“Sure,” I said. What the hell?
Matilda McNeill Jernigan finished her turkey salad croissant, fished around in one of her tote bags and came out with a plastic badge holder which she pinned to a green chiffon scarf on her shoulder. The name on the badge was Louisa Ferncliff, representing Quality Interiors of Seattle, Washington.
She tilted her head closer to mine and I smelled rose cologne and a faint hint of that ubiquitous almond-scented liquid hand soap one finds in most public restrooms these days. Her husky voice dropped to a more confidential level. “Press badges are better.”
She eyed the badge on a raincoat that someone at the next table had draped over the back of a chair next to mine and I wondered if I were about to see a minor felony committed. “Press badges get you into any showroom without people trying to sell you a truckload of coffee tables, but a buyer’s will do fine too. A word to the wise thought—do not try to get into a showroom while wearing an exhibitor’s badge. They will think you are a spy.”
She fished around in her bag again and frowned. “They all seem to be males and—Ah! Have you a black pen?”
I handed over my favorite Pentel and watched as she artistically changed Jack Sotelli of Home-Lite in Newark, New Jersey, to Jacki Sotelli.
“Should anyone notice, just flirt your eyes and say that they always misspell your name,” she said, adjusting her scarves before gathering up her bags to go.
I pinned the badge to my jacket dubiously. “But I don’t know a thing about Newark.”
“Then you will have to pretend you have just been transferred, will you not?”
3
« ^ » “Music is supposed to be good for the dyspepsia, has an excellent influence on torpid livers, and cures melancholy in a moment.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
The Global Home Furnishings Market was a block off Main Street and seemed to have started life as a collection of adjacent buildings of different heights and architectural styles. Now they were painted a uniform navy blue and were interconnected by futuristic tubular glass walkways high above the street
In my beige slacks and black jacket, I wasn’t exactly dressed for a formal cocktail party, but neither were most of the other people crowding into the elevators that whisked us up to the ninth floor of the huge Global Home Furnishings building. Some of the older women looked as if they’d gone back to their hotel rooms and changed into softer clothes and prettier earrings, but the majority were still in daytime business attire. Male uniformity dictated dark suits and white shirts but an occasional seersucker blazer or outrageously colorful tie broke that lockstep monotony and the aroma of fresh cologne mingled with spritzes of perfume.
Anticipation bubbled like champagne as friends and associates greeted each other each time the doors opened.
Eventually, the elevator deposited us in a wide hallway tiled in polished pearl gray marble and lined with such lavish furniture showrooms that I thought for a moment I was in an upscale mall. Brand names only subliminally known from magazine ads flowed in gold script across gleaming glass windows or were chiseled over pink marble archways. Behind the windows and archways were mahogany chests and beds heaped high with colorful designer linens. Across the hall was a collection of painted furniture with a breezy California look. Next door, a classical Roman atrium contained modern dining furniture wrought from ebony and attenuated iron, with touches of blue-green verdigris.
I was on sensory overload. The shiny surfaces, the heady smell of new leather and plastic and textiles that was like opening the door on your first new car, the excited voices—I wanted to stop and take it all in like a kid in a video store, but Mrs. Jernigan, who was several inches shorter, darted and danced straight ahead and I was forced to keep up or lose her in the crowds.
We entered a glass-enclosed tube and passed high above a clump of dogwoods below into an adjacent building, then onto another elevator for two floors.
Old Home Week parties seemed to be going on everywhere—in the showrooms or in small nondescript rooms down side halls. People wandered past with printed guide maps and blank looks.
“Did they say third turn to the left?”
“This is the tenth floor, isn’t it?”
“Hey, what happened to Stan?”
On my own, I, too, would have been confused, but Mrs. Jernigan seemed to know every turn and twist through this maze of showrooms and branching hallways.
We passed through an austerely formal marble vestibule where chrome and glass elevators were disgorging more people. Just beyond, a weighted brass stanchion held a placard which pointed the way to the Fitch and Patterson reception.
Even though I’ve never paid much attention to furniture makers, Fitch and Patterson is a household name in certain households. For years, the company used to give a miniature cedar chest to every girl who graduated from high school in North Carolina. They stopped the practice when I was in second grade, but I’ve kept the one that my mother used as a jewelry box. Even though the concept of hope chests seems like a hopeless anachronism to me, a lot of aspiring debutantes across this state still own full-sized, cedar-lined Fitch and Patterson chests to which their female relatives will donate lace tablecloths and pieces of heirloom silver every Christmas until the day they marry.
(You don’t think someone with pretensions of blue blood ever buys her own silver, do you? No, no, no, no. It’s always handed down from before the war. The Civil War. Even though a surreptitious glance at the back of a fork may reveal a hallmark that didn’t exist before 1940, your hostess will proudly tell you how the Yankees were too dumb to discover that her clever forebears had hidden the family silver in a hollow porch column/on the smoke ledge up inside the open hearth/under great-great-grandmother’s hoop skirts as she sat in her rocking chair on the veranda when Sherman’s scavengers came riding up. “And there’s the dent where she accidentally rocked over this very same tray.” Being columnless and hoopless, my dirt-farming Civil War forebears were doing good to have tin forks for their cornbread and collards.)
Two perky young women with big hair and even bigger smiles were working the Fitch and Patterson reception table, trying to match badge names to their guest lists; but with such a crush of people streaming past them toward the open bar inside, they hindered us no more than had the guard on the street doors downstairs.
“As long as we wear badges and act as if we have been invited to these parties, no one will stop us,” said Matilda McNeill Jernigan.
We accepted complimentary tote bags and a handful of advertising flyers from more young women and sailed on into the reception amid a group of jovial bald men who seemed to be at least three drinks ahead of us.
The tote was rather attractive: sturdy black canvas with a discreet Fitch and Patterson logo in gold and white on the front. I slipped my purse inside and jammed the flyers in on top as Mrs. Jernigan redistributed some items in her own bags.
My whimsical guide had the build of a ten-year-old child or aging elf, and beneath the soft glow of the crystal chandeliers, her—dress? costume? assemblage?—of pink, green and lavender chiffon lost some of its eccentricity and took on a festive playfulness. Like a small rainbow-colored cloud, she drifted through the crowd toward the buffet where smoked salmon, boiled shrimp, fresh fruits, cheeses and crisp crackers tempted those who had evidently skipped dinner. After my turkey croissant, I was no longer hungry, but I snagged a glass of white Zinfandel and drifted after her.
“Savannah! How perfectly splendid to see you here,” exclaimed an ash-blonde, middle-aged woman in an elegant black brocade suit that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. The diamonds on her finger and ears would have gone a long way toward reducing the national deficit.