and a blue silk hip-length tunic with my hair loose over my shoulders. The photographer hadn’t shown up yet.
‘Thanks.’ She quickly ate two sandwiches, finished the drink. I sat down in front of her, fighting to keep my mind on this woman, this moment. An interview with WWD was a dream come true, but I could still feel Thorne in my mouth, his hard-on against my stomach, his hands kneading my ass.
Aileen fished into her backpack, extracted a notebook and pen. I uncrossed my legs, sat up. A chance in a million, Nicole, I thought. Don’t blow it.
‘You always show only twelve bags. Is that right?’
‘A lot of hard work goes into making a bag. It’s all I can manage right now.’ I threw a look at the front door. ‘Where’s your photographer?’
‘I told him to come at seven-thirty. I wanted to get some facts down and a little human interest stuff. Never hurts.’ Aileen wrote something down in her notebook. ‘OK. How did you start?’
‘Making bags when I was a kid,’ I said, happy to move away from the number twelve. ‘I’d cover paper bags with magic marker doodles, then sew ribbons on them for straps. By the time I got to high school I’d moved on to cloth bags, selling them to my friends for a couple of bucks each.’
‘Why handbags?’
‘Here I was, six, seven years old wanting desperately to be grown-up. Grown-ups wear heels and handbags. I knew I couldn’t make heels with paper bags. Besides shoes only hold feet. A bag, it can hold all you need to get through the day. You can hide a secret inside if you want.’
‘Not if you have kids.’
‘You’re right.’ I went over to the work table and picked the closest bag, a patchwork satchel in different shades of grey. ‘That’s why my bags all have a hard-to-find pocket that I hope will keep a secret safe. At least from kids.’ I opened it up and handed it to her. ‘See if you can find it.’ I loved going through my mother’s bags, rolling and unrolling the lipstick, running her silver-edged comb down my hair, burying my nose inside and taking long sniffs of that wonderful mom smell that always made me feel safe. Until the day I found a letter tucked under the lining where the stitching had come undone. She had folded it and refolded it so many times the page was falling apart.
Aileen rustled through the bag. ‘I can’t find the pocket.’
‘On the outside.’ I upended the bag, showed her the two-inch slit. I extracted a note, showed it her.
‘“Desire,”’ she read. ‘Clever idea.’
‘I’d go to Barnes and Noble and look through all the fashion magazines to get ideas. My idol was Princess Di, of course, like every other girl I knew. She wore the most elegant bags.’
‘You’re young. Mine was Audrey Hepburn.’
‘I’ve seen her in a few movies on TV. She was great-looking.’
Aileen sighed, reached for another sandwich. ‘Go on. I’m listening.’
‘I made a clutch for Princess Di cut out of an old tweed coat.’ That coat had belonged to my father. Mom was throwing it away because he had just thrown us away. He’d gone, to another woman, to another city, state, country. I never did find out.
‘I sewed sequined Ds all over it and sent it to Kensington Palace.’ I poured my heart into that purse. I was desperate to make something beautiful. The purse was meant for Mom – her name was Dorothy. A present to stop her sobbing day and night, but she didn’t want it. She didn’t want anything or anyone except my father. I had read in the magazines that Princess Diana was also unhappy so I sent her the bag. ‘She sent me a handwritten thank-you note. I treasured it for years.’
‘If she’s the one who wrote it and not some secretary. It should be worth a sum if you want to sell it.’
‘It got lost in a move.’ I buried the note with my mother along with my father’s letter she’d kept all those years.
Aileen checked the time on her cellphone, frowned. ‘Who are your backers?’
‘Backers? The bank.’
‘A young woman with no business experience? You must have really impressed them.’
‘I got lucky. And I had some money of my own.’ What had gotten Desire, Inc. started was a small inheritance from Mom and selling the house I’d grown up in in Newburgh. The bank had stepped in after two years, when I had something to show them.
The sound of the buzzer. ‘That must be the photographer.’
‘Better be. I’ve got to be uptown at the Lauren show in thirty minutes. Thank God they never start on time.’
Leila stepped out of the elevator.
‘Hey, good morning,’ I said in too loud a voice, happy at the interruption. Aileen’s questions had unleashed bad memories and Thorne was still on me.
Leila walked in with a kid in tow. ‘Meet Kyle.’ Loaded down by two enormous cameras, Kyle looked all of twenty. He was in jeans and a Pink Floyd sweatshirt that hadn’t seen a washing machine in months. A Yankees cap worn backwards held shoulder-length hair in some kind of order. He had a cute, sleepy face.
‘You get lost?’ Aileen stood up and brushed the breadcrumbs off her skirt. ‘After I pick the bags you got ten minutes to shoot.’ She turned to me. ‘I do the picking. Maybe you want to go to your office or somewhere. Put some more makeup on. And pin your hair up. Shame to waste that neck. We’ll take a picture of you before we go.’
I raised my hands in surrender. I wasn’t about to argue with WWD. At least not at this point of my career. As I walked toward my office Leila winked at me. I laughed. My losing control always gave her a kick.
‘What’s with necks?’ I asked Leila as soon as Aileen and her photographer left.
‘Beats me.’ Leila hated her own neck, which was much longer than mine. She thought it made her look like a giraffe. I thought it made her look regal. ‘You’ll be happy to know she picked all the funky bags without my help.’
‘Good.’ I walked into the office, a windowless room just large enough to fit two IKEA desks and chairs, a metal filing cabinet I’d found at the Salvation Army and a drawing board. To spruce up the place I had covered the walls with my watercolour designs, even the ones I had rejected. Leila had added a sprinkling of bright Tunisian tiles from her own collection. Geoffrey had offered to decorate the office for free, but I liked to work in an efficient, pared-down space. Luckily so did Leila. It was our private work space. No client was allowed in.
Leila followed. ‘You should have worn that new green top. Brings out your eyes.’
I groaned. ‘The article is never going to appear.’
‘It will.’
‘I usually appreciate your confidence, but today I find it irritating.’ I sat down. ‘Let’s go over the last orders.’
Leila sat back, folded her arms and grinned at me, which was even more irritating.
‘What?’
