Marcus appeared about to throw up. Where would he find horses on a Saturday afternoon? How would he locate Padraig and face the towering tantrum that would ensue when the photographer was forced to do a reshoot on short notice? As if she could read his thoughts, Ivy told him, “I’ll handle Padraig. You get the elements. Wisconsin and Michigan and those places are... the fucking Midwest. There have got to be plenty of horses.”
“We have to get them here and I have to book the indoor warehouse space again...”
“No, an outdoor space, like a ranch or a farm.”
“Okay,” Marcus said. He angled his eyes at me. I was from Wisconsin. Marcus was from Brooklyn. Surely, I had relatives who got up early to milk the cows? I smiled and shrugged.
“Well, Marcus, if it has to be tomorrow, I mean first thing, daylight, that will have to work, Marcus,” Ivy said. She had used his full given name twice. Marcus was on her official shit list, although he’d had nothing to do with the feature story, which was called “Taking the Veil.”
Ivy turned to me. “Now about that story. Reenie, as you know,Fuchsiais aspirational. This idea of yours feels...” She shuddered. “It feels very sordid. This woman is a sex worker. We’re about fashion as communication. Issues that face women. This is crime pure and simple, and it could also be seen as voyeuristic.”
With intention, I let my eyes rest pointedly on the scantily clad model with the big hat covering her lady parts.
Ivy snorted. “Okay, Reenie. Point taken.”
“It’s anything but simple, Ivy. The story is in how she got this way, Ivy. When we knew each other, she was admired. She was respected. Even by the teachers and... community leaders.”
“Maybe she was sexually abused.”
“Her father was a minister.”
“Well,” Ivy said, with some satisfaction. “There you go.”
“Even if it were that straightforward, and I’m betting that it’s not, last I heard, domestic and sexual abuse and objectification were indeed issues that face women. Those are issues women face throughout their lives, from girls to elders.”
Marcus said, “It sounds utterly depressing, Reenie.”
I turned on him. “Don’t you have to see a man about a horse?”
“I just don’t know if our reader is curious about what drives the life of a high-priced escort...”
“Oh wait,” I said, holding up one hand and peering down at my phone. “I have to get rid of this. Give me a second.” I took a few steps away and, in a whisper, voice-texted Marcus:If you don’t stand by me on this, you are dead to me. I will never fix you up with another spectacular woman...Marcus was as straight as the fabled strip of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable Lake Shore Drive where our office building stood, but he was also beautiful and worked for a women’s fashion magazine. Surrounded every day by epically gorgeous female creatures, he sometimes protested his heterosexuality too much, and some of those women ended up thinking Marcus really wanted to go shopping with them instead of going to bed with them.
Now, glancing at his phone, he said quickly, “On the other hand, anybody would be fascinated by this. Man or woman. Young or older. Clearly, something profound happened.”
I put in, “This isn’t a lifestyle piece, Ivy. This isn’t a story about courtesan couture. It’s a story about a brilliant, beautiful woman, a good person, who left home and started doing this a long time ago, when she wasn’t even old enough to drink. Right now, she’s barely twenty-seven and she might spend the rest of her life in prison. I’m not saying that I’m sorry for her. But I’m curious. Aren’t you?”
Ivy adjusted the lacy bib of her six-hundred-dollar coveralls. Denim would be the next big thing. We never knew whether Ivy created fashion trends or intuited them from cultural clues, like sounds only dogs could hear. But she was invariably right: ten seconds after our story last year about the return of plaid, (“Tartan Is on Trend!”), everyone was wearing kilts.
Ivy said, “I don’t think so, Reenie.”
“Well,” I said and took a deep breath and let it out slowly, “then I’d like to request a leave of absence. To cover this. A few months. Someone will buy it.” Ivy slowly shook her head, side to side.
There was a long pause. If Ivy had said just one more word, I’d have taken it all back. In the ordinary run of things, wherever I worked, I would still have had a good year ahead of me of answering phones and bringing people research files before I wrote anything except “Snowball Boosters, left to right, include Hale Shipson III and Ginger Rayburn Shipson...” I recalled how my hair smelled after a long night of tending bar and sometimes waiting tables at Angel on the Rock, especially on Thursdays, when the nightly special was fried oysters and onion rings with sauerkraut, and how the head under my hair hurt from the smell of the strong coffee and the sound of impassioned poetry. Just as not everyone who is beautiful is good, not everyone who is earnest is a poet.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t like Angel on the Rock... It’s one of a cluster of restaurants owned by the older brother of a friend of mine, all in the Chicago area but each of them themed to represent a different iconic seaside town somewhere in the world. Angel on the Rock is themed after Brighton, in England, a resort town with a huge coastline and boardwalk beach pier where families huddled on the sand. Its chosen art form is poetry. There’s one called Seven Gables, that pays homage to the sights of Salem, Massachusetts, where the patrons told ghost stories, often in costume, and he had planned one as an homageto Mykonos, that Greek hillside town with its candy-colored houses and buildings like chunks of chalk, where solo musicians would be invited to perform.
I’d stayed at Angel on the Rock for two years, doing occasional freelance stories (“Ten Ways to Look Like a Diva in Thrift”... “Ten Ways to Ace an Interview”... “How to Be a Good Parent After a Bad Childhood”... “How to Start a Book Club for Serious Readers”... “How to Host a Dinner Party for Twelve for $100”... “Know Your Physician’s Politics”) for online zines.
During this time, I lived with Daniel and Steven, married medical students who were having twins by surrogacy with Elodie, another medical school classmate. In the aggregate they were the three most beautiful people probably in Chicago at the time. All that genetic grace and hope had the effect of making me feel dumb and lonely.
So I went to graduate school, figuring on even more onerous student debt but getting a scholarship because the dean was a friend of my mom’s, which made me feel like a Hollywood A-lister who bought her kid’s way into USC, but in reverse.
I’d had a lucky life. My luck held.
And then, just by chance, right out of grad school,Fuchsia.
Mine was not a good job, it was a great job.
