Triptych
Six
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!” we sang as Damon blew the seven candles out on his cake and the kids dove into the sweets. It had been a great afternoon and parents were arriving to shuttle their own six- and seven-year-olds back home. I’d cleaned up the grill and Jack had cleared the yard of sports equipment and was sprawled on the deflating bouncy tent—just forcing the air out, so he said.
Drew—completely exhausted—was cuddled in Meddy’s lap and even as he pushed a piece of cake into his mouth you could see his eyes drifting closed. He’d done his best to keep up with his older brother and all his friends.
We waved goodbye to the last of the guests and Damon planted himself in front of the fireplace to play with his new radio-controlled car. It buzzed around and around the room, bumping into furniture, and frequently flipping over on a turn. Damon thought that was great and proceeded to figure out what would cause the most spectacular accident. Drew had become very attached to his Melody as it finally dawned on him that all the new toys were Damon’s.
I watched as Damon considered what toy to play with next.
Jack indicated he had to get home now and was going to drop the tent off at the rental company on his way. Drew ran to hang onto his leg and it looked like the little boy was about to implode. Surprisingly, it was Damon who rescued both the situation and his brother.
“Drew!” Damon shouted. “Let’s play Lincoln Logs. We’ll build a fort in the bedroom and then we won’t have to put them away.”
Apparently, the idea of playing with one of his brother’s new toys and not having to put it away appealed to Drew. Damon tucked his car under one arm and wrapped the other around his brother as he said “’Night,” to his father and led the way to his bedroom.
“That boy has the savvy of… mmm… Kate,” Jack said.
“You set the example, not me,” Kate said matter-of-factly. We all looked at her. “What?”
“That’s very profound, Kate,” Jack said. “Can I drop you somewhere on my way home?”
“Um… well…”
“Oh, Kate,” Lissa said. “I was hoping you’d help Melody and me clean up the kitchen while Tony reads to the boys. Do you mind?”
“No. That’d be fine. Thanks, Jack, but I guess I don’t need a ride.”
Jack glanced at Lissa and then at Melody and me.
“Okay. I’ll see you all later in the week. I understand I’m invited to a presentation Tuesday night?”
“Yes,” Melody said. “As an advisor.”
“Interesting,” Jack said. I saw him shake his head and chuckle as he left the house.
“Do you mind spending the night, Kate?” Lissa asked. “We’ll take you back if you’d prefer.”
“If you don’t mind me taking the guest room,” Kate said, “I’d appreciate it. And thank you. I like Jack, but I’m just a little nervous. It’s not about him, though.”
“Kate,” I said, “if anyone acts inappropriately toward you, I’ll personally take him—or her—down a notch or two.”
“Are you a possible date or a big brother?” Kate asked. “Just for the record.”
I stood there and spluttered, not knowing what the hell to say until Melody and Lissa started laughing. Then Kate lost it, and all I could do was shake my head and raise my hands in surrender.
“Still… thank you, Tony,” Kate said. “That’s really sweet.”
The boys were in bed at last. In spite of how mature Damon acted sometimes, there had been a dispute over the roof of the fort in the bedroom and a few Lincoln Logs had been thrown. It had taken both Lissa and me to get them settled down and storied so they might possibly get to sleep. Kate and Melody had finished tidying up the kitchen and had taken out the trash by the time we felt it was safe to leave them.
It was one of those rare nights when Lissa opened a bottle of wine and poured all four of us a glass. It’s not like we never drink, but Melody and Kate and I are still under age and technically Lissa shouldn’t share a glass with us. But, special occasions… I noticed Kate set hers aside almost untouched.
“Ahhh. Is it over?” Lissa asked as she sank into the sofa.
“Hey, that reminds me…” I said as I grabbed my sketchbook.
“Are you going to draw?” Melody asked.
“No. I just wanted to get Kate’s opinion of something.” I flipped the book open to a very free-form sketch I’d doodled one afternoon. “Do you have an idea of what to do for your exhibition paintings, Kate?”
“Not really. I was kind of down after Clarice criticized my charcoals. I haven’t drawn anything since.”
“What did that bitch say?” Lissa demanded. I held both hands up palms outward begging her to be patient.
“She said I wasn’t taking care of my drawings and they were all smudged and not salable,” Kate said. Yeah, that was pretty much the gist of it. But…
“What she was really saying—or reacting to, maybe—was that she thought your charcoals were great and should be framed immediately so they wouldn’t get damaged.”
“You have such a nice way of phrasing things,” Melody laughed. “We love you.”
“Yeah,” Kate said. “I guess that’s what she was saying.”
“Well, she’s negotiating some commissions for me. I bet she’d find some for you, too. But there’s one that I thought of that I can’t do. I was wondering if you’d be interested. It’s a little out-of-the-ordinary for you.” I showed her the doodle. “See, I was sitting there where Lissa is and Melody was in my lap—see? This is what I was trying to do—and then Lissa curled up beside us. I caught the reflection in the glass. But I don’t think I can actually draw it the way you’d see it. Would you… well… I was wondering if…”
“Go get in the position and let me see it,” Kate said.
“Um… Lissa, can I sit there?”
“Ugh,” she said, pushing herself upright from where she’d sprawled.
I sat and called Melody over to sit in my lap.
“Remember the other night when we were all cuddled up here?” I asked. “Now, Lissa, face me and put an arm around Mel. Tuck up.”
In a moment we were all back in the very comfortable little pile we’d been in a few nights ago. Kate stood over by the fireplace and looked at us. Then she started walking around us, stopping to look from nearly every angle. We sat like that for nearly five minutes before she stopped circling. She sat next to Melody and me on my left and managed to snuggle into our arms.
“I can see it,” she said. “But it’s like I can see the things that you draw. It’s a beautiful composition, but it’s so broad that I don’t know if it is compatible with what I’d put in the exhibition. On the other hand, I’d love to try it, but let’s not tell Clarice about it. At least not yet.”
“What do you think, lovers? Could we sit for a portrait like this for Kate?”
“Hells yeah!” Melody said. “I was wondering how we were ever going to get a picture of the three of us.”
“Wonderful,” Lissa mumbled. She rolled a little and lay back in Melody’s lap looking up at the three of us. “Do we have the energy for a hot-tub? Or should we just go to bed?”
I felt Kate shift away a little and raised an eyebrow at Melody.
“Let’s just call it a night,” she said. “I’d just fall asleep and drown.”
“Yeah,” said Kate. “I think I’ll just crawl down the hall and go to sleep. This was a fun day.”
“You can…” I pressed a finger against Lissa’s lips as Kate extracted herself from our pile. We all unwound and stood up. I caught Kate’s hand before she left and pulled her to me for a kiss.
“Goodnight, Kitten,” I said. She smiled at me. Then turned to Melody. They kissed sweetly and Melody had a dreamy look on her face. Kate turned to Lissa. That kiss might have been just a little longer and a little more intimate than Melody’s and mine, but I wasn’t sure if that was Kate’s doing or Lissa’s.
“’Night.” Kate wandered down the hall to the guest room.
“That girl just does something to me,” Lissa said.
“Me too,” I affirmed. “But she’s not ready to join us in bed. I know you were about to invite her.”
“Yeah.”
“But why not?” Melody asked. “She’s shared the big bed with me when you were in Chicago and Lissa was sick.”
“And with me while you were in Nebraska and Melody was in Boston,” Lissa added.
“If you were both someplace else, I think she’d sleep with me, too,” I said. “Exactly the same way she did with you—chastely. When she has all three of us together, I don’t think she plans to be chaste.”
“You know something?” Melody asked.
“It’s just a feeling. When she asked us to the zoo concert, you know, she asked me. I thought she was just asking me at first, but she just assumed that if she was asking me, she was asking all three of us. When I told her what I thought, she said she’d never ask just me on our first date. It’s the same thing. She won’t be involved with any of the three of us until she’s involved with all three of us.”
Melody wore a gray skirt cut just above the knee and conforming tightly to her womanly curves from there to her waist. Her blue silk blouse was neatly tucked in. Her hair was tied up in a bun and she was wearing the cutest pair of secretary’s glasses I’d ever seen. I’d never seen her in glasses before, and I wasn’t really sure there was glass in them. But they looked cute. Even more amazing, though, were her legs in charcoal mesh nylons with a seam up the back leading down to a pair of high heels that screamed sexy. She looked like she’d just walked off the set of Mad Men. At least two of us sitting in front of her as she gave her presentation couldn’t think of much beyond getting her to bed. I wouldn’t have bet on Jack thinking any differently.
“So to capitalize on both our spokesperson’s image as a fashion-setter and her reputation on the courts, I give you ‘Ice Queen Sportswear.’ Our slogan: ‘Take it to the court.’ Our logo, a racquet hitting a snowball. Just the right amount of whimsy mixed with attitude. Lady and gentlemen, an Open Winner.”
Melody’s presentation was beautiful. She’d done the requisite PowerPoint, but sitting in our boardroom/dining room, we’d have had to all gather around a laptop to view it. Instead, Melody had huge flipchart pages pasted up on poster board so she could dramatically reveal what was behind. I started applauding. Lissa and Jack joined in.
“May I?” Jack asked permission of Lissa and me to question our presenter. We nodded. “Miss Anderson, that was a very nice presentation, and I understand you have more, but I’d like to ask just a couple of questions if you don’t mind.”
“Of course, Mr. Wade,” Melody answered. She sounded confident and professional, but I could see her wobbling on her high heels.
“Name search. Has this been vetted by the attorney?”
“Yes sir. I did the preliminary search and having found nothing through the Internet, I submitted the proposal along with my short list of alternatives to our attorney, Mr. MacDonald. He has indicated that the name is in-corp-or-able? and trade markable.”
“Good. Now about the image. Don’t you think Ice Queen has a bit of a negative image overall?”
“I put out a SurveyMonkey on exactly that subject. It seems that when men use the words, they are derogatory. ‘That bitch will turn you on, but she’s a real Ice Queen,’ meaning that she’s a prick tease. But among women, the phrase takes on a more admirable quality. It means a strong woman who won’t let men—or anyone else—take control of her. It means she is totally cool and focused. Nothing raises her blood pressure. This has been advanced by such popular movie icons as Lara Croft, Hermione Granger, Bella Swan, and Natasha Romanoff. They are powerful, sexy, and they don’t take shit from anyone.”
“Well. Thank you. I think that’s all my questions.”
“Are there any other questions?” Melody asked.
“Are you wearing garters?” Lissa asked. At that point we all broke up laughing and Melody proceeded to her next point in the presentation.
“SingWear can supply us with an initial run of our logo apparel with exclusive rights to certain textile products. Miss Grant provided design specifications to suit the powerful woman image. SingWear has a tendency to make everything look like French-cut swimsuits. They are very proud of their line of beach volleyball outfits. But they’ve agreed to cut to the specifications that Miss Grant gave them. In the meantime, acting on information that SingWear provided regarding their fabric supplier in China, I’ve had a couple of late night calls to Beijing. Unfortunately, we have to assume that if we have the fabrics dyed to our specifications in China, every cut-rate sportswear manufacturer in the world will have our designs in their fall lines. It’s possible that one of them could even beat us to market.”
Melody paused and took a long drink of water. I was scowling. The one thing that I didn’t want was for Lissa and Melody to get ripped off. They were putting a lot of work into this. You always expect things to be copied the next season, but you lose your edge if everyone comes out with the same thing. People would buy Nike over Ice Queen simply because it had the Nike swoosh on it.
“I have found a U.S. textile mill that would supply our designs exclusively for our uses with certain minimum orders guaranteed. The nice part about this is that the designs are difficult to replicate if you don’t have the dye formulae. So even a second run with a different dye-lot would likely have color differences recognizable to the average consumer. It’s costly, but we’d be guaranteed exclusivity. The fabric would be shipped to Singapore for tailoring and the goods shipped back to the U.S. and other international markets as we see fit. Mr. Wade, I can see the questions forming. We may as well deal with them as they come.”
“Thank you, Miss Anderson. I agree strongly that if you pursue custom fabric designs you should do everything possible to protect them. But I’ve looked at the numbers you provided in advance and this is expensive. Would you lose that much by just using stock fabrics for the first season? Isn’t it the designs of the outfits themselves that will sell the goods?”
“Good question and I’ve tried not to be too sold on my own work,” Melody said sadly. “Stock fabrics would be cheaper. They might even be unique since major sportswear manufacturers will use custom fabrics.”
“Not so,” Lissa said. “If we went with stock fabrics, our goods would fall into the same category as the white label clothes that get branded for Target, Walmart, K-Mart, Sears, and J.C. Penney. Without custom fabrics we’d have to cut the prices so much that it would end up worse for profit than paying for premium fabrics.”
I wanted to cheer. I don’t know why I felt like we had to convince Jack that we were doing the right thing. Technically, he was an unpaid consultant without even an interest in the business. We all knew he was as emotionally vested in Lissa’s success as the rest of us, though.
“I see the point,” Jack said. “You’ve done your homework. So what is the potential distribution?”
Lissa stood and Melody sat down to yield the floor. Of course, Lissa and I were still dressed as we’d come from the club—in our warm-ups. We’d showered and cleaned up before coming home, but we hadn’t taken formal meeting-wear with us. When we got home there’d been light hors d’oeuvres and bottled water waiting for us and the meeting started as soon as we were settled.
“As of today, we have interest from regional retailers in Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Miami, and Dallas. Of course, these are not orders, but they are based on personal contacts I’ve maintained with the buyers in each of those stores. If we have a line of sportswear that is unique and well-supported, we have customers. But, of course, we expect wholesale to those stores to be far less than our own retail endeavor online. The full marketing and sales presentation is scheduled for next week.”
I can’t say that the rest of our meeting went with everyone in complete agreement on every point. But with a few minor changes to the plan based on a couple of good suggestions from Jack (like adding a child-labor clause to our manufacturing contracts), we came out with a manufacturing plan. All we needed was about a quarter million in capital funding!
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