“Oh?” An inch of pristine snow coated the floor of the balcony and the teak furniture outside. He leaned as far as he could through the door opening and lit up. Much as he relished a smoke, he couldn’t abide the after-smell in his office. It was like the scent of a woman’s genitalia: he enjoyed it well enough during but couldn’t wait for her to shower after. “What’d she do?”

“She ran the vacuum cleaner. While I was on the phone!”

“Oh, dear. Something important, was it?”

“Of course it was important. I was talking to Jan!”

He took a long drag on the cigarette. Jan was the latest in a line of Melanie’s life coaches who was training her in self-care. He wouldn’t have thought she needed much help in that department. Her days consisted entirely of beauty and health treatments, shopping, tennis and swimming, and sessions with her therapist, all under the rubric of self-care. While his own days consisted entirely of caring for others. For women it was all about choice, but for men like Barrett there was no choice. From the cradle his fate was set: to work every day of his adult life to support a household—or two, as it turned out—of other people who could then be free to amuse themselves or express themselves or do whatever the hell they felt like doing. Or not doing, in the case of his layabout son Christian. These were the expectations with which every man of his age and race and class had been raised, and they were passed down from generation to generation. If a man wasn’t more successful than his father and his father before him, he was a failure. And Barrett was responsible not only for his families but for all the employees in this office and the one on Seventh Avenue and the studios in Tours and Milan, not to mention the factories on the other side of the world. This, he thought, was the true white man’s burden.

“She can’t follow even the simplest instructions, Barry.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that, darling.”

“Send somebody to come get her, would you? And you need to get me a new housekeeper, Barry. Today! Someone who speaks a modicum of English this time.”

“I’ll get right on it. Love you!”

Graziella was next; her fall line would be unveiled on the runway at Lincoln Center in just four days. Always high-strung, she was close to snapping under the pressure of Fashion Week. Today’s crisis was the detention of six of her models at JFK. Customs and Border Protection had the gall to question the purpose of their visit. The girls had done what the foreign models were always instructed to do: pretend to be tourists or students. But they’d made the mistake of traveling together—what to call a group of models? he wondered—and CBP couldn’t help but be suspicious of such an anorexia flying into New York on the eve of Fashion Week.