Fashionistas

by Lynn Messina

  “I’d like to report a section C.”

  Her smile wavers. “A section C?”

  “Yes, a section C, subset 2.”

  “Are you sure?” she asks.

  “I’m sure,” I say.

  She sighs heavily, the amiable crinkles disappearing completely. “We take dress-code violations very seriously here.” Then she retrieves a form from the filing cabinet along the wall and lays it on the table in front of her. She isn’t prepared yet to give it to me. “Are you quite sure they weren’t shoes? With the fashions today, sometimes it’s so hard to tell…. And Fashionista, such a trendy place. One time we had an editor come in complaining about a co-worker wearing a bikini but it turned out it was just Betsey Johnson hotpants.” She lets out a nervous laugh.

  “They were slippers,” I say emphatically. “I’m positive.”

  With great reluctance, she hands me the form. Since I read the employee handbook from cover to cover before coming down here, I’m very familiar with the form and I fill it out quickly.

  She peruses the document. “Everything seems to be in order. If there’s nothing else…?”

  “Actually, would you mind checking his file for me? I’m very much afraid this is his second such infraction.”

  Jumping to her feet, she digs through the cabinet filled with personnel files and withdraws Alex Keller’s. “I don’t believe it. Nobody violates the dress code twice!”

  His file is thin. There is nothing in it except his résumé, emergency contact information and a card with his current address and telephone number.

  “He has a spotless record,” she says proudly.

  Although I’m trying to memorize a long series of numbers—47386405074#11A—this grabs my attention. “Are you sure?” I almost snatch the file from out of her hands.

  “That his record is spotless? Of course, I have it right here. There’s not a complaint in it, except your Section C, subset 2, which will not be officially entered until after we conduct a full investigation.”

  “But that’s not possible,” I say. Alex Keller has been pissing people off for six years. How can there be not one complaint in his file?

  Although I didn’t mean to imply that she’s on the take, that’s exactly what I’ve done. Her eyes narrow suspiciously. “And why not?”

  “He’s belligerent and antagonistic and seems to have a serious problem controlling his temper,” I say, listing a few of his many failings in an effort to put her at ease.

  Her features lighten but she’s not appeased. “If you have a specific incident in mind, you can make a formal complaint now.”

  I have several specific incidents in mind and would like nothing more than to spend the rest of the day lodging complaints against Alex Keller, but I can’t linger. The numbers are already fading from my memory.

  The Maine Filibuster

  Every morning Anna Choi comes into the office, itemizes her clothing and sums up her look with a pithy statement. Today she is Ellis Island retro. Pants: Antique Boutique, $45; shirt: H&M, $11; coat: Hasidic overcoat from Williamsburg, $30; headwrap: Bendel’s, $220; shoes: Fausta Santini, $72.

  Although she is making fun of the Public Eye, an item in the local weekly that asks people on the street these very questions, Anna faithfully adheres to the dictates of self-conscious funkiness found therein. Her pants are almost always from a flea market, her shirts are almost always from the bottom of the secondhand bin at Domsey’s, and nine times out of ten she’s sporting one outrageously expensive item, which is usually something small like a belt or a purse.

  Anna is the editor of Fashionista’s Home Front section and it’s her job to write about celebrities puttering about in their French country kitchens. She visits their homes, spends two hours touring their grounds and taking notes on the way sunlight pours through skylights, and then returns to her three-hundred-square-foot apartment in the East Village. Because her tenement barely has a kitchen, let alone a place for pots, pans and oven mitts, Anna is a closet fetishist. Her mouth waters at a glimpse of neatly stacked linens in a narrow space. Her heart beats faster at the sight of dry goods in a pantry. These are the temples she chooses to worship in, and every month her editor has to cut five hundred words on walkins and shelving systems and coat hangers.

  Home Front is a lush section, with exquisite photographs of beautiful celebrities in white fluffy robes eating croissants on hydrangea-drenched verandas or kissing in wooden boats on their lily ponds or playing Bach’s third concerto on their baby grand pianos. Flipping through the section, you get the sense that these moments are more than posed, they are staged. They are practiced scenes that don’t quite exist beyond the click of the Canon Rebel EOS 5 and you can’t help but feel that the participants themselves look at the photos with the same longing you do. It’s like Cary Grant wishing he were Cary Grant.

  Despite the breadth of homes covered—ranches in New Mexico, villas in Malibu, town houses in Manhattan—there is a remarkable sameness about the articles. It’s as though everyone has a 200-year-old circular stone shrine in the backyard or a statue of Nefertiti in the driveway. Anna does a good job of mixing it up, of making this library of leather-bound first editions seem like the first library of leather-bound first editions she has ever seen. Her writing is strong, and she delights in giving celebrities free rein and then gleefully reporting the glittering bon mots they let fall from their lips. Inevitably an actor will show her the spot on the side of a hill where he stands and belts Hamlet’s “too too solid flesh” soliloquy at the top of his lungs. With enough rope, anyone will hang himself.

  Although it’s three-thirty and the cannonball has already left Penn Station for the Hamptons, we’re having a Friday afternoon meeting. This is an unprecedented event, and Anna, like everyone else in the room, is thoroughly unprepared. She has a short list of celebs whose publicists have pitched her their homes but they’re not quite A-list, and at the mention of an All My Children star, Jane’s lip curls in disgust. We do not cover soap opera actresses.

  “What else?” asks Jane, checking to see if it’s four o’clock yet. She’s not the only one whose eyes are repeatedly drawn to her watch. Half the room had expected to leave by three to get to their summer shares in time for pre-dinner cocktails on the deck.

  Anna glances down at her notes, and although she is now nervous, she looks as impeccable as ever. She’s wearing an overcoat so tattered and torn that even the Hasidim threw it away but she still looks perfect. On her, frayed cuffs are an accent. “That’s all for now. I’ll know more on Tuesday,” she says, a subtle reminder to our intrepid editor in chief that this meeting is impromptu and unplanned. “I expect the publicists to get back to me after the weekend.”

  Jane is the sort of person to leave publicists and editors hanging over long weekends, but she doesn’t accept that type of behavior from others. She huffs angrily now, looking very much like she wants to vent her spleen on Anna, but she holds herself back. Marguerite is in the room. She’s sitting across from her with a friendly smile on her face and Jane seeks to mimic her behavior. For a nanosecond Jane wants to be liked. It’s for all the wrong reasons, but it saves Anna a reaming.

  She turns her attention to a summer intern. “You there, with the pimple, what are you working on?”

  The mortified college junior mutters and sputters for a few seconds before mumbling something about high-top sneakers. The other intern in the room, who has a carbuncle the size of the Liberty Bell on her nose, tilts her head down, trying to hide her face. She is wishing desperately that she could disappear.

  Jane called this meeting after discovering that Marguerite planned to catch the last flight to Bangor, Maine, which leaves Kennedy at four. A multimillionaire land developer has invited her to his private island for a weekend party, and Jane is determined to put a damper on the festivities. Marguerite was free to miss the emergency meeting, of course, but she chose to stay for political reasons. She knows that her position at Fashionista is still precarious. Ja
ne herself planned on being on the express train to Montauk, but thwarting Marguerite’s weekend plans is more important than her own. Now she’ll have to take the jitney and suffer the traffic on the L.I.E. or take one of the later trains, which stops at Forrest Hills and Baldwin and Seaford and Copiague and Bridgehampton and all the stops in between. Jane is the first person to cut off her nose to spite her face.

  By the time Jane finishes tormenting spot-riddled teenagers, she has only fifteen minutes left to kill. She will not allow this meeting to end a second before four. Leaving nothing to chance, Jane wants to make sure that even if Marguerite hops on a magic carpet, she still won’t catch that plane. Her assistant, Jackie, who has been on the phone with the airline since two o’clock, is under strict orders to report any delays the moment they happen. Jane will keep us here as long as long as it takes, even if she has to read names from the telephone book until midnight.

  “What about article ideas?” Jane asks, looking around the table. “I believe I sent out a memo asking for three fresh article ideas from each of you by this afternoon’s meeting.”

  This is a complete fabrication—since this meeting was not conceived of more than ten minutes before it was called, no memo went around—but nobody points this out. We all sit in our chairs averting our gazes and hoping someone else raises her hand. The atmosphere is very much like freshman English, with none of us quite sure of the symbolic importance of the bell jar.

  Marguerite steps up to the plate. “I have a few ideas for the upcoming wedding issue.”

  Giving Marguerite the floor was not Jane’s intention and she glares at her nemesis. “I’m sure you do, but I would rather start with the junior…”

  “We should do a feature on bridesmaid dresses,” she says, as if Jane weren’t still speaking. Jane, who has never been confronted with this tactic, trails off into stunned silence. We all notice and try desperately to hide our smirks. Some of us don’t succeed but Jane is too angry to notice.

  Marguerite continues, seemingly oblivious. “I was thinking about how people always say that you can wear your bridesmaid dresses again. Even with the most hideous dresses, someone, usually the bride, insists that if you cut the hem and dye it black, it will be a lovely cocktail dress. But nobody ever does. What if we got five or six bridesmaid dresses and gave them to designers—Michael Kors, Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan—and asked them to make them wearable?”

  “I’ve got six dresses in my closet ready to go,” announces Christine. “Just say the word.”

  There is general agreement around the table. You don’t get to your late twenties without wearing at least one pink dress with a sweetheart collar.

  “I have an awful Maid Marian gown in forest-green,” says Allison. I know all about her Maid Marian gown in forest-green. Allison spent weeks and weeks trying to change her sister’s mind. First she reasoned, then she cajoled, finally she begged. It was all for naught. The elder Harper was determined to have her medieval-style wedding, despite the fact that jousting was made illegal at the turn of the eighteenth century. As I learned from many hours of eavesdropping, you can always find someone willing to get on a horse and dodge a five-foot lance for a few hundred bucks.

  “Maid Marian?” an editor asks, amazed by the depths to which a bride will sink. “Gee, and I thought the Empire-waist periwinkle-blue thing my cousin made me wear was bad.”

  Allison laughs. “Please, I’d kill for an Empire wai—”

  “It’s an interesting suggestion,” says Jane, trying to draw attention away from Marguerite’s very good idea, “but there are strict rules in this company about utilizing our own people for anything in the magazine.”

  This rule applies to using Ivy Publishing employees in layouts, not their cast-off bridesmaid dresses, but Marguerite has a better idea anyway. “Of course, Jane,” she says, as if she is expecting this objection, “I’m aware of the company’s rule. But I thought we could turn to our readers for dresses.”

  “Our readers?” Jane asks, thrown off by the concept, as if she’s unsure who these people are.

  “Yes, we can have a contest of sorts and ask our readers to send in photos of their ugliest bridesmaid dress,” Marguerite explains. “We’ll select the ten worst and give them to designers.”

  “That’s an excellent idea,” says one of the photo assistants, whose enthusiasm for the project momentarily overcomes her good sense. If you want to last at Fashionista, you do not offer compliments to people Jane is trying to skewer with her eyes. “We can get before and after shots of them.”

  The annual wedding issue already has one layout with regular women wearing bridesmaid dresses. There is no way Jane will allow two. She feels the same way about regular women as she does soap opera actresses. As far as she’s concerned, soap opera actresses are regular women.

  “Yes, an interesting idea and I’m sure it would be perfect for your average Australian.” Jane gives Marguerite an artificial smile. It’s the only kind she’s capable of. “However, here at Fashionista, we’re not dressing kangaroos. Our readers are a little bit more sophisticated.”

  “Our readers weren’t kangaroos,” Marguerite says pleasantly. She’s trying to appear as if the insult doesn’t bother her, but her hands are clenched tightly at her side.

  “Right, of course. Wallabies, then. Regardless, your idea is cute but I’m afraid it’s just not right for us. If you stay around long enough, you’ll probably get a feel for what is Fashionista and what isn’t Fashionista. For the moment, I think Fashionista is escaping you. Read a few more issues and get back to me.”

  Marguerite smiles tightly. “That’s all right. I’m willing to take another stab at it. I believe the memo said three ideas?”

  Terrified, with good reason, that the loathed editorial director might come up with another impressive suggestion, Jane demurs. There are only three minutes to go. “No, I’m sure I said only one. Let’s give someone else a chance.” She looks around. “Lydia?”

  “How about camouflage fatigues? They’re a trend du jour.”

  Trend du jour is one of Lydia’s favorite phrases and she uses it without any sense of self-conscious irony, as if some current styles really are more current than others.

  Jane nods. These are the sort of ideas she likes—ones that aren’t from Marguerite and that we’ve done before. She likes to trod familiar ground and it’s tough to blame her. Our readers, who she has a hard time remembering, don’t seem to mind what we write about as long as we show pictures of famous people. Lydia will find three examples of stars sporting the camouflage look and that will be that. “Good. Go after it. Who’s next?” Since I’m sitting next to Lydia, Jane’s gaze naturally settles on me. “Vig.”

  Although I always have a few ideas swimming in my head, I know these aren’t the sort that Jane will like and I try to think of a trend du jour to toss out. Then I hear the sound of change jingling—a sure sign that Jane’s assistant is near. A second later, Jackie is standing in the doorway nodding discreetly to Jane. The last plane for Bangor has closed its door. This meeting is over. “Well,” I say, “I thought we’d do a piece on—”

  Jane interrupts me, as I knew she would. She’s already standing up. “That’s very nice, Vig, but I’ve got to run. I have an important appointment that completely slipped my mind. See you all Tuesday,” she says, before remembering Marguerite. She will not leave us alone with her and her dangerous bridesmaid ideas for long. “Ah, I mean Monday. See you all Monday.” She darts out the door and the rest of the staff waits a respectable five heartbeats before following close on her heels. They dash to their desks, grab their suitcases and wheel their compact one-pieces out to the elevators. Five minutes later I’m the only one left on the floor.

  Superwoman

  Maya thinks that I’m only attracted to emotionally unavailable men.

  “Workaholics, cheats, mama’s boys. It’s a freak show of guys who can’t make a commitment and you’re the ringmaster,” she said after my last relations
hip ended unceremoniously in the produce aisle of the Associated supermarket on the corner of Bleecker and LaGuardia. While I was watching Michael debate the relative merits of green bananas—sure, he wanted a banana now but would he want one in three or four days when this bunch finally ripened—the unfeasibility of the relationship hit me. The uselessness of the entire thing hit me like a blast of heat from a very hot oven, I said goodbye and walked out of the store alone. Michael didn’t notice. He was too busy reassuring the bananas that it wasn’t them, it was him.

  “It’s like a superpower with you,” Maya continued. “Being able to find emotionally unavailable men at fifty paces and through concrete walls is what you bring to the Hall of Justice. I mean, if there’s a room full of single well-adjusted men, wholehearted and unscarred, you’re inexorably drawn to the only one who just broke up with his girlfriend of four years in the parking lot.”

  This much is true. I met Michael at one of those serial dating evenings that Maya dragged me kicking and screaming to the week before Valentine’s Day. He was there to pick up his sister. But it’s not a superpower. Or if it is, then it’s a silly power, the sort someone thought up after all the good ones were taken. I’m like a Wonder Twin without Gleek and the mass appeal of seventies kitsch.

  “There must be some way to harness your power,” she added, with a laugh. She is only half joking. “Like, maybe we can rent you out by the hour to women who want to know before they expend all that time and energy if their relationship is going to go anywhere. Ooh, maybe we can get large groups of women to gather with their men in one place, like Tupperware parties. We’ll line them up and have you go down the row to see who you are attracted to.” She gave me a considering look, as if I were there in the trenches with her, devising a business plan. But I wasn’t. I was in the real world where my superpower isn’t good for anything but pain and disappointment. “Then we’d have to charge by the man, I suppose, although we will, of course, offer volume discounts.”