V. Designers

We only sold rugs to interior designers: glamorous, ugly women (and the occasional gay man) with too much time on their hands. For most of them it was a hobby—something to do to kill the hours of the long, affluent day. They were forever wandering in and out, flirting and talking and carrying on as if they did not live in Salt Lake City, Utah, but were instead cavorting with the gurus of New York or Paris. Did I mention they were ugly? None of them were even the least bit attractive. On occasion they would bring their clients (who were often very attractive) to the showroom to look at the rugs that hung from gigantic metal frames swinging on hidden hinges, creating the illusion of eighteen-feet-tall books with fifteen-thousand dollar pages made of silk and wool. Clueless, the designers’ clients were typically lonely housewives whose husbands’ financial successes fueled their own, masturbatory, financial excesses.