“We’ll see,” he’d responded coldly. “You have through the December issue. Publish pornography for all I care. But make some goddamn money.”
Margot increased the speed and incline on her treadmill, picking up the pace on her morning workout. Twenty minutes and three miles later, her pink leotard soaked front and back in sweat, she jumped off the treadmill and started the forty-five-minute barre routine she punished herself with several days a week.
“You can choose either the cardiologist or the orthopedic surgeon,” she always told her children, none of whom had ever joined her in her exercise studio except for the two months before their weddings, panicking about the state of their upper arms. But her hard work paid off. At seventy-two, Margot looked fifty, the same age as her oldest daughter.
She hopped into the shower and donned an oilcloth shower cap. After a quick rinse, covering her body in a tangerine-scented bodywash from an unlabeled bottle, she combed her hair back out and twisted it into a neat bun. In her carved mahogany walk-in closet, dozens of racks were hung with freshly pressed couture dresses arranged by color and by season; a wall-length set of narrow drawers held her underclothes and accessories. A huge upholstered bench dominated the center of the room. Virgin-white cashmere carpet, the wool harvested from goats perched atop the highest mountains in Mongolia, cushioned her knotty athletic feet as she wandered the room.
After opening a velvet-lined drawer, she wiggled into a silk crepe camisole and underpants before selecting a pale gray glen plaid suit from Vivienne Westwood. The oversized legs of the suit’s trousers had been ironed and starched to a knife-edge drape. She ran her fingers down them with satisfaction, choosing a set of heavy brass neck rings from Kenya that she’d purchased at an estate auction from a minor Rockefeller.
Next she wandered into her gray marble bathroom, plastered a thick coat of moisturizer over her face from a small amber-colored apothecary jar, and tamped down the shine with a light dusting of translucent powder. Finally she applied a single swipe of Chanel lipstick and two of mascara, slipped a monogrammed kidskin wallet into her pocket, and walked out the front door of her Park Avenue penthouse into her private elevator.
Grinding her teeth, Margot read and replied to a crop of early-morning emails on her way down. The most interesting one was from Paula; it seemed that the remaining RAGE staffers were expressing outright resentment toward Cat and Bess.
She wrote back and authorized Paula to spend whatever she had to on Margot’s personal credit card. Get them tickets to Paris like I said. The staff need to be motivated, she typed. And we can’t let them think anything’s wrong. Let’s give them something to look forward to. It’ll be great publicity. Ask Lou if you can get a discount at that hotel her ex-husband owns.
Fifteen million copies.
RAGE’s future rested in the hands of the November and December issues.
Margot tried not to think about it.
Callie Court yawned and stretched out in her bed, tossing the dove-gray linen duvet aside. She kicked her legs up into a bicycle pose and stared over her soft, round belly at the lumpy plaster ceiling. The last eight weeks had been a whirlwind. Her agent had dropped the fact of her RAGE contract in all the right ears, omitting the name of the magazine but implying that it was one of the top three women’s titles—either RAGE; Frenzy, the pornographic German monthly; or Cinq a Sept, the chic French quarterly—and she’d managed to pick up two runway shows for next week along with an “inner beauty” campaign from Raven, a cosmetics conglomerate trying to bounce back from allegations made in the RAGE article. Raven alone had kept her busy for the last three weeks. Callie had to give away all her bar shifts, too: the Raven contract didn’t allow her to drink, lest she finally ruin the peaches-and-cream complexion she’d been born with and steadily abusing for the last decade.
She let her legs fall back down on the bed and breathed out in a long, slow whistle. Today was the day that Jonathan’s camp would release her Rhythm Nation video online. In it, she wore only a sequined bikini bottom from his spring collection as she took tiny bites of an oversized ice-cream sandwich that melted and dripped down onto her body while performing the military-style dance routine from the 1989 Janet Jackson music video, something she’d spent countless hours rehearsing as a teenager.
The background was a crudely spray-painted scene of palm trees. Glitter exploded halfway through the video out of a cannon and stuck to the melted ice cream. She completed the dance by doing the splits, laughing hysterically, a banshee. FIN, it said, fading to white, STARRING CALLIE COURT / COSTUMES BY JONATHAN SPRAIN.
Tomorrow was Callie’s RAGE shoot, and she was supposed to spend today relaxing, doing yoga, and staying out of the sun, so she finally rolled out of bed and walked the five steps to her kitchen to put the kettle on for tea, then walked over to the antique armoire where she kept her clothes and took down an old Vans shoebox.
It was full of photographs. The oldest ones had been taken with cheap disposable cameras: an out-of-focus Mark laughing on the quad in front of Dakin House, shaggy-haired Mark playing a guitar while she sat next to him in a ratty papasan chair, naked Mark lying in the bed of her freshman dorm, trying to hide his face.
Around 2005 the photos became mostly Polaroids. Mark in a tuxedo at the Central Park Boathouse, at the wedding of a couple now divorced. Mark wearing an aviation suit before they jumped out of a plane together in New Jersey. Mark holding a puppy in Prospect Park. Mark looking hung over in her apartment. Twenty-six-year-old Mark drinking a beer in Park Slope. Mark captured midair in the pit at a punk show downtown somewhere. Mark covered in body paint for a Bushwick party.
Around 2012 the photos turned into square printouts from Photogram; there were only a half-dozen of these, their time together less frequent during his relationships with the condescending horse-faced lawyer and the pointy-headed ballerina. Still, she had a photo of Mark standing in front of CBS in Midtown, clowning around during a lunch break; Mark drinking coffee out of a paper cup at Grand Army Plaza; Mark holding up a bowling ball at the derelict alley she loved near the Lincoln Tunnel; Mark doing a shot in his first NYPD uniform. Mark and Callie together on the Coney Island Cyclone before it was torn down.