by Lucy Sykes
Furious didn’t begin to describe the way Imogen was feeling, but she tried to shelve it for a few minutes to get to the bottom of what happened with the photo shoot.
“Ashley, why is the photo shoot online?”
The girl’s voice rose a little before she caught herself and realized she was meant to be whispering. “Ugh. Yeah. I know it sucks. Eve made me post it this morning.”
“What?”
“Eve said we needed original content up today since everyone on the East Coast is stuck home in the snow. We are running snow-day specials and getting heaps of people to buy from it. That’s good at least, right?”
“I organized that shoot. I was meant to have editorial approval. Alice wanted to retouch the photos. It was in her contract. They weren’t ready to be published.”
Now Ashley sounded confused and slightly defensive. “Eve gave us approval. The two of you are, like, the same, right? If she tells us we can do something, then it’s okay.”
“Ashley, we are not at all the same. I worked hard on that shoot. You know that. You worked hard with me and the way it looks on the site is not what we planned. My relationship—and Glossy.com’s—with Alice is now over.”
“Shit. Imogen, I need to go. Eve is screaming about something.” She lowered her voice even more. “She says we are going to have a snowed-in pajama party here. I don’t think she’s letting any of us go home…not that we could get home if we wanted to…”
The line went dead.
What good would it do to email Eve now? The entire office was there, probably sprawled across the floor of her one-bedroom apartment. Imogen would look foolish calling over there now.
She stared at the phone.
Too embarrassed to call Bridgett or Massimo, she scrolled down through her contacts and finally landed on R. She’d never made an emergency call to Ron before. It rang through to voice mail. What was the protocol for this? Did she leave a message? When did people just stop picking up their phones?
Still sitting cross-legged on the floor, Imogen received a text from the therapist.
>>>>Hold on. I’m going to Skype you.<<<<
She paused before writing back.
>>>>Ok.<<<<
He replied with a smiley face emoticon. Skype therapy? Of course. Why not?
She added a smiley face to show she wasn’t in truly dire straits. People in truly dire situations didn’t use emoticons.
Her cell phone flashed. She accepted the call and her therapist’s beard loomed large on the screen.
“Imogen? What did you want to talk about?” It was the first time she’d tried to use the video function on her phone. She didn’t know where to put the device. Farther away looked better, so she stretched her arm as far from her body as it would go. Ron had no such compunction about how he appeared. She could see directly up both his nostrils.
“I’m so sorry, Ron. You must think I’m a complete nut for calling you like this.”
“Imogen. My business is nuts.”
“Fair point.” She laughed. “It’s just…I’m at a breaking point. I don’t know how much longer I can take her games and bullshit, Ron.”
“What did Eve do now?”
“It sounds so stupid to explain it. It sounds like some juvenile middle school prank, but that’s what my life has come to.” She went on to tell Ron all about the snow day and how Eve had the whole staff, except her, over at her house.
Ron paused for a moment before replying very diplomatically, “Do you think there was any chance, any chance at all, that Eve actually thought, ‘Hey, Imogen has two kids at home, maybe she does need the day off…maybe I don’t need to bother her.’ ”
That couldn’t be true. If it had been, Eve wouldn’t have made the decision unilaterally. She would have offered Imogen the chance to work with the rest of the team or to stay home with her kids. Eve had the staff come to her house and left Imogen out specifically to undermine her. Eve was a clever girl who knew exactly what she was doing when she posted that photo shoot. She knew it would ruin Imogen’s relationship with Alice. Eve had dealt with enough Alice Hobbs photo shoots when she had been Imogen’s assistant to know what the photographer was like.
Ron’s arm must have been getting tired because the screen was starting to waver and fall. Imogen could see a giant patch of his white skin.
“Jesus, Ron, are you wearing clothes?”
“No, Imogen. I’m not. I’m upstate at this wonderful naked retreat. It’s incredibly freeing. I actually think it’s something you could possibly benefit from.”
“Are you mad, Ron? I don’t want to go to a naked retreat. Keep the phone at eye level, please.”
“Of course. Sorry about that,” Ron continued. “You need to make a choice. Is this what you really want to be doing? You’re a woman who loves a challenge. You want to win, but you’re also a woman getting over cancer and a mom with two young kids and a wife to a husband with an incredibly stressful job. Do you want to kill yourself every day working with this girl you hate?”
She thought about it. Right now, the future of magazines was like a road that ended at a sheer cliff with a drop so steep Imogen couldn’t see to the bottom. But she believed she had no discernible skills outside of putting a magazine together.
“Ron, are you saying this to me as my shrink or my psychic? Because if you know, like you actually know, something important about my future, now would be the time to tell me.”
“I’m saying it to you as a friend. I am taking off my shrink hat and my psychic hat. Evaluate if this job is still worth it to you. Do you need it?”
Imogen’s voice grew small. “I’m scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“Scared that no one will ever call again. Scared I’m over.”
“I can’t tell you what to do, Imogen, but I will ask you this: Do you want every day to be like this?”
She grew quiet again.
“Life is funny, you know. It isn’t a running text. It has chapters. You might have a very different ending than the one you imagined.”
“I know. I need to think.”
“Okay. You know you can Skype me anytime. I’m here for you.” With no clothes on, Imogen thought.
“I know, Ron.”
She made an air kiss at the screen to say good-bye and sank into the cushions of the couch and into the silence. A vase full of deli roses purchased earlier in the week by Tilly and Annabel sat on the low coffee table in front of her. About four days old, the peach roses were beginning to brown around the edges and wilt in the middle. Without thinking about it, Imogen held up her phone to snap a picture.
Imogen posted it to Instagram. Why should you only post happy things to social media? Where was the Instagram for the sadness? “Dying rose” was her caption.
The Monopoly game was in progress when she returned, but she didn’t have it in her to play.
“I’m going to have to lie down for a disco nap before dinner.” Annabel had hotels on both Boardwalk and Park Place. Johnny controlled all four of the railroads. They were so intent the three of them barely raised their heads.
She lay on the bed on her back, trying to employ all of Ron’s meditation tricks. Sending awareness down to her toes and imagining them relaxing. Moving all the way up her legs. She tried to let her thoughts float away on a cloud. Tried counting backward from one hundred. Tried breathing in for ten seconds and out for twelve. The hamster wheel in her mind kept turning.
She wasn’t sure how long she did the relaxation exercises before she actually fell asleep. She must have rolled from her back onto her side because she didn’t wake up until she felt Alex curling behind her.
“Is it time for dinner?”
“Not yet. The kids went back out to play in the snow for an hour or so.”
Her body remained rigid and tense. Alex moved his hand up to her neck to rub away the tension.
“Baby, what’s wrong? What were all those phon
e calls? What did the Wicked Witch of the Lower East Side do now?”
That made Imogen smile just a little. They had started calling Eve the Wicked Witch of the Lower East Side when a mutual friend informed them she moved into the luxury high-rise above the Whole Foods on Houston Street between Bowery and Chrystie. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg supposedly kept a loft there, which is what made Eve so keen on it in the first place. Eve loved little more than proximity to fame.
“Eve demanded that the staff come to work at her house today and didn’t tell me about it.” Every time the words came out of her mouth, Imogen felt more and more immature. Thankfully her husband chose to take the matter seriously.
“Have you spoken to anyone about this? Have you talked to HR? Have you gone to Worthington? Her behavior is out of hand.”
“What can I say to them? Eve ordered everyone over to her house except for me. Come on, Alex. I’m not that petty.”
“Not just that…even though I think there are serious legal issues involved when a boss forces their employees to come to their home. I am talking about the firings, the verbal abuse in the office. All of it. Someone else besides you needs to step in and deal with it.”
Imogen didn’t want to talk to Worthington about it. Doing that would be admitting defeat.
She rolled over to face him.
“I have to.” Her husband put both of his hands on her cheeks.
“Why do you have to?”
Oh god, was he really going to make her say it? It was demeaning for her to say it. She loved him so much that she hated throwing this in his face.
Alex just knew. “You don’t need to be the breadwinner, Im.”
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
She squeezed her eyes shut in frustration at her idealistic husband.
“Open your eyes, Imogen.” She couldn’t. “I’m serious. Open them,” he said.
“There are twenty things we can change, not tomorrow, but things we can change about how we live so that you don’t need to make your big-time editor salary anymore. We can sell this house and move into an apartment…like everyone else in this city. I can go work at a big law firm. The kids can go to public school. We could move somewhere else entirely. We aren’t stuck. We’re well-educated people with great careers behind us. Nothing is more important to me than this family. We’ll find a way to make our lives work whether you have this job or not.”
Imogen didn’t know what to say. She knew Alex would support her, but she certainly hadn’t expected this.
They had good intentions to make love that night. And yet, once again, exhaustion, physical and emotional, overcame them both and, as usual, they chose delirious sleep over married sex.
—
Ashley learned fairly early on working for Eve that there was a direct correlation between how many flattering Instagram photos you posted of her and how much she liked you. And so, Ashley made it a best practice to post at least two well-filtered shots of her boss each and every day, always with flattering hashtags (#HauteBoss, #Cute-orCutest?). This made her immune to much of Eve’s regular ire. Eve’s better side was her right and so during the snow day she posted pics of Eve from the right making guacamole in her sweats and pretending to meditate on her snowy balcony, her legs crossed in the snow, thumb and forefinger purposefully balanced on her knees.
“Pissed” wasn’t the right word; she just felt like she was being used as a pawn in Eve’s grudge match against Imogen and that was the worst. She got shitty service at Eve’s creepy apartment. Saying she needed privacy, Eve reluctantly pointed her toward a full bathroom off her bedroom, which was all white on white, like a room in a mental hospital, and it immediately became clear why Eve hadn’t been letting the women into the room.
The bathroom was small but clean and the stark white of the walls made the yellow Post-it notes stuck all around the bathroom surface stick out all the more. Written in Eve’s measured hand were reminders, most obviously meant for her to read to herself in the mornings: “Be nice.” “Say thank you.” “Be polite.” “Remember to smile.” “Make eye contact.” They were instructions for how a sociopath should behave to seem human. Beneath them, in hot pink lipstick, cursive letters read: “You deserve everything!”
<<< CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN >>>
From: Eve Morton ([email protected])
To: [email protected]
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing to you to express my interest in giving a TED talk at this year’s annual TED Conference. I LOVE your series and have listened to it since I was an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School.
I currently run one of the most influential fashion brands in the world, Glossy.com, formerly Glossy magazine. I have been snowed in with my staff for the past twenty-four hours, during which I had a brain spark I had to share with you.
Here is what I am proposing: I want to give a talk at your conference entitled, “Adapt or Die.” Catchy title, right? I think this talk has the opportunity to trump Tony Robbins’s talk on why we do what we do or Steve Jobs’s talk on how to live life.
My concept stems from my personal experience. I am currently working in an environment with people who are two generations older. Their ability to grasp the very basics of technology, the future of business and their desperation to cling to the old tenets of our industry will be their demise. It is positively Darwinian in its simplicity. I think I may be the first person to make this connection. ADAPT OR DIE IN THE WORKPLACE. These dinosaurs have been told the asteroid is coming and still they keep going about life as usual. It is as if they don’t fear the extinction. Meanwhile, my generation is coming in hard and fast, ready to take over.
I am telling you. This talk will kill. IT WILL ABSOLUTELY KILL! I would love the chance to discuss this with you more. Please feel free to reach me on this email.
Have a Good, Great, Gorgeous, GLOSSY! Day!!!
Eve Morton, Editorial Director, Glossy.com
From: Amy Tennant ([email protected])
To: Eve Morton ([email protected])
Dear Ms. Morton,
Thank you for your submission to TED. As you can imagine, we receive thousands of applications for TED talks each week. At this time, we will not be able to accommodate your request for a talk. And, while we rarely comment on the proposals that we receive due to the fact that we here at TED truly believe that creativity and innovation manifests in a variety of ways, I did want to send a note to let you know that this talk would be offensive and go against the very ethics of TED, which strives to be inclusive rather than exclusive. As a proud woman of 53 years old, I believe this is an idea best kept to yourself.
Warm Regards,
Amy Tennant, Director of Talent Curation, TED
—
A magical army of plows and salt trucks did their work overnight, making Imogen’s morning commute surprisingly smooth.
She’d succumbed to her husband’s advice and was scheduled to meet with Worthington at eleven a.m. She wouldn’t be catty. She’d present the facts. Her employees were dropping like flies. Glossy’s reputation in the industry was going down the tubes. Eve abused the designers. They didn’t want to work with them anymore. Morale at the office was at an all-time low, no matter how many spin classes they did or how many jugglers or international DJs she brought in.
Imogen wasn’t nervous. A weight lifted the night before and she was ready for whatever Worthington threw at her. If he told her to get the hell out of his office, that Eve was good for business, she would walk out and feel confident that she didn’t need to come back.
She was even unfazed when Eve walked into Imogen’s office and flounced onto her couch first thing that morning, crossing the legs of her pristine orange Juicy Couture track pants. She wore a plain white T-shirt with bold black writing: DON’T WORRY, BE YONCÉ. All Imogen wanted was to go through her customary morning routine, check her emails and run through the schedule of stories for the s
ite.
“Where were you yesterday?” Eve asked archly. What a witch.
“I was at home.”
“Why weren’t you at my place?” Eve volleyed back.
“I didn’t know anyone was at your apartment until late yesterday. No one told me.”
“That’s not true,” Eve countered. Imogen could tell Eve was having a difficult time suppressing a smile. “I emailed you first thing in the morning and I texted.”
“I never got an email or a text from you, Eve.”
“You probably missed them,” she said.
That was the thing about technology these days. You could blame a text or an email disappearing on spam or a faulty connection. It was never anyone’s fault.
“You never sent me an email or a text, Eve.”
“I most certainly did. It’s weird you didn’t get it. Anyway, we had a really productive day. You should have been there.”
“How late did the girls stay?”
“Oh, they slept over. We had a slumber party. Everyone camped out on the floor. We baked frozen gluten-free pizza. We danced. We came up with a whole choreographed routine to Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy in Love.’ Want to see?” Before Imogen could say that she had no interest at all in seeing the coordinated dance routine, Eve crossed to her side of the desk. She held her phone horizontally and hit play.
It was very clear, from the looks on the staffers’ faces, that no fun was being had. This could have been filmed in Guantánamo. There was Eve, front and center, belting out the lyrics, feet hip-width apart, bouncing her fists next to her waist before her hips went left and then right and her arms crossed in front of her chest. The other girls followed along, aware they were being filmed, not happy about it. One would think Eve would notice their lack of enthusiasm when she flipped her hair around her head and turned to shake her ass for the camera, but she was just too into it.
“Is that not the most amazing thing you have ever seen?” Eve grinned with pride. “I think we should put it on the site.”