Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Know (2 page)

I ordered a Town Car to take me to the dealership, where I turned over a note I'd forged with Miranda's signature that instructed them to release the car to me. No one seemed to care whatsoever that I was in no way related to this woman, that some stranger had cruised into the place and requested someone else's Porsche. They tossed me the keys and only laughed when I'd asked them to back it out of the garage because I wasn't sure I could handle a stick shift in reverse. It'd taken me a half hour to get ten blocks, and I still hadn't figured out where or how to turn around so I'd actually be heading uptown, toward the parking place on Miranda's block that her housekeeper had described. The chances of my making it to 76th and Fifth without seriously injuring myself, the car, a biker, a pedestrian, or another vehicle were nonexistent, and this new call did nothing to calm my nerves.

Once again, I made the round of calls, but this time Miranda's nanny picked up on the second ring.

‘Cara, hey, it's me.'

‘Hey, what's up? Are you on the street? It sounds so loud.'

‘Yeah, you could say that. I had to pick up Miranda's Porsche from the dealership. Only, I can't really drive stick. But now she called and wants me to pick up someone named Madelaine and drop her off at the apartment. Who the hell is Madelaine and where might she be?'

Cara laughed for what felt like ten minutes before she said, ‘Madelaine's their Persian kitten and she's at the vet. Just got spayed. I was supposed to pick her up, but Miranda just called and told me to pick the twins up early from school so they can all head out to the Hamptons.'

‘You're joking. I have to pick up a fucking cat with this Porsche? Without crashing? It's
never going to happen
.'

‘She's at the East Side Animal Hospital, on Fifty-second between First and Second. Sorry, Andy, I have to get the girls now, but call if there's anything I can do, OK?'

Maneuvering the green beast to head uptown sapped my last reserves of concentration, and by the time I reached Second Avenue, the stress sent my body into meltdown.
It couldn't possibly get worse than this
, I thought as yet another cab came within a quarter-inch of the back bumper. A nick anywhere on the car would guarantee I lose my job – that much was obvious – but it just might cost me my life as well. Since there was obviously not a parking spot, legal or otherwise, in the middle of the day, I called the vet's office from outside and asked them to bring Madelaine to me. A kindly woman emerged a few minutes later (just enough time for me to field another call from Miranda, this one asking why I wasn't back at the office yet) with a cat-carrier, through the wicker bars of which I could see a mass of white fluff. The woman told me to drive very, very carefully because the kitten was ‘experiencing some discomfort.' Right, lady. I'm driving very, very carefully solely to save my job and possibly my life – if the cat benefits from this, it's just a bonus.

With the basket on the passenger seat, I lit another cigarette and rubbed my freezing bare feet so my toes could resume gripping the clutch and brake pedal.
Clutch, gas, shift, release clutch
, I chanted, trying to ignore the kitten's pitiful meows every time I accelerated. She alternated between crying, hissing, and some sort of unidentifiable high-pitched screeching. By the time we reached Miranda's building, the kitten was nearly hysterical. I tried to soothe her, but she could sense my insincerity – and besides, I had no free hands to poke through the bars to offer a reassuring pat or nuzzle. So this was what four years of diagramming and deconstructing books, plays, short stories, and poems were for: a chance to comfort an over-pampered fur ball while trying not to demolish someone else's really, really expensive car. Sweet life. Just as I had always dreamed.

I managed to dump the car at the garage and the cat with Miranda's doorman without further incident, but my hands were still shaking when I climbed into the chauffeured Town Car that had been following me all over town. The driver looked at me sympathetically and made some supportive comment about the difficulty of stick shifts, but I didn't feel much like chatting.

‘Just heading back to the Elias-Clark building,' I said with a long sigh as the driver pulled around the block and headed south on Park Avenue. Since I rode the route every day – sometimes twice – I knew I had exactly eight minutes to breathe and collect myself and possibly even figure out a way to disguise the ash and sweat stains that had become permanent features on the Gucci suede. The shoes – well, those were beyond hope, at least until they could be fixed by the fleet of shoemakers
Runway
kept for such emergencies. The ride was actually over in six and a half minutes, and I had no choice but to hobble like an off-balance giraffe on my one flat, one four-inch heel arrangement. A quick stop in the Closet turned up a brand-new pair of knee-high maroon-colored Jimmy Choos that looked great with the leather skirt I grabbed, tossing the suede pants in the ‘Couture Cleaning' pile (where the basic prices for dry cleaning started at seventy-five dollars per item). The only stop left was a quick visit to the Beauty Closet, where one of the editors there took one look at my sweat-streaked makeup and whipped out a trunk full of fixers.

Not bad
, I thought, looking in one of the omnipresent full-length mirrors. You might not even know that mere minutes before I was hovering precariously close to murdering myself and everyone around me. I strolled confidently into the assistants' suite outside Miranda's office and quietly took my seat, looking forward to a few free minutes before she returned from lunch.

‘And-re-ah,' she called from her starkly furnished, deliberately cold office. ‘Where are the car and the kitten?'

I leaped out of my seat and ran as fast as was possible on plush carpeting while wearing five-inch heels and stood before her desk. ‘I left the car with the garage attendant and Madelaine with your doorman, Miranda,' I said, proud to have completed both tasks without killing the car, the cat, or myself.

‘And why would you do something like that?' she snarled, looking up from her copy of
Women's Wear Daily
for the first time since I'd walked in. ‘I specifically requested that you bring both of them to the office, since the girls will be here momentarily and we need to leave.'

‘Oh, well, actually, I thought you said that you wanted them to—'

‘Enough. The details of your incompetence interest me very little. Go get the car and the kitten and bring them here. I'm expecting we'll be all ready to leave in fifteen minutes. Understood?'

Fifteen minutes? Was this woman hallucinating? It would take a minute or two to get downstairs and into a Town Car, another six or eight to get to her apartment, and then somewhere in the vicinity of three hours for me to find the kitten in her eighteen-room apartment, extract the bucking stick shift from its parking spot, and make my way the twenty blocks to the office.

‘Of course, Miranda. Fifteen minutes.'

I started shaking again the moment I ran out of her office, wondering if my heart could just up and give out at the ripe old age of twenty-three. The first cigarette I lit landed directly on the top of my new Jimmys, where instead of falling to the cement it smoldered for just long enough to burn a small, neat hole.
Great
, I muttered.
That's just fucking great
. Chalk up my total as an even four grand for today's ruined merchandise – a new personal best. Maybe she'd die before I got back, I thought, deciding that now was the time to look on the bright side. Maybe, just maybe, she'd keel over from something rare and exotic and we'd all be released from her wellspring of misery. I relished a last drag before stamping out the cigarette and told myself to be rational.
You don't want her to die
, I thought, stretching out in the backseat.
Because if she does, you lose all hope of killing her yourself. And
that
would be a shame
.

I knew nothing when I went for my first interview and stepped onto the infamous Elias-Clark elevators, those transporters of all things en vogue. I had no idea that the city's most well-connected gossip columnists and socialites and media executives obsessed over the flawlessly made-up, turned-out, turned-in riders of those sleek and quiet lifts. I had never seen women with such radiant blond hair, didn't know that those brand-name highlights cost six grand a year to maintain or that others in the know could identify the colorists after a quick glance at the finished product. I had never laid eyes on such beautiful men. They were perfectly toned – not too muscular because ‘
that's
not sexy' – and they showed off their lifelong dedication to gymwork in finely ribbed turtlenecks and tight leather pants. Bags and shoes I'd never seen on real people shouted
Prada! Armani! Versace!
from every surface. I had heard from a friend of a friend – an editorial assistant at
Chic
magazine – that every now and then the accessories get to meet their makers in those very elevators, a touching reunion where Miuccia, Giorgio, or Donatella can once again admire their summer '02 stilettos or their spring couture teardrop bag in person. I knew things were changing for me – I just wasn't sure it was for the better.

I had, until this point, spent the past twenty-three years embodying small-town America. My entire existence was a perfect cliché. Growing up in Avon, Connecticut, had meant high school sports, youth group meetings, ‘drinking parties' at nice suburban ranch homes when the parents were away. We wore sweatpants to school, jeans for Saturday night, ruffled puffiness for semiformal dances. And college! Well, that was a world of sophistication after high school. Brown had provided endless activities and classes and groups for every imaginable type of artist, misfit, and computer geek. Whatever intellectual or creative interest I wanted to pursue, regardless of how esoteric or unpopular it may have been, had some sort of outlet at Brown. High fashion was perhaps the single exception to this widely bragged-about fact. Four years spent muddling around Providence in fleeces and hiking boots, learning about the French impressionists, and writing obnoxiously long-winded English papers did not – in any conceivable way – prepare me for my very first post-college job.

I managed to put it off as long as possible. For the three months following graduation, I'd scrounged together what little cash I could find and took off on a solo trip. I did Europe by train for a month, spending much more time on beaches than in museums, and didn't do a very good job of keeping in touch with anyone back home except Alex, my boyfriend of three years. He knew that after the five weeks or so I was starting to get lonely, and since his Teach for America training had just ended and he had the rest of the summer to kill before starting in September, he surprised me in Amsterdam. I'd covered most of Europe by then and he'd traveled the summer before, so after a not-so-sober afternoon at one of the coffee shops, we pooled our traveler's checks and bought two one-way tickets to Bangkok.

Together we worked our way through much of Southeast Asia, rarely spending more than $10 a day, and talked obsessively about our futures. He was so excited to start teaching English at one of the city's underprivileged schools, totally taken with the idea of shaping young minds and mentoring the poorest and the most neglected, in the way that only Alex could be. My goals were not so lofty: I was intent on finding a job in magazine publishing. Although I knew it was highly unlikely I'd get hired at
The New Yorker
directly out of school, I was determined to be writing for them before my fifth reunion. It was all I'd ever wanted to do, the only place I'd ever really wanted to work. I'd picked up a copy for the first time after I'd heard my parents discussing an article they'd just read and my mom had said, ‘It was so well written – you just don't read things like that anymore,' and my father had agreed, ‘No doubt, it's the only smart thing being written today.' I'd loved it. Loved the snappy reviews and the witty cartoons and the feeling of being admitted to a special, members-only club for readers. I'd read every issue for the past seven years and knew every section, every editor, and every writer by heart.

Alex and I talked about how we were both embarking on a new stage in our lives, how we were lucky to be doing it together. We weren't in any rush to get back, though, somehow sensing that this would be the last period of calm before the craziness, and we stupidly extended our visas in Delhi so we could have a few extra weeks touring in the exotic countryside of India.

Well, nothing ends the romance more swiftly than amoebic dysentery. I lasted a week in a filthy Indian hostel, begging Alex not to leave me for dead in that hellish place. Four days later we landed in Newark and my worried mother tucked me into the backseat of her car and clucked the entire way home. In a way it was a Jewish mother's dream, a real reason to visit doctor after doctor after doctor, making absolutely sure that every miserable parasite had abandoned her little girl. It took four weeks for me to feel human again and another two until I began to feel that living at home was unbearable. Mom and Dad were great, but being asked where I was going every time I left the house – or where I'd been every time I returned – got old quickly. I called Lily and asked if I could crash on the couch of her tiny Harlem studio. Out of the kindness of her heart, she agreed.

I woke up in that tiny Harlem studio, sweat-soaked. My forehead pounded, my stomach churned, every nerve shimmied – shimmied in a
very
unsexy way.
Ah! It's back
, I thought, horrified. The parasites had found their way back into my body and I was bound to suffer eternally! Or what if it was worse? Perhaps I'd contracted a rare form of late-developing dengue fever? Malaria? Possibly even Ebola? I lay in silence, trying to come to grips with my imminent death, when snippets from the night before came back to me. A smoky bar somewhere in the East Village. Something called jazz fusion music. A hot-pink drink in a martini glass – oh, nausea, oh, make it stop. Friends stopping by to welcome me home. A toast, a gulp, another toast. Oh, thank god – it wasn't a rare strain of hemorrhagic fever, it was just a hangover. It never occurred to me that I couldn't exactly hold my liquor anymore after losing twenty pounds to dysentery. Five feet ten inches and 115 pounds did not bode well for a hard night out (although, in retrospect, it boded very well for employment at a fashion magazine).