worked. We could pretend innocence. In truth, I had visited Charlie’s sweatshops once or twice, and that had been enough; I had not gone back anymore. I could testify, if need be, that we bought our merchandise from various makers, including Charlie Han, and had no idea what were the working conditions in the shops where our clothes were sewn. We were not obligated, under the law, to inspect the factories of our suppliers.

As Sal kept reminding me, this was the garment industry, and Cheeks wasn’t big enough to change it. Other companies might be, but they had no interest in changing it.

Charlie did get in trouble once. Federal inspectors found a lot of violations of various laws in a loft on Thirty-fifth Street, and they traced the ownership to Charlie Han—that is, they thought they had traced the ownership.

Charlie was arrested, hustled out of his office in handcuffs, taken before a federal magistrate, jailed briefly, and then released on bond—protesting all the while that he did not own or manage the loft where they found all the violations.

He was indicted on six counts nevertheless, and in the fall of 1979 his case came to trial.

I was shaking. Among the merchandise found in the sweatshop were things we sold in Cheeks stores.

I sent a lawyer to observe the trial. He bought a copy of the transcript on the testimony I would be interested in.

MR. JULIUS
: Mr. Han, I hand you an article of clothing. I suppose we must call it a pair of panties. What had you to do with the manufacture of that article?

JUDGE GRIFFITH
: There will be no laughter or other noise from the spectators in the courtroom.

MR. HAN
: Nothing.

MR. JULIUS
: Please read the label in that article of clothing.

MR. HAN
: It reads, “Cheeks. Intimate apparel.”

MR. JULIUS
: What is Cheeks?

MR. HAN
: It is a seller of women’s intimate apparel.

MR. JULIUS
: Have you ever been involved in the manufacture of merchandise for Cheeks?

MR. HAN
: I was at one time, briefly. Some years ago.

MR. JULIUS
: How many years ago?

MR. HAN
: To the best of my recollection, twelve or fifteen years ago. About that. Something like that.

MR. JULIUS
: Do you do any business with Cheeks today?

MR. HAN
: Yes.

MR. JULIUS
: What kind of business?

MR. HAN
: I am a manufacturers’ representative; in other words, a salesman. When one of my manufacturers comes up with something I think might appeal to Cheeks, I show it to them.

MR. JULIUS
: Obviously this pair of panties was manufactured for this Cheeks company. It has their label sewn in it.

MR. HAN
: Cheeks bought the entire supply of that item. That’s what it usually does, buys all of an item, together with the exclusive right to merchandise it.

MR. JULIUS
: How many pairs of these panties did Cheeks buy?

MR. HAN
: I think a thousand dozen.

MR. JULIUS
: You have said you never saw the sweatshop in which these panties and a lot of other items were made. Is that your testimony?

MR. HAN
: I deal with the executives of the companies I represent, in their offices or mine. I never go to their manufacturing facilities.

MR. JULIUS
: With whom did you deal in securing a thousand dozen pairs of these panties for sale to Cheeks?

MR. HAN
: I dealt with Mr. George Alexander, vice president for sales, Alexander and Company. It is a family business.

MR. JULIUS
: Where is Mr. Alexander now?

MR. HAN
: I haven’t seen him for some time.

MR. JULIUS
: A family business, you say. Where are the other members of the Alexander family?

MR. HAN
: I never met any of them but George.

MR. JULIUS
: They are all missing, disappeared.

MR. HAN
: If they were running an illegal sweatshop, I am not surprised.

That was Charlie Han. He had covered his tracks extremely well. He always did. And he carefully kept my name out of the case. How could I be anything but grateful?

The crotchless panties handled by the prosecutor as if they were dirty and would soil his hands drew a lot of media attention. The publicity didn’t hurt us.

George Alexander was like Murray. He was insulation between Charlie and his businesses. We would encounter him again later, in a surprising way.

Melissa waited two months after Giselle died before she made it plain to me that she would not mind doing what she could to relieve my horniness. My God! What a piece of luck! To have lost Giselle and then so soon to be able to form a relationship with a woman like Melissa.…

Melissa had been around in one capacity and another since that day when, as a twenty-year-old model, she had offered to trim her pubic hair so it wouldn’t show over the top of one of our bikinis. She was the one who had recommended Larkin Albert as a designer. We had used her as a model often.

She had married. She had divorced. She had no children.

For a short time she was in tough circumstances, and we made work for her. One year I sent her to Paris to tour the shops that supplied what we imported, to identify what she thought would sell in the States. She turned out to be good at it. She had a very good sense of what American women would wear.

She was never a top model. There was too much of her for that. But she appeared in hundreds of department-store ads for bras and panties. Twice she appeared in ads in
The New York Times Magazine,
once in
Vanity Fair,
and then in catalogs, modeling very ordinary American-style white undies. Her name remained unknown. Her face and figure were familiar to people who had no idea who she might be.

Sal tried to put the make on her. She rejected him gently but emphatically.

Okay. I recognized her subtle suggestion for what it was and took her up on it, gladly. She spent the night in my apartment. Then some more nights.

Winter settled things for Melissa and me. One morning we left the apartment and went down to try for a cab. New York can be a terrible place when the weather is bad. Snow had fallen overnight, leaving the streets curb-full with slush and filthy water. Sleet was falling now. New Yorkers, taking their quirky, surly pride in the myth that they can’t be defeated, were fighting each other for cabs and scrambling along the slippery sidewalks toward the subway entrances.

Melissa and I stood in the foyer of our building, looking at the challenge.

“What the hell are we doing?” I asked her.

She shook her head and shrugged. “Damned’f I know,” she said. “I’m really damned if I know.”

I remember how she looked. She was wearing a leopard hat and coat that had Dupont, not Africa, in their ancestry, plus vinyl boots against the slush. Her brown hair turned under her chin. Her skin already glowed from the harsh, cold wind. She was thirty-five years old.

“Let’s go back upstairs,” I said. “Make a pot of coffee. Scramble some eggs. Eat and go back to bed.”

She shook her head. “I have to be at—”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do if I expect to make a living.”

“You don’t have to make a living, Melissa. Or you can make one in my business. And it’s silly, isn’t it, for you to keep a separate apartment?”

We went back upstairs. She called the photographer—who thought she was twenty-seven, not thirty-five—and said she could not come in to model underwear because of the weather. I called my office and said I was not coming in because of the weather. That was it. From that day, we lived together.