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.
3
“Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.”
—Mae West
If Roxanne Dubrow’s new marketing plan sent a shudder through Claudia, it was like a balm to my soul. As I put together an agenda for the coming month, filled with meetings with New Product Development, entertaining bids from ad firms, talking with the sales reps about in-store positioning, I knew I was going to be okay. Even Lori seemed to shrug off her own personal crisis when I filled her in on what needed to be done for the new campaign. Maybe it was the excitement of seeing the new product that would one day be Roxy D, as boxes of Sparkle had already been shipped in from the Dubrow compound on Long Island for us to review. Or maybe it was the dozen long-stems Dennis had sent, which seemed to ameliorate any wounds his newly announced future plans had caused. For a brief moment, I even hoped for my own long-stems—not that I wanted Ethan back, but a girl did like a man to grovel a bit. Although I hardly expected that from Ethan. One of the few things he and I had in common was a stubborn streak a mile wide.
Besides, I had already begun to build up a wall of indifference to him.
So I was dually armed when I found myself sitting before the one person whose whole purpose, at least for the forty-five minutes a week we spent together, was to probe at whatever feelings she believed I was having.
Shelley Longford, my therapist.
“You broke up with him?” Shelley said after I had blithely related the story of my mishap with Ethan, after spending more than half the session seated in the chair across from her in a tiny, nondescript office on the fourth floor of an equally nondescript office building on W. 72nd Street, relating the more mundane details of my life. The new campaign at Roxanne Dubrow. The fact that I was having trouble getting my super to come up and fix a crack that had begun in the ceiling of my pretty, albeit ancient, bathroom. I think I was starting to bore myself, which probably made me blurt out the news of my breakup.
In truth, I took a certain satisfaction in the shock that wreathed Shelley’s normally composed features. I had been seeing her just four months, and this was the first time I seemed to get some sort of rise out of her. The most I had seen before was a nervous tuck of that shiny dark hair behind her ear, or a narrowing of her dark eyes. Now, after her somewhat harried exclamation, I felt a sort of…triumph.
“Well, what would you have done?” I asked now, knowing she would somehow find a way to turn the question back on me. This therapy business was so tricky, and if it hadn’t been for the endless prodding of the social worker on my case, I wouldn’t even be here. It was so pointless somehow. I had been coming once a week for four months now, sitting across from a woman I didn’t know—and didn’t want to know, judging by the tastefully drab decor of her office, her bad haircut, her aloof manner and the fact that I was paying her $140 for forty-five minutes of relative silence while she asked questions that seemed to have nothing to do with me. Questions that always seemed to lead to one answer—an answer I refused to give her.
“Well, there are a lot of things one could do in a situation like the one you experienced with Ethan,” Shelley began, carefully leaving herself out of the answer as I’m sure she was trained to do. See what I mean? How can you warm up to someone like this?
I raised my eyebrows, stubbornly resisting the impulse to make life easier for her as I waited for her to fill me on all these options I allegedly had now that Ethan Lederman the Third had accidentally let a few of his precious sperm loose in a woman he had been sleeping with for months, yet somehow couldn’t see himself actually propagating with.
“You could have talked,” she said, after a lengthy pause. A pause that cost me quite a few bucks at these rates. I could have invested in the new Stila lip shade with more result.
“About?” I said, not wanting to give her anything.
“Your options,” she said.
“Options?” I began, feeling my temper suddenly—and surprisingly—spike. “Let’s see, what exactly were the options that Ethan Lederman the Third presented me with? Ah, yes. There was the douche—very clever on his part. Made me wonder if he’d ever been down this road before. Oh, and then there was the morning-after pill. That’s right. Get rid of it before it even gets started. Nice clean solution. Better than say, throwing it in the Hudson after it was born….”
When I saw I had not managed to make a dent in that composure of hers, I continued, “Look, the bottom line is he wanted nothing to do with anything real between us. It was all too glaringly apparent that he didn’t want a child with me. That he didn’t want…me.”
This last word came out on a squeak, making me realize how
