LITMIR.BIZ

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deep sadness, like a man watching helplessly from the riverbank as floodwaters wash away everything he’s known and accepted as real, solid, indestructible.

      “Yes, it was.” Up ahead, traffic finally jars loose. I skid across the slick seat like a pinball as the cabby swerves into what he perceives to be an opening in the next lane. “We’ll talk later,” I say, adding, “I’ll try to be home by six,” before clapping my phone shut and stowing it back in my bag, shoving that part of my existence right in there with it.

      I swear, sometimes I feel like Batman, living two lives. Except I’d look totally stupid in that outfit.

      We shoot through Times Square and on down Seventh Avenue like a front-runner in the Daytona 500. Something like three seconds later, the taxi screeches to a halt in front of the building that houses Nicole Katz’s showroom and offices, way up in the thirtieth floor penthouse.

      The cabby nods his thanks at the hefty tip—I’m very generous with other people’s money—and I haul myself and the poor unsuspecting garment out of the cab. I can feel the cabby’s eyes glued to my backside as I dodge passersby to get to the revolving door. Considering the amount of clothes I have on, the guy must have some imagination, is all I have to say. Considering how long it’s been since I’ve had anything even remotely resembling sex, I’m not even tempted to take offense.

      Thirty stories and a major head rush later, the elevator opens directly onto reception. Chinoiserie for days, lots of black lacquer and reds and yellows, don’t ask. I’m sure it was cutting edge in 1978. Sprawled across the wall over the reception desk like a row of stoned Bob Fosse dancers, ridiculously large, gleaming gold letters spell out:

      Nicole Katz, Ltd.

      Valerie, our receptionist since Christmas, is too deeply engrossed in what I assume is a personal phone call (frown line snuggled neatly between her dark brows, liberal use of “Ohmigod!”) to acknowledge my return as I pass the desk. Whatever. She’s twenty-one. Engaged. Working at Nicole Katz is not exactly her life’s goal. A year from now, she will be remembered only as what’s-her-name, that brunette receptionist we had a while back, name started with a V, maybe? And she will undoubtedly remember me as the short, chunky chick who wore all those strange hats and weird clothes.

      Our relationship is based on mutual dismissability.

      I yank open one side of the double glass door and walk into the showroom. Which, I observe on a sigh, has been visited in my absence by a small but potent explosive device. Rumpled, discarded samples and fabric swatches obliterate every pseudo-Chinese surface; Joy and leftover cigarette smoke duke it out for air rights. Nikky’s personal handiwork, would be my guess. The devastation is even more grotesque in the harsh winter daylight blaring through the wall-to-wall windows overlooking the Hudson.

      The woman is a total nutcase, but she’s a successful nutcase.

      “Where is it, where is it?” I hear the instant the door shooshes closed, cutting off Valerie’s next “Ohmig—” Before I can answer, Jock, the draper, lunges at me, snatching the box from my hands with only a glancing leer at my wool-swathed chest. “You got a size 8, right?”

      Having done this at least a dozen times in the past year, I do know the drill. “Yes, Jock,” I say, yanking off my hat and shrugging out of my father’s camel topcoat, then one of his Pierre Cardin suit jackets (both altered to fit me), wedging the lot into the mirrored closet next to the showroom doors. I tug down the hem of one of my mother’s Villager sweaters, circa 1968. The dusty rose one with the ivory and blue design across the yoke. Starr has already informed me she wants it when she gets big. We’ll see.

      My desperately-needs-a-trim layered hair crackles like a miniature electrical storm around my head. My Telly Monster imitation. This does not stop Jock from grabbing me, plastering his (not exactly impressive) crotch against my hip and planting a big, sloppy kiss on my cheek. Then he’s off to do what a draper’s gotta do. I hope, for his sake, he got more out of our little encounter than I did.

      Oh, Giaccomo Andretti’s basically harmless, his lothario complex notwithstanding. He’s just a bit doughy and married for my taste. And his view of his skills as a draper is a tad skewed. Jock sees himself as a world-class pattern maker. That he hasn’t draped an original pattern since Dinkins was mayor is beside the point.

      Not that the Versace will be recognizable once its progeny have Nikky’s label in them. She’s not stupid. The lapel will be wider or narrower or ditched altogether; the skirt will be longer or shorter or slit up the back if this one’s slit up the sides; the fabric will be a print if this one’s a solid or solid if this one’s a stripe, silk instead of linen, a fine wool instead of gabardine.

      In other words, this so-called “designer” doesn’t have an original idea rattling around underneath her Bucks County Matron silver pageboy. Her “classic” fit is derived from, quite simply, other designers’ slopers.

      Yep. By three o’clock this afternoon, Jock will have carefully dissected the Versace and traced the pattern from it. By noon tomorrow, Olympia, Jock’s best seamstress, will have so carefully reconstructed it no one will ever know it was apart. And by the next morning, I will have returned said suit to the salesgirl, with the sorrowful explanation my sister didn’t like it, after all.

      And for this I spent four years at FIT.

      Divested of my contraband goods, I hie myself to what passes for my office this week—a banquet table crammed into a corner of the bookkeeper’s office. Apparently my boss can’t quite figure out what I do or where to put me. She only knows she can’t do without me. Or so she says. Which is fine by me. Making myself indispensable is what I do best.

      And yes, I’ve asked for an office. Repeatedly. Nikky keeps saying, “You’re absolutely right, darling, I’ve simply got to do something about that….” and then she promptly forgets about it.

      Before you ask, “And you’re here why?” two words:

      Benefits package.

      A stack of new orders awaits me. In Nikky’s completely indecipherable handwriting. Of course, even if the woman weren’t writing in some ancient Indo-European dialect, since she routinely leaves out things like, oh, sizes and colors…

      At least, these seem to be mostly reorders. So in theory, if I look up the stores’ original orders, I should be able to figure it out.

      In theory.

      Long red nails a blur at her calculator, Angelique, 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

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