Читать книгу Bombshell - Lynda Curnyn - Страница 9

“There aren’t any hard women, just soft men.”

—Raquel Welch

Though I have mastered the art of the breakup, the aftermath always kills me. I’m not talking about regret. I’m not the kind of woman to cry over a man. I do just fine with these things. It’s everyone else I can’t deal with.

Like my friend Angela.

“Gracie, what the hell happened this time?” she said when she caught me on the phone, which I had been avoiding. I never call friends in the post-breakup period. Too much explaining when there really isn’t much to explain. Besides, I hate it when women overanalyze relationships. And though I love Angie dearly—have ever since I dated her older brother during our shared term at Marine Park Junior High in Brooklyn—she suffers from this particularly female malady.

I gave her the snapshot version.

“Asshole,” she said, succinctly summing up Ethan. At least I could count on Angela to agree with me, once given the facts. She wouldn’t have me accept anything less than worship from a man, now that she had settled in with her own worshipful partner, her roommate and best friend-turned-lover, Justin. Of course, she wasn’t about to let a little thing like one of my umpteen breakups slide, either. “I’m coming over.”

“No!” I replied, then realizing my abrupt rejection of her brand of girlfriend comfort had probably hurt her feelings, I hedged. “I mean, I’m tired. I have a big day at work tomorrow….” The last thing I wanted was to be soothed and coddled. I was fine, really. In fact, I felt almost…relieved. I was back to my natural state. Alone.

Knowing I wouldn’t be able to hang up the phone without agreeing to a least an hour of the sympathetic cooing and all-out Ethan-blasting on my behalf, I finally made plans to meet her for drinks that Thursday.

Then, because there was one other person to whom I felt some obligation to at least give the larger details of my life to, I called my mother.

As usual, I was not afforded the luxury of speaking with her alone, because as soon as she heard my voice, she beckoned my father to the phone. “Thomas, sweetheart, pick up the extension. Gracie’s on the phone!”

My parents had retired and moved to their dream house just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, four years ago, and though I was happy for them, I hadn’t had a private conversation with my mother since. Maybe it was because her naturally frugal nature demanded that a long-distance call involve more than two speakers, but she seemed to treat my every phone call as some wondrous event she couldn’t resist sharing with my father. Or maybe it was just that she shared everything with my father. He was, as she would often tell me over a glass of wine that would inevitably turn her dreamy-eyed and nostalgic, the love of her life.

“Grace?” my father’s deep baritone boomed over the line, a voice that up until his retirement had filled the awestruck college students who had frequented his seminars with reverence.

“Hi, Dad,” I replied, a reluctant smile edging the corners of my mouth. It wasn’t that I didn’t love talking to my father. It was just that breakups resulting from sexual mishaps weren’t the kind of thing I felt I could confide in him.

So I described our demise as a couple as a desire for a “clean break.” “We didn’t really have the same goals,” I said, realizing that this was probably true. I mean, I did want to have a baby. Always imagined I would—someday. But I hadn’t realized the extent of my desire until the other night. Funny how something like a little broken latex can bring so much…clarity.

“Better you realize that now, Grace, rather than later,” my mother said, turning my recent relationship disaster into a triumph, as was her nature. Though she had been happily married to one man since the age of twenty-five, my mother seemed to have a different prescription for happiness for me. “Besides, you have your career to focus on now,” she said, as she’d been saying ever since I had landed the Senior Product Manager position at Roxanne Dubrow three years ago. In her mind, I was the single career woman she never was. My mother had studied the cello since she was nine and dreamed of joining the symphony. But she had given up that dream shortly after her marriage to my father, settling instead for a life as a music teacher in the public schools. She hadn’t, however, given up her belief that a woman’s first duty was to herself and her goals. She never failed to tell me how proud she was of me for staying true to mine. “If the girls at Hewlett High could see you now,” she always said, referring to my rebellious youth and somewhat colorful reputation. If my yearbook had allowed for those colorful attributions of yesteryear, mine would have read, “Girl most likely to single-handedly destroy her life.”

Yet now I was a shining beacon of success. Sophisticated. Cosmopolitan. Successful.

Even my father gave one of his familiar murmurs of assent—it was the only thing that reminded me he was still on the line—whenever my mother went off on how exalted my position at Roxanne Dubrow was, how magnificent my life.

I suppose it was pretty magnificent, I thought, once I hung up the phone and glanced around my apartment. At least from a real-estate point of view.

I live in a doorman building on the Upper West Side. That’s code for mega rent, though mine wasn’t up to current astronomical rates since I had snagged this apartment almost six years ago.

Six years. I had been twenty-eight at the time, and had just landed my first job managing my own product. Granted it was for a pharmaceutical company—not as glamorous a position as my current one—but I was jubilant. I finally had a salary fat enough to leave behind my third floor walk-up in the nowhereland of Kip’s Bay. I even had an assistant, though I barely knew what to do with her back then. I was moving toward my thirties still buoyant with the belief that I was entering the best part of a woman’s life, sexually, emotionally, financially. By thirty-five, I’d been told once by a college professor whom I admired, a woman usually has everything she wants.

I looked around my living room, decorated in soft whites. It was the kind of space I had always dreamed of having: lush, romantic, inviting. I thought about the fact that just this past summer, at our annual company summer outing at the Southampton Yacht Club, Dianne had told me that she thought I had “vision”—the kind of vision, she implied, that upper management at Roxanne Dubrow appreciated.

Yes, I did have a lot going for me, I thought. Then my eye fell upon two ticket stubs that had been left on the coffee table from the opera Ethan and I had attended the other night….

My stomach clenched, and I ran my hand soothingly over what Ethan had once referred to as my Botticelli belly—like the goddesses depicted by the old masters, I was a bit more rounded about the hips and breasts than today’s waif standard. Yes, Ethan had always liked my body. Just as I had liked his. And it had been enough, I supposed.

Until last Saturday night.

What had I expected of him, really? I wondered, finally rousing myself from the sofa and grabbing the ticket stubs to toss before I hit the bathroom for my nightly cleansing and moisturizing ritual.

I had expected nothing.

And that was exactly what I got.

“Morning Mist,” Claudia said when I stepped into her office the next day and found her gazing at a tiny glass jar with branding I recognized to be that of Olga Parks, our main competitor in the older woman’s market.

“Morning to you, too,” I said, wondering at the gleam in her eye.

Claudia shook her head, picking up the glass vial in one hand and holding it before me. “Have you seen this yet?” she demanded.

I glanced at the bottle, hearing the reprimand in her voice. One of my jobs was to keep an eye on the competition, and clearly Claudia thought I had been remiss in this area.

I decided to set her straight. “Olga Parks. Spring line. Two years ago.” I remembered the product well, as I myself had been seeking something to restore the dewy look that seemed to disappear just after my thirtieth birthday. At $65 for two ounces, Morning Mist hadn’t promised to restore moisture—that was the job of the $85 moisturizer it had been paired with. Morning Mist had more of a cosmetic purpose; sprayed on my face, it added a sheen that suggested I had run a mini-marathon during a ninety-degree NYC day. That was a little too much dewiness for me, and I had mentioned that in my report to Claudia, also two years ago.

But my manager had already moved beyond ire to fascination. “Why didn’t we latch on to this concept? It’s pure genius!” she said, spraying the back of her hand and studying the resultant sheen. “Look!” she said, holding out her hand to me, as if the evidence were clear. “When was the last time you saw that kind of glow on your skin?”

“At the gym. It looks like sweat, Claudia. Besides, aren’t we supposed to be focusing now on products for women who are still suffering from excess oils?”

I saw a shudder roll through her, as if the very idea of catering to our younger counterparts disturbed her. “Speaking of which, where is our slick little admin this morning? It’s ten o’clock and she has yet to make an appearance. I need her to run off some sales figures for me.”

I knew from the soft-spoken voice mail waiting for me on the phone this morning that Lori had been feeling a bit under the weather and was going to try to be in by noon. Though I detected in her somewhat despondent message that whatever ailed her was probably more emotional than physical, I covered for her. “She has a touch of a stomach virus. She said she’ll be in by noon.”

“Girls today,” Claudia said with disgust. “Bunch of wimps.” She shook her head. “They’ll never be what we once were, will they, Grace?”

And we’ll never be what they are now, I thought. Ever again.

Not wanting to dwell on that, I decided to steer Claudia back to the purpose of our meeting, which was to debrief me on the corporate agenda that had been hashed out in the Swiss Alps. “I’m ready for the debrief if you are,” I said, eyeing Claudia as she gazed with a mixture of fondness and disgust at the pretty little jar.

“Right,” she said, a look of resignation descending over her aristocratic features. “Well, first I should tell you it wasn’t so much a brainstorming as a corporate screwover. They didn’t invite us up there to come up with the new vision for Roxanne Dubrow, but to cram their new mandate down our throats. I guess Dianne figured her distasteful little plan would go down easier with a little sparkling water and pâté.”

“Don’t tell me Burkeston finally got the go-ahead from Dianne on that product line she’s been testing forever?” Winona Burkeston, Director of Research, was a bit of a maverick. Though she was close to fifty herself, she had been pushing to get a youth line at the company’s forefront for years.

“What, are you living in a cave, Grace? Burkeston’s gone. Has been for what—two months now? They called it a resignation, but I think she was forced out. Dianne sent down the memo herself. Surely you must have—” Claudia frowned. “Maybe I didn’t pass it on to you.” She shrugged, as if the fact that she repeatedly forgot to pass on vital corporate info really wasn’t an issue. “Anyway, she’s been replaced. By a pretty little Brit named Courtney Manchester, who looks like she’s all of sixteen herself and fresh from London with some fancy degree and a pair of tits I’d swear were silicone if I hadn’t caught sight of them in the steam room.” Her eyes narrowed. “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if those perky tits helped push her agenda through. You know how Michael is when it comes to a fresh piece of ass.”

That sent an unexpected stab of heat through me. And why shouldn’t it? Because Michael Dubrow, the baby of the Dubrow clan and only son, had once claimed me as his piece of ass, for a brief, passionate period in my early history at Roxanne Dubrow. But just as quickly as we got caught up in the perilously romantic idea of our being together despite the company-wide stir an affair between the Dubrow heir and the new—well, I was new at the time—Senior Product Manager would create, we were weighted down by those same facts. Well, Michael was, anyway.

“C’mon, Grace, you can’t be serious,” he had said when, during a romantic weekend rendezvous in the Hamptons, I had speculated on the future. “You and I are friends,” he declared, his only acknowledgment of the deeper intimacy I thought we shared indicated by the way he squeezed my hands in his. “Besides we work together. Think of what people might say….”

In truth, the only thing I had been thinking of until that point was that I had found my soul mate. Yes, even I had fallen under the spell of that foolish notion once. In fact, I was so enthralled by the idea of Michael and myself as the future golden couple of the Dubrow clan that I was blind to the reality of us. Instead I was focused on the moment when I could tell the world that I was in love—yes, in love—with Michael Dubrow. But that moment never came. Because as soon as I realized that Michael wasn’t dreaming of an “us,” the very notion effectively ended in my mind.

Ironically, there was no drama at the end, despite the strength of feeling I had developed for him during our short affair. No damning speech. Not even a real breakup. I ended things just as easily as they had started over cocktails at a sales conference four months earlier. Not two weeks after our debacle in the Hamptons, Michael and Dianne came to New York for a few days of meetings. When, at the end of the first day of strategizing in the corporate boardroom, he discreetly suggested we sneak away for an after-work drink, which was usually code for “Let’s go fuck,” I politely declined, saying I needed to get to bed early that night if I hoped to be fresh for our next round of meetings in the morning. It was a clever blow-off on my part. Michael Dubrow considered himself a model employer, and I knew he would never argue with good employee behavior. As predicted, he didn’t argue. And after a while, he stopped asking. Soon enough our relationship went from intensely personal to coolly professional. As if everything that had come before didn’t matter. As if he didn’t matter to me.

Now I knew that, on some level at least, he had.

“What in God’s name is wrong with you?” Claudia asked, startling me out of my reverie.

I quickly composed myself, masking whatever dismay might have shown on my face with a lame excuse about not getting enough sleep the night before. I had to. No one knew about me and Michael. Not Claudia. Not even Angela. And whether out of some warped loyalty to Michael, or a desire not to reveal that bit of romantic foolishness on my part, I wanted to keep it that way.

Fortunately, Claudia was too wound up by the evil she saw in our new corporate direction to be bothered inquiring into my feelings.

“You know that little product line we bought from that floundering U.K. company? Sparkle?” Claudia said, referring to the makeup line we acquired a year ago when the idea of getting into a younger market was just a sparkle in Dianne’s eye. “Dianne—and Michael, I suspect—have decided that this line is going to save Roxanne Dubrow.” She rolled her eyes. “The vision is to rename it in a way that subtly links it to the mother brand—hence, the ‘child’ brand revitalizes the ‘mother.’”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Kind of like how Teen People revitalized People magazine.”

Her eyes narrowed on me, as if I had betrayed her by simply pointing out the rationale of the plan.

I backpedaled a bit, not wanting to get on the wrong side of Claudia so early in the workweek. “So does this ‘child’ have a name?” I said with what I hoped was the right amount of disdain in my voice.

“Oh, it does,” Claudia said, turning her gaze full on me. “Roxy D.”

It was good. And I said as much.

“Well, I’m glad you agree,” Claudia said, her tone thick with irony. “Because a full two-thirds of our marketing budget for this year is now being redirected toward making Roxy D a household name—or should I say a dorm-room name.”

“Hmmm,” I muttered noncommittally, while the impact of that sank in. For the past three years, my role, under Claudia’s leadership, had been to develop marketing and advertising that positioned Roxanne Dubrow as the premiere mature woman’s cosmetic company.

“Now they’ve brought in this little chippy from the U.K., and apparently she’s cast a spell over the whole Dubrow clan—or at least Michael. But you know how Dianne listens to everything her brother says as if he were some sort of marketing genius.” This earned another roll of Claudia’s eyes, as she hated the fact that Michael, simply by virtue of his role as heir to the Dubrow crown, frequently imposed his point of view on everything from marketing to packaging to color palettes. He was very hands-on, and though I was loath to admit it, it was one of the things I had admired about him. His passion for the business. His ambition.

“Suddenly Dianne is positively dazzled by the idea that the Roxy D brand is going to lure all those twentysomethings back to the Roxanne Dubrow counters. And she’s wagering big on that assumption,” Claudia finished, naming a figure that had me sucking in my breath.

The last time our department had seen that kind of money was during the heyday of Roxanne Dubrow’s Youth Elixir—not that I had been around to witness that. Created in the early eighties, Youth Elixir was the moisturizer that Roxanne Dubrow had made its reputation on. Youth Elixir promised to refresh, refine and, most of all, restore all the vital moisture that started to seep out of the skin the moment a woman reached the big 3-0. It was a pretty good product. In fact, I might have been tempted to drop $65 for two ounces of the stuff if I didn’t get it by the case for free.

“So what about the Youth Elixir campaign?” I asked, bewildered about where the money for the advertising for this would come. Youth Elixir had been such a perennial bestseller for Roxanne Dubrow that just six months ago, Dianne had advocated making the moisturizer the center of the Spring campaign. During a corporate strategy meeting held right here in the New York office, she had stated that putting the company’s flagship product on the front lines once more would remind consumers of the powerhouse product that had made Roxanne Dubrow what it is today, and hopefully convince new consumers to try it. But apparently that had all changed.

“It’s on the backburner,” Claudia replied, giving me a look weighted with meaning. As if she saw this as the beginning of some end I could not yet fathom. “The idea is that if we successfully lure the younger market to the counter with Roxy D, they’ll eventually graduate to Roxanne Dubrow.”

“Hmmm,” I said again, wondering at the implications of this for me. After all, the Youth Elixir campaign was to be my campaign to run, under Claudia’s leadership, of course.

As if in answer to my unasked question, Claudia continued, “You and I are going to have our hands full over the next few months working on this dreadful new campaign.”

I looked at her, feeling a bit of relief that I was to have a role in the campaign that was to be the company’s lifeblood, judging from the amount of money we were sinking into it. I had seen the careers of product managers of yesteryear shrink to nothing during budget changes. Though Roxanne Dubrow had acquired other brands over the years, I always felt fortunate to be working on the signature brands, especially when budget time came.

“We need to do some testing, develop a new package,” Claudia was saying now. “Line up the talent for the print campaign….”

My mind immediately began to roam over the current crop of models out there. “Well, there’s no shortage of younger models,” I said finally, realizing that the youth fever had already taken over in most marketplaces. That Roxanne Dubrow might, in fact, be a little late in jumping on this particular bandwagon.

“Oh, Dianne has already made her decision,” Claudia said now, and I could tell how much it irked her to receive all her marching orders from on high. “She wants Irina Barbalovich,” she declared.

I quickly wrapped my mind around that. Irina had been embraced by the fashion world ever since she had been plucked from her parents’ farm in rural Russia to walk the runways of Paris at the tender age of seventeen. In fact, in the past six months, she had gotten more magazine covers than Cindy Crawford at the height of her career. Which meant we were going to pay through the nose for her. Now I understood where most of that budget was going. Irina was the next generation of supermodel, and the fact that Dianne hoped to head up our spring campaign with her was big. Roxanne Dubrow usually chose a no-name stunner they inevitably turned into a star. Now it looked like Dianne was hoping to harness the power of the industry’s latest supermodel. “Didn’t you say they wanted a sixteen-year-old?” I asked, somewhat inanely, still trying to figure out the implications of this for us in marketing. “I think Irina’s closer to nineteen by now…” I continued, remembering a profile I had read of her when she did a recent cover for Cosmo.

“Sixteen, nineteen. Whatever,” Claudia said, waving a hand dismissively, as if anyone under the age of twenty was not worthy of her regard. “She’s the next big thing, and if we don’t bring her on board soon, my dear Grace, we may find ourselves without a campaign at all.”

I didn’t miss the threat beneath her words, but I took it with a grain of salt. Claudia was forever hinting at the annihilation of our jobs. I sometimes wondered if it was the only thing that motivated her to get out of bed and come to work these days.

“We’ll get her,” I said, ready to take on the challenge. After all, there is nothing like a full work life to keep a woman from remembering how empty her love life has suddenly become.