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
