The Knockoff

by Lucy Sykes

  “Yes, Imogen?” she said sweetly.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Sure. Your office?”

  Eve settled herself on the couch while Imogen closed the door behind her.

  “That was my idea.”

  “What was your idea?” Eve’s eyes widened with incredulity.

  “Salefie was my idea. I told you that idea before I left last night and you know it.”

  Eve cocked her head to one side. “Was that you? I could have sworn that it was one of the ideas I wrote down weeks ago. I think it came from a jam session with the Customer Insight Team about how we could get the conversion rate up.”

  Imogen felt like she was entering a parallel universe.

  “We talked about it last night.”

  Eve kept the confused stare on her face.

  “I talk to so many people about so many ideas every single day, Imogen. My job is to make sure that everything is efficiently implemented and this was. I am sure something you said could have contributed to what I came up with.” Eve’s expression shifted to something nearing pity.

  “This is low, Eve. Stealing ideas.”

  Eve just kept smiling. “All of the ideas belong to everyone, Imogen. We are a team.” Imogen had no words left. She could go on for another twenty minutes, but Eve had backed her into a corner.

  “I have a meeting,” Imogen lied, mustering all of the strength she had left into her voice. “I’ll be out of the office for a couple of hours.”

  Eve had already turned her attention back to her phone.

  “No worries, Imogen. All of us will be just fine here without you.”

  —

  Imogen squinted unhappily into the dull winter sun. She needed to think.

  There was only one person she wanted to speak to and once she walked outside, Imogen pulled out her cell and from memory dialed the number for Molly Watson’s Upper East Side apartment. Molly had never owned a cell phone. Her fleet of assistants always knew how to reach her, and if that failed, she had a landline in her apartment with an answering machine she checked religiously every evening.

  “No one needs to be able to reach you all the time,” Molly once told Imogen in the languid hours of the morning after an eleven-hour photo shoot. “Always be a little inaccessible. Everyone will just want you all the more.” How long had it been since she talked to her old boss? Five months at least. She had stopped returning Imogen’s calls over the summer.

  Someone answered on the third ring. The voice was small and Imogen imagined it must be one of Molly’s many minions.

  “This is Imogen Tate for Molly Watson,” Imogen announced herself.

  Silence on the other end.

  “Im, it’s me, darling.”

  Molly’s voice could command a room of models with egos the size of the Hope Diamond. When she whispered an entire photo shoot went silent in fear they would miss out on something of dire importance. The voice Imogen heard on the other end of the line was limp and spiked with anxiety.

  At first Molly hesitated when Imogen said she would love to pop by and catch up before lunchtime, but relented with little protest.

  “It’s probably a good idea, my darling,” she said. “Come straight up. I will tell Isaac you are on your way.” Isaac, Molly’s doorman, had been manning the white-gloved lobby of 100 East Eighty-Seventh Street for thirty years, ever since Molly bought the three-bedroom apartment with a sweeping terrace and a library with one of the most extensive collections of fashion tomes anywhere in the Americas.

  Molly had never married. She would have died if she heard anyone use the term, but she was one of the many, many fashion widows in New York City—women so devoted to the industry that they never put a man ahead of a promotion. Aside from being professionally single, Molly was everything Imogen wanted to be—tough yet fair, demanding but willing to listen with energy that was contagious. But most of all she inspired Imogen to find a job that she absolutely adored.

  “Love what you do, darling, otherwise what’s the fucking point,” she’d told her over and over again.

  In the marble-floored lobby, Isaac, wearing his crisp uniform, greeted Imogen by name. His lips contracted as if he wanted to tell her something more before she boarded the elevator to the twelfth floor.

  The lift opened to the left, directly into Molly’s foyer. Typically overrun with friends, caviar and cigarette smoke, the space now smelled slightly stale, like a book left too long on a shelf. Imogen could hear the din of a television in a room farther into the interior, but couldn’t imagine where it was coming from. As long as she had known her, Imogen had never seen Molly watch TV. Lula, Molly’s longtime maid and sometime cook, was noticeably absent from the foyer, where Imogen was accustomed to her whisking away coats and shawls and proffering tea, coffee and the odd Xanax to the particularly anxious visitor. Imogen followed the unmistakable voices of Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb of the Today show. Molly’s apartment was an exercise in coziness. Books on subjects ranging from art to fashion to history lined every wall. There were biographies of every great designer of the twentieth century. Custom-printed Cole-fax and Fowler wallpaper of Victorian roses peeked through between the shelves. Persian rugs were layered one on top of the next but couldn’t prevent the wood floor from creaking gently beneath Imogen’s heels. A mahogany grandfather clock in the corner had stopped with the hands splayed in opposite directions. Without squinting Imogen couldn’t tell if it was stopped at six or twelve thirty. On a wonderful wrought-iron mantelpiece sat old Polaroids from long-ago photo shoots propped against tall white candles. Above those was Imogen’s favorite piece in the entire apartment, an original Edward Hopper painting, High Road. The oils showed a country thoroughfare sloping gently into a bucolic town. The painting had been on loan to the Whitney for the past eighteen months. Imogen was pleased to see it back. More than a beautiful piece, its title was Molly’s mantra: “Always take the high road.” Each time Imogen looked at it, she discovered something new. Today she saw it as something aspirational, a road far outside of her urban existence. Far away from Eve.

  A massive dark green velvet chesterfield sofa covered in no fewer than twenty cushions occupied the majority of the room. It was whispered that Molly had someone come in to fluff those cushions every afternoon. The schoolteacher’s daughter in Imogen always marveled at that. Imagine one person just to fluff your pillows!

  Enveloped within those massive cushions was Molly, her eyes affixed to what, judging from the thin plastic still covering the screen, had to be a relatively new very thin and flat television. Imogen shuffled her feet and cleared her throat to grab the woman’s attention, causing Molly to swivel her elegant steel-gray ballerina bun around to greet her with an unsure smile. The woman’s face was unlined even at seventy, from five decades of religiously avoiding the sun. She was, as ever, dressed all in black, Olatz black silk pajamas so tailored that from afar they could be mistaken for a bespoke pantsuit, crisp, classic and ever so cool. Just a pop of color at her neck, four adjoined strands of red beads on a vintage Chanel Gripoix necklace.

  Her posture, once celebrated at Miss Porter’s finishing school, remained straight as a pin.

  Imogen’s gaze traveled to the painting. “You got it back.”

  “I did,” Molly said simply, with a studied admiration of the piece. “The room wasn’t entirely complete without it, was it? Is that a silly thing, to believe that a painting can complete a place…or a person? Edward Hopper loved to paint. He never made much money from it, but he loved it. He made his money making illustrations for advertisements, did you know that? Despised it, but it paid the bills. This right here, this perfect scene, this is something he truly loved.”

  “You look wonderful,” Imogen said, even though it wasn’t exactly true. Molly looked tired. Navy semicircles under her eyes were the only imperfection on an otherwise flawless face. Her smell wafted over Imogen, a mixture of expensive tobacco and Joy by Jean Patou.

/>   “I’ve been calling you,” Imogen said with a sense of urgency she hadn’t expected to use.

  Molly reached over to place her hand on the younger woman’s.

  “Shall we smoke a ciggie?” asked the same small voice Imogen had heard on the telephone. Imogen made a small glance at her own breasts, thinking about the cancer, before giving a slight shake of her head, indicating that Molly should smoke alone as she lowered herself down onto the outlandishly large couch. Sitting next to Molly made her feel calmer, gave her a sense that the world could be righted and go back to the way things used to be.

  The older woman pulled closer a pale green gold-leafed Limoges ashtray sorely in need of emptying and secured a wearied pack of Dunhills from the folds of the couch. A window was cracked for the smoke to escape and heavy lilac chintz grand curtains shimmied like burlesque dancers in the autumn breeze. Neither woman spoke until Molly exhaled her first heady pull. They were still in the easy and familiar silence.

  Imogen embraced the smoke blowing toward her like a long-lost friend she might never hold again.

  “How are you doing, my dear?” Molly asked.

  Of course Molly knew what had happened to Glossy and she would know that Imogen knew she had been let go from Moda. Imogen didn’t want to dive right into all of the uncomfortable details, but she couldn’t help it. She let it all unload onto Molly: her shock at returning to the magazine, the horror of Eve’s brash behavior, the way she lorded over the staff.

  “I just don’t think I can stand it, Molly. I may need to leave Glossy altogether and go to another magazine. Elle was calling about a year ago.”

  She could have kept going, listing various publications that should be offering her a job, but Molly’s eyes were drilling into her.

  “Keep your job, Imogen,” she said tightly. “Keep your job.”

  “But—” Imogen began.

  “It’s no longer 1995. It’s no longer even 2005. It’s 2015 and we are a dying breed in a dying world. I cannot get another job. No one will hire me. I’ve called everyone. Everyone in this town who owed me so many favors for so many years, favors I never needed to collect. When I needed to collect them, those people stopped returning my calls. I am a dinosaur. I am extinct. You, my darling girl, are merely endangered. You can save yourself. Keep this job. Do what they tell you. Don’t end up like me.”

  Imogen didn’t know what to say.

  “Who does Eve think she is? Does she think I’ll just give in? Does she think I’ll just quit?” Imogen’s voice wavered.

  “She does. It’s clear Eve believes editors of our vintage should be put out to pasture like old mares.”

  Imogen sat there stunned, but still ready to fight.

  “What bothers me the most is how she turned on me. This was a girl I mentored. I wanted her to succeed and she double-crossed me and stabbed me in the back.”

  “She did, darling. That she did. She is an ungrateful little cow.” Molly’s eyes dimmed.

  “You’re a good person, Imogen. You still have your passion.”

  Molly patted her gently on the knee. “I need to rest.” As Molly rose, Imogen noticed her age for the first time, the slight hunch in her back, her body recoiling at the idea of movement, as if it hurt to shift ever so slightly. She shuffled slowly into the adjoining bedroom, looking over her shoulder a very small bit. “See yourself out, my dear.”

  And then, as an afterthought, she added quietly: “Good luck.”

  <<< CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE >>>

  Imogen felt a sense of relief when her phone rang and it was the principal of Annabel’s school. No parent ever wanted to get that call, but it meant she had an actual reason for not returning to work.

  “Ms. Tate, I need you to come to the school immediately” came the stern voice of Ms. Oglethorpe, a woman with the demeanor of a drill sergeant who has just eaten something unpleasant. Ms. Oglethorpe’s voice at the other end of the line made Imogen’s mind swim with terrible thoughts, the worst of which was that one of Marty McAlwyn’s wealthy former clients had finally snapped and come after her children, kidnapping Annabel for a small ransom to replace the money they lost when Alex put their deadbeat benefactor behind bars.

  “Is Annabel all right?”

  “She’s fine. She isn’t hurt, I can promise you that, but you will need to come take her home.”

  “Can you please tell me what is happening with my daughter, Ms. Oglethorpe?” Even as the words left her mouth, Imogen knew she’d learn nothing over the phone. Ms. Oglethorpe delighted in the pageantry of informing parents in person that their offspring had disappointed her.

  —

  Annabel looked small on the generously proportioned chair outside Ms. Oglethorpe’s office. She swung her legs back and forth in a rhythm that looked like it soothed her. Her head was low and she wasn’t crying, but when Imogen put a finger beneath her daughter’s chin to raise her face, she saw that her eyes were rimmed red.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy” were the first words out of her mouth. “I just wanted to know who was doing it. I just needed to know which one of them was saying those terrible things about me.” Tears spilled down Annabel’s apple-round cheeks. What exactly had her daughter done?

  Ms. Oglethorpe, a stern groove whittled between her deeply set eyes, exited her office and cleared her throat.

  “Ms. Tate, please come into my office. Miss Marretti will be just fine sitting out here for a while longer.”

  Imogen felt like a child herself as she eased into a chair opposite Ms. Oglethorpe’s imposing mahogany desk.

  “I can assure you Annabel is not the kind of little girl who gets into trouble. This has to be some kind of misunderstanding.”

  Ms. Oglethorpe folded her hands in front of her, the fingers gnarled and red around the knuckles. She dispensed with any niceties about Annabel. “First of all, you do know our policy of not allowing smartphones in the classrooms. We understand that you parents feel the need to buy them iPhones and iPads and all other manner of ‘i’ things at a younger and younger age each and every year, but we cannot have those things in our classrooms when the teachers are trying to teach. It’s an enormous distraction.” Imogen nodded. Every single one of Annabel’s friends were given a smartphone well before their eighth birthdays. They’d been able to hold out until she was nine. It would come even earlier with Johnny. He already tried to swipe his finger across picture books to turn the page.

  “Did you call me down here because Annabel had her phone in the classroom?” Absurd, even for a school like this one.

  “No. I just wanted to point out that Annabel had her phone with her when she screamed and threw food at Harper Martin and a table of other young ladies.”

  Imogen was familiar with Harper Martin’s mother. Ella Martin was the socialite fourth wife of the George Martin, the owner of the Brooklyn Nets. If the younger Miss Martin was anything like her entitled mum, Imogen could understand screaming at her, but she still didn’t fully understand what would make Annabel lash out like that, unless Harper was the one sending the nasty messages to her daughter.

  “Ms. Oglethorpe, I am sure there is an explanation. Did you ask Annabel why she did what she did?”

  “I did. She clammed up.”

  Imogen sighed. “Would you mind giving me some time with my daughter? Would you let me try to figure out what is wrong? There has to be a reasonable explanation.”

  “I prefer you take her home. She’s suspended for today and tomorrow.”

  Imogen didn’t know what to say. Her daughter, suspended from school.

  Annabel was suitably cowed when Imogen walked out of the office. She stood and placed her small hand in her mother’s, something she had refused to do for a couple of years now. They walked the six blocks back to their house in silence. When they got there, Imogen told Annabel to go upstairs and wash her face and asked her to meet her in the kitchen in fifteen minutes. Her daughter silently obliged. Imogen busied herself putti
ng on the kettle for some tea.

  Annabel was wearing pajamas with little penguins dotted all over them when she padded back down the stairs. They made her look much younger than ten.

  Imogen gestured to the kitchen table and the English Breakfast tea, her favorite. Her daughter wrapped her small hands around the warm mug and sat down.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?” Annabel nodded. “Go on, then.”

  “I’ve been getting these messages.” Annabel squirmed uncomfortably. “First they got posted to my Facebook wall and then they came as Facebook messages. Sometimes they are mean comments on my Instagram and my YouTube.”

  “Can I see them, darling?”

  “I erased a lot of them. I didn’t want anyone else to see them. But there are still a couple.” Annabel pushed her chair back from the table to grab her laptop out of her bright pink backpack. She logged onto the Wi-Fi and then opened up her Facebook page. Sure enough, the messages came from the same girl, “Candy Cool.”

  There were still four messages in Annabel’s in-box. Imogen gasped when she saw what they said.

  No boys r ever gonna like u because u have a face like a monkey.

  U should ask your fancy mom if she thinks u r fat. I bet she does.

  Do u ever look in the mirror and cry?

  Hey chubs. U Suck!

  Imogen shuddered.

  “Why do you think these came from Harper?”

  Annabel shrugged.

  “Harper and her friends are jerks. They don’t like me. They laugh at me. I saw Harper on her phone in the cafeteria. She snuck it. She had my Facebook up on it. They were laughing at it.”

  Annabel was in tears again. How could Imogen blame her? Imogen understood better than anyone right now what it was like for a bully to push you to your breaking point. She crossed to the other side of the table, picked her daughter up out of her chair and sat down in it herself, pulling Annabel down onto her lap, letting her cry into her breast. Breathing in the scent of her hair, Imogen could feel her heart just breaking for the girl.