“Tomorrow,” Ivy said, “near Milwaukee.” I thought,Milwaukee?“Just nose around for a little featurette, not about this event per se but about these kinds of fashion swap meets.” Ivy pleaded to my better nature. “Nobody writes about this stuff like you do,” she said, meaning this as a compliment. Instead, Ivy transformed the handbag swap meet into an objective correlative for my career. My greatest contribution to arts and letters would be my paeans to purses, my deft analysis of how the new geometrics and the influence of the young royals were pushing boho bags off the shelf in favor of sharply structured pocketbooks.
For you will surely get it, I thought.
“I can’t,” I told Ivy. “What I’m writing about here is life or death and the trial starts... tomorrow.” This was a big gamble. Felicity’s strange case had spread all over the place; Ivy was so delighted by that it bordered on cold-blooded. She could easily turn on her TV and spot the lie. As insurance, I added, “Unless it’s delayed.” Ivy did not reply, an ominous sign.
“Reenie,” she said. Using my name was another ominous sign. “I want you to just pop in at this swap meet. It’ll take you a couple of hours at most. See what people are saying about the brand. Then fill in a little history. Five hundred words.” She added, “I’m not pulling you off your magnum opus.”
I knew when I was beat.
Later that day, back at my parents’ house, I observed thatmy mother had made herself hours late for work to give me breakfast, as if I were a child. Well, I was her child. She asked me if she should work from home. I said not to bother, as all she would be doing was watching me alternate between sleeping and crying.
“This friend?” she said. “Is he or she making you happy? Because you don’t look happy.”
“I think I’m in love.”
“That would explain not looking happy.”
“I think it’s already over.”
“Even more so. Don’t you have too many irons in the fire to start up a love affair?”
“You don’t get to pick the time that’s convenient, Mom.”
“Probably best, though, given the circumstances and suitability of the person.”
“I didn’t fall in love with an unsuitable person.”
“Felicity’s defense lawyer?” my mother said, adding, “Hmm.”
How did she know that? How on earth did she know that, then? I didn’t know then and I still don’t know. But what I said was nothing. Fully Mirandized, I struggled upward to my childhood room, where, yet once more, I started to cry.
Seven
Mourning Dove
Zenaida macroura.Sometimes known as the turtledove, this attractive gray bird, which reminds some observers of a woman in Quaker garb, is one of the most abundant and widespread North American birds. Doves are often hunted, with more than twenty million birds shot annually in the US, both for sport and meat. Some think the bird’s distinctive low call sounds like a lament. In the Bible, John the Baptist referenced a dove to signify innocence. In the second century AD the Roman writer Juvenal said, “Censure acquits the raven, but pursues the dove.”
Now began the hardest time of my life to that point.
What do police say, the training takes over? I would dress and work and eat and drive and make coffee and brush my teeth and remove my mascara at night because I knew how to do those things. I was used to being alone.
I went to the Kate Spade event alone.
Alone, I walked through a field of flower beds fashioned into an elaborate carpet (there was no way to not walk on the flowers, which made me nervous) toward a series of gilded tents set up just outside the ballroom at one of those cornfield castles on the Wisconsin border, purpose-built in the twenty-first century to look like an eighteenth-century English great house.
Kate Spade was my favorite designer. I often thought about her bright and bold and ultimately heartbreaking life, of her death by suicide and her final note reassuring her adored young daughter that Daddy would explain everything. I wished I could have been there to tell her, hold on, tomorrow could be better, tomorrow could be worse, you can always decide that another day will be your last day.
Depression was something I had never experienced. That day, I understood that I was only sad. People had died of a broken heart, but I would not; I was not that finely strung. In time, I might even be happy, albeit without the astonished completedness I had briefly known.
There was a row of huge easel-backed photos of Kate Spade: flanked by a display of purses, with her arms out to embrace the doorway of one of her retail stores, a close-up of her with her sweet, iconic sixties-style French twist hairdo, her smile both mischievous and demure. Behind the easels were boho flourishes, including a pickup truck overflowing with artfully disarrayed baskets of roses and lavender, each bushel basket adorned with a huge patent leather bow. Risers draped with bolts of pink satin were decked with bags and wallets and totes and shoes in characteristic bright primary colors, decorated with pink carousel horses, teddy bears, cartoon pineapples with faces, hearts, and windmills.
I wandered about, desultorily talking to fans and shoppers, writing down a few of the things they said, spending a few extra moments with a woman who described the worth of collecting accessories, smiling because I knew how to do that. An extravagant array of gustatory delights sat there for the taking, mimosas at ten in the morning, tiny baked brioche egg cups, strawberry flan cake. Waiters offered trays of crab puffs. I bit into a baked brioche, swallowing the single bite with difficulty, dropping the rest into a wastebasket. I drank three mimosas in rapid succession, and the swirl of bright colors around me began to pulse and emit a kind of noise like the far-off siren of an approaching police car.
“I’m eating too much,” said Stevie Lan, a casual friend who freelanced forVogue. Carrying a clear plastic sack with five graft purses, he sat down beside me and kissed my cheek. “What’s the big word, Reeno? What’s the big story?”
Normally I would have teased him and demanded that he give me one of the purses as a present for my mom, who had the best collection of purses in Wisconsin. Puzzled by my silence, he handed me one anyhow. I drained another mimosa in two swallows, then examined the bag for country-of-manufacture tags and a collection label. It was a copy, but an excellent copy; the manufacturer had misspelled the Maira Kalman collection designation, replacing one of thea’s in the first name with ano. I tried to laugh, but that proved too big a task. “This is a fake. Fathead fraudsters, learn to spell already,” I said, showing Stevie the error. “All the great criminals have moved out of town.” He said he would keep it anyhow, for his teenage niece, and gave me a white Kate Spade clutch shaped like a seashell.
“So, Reenie, you look a little pale. Maybe pale green.”
