Dead is the New Black (23 page)

“First of all, Sheldon’s not selling anything. He’s making noise. He’s trying to get more money. And he’s trying to panic me by disassembling my staff and unraveling every deal I had going before Gracie died. It’s pure spite. Second of all, what do you mean you got beat up?”

“Hit repeatedly with blunt force.”

“Can I come out now?”

Laura slipped behind the curtain that separated the hall door from the bed just as he stepped out. He paused, then said, “You’re being ridiculous.”

“Why are you here? You looked sick at Rikers, and now you’re in the hospital?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“My face got messed up by two guys last night, and I don’t want you to see me. That’s all. Now, tell me why you’re in the hospital with the breathy accordion thing.”

Jeremy snapped open the curtain. Laura hid her face behind her hands.

“Laura.” He said it like an impatient parent.

“Jeremy.” She said it like an adult child who didn’t like to be questioned.

He took hold of her wrists, and she smelled him, the same as that first day, a breath of the ocean. She could smell that every day and never get tired of it.

His hands pressed her wrists downward, but she wouldn’t let him pull them away. “Tell me,” she said.

His fingers clasped her wrists, the downward pressure easing.

“I have a thing,” he said.

“That’s an unsatisfactory answer.” She felt the moisture of her breath against her hands.

“I have a thing, since birth. It’s a genetic defect.”

“Uh huh.”

“And no one knows. Not a soul but my doctor and my lawyer.”

“And your mother,” she interjected.

“And the nurses.”

“And probably the odd aunt or uncle?”

“And Gracie knew,” he said, with a bit of remorse.

“And you’re stalling.”

“I have cystic fibrosis.”

She moved her hands. “Don’t you die from that?”

“That was a dirty trick, Laura.” He stepped back. She noticed than that he wore street clothes, a pale blue oxford shirt and chinos. She was used to seeing him in a suit at work.

“What trick?” Then she caught a glimpse of herself in the darkened computer monitor. Her face seemed normal, not swollen, busted up, or otherwise deformed. She swung around to look at herself in the bathroom mirror, which was visible from where she stood, and saw that only one cheek was blackened. Not something she wanted Mom to see, but it was hardly worth hiding her face over. “They kept hitting me, so I thought I had bruises all over.”

Jeremy said nothing, but the look on his face told her that what she had said was a blow to him. She wanted to question him more about his revelation, but he huffed again, a series of
huh huh huh
noises that sounded gentle. The look on his face, and its red color, told her the sounds weren’t a simple hard breath.

He sat on the bed and gripped the edge. “Close the door.” When she did, he took a few seconds to regain his breath.

Laura stood by the curtain. “I’m sorry.”

“If everyone knew,” he said. “I’d lose investors, and my line would be about me ‘overcoming adversity.’ Empowerment. A positive attitude. Guaranteed I’d be on Oprah already, talking about my childhood. That shit makes me sick. I’d have to write a book to make a dime, and then they’d buy the clothes waiting for me to die. And don’t be sorry. Pity’s worse than Oprah.”

“I won’t pity you for being sick, if you won’t pity me for getting beat up.”

His shoulders slumped a little. This was yet another Jeremy. He went from being her mentor to her boss to her crush to a sick man to a beaten man. She didn’t think she could stand another permutation, and she definitely couldn’t stand to look at this one for another second. She plopped down next to him, and they both stared out the window.

“Sheldon offered me a contract,” she said. “David said he’d fire me if I didn’t sign. Can he fire me?”

“He’s the majority shareholder now. Why don’t you want it?”

“I don’t trust him, and I don’t want to work for him. I trust you. I don’t know what’s happening, but I like working for you. No. I
love
working for you and, if I can’t anymore, then I’m not working for anyone.” She thought of Pierre Sevion’s offer, knowing it stank all over town. Still, pretending it was real was better than imagining a tech design job at T&C.

“You must be the only one who feels that way,” he said.

“Maybe you should ask around.”

The truth in the statement silenced him. He looked at his hands, then out the window. He had never asked anyone how they liked their job. They stayed or went. He found new people, or he didn’t. Cursory yearly reviews reviewed performance, not happiness. It became clear to Laura that this was yet another way he wrapped himself in a protective film. But her statement must have pierced it.

His silence went on for minutes. He rubbed his palms together. “There’s a good chance I can lose this business. I was trying to work out a deal for another line, something with some teeth, financially. I feel like every season I move money around to keep the lights on, but we had this offer from IWU.” He pronounced it “eye-woo” like a good garmento. International Women’s Union was a background company for some of the most successful lower-priced designer lines in the world. “IWU’s thinking massive. Total international saturation
a la
H&M, and trend forward like I can’t even do now. Gracie wanted nothing to do with it. She thought of our company like our relationship. It had to stay small and discreet and on life support, or she was uncomfortable. I offered her everything. I said I’d let Carmella design for it, and I’d never touch it, just give it my name for a little credibility, and she said no. Then I promised to take my name off it and just be inside the PR machine, and she said no. I’ve never seen her so stubborn.”

“She thought she was going to lose you.”

“After nine years she had no business being such a pain in my ass. Where else was I going to go? What decent woman’s going to have me, supposedly gay and probably dead at forty?”

“You don’t know women, I guess.”

“I know all too well.”

She saw from his face exactly what he meant. Any woman that would have him in any of those circumstances wasn’t the kind of woman he wanted. A whole new world of Jeremy opened up to Laura. She understood him—his crazy hours, his devotion to a business that gave little back, his micromanagement of every aspect of his world. The arrogant, confident prick was gone, replaced by a pathetic loner. Trapped as he had been by Gracie, he also made the perfect murder suspect, except that in every word he said, and every bit of anger he held, she heard only that he had loved her as much as the circumstances allowed.

“Sheldon found out about you, and that’s why they were fighting the night before.”

“Oh, it was worse than that. Gracie told him about the IWU deal and how she was going to have to squash it. He’s mad that she’s stopping him from making money. These rich people are off their bird, because when she calls me, crying, because he’s now in our business—and she’s going public with the fact that I’ve been sleeping with her since I was nineteen. Is this normal? Who acts like this? She’s pacing around my office Saturday, telling me Sheldon wants her to leave me and give him the business, and it’s the business part that’s making her mad. So she’s calling WWD tomorrow to tell them we’re engaged. And this is not something I have a choice about. It’s something that’s happening to me.” His voice filled with anger, and she wondered if he had been disappointed enough that morning to kill Gracie.

“Jeremy, I—”

He didn’t let her finish her apology. He spat out the rest like an unstoppable force. “I couldn’t even look at her. But I have to tell you I was relieved, because I wanted to end it anyway, and she knew it. Stupid, she wasn’t. No, no. She made it clear she’d bury me in a mountain of litigation if I tried to leave her, or if I tried to push through the IWU deal with Sheldon, who made it clear he was interested. You know, the minute Gracie walked out to go talk to her husband, he had me on the phone. Screw my wife and make me a dime. Right? They had me pinned. I had to get out of there. There was one place they’d never find me. I mean, if they looked for me at the 40th Street floor it would be the last place on earth.”

Then, it dawned on her. “The wool fibers in the factory aggravate the fibrosis.”

“Put me on a respirator. That and being in jail.”

“And that doesn’t prove you were in the factory all night?”

“I was hospitalized last year without being in the factory. So, no. Proves nothing.” He finally looked at Laura, who stewed in yet another revelation. “That trip to Marseilles in June wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment vacation.”

It all came up for her then, when she realized how much she didn’t know—about his disease, about his business, about his love life. And all those details were just that, details. Things that may have kept her from him, things that would have separated the real Jeremy from the Jeremy with too many circumstances. She felt the same no matter the trappings, because she never had them blocking her view of him. To her, he was a pure talent, pure respect, pure kindness, always.

“I hate you,” she said.

“That’s been obvious from day one.”

The sarcasm in the remark stood out like a misaligned button. He had known how she felt from the day they met. Did he know that she breathed harder when he stood close? Did he see her watch him—his grace, his affinity for the air around him, his fluidity—for a second too long? All those times when they had come to work early and spent half an hour talking over artisan coffee, had he been laughing at her? Had he soaked up her admiration without any intention of reciprocating? Used her to pump up his ego? Used her to prove to himself that he could still have a younger woman if he wanted one?

The shame was a bucket of cold water in her face, shocking at first, leaving behind a burning on her cheeks. She dared not look at anything but her sweat-soaked hands. When he reached for her hand out of pity, the shame went even deeper.

She ran out of the room.

The hallway was cold and smaller than she remembered it, and the maze back to her room seemed to twist more often, until she was convinced she was as lost as she would ever be. When she asked a passing orderly the way to her room, she found she was two doors down from it. She entered, emotionally and physically exhausted, and saw Ruby sitting by the window, flipping through an issue of
i-D
.

“Where the hell were you?” Ruby asked.

Laura threw herself on the bed like a dramatic adolescent and stuffed her face in the pillow. “I’m dying.”

“Well, they want to discharge you, so you’d better let them know.”

Laura had no humor in her, and the quip stung, coming as it did from her more beautiful, more charming, taller, thinner, twin sister, who never had an inch of trouble with men. She pushed her face deeper into the pillow and curled into a fetal position. She felt the bed sink at the edge and a hand on her back, and Laura knew Ruby was going to try and be understanding.

If that was what she wanted, Laura would give her the opportunity to try it. “I’m so ashamed,” she said by way of introduction to the subject matter. “I am such an ass.”

Though Laura expected some type of agreement, or snide acceptance of the terms of the conversation, Ruby surprised her. “No, you’re not. Come on, I’m sure whatever it is, it isn’t such a biggie.”

“I’m in love with someone.”

“Oh, great!”

“But he’s totally out of my league, and I just found out that he knew the whole time how I felt, and I want to kill myself.”

“How long did you expect to keep it a secret and get anywhere with it?”

Laura pulled her head from the pillow. “Forever. I can’t take that he thinks I’m just some groupie. It’s really bad.”

“Did he say that was how he felt? Did he laugh at you? Did he say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks’? I mean, what happened?”

“He tried to console me.”

“Ouch.” Ruby patted her back, and she found she didn’t mind. “Is it Stu?”

“Oh, God, no. Ruby, come on.”

“What? He’s cute.”

“He’s not ‘out of my league’ cute.”

“Well, who is it, then?”

Laura paused. If she told Ruby, it would be completely out of the bag. There were disasters, and there were
disasters
. Ruby knowing was a nine-point earthquake during a blizzard.

“Jeremy,” she said, consequences be damned

“Your gay boss?”

“He’s straight.”

Ruby gasped audibly. “No.”

“Yes.”

“Shut up.”

“No, really. He’s been sleeping with Gracie Pomerantz for nine years.”

“Who knows? Sheldon? Does he know?”

“I don’t know. Jeremy was trying to break up with her and still keep his business, but she wouldn’t let him, and her husband found out and was stalking Jeremy to do this deal with IWU.”

Once she told Ruby about Jeremy, nothing stayed sacred or hidden. She launched into everything Ruby had missed, from Yoni’s reassembly of the shredded contract to her night at Duomo, from Jeremy’s story to Pierre Sevion and her doubts about the offer.

Rather than jump up and down clapping, or grill Laura on why she hadn’t told her sooner, Ruby stood and gathered Laura’s things, her coat and scarf and shoes. Like a woman with newfound purpose, she dressed her sister and hunted down a nurse. She got a doctor to examine her for a concussion and sign her out. When Laura’s cell phone rang, she picked it up and sent Cangemi to voice mail. She didn’t talk, for which Laura was grateful. She didn’t tell Laura why she was so motivated to get her out of the hospital, even when they stood on First Avenue bundled and ready for something Laura couldn’t name.

Ruby, however, seemed fully in control of the moment. She called Stu, which made Laura blanch. What was she trying to do, set her up with someone ‘in her league’ cute? But before she could question her, Ruby had set up an immediate confab at Plate, for which she hailed a cab and paid.

CHAPTER 23.