The Drifter(55)
“Gavin, I got a job!” Betsy shouted over the traffic noises into a pay phone at 72nd and Lexington. “It’s at a fancy shop on Madison, working for a rug dealer.”
“A what dealer?” he said.
“A rug dealer, not a drug dealer. It pays in cash, you know, under the table. The owner seems a little sketchy, but I’ll just be answering phones and stuff. Now that I’m describing it to you I’m realizing I may as well be working for a drug dealer, but it’s a job.”
Gavin sang “Let the River Run” from Working Girl into the phone, and they celebrated with Indian takeout and a bottle of cheap champagne.
Three months later, she was sitting at her desk with one hand cupped around a hazelnut coffee from the deli on the corner, paging through the New York Post with the other, feeling as employed as she ever had. Hazelnut coffee had become her new obsession, and she had one for breakfast and lunch because it was all she could afford, even though she was almost certain it was the source of some significant gastric distress. Regardless, she lost eight pounds on her new regimen and had no plans to stop. When she looked up, she wasn’t entirely surprised to see a couple of serious-looking men in dark suits walking through the door, carrying badges that identified them as IRS officers, since her boss had been dodging their increasingly persistent phone calls since the day she’d started. In a rare prescient moment, she stashed the Rolodex on the desk into her backpack. The next day when she showed up for work, the door was padlocked.
About a week later, she downed a double espresso and worked up the nerve to spin through the contact cards and start calling some of the designers she had met at the shop for job leads. One of her favorites, Kenneth Marks, a small, pinched decorator who was constantly taking $30,000 rugs out on memo and hauling them to Litchfield County for a particularly indecisive client, said he would put in a good word for her with the human resources department at an esteemed auction house.
“Wear something nice, Elizabeth,” said Kenneth.
“What do you mean?” she asked, glancing down at her Levi’s, realizing that she was still wearing the white, ribbed tank top she’d slept in.
“I mean, not that ratty Muppet-fur sweater that you wear every day, and those shoes,” he added.
Betsy looked toward the pile of shoes near the front door and found the offending footwear, black loafers with large, square block heels. She could feel her face burn hot with shame.
“Look, you’re well-spoken and you’re smart. You can be charming, when you want to be. And you’re sort of blonde, which helps. I know you don’t think people notice or care that you walk around with that red backpack and rotate the same three work outfits,” he said, “but . . .”
“But what?” Betsy’s face burned a little more, but with pride this time. That Kenneth thought she was smart came as a pleasant surprise. Ever since she arrived in New York, Betsy found herself constantly on the verge of apologizing for going to a state school, in the South no less. Whenever she would meet someone and the talk would start about where they went, usually in that coded, subtle way of naming the location of the college rather than its name (New Haven not Yale, Cambridge not Harvard, Philly not Penn), or dropped references to boarding school and summers spent in Maine or on Nantucket, Betsy would notice her pulse quickening a bit in anticipation of her end of the conversation. She would avoid talking about it, if she could. If someone pressed the issue, she would have to explain, again, why she went to school in Florida to some guy who felt superior to her because he grew up riding the train into town to chain-smoke at Moran’s, or some other date-rapey bar on the Upper East Side. The truth was, when she was in high school, she didn’t realize she had options. Money was tight. The guidance counselor at her high school was brain-dead. She got in, with a little scholarship money. She went. The end. “What is it? But what?”
“But people do. They notice. I think it’s time for you to break out that emergency credit card and use it to buy some heels, a decent coat, and maybe even a bag. It doesn’t have to be Hermès, just something spunky. Because it is. An emergency.”
She took Kenneth’s advice and headed to Bloomingdale’s on 60th and Lexington, but even after the splurge—the slightly stumpy Charles Jourdan heels, green Coach bag, khaki blazer, and button-down shirt (which she scored for a steal in the boys’ department) that she wore with a black stretchy skirt she bought in 1987 for a high school choral performance—she felt conspicuous. When she arrived at the strange little gazebo filled with stacks of catalogues off of the lobby, the three women standing behind it, each wearing a different jauntily tied silk neck scarf and a sleekly tailored navy jacket, looked at her like they had just heard the best joke ever told.
Betsy had thought that Kenneth was being charitable when he sent her in for the interview. Once she passed through the gleaming brass doors into the marble lobby, past the guard in the weird gilded cage and up the important stairs, she was struck by the swirl of officious-looking mean girls filing through the turnstiles in the lobby, and she realized that Kenneth must have detected that glint of uncertainty, even a smidge of self-hatred, in her eyes. He must have known that Betsy was hungry to prove something. He may also have suspected that Betsy had a secret, though he couldn’t possibly have guessed what it was. “How may we assist you?” asked the tallest of the three, who had the curious posture of an ostrich and Princess Di hair.