Alternate Side(12)
The job she had now was some steps up from a development job, and it had literally fallen into her lap. The fashion institute had had a lunch to launch its exhibit of a collection of women’s clothes of the Jazz Age, the waitstaff weaving carefully among mannequins wearing beaded shifts, fur neckpieces, cloche hats. The Cobb salads and glasses of iced tea were already on the tables when they sat down.
“When did the Cobb salad become the official lunch food of New York City women?” said the woman on her left, who had given them a modest gift although she could have afforded to give them something larger, and who was seated next to Nora so Nora could pry something larger out of her.
“And why is a Cobb salad called a Cobb salad?” Nora said.
From her other side came a loud, nasal voice: “It’s named for the owner of the Brown Derby in Hollywood, who invented it. Out of leftovers.”
Nora swiveled. “Well, thank you for that,” Nora said, in her best development-officer voice, trying to read the woman’s place card without obviously squinting. (She would really have to talk to the staff about making the names larger on the place cards.) “And I’m so pleased that you’re interested in the institute. May I call you Bebe?”
“You can call me Queen Elizabeth if you’d like,” the woman said, pulling the soft center out of the popover on her bread plate. “I’m not interested in the fashion institute. I’m interested in you. I want to offer you a job.”
As soon as she got home that evening she called Christine and told her about the meeting she had had after lunch, which had taken place in the backseat of a Mercedes SUV. “She’s insane,” Nora said. “She wants to start her own museum, from scratch, and she wants me to run it.”
“What kind of a museum?”
“Jewelry. She wants to start a museum of jewelry with her own collection, which apparently is pretty large, and the collections of her friends after they die. She says she has two friends who are already willing to kick in.”
There was a long silence. “Crazy, right?’ Nora said.
“It’s a fantastic idea,” Christine said. “It’ll be a huge success, Nonnie. Women will beat down the door.”
Nora was the one who was silent this time. Her sister and her husband had started a business in Seattle making yoga clothes with inspirational sayings written in tiny, almost imperceptible letters at the nape of the neck or the edge of the cuff, which Nora had thought was a waste of two good college educations. Each time Nora read a piece about the company—and there were many pieces about the company now—the number of millions it was said to be worth rose. Nora had once made the mistake of saying at a business lunch that her sister was the Christine of Small Sayings—“Shouting Is So Over” was their slogan—and she’d had to listen to fifteen minutes about the cotton, the fit, the durability, even the sayings, which Nora had once compared to those found in fortune cookies. “I know it sounds silly, but every time I put on that shirt that says ‘Today might just be the best day of my life’ on the hem, I feel good,” the director of development at Hunter College had said.
“I have that shirt!” her assistant had chimed in.
“Oh, come on, who’s going to beat down the doors to look at jewelry?” Nora said to Christine. “If you want to look at jewelry you can just walk into Harry Winston.”
“Ordinary people aren’t going to walk into Harry Winston. They made me feel like a shoplifter the one time I was in there. Even Tiffany’s makes you feel uncomfortable. But with a museum you’re inviting them in and not even asking them to buy. Although the gift shop opportunities here are major. Major. You’ll get all those women who want to own some big honking opal but could never afford it and are thrilled to have a facsimile. Your whole crazy city is aspirational now, people spending more than they can afford, trying to live a big life that’s beyond them. This is perfect. It will be huge, I’m telling you.”
And her sister had been right. Despite condescending comments in the art magazines and a few digs in the newspapers, the Museum of Jewelry took off almost from the day its heavy steel-and-smoked-glass double doors opened. There wasn’t much of the sort of work Nora had done before, raising money from people who were constantly being asked to write a check, the ones who were tired of being asked and the ones who just loved the attention. The museum had a decent endowment; Bebe sold three Impressionist oil paintings she said she had always found depressing, and supplemented that with a chunk of her late husband’s massive investment portfolio. And they had a large, rather handsome space that Bebe owned outright. Her husband had been a real estate developer, who, she said, saw Chelsea as an up-and-coming area before anyone else did. He had built a square Brutalist building close to the river that he intended to market as a mall for galleries, “one-stop shopping for the discerning collector.” (One of the things her husband loved about her, Bebe liked to say, was that she wrote his slogans.) But significant galleries were not charmed by the mall idea, and less significant ones couldn’t afford the rent, and then Bebe’s husband had died, went, according to Bebe, “out like a light in the car on the way home from Le Cirque.” Bebe took a tour of the empty building while the estate was being settled and, as she liked to tell reporters, she had a brainstorm while looking down at her cuff bracelet: the museum was born.