Pamela had been brooding about this all day, while fulfilling the many tedious duties of what amounted to an assistant store manager position at Bartlett’s with neither a title nor salary to match. Instead of inspecting new inventory and conferring with department managers about summer clearance merchandise, she longed to be seated comfortably behind a drawing board in the airy design studio that occupied the second floor of the Damaris shop in Random Point. It was in this sky lit room with windows looking down on the main street of the village that she and Damaris created suits and dresses, sharing the same aesthetic and happy in each other’s company.
“I’ve been to college, grad school and design school. I’ve worked on the floor. I’ve modeled. I’m a partner in a rising design label. And I’m told I’m a millionaire’s wife. When am I going to be able to do what I want?”
“What would Mr. Bartlett say if you insisted he let you go?” Amanda asked with extreme interest.
“I’m not allowed to insist on anything. I’m supposed to be submissive.”
“So, you’re finding your marriage oppressive?”
“Not the marriage, but my work load.”
“He’s working you,” Amanda observed.
“They all do. They all make me their bitch, Amanda,” said Pamela with heartfelt exasperation. It was the first time she had fully unburdened herself to another woman in the scene and she suddenly felt as if she’d been let out of a Victorian waist cinch after wearing it for six hours. “Hugo was even worse than Ambrose,” she added sensationally.
“You mean, when you worked for him?” Amanda prompted, already well aware of how cavalierly her newly discovered parent had used Pamela from his own confession of the episode.
“Oh yes, he was positively gothic with his impossible demands and relentless perfectionism.”
“He was fucking with you for some reason, right?”
“That’s true enough,” Pamela admitted. “I was engaged to Sloan at the time and was jealous of Hope Lawrence working under him at the bookshop. Hugo attempted to distract me by working me to exhaustion every day and eventually beginning to spank me for mistakes.”
“Why did you even let him do that?” Amanda marveled, as shocked and disconcerted at her father’s inappropriate behavior towards Pamela as when he’d originally revealed the same details about the episode, which had concluded with Hugo’s simultaneously firing Pamela and ending their brief dominant/submissive love affair.
“Oh, because I’d fallen madly in love with him by that time,” Pamela smiled, even though the experience had caused her many tearful moments. “I must be a genuine masochist, I always love the man who is the meanest to me,” she concluded.
“But, Mr. Bartlett isn’t really mean to you?” Amanda asked with concern.
“I don’t think he thinks he is,” said Pamela.
“Pamela, it seems to me you could easily get your own way with him if you put your mind to it,” Amanda suggested.
“What would you do?” Pamela asked with interest, almost to the point of open rebellion.
“Well, first I’d ask myself what would be the worst thing that might happen if you just stopped going into work.”
“He might very well beat me.”
“So let him beat you a few times. Just be stubborn and don’t give in.”
The girls were silent for a moment, thinking about Ambrose Bartlett. Then Amanda said, “Let’s go eat!”
“Really?” Pamela looked doubtful.
“I found a great little vegetarian place in the village. The food only tastes sinful, it’s really healthy,” said Amanda, leading Pamela out of the hot box. “Don’t tell me you were planning on skipping dinner?” Amanda demanded of her obsessively weight conscious friend.
“Well, yes. I had a big lunch.”
“But you just worked out.”
“I know, but…” Pamela quickly donned a white lace under-wire bra and matching French cut panties and briefly regarded her image in the locker room mirror before stepping into a pair of khaki capris, beige laced espadrilles and a fitted, open collared white cotton shirt.
“Pamela, you shouldn’t let yourself get so thin. Let yourself gain ten pounds. Men in our scene like curves.”
“Not Ambrose,” said Pamela, running a brush through her smooth black geometrically cut bob. “He insulted his first wife into leaving him because she gained weight.”
“Seriously?” Amanda got into a tailored black cotton bra and panty set, pulled a sleeveless black vee neck top over her head and tied a tan wrap skirt around her small waist. She sat on the wooden bench to strap on black cloth platform sandals. “The more you reveal about Mr. Bartlett, the more of a complete piece of work he sounds like.”
The girls emerged on the street under a full moon, put their gym bags into their cars, then relocked their cars and began walking arm in arm into the heart of the village of Random Point.
“You’ve been a model, you’ve been in a book, and you design half the clothes in the line. You should be going on talk shows promoting yourself,” said Amanda.
“I think so too, but I don’t have time.”
“I can see you on Project Runway in a heartbeat,” said Amanda, who would seldom pause to watch television, unless a fashion show was on.
“Stop Amanda, you’re agitating me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“If Ambrose knew you were steaming me up like this he’d be furious,” Pamela observed. She knew her husband that well. “But what you say makes sense. Except about gaining weight. I’d die.”
“Whatever you do, don’t make Mr. Bartlett furious at me,” Amanda begged. “I like walking in the shows at the store.”
Pamela Bartlett had become even more tired of showing up for work at her husband’s department store than she had admitted to Amanda and did in fact feel cruelly ill-used by her husband to the point of fully considering open rebellion even before Amanda suggested it.
That morning, after showering and perfuming herself in the black and pink tiled art deco bathroom that joined the master suite of Bartlett’s house on the cliff, Pamela in a slate blue cotton wrapper, gazed long and hard at the perfect size 2 pencil skirted suit she had laid out. Summer inventory clearance was going on all over the store that day and Pamela knew she could look forward to hours in designer dresses deciding mark down percentages on various numbers and assigning personnel to retag them. She picked up the smart pair of four inch tapering stacked heels in black suede she had been going to wear with the suit. The notion of hours on her feet in those shoes suddenly oppressed her mightily. Swallowing the lump that rose in her throat, Pamela deliberately rehung the chalk gray suit back up, replaced the shoes in the area of her connecting shoe closet reserved for pumps, and then pulled out a navy a-line skirt and sleeveless white open collared shirt along with a pair of navy flats to wear instead. This outfit she slipped over a light, lace trimmed white cotton bra and panty combination.
Thoughtfully she brushed her gleaming black bob while looking in the mirror, realizing that Amanda was right, she was very thin. Pamela was not the victim of body dysmorphia, but she was never the less actuated by all the typical anxieties of the modern cosmopolitan woman, first and foremost of which was the imperative to stay thin. Had not the immortal Anita Loos, creator of Lorelei Lee and surviving beauty until age 90, murmured, “Fat is death?” Didn’t Wallace Simpson say, “A woman can never be too rich or too thin?” “One should eat to live, not live