Sheer, p.12
Sheer, page 12
“I have,” he said. His bushy eyebrows crinkled. “This business of yours—”
“Reveal.”
“—yes, Reveal. You’re serious about it?”
“Of course I am. It’s my calling.”
“Your calling?”
“Yes. I’ve been doing people’s makeup my whole life. It’s what I was born to do.”
“Founding a business is not the same thing as an artistic calling.”
I fingered the rim of my coffee mug. “I can learn how to build a business. Talent and passion—those aren’t things you can teach.”
A reluctant smile spread over Donald’s lips. “I would agree with that,” he said. “Still, in my experience creative talent and business acumen rarely coexist in the same person.”
“If you feel that way, why would you invest in Reveal?”
“I did it for me. For my personal brand. These days, people like a power couple. It gives you a social edge. Trophy wives have lost their currency. We can’t be a power couple if my wife’s spending all day in the hair salon while her candles collect dust.” Donald cleared his throat. “Ellen thinks this is her investment and her business. You won’t do anything to change her mind.”
“Sorry?”
“Ellen is not a businesswoman. There’s no harm in letting her think it, though, for the sake of appearances. Make no mistake: I am running this show.” Donald leaned in closer to me. I could smell his dried sweat. “Image is everything, Maxine. Don’t you ever forget it.”
Donald’s message about appearances didn’t scare me as it should have. I was a beauty founder: Who knew more about the importance of that than I did? At the time, I thought his concern was for how his marriage to Ellen looked, how it reflected on his own prowess as a man and a financial titan. I was too young to recognize that the image he referred to also included me. As for the revelation about his role in Reveal, my age protected me there, too. At twenty-three, I believed that I could handle, with ease, the injection of a little male involvement—and money—into the skin of Reveal. I was a visionary. The company didn’t exist without me. Naivete and hubris are the vertebrae of youth; they gave me a conviction that my inexperience didn’t merit.
By 6:45 a.m., Donald was gone from the apartment. Ellen seemed to see him as infrequently as I did. She would wake and press a buzzer next to her bed. A maid in a full uniform of a black dress and white lace apron, straight out of a movie, would enter her room, draw the curtains, and set the newspapers on the end of her bed. The maid would then leave and return a few minutes later with black coffee, toast, fruit, and one soft-boiled egg on a silver tray. Most mornings, I kept Ellen company.
After my encounter with Donald, I watched her eat breakfast from my usual position in a stuffed armchair. The room smelled of newspaper ink and of Ellen’s extra-dark toast. A paisley silk robe was wrapped around her pajamas; reading glasses were perched on her unmade-up face. I wore the striped cotton pajama set Ellen had loaned me on my first night and that I had slept in ever since. As a child, I had never sat and watched my mother read the paper or eat breakfast. I couldn’t recall my mother ever enjoying a leisurely morning meal.
The newspaper rustled as Ellen turned the page. She considered me with her penetrating gaze.
“I’m very proud of you,” she said.
My body seemed to float out of the chair.
“Thanks, Ellen.”
“I mean it, Maxine. You are so disciplined and devoted.”
I had no social life, no friends, nothing except for Reveal and Ellen—I wasn’t so much devoted as I was a monk, the occasional night out aside.
“You remind me of myself,” Ellen continued, which I understood to be a high compliment, narcissism being the pinnacle of praise. “You will do anything to succeed. It’s thrilling to watch.”
“Thanks, Ellen,” I repeated, at a loss for any other reply.
Ellen smiled.
“Keep up the good work,” she said, then returned to her newspaper.
Ellen, I realized, lived a complete lie. She wasn’t a businesswoman or a hardcore achiever. She had a Park Avenue existence paid for exclusively by her husband. The closest she had approached success was a defunct candle business. In that respect, she wasn’t so different from my mother. Though there was a crucial distinction: my mother wasn’t a fool; she was aware of how imbalanced her circumstances were. That’s why she was so dissatisfied. Ellen was too delusional to recognize her unhappiness.
I could feel that Ellen’s praise was sincere. It warmed me. Unlike my parents, she saw my ambition and rewarded me for it. She wanted Reveal to succeed. So did Donald, even if he only cared how that success appeared. On the surface, our agendas were mostly aligned. If I probed beneath that surface, though, I felt a deep sadness for Ellen. Donald had said trophy wives were no longer in fashion, but to my eyes that was still exactly what Ellen was.
* * *
—
I negotiated a deal to sell Flush at the Bloomingdale’s and Henri Bendel department stores—without any help from my estranged father, I should add. Since I only had one product, Reveal didn’t merit a full counter setup, like the ones I had operated behind during my Macy’s days. Each store erected a small display, a table piled high with Flush bottles, now boasting Reveal labels, adjacent to signage with our ad, overseen by a saleswoman whose job it was to paint passersby with my concoction. If they liked what they saw, she slipped them a free sample. The Flush tables were located at the front entrance to the Bloomingdale’s and Henri Bendel cosmetics departments, the better to maximize customer contact.
One day, I visited the Bloomingdale’s outpost on a reconnaissance mission. Anonymity shielded me, despite the Vogue article. A single magazine story didn’t equal widespread recognition. I would inspect how the store was representing my product, get a feel for who my customers were. The Reveal station was a mirrored hexagon with tiered white shelves that held bottles of Flush, like a champagne-glass tower you see in Las Vegas.
Back then, the Bloomingdale’s cosmetics department existed in a perennial state of bustle. Today, it is like a silent wing of a library. Everyone goes to Sephora or shops online, as the Board loves to remind me. Sephora existed back then, too; the first US store, in SoHo, opened the same year that Reveal launched. Still, department stores threw around their weight for a while longer.
Each cosmetics counter at Bloomingdale’s had multiple staffers and those people worked for their commission. To walk across the cosmetics department meant tolerating borderline assault. There were the perfume men in their black slacks and skintight button-down shirts, their straightened hair gelled back from their ample foreheads, wielding atomizers like weapons as they spritzed a person with an array of florals and cloying vanilla finishes. The lipstick women were equally aggressive, charging after prospective customers in their three-inch heels.
Then there were the bullies, whose preferred strategy was to browbeat people into requiring services. That foundation looks all wrong! No one with your lips should wear that shade! Is that really how you want your eyes to look?
The woman who oversaw my Flush display at Bloomingdale’s was an emaciated blonde in black pants and a black long-sleeved top. Beauty brands are generally responsible for hiring their own sales associates, even in department stores, and Ellen had chosen this woman on the recommendation of an acquaintance. I paused beside a nearby handbag display to observe the action from afar. The woman was tall and she exploited her height to box in potential customers, then swipe their wrists with stripes of Flush before they had a chance to decline. Repeatedly I watched this scrawny yet towering woman throw herself into the line of oncoming pedestrian traffic. It was hard not to admire her determination—until she added heckling to her repertoire.
“Ma’am, are you feeling okay? You look awfully pale…”
“How’s your circulation, miss? You could use a little perking up.”
“When was the last time you flushed with pleasure? Not lately?”
The tall blonde followed these insults with her combo attack of “…try some Flush today—I guarantee you’ll never leave home without it.” She was a one-woman good cop, bad cop routine. It seemed to work. The customers she offended halted, taken aback by her insults. She quickly converted their horror into pleasure at the effect that Flush had on their complexions.
Still, I didn’t want the success of Reveal to rely on a woman’s low self-esteem. Flush was an elixir of confidence; this hack was treating it like a bandage for a woman’s sins.
I strode in the direction of the saleswoman. She took the bait, thrust herself in front of me with all the zeal of a religious acolyte. Go ahead, I thought, give me your best insult.
The woman paused for the first time since I had watched her. That’s right, lady—I’m perfect. I already wore my daily dose of Flush. Her eyes careened over my cheeks and lips, then she went in for the kill.
“You’re looking sickly today. Try some of this—it will perk you right up.”
I smiled widely, which immediately threw her off. She wanted her customers indignant so she could pull her one-two punch. Now that I was closer to the Flush station, I saw there was a printout of my Vogue story resting against some Flush bottles with an As Seen In…frame around it. This woman had been standing beside my photo the whole time.
“Listen, do you need glasses or something?” I nodded at the framed Vogue story and watched the color, Flush and all, disappear from her face. “That’s me and this product is mine. I will not have you criticizing customers to sell it.”
This woman couldn’t muster a worthy retort.
“Get going,” I said. “You’re fired.”
“I don’t work for you!” she sputtered, finally locating her vocal cords.
I glowered at her.
“Yes, you do. My product, my decisions. Go.”
The woman clomped away. Without her, I would lose a day of potential sales. Until we found her replacement, I would do her job.
The first woman to stroll my way was a practiced New Yorker; she swung so wide, you would have thought she was avoiding a sinkhole. A pair of women came toward me from a different direction; they had the tough, pointy faces and minimalist ensembles of corporate-ladder climbers. I watched their eyes move curiously over to the Flush display, though the speed of their strides remained steady.
“Do you have a second?” I asked, my tone reticent, overcompensation for my predecessor.
The older of the two women, a redhead, tossed me a look of deep pity, like she couldn’t believe this was how I earned a living.
More women passed me by, women with strollers, women loaded down with shopping bags, bored women, stressed women, women with somewhere else to be. Each time, I held out my hands and did my best to catch their eyes. No one paid me attention.
It was an unfamiliar feeling, this complete disinterest from other women. I was accustomed to being judged and disdained, not ignored. What was happening here? I knew I possessed charm; Caroline and Jessica and many other women were evidence of that. When the occasion called for it, I could turn it on. The reason my charm had worked in those instances was because it came wrapped up with sex. Extricated from lust, my charisma didn’t know what to do or where to land. It required the insinuation of physical attraction, like a base note in a complex perfume, to ground it and lend it power.
If I was going to land any future customers, I needed to flirt.
“Excuse me, ma’am, would you like to try some orgasm in a bottle?”
The forty-something brunette in a pink Chanel suit stopped short.
“What did you say to me?”
“I asked if you wanted to try some orgasm in a bottle.”
The brunette stared at me in disbelief.
“What does that even mean?”
I angled a bottle of Flush so that the store’s fluorescent lighting cut a quick line of transparency through the red liquid inside.
“Maybe you saw my story in Vogue,” I said, nodding at the framed article. A woman in Chanel lived and died by the pages of Vogue. “I created this. It’s called Flush and it makes a woman look like she had the best sex of her life. Care to try some?”
I unscrewed the bottle’s metal top and offered its built-in brush to the Chanel woman.
“Okay,” she said. She pushed up one of her pink tweed sleeves and showed me the underside of her wrist.
I dipped the brush back into the bottle’s rosy pool and applied a gentle stroke across her inner wrist. Her dark eyes burned into my forehead. I suppressed a small smile. The woman looked down at her wrist. Then she glanced back up at me, her eyes lingering on my face longer than common courtesy permits. I noticed her gold wedding band. The light in her eyes told a different story than that token of convention did. The stale department store air between us was suddenly alive.
I cannot explain how or why I knew that she was different from what her appearance would suggest. Caroline was correct when it came to “signs.” You develop an extra sensitivity to the world when you experience firsthand its more covert and complicated layers. This sixth sense is a means of survival as much as it is a language of connection.
“This is meant for…” she said, gesturing at the bottle of Flush.
“Your cheeks and your lips.” I paused. “But you can put it anywhere you want.”
My eyes settled on the woman’s lips as I gauged her reaction. Her mouth was like a slightly deflated croissant. I can work with that, I thought.
“Will you show me what it looks like on?”
I beckoned the woman over to a stool on the other side of the Flush display.
“It would be my pleasure.”
The Chanel woman’s name was Cheryl. Later that day, after I had painted the inner wrists of too many women to count, I met Cheryl at her Central Park West apartment. She had a view of the reservoir and the Bridle Path, not unlike the one I have today. In fact, my current building is a block from her then home. I wonder if she still lives there.
Cheryl served us ice-cold gin martinis, garnished with little cocktail onions on thin silver skewers. We drank them as we sat in her chintz-filled living room, redolent with the scent of gardenias and roses. Cheryl’s husband was out of town on business, clearly lucrative going by her surroundings.
Halfway through her gin martini, Cheryl plucked her glass coupe by its slender stem and carried it across the living room, down a long hallway, and into her carpeted bedroom. I followed her. There, she downed the remainder of her martini in one elegant take and placed the empty coupe on her dresser. She took my coupe, swallowed its contents, and settled it next to her glass. Then she kissed me. In bed, I made it clear that where orgasms are concerned, I am better than anything you’ll get from a bottle, even one of my own design.
Afterward, we lay on her massive king bed, her sheets satiny against my bare body. An extravagant chandelier hung above us; its faux flames emitted a sepia light. The curtains on the room’s picture windows were defiantly open. Cheryl lived on a high-enough floor that there was no danger of anyone seeing us. Outside, the sun had already set, and the sky’s dusky light wafted in.
Cheryl was on her stomach. She was a slender woman and her long, graceful back crested across the bed majestically. In the dual lighting scheme from the chandelier and the window, her skin had the radiance of crushed pearls.
“Your skin,” I whispered.
“What?” said Cheryl, her large dark eyes on me.
“Don’t move,” I begged her. Even if I had snapped a photo of Cheryl’s back, I doubt it would have captured the effect that so mesmerized me in that moment. The only choice was to memorize what I saw and do my best to re-create it in another form. I stared at Cheryl’s back, for how long I can’t say. By the time I left Cheryl’s apartment that image of her gleaming back, like a crescent moon fallen to earth, was imprinted on my brain.
Be a Boss
Reveal needed a home base now that we were an established operation. Ellen—and Donald—had a friend who was the landlord of a cast-iron building in SoHo. He gave Ellen a sweet deal on a fifth-floor open-plan space. The area’s scrappy, artist legacy would set Reveal apart from the saccharine fluff of the beauty world. We retained the suite’s openness and set up desks that faced each other so that each worker could see everyone else on the floor. Full transparency was Reveal’s touchstone from the start, like the makeup we were selling. An architect cordoned off a corner of the suite with glass walls. That was for my office. Reveal wasn’t a socialist enterprise, after all. Besides, everyone could see into my office. I was more on display than anyone else.
Those desks in suite 506 required bodies. Ellen reached out to her various acquaintances across her social network and asked them to send her the résumés of any young, talented women interested in “getting in on the ground of the next great beauty revolution.” That was how she put it.
“We need to discuss new hires. I’m thinking six employees to start,” Ellen informed me one afternoon over lunch at a French bistro she frequented on the Upper East Side. Until then, it had been me and a rotating cast of eager interns Ellen had exploited from her friends’ children. I was drowning in restock requests, press inquiries, raw materials sourcing, and quality control struggles with various factories. Ellen speared a dainty bite of her chicken paillard, light on the oil, no butter. “We can build from there.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can set up some interviews.”
“Don’t you think I should handle the interviews? It is my investment, after all.”
I wanted to remind Ellen that it was technically Donald’s investment. “They’ll be reporting directly to me, not to you. As the founder, I should do the interviewing—at least initially. You can meet them once I’ve vetted them.” After the saleswoman incident at Bloomingdale’s, I needed to have serious oversight of Reveal to ensure that it adhered to my principles.
