Dead is the New Black (9 page)

Carmella and André, on the other hand, had been less forthright. Carmella had buddied up, and André had bullied. Most likely, she’d cut André loose and let him do whatever he wanted, since he ran his department, anyway. Carmella was something different entirely. Jeremy expected Laura to make sure the show came off well, which was Carmella’s responsibility. She could easily go off the rails and spend her days in front of the building keeping R.J. Reynolds in business. She seemed to have zero territorial instinct, yet Laura didn’t want to take that as permission to use her contact with Jeremy as a reason to make the designer feel as though a patternmaker was co-opting her department. She had to assume it could all backfire, and Jeremy could return to the office to find Laura sitting at her table in a chicken suit.

That wouldn’t do. It didn’t matter that Jeremy was out of her league on the one hand, and homosexual on the other. She would
not
be humiliated. Period.

Laura met her mother out front at nine fifteen and took her into the elevator.

Mom carried a burlap bag full of crochet needles. “I didn’t know what size needle you needed, so I brought all of them.” She opened her bag, revealing needles as thin as wires and as thick as Sharpies, and everything in between.

“You’ll need a few. We’re going multi-gauge.”

As soon as the elevator doors opened, she felt something different in the office. Renee’s smile didn’t glow. The halls were empty. The music that usually drifted in from the showroom was silent. As she approached her table, the prep for the fitting was in full swing. Seventeen models were coming to have their garments pinned, tucked, and re-sewn so they flowed like magic on the runway. Usually, Jeremy and Carmella would redesign, add, drop, and change until everything looked perfect. They would accessorize and coordinate into the night. The prep, which included measuring the garments, sewing up the last of them, organizing outfits by model, and sundry yelling and screaming, was usually loud and vibrant. Today, it seemed as though the air had gone from the balloon. It was going to be a disaster.

No one said hello. No one noticed she was about two hours later than usual. No one mentioned the matte jersey group. They just hunched like monks over an illuminated manuscript. Laura checked to make sure she wasn’t wearing a chicken suit. She led Mom to a chair and showed her the crochet graphs, keeping her voice lower than usual for reasons she only intuited. She nodded and asked questions. Anyone else would have panicked. Their freelance sweater technician had drawn a graph so complex it required four different sizes of grid paper and more stitches than most people had learned in a lifetime. Mom, though in her sixties, still had a nimble mind and fingers. Each box in the grid had an “X,” a slash or a dot, which denoted the direction of the yarn and the needle. She knew where to interpret the graph literally, and where to let complexity go. She got the
idea
, and Laura knew she could hand her the yarns and the beads and get to work without worrying that she would have nothing to show Jeremy the next day.

Then, she heard it. A bellow. A raging roar like a cornered lion.

“Why is this on a scrap of paper?!”

Laura looked up. No one else moved except to put their noses further into their work. Carmella measured a pocket as if she were splitting an atom. Laura threw an eraser at her.

The initial roar was followed by another. “Who keeps books like this? God
damn it
.”

Carmella glanced up, and Laura put her palms up in a gesture that said,
Are you going to tell me what’s going on here?

Carmella grabbed a sample and draped it over Laura’s dress form. They pinned it together, and unpinned and repinned as they talked.

“It’s her husband, Sheldon Pomerantz. There are seven people in the office, and they’re going through all the business papers.” Carmella looked over the mannequin’s shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “He’s quite pissed off. I saw some jobs for you in the paper this morning. Nothing for me.”

“I don’t want another job. I want to do the show, and I want Jeremy to come back.”

As if in answer, Sheldon burst in—fuzzy hair, skin starting to give in to gravity, two-piece, double-vented suit held up by pure, white-hot, lawyerly rage. Nine years and he actually didn’t know. The way his green eyes cut across the room, it seemed impossible that he missed anything.

“Who’s in charge of this ‘show’?” He used the flying quotes.

Laura and Carmella looked at each other. Carmella hid behind the mannequin. Tiffany froze. The only sound was Tony cutting oaktag.

Laura couldn’t tolerate pauses after questions to which she knew the answer. “Jeremy.”

“No
shit
,” he said. “Who’s in charge while the little creep’s behind bars for killing my
wife
?”

A pause went on too long, and Laura knew what kind of guy Sheldon was. He was the guy who would let a silence hang on the phone indefinitely, until the other person felt like they had to say something, anything at all, to break it. He was the guy who gave you enough rope to hang yourself.

“We’re all in charge, I guess,” Laura said, looking for support from her team and finding none. “I mean, we have a ton of work to do until next Friday. There’s a fitting today at two, if you want to come. It’s fun.”

This guy in the fitting? Why did she keep talking? Why couldn’t she shut up?

“Thank you, Miss…” He tilted his head for the completion of the sentence.

“Carnegie,” she said. “Laura Carnegie. No relation.”

“I was looking for something
fun
to do. But I’m busy breaking this business apart and selling it. So your fun this afternoon is called off. You can all keep coming in for two weeks, or you’ll be docked pay. Check in with David at the front desk before you go in or out.”

He turned on his heel to leave, and Laura called, “What should we tell the models?” She didn’t ask out of bravery, but because she needed to know.

Sheldon turned back to the room, and everyone cowered. “The who?”

“Well…” She cleared her throat. “We have all these models coming, and the agencies are going to want to know why their contracts are being cancelled.”

“They don’t read the goddamn papers?”

“Well, okay, yeah, but it doesn’t look good.”

Sheldon stepped fully into the room for the first time, and she felt seven feet worth of heat coming off his five-and-a-half-foot-tall body.

“You think I care what the jellybacks in this business think? If they’re paid, they’ll have nothing to squawk about.”

“Okay, but, we’re paying them in money, yes, and even if we paid them for the lost time, there’s this whole thing that the show isn’t about money. It’s about exposure, and if you take that part of the payment away, then they can sue you pretty good. It happened with Barry Tilden? When Olga Mouchen came to the show drunk and he sidelined her?” Laura couldn’t believe she was still talking. “And even though she got paid, she lost the exposure time, and three other designers dropped her from their show, not because she was a drunk, but because she hadn’t been in the Barry Tilden show, like the agency promised. And so the agency sued, and Barry lost like, I don’t know the number exactly, but you can look it up. So we have seventeen models, so you can figure it out pretty easy, so—”

Carmella kicked her. She shut herself off mid-sentence.

Sheldon just looked at her. Mouth closed. Expressionless. Then, he walked out of the room, presumably to look up how much he would lose canceling the show, and to weigh that against the humiliation of letting it go on.

The thought of humiliation drove her into the “history closet” to look for some obscure pattern she had made two years ago, hence the closet’s name, which came from what it held, a history of the company’s bestsellers and priceless trimmings. Only she and Jeremy had the code to get in. It was her safe place.

She typed her passcode into the little pad and closed the door behind her. Sometimes, she went in there when she felt sad, or when there was so much pressure at her desk she needed ten minutes alone. She could barely move between the racks, and the closeness took away all sense of vulnerability, which was good, because once she got deep enough into the racks, where they kept the stuff that sold before Laura’s time, she was going to cry her eyes out. No holds barred. And then she was going to wipe her face on Italian tissue linen pants, or a silk georgette blouse with real pearl buttons. She didn’t care.

Because she loved him, and she knew it then. And as long as she worked at this job she also loved, she would be trapped. She had to rescue the company to rescue Jeremy, so that she could pine for what would never be hers.

She found once she got to the back, however, that her eyes were dry. She texted Ruby:

—
Lunch
—

She heard back almost immediately:

—
Valerie’s
—

Of course. Ruby couldn’t resist the opportunity to be seen any more than Laura could resist the punishment of seeing her sister for lunch.

CHAPTER 10.

Valerie’s had been in business since the garment district
was
the garment district, and it hadn’t been renovated or improved. If you were a Parsons student or Calvin Klein himself, you waited in line along the row of steam tables behind glass so fogged you were only allowed to guess what was in them. You read the handwritten signs out to the men and women behind the counter, and they put your lunch on a plate. If someone in front of you took forever to decide, you waited. You could huff and puff, but you waited. You read the inked-in signs that told you about substitutions (none), payment methods (cash), and charges for empty takeout containers (significant). Once you got to the end of the line, you got your tray or your bag, and you paid what you were told. There was no rhyme or reason to the pricing, and there were no arguments. Then, you sat down at the cracked linoleum tables carved with layers of names—there was a Marc Jacobs table that the Parsons kids fought over—and ate the sauciest, drippiest, tastiest Italian food you could get in a three-mile radius.

It was New York comfort food at its finest. Laura needed it to feel normal again. She treated herself to spaghetti and meatballs, a dish that guaranteed tomato sauce spray on her blouse and five pounds added to her belly and hips. She even put sugar in her iced tea, promising herself she’d skip dinner or eat salad the rest of the week.

Ruby slipped in across from her. She had shrimp scampi dripping in butter that probably cost twelve dollars, a salad she would invariably ignore, and a plate of tiramisu. However, she hadn’t ordered any guilt or regret, and dove into her food the same way she dove into relaying the terms of her life’s minutia:

Her nail polish for the wedding (neutral), her hair (undecided), the venue (the Armory), the band (Michael’s very expensive choice—she thought he could get Van Halen for less), and the maid of honor gown (no importance to Laura, but Ruby wouldn’t stop sketching it).

“I’ll do a drape and figure out what it looks like then,” Laura said.

Ruby pushed herself back in her chair and changed the subject. “Your office was open today, even with Jeremy out?” Laura went with it, diving into the Sheldon story and her babbling about the Barry Tilden incident.

“What do you think he’s looking for?” Ruby asked, stealing a chunk of Laura’s bread and sopping up the last of the sauce.

“Sheldon? He’s not looking for anything.”

“Right, Laura. He’s digging through papers and computer files and cursing his brains out, and he’s just what? Cleaning up his wife’s business?”

“Okay, so what’s he doing?”

Ruby wiggled in her chair. Laura realized her sister found it all very amusing. “There’s something in those records he wants to find and cover up.”

“You watch too much TV.”

“You live in a bubble.”

“He had nothing to do with Gracie and Jeremy’s business.”

“Says who? And where did the money come from? She wasn’t an heiress or anything. She wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer. The money came from her husband. I think the question is, why did he give her all this money for a totally risky business he didn’t know anything about? For nine years? I mean, seriously, smart people do this?”

Laura shrugged and twisted her spaghetti on her fork. “You think it was taxes or something? Like he wanted to take a loss?”

“Did he write the contract?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, duh. Your answer’s there.” And with that, Ruby slid the tiramisu front and center. It was a huge portion, and she finished every last bit of it.

When Laura got back to the office, Renee was gone, and David sat at the front desk. He was an extra-small in weight and an extra-large in height. Sleeves a little short. Shirt a little big. She couldn’t see his ankles from behind the counter, but she bet his socks were visible. He had a little crocheted yarmulke about the size of a table coaster bobby-pinned to the top of his head.

“Name?” he asked, looking her in the eye and giving her a small smile, as if he didn’t like the job any better than she did.

“Laura Carnegie.”

He looked at her over his glasses. “Any relation?”