I was in the elevator and descending, my vision splotchy from the sunlight, when only one thing came to mind: the girl.
In the lobby, I hesitated, but then couldn’t resist finding out what was going to happen if I followed Erica’s directions. I looked for the bank of elevators that would take me to B2. When I reached the basement, two floors beneath the Austen Tower, I was standing before a set of double doors, a tarnished silver portal with a sign attached to it that read BEAUTY CLOSET. There was a keypad to the right of the doors, and a button, like a doorbell.
The elevator doors closed behind me. I stepped to the silver doors and rang the bell. A number of seconds passed, but there was no sound or hint of a human being on the other side.
I was about to ring the bell again when I heard the faintest noise. I pressed my ear to the door. Click-clop, click-clop. The sound grew steadily louder. Click-clop, click-clop, like a horse in a Western film. Click-clop. I listened for a minute longer and realized it was the sound of someone wearing high heels, approaching from a great distance. Click-clop.
“Coming,” a voice called, and then one of the doors opened slightly and a head popped out. “I am Julia Cole, manager of the Beauty Closet. How may I help you?”
“I’m Plum. I don’t know why I’m here.”
The woman opened the door, allowing me entry, but she didn’t speak. I stepped inside and what I saw made me gasp. The Beauty Closet was hardly a closet. You could easily fit a 747 inside it, perhaps two. For as far as I could see were steel shelves reaching to unknown heights, with blinding lights overhead; it was like a supermarket on the grand scale of a temple constructed by the Babylonians. Ladders on wheels were positioned in each aisle, extending so high that the tops of them were whited out by the lights, as if they were ascending into the sky. There were signs at the end of each aisle—LIPS, LIDS, LASHES, HAIR, and so on—and each shelf was lined with black lacquered trays filled with products.
“You call this a closet?”
The woman stood before me, wearing a silky mauve blouse and cream-colored slacks that ended just above her ankles, with heels on her feet. Around her slender waist was a black canvas tool belt, filled with brushes and tubes of lipstick.
“For you,” she said, handing me a metallic tube. On the bottom it said, “Juicy Plum.”
Julia motioned for me to follow her. We walked down the Lips aisle, which was subdivided into sections for lipstick, gloss, liner, and balm; each of these sections was subdivided by color, with swatches on display, like the inside of a paint store. Taped to one of the shelves was a handwritten sign: LIPS: MINORA AND MAJORA, with an explicit illustration of a vulva. “Just a little humor,” Julia said when she saw me looking.
In the middle of the aisle were two stools on wheels, where Julia and I sat. “To answer your question, we call this the Beauty Closet for old times’ sake. When the Austen Corporation was founded on this site in 1928, Cornelius Austen’s daughter was put in charge of organizing the cosmetics for the two fashion magazines Austen published at that time. It was just a way to keep her busy until she found a husband. She was well liked, always offering tea to those who visited her in the closet. The Beauty Closet became an Austen tradition.”
Julia adjusted her tool belt to prevent some makeup brushes from slipping out. Above her head was a shelf labeled LIPSTICK/MATTE/BURGUNDY.003LMB. I wondered if Julia had devised this Dewey Decimal System for cosmetics.
“What’s all this makeup for?”
“There are fifty-two stories on top of us. We publish nine fashion magazines, known collectively as the Nine Muses, as you know, and we also produce many television programs and all sorts of other things. There are a lot of women on our pages and on our air, and all of them need makeup. That’s what we provide here.”
I glanced around, trying to take it in, and shivering slightly.
“It’s chilly in here so the makeup doesn’t melt. I’m used to it by now,” she said. “Before we go any further, you must agree that what I say to you here is confidential.”
I nodded.
Julia reached into her belt and withdrew a folded paper. “On May eleventh, writing under an assumed name, I sent this message through the Dear Kitty portal of the Daisy Chain website: Dear Kitty, I consider you to be one of the great intellectual minds of our time, so I would like to ask you a question. Who is more oppressed—a woman covered from head to toe in a burka or one of the bikini-clad models in your magazine?”
I thought for a moment, and then the memory of it swam to the surface. “I remember. That wasn’t the usual type of message.”