Finding the Muse
Finding the Muse
It’s a Saturday morning and Stevie is seated at a booth in Norms on La Cienega, waiting for Jack. He had a tennis game earlier and was going to swing by afterward and meet her for lunch. He was vague about his tennis partner. “Just a friend,” he said.
He’s already fifteen minutes late when she spots Marta Krass, a former classmate from Chouinard, heading her way. Marta keeps her oversized sunglasses on and wears frosted white lipstick and big dangling earrings. She’s meeting Bob Mackie for lunch and is eager to tell Stevie that she’s working with Sally Hanson at Jax. Stevie wants to tell her she’s working with Jack Ryan, but outside of Mattel, that means nothing.
“I love it there,” Marta says. “I can’t believe how much I’m learning. I’m not actually executing any of my own designs yet, but Sally said she’d at least look at them…”
The envy is instantaneous. It rises up in her like acid reflux. Stevie can’t help it. Jax is one of the most exciting new designers on the fashion scene. Sally and her husband have created a line of fashionable women’s slacks with zippers in the back that accentuate the waistline and hips. They’re in Beverly Hills and everyone from Natalie Wood to Marilyn Monroe is a client.
“And what about you?” asks Marta, removing her sunglasses, patting her hair into place. “Where’d you land?”
Stevie feels like she’s about to confess to a crime. “I’m at Mattel,” she says, quickly looking away, eyeing the door for Jack.
“Mattel? Wait”—Marta contorts her white frosted lips as if she’s trying to solve a calculus equation—“isn’t Mattel that toy company?”
“I’m still a fashion designer, though.” Stevie immediately goes on the defensive, hating that she felt the need to tack on that though as a qualifier. “I’m working on the Barbie doll.”
Marta laughs and then sees that Stevie is serious. “Really? You’re designing doll clothes?”
Stevie’s cheeks flame. “Charlotte’s working there, too. Remember Charlotte Johnson?”
“Oh yeah.” Marta starts searching around the diner for Bob. “I heard something about that. I can’t believe she threw her career away like that.” Realizing she’s just insulted Stevie, Marta waves her hand in a silly me gesture and adds, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just”—she raises one shoulder, bewildered—“why would you both want to work on that doll?”
That doll? Stevie wants to ask what Marta means by that when Bob arrives, looking dapper and handsome as ever. She always liked him, they got along well in school, and after a quick hello, he tells her he’s now Ray Aghayan’s assistant. Stevie smiles and congratulates him, despite another rush of acid.
“And what about you?” he asks. “I heard you’re working with Charlotte at some”—he searches for it—“what is it? A toy company?”
Stevie goes through the humiliation for a second time, and after he and Marta make their exit, she glances at her watch. Jack is almost thirty minutes late. She signals the waitress, pays for her coffee and leaves.
—
At home she sits in the living room and studies her thimbles in the shadow boxes on the wall. She’s been collecting them since she was a young girl and now has hundreds, made of brass, silver, nickel, hand-painted porcelain and china. She glances away and stares at her sewing machine.
If Marta is laughing at her for designing Barbie’s clothes, no designer will take her seriously. It’s time to face the facts. Stevie can no longer pretend that Mattel is her ticket into the fashion world. Her classmates are moving up in the industry while the gap between where they all started continues to widen.
She thought she’d made peace with working on Barbie, but if she had, she wouldn’t be feeling like such a failure right now. Clearly, the money’s not enough. The dream—the dream she’s had since high school—is still there inside her. It may have cooled to an ember, but seeing Marta and Bob just reignited the fire. She can’t go on denying that she still wants to be a fashion designer. A real fashion designer.
This declaration reminds her of that conversation she had with Ruth about learning to bounce back from disappointments and false starts. Change your plan, change your approach, but don’t you dare ever give up. Stevie needs to muster up that bounce-back quality. But how?
She’s putting this all together in her mind when Jack calls, full of apologies. They —she’s too proud to ask who they is—went for drinks after tennis and he lost all track of time. He doesn’t say anything about coming over later and she’s surprisingly okay with this, maybe even a little relieved. She needs this time to herself to learn how to bounce back, to figure out a new plan and make this a turning point for her career.
She has the weekend—the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday—to do nothing but create. She’ll stay up all night like she used to when she was in school. She’ll start from scratch and design an entirely new portfolio. She’ll create classic, tailored dresses and slacks and beautiful silk blouses and tweed overcoats. She’ll do dramatic, formal pieces, too.
From now on, instead of going to the beach after hours, she’ll come straight home and get to work. She’ll stop spending so much time with Jack and will focus more on creating a portfolio so spectacular that no one will be able to turn her away. She’ll do the kind of designs that will get her hired in a real fashion house.
She sequesters herself in her apartment with a pile of fashion magazines, a stack of sketchpads and jars of pencils and markers. She can’t remember the last time she worked on anything that wasn’t for Barbie, and that one-sixth scale is so ingrained in her that she’s restricted, thinking only of ideas that will work for Barbie. Before she’s even put pencil to paper, she’s censoring herself. She sits like that for the better part of an hour, sketching something only to crumple it up, add it to the crinkled balls of paper at her feet. She knows this sort of thing can’t be forced and yet she’s willing it to happen, trying to squeeze the artistry from her pores. She simply must make something amazing happen on the page. There is such heaviness and desperation in every stroke of her pencil, and everything is shit—derivative of what’s already been done, already photographed in that stack of glossy magazines.
The late-afternoon sun is streaming in from the window, making her drowsy. Eventually she dozes off, waking only when she feels her sketchpad slip from her hands. She gets up, makes a cup of tea. Her left arm, from her pinky to her elbow, is smudged with pencil lead. Waiting for the tea to steep, she wonders why it is that everyone always compares up, never down. At least she’s working in a related design field with fabrics, with fashions and with Charlotte Johnson, no less. Plus, she’s getting paid for it and is probably making more money than Marta, Bob or Vivian. Some of their classmates aren’t even in the field. Lucy Troy is now working as a dental hygienist; Perry White is moving furniture; Sandra Hinks is still living at home, working in a grocery store. It could be so much worse.
And the ironic part is that while people like Vivian, Marta and Bob are working with top designers, they’re not executing their own ideas. Stevie is actually doing more of that at Mattel. None of them have seen their own designs finished, in the stores. Let alone featured in a television commercial. Her colleagues are still pinning fabrics and cutting out patterns for other people’s designs. Stevie’s not just a wrist—she’s creating some of the top fashion looks. She attends fashion shows, she’s meeting with fabric vendors and notions suppliers. She’s right in the thick of it; the only difference is the scale she’s working in.
This shifts something inside Stevie and makes her appreciate the true opportunity before her. And as that takes hold, so does a new idea for Barbie. She leaves her tea on the counter and rushes back to her sketchpad. With a sense of ease and command, she conjures up a sophisticated black-and-white double-breasted dress with a full skirt. She goes bold with the white shawl collar and tops it off with a dramatic wide-brimmed white and black hat. In less time than she spent littering her floor with dreck, she’s created a smashing outfit, one she’d wear herself. And in this moment, she feels so light, so alive and proud. She’s happy. Genuinely happy. And best of all, it’s a happiness that’s not on loan from Jack or any other man. No one can take this from her. It’s hers and hers alone. She wants to capture this glorious feeling and bottle it up.
It dawns on her that Barbie rescued her from that diner on Pico Boulevard, brought her back into the fold of fashion design and gave her a license to create. All day long she’s been straining her brain to come up with something when her muse, Barbie, has been here all along.
—
The following week, on her way to the Castle, Stevie’s stopped at a red light on Rochester Avenue and takes advantage of this moment to close her eyes. She could have easily nodded off had the car behind her not honked. She was up late the night before, working up a new ensemble for Barbie. Ruth wants the team to focus more on Barbie’s careers, and after brainstorming with Charlotte, they came up with the idea of Barbie the airline stewardess. Loomis is trying to secure a licensing agreement that would let them use the American Airlines logo.
Having recommitted herself to her career and Barbie, Stevie’s been so busy and preoccupied that lately she hasn’t spent much time with Jack outside of the office. She hasn’t really missed him, either. He’s aware that she’s pulling away and it’s making him cling to her all the more. He’s already lost whatever interest he had in the new secretary and is again focused on Stevie, doing his level best to reel her back in. When she doesn’t invite him along for dinner with her parents, when she opts to spend time with Vivian instead of lounging by the pool at the Castle, he sulks, he drinks. Once, when she was too tired to stay the night, he called and woke her up, begging her to let him come over. Lately, being with Jack isn’t much fun. Now it feels like work, and she has enough of that with Barbie.
As she pulls up to the Castle, Brenda Lee starts belting out “Sweet Nothin’s” over the radio, giving Stevie a second wind. Stepping out of the car, she sees the door to the family’s private entranceway open. Two young girls—Ann, age six, and Diana, age four—drift out onto the walkway in matching sailor dresses. Stevie’s never seen Jack’s daughters before. Or Barbara, who has now joined them, along with an Irish setter, straining against its leash. A dog? Jack’s never mentioned them having a pet. They don’t see Stevie, or if they do, they don’t acknowledge her— Just another one of Jack’s girls . But Stevie is watching them, mesmerized. Barbara Ryan has soft, warm eyes and lots of dark hair that bounces upon her shoulders. The younger girl looks like her mother, the older one like Jack.
Despite the day’s heat, Stevie feels a chill. Aside from her first visit to the Castle, Stevie has conveniently forgotten that Jack is a father and someone’s husband. Even if Barbara is willing to look the other way, Stevie sees the truth right before her. Barbara wrangles the dog and her daughters into the car. They drive off and disappear, but the ghost of them remains, and it’s haunting.
Stevie feels like a trespasser, slipping through the side door of the Castle. She hears Jack down the hall, talking on one of his many telephones, and she darts into the powder room and closes the door. She doesn’t want to be there, doesn’t want to see Jack. The switch has been thrown; all that delicious electricity that once flowed through her at just the thought of him has now been cut off. She knows that she’ll never kiss him again, never feel their bodies moving together in that intense dance where he leads, having taught her all the steps. She’ll never again wake in the middle of the night to find his head on her pillow and his body pressed as close to hers as he can get. None of that, she knows, will ever happen again.
—
That night, after Stevie breaks up with Jack, she goes home, has a good cry and pours herself a glass of wine from an expensive bottle he gave her—mostly so he’d have something decent to drink at her place. How could an affair that started out so light, so fun and easy have turned so heavy and guilt-ridden? And it’s not so much because of his wife but because of Jack. She never expected him to take it so hard. How could he have not seen this coming? He’d been a mess when she left the Castle, already drunk and begging her to stay. She’s still baffled by this. As her heart uncoils and goes flat, she knows she did the right thing, but still it hurts.
It’s times like these when Stevie envies those little girls who can escape into Barbie’s perfect world where nothing ever goes wrong. Barbie never gets a headache, never comes down with a cold or the flu. She doesn’t worry about balancing her checkbook or paying her bills. She never has insomnia or gets the hiccups. Never breaks a fingernail or gets a blister from her high heels. She never gets involved with the wrong guy and never has to break up with anyone. Stevie decides that grown-ups need their own Barbie dream world every bit as much as children do.