the bookkeeper du jour, doesn’t even glance over. “Thought you’d like that,” she says in her Jamaican accent. Nikki is nothing if not an equal-opportunity employer. In the past three months, we’ve had one Italian, one Chinese, and two Jewish bookkeepers of various genders and sexual orientations. And now Angelique, who I give two more weeks, tops. Especially as her crankiness indicators have been rising quite nicely over the past few days. It takes a special person to work here. Sane people need not apply.
“Nikky said to tell you Harry needs these ASAP so he can figure out the cutting schedules and get them to the subs.”
The subcontractors. Better known as the sweatshops that permeate the relentlessly drab real estate over on 10th and 11th Avenues, filled with seamstresses who speak a dozen different languages, none of which happen to be English. Skirts that retail for two-four-eight-hundred bucks, cut out by the dozens by powersaws on fifty-foot long cutting tables, stitched together by industrial sewing machines that sound like 747 engines, for which the sub gets a few bucks a skirt. Which is not what the seamstresses get, believe me. But hey—Nikky can say her products are American-made.
Of course, I can’t sit at my ersatz desk because my chair is piled with samples dumped there by God-knows-who. So I gather them up—from the current fall line, we’re all sick to death of them—and haul them back to the showroom, thinking maybe I should straighten out the showroom before Sally, Nikki’s saleswoman, sees it.
“Je-sus!”
Too late.
I shoulder my way through the swinging door, my arms full, to be greeted by large, horrified blue eyes. Sally Baines is the epitome of elegant, with her softly waved, ash-blond hair and her restrained makeup. Today our lovely, slim, fiftyish Sally is tastefully attired, as usual, in Nikki’s (cough) designs—a creamy silk blouse tucked into a challis skirt in navy and dark green and cranberry paisley, a matching shawl draped artfully over her shoulders and caught with a gold and pearl pin.
“An hour, I was gone.” The words are softly spoken, precisely English-accented. “If that. How can she do this much damage in one bloody hour?”
This is a rhetorical question.
“Come on,” I say, hefting the samples in my arms up onto the rack, then turning to the nearest mangled heap. “I’ll help.”
I hear the ghosts of anyone who’s ever lived with me laughing their heads off. Okay, so I’m not exactly known as the Queen of Tidy.
Just as Sally and I are cleaning up the last of the debris, in this case lipstick-marked coffee cups and full ashtrays, Nikki sweeps in through the doors, swathed in Autumn Haze mink and looking as fresh as three-day-old kuchen. She scans the now-clean room (I’m brought to mind of those insurance commercials where the destruction is undone by running the film backwards), then beams at us as much as the Botox will allow.
“You two are absolute angels,” she says, sweeping over to me to give me a one-armed hug. “Angels. I would have straightened up myself later, you know that—”
Sally and I avoid looking at each other.
“—but I got stuck at lunch with my attorney and time just got away from me. Did you get the suit? Is Harold here? Did my daughter call?”
“Yes, I don’t think so, and not that I know of,” I said, wondering why she doesn’t ask Vanessa or Virginia or whatever the hell her name is, since, um, she’s the one paid to answer the phone?
Harold, by the way, is Nikky’s husband. You’ll undoubtedly meet him later. Lucky you.
Nikky goes on about whatever it is Nikky goes on about for another thirty seconds or so, then sweeps into the back to assuredly wreak more havoc, leaving a zillion startled molecules in her wake. Ten seconds later, the yelling starts.
So Harold is here. He has a teensy office, way in the back (where all good bogeymen live) just large enough for him to run his own business from. And what business might that be, you ask? Okay…picture some Lower East Side bargain emporium, racks and racks of sleazy little tops for $5.99. Those are Harold’s. He actually hires a—picture quotation marks drawn in the air—designer to crank out these things, which are then produced someplace where monsoons and leeches are taken seriously. We all try to ignore him, but unfortunately he periodically emerges from his lair, snarling and snapping, to fight with his wife and piss me—and everybody else—off. An occupation in which he is apparently presently engaged.
Sally bequeaths me a sympathetic glance as I haul in a breath, close my eyes and reenter the Twilight Zone. However, I think as I return to my cubbyhole and begin logging all those orders onto the computer so I can print out the cutting list so Harry, our production manager, can order fabric and send specs over to the subs, compared to some jobs I could name, this one is downright cushy. There is that medical plan, for one thing. And I tell myself, as I often do, that one must endure a certain amount of indignity on the way to the top, if for no other reason than to be able to enjoy inflicting similar indignities on those underneath you when you get there.
It’s all part of some divine plan. Or at least, part of my plan. After five agonizing years on salesfloors and in buyer’s offices, Seventh Avenue is a major, major step. “Assistant to name designer,” the ad had said.
Yeah, well, she has a name all right. But then, so do we all.
Actually, Nicole isn’t her real name. My guess is Rivkah Katz didn’t quite project the image she was looking for. Not much call for babushkas in the Hamptons. But for all her hard work (cough), for all her stuff isn’t cheap (as opposed to her husband’s stuff, which redefines the word), you won’t find Nicole Katz Designs in Bendel’s or Barney’s or Bloomie’s. You won’t find Gwyneth or Renee or Julia sporting her togs. Anna Wintour isn’t wetting her pants to get a sneak peek at her fall line.
You will, however, find her clothes tucked away in Better Sportswear in Macy’s or L&T or Dayton’s, in boutiques catering to well-off women of a certain age. You might catch the broad-stroked sketches splashed across a full page in the Times twice a year, showcasing her pretty silk blouses and fine wool skirts; a cashmere twinset; a suit, suspiciously familiar. Pricey enough to be taken seriously by many, but not pricey enough to be taken seriously by those who—supposedly—count. No doubt about it, Nikky Katz is solidly second tier. But she’ll never be first tier, never have her clothes mentioned in the same breath as Prada or Klein (either one) or Versace.
The thing is, though, she’s in a damn good position for someone whose talent is limited to sticking with the tried-and-true. And for knowing which designs to knock off. Hey—the woman’s raking it in hand over fist, producing a stable product that continues to sell by dint of its not being subject to the whims of the rich, bored twenty-somethings that fuel the upper echelons of the fashion industry. Her customers depend on her to give them what works, and in twenty years, she hadn’t disappointed them yet.
All in all, not a bad gig. Especially as she’s all but invisible, way up here in her snug little niche, her customers clinging to her like bees to a hive. Neither the big designers nor the young and hungry newbies want her market share. Ergo, in one of the most fatuous, unpredictable, unstable industries in the world, Nikky Katz’s business is as solid and safe as Fort Knox.
Which is why she’s my idol.
chapter 2
Now before you say, “You are one totally sick puppy,” hear me out.
God knows, I don’t emulate
