Lipstick Jungle

  She stared out through the French windows again to the little garden in back. Spring was well and truly here—the cherry trees (which were some special pedigreed species of flowering fruit tree normally found only in Washington, D.C., that Seymour had bought from a senator’s wife) already had full, fuzzy buds; in a few more days, there’d be flowers. And in a couple of weeks, they would open the house in East Hampton, and how heavenly that would be. They used the house in May, June, and July, leaving August for the crowds, but the best month was May, when the sea air was warm and sleepy, and the grass as sharply green as shards of glass. She always told herself that she would garden and never did, but maybe this year she would get around to planting a flower or two . . .

  “Did you see this?” Seymour asked, coming into the breakfast room with the New York Times in his hand. Seymour was dressed for the day like a college student—in jeans and some type of expensive sneaker, his longish hair tucked back behind his ears. His eyes were shrewd—their normal expression—and Nico smiled, thinking Seymour had probably come out of the womb with those eyes and terrified everyone in the delivery room.

  “What, darling?” she asked.

  “Story in the Metro section. About Trent Couler. The fashion designer who just went out of business. I hope Victory reads the story,” he said, hovering above her.

  “Why?” Nico asked, taking a sip of her tea.

  “It should make her feel good about taking that offer. She’ll be safe,” Seymour said.

  “I’m not sure Victory wants to be safe,” Nico said.

  “Everyone wants to be safe,” Seymour said. “Now she can retire.”

  Nico smiled to herself and took a bite of her egg. Seymour’s attitude was so like a man, she thought. It was ironic, but when you scratched the surface, most successful men were working for one thing only—to retire—and the sooner the better. Whereas women were the complete opposite. She had never heard a woman say she was working so she could retire to a desert island or to live on a boat. It was probably, she thought, because most women didn’t think they deserved to do nothing.

  “Maybe I’ll take Victory to lunch,” Seymour said, going out of the room.

  Nico nodded, looking after him. Victory was probably too busy to go to lunch with Seymour, but it didn’t matter. No wonder Seymour didn’t really understand, she thought. Thanks to her, Seymour was, in a sense, retired himself, his only real obligation being the one class he taught at Columbia.

  But he handled his spare time beautifully, she corrected herself. She never would have been able to keep herself as wonderfully occupied as Seymour did. And she felt another one of those guilty pangs. “How can you cheat on Seymour?” Victory had asked her.

  “I’m not as cold a person as everyone thinks I am,” Nico said. “I have desires. Am I supposed to suppress those desires for the rest of my life?”

  Victory was so rigid about it, Nico thought. “You’re taking the chance of ruining your life for a little sex? That’s what men do all the time,” Victory said. She was mortified, but people who had never been married were so idealistic about the institution, whereas if you were married yourself you understood that it wasn’t perfect, and that you had to make it work within that imperfection. “I love Seymour. I would never leave him,” Nico had protested. “But we haven’t had decent sex for . . .”

  “I know,” Victory said. “But how can that be?”

  “It’s something that just happens,” Nico said. “You get too busy. You’re tired. And then you get used to not doing it. It’s comfortable that way. There are other things that are more important . . .”

  “Then why do it at all? With Kirby?” Victory asked. She put her hand on Nico’s arm. They were walking down West Broadway, going to visit Wendy at her new home—a suite at the Mercer Hotel. What a disaster that was—her own situation seemed trivial by comparison. “Am I supposed to go for the rest of my life without good sex?” Nico asked. She couldn’t explain how being with Kirby made her feel, or had made her feel at the beginning, anyway. She hadn’t ever had sex like that. It was like discovering a new toy—or rather, like finally understanding what everyone else was always making such a fuss about. It made her feel more like other people to have sex like that.

  “Some people would say that a marriage is over when you stop having sex,” Victory said.

  “Some people are always judging other people’s relationships. And some people don’t know what can happen when you’ve been married for fourteen years. And Seymour doesn’t know . . .”

  “You can’t be sure about that,” Victory said. “Maybe he does know and he doesn’t care. Maybe you’re right, and he has no clue. But it doesn’t matter. Even if he doesn’t know. I really think,” Victory said primly, “if you’re going to continue on with this affair, you should tell him. At least that way Seymour has a choice in the matter. That’s what’s so unfair about these things—you don’t give the other person a choice. Of course men do it all the time, but we have to be better than men. There’s something about it that isn’t honorable . . .”

  “I know . . . I know,” Nico agreed. “It scares me. But I can’t quite . . .”

  “It’s okay to do things to discover certain aspects about yourself. We have to make mistakes. But I do think you should stop now, before you potentially ruin your family,” Victory said stubbornly.

  “Even if we did . . . get divorced, I know we’d all be okay,” Nico said, equally stubborn.

  “But for what?” Victory exclaimed. “There aren’t many men like Seymour. I know he’s harsh sometimes, but he’s truthful. Seymour has character. And so many men don’t these days. Look at Shane. Not an ounce of character, right from the beginning.” She paused, staring straight ahead. “You can never ultimately make a marriage work with a man who lacks character. It’s always going to end up a disaster,” she said. “But you chose wisely from the beginning. Your marriage works. You don’t want to let a . . . a fuck,” Victory said, cringing at her own uncharacteristic use of the word, “ruin something that works so well for you . . .”

  Nico sighed and scooped out the last bit of egg white from the bottom of the shell. Victory was right, of course, and, subconsciously, she had probably told her about the affair so that Victory would talk her out of it. She knew it was wrong and that she had to stop, but it hadn’t been so easy to disentangle herself.

  She picked up her plate and cup and carried them into the kitchen, rinsing the drops of congealed egg yolk under a blast of hot water. When the plate was clean, she put it into the dishwasher, rearranging the dishes into a more spatially and economically pleasing configuration. The kitchen was large—a catering kitchen, with restaurant-quality ovens and burners—and generally tidy, but looking around she discovered a long thread caught on the edge of one of the burners, probably left over from the maid’s dishcloth. For a second, she thought about leaving it there—it was only a little thread!—but she knew that if she left it, she’d be thinking about that damn thread for the next two hours. The thread would become magnified in importance; it would become equal to everything else she was dealing with. The thread . . . and Mike Harness: A toss-up. It wasn’t healthy to think like this, to be obsessed with a thread, but she couldn’t help it. She grabbed the thread and threw it into the trash, and as the thread settled onto a stained paper towel, she immediately felt better. Victory was so right, she thought. She was neurotic, and she was lucky to have Seymour, who put up with her. He hardly even complained. If he’d been in the kitchen with her at that moment, and had seen her wrestling with the thread, he would have laughed. And not in a mean way. For some reason, she and Seymour really, really liked each other and always had, and in the long run, wasn’t that a lot more important than lust?

  Of course it was. And having satisfactorily figured that out, she went upstairs to say good-bye to her daughter.

  Katrina’s room was her own oasis and even had its own bath—a luxury no child could have imagined when Nico was a kid. Funny how they??
?d grown up back in the sixties and seventies, an entire family of five sharing one bathroom. She hadn’t even had her own room. She’d shared with a sister who was two years younger, and how happy her sister had been when she’d gone off to college and she’d finally had the room to herself. They loved each other, she supposed, but they’d fought constantly as children. Of course, everyone she knew who was her age had grown up with crappy elements in their childhood—fathers who drank too much, frustrated mothers, daily put-downs, unhappy siblings. It was normal for fathers to come home from work and punish their kids with a beating from a belt. Children weren’t worshipped back then, certainly not the way they were now, and on the weekends there was an endless list of chores. She’d had to mow the lawn and gather newspapers, and when she got older, she was the first girl in the neighborhood with a paper run, which she’d decided was preferable to babysitting. It wasn’t a bad childhood per se, and yet nearly every parent her age wouldn’t have dreamed of repeating it, wanting their own children to have something better: to feel more loved and more wanted and more valued than their own parents had made them feel. When she thought back to her own childhood, what she remembered most was the endless litany of complaints that parents had about their children, how bad they were and how they would never accomplish anything. The result was adults with no self-esteem—like her sister, who lived in a small town and was a born-again Christian and worked as a waitress at a local pizza joint (and was on her third husband—a house painter)—or adults who were overachievers, like herself. Determined to avoid unhappiness by accomplishment. It wasn’t, perhaps, the perfect solution, especially if the accomplishment didn’t come. But if you worked hard enough, it usually did, and at some point in your life you realized that there were no perfect solutions, and what was most important was to do something useful with your time, hopefully something you enjoyed.

  But as she was walking down the short hallway to Katrina’s room, she suddenly felt afraid. What if she got Mike’s job and it didn’t matter?

  What if nothing mattered?

  And that was the whole puzzle of it, wasn’t it? It didn’t really matter. It wasn’t ultimately important, in terms of happiness, whether she got Mike’s job or not. It would make her happy for a minute. And so, why do it? Why go to all the trouble? She didn’t have to do it. But she knew, nevertheless, that she would do it. And once she had the position, she would bust her ass to do a great job. Sometimes that’s all there was, really, the day-to-day desire to do it better, to fix it, and if that was all there was, then so be it. She knocked on the door and went into her daughter’s room.

  Katrina was dressed in her school uniform, watching a Japanese anime on her computer. “Hi, Mom,” she said, not looking up from the cartoon. “Are you leaving?”

  “In a minute,” Nico said. She wanted to say something to her daughter, something inspiring or meaningful, perhaps, but what?

  She glanced at the computer screen. Katrina and her friends were obsessed with Japanese anime, and looking at the exaggerated female characters, it struck her that the Japanese had moved about one inch in their attitude toward women, which could be summed up as an obsession with the transformation of the female into a creature of nonthreatening sexual submission. The ideal female was either a geisha or, as in the cartoon, a clownish baby doll, in which her appearance was her only currency. Nico hated the message, and yet a part of her understood its appeal. It was so much easier to hide behind appearance, and for a little girl, the option might seem empowering.

  “You know there’s a better way to do it,” Nico said, standing behind her daughter.

  Katrina looked up. “It’s just a cartoon, Mom. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  There was that word again: meaning. “But it does mean something,” she said. And she wondered why, no matter how many strides forward women made, when it came to the next generation, it still felt like women hadn’t progressed at all. Looking at the cartoon again, she realized that her daughter was still going to have to struggle with the same issues she’d had to wrestle with about men and life and work. And when her daughter got to be her age, would women have advanced any further? Or would they have regressed, living in a world where people had gone back to insisting that a woman’s place was in the home?

  Sensing her mother’s disapproval, Katrina shut down the computer. “What are you doing today? Anything special?” she asked, standing and gathering up her things.

  “I’m going to have someone fired today,” Nico said.

  Katrina gave her an agonized look. “Oh, Mom. Is that nice?” she asked.

  How could she ever explain it? Nico thought. But she had to try. She had always believed that it was important not to shield Katrina from the realities of her career, that knowing what she did would help Katrina someday. “It isn’t nice, but it’s necessary,” she said, smoothing out a wrinkle on Katrina’s bed. “This man hasn’t done anything to improve the publishing division, and the profits are flat.” Could she understand that? Nico wondered, looking at her daughter. “And he’s a chauvinist. If I don’t fire him, he’ll probably fire me. When it comes to business, you can’t be nice all the time. There are certain things that, as an adult, you have to accept in order to be a success. And everyone who is in business understands. They’re all playing the same game. You try to do what’s fair . . .” she broke off helplessly. Katrina was looking at her with patient boredom—she was probably already thinking about something else.

  “Right, Mom,” Katrina said, not entirely convinced.

  “You see,” Nico tried again. “Nobody knows exactly how they’re going to behave until they’re faced with certain challenges. It’s one of the great things in life—putting yourself in positions to meet new challenges and not being afraid to do so. It’s what keeps life interesting and ultimately makes you the best person you can be.” And that is your lesson for the day, Nico thought, for whatever it’s worth. “Does that make any sense?” she asked.

  “I guess.” Katrina shrugged. She picked up a pink patent leather book bag, emblazoned with thunderbolts and a kitty cat wearing blue eyeshadow. “Good luck, Mom,” Kat said, giving her a brief hug. And as Kat went out of the room, Nico realized that it wasn’t her daughter she was trying to convince, it was herself.

  * * *

  KIRBY CALLED HER AS she was walking into her office.

  “Hiya, pretty lady,” he said, his typical greeting, which still made Nico wince. He shouldn’t be calling her at all, but it was too late. She had allowed it, and slowly but surely they had ended up talking at least once a day, and sometimes two or three or even four times a day—the fact was, she was more involved with Kirby than she’d admitted, even to Victory. “I can’t talk now,” she said into the phone. One of her assistants looked up and nodded. For the past few months now, they must have been wondering who it was that she talked to like this. She had to break it off . . .

  “Will I see you later?” Kirby asked.

  “I can’t. I have a very important day ahead of me.” She went into her office and half closed the door, leaving it open a little so as not to arouse undue suspicion. No one in offices trusted closed doors—there was something about a closed door that led to speculation about what was going on behind it. And ever since that item had appeared in the Post about her possibly taking Mike Harness’s job, she’d been especially careful. On the Monday morning after the item had appeared, Mike had sent her an e-mail, which he’d cc’d to several other executives, saying, “Glad to see that you’re taking over my job.” To which she’d replied smartly, “You wish!”—the idea being that she wasn’t taking it seriously, and neither should he.

  “But you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” Kirby asked.

  “What?” she asked, knowing exactly what he was referring to.

  “Sex,” he said. A month ago, the word, coming from his mouth, would have caused immediate arousal, but now all she felt was annoyance. What was wrong with her? Was it possible that nothing could satisfy h
er anymore?

  “I’ll have to call you later,” she said firmly, and hung up.

  She sat down in front of her computer. It was eight-thirty a.m.; she had one hour until her meeting with Victor Matrick. She opened her e-mails, which were filled with correspondences from various departments (everyone cc-ing everyone else on all kinds of mundane issues in order to prove they were on top of things and that no one was being left out of the loop—and therefore couldn’t be blamed or responsible for anything that might potentially go wrong), along with attached layouts and stories and schedules for the magazine. She asked her assistant to print out two of the stories, then called Richard, the art director, and asked him to change one of the layouts. He made a fuss about it, coming down the hall to her office to argue about it. She gave him two minutes to make his case, then coolly repeated her objections and told him to change it, asking for the new version just before lunch. He left her office in a huff and she shook her head in annoyance. Richard was considered the best in the business, but he was overly emotional and took every criticism personally, clinging to his work as if he had just painted the Sistine Chapel. Nico knew that behind her back, he called her the Nico-tano Bomb, and she’d thought about firing him several times. She had done that in the past—fired employees who’d bad-mouthed her excessively—her thinking being that if it got back to her, it had to be extreme, and if they had that much of a problem with her, they would undoubtedly be happier someplace else.

  She picked up one of the stories and began reading, but put it down again after a few seconds. She couldn’t quite concentrate. She got up and went to the window, looking out over the view, which contained a sliver of Central Park. Mike’s office, which was two floors up and in the front of the building, had a full view of Central Park, and so, for that matter, did Wendy’s. Editors in chief weren’t quite as high up on the totem pole as presidents of entire divisions, and the fact that Victor Matrick was even considering her for Mike’s job was unusual. Normally, editors in chief could go no higher—once you became an editor in chief, you could only move laterally, becoming the editor in chief of another magazine. But she didn’t care about precedent. If someone said something couldn’t be done, it seemed like something worth trying. And she was clever, she thought. Why allow herself to rot in a dead-end job?