Festival of Deaths(9)

4


SHELLEY FELDSTEIN HAD STARTED out as a dresser of department store windows, and she had been pretty good at it—very good at it—at a very young age. She had started the way all dressers start, as the assistant to an assistant, in a second-rate store with delusions of grandeur. She had just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and had delusions of grandeur herself. Maybe they weren’t such delusions. By the time she was twenty-four, she was chief dresser for her store. By the time she was twenty-six she was head dresser for Saks. By the time she was twenty-eight she was freelance, the single most successful dresser in Manhattan, the kind of person to whom stores paid thousands of dollars to do just one window. She was also married, pregnant, and bored to tears. If she had been born in another time and place, she would have quit working as soon as her baby was born. Having been born in this time and this place, that didn’t seem right. It also didn’t seem right to give up the money. In the year that she was pregnant, Shelley bought home over two hundred fifty thousand dollars, beating her husband’s take from his job as a stockbroker by better than twenty-five grand. Fortunately, Robert didn’t mind. What Shelley minded was the repetitiveness of it. Executives from Saks and Lord & Taylor and Altman’s and Bergdorf Goodman would call her in and tell her they wanted something different, but they wouldn’t mean it. What they wanted was what had come to be called a “Shelley Feldstein Look.” Shelley Feldstein was sick of the Shelley Feldstein Look. It reminded her of the Villager skirt and sweater sets she used to wear in high school. It was that out of date.

Shelley Feldstein had been brought up to be what her mother called “a sensible girl.” She had been taught the importance of things, like home and family, husband and children, security and responsibility. She had been taught the dangers of chasing after butterflies, especially when that meant giving up a good job or a good marriage when you didn’t have anything else on the line. Shelley might have gone on forever, posing faceless black mannequins wearing Christian Lacroix in tableaux meant to resemble the Amazon rain forest, if it hadn’t been for a set of very unusual circumstances. In the first place, Robert took her to Tavern on the Green for dinner, which he hated, because she loved it and it was her fortieth birthday and she had been feeling depressed. In the second place, Robert said something grossly insensitive and made her cry, which he had never done before in all their years together. In the third place, when Shelley had gone to wash her face, she had met Lotte Goldman and DeAnna Kroll in the bathroom.

The reason DeAnna had not been able to get in touch with Shelley was because all but one of the ringers on the phones in Shelley’s apartment were off. They were off because Shelley’s four-year-old had turned them off, which was what he had taken up for a hobby over the last few months. Shelley had gotten up in the night with a headache and gone down to the kitchen for an aspirin, and it was there that DeAnna had found her. The kitchen phone was a wall phone. Jason couldn’t reach it.

Shelley had had her meeting with Lotte and DeAnna five years ago. They had been five good years, in spite of the fact that she was making less money than she had been doing windows. They had been five years of excitement and adventure and very late nights. In fact, Shelley had gotten pregnant with Jason in the warm glow of the euphoria that had visited her after DeAnna made her offer.

Coming into the studio at quarter after four in the morning, carrying a black leather tote bag from Coach full of line drawings and lighting specifications, Shelley felt like a student again, not the forty-five-year-old mother of six. It even made her secretly pleased that the sets she would be dealing with were intended to house such—well, outrageous programs. Shelley loved telling people she worked for The Lotte Goldman Show. Not only did everyone watch it, everyone was shocked by it. When Shelley got a couple of glasses of wine into her, she told stories about what it was like to work with the woman who smoked a cigar with her private parts and the man who had had his balls tattooed. That second one really got to the men, turning them green, making their eyes bulge. It was wonderful.

What was not wonderful was this set left over from the Siamese twins, and Shelley knew it. She dropped her tote back at the door of the studio and walked to the center of the stage, looking at the love seat, looking at the wide-armed club chair Lotte was supposed to sit in for the interview. For one thing, there weren’t enough places to sit. DeAnna had said something on the phone about four couples. For another, the ambiance was wrong. Ambiance was the important thing. People on the outside had no idea. The set of The Lotte Goldman Show might look simple to produce, but it wasn’t, because tone was everything. Get the tone wrong, and you were likely to have the FCC down on your neck, screaming about obscenity.