I sniffled and started to feel stupid.
“And don’t feel strange, you hear? I have a feeling you kept that inside for a long, long time and you have to have a good cry every now and then.”
She was fumbling around in her desk for something while I tried to wipe the mascara from my cheeks. “Here,” she proclaimed proudly. “I’m destroying this right after you see it, and if you even think of telling anyone about it, I’ll wreck your life. But just look, it’s amazing.” She handed me a manila envelope sealed with a “Confidential” sticker and smiled.
I tore off the sticker and pulled a green folder out. Inside was a photo—a color photocopy, actually—of Miranda stretched out on a restaurant banquette. I recognized it immediately as a picture taken by a famous society photographer during a recent birthday party for Donna Karan at Pastis. It had already appeared on the pages of New York magazine and was bound to keep showing up. In it she was wearing her signature brown and white snakeskin trench coat, the one I always thought made her look like a snake.
Well, it seems I wasn’t alone, because in this version, someone had subtly—expertly—attached a scaled-to-size cutout of a rattlesnake’s rattle directly where her legs should have been. The effect was a fabulous rendition of Miranda as Snake: she rested her elbow on the banquette, cradled her chiseled chin in her palm, and stretched out across the leather, with her rattle curled in a semicircle and hanging off the edge of the bench. It was perfect.
“Isn’t it great?” Ilana asked, leaning over my shoulder. “Linda came into my office one afternoon. She’d just spent the entire day on the phone with Miranda, selecting which gallery they’d dine in. Linda naturally insisted on one gallery because it’s by far the best size and most beautiful, but Miranda mandated that it be held in the other one near the gift shop. They went back and forth for a while before Linda finally—after days of negotiations—got permission from the board to hold it in Miranda’s gallery, and she was so excited to call Miranda and tell her the great news. Guess what happened when . . .”
“She changed her mind, obviously,” I said quietly, feeling her irritation. “She decided to do exactly as Linda suggested in the first place, but only once she was sure everyone would jump through all her hoops.”
“Precisely. Well, this irritated the hell out of me. I’ve never seen the entire museum turn itself upside down for anyone—I mean, christ, the president of the United States could ask to have a State Department dinner here and they wouldn’t let him! And then your boss thinks she can march in and order everyone around, make our lives a living hell for days on end. Anyway, I made this pretty little picture as a pick-me-up for Linda. You know what she did with it? Shrunk it on the copier so she could have a little one for her wallet! I just thought you’d get a kick out of this. Even if it’s just to remind you that you’re not alone. You’re definitely the worst off, but you’re not alone.”
I stuck the picture back in its confidential envelope and handed it back to Ilana. “You’re the best,” I said, touching her shoulder. “I really, really appreciate it. I promise to never, ever tell anyone where I got this, but will you please send this to me? I don’t think it’ll fit in the Leiber bag, but I’d give anything if you’d send it to me at home. Please?”
She smiled and motioned for me to write my address, and we both stood up and walked (I hobbled) back to the museum’s foyer. It was just about seven, and the guests were due to arrive any minute. Miranda and B-DAD were talking to his brother, the honored guest and groom, who looked like he had played soccer, football, lacrosse, and rugby at a Southern school—one where he was always surrounded by cooing blondes. The cooing blonde of twenty-six who was to become his bride was standing quietly by his side, gazing up at him adoringly. She was holding a snifter of something and chortling at his jokes.
Miranda was hanging on to B-DAD’s forearm with the fakest of smiles plastered across her face. I didn’t have to hear what they were saying to know that she was barely responding at the appropriate time. Social graces were not her strength, as she had little tolerance for small talk—but I knew she’d be on her best kiss-ass behavior tonight. I’d come to realize that her “friends” all fell into one of two categories. There were those she perceived as “above” her and who must be impressed. This list was short, but it generally included people like Irv Ravitz, Oscar de la Renta, Hillary Clinton, and any first-rate, A-list movie star. Then there were those “below” her, who must be patronized and belittled so they don’t forget their place, which included basically everyone else: all Runway employees, all family members, all parents of her children’s friends—unless they coincidentally fell into category number one—almost all designers and other magazine editors, and every single solitary person in the service industry, both here and abroad. Tonight was sure to be amusing because these were category two people who would have to be treated like category ones, merely because of their association with Mr. Tomlinson and his brother. I always enjoyed the rare occasions when I got to watch Miranda try to impress those around her, mostly because she wasn’t naturally charming.
I felt the first guests arrive before I saw them. The tension in the room was palpable. Remembering my color printouts, I rushed over to the couple and offered to take the woman’s fur wrap. “Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson, thank you so much for joining us this evening. Please, I’ll take that. And Ilana here will show you to the atrium, where cocktails are being served.” I hoped I wasn’t staring during my monologue, but the spectacle was truly outrageous. I’d seen women dressed like hookers and men dressed like women and models not dressed at all at Miranda’s parties, but never before had I seen people dressed like this. I knew it wasn’t going to be a trendy New York crowd, but I was expecting them to look like something out of Dallas; instead, they looked like a dressier version of the cast from Deliverance.
Mr. Tomlinson’s brother, himself distinguished looking with silver hair, made the horrible mistake of wearing white tails—in May, no less—with a plaid handkerchief and a cane. His fiancée had on an emerald green taffeta nightmare. It swirled and puffed and gathered and forced her enormous bust up and over the top of the dress so that it appeared her own silicon breasts might actually suffocate her. Diamonds the size of Dixie cups hung from her ears, and an even larger one sparkled from her left hand. Her hair was bleached white with peroxide, as were her teeth, and her heels were so high and so skinny, she walked as if she’d been a running back in the NFL for the past twelve years.
“Dah-lings, I am so delighted you could join us for a little pah-ty! Everyone loves pahties, now don’t they?” Miranda sang in a falsetto voice. The soon-to-be Mrs. Tomlinson looked as if she’d pass out. Right there before her was the one and only Miranda Priestly! Her glee embarrassed us all, and the whole wretched crowd moved into the atrium with Miranda leading the way.
The rest of the night went on much like the beginning. I recognized all the guests’ names and managed not to utter anything too humiliating. The parade of white tuxes, chiffon, big hair, bigger jewels, and barely postadolescent women ceased to amuse me as the hours wore on, but I never grew tired of watching Miranda. She was the true lady and the envy of every woman in that museum that night. And even though they understood that all the money in the world could never buy them her class and elegance, they never stopped wanting it.
I smiled genuinely when she dismissed me halfway through dinner, as usual without a thank-you or a good-night. (“Ahn-dre-ah, we won’t be needing you anymore this evening. See yourself out.”) I looked for Ilana, but she had already sneaked out. The car took only about ten minutes to arrive after I called for it—I had briefly considered taking the subway, but wasn’t sure how well the Oscar or my feet would’ve held up—and I sunk, exhausted but calm, into the backseat.
When I walked past John on my way to the elevator, he reached under his little table and pulled out a manila envelope. “Just got this a few minutes ago. It says ‘Urgent.’ ” I thanked him and sat down in a corner of the lobby, wondering
who would be messengering me something at ten o’clock on a Friday night. I tore it open and pulled out a note:
Dearest Andrea,
It was so great to meet you tonight! Can we please get together next week for sushi or something? I dropped this off on my way home— figured you could use the pick-me-up after a night like the one we just had. Enjoy.
Xoxo,
Ilana
Inside was the picture of Miranda as Snake, only Ilana had enlarged this one to a ten by thirteen size. I looked at it carefully for a few minutes, massaging the feet I’d finally pulled from the Manolos, and looked into Miranda’s eyes. She looked intimidating and mean and just like the bitch I stared at every day. But tonight she’d also looked sad, and not a little lonely. Adding this picture to my fridge and making fun of it with Lily and Alex wasn’t going to make my feet hurt any less, or give me back my Friday night. I tore it up and hobbled upstairs.
15
“Andrea, it’s Emily,” I heard a voice croak from the phone. “Can you hear me?” It had been months since Emily had called me at home late at night, so I knew it had to be serious.
“Hi, sure. You sound like hell,” I said, bolting upright in bed, immediately wondering if Miranda had done something to make her sound that way. The last time Emily had called this late was when Miranda had called her at eleven on a Saturday night to demand that Emily charter her and Mr. Tomlinson a private jet to get home from Miami since bad weather had canceled their regularly scheduled flight. Emily was just getting ready to leave her apartment to attend her own birthday party when the call came in, and she’d immediately called me and begged me to deal with it. I hadn’t gotten the message until the next day, though, and when I called her back, she was still in tears.
“I missed my own birthday party, Andrea,” she’d wailed the second she picked up the phone. “I missed my own birthday party because I had to charter them a flight!”
“They couldn’t get a hotel room for one night and come back the next day like normal people?” I’d asked, pointing out the obvious.
“Don’t you think I thought of that? I had penthouse suites reserved for them at the Shore Club, the Albion, and the Delano within seven minutes of her first phone call, figuring she couldn’t possibly be serious—I mean, my god, it was a Saturday night. How the hell do you charter a flight on a Saturday night?”
“I’m guessing she wasn’t so into that idea?” I’d asked soothingly, feeling genuinely guilty that I hadn’t been around to help her out and simultaneously ecstatic that I’d dodged that particular bullet.
“Yeah. Not so into it at all. She called every ten minutes, demanding to know why I hadn’t found her anything yet, and I had to keep putting these people on hold to answer her call, and when I went back to them, they’d hang up.” She gulped air. “It was a nightmare.”
“So what finally happened? I’m almost scared to ask.”
“What finally happened? What didn’t finally happen? I called every single private charter company in the state of Florida and, as you might imagine, they weren’t answering their phones at midnight on a Saturday. I paged individual pilots, I called domestic airlines to see if they had any recommendations, I even managed to talk to some sort of supervisor at the Miami International Airport. Told him I needed a plane in the next half hour to fly two people to New York. Know what he did?”
“What?”
“He laughed. Hysterically. Accused me of being a front for terrorists, for drug smugglers, everything. Told me I had a better chance of getting hit by lightning exactly twenty times than I did of securing a plane and a pilot at that hour—regardless of how much I was willing to pay. And that if I called back again, he’d be forced to direct my inquiry to the FBI. Do you believe it?” She was screaming at this point. “Do you fucking believe it? The FBI!”
“And I assume Miranda didn’t like that, either?”
“Yeah, she loooooved that one. She spent twenty minutes refusing to believe that there wasn’t a single plane available. I assured her that it wasn’t that they were all taken, just that it was a difficult time of night to be attempting to charter a flight.”
“So what happened?” I didn’t see this one ending happily.
“At about one-thirty in the morning she finally accepted that she wasn’t going to get home that night—not that it mattered whatsoever, since the girls were with their father and the nanny was around all day Sunday if they needed her—and she had me buy her a ticket for the first flight out in the morning.”
This was puzzling. If her flight had been canceled, I’d assumed the airlines would’ve rescheduled her for the first flight out in the morning, especially considering her premier-advantage-plus-gold-platinum-diamond-executive-VIP mileage status and the original cost of her first-class tickets. I said as much.
“Yeah, well, Continental scheduled them for their first flight out, which was at six-fifty A.M. But when Miranda heard that someone else had managed to get on a Delta flight at six-thirty-five A.M., she went ballistic. She called me an incompetent idiot, asked me over and over what good an assistant was if I couldn’t do something as simple as arrange for a private plane.” She’d sniffed and took a sip of something, probably coffee.
“Ohmigod, I know what you’re going to say. Tell me you didn’t!”
“I did.”
“You didn’t. You’ve got to be kidding. For fifteen minutes?”
“I did! What choice did I have? She was really unhappy with me—at least this way, it seemed like I was actually doing something. It came to another couple thousand bucks—not exactly a big deal. She was bordering on happy when we hung up. What else can you ask for?”
By this point we’d both started laughing. I knew without Emily’s telling me—and she knew I knew—that she’d gone ahead and purchased two additional business-class tickets on the Delta flight for Miranda just to shut her up, to make the incessant demands and insults finally, blissfully, cease.
I was nearly choking at this point. “So, wait. By the time you arranged for a car to take her to the Delano—”
“—it was just before three in the morning, and she’d called my cell phone exactly twenty-two times since eleven. The driver waited while they showered and changed in their penthouse suite and then took them right back to the airport in time for their earlier flight.”
“Stop! You’ve got to stop,” I howled, doubled over at this charming series of events. “This did not really happen.”
Emily stopped laughing and tried to feign seriousness. “Oh, really? You think all of this is good? I haven’t even told you the best part.”
“Oh, tell me, tell me!” I was positively gleeful that Emily and I had, for once, managed to find something funny at the exact same time. It felt good to be part of a team, one half in the battle against the oppressor. I realized then for the first time what a different year it would have been if Emily and I could’ve truly been friends, if we could have covered and protected and trusted each other enough to face Miranda as a united front. Things probably wouldn’t have been quite so unbearable, but, except for rare times like these, we didn’t agree on just about everything.
“The best part of all of it?” She was silent, dragging out the joy we shared a few moments longer. “She didn’t realize this, of course, but even though the Delta flight took off earlier, it was actually scheduled to land eight minutes after her original Continental!”
“Shut up!” I’d howled, delighted with this delicious new nugget of information. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
When we finally hung up, I was surprised to see that we’d been talking for more than an hour, just like a couple of real friends would. Of course, we immediately reverted back to just-contained hostility on Monday, but my feelings for Emily were always a bit more affectionate after that weekend. Until now, of course. I sure didn’t like her enough to hear whatever surely irritating or inconvenient thing she was preparing to dump on me.
“Really, you sound horrible. Are y
ou sick?” I tried valiantly to interject a touch of sympathy in my voice, but the question came out sounding aggressive and accusatory.
“Oh yeah,” she rasped before breaking into hacking coughs. “Really sick.”
I never really believed it when anyone said they were really sick: without a diagnosis of something very official and potentially life-threatening, you were well enough to work at Runway. So when Emily finished hacking and reiterated that she was really ill, I didn’t even consider the possibility that she wouldn’t be at work on Monday. After all, she was scheduled to fly to Paris to meet Miranda on October 18 and that was only slightly more than a week away. And besides, I’d managed to ignore a couple strep throats, a few bouts of bronchitis, a horrific round of food poisoning, and a perpetual smoker’s cough and cold and hadn’t taken a single sick day in nearly a year of work.
I’d sneaked in a single doctor’s appointment when I was desperate for antibiotics with one of the cases of strep throat (I ducked into his office and ordered them to see me right away when Miranda and Emily thought that I was out scouting for new cars for Mr. Tomlinson), but there was never time for preventative work. Although I’d had a dozen sets of highlights from Marshall, quite a few free massages from spas that felt honored to have Miranda’s assistant as a guest, and countless manicures, pedicures, and makeovers, I hadn’t seen a dentist or a gynecologist in a year.
“Anything I can do?” I asked, trying to sound casual while I racked my brain thinking of why she’d called to tell me that she didn’t feel well. As far as we were both concerned, it was completely and entirely irrelevant. She’d be at work on Monday whether she felt well or not.
She coughed deeply and I heard phlegm rattling in her lungs. “Um, yeah, actually. God, I can’t believe this is happening to me!”
“What? What’s happening?”
“I can’t go to Europe with Miranda. I have mono.”
“What?”