Fashionistas

by Lynn Messina

  “It was warm in the office, but I kept my sweater on, hoping that someone would notice its cuteness.”

  “Almost all hope is cruel,” I say carelessly.

  Ordinarily Maya would contradict me but today her usual optimism is dulled by rejection—Roger’s and Marcia’s—and she nods forlornly.

  A prolonged silence follows.

  “I’m involved in a plot,” I say out of nowhere. This thought has been circling my brain for almost twenty-four hours now and it has to go somewhere. It has to be expressed or permanently crushed.

  “Hmm?” Consumed by her own misery, she’s forgotten my presence.

  I’m reasonably sure that there is no one from Fashionista in the bar, but I scope out the perimeter just to be certain. I lean over and whisper. “I’m involved in a plot to bring down the editor in chief.”

  Maya’s eyes bug out. “A plot?”

  “A plot.”

  “What kind of plot?” she asks, leaning forward. Maya is genuinely interested. My talk of plots has managed to break through her wall of self-pity.

  I give her the rough outline of the plan and she stops me to ask details. “Gavin Marshall?” she says, as if trying to recall the name. She draws a blank.

  “I’ve never heard of him, either. But he’s a big deal over in England,” I say. “I looked up a few articles about him today. He’s the son of an earl. He grew up in a mansion that’s a national landmark. I think his great-great-grandfather was the prime minister during the Crimean War. He went to all the best schools—Eton, Oxford and the Royal Academy of Art,” I say, running off a list of his advantages. “I think the only hardship he’s ever had in his life was convincing Daddy to let him mutilate a cow in the Victorian plunge pool.”

  Maya is quiet for a moment. She’s putting it all together and trying to come to a conclusion. “Do you think it’ll work?”

  I laugh. “Not a chance. I’ll most likely get fired over the whole mess, but I’m leaning toward it anyway.” Having said these words aloud, I’m overcome by an unexpected emotion. Although I haven’t felt it in a while, I know it’s excitement. Nothing else feels this way.

  “You’d risk your job?”

  I nod enthusiastically. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m as surprised as you. When I woke up yesterday morning, I was pretty satisfied with my job.”

  Maya takes a sip of her cosmo and tilts her head. “What’s changed?”

  An excellent question. “I’m not really sure. Somewhere between talking to a new editor who’s receptive to ideas that are typically un-Fashionista and meeting with one of my editors who gave me another classic Fashionista assignment, I’ve become disgusted with my job. We don’t do anything. We take the same three strands of yarn every month—celebrity, fashion and beauty—and weave them into different patterns. It’s so deadening,” I say, recalling today’s assignment to track down famous skate-skiers. The topic is new, but the copy is old, and after several days of talking to publicists and personal assistants, I will produce five hundred words on why you should be trading in your old snowboard. The article will have too many adjectives and several exclamation points and it will make you wonder if you’re really missing out on something, but don’t be fooled. It’s just rhetoric. It’s just Fashionista trying to convince you that celebs, like blondes, really do have more fun. “Do you remember how excited I was when I got this job?” I ask.

  Maya nods. Of course she remembers. I’d been sleeping on her couch at the time.

  “We’d only been out of college for two years, but it felt like I’d been fetching coffee for the editor of the Bierlyville Times for more than a decade. Back then, I didn’t think there was anything in the world more glamorous than living in Manhattan and reporting on celebrities.” I take a sip of gin and tonic and sigh heavily. “How’s that for Missouri-bred naiveté?”

  Maya doesn’t comment on my Midwestern simplicity. She was raised in a Connecticut suburb less than forty minutes away, and there was never anything glamorous about the big city. It was just a place to go on Saturday nights to get drunk. “Fight the power,” she says, raising a fist in the air in a halfhearted display of revolutionary fervor. “And if mutiny doesn’t work out and they fire your ass, don’t worry. You can go freelance. I’ll help you get started—there’s plenty of work.”

  Despite the fact that she works with strangers, Maya is always upbeat about freelancing. She’s like one of those immigrants who comes to the New World and writes letters home about untold wealth and success. In the past, I’ve been resistant to her lavish claims. I know the streets aren’t paved with gold. I know that most people aren’t prosperous in the land of prosperity. I know this and I cling to my Old World ways. But sometimes you have no choice. Sometimes events propel you across oceans. Working at Fashionista is starting to feel like a potato famine.

  It is now six o’clock and the trickle of people who have been coming in for the past hour suddenly arranges itself into a crowd. A man wearing Gucci slippers squeezes in between our chairs and starts waving his hand in the air in a desperate bid for attention. Theatrics like this rarely work in New York City bars.

  “Get the check,” Maya says, but I’m already one step ahead. I’ve already made eye contact with the bartender, and at this moment he’s tallying up our tab.

  Maya protests but I insist on treating. Although I’ve played the scene lugubriously out of deference to her feelings, this has been a celebration for me. Roger is out of our lives. And even though seventy-five dollars is a substantial portion of my drink budget for the month, it’s a small price to pay for the pleasure.

  In the lobby, Maya vanishes into the bathroom, and I stand in the corner, watching people check in. A large group of Japanese tourists has just arrived and while the men are waiting in a cluster for room keys, their wives are milling around. Some are at the newsstand flipping through magazines; others are sitting in the lobby. The lobby itself is full of misfits—riveted aluminum lounge chairs, long lime-green benches that cut the room in half, wide orange wingbacks with brothel-like flourishes, armchairs with pictures of dogs silk-screened on. These are discordant objects that shouldn’t come together. They shouldn’t come together and anywhere else they wouldn’t, but somehow they do here against this gray backdrop.

  Maya reappears a few minutes later. She steps out of the bathroom and is almost instantly accosted by a Japanese woman who wants her to take a picture of her and her friends, who have arranged themselves on the grand staircase. Maya complies happily, although her picture-taking skills are somewhat compromised by the copious amounts of alcohol she’s consumed. She covers the lens with her thumb. The Japanese women are too polite to comment and they thank her appreciatively, but they stay in formation. After we leave, they’ll call to one of their friends over by the magazine racks and ask her to take the shot.

  Phase One

  Despite the dramatic improvement in Keller’s sister’s life after her inclusion in our makeover issue, I don’t believe Keller owes me a favor or that he’d even acknowledge such a debt if it did exist. With all this uncertainty in mind, I decide to meet with him in person. I don’t want to have this conversation over the phone. I don’t want to conduct it over e-mail. I want to read his face and see how he reacts to my suggestion. Sometimes that’s the only way to know if you should advance or retreat.

  I call his assistant, Delia Barker, to set up an appointment.

  “Alex is booked,” she says into the receiver. “I can put you through to his voice mail.”

  I don’t want his voice mail. “Are you sure he doesn’t have one single minute to spare in the next seven days?”

  “Alex is booked,” she chirps again. “I can put you through to his voice mail.”

  She sounds like a cuckoo bird, like an automated device that only tells you the time. I hang up the phone and walk over to her office just to make sure she’s flesh and blood. Delia is sitting there in her vanilla-scented room with her thick, black hair in a ponytail. She sees me in h
er doorway and takes out a calendar. “Alex is booked,” she says. “You can look for yourself.”

  I accept the calendar and peruse his commitments: lunches, openings, junkets, meetings, photo shoots, jacket fittings, more meetings. Delia has filled in something for every minute, but it’s not just the next seven days. It’s the next seven months. This can’t be real. There has to be another set of books here, the set that you don’t show to the guys from the IRS. I stare at her consideringly. It’s obvious that Delia isn’t going to stray from the party line. Alex is booked. She can put me through to his voice mail.

  Crushing a sneer, I thank her for her help and think about other courses of action. Taking Delia’s advice would be the logical choice, but I don’t. Instead, I position myself in the supply closet across the hall and wait. I have calls to designers of outerwear to make, but I don’t let that bother me. I’m focused on one objective and one objective only—to have a face-to-face with Alex Keller.

  Five hours later I’m still waiting. Lydia has been in here twice to get padded envelopes and timesheets and each time, she looked at me funny. Each time she came in, I’d grab a box of staples and try to look casual as I stared at it with intense fascination.

  Constant surveillance demystifies Keller’s delivery system. After the second knock, Delia sticks her head out of her office and takes the item from Alex’s in-box. She does this quickly, with an economy of movement, as though each time she’s going for the world record. Blink and you miss it.

  I’m ready to call it quits when I hear Delia tell a senior editor that Alex is in an extremely important meeting, but he’ll give her a call as soon as he’s out. I perk up at this. If Alex is in a meeting now, then he has been in a meeting all day. This doesn’t sound right—there was no talk of meetings when I tried to make an appointment five hours ago—so I wait until Delia leaves her desk. I watch her disappear into the ladies’ room and let myself into Alex’s office.

  I’m hoping to interrupt an extremely important meeting but the office is empty. He left the computer, the lamp and the stereo on. He even placed a half-finished cup of coffee on his desk. The coffee is a nice touch but it doesn’t fool me. I know exactly what he’s doing. I’ve done it myself many times but never on a scale this big. Whereas I light the candle and step out for a few hours, he’s stepped out for a career.

  Although I have nothing but a half-drunk cup of cold coffee to go on, I know I’m right. There is no other explanation for his phantasmal existence, for the way he is rarely seen but often heard.

  I exit the office before Delia gets back—Delia, the accomplice who tells lies and falsifies documents for him—and return to my desk. Staring up at me are twenty photos of engagement rings, a list of designers who make outerwear, and the telephone number for the Sanrio headquarters in San Francisco. I have thirty-two new e-mails, the message light on my phone is blinking and there are four Post-it notes from Dot, each one more illegible than the last. Thanks to my spy stint, I’m now hours and hours behind. I won’t leave here until after nine o’clock.

  I sit down with a heavy sigh, thinking that if I had an assistant who was willing to cover for me, it’s doubtful that I’d ever go to work either.

  Phase One Continued

  Christine is rhapsodizing about kumquats.

  “It’s like this,” she says, her voice full of wonder. “The soft-shell crab is to the lobster as the kumquat is to the orange.” She looks at me expectantly.

  I nod to show her I understand the analogy, but she just shakes her head at my tepid response. I don’t really understand.

  “One more time,” she says, “follow me here. The soft-shell crab is to the lobster as the kumquat is to the orange.”

  I shrug. “You eat the exoskeleton.”

  “Close enough,” she concedes before bursting out with the right answer. “You eat the skin! Isn’t that just the gosh-darniest thing you’ve ever heard?”

  I’d like to say that I’ve heard things gosh-darnier but that would be a lie. “Yes, it is.”

  “Here, have one.” She gives me a kumquat. “They’re a revelation.”

  It’s spongy and sweet and when I bite into it juice squirts onto my lips, but there’s nothing revelatory about it. “It’s good,” I say, underwhelmed and not trying to hide it.

  Christine’s disappointed with my reaction but she rallies. “Last night we made frozen kumquat soufflé with apricot coulis. It was delish.”

  I say, “Frozen kumquat soufflé?” to be friendly, to encourage conversation, but I really don’t have the time for either kumquats or conversation. It’s Friday, and I’ve several things to do before the weekend, the least of which is finding Alex Keller’s address. I don’t know how I’m going to do this. He’s not listed with information, so I will have to sneak into Human Resources or somewhere equally unwelcoming and look through files.

  But despite this, I ask questions. I take a moment to show interest because I know few people who have dreams and it seems wrong not to nourish their hopes.

  From her detailed description, a frozen soufflé sounds like nothing more exotic or complicated than vanilla ice cream served in a white ceramic bowl, but I just nod and smile and refrain from comment. I’ve already disappointed her on the kumquat front and don’t have the heart to do it again.

  While she’s explaining the intricacies of making apricot coulis—first you stew the apricots, then you add sugar—I’m trying to decide what to do next. I’m trying to figure out which is more important: keeping my job or liking my job. Breaking in to Human Resources and rifling through their files will produce the address of Alex Keller, but it will more likely yield my instant dismissal. And to what end? Keller won’t agree to help. He won’t offer his services with a carefree smile and a happy glint in his eye. Even if I do manage to get my hands on his contact info without suffering personal harm, nothing will come of it. As soon as I knock on his door, Keller will tell me to get lost before viciously slamming it in my face. I’ve been on the receiving end of too many of his voice mails to expect anything less.

  This is the perfect excuse to extricate myself from the plot, and I consider telling Allison and the fashionistas that the whole thing is off. I consider jumping ship and making them find someone else to be their linchpin. Alex Keller is too much of a risk; he’s the sort of long shot that tumbles empires and destroys fortunes.

  But even though I have the entire withdrawal speech formulated and written in my head, I don’t deliver it. Bringing down Jane McNeill might just be a pipe dream but it seems wrong not to nourish it.

  My 15th Day

  My first quarrel with Alex Keller was over the color copier. He’d left a sheet of white paper in the feeder, which I removed and placed next to the machine.

  “Don’t do that!” he yelled, as soon as I answered the phone.

  Since the only thing I had done was pick up the receiver, I naturally concluded he meant that and immediately hung up. A second later the phone rang again. Clearly he was a hard man to please.

  I let it ring four times before picking up. “Hello,” I said pleasantly, as if I didn’t know who it was.

  “Don’t you ever hang up on me again or I’ll have your job,” he said, angrily throwing his weight around.

  Although I hated all sorts of confrontation and was only an editorial assistant, I refused to cower in the face of threats. “Whom do I have the pleasure of speaking to?” I asked disingenuously. Although I didn’t yet know his voice or his telephone number, I’d heard enough stories to make an educated guess.

  “This is Alex Keller. I’m the events editor at this magazine and I was in the middle of using the copier outside the kitchen when you hijacked it. You took the article I was photocopying. It’s a very important document and I can’t have people like you touching it. Don’t do it again.”

  I rolled my eyes. Although I hadn’t bothered to read the article before moving it—gingerly!—to the side, I saw enough to know that it wasn’t the Declaration of Inde
pendence. Magazines are a completely disposable medium. Nothing we touch is very important.

  “I thought you were done,” I said, compelled to defend myself.

  “Until you see me removing my documents from the feeder, I’m not done!” he announced, as though he were visible to the naked eye, as though he didn’t move through secret passages and priest holes.

  There were four other copiers on the floor. “Okay.”

  The phone slammed down. He didn’t say goodbye.

  Keller never says goodbye and he snaps at you whenever possible and, rather than leave messages on your voice mail—because you’re too wily now to pick up the phone when you see his extension on the display—he sends you blistering e-mails telling you what to do.

  And he never thanks you. So when on those rare occasions you need something from him, you’re always polite and you always send a thank-you—as a reminder, as a dig, as an act of passive aggression. You know being thanked over e-mail bugs the hell out of him. You know this because the first time you did it, he wrote an e-mail back telling you never to thank him again. He already gets too many effing e-mails.

  You write “okay” and hit Send.

  More Phase One

  Stacy Shoemaucher is a friendly-looking woman with chin-length black hair and faded lipstick. She’s wearing a double-breasted light blue suit, the sort that makes her figure seem frumpy and her complexion sallow. If she weren’t an employee of Ivy Publishing, she’d be an ideal candidate for next year’s makeover issue. We’re always looking for frumpy and sallow.

  Her desk is pleasantly disheveled, and the walls of her office are decorated with those earnest and vaguely embarrassing posters that you expect human resources people to have, the ones with nature scenes that say things like “The mountain only seems taller up close” and “Success is more afraid of you.”

  Stacy gestures to a chair and I take a seat across from her at the small round table in the corner. I must seem a little hesitant to her—this is my first trip to Human Resources—so she smiles encouragingly. Her lips curve warmly and her eyes crinkle in an amiable way, and when she asks, “What can I do for you?” I believe that she actually wants to help.