She squinted at the screen. This particular photo of Janey must have been taken at a show for a capsule collection for Stone Fox Bride yesterday morning. The presentation had been packed, since everyone was obsessed with Stone Fox and their genuinely foxy founder, Molly Guy, so even the snooty fashion editors who couldn’t give a damn about what was happening in the bridal world accepted the invite. There she was, sitting between the new editor in chief of Brides magazine (she could never remember her name) and Linda Fargo, the beloved women’s fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman. Her face was large on the screen and she was biting into a bruffin, the new pastry fad created by that sexy French chef down on Spring Street (the one who never buttoned his shirt all the way) that was supposed to be the love child of a brioche and a muffin. They were delicious—both pastry and chef.
There was nothing wrong with the picture as far as she could tell. As the CEO of B, the couture wedding dress company she and Beau ran together, Janey was photographed all the time sitting in the front row of fashion shows. She’d gotten so used to it that she’d perfected her “very serious yet playful CEO face” for the cameras. She tilted her head to the right and smiled with her mouth closed, her nose slightly scrunched as if she were about to break into a laugh. For Janey, being photographed was part of the job. For Beau it was a passion. He regularly courted young paparazzi to ensure his most fabulous nights out in his most outlandish outfits would find their way into the party pages of Vanity Fair and Town & Country. Janey had once discovered that the majority of space on Beau’s hard drive consisted of two decades of Beau’s high-resolution press photographs sorted by date and the designer of his outfit.
“Do you care to explain what is happening in this picture, Janey?” Beau said in his best kindergarten teacher voice.
Do I care to explain myself?? Not even a little. God, she was tired. This coffee was not giving her the wake-up buzz she needed. Janey felt a tickle begin at her collarbone and reached up to scratch it. A bumpy rash had begun to form, a physical manifestation of the anxiety Beau’s questions were causing her. A low level of angst in her stomach was the norm on most days. The rash was the next level of unease.
Janey sat taller in her chair and willed herself to channel her inner badass. It didn’t matter that it was ridiculous that she even had to do this as the CEO of their company. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t fair. This was going to be her morning.
“I was at Stone Fox. The dresses were gorg…if a little overpriced. They’re boho perfection. If I ever get married again and if we didn’t make our own wedding dresses for a living, I’d wear their second-skin silk Lucinda dress. You should’ve been there too, but I believe you needed to go to Ashtanga yoga instead. Or maybe it was Bikram. I get them confused. Which one gives you an orgasm when you put your leg over your head?” They’d come to a tacit agreement years ago that Janey would be the one to attend early morning meetings, fittings, and fashion shows since unless an appointment involved shirtless yoga with a fit nineteen-year-old yogi, Beau was unlikely to make it out of bed before ten a.m.
Janey continued, allowing her irritation to seep into her voice. “I’m eating a bruffin in this photo…banana nut I think.”
“Exactly! You’re eating in front of one hundred people!”
Janey paused and waited for some sign that he was kidding, but his expression never changed. She stifled her own laugh and glanced left and right at the crowded dining room.
“Shit! I’m doing that right now too.” She feigned mock horror and put her hand to her chest. “Should I stop? There might even be fifty people in this restaurant. And they’re all…watching…me eat. Careful— They’re watching you too. Maybe we should hide? Shall we take our plates underneath the table?”
Now that Janey stopped to really look around, she realized she didn’t actually see anyone else noshing on French toast. The waiters, all of them irresponsibly handsome struggling actors, were serving veggies with Crayola-colored dips for thirty dollars a platter and twenty-dollar thick dark green smoothies. The two elegant women at the table next to them had nursed the same espressos for more than an hour, their eyes wide and alert from caffeine and hunger. Janey was complicating the temperament of the Horse Feather by devouring her carbs, an item that had only been placed on the menu for the benefit of the odd tourist who happened to find his or her way into the restaurant.
As Beau sighed, his baby blue ascot wiggled like a genie shaking free of a claustrophobic bottle. He held up a single bony finger too close to Janey’s mouth to signal her to pause their conversation for a moment while he made eye contact with the waiter.
“Where’s this bacon from?” Beau asked the handsome young man.
“I believe it came from a turkey,” Janey muttered under her breath, glancing up to see if Beau’s question was met with disbelief equal to her own. She briefly wondered what type of “slash” this waiter was. Was he a waiter/actor or a waiter/model? He was too handsome to be a waiter/poet. Those guys did better in Brooklyn anyway. She settled on actor, certain he’d been one of Marnie’s boyfriends on Girls.
“Oh, it’s a local heirloom turkey,” the young man said without missing a beat. Heirloom food was all the rage these days, but Janey had no idea what that even meant. She thought it was the food equivalent of vintage clothing. But did that mean it was old?
“How local?” Beau pressed, forming a steeple with his two index fingers beneath his chin.
Instead of rolling his eyes, which Janey believed to be the only proper response to this kind of question, the waiter paused and nodded earnestly.
“I’ll check on that for you. Right away.”
Talking about the turkey reminded Janey of the first time Beau spent Thanksgiving with her family back in Charleston. It seemed like a thousand years ago. Beau was more than just her business partner. They were best friends, the oldest kind, able to date their friendship before the onset of puberty. As a kid, Janey had lots of friends. The other children treated her friendship as a prize, since she was practically royalty in South Carolina. Her daddy owned the Sweet Chocolate company that employed half the damn county. From a very early age Janey realized everyone in their town was the same. They talked the same, liked the same things, hated the same things, wore the same clothes, and had the same ambitions. Janey observed the other kids at school with the same curiosity she used for the adults and found that the boys and girls adopted their southern parents’ stereotypes early on. The little boys wore sherbet-colored polo shirts, worshipped at the altar of the Gamecocks, and were a peculiar mix of chivalrous and misogynistic. The little girls arrived at school with perfectly coiffed hair and Lilly Pulitzer sundresses covered in excited crabs and petulant seahorses. They adopted their mamas’ turns of phrase—“Not to be a gossip, but…” and “God bless her heart.”
Beau came to their school in the third grade, and from the start he kept to himself. He was smaller than the other boys, and when they went off to play at recess, he sat under the willow tree timidly eating his own lunch out of a brown sack. Janey couldn’t help but watch him. For weeks, she had no idea he was watching her too.
“Hello, Jane Sweet,” she heard a high-pitched voice say one afternoon while she sat reading on the bench outside school waiting for Mama to pick her up.
“Hi, Beau,” she responded cautiously.
“Do you think it would be all right if I drew you?”
“Excuse me?”