Hey babe, how are you? Hope your day is at least ok. You must be loving that she left, right? Enjoy it. Anyway, just wanted to see if you think you’ll be able to call me around three-thirty today. I have a free hour then before the reading program starts and I need to talk to you. Nothing major, but I would like to talk. Love, A
To which I immediately worried and replied to ask if everything was OK, but he must have logged off right away because he never wrote back again. I made a mental note to call him at exactly three-thirty, loving the feeling of freedom that comes from knowing that She wouldn’t be around to screw it up. But just in case, I pulled a piece ofRunway stationery from the pile and wrote CALL A, 3:30 P.M. TODAY and taped it to the side of my monitor. Just as I was going to call back a friend from school who’d left a message on my Home machine a week earlier, the phone rang.
“Miranda Priestly’s office,” I all but sighed, figuring that there wasn’t a single person on earth I wanted to speak with at that moment.
“Emily? Is that you? Emily?” The unmistakable voice filled the phone line and seemed to seep into the air in the office. Even though she couldn’t have possibly heard from across the suite, Emily looked up at me.
“Hello, Miranda. This is Andrea. May I help you with something?” How on earth was this woman calling? I quickly checked the itinerary that Emily had typed for everyone while Miranda was in Europe and saw that her flight had taken off a mere six minutes before and she was already calling from the seat phone.
“Well, I should hope so. I’ve looked at my itinerary and I just noticed that hair and makeup for Thursday before dinner is not confirmed.”
“Um, well, Miranda, that’s because Monsieur Renaud wasn’t able to get an absolute confirmation from the Thursday people, but he said it was ninety-nine percent that they’d be able to and—”
“Ahn-dre-ah, answer me this: Is ninety-nine percent the same as a hundred? Is it the same asconfirmed ?” But before I could answer I heard her tell someone, most likely a flight attendant, that she wasn’t “particularly interested in the rules and regulations regarding the use of electronics” and to “please bore someone else with them.”
“But ma’am, it’s against the rules, and I’m going to have to ask that you disconnect your call until we’ve reached a cruising altitude. It’s simply unsafe,” she said beseechingly.
“Ahn-dre-ah, can you hear me? Are you listening . . .”
“Ma’am, I’m going to have to insist. Now please, hang up the phone.” My mouth was starting to ache from smiling so widely—I could only imagine how much Miranda was hating being addressed as “ma’am,” which, as everyone knows, connotes old lady all the way.
“Ahn-dre-ah, thestewardess is forcing me to end this call. I’ll call you back when thestewardess allows me to do so. In the meantime, I want hair and makeup confirmed, and I’d like you to begin interviewing new girls for the nanny position. That’s all.” It clicked off, but not before I heard the flight attendant call her “ma’am” one last time.
“What did she want?” Emily asked, her forehead wrinkling in intense worry.
“She called me the right name three times in a row,” I gloated, happy to prolong her anticipation. “Three times, do you believe it? I think that means we’re best friends, doesn’t it? Who would’ve thought? Andrea Sachs and Miranda Priestly, BFF.”
“Andrea, what did she say?”
“Well, she wants the Thursday hair and makeup confirmed because clearly ninety-nine percent isn’t reassuring enough. Oh, and she said something about interviewing for a new nanny? I must’ve misunderstood that one. Whatever—she’ll call back in thirty seconds.”
Emily took a deep breath and willed herself to endure my stupidity with grace and style. It clearly wasn’t easy for her. “No, I don’t think you misunderstood at all. Cara is no longer with Miranda, so obviously she’ll be needing a new nanny.”
“What? What do you mean no longer ‘with Miranda’? If she’s no longer ‘with Miranda,’ then where the hell is she?” I found it really hard to believe Cara wouldn’t have told me about her abrupt departure.
“Miranda thought Cara might be happier working for someone else,” Emily said in what I’m sure was much more diplomatic phrasing than Miranda herself had used. As if Miranda had ever been attuned to other people’s Happiness!
“Emily, please. Please tell me what really happened.”
“I gathered from Caroline that Cara had grounded the girls in their rooms after they talked back to her the other day. Miranda didn’t feel it was appropriate for Cara to be making these decisions. And I aGREe. I mean, Cara is not these girls’ mother, you know?”
So Cara had gotten fired because she made two little girls sit in their bedrooms after they’d surely given her attitude? “Yeah, I see your point. It’s definitely not a nanny’s job to look out for the well-being of her charges,” I said, nodding solemnly. “Cara was out of line there.”
Emily not only didn’t react to my dripping sarcasm, but didn’t seem to detect so much as a hint of it. “Exactly. And besides, Miranda never liked that Cara didn’t speak French. How are the girls supposed to learn to speak it without an American accent?”
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe from their $18,000-a-year private school, where French was a required subject and all three of the French teachers were native speakers? Or perhaps from their own fluent mother who had herself lived in France, still visited a half-dozen times a year and could read, write, and speak the language with perfect, lilting pronunciation? But instead I said, “Hey, you’re right. No French, no nanny. I hear you.”
“Well, regardless, it’s going to be your responsibility to find the girls a new nanny. Here’s the number of the agency we work with,” she said, sending it to me in an e-mail. “They know how discriminating Miranda is—and rightfully so, of course—so they usually give us good people.”
I looked at her warily and wondered what her life had been before Miranda Priestly. I got to sleep with my eyes open for a little while longer before the phone rang again. Blessedly, Emily answered it.
“Hello, Miranda. Yes, yes, I can hear you. No, no problem at all. Yes, I have confirmed hair and makeup for that Thursday. And yes, Andrea has already begun looking for new nannies. We’ll have three solid candidates ready for you to interview on your first day back.” She cocked her head to the side and touched her pen to her lips. “Mmm, yes. Yes, it’s definitely confirmed. No, it’s not ninety-nine percent, it’s one hundred percent. Definitely. Yes, Miranda. Yes, I confirmed it myself, and I’m quite positive. They’re looking forward to it. OK. Have a nice flight. Yes, it’s confirmed. I’ll fax it right now. OK. Good-bye.” She hung up the phone and appeared to be shaking.
“Why doesn’t that woman understand? I told her the hair and makeup were confirmed. And then I told her again. Why did I have to tell her fifty more times? And do you know what she said?”
I shook my head.
“Do you know what she said? She said that since this has all been such a headache for her, she’d like me to redo the itinerary so that it will reflect that hair and makeup is now confirmed and fax it to the Ritz so she’ll have the correct one when she arrives. I do everything for that woman—I give her mylife —and this is how she talks to me in return?” She looked ready to cry. I was thrilled for the rare opportunity to see Emily turn on Miranda, but I knew that aRunway Paranoid Turnaround was imminent, so I had to proceed with caution. Strike just the right note of sympathy and indifference.
“It’s not you, Em, I promise. She knows how hard you work—you’re an amazing assistant to her. If she didn’t think you did a GREat job, she’d have gotten rid of you already. She’s not exactly scared to do it—you know what I mean?”
Emily had stopped tearing and was approaching the defiant zone where, even though she aGREed with me, she’d defend Miranda if I said anything too outrageous. I’d learned about the Stockholm Syndrome in psych, in which the victims identify with their captors, but I hadn’t really understood how it all played out. Maybe I’d videotape one of the little sessions here between Emily and me and send it to the prof so next year’s freshmen could actually see it happening firsthand. All efforts to proceed carefully began to feel superhuman, so I took a deep breath and dove right in.
“She’s a lunatic, Emily,” I said softly and slowly, willing her to aGREe with me. “It’s not you, it’s her. She’s an empty, shallow, bitter woman who has tons and tons of gorgeous clothes and not much else.”
Emily’s face tightened noticeably, the skin on her neck and around her cheeks pulling taut, and her hands stopped shaking. I knew she was going to bulldoze me at any moment, but I couldn’t stop.
“Have you ever noticed that she has no friends, Emily? Have you? Sure, her phone rings day and night with the world’s coolest people, but they’re not calling to talk about their kids or their jobs or their marriages, are they? They’re calling because they need something from her. It sure seems awesome looking in, but can you imagine if the only reason anyone ever called you was because they—”
“Stop it!” she screamed, the tears streaming down her face again. “Just fucking shut up already! You march into this office and think you understand everything. Little Miss I’m So Sarcastic and So Above All This! Well, you don’t understand anything. Anything!”
“Em—”
“Don’t ‘Em,’ me, Andy. Let me finish. I know Miranda is difficult. I know she sometimes seems crazy. I know what it’s like to never sleep and always be scared she’s calling you and have none of your friends understand. I know all that! But if you hate it so much, if you can’t do anything but complain about it and her and everyone else all the time, then why don’t you just leave? Because your attitude is really a problem. And to say that Miranda is a lunatic, well, I think there are many, many more people out there who think she’s gifted and gorgeous and talented and would think you’re a lunatic for not doing your best to help out someone so amazing. Because she is amazing, Andy—she really is!”
I considered this for a moment and decided she had a point. Miranda was, as far as I could tell, a truly fantastic editor. Not a single word of copy made it into the magazine without her explicit, hard-to-obtain approval, and she wasn’t afraid to scrap something and start over, regardless of how inconvenient or unhappy it made everyone else. Although the various fashion editors called in the clothes to shoot, Miranda alone selected the looks she wanted and which models she wanted wearing each one; the sittings editors might be the ones at the actual shoots, but they were simply executing Miranda’s specific and incredibly detailed instructions. She had the final—and often even the preliminary—say over every single bracelet, bag, shoe, outfit, hair style, story, interview, writer, photo, model, location, and photograph in every issue, and that made her, in my mind, the main reason for the magazine’s stunning success each month.Runway wouldn’t beRunway —hell, it wouldn’t be much of anything at all—without Miranda Priestly. I knew it and so did everyone else. What it hadn’t yet done was convince me that any of this gave her a right to treat people the way she did. Why was the ability to put together a Balmain evening gown and a brooding, leggy Asian girl on a side street in San Sebastian worshiped so much that Miranda wasn’t accountable for her behavior? I still wasn’t building the bridge, but what the hell did I know? Emily obviously got it.
“Emily, all I’m saying is that you’re a really GREat assistant to her, that she’s lucky she has someone who works as hard as you do, who’s so committed to the job. I just wish you’d realize that it’s not your fault if she’s unhappy with something. She’s just an unhappy person. There’s nothing more you could have done.”
“I know that. I really do. But you don’t give her enough credit, Andy. Think about it. I mean, really think about it. She is so incredibly accomplished, and she’s had to sacrifice a lot to get there, but couldn’t the same be said of supersuccessful people in every industry? Tell me, how many CEOs or managing partners or movie directors or whatever don’t have to be tough sometimes? It’s part of the job.”
I could tell we weren’t going to see eye to eye on this one. It was clear that Emily was deeply invested in Miranda, inRunway, in all of it, but I just couldn’t understand why. She wasn’t any different from the hundreds of other personal assistants and editorial assistants and assistant editors and associate editors and senior editors and editors in chief of fashion magazines. But I just didn’t understand why. From everything I’d seen so far, each one was humiliated, degraded, and generally abused by their direct superior, only to turn around and do it to those under them the second they got promoted. And all of it so they could say, at the end of the long and exhausting climb, that they’d gotten to sit in the front row at Yves Saint-Laurent’s couture show and had scored a few free Prada bags along the way?
Time to just aGREe. “I know,” I sighed, surrendering to her insistence. “I just hope you know that you’re doing her the favor by putting up with her shit, not the other way around.”
I expected a quick counter-attack, but Emily grinned. “You know how I just told her like a hundred times that her Thursday hair and makeup were confirmed?”
I nodded. She looked positively giddy.
“I was totally lying. I didn’t call a single person or confirm anything!” She practically sang the last part.
“Emily! Are you serious? What are you going to do now? You just swore up and down that you’d personally confirmed it.” For the first time since starting work, I wanted to hug the girl.
“Andy, be serious. Do you honestly think that any sane person is going to say no to doing her hair and makeup? It could make his whole career—he’d be crazy to turn her down. I’m sure the guy was planning to do it all along. He was probably just rearranging his travel plans or something. I don’t have to confirm with him, because I’m that sure he’ll do it. How could henot ? She’s Miranda Priestly!”
Now I thought I would cry, but instead I just said, “So what do I need to know to hire this new nanny? I should probably get started right away.”
“Yeah,” she aGREed, still looking delighted with her own cleverness. “That’s probably a good idea.”
The first girl I interviewed for the nanny position looked positively shell-shocked.
“Oh my god!” she’d howled when I asked her over the phone if she’d mind coming to the office to meet with me. “Oh my god! Are you serious? Oh my god!”
“Um, is that a yes or a no?”
“God, yes. Yes, yes, yes! ToRunway ? Oh my god. Wait until I tell my friends. They’ll die. They’ll absolutely die. Just tell me where to be and when.”
“You understand that Miranda’s away right now, so you won’t be meeting with her, right?”
“Yep. Totally.”
“And you also know that the job is being a nanny to Miranda’s two daughters, right? That it won’t have anything to do withRunway ?”
She sighed as if to resign herself to the sad, unfortunate fact. “Yes, of course. A nanny, I totally get it.”
Well, she hadn’t really gotten it, because even though she looked the part (tall, impeccably groomed, reasonably well dressed, and seriously underfed), she kept asking which parts of the job would require her to be at the office.
I shot her a specialty Withering, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Um, none. Remember, we talked about this? I’m just doing some initial screening for Miranda, and we just happen to be doing it in the office. But that’s it. Her twins don’t live here, you know?”
“Right, right,” she’d aGREed, but I’d already nixed her.
The next three the agency had waiting in the reception area weren’t much better. Physically, all fit the Miranda profile—the agency really did know exactly what she wanted—but not one had what I’d be looking for in a nanny who’d be taking care of my future niece or nephew, the standard I’d set for the process. One had a master’s in child development from Cornell but glazed over when I tried to describe the subtle ways this job might be different from others she’d held. Another had dated a famous NBA player, which she felt gave her “insight into celebrity.” But when I’d asked her if she’d ever worked with the children of celebrities, she’d instinctively wrinkled her nose and informed me that “famous people’s kids always have, like, major issues.” Nixed. The third and most promising had grown up in Manhattan and had just graduated from Middlebury and wanted to spend a year as a nanny to save some money for a trip to Paris. When I asked if that meant she spoke French, she nodded. The only problem was that she was a city girl through and through and therefore didn’t have a driver’s license. Was she willing to learn? I’d asked. No, she’d answered. She didn’t believe that the streets needed another car clogging them. Nix number three. I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out a tactful way of telling Miranda that if a girl is attractive, athletic, comfortable with celebrity, lives in Manhattan, has a driver’s license, can swim, has an advanced deGREe, speaks French, and is completely and entirely flexible with her time, then chances are she does not want to be a nanny.
She must have read my mind, because the phone rang immediately. I did a few calculations and realized that Miranda would have just landed at de Gaulle, and a quick glance at the second-by-second itinerary Emily had so painstakingly constructed showed she would now be in the car on her way to the Ritz.
“Miranda Pri—”
“Emily!” she practically shrieked. I wisely decided now wasn’t the time to correct her. “Emily! The driver did not give me my usual phone, and as a result I don’t have anyone’s phone number. This is unacceptable. Entirely unacceptable. How am I supposed to conduct Business with no phone numbers? Connect me immediately to Mr. Lagerfeld.”
“Yes, Miranda, please hold just a moment.” I jabbed the hold button and called out to Emily for help, although I would’ve had better luck simply eating the receiver whole than actually locating Karl Lagerfeld in less time than it took Miranda to get so annoyed that she’d smash down the phone and keep calling to ask, “Where the hell is he? Why can’t you find him? Do you not know how to use a phone?”
“She wants Karl,” I called over to Emily. The name immediately sent her flying, racing, tearing through papers all over her desk.
“OK, listen. We have twenty to thirty seconds. You take Biarritz and the driver, I’ll get Paris and the assistant,” she called, her fingers already flying across the keypad. I double-clicked on the thousand-plus name contact list that we shared on our hard drives and found exactly five numbers I’d have to call: Biarritz main, Biarritz second main, Biarritz studio, Biarritz pool, and Biarritz driver. A quick glance over the other listings for Karl Lagerfeld indicated that Emily had a grand total of seven, and there were still more numbers for New York and Milan. We were dead before we started.
I’d tried Biarritz main and was in the middle of dialing Biarritz second main when I saw that the FLASHing red light had stopped blinking. Emily announced that Miranda had hung up, in case I hadn’t noticed. Only ten or fifteen seconds had passed—she was feeling particularly impatient today. Naturally, the phone rang again immediately, and Emily responded to my pleading puppy eyes and answered it. She didn’t get halfway through her canned GREeting before she was nodding gravely and trying to reassure Miranda. I was still dialing and had—miraculously—made it to Biarritz pool, where I was currently talking to a woman who didn’t speak a single word, a single syllable, of English. Maybe this was the obsession with speaking French?
“Yes, yes, Miranda. Andrea and I are calling right now. It should only be a few more seconds. Yes, I understand. No, I know it’s frustrating. If you’ll allow me to just put you on hold for ten seconds or so, I’m sure we’ll have him on the line. OK?” She punched “hold” and kept right on jabbing numbers. I heard her trying in what sounded like horrifically accented and broken French to talk to someone who appeared to not know the name Karl Lagerfeld. We were dead. Dead. I was getting ready to hang up on the crazy French woman who was shrieking into the receiver when I saw the FLASHing red light go out again. Emily was still frantically dialing.
“She’s gone!” I called with the urgency of an EMT performing emergency CPR.
“Your turn to get it!” she screamed back, fingers flying, and sure enough, the phone rang again.
I picked it up and didn’t even attempt to say anything, since I knew the voice on the other end would speak up immediately. It did.
“Ahn-dre-ah! Emily! Whoever the hell I’m talking to . . . why is it that I’m speaking with you and not with Mr. Lagerfeld? Why?”
My first instinct was to remain silent, since it didn’t appear that the verbal barrage was over, but as usual, my instincts were wrong.
“Hell-ooo?Anyone there? Is the process of connecting one phone call to another really too difficult forboth my assistants?”
“No, Miranda, of course not. I’m sorry about this—” My voice was shaking a little, but I couldn’t get it under control. “—it’s just that we can’t seem to find Mr. Lagerfeld. We’ve already tried at least eight—”
“Can’t seem to find him?”she mimicked in a high-pitched voice. “What do you mean, you ‘can’t seem to find’ him?”
What part of that simple five-word sentence did she not comprehend, I wondered. Can’t. Seem. To. Find. Him. Seemed rather clear and precise to me: We can’t fucking find him. That is why you’re not talking to him. Ifyou can find him, thenyou can talk to him. A million barbed responses raced around my head, but I could only sputter like a first-grader who’d been singled out by the teacher for talking in class.
“Um, well, Miranda, we’ve called all of the numbers we have listed for him, and he doesn’t appear to be at any of them,” I managed.
“Well of course he’s not!” She was almost screaming now, that precious, well-guarded cool was precariously close to collapsing. She took a deep, exaggerated breath and said calmly, “Ahn-dre-ah. Are you aware that Mr. Lagerfeld is in Paris this week?” I felt like we were doing English As a Second Language lessons.
“Of course, Miranda. Emily has been trying all the numbers in—”
“And are you aware that Mr. Lagerfeld said he’d be available on his mobile phone while he was in Paris?” Every muscle in her throat strained to keep her voice even and calm.
“Well, no, we don’t have a cell number listed in the directory, so we didn’t know that Mr. Lagerfeld even had a Cell Phone. But Emily is on the phone with his assistant right now, and I’m sure she’ll have that number in just a minute.” Emily gave me the thumbs-up right before she scribbled something and exclaimed, “Merci,oh yes, thank you, I mean,merci ” over and over again.
“Miranda, I have the number right here. Would you like me to connect you now?” I could feel my chest puff out with confidence and pride. A job well done! A superior performance under the most pressure-filled conditions. Never mind that my really cute peasant blouse that had been complimented by two—not one, but two—fashion assistants was now sporting sweat stains under the arms. Who cared? I was about to get this stark raving mad lunatic of an international caller off my back, and I was thrilled.
“Ahn-dre-ah?” It sounded like a question, but I was only concentrating on trying to figure out a pattern for indiscriminate name mix-ups. At first I’d thought she did it deliberately in an attempt to belittle and humiliate us even more, but then I figured out that she was probably quite satisfied with the levels of belittlement and humiliation we endured and so she did it only because she couldn’t be bothered to keep straight details so inane as her two assistants’ names. Emily had confirmed this by saying that she called her Emily about half the time but called her a mixture of Andrea and Allison—the assistant before her—the other half. I felt better.
“Yes?” Squeaking again. Dammit! Wasn’t it possible for me to have just a tiny bit of dignity with this woman?
“Ahn-dre-ah, I don’t know what all the fuss is over finding Mr. Lagerfeld’s mobile number when I have it right here. He gave it to me just five minutes ago, but we were disconnected and I can’t seem to dial correctly.” She said the last part as though the entire world was to blame for this irritation and inconvenience except for herself.
“Oh. You, um, you have the number? And you knew he was on that number the whole time?” I was saying it for Emily’s benefit, and it only served to enrage Miranda even more.
“Am I not making myself perfectly clear here? I need you to connect me to 03.55.23.56.67.89. Immediately. Or is that too difficult?”
Emily was slowly shaking her head in disbelief as she crumpled up the number we’d both just fought so hard to get.
“No, no, Miranda, of course that’s not too difficult. I’ll connect you right away. Hold just a minute.” I hit “conference,” dialed the numbers, heard an older man shout “Allo!” into the phone, and hit conference again. “Mr. Lagerfeld, Miranda Priestly, you’re connected,” I stated like one of those manual operators from theLittle House on the Prairie days. And instead of putting the whole call on mute and then hitting speaker so Emily and I could listen in on the call together, I just hung up. We sat in silence for a few minutes as I tried to refrain from badmouthing Miranda immediately. Instead, I mopped some dampness from my forehead and took long, deep breaths. She spoke first.
“So, let me just get this straight. She had his number the entire time but just didn’t know how to dial it?”
“Or maybe she just didn’t feel like dialing it,” I added helpfully, always enthusiastic for the chance to team up against Miranda, especially considering how rare the opportunities were with Emily.
“I should’ve known,” she said, shaking her head like she was horribly disappointed with herself. “I really should’ve known that. She always calls to have me connect her to people who are staying in the next room, or who are in a hotel two streets over. I remember I thought that was the weirdest thing, calling from Paris to New York to have someone connect you to someone in Paris. Now it just seems normal, of course, but I can’t believe I didn’t see that one coming.”
I was about to run to the dining room for lunch, but the phone rang again. Operating under the lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice theory, I decided to be a sport and answer the phone.
“Miranda Priestly’s office.”
“Emily! I am standing in the pouring rain on the rue de Rivoli and my driver has vanished. Vanished! Do you understand me? Vanished! Find him immediately!” She was hysterical, my very first time hearing her that way, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it was the only time.
“Miranda, just a moment. I have his number right here.” I turned to scan my desk for the itinerary I’d set down a moment earlier, but all I saw were papers, old Bulletins, stacks of back issues. Only three or four seconds had passed, but I felt as if I were standing right next to her, watching as the rain poured down on her Fendi fur and caused the makeup to melt down the side of her face. Like she could just reach out and slap my face, tell me I’m a worthless piece of shit with zero talent, no skill set, a complete and total loser. There wasn’t time to talk myself down, remind myself that this was merely a human being (theoretically) who wasn’t happy to be standing in the rain and was taking it out on her assistant 3,600 miles away. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.
“Ahn-dre-ah! My shoes areruined . Do you hear me? Are you even listening? Find my drivernow! ”
I was at risk of some inappropriate emotion—I could feel the knot in the back of my throat, the tightening of the muscles in the back of my neck, but it was too early to tell if I would laugh or cry. Either one: not good. Emily must have sensed as much, because she leapt out of her seat and handed me her copy of the itinerary. She’d even highlighted the driver’s contact numbers, three in all, one for the car phone, his mobile phone, and his Home phone. Naturally.
“Miranda, I’m going to need to put you on hold while I call him. Can I put you on hold?” I didn’t wait for a response, which I knew would drive her crazy, and threw the call on hold. I dialed Paris again. The good news was the driver picked up on the first ring of the first number I tried. The bad news was he didn’t speak English. Although I’d never been self-destructive before, I couldn’t help but smash my forehead firmly into the Formica. Three times of this, and Emily had picked up the line at her desk. She’d resorted to screaming, not so much in attempt to make the driver understand her own bad French, but simply because she was trying to impress upon him the urgency of the current situation. New drivers always took a little breaking in, mostly because they foolishly believed that if Miranda had to wait forty-five seconds to a minute extra, she’d be all right. This was precisely the notion of which Emily and I were to disabuse them.
We both put our heads down a few minutes later, after Emily had managed to insult the driver enough that he’d hightailed it back to where he’d left Miranda three or four minutes earlier. I wasn’t particularly hungry for lunch anymore, a phenomenon that made me nervous. WasRunway rubbing off? Or was it just the adrenaline and nerves mixing together to guarantee no appetite? That was it! The starvation so endemic atRunway was not, in fact, self-induced; it was merely the physiological response of bodies that were so consistently terrified and all-around anxiety-ridden that they were never actually hungry. I vowed to look into this a little more and perhaps explore the possibility that Miranda was smarter than all of this and had deliberately created a persona so offensive on every level that she literally scared people skinny.
“Ladies, ladies, ladies! Pick those heads up off those desks! Can you imagine Miranda seeing you now? She wouldn’t be very happy!” James sang from the doorway. He had slicked back his hair using some GREasy, waxy stuff called Bed Head (“Hot name—how can you resist?”) and was wearing some sort of skintight football jersey with the number 69 on both the front and the back. As always, a picture of subtlety and understatement.
Neither of us so much as glanced at him. The clock said it was only four, but it felt like midnight.
“OK then, let me guess. Mama’s been calling off the hook because she lost an earring somewhere between the Ritz and Alain Ducasse and she wants you to find it, even though it’s in Paris and you’re in New York.”
I snorted. “You think that would put us in this condition? That’s ourjob . We do that every day. Give us something difficult.”
Even Emily laughed. “Seriously, James, not good enough. I could find an earring in under ten minutes in any city in the world,” she said, all of a sudden inspired to join in for reasons I didn’t understand. “It’d only be a challenge if she didn’t tell us what city she’d lost it in. But I bet even then we could do it.”
James was backing himself away from the office, a look of feigned horror on his face. “All right, then, ladies, you have a GREat day, you hear? At least she hasn’t fucked you both up for good. I mean, seriously, thank god for that, right? You’re bothtooootally sane. Yeah. Um, have a great day . . .”
“NOT SO FAST THERE, YOU PANSY!” shrieked someone very loud and very high-pitched. “I WANT YOU TO MARCH YOUR WAY BACK IN THERE AND TELL THE GIRLS WHAT YOU WERE THINKING WHEN YOU PUT THAT SHMATA ON THIS MORNING!” Nigel grabbed James by the left ear and dragged him into the area between our desks.
“Oh, come on, Nigel,” James whined, pretending to be annoyed but obviously delighted that Nigel was touching him. “You know you love this top!”
“LOVE THAT TOP? YOU THINK I LOVE THAT FRATTY, GAY-JOCK LOOK YOU’VE GOT GOING? JAMES, YOU NEED TO RETHINK HERE, OK? OK?”
“What’s wrong with a tight football jersey? I think it looks hot.” Emily and I nodded in quiet alliance with James. It may not have been exactly tasteful, but he did look incredibly hip. And besides, it was kind of tough to be taking fashion advice from a man who was, at that precise moment, wearing zebra-print boot-cut jeans and a black V-neck sweater with a keyhole cut out in the back to reveal rippling back muscles. The whole ensemble was topped off with a floppy straw hat and a touch (subtle, I’ll give him that!) of kohl eyeliner.
“BABY BOY, fashion IS NOT FOR advertising YOUR FAVE SEX ACTS ON YOUR SHIRT. UNH-UNH, NO IT’S NOT! YOU WANNA SHOW A LITTLE SKIN? THAT’S HOT! YOU WANNA SHOW SOME OF THOSE TIGHT, YOUNG CURVES OF YOURS?THAT’S HOT. CLOTHING IS NOT FOR TELLING THE WORLD WHAT POSITION YOU PREFER, BOYFRIEND. NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
“But, Nigel!” A look of defeat was carefully constructed to disguise how pleased he was to be the center of Nigel’s attention.
“DON’T ‘NIGEL’ ME, HONEY. GO TALK TO JEFFY AND TELL HIM I SENT YOU. TELL HIM TO GIVE YOU THE NEW CALVIN TANK WE CALLED IN FOR THE MIAMI SHOOT. IT’S THE ONE THAT GORGEOUS BLACK MODEL—OH MY, HE’S AS TASTY AS A THICK, CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE—IS ASSIGNED TO WEAR. GO ON NOW, SHOO. BUT BE SURE TO COME BACK HERE AND SHOW ME WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE!”
James scampered off like a recently fed bunny rabbit, and Nigel turned to look at us. “HAVE YOU PUT IN HER CLOTHING ORDER YET?” he asked no one in particular.
“No, she won’t choose until she has the look-books,” Emily answered, looking bored. “She said she’ll do it when she gets back.”
“WELL, JUST BE SURE TO LET ME KNOW AHEAD OF TIME SO I CAN CLEAR MY SCHEDULE FOR THAT PARTY!” He took off in the direction of the Closet, probably to try to catch a glimpse of James changing.
I’d already lived through one round of Miranda wardrobe ordering, and it hadn’t been pretty. When at the shows, she went from runway to runway, sketchbook in hand, preparing herself to come back to the States and tell New York society what they would be wearing—and middle America what they’d like to be wearing—via the only runway that actually mattered. Little did I know that Miranda was also paying particular attention to the outfits cruising down the runways because it was her first glance at what she herself would be wearing in the upcoming months.
A couple weeks after returning to the office, Miranda had handed Emily a list of designers whose look-books she’d like to see. As the usual suspects rushed to get their books put together for her—their runway photographs often weren’t even developed, never mind airbrushed and bound, before she demanded to see them—everyone atRunway was put on alert that the books would be arriving. Nigel would need to be ready, of course, to help her flip through them all and select her personal outfits. An accessories editor should be on hand to choose bags and shoes, and perhaps an extra fashion editor to ensure that everyone was in aGREement—especially if the order included something big, like a fur coat or an evening gown. When the various houses had finally pieced together the different items she’d requested, Miranda’s personal tailor would come toRunway for a few days to fit everything. Jeffy would completely empty out the Closet, and no one would really be able to get any work done at all, since Miranda and her tailor would be holed up in there for hours on end. On the first go-round of fittings, I’d walked by the Closet just in time to hear Nigel shouting, “MIRANDA PRIESTLY! TAKE THAT RAG OFF THIS SECOND. THAT DRESS MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A SLUT! A COMMON WHORE!” I’d stood outside with my ear pressed to the door—literally risking life and limb if it were to swing open—and waited for her to upbraid him in that special way of hers, but all I heard was a quiet murmur of agreement and the rustling of the fabric as she removed the dress.
Now that I had been there long enough, it seemed as though the honor of ordering Miranda’s clothes would fall to me. Four times a year, like clockwork, she flipped through look-books like they were her own personal catalogs and selected Alexander McQueen suits and Balenciaga pants like they were T-shirts from L.L.Bean. A yellow sticky on this pair of Fendi pencil pants, another placed squarely over the Chanel skirt suit, a third with a big “NO” plastered across the matching silk top. Flip, stick, flip, stick, on and on it went, until she had selected a full season’s wardrobe directly from the runway, clothes that had most likely not yet even been made.
I’d watched as Emily had faxed Miranda’s choices to the different designers, omitting any size or color preference, since anyone worth their Manolos knew what would work for Miranda Priestly. Of course, merely being made to the correct size wasn’t enough—when the clothes did arrive at the magazine, they’d need to be cut and tucked to make them appear custom-made. Only when the entire wardrobe was completely ordered, shipped, snipped, and delivered expressly to her bedroom closet by chauffeured limousine would Miranda relinquish last season’s clothes and heaps of Yves and Celine and Helmut Lang would find their way—in garbage bags—back to the office. Most were only four or six months old, stuff that had been worn once or twice or, most often, not at all. Everything was still so incredibly stylish, so ludicrously hip, that it wasn’t yet available in most stores, but once it was last season, it was about as likely to show up on Miranda as a pair of pleather pants from Target’s new Massimo line.
Occasionally I’d find a tank top or an oversize jacket I could keep, but the fact that everything was in a size zero was a bit of a problem. Mostly we distributed the clothes to anyone with preteen daughters, the only ones who had a shot in hell of actually fitting into the stuff. I pictured little girls with bodies like little boys strutting around in Prada lipstick skirts and slinky Dolce and Gabbana dresses with spaghetti straps. If there was something really dynamite, really expensive, I’d pull it from the garbage bag and stash it under my desk until I could smuggle it Home safely. A few quick clicks on ebay or perhaps a little visit to one of the upscale consignment shops on Madison Avenue, and my salary all of a sudden wasn’t so depressing. Not stealing, I rationalized, simply utilizing what was available to me.
Miranda called six more times between the hours of six and nine in the evening—midnight to threeA .M. her time—to have us connect her to various people who were already in Paris. I fielded them listlessly, uneventfully, until I went to gather my things and try to sneak out for the night before the phone rang again. It wasn’t until I was climbing exhaustedly into my coat that I caught a glimpse of the note that I’d stuck to my monitor just so this very thing wouldn’t happen: CALL A, 3:30P.M. TODAY. My head felt like it was swimming, my contacts had long before dried to tiny, hard shards covering my eyes, and at this point my head started to throb. No sharp pains, just that nebulous, dull kind of ache where you can’t pinpoint the center but you know it will build and build in a slow, burning intensity until you either manage to pass out or your head just explodes. In the frenzy of all the calls that had produced such anxiety, such panic, from across an ocean, I had forgotten to take the thirty seconds out of my day and call Alex when he’d asked me to. Simply up and forgotten to do something so simple for someone who never seemed to need anything from me.
I sat down in the now darkened and silent office and picked up the phone that was still a little wet from my sweaty hands during Miranda’s last call a few minutes earlier. His Home line rang and rang until the machine picked up, but he answered on the first ring when I tried his Cell Phone.
“Hi,” he said, knowing it was me from the caller ID. “How was your day?”
“Whatever, usual. Alex, I’m so sorry I didn’t call you at three-thirty. I can’t even get into it—it’s just that things were so crazy here, she just kept calling and—”
“Hey, forget it. Not a big deal. Listen, now’s not really a GREat time for me. Can I call you tomorrow?” He sounded distracted, his voice taking on that faraway quality of someone talking from an international payphone on the beach of a tiny village across the world.
“Um, sure. But is everything OK? Will you just quickly tell me what you wanted to talk about before? I’ve been really worried that everything’s not OK.”
He was quiet for a moment and then said, “Yeah, well it doesn’t seem like you were all that worried. I ask you one time to call me at a time that’s convenient for me—not to mention that your boss isn’t even in the country right now—and you can’t manage to do that until six hours after the fact. Not really a sign of someone who’s genuinely concerned, you know?” He stated all of this with no sarcasm, no disapproval, just a simple summary of the facts.
I was twisting the phone cord around my finger until it cut off the circulation entirely, making the knuckle bulge out and the tip turn white; there was also a brief, metallic taste of blood in my mouth, the first realization that I had been gnawing on the inside of my bottom lip.
“Alex, it’s not that I forgot to call,” I lied openly, trying to extricate myself from his nonaccusatory accusation. “I simply didn’t have a single second free, and since it sounded like something serious, I didn’t want to call just to have to hang up again. I mean, she must have called me two dozen times just this afternoon, and each one is an absolute emergency. Emily took off at five and left me all alone with that phone, and Miranda just didn’t stop. She just kept calling and calling and calling, and every time I went to call you, it’d be her again on the other line. I, uh, you know?”
My rapid-fire list of excuses sounded pathetic even to me, but I couldn’t stop. He knew I had just forgotten, and so did I. Not because I didn’t care or wasn’t concerned, but because all things non-Miranda somehow ceased to be relevant the moment I arrived at work. In some ways I still didn’t understand and certainly couldn’t explain—never mind ask anyone else to understand—how the outside world just melted into nonexistence, that the only thing remaining when everything else vanished wasRunway . It was especially difficult to explain this phenomenon when it was the single thing in my life I despised. And yet, it was the only one that mattered.
“Listen, I have to get back to Joey. He has two friends over and they’ve probably torn apart the entire house by this point.”
“Joey? Does that mean you’re in Larchmont? You don’t usually watch him on Wednesdays. Is everything OK?” I was hoping to steer him away from the blatantly obvious fact that I had gotten too wrapped up at work for six straight hours, and this seemed like the best path. He’d tell me how his mom had gotten held up at work accidentally or perhaps had to go see Joey’s teacher for conferences that night when the regular babysitter canceled. He’d never complain of course—that just wasn’t his style—but he’d at least tell me what was going on.
“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine. My mom just had an emergency client meeting tonight. Andy, I can’t really talk about it now. I was just calling before with some good news. But you didn’t call me back,” he said flatly.
I wrapped the phone cord, which had begun to slowly unravel, so tight around my pointer and middle fingers that they began to pulsate. “I’m sorry” was all I could manage, because even though I knew he was right, that I was insensitive not to have called, I was too worn out to present a huge defense. “Alex, please. Please don’t punish me by not telling me something good. Do you know how long it’s been since anyone has called with good news? Please. Give me that at least.” I knew he’d respond to my rational approach, and he did.
“Look, it’s not that exciting. I just went ahead and made all the arrangements for us to go back for our first Homecoming together.”
“You did? Really? We’re going?” I’d brought it up a couple times before in what I’d liked to believe had been an offhand and casual way, but in a decidedly non-Alex fashion he’d been hedging on committing to our going together. It was really early to be planning any of it, but the hotels and restaurants in Providence were always full months ahead of time. I’d dropped it a few weeks earlier, figuring that we would figure something out, find a place to stay somewhere. But somehow, of course, he’d picked up on just how badly I wanted to go with him, and he’d figured out everything.
“Yeah, it’s done. We have a rental car—a Jeep, actually—and I reserved a room at the Biltmore.”
“At the Biltmore? You’re kidding? You got a room there? That’s amazing.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve always talked about wanting to stay there, so I figured we should try it. I even made a reservation for brunch on Sunday at Al Forno for ten people, so we can each gather up the troops and have everyone in one place at one time.”
“No way. You did all of this already?”
“Sure. I thought you’d be really psyched. That’s why I was really looking forward to telling you about it. But apparently you were too busy to call back.”
“Alex, I’m thrilled. I can’t even tell you how excited I am, and I can’t believe you figured everything out already. I’m really sorry about before, but I can’t wait for October. We’re going to have the best time, thanks to you.”
We talked for another couple minutes. By the time I hung up, he didn’t sound mad anymore, but I could barely move. The effort to win him back, to find the right words not only to convince him that I hadn’t overlooked him but also to reassure him that I was appropriately grateful and enthusiastic had drained the last reserves of my energy. I don’t remember getting into the car or the ride Home or whether or not I said hello to John Fisher-Galliano in the lobby of my building. Besides a bone-deep exhaustion that hurt so much it almost felt good, the only thing I remember feeling at all was relief that Lily’s door was shut and no light peeked out from under it. I thought about ordering in some food, but the mere thought of locating a menu and a phone was too overwhelming—another meal that simply wasn’t happening.
Instead, I sat on the crumbling concrete of my furnitureless balcony and leisurely inhaled a cigarette. Lacking the energy to actually blow the smoke out, I let it seep from my mouth and hang in the still air around me. At some point I heard Lily’s door open, her footsteps shuffling along the hallway, but I quickly turned out my lights and sat in the darkened silence. There had just been fifteen straight hours of talking, and I could talk no more.
