“Help me” was all he had to say.
To his credit, Beau was scared out of his mind and ready to take all of her hard-earned business school advice as gospel. She asked her daddy if she could have a reprieve from coming down to work at Sweet. Not forever, just long enough for her to try out living in New York and get Beau’s wedding dress thing off the ground. When Janey arrived in New York, Beau was living in a ridiculously expensive loft in SoHo, paid for by a much older boyfriend/investor. His designs were brilliant, but his business was not. He’d spend two thousand dollars on materials for a dress and then sell it for a thousand. It took Janey a month to streamline everything, and by the end of the first year all the pieces fell into place.
“I want half the company,” she said then, high on being a newly minted MBA and the one person Beau could turn to for real help. She wanted him back so badly, but she wanted him to earn it too.
Besides, she knew she’d deserved it. She’d gotten them in Barneys’ famous display windows and on the Hollywood wedding circuit. And though Beau Von B. had added two syllables and gotten rid of his real last name (Matthews) when he came to New York City, Janey insisted they keep their brand name simple, just B.
B was for beautiful, for bride, for beholden, even though she let Beau keep thinking it was a B for Beau. Just like that B became the sum of her life with just a few subplots. For the most part she loved what she did, enjoyed the wedding dress business. There was something special about making a bride feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. B dresses weren’t for everyone. They never talked about it, not out loud anyway, but for the past couple of years the B designs, with their sultry silhouettes and clingy lace, were best suited to slender women, very slender women. And even though B never publicized the fact that they didn’t make a dress above a size 6, it was well documented in the fashion press that “shedding for the wedding” took on an entirely new meaning when a woman purchased a B original. You’d think that would limit their selling potential, but it did the exact opposite. It made them seem more luxurious, more aspirational. Janey wouldn’t have been able to fit into a B wedding dress. For her own wedding Beau designed something custom, and she’d never even thought about what size it was.
Janey was jerked out of her nostalgia and back to the Horse Feather by Beau’s moody whine. “You’re eating a muffin in the front row of a fashion show in front of hundreds of editors and bloggers and buyers and cameras.” The expression on Beau’s face as he said the word “muffin” was akin to the one people made when they said the word “pedophile.” His entire mouth shifted to the right side while his eyes danced left. Janey was tempted to stand up, leave the restaurant, and go to the office. Let Beau’s tantrum pass. They always passed.
“It’s a bruffin, not a muffin,” she said, using the tip of her index finger to swipe the remaining maple syrup from her plate. The knot of anxiety deep inside her stomach demanded she put more food into her mouth even though she felt full. As predicted, the act of licking the sweet liquid off her fingertip soothed her. She studied the picture again and tried not to laugh. She looked fine. Maybe she had a slight double chin, but it was probably just a bad angle and that chin (chins?) was framed by her lovely long shiny black hair. She was starting to regret the bangs, but they weren’t her idea, they were Beau’s. “You’ll look so Parisian!” he’d exclaimed after gushing over a spread of Isabelle Huppert in Vanity Fair. “And besides, then you won’t need to get Botox as often.” So she’d asked her hairdresser to try the bangs, but instead of looking French she looked like a forty-year-old woman trying too hard to look like a twenty-year-old woman, like those people on reality television.
“Janeyy, Janeyy-boo! Are you listening to me? Do you hear what I’m saying?” Beau waved the gnawed piece of bacon in the air like a wand. His voice became firmer.
“No, Beau. I didn’t hear you,” Janey said sarcastically, grabbing the piece of meat from his hand and putting it into her own mouth. He wasn’t going to eat it anyway.
“I can’t have my CEO eating, especially in the front row of a runway. It’s all over Instagram. Everyone is talking about it. I don’t even want to read you the comments, but somebody compared you to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.”
He couldn’t be serious. No one would compare a grown woman at a fashion show to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. No one who wrote about fashion shows was old enough to have seen the original Ghostbusters.
“This is so bad. So bad, Janey! We sell wedding dresses. We sell dreams of perfect, slim, beautiful brides and here you are looking all…‘eff.’ Everyone is calling you ‘eff.’?”
“Excuse me? Looking all what?”
“Eff. The F word. Don’t make me say it, Janey; you know that word makes me gag.”
“Say it, Beau,” Janey growled at him.
“Fat,” he whispered.
“Fashion fat?” She cracked a smile. It was an inside joke between the two of them, created back in the days when they still had inside jokes. They’d hear their models, their size 0 models, complaining about how fat they were and report back to each other about which girl incorrectly thought she was a cow that week. She was “fashion fat,” an absurd term they created that meant anything larger than a tiny size 4. They’d elongate and soften the “a” so that it sounded vaguely German. Faashunvaat.
But Beau wasn’t smiling. “No, Janey,” he said without blinking. “Fat.”
His words stung like a slap. “Seriously, Beau?” She’d gained a little weight in the past year, but who was counting? Beau was, apparently. She knew she could lose a few pounds, but she was far from fat. So what if her skinny jeans didn’t fit anymore. She wasn’t a teenager. She didn’t wear crop tops no matter what Elle said about how they were making a comeback—FOR ANY AGE! Her backside had a bit of jiggle, but who cared? It had been a tough year. Besides that, she was a forty-year-old woman, not a teenager. People gained weight when they got older. When her standard uniform (beautifully cut black blazer, black trousers, crisp silk shirt for day and an array of soft simple T-shirts for night) began to feel tight she simply ordered the next size up on Net-a-Porter and tried not to pay attention to the numbers. She’d done that three, maybe four times in the past twelve months.
“I’m not fat, Beau!”
He crossed his arms in front of his petite chest.
“I’m not saying you are fat, but other people are saying it. You’re the face of my brand, Janey. You have to be aspirational. That’s part of why this works. We’re both so cute.”
Beau was the kind of person who said things out loud that other people would only think to themselves.