Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Know (27 page)

‘Hello there, Emily. Nothing wrong at all. Miranda will be here shortly. Mr T. just came by to drop off her things. How are you doing today?'

Emily beamed. I wondered if she actually enjoyed his presence. ‘Just fine. Thanks so much for asking. And you? Did Andrea help you with everything?'

‘Oh, she sure did,' he said, throwing smile number 6,000 in my direction. ‘I wanted to go over a few things about my brother's engagement party, but I realize that it's probably a little early for that, right?'

For a moment I thought he meant too early in the morning and I almost shouted ‘Yes!' but then I realized that he meant it was too early in the planning to discuss details.

He turned back to Emily and said, ‘You've got yourself a great junior assistant here, don't you think?'

‘Absolutely,' Emily managed through clenched teeth. ‘She's the best.' She grinned.

I grinned.

Mr Tomlinson grinned with extra wattage, and I wondered if he had a chemical imbalance, perhaps hypomania.

‘Well, Mr T. had better be on his way. It's always lovely chatting with you girls. Have a nice morning, both of you. Good-bye now.'

‘'Bye, Mr Tomlinson!' Emily called as he rounded the corner in the hallway on his way to reception.

‘Why were you so rude to him?' she asked as she pulled the flimsy leather blazer off, only to reveal a flimsier chiffon scoop-neck that was laced all the way up the front like a corset.

‘So rude? I helped him unload her stuff and I talked to him before you got here. How is that rude?'

‘Well, you didn't say good-bye, for one thing. And you have that look on your face.'

‘That look?'

‘Yes, that look of yours. The one that tells everyone just how far above this you are, just how much you hate it here. That may fly with me, but it won't with Mr Tomlinson. He's Miranda's
husband
, and you just can't treat him like that.'

‘Em, don't you think he's a little, I don't know … weird? He never stops talking. How can he be so nice when she's such a … so not as nice?' I watched as she glanced inside Miranda's office to make sure that I'd set the newspapers correctly.

‘Weird? Hardly, Andrea. He's one of the most prominent tax attorneys in Manhattan.'

It wasn't worth it. ‘Never mind, I don't even know what I'm saying. What's going on with you? How was your night?'

‘Oh, it was good. I went shopping with Jessica for gifts for her bridesmaids. Everywhere – Scoop, Bergdorf's, Infinity, everywhere. And I tried on a bunch of stuff to get some idea for Paris, but it's still really too early.'

‘For Paris? You're going to Paris? Does that mean you'll leave me alone with her?' I hadn't meant to say the last part out loud, but it had slipped.

Again, a look like I was crazy. ‘Yes, I'll be going to Paris with Miranda in October, for the spring ready-to-wear shows. Each year she takes her senior assistant to the spring shows so she can see what it's really like. I mean, I've been to, like, a million at Bryant Park, but the European shows are just different.'

I did a quick calculation. ‘In October, as in seven months from now? You were trying on clothes for a trip seven months from now?' I hadn't meant for it to sound as harsh as it did, and Emily immediately got defensive.

‘Well, yes. I mean, obviously I wasn't going to buy anything – so many of the styles will have changed by then. But I just wanted to start thinking about it. It's a really huge deal, you know. Stay in five-star hotels, go to the craziest parties ever. And my god, you get to go to the hottest, most exclusive fashion shows in existence.'

Emily had already told me that Miranda went to Europe three or four times a year for the fashion shows. She always skipped London, like everyone did, but she went to Milan and Paris in October for spring ready-to-wear, in July for winter couture, and in March for fall ready-to-wear. Sometimes she'd hit resort, but not always. We'd been working like crazy to get Miranda prepared for the shows coming up at the end of the month. I'd wondered briefly why she wasn't planning on bringing an assistant.

‘So why doesn't she take you to all of them?' I decided to just go for it, even though the answer was sure to entail a lengthy explanation. I was excited enough that Miranda would be out of the office for two whole weeks (she spent one in Milan and one in Paris) and was giddy at the thought of getting rid of Emily for a week of that. Visions of bacon cheeseburgers and nonprofessionally ripped jeans and flats – oh hell, maybe even sneakers – filled my head. ‘Why just in October?'

‘Well, it's not like she doesn't have help over there. Italian and French
Runway
always send some of their assistants for Miranda, and most of the time the editors help her themselves. But it's at spring RTW that she throws a huge party, the annual kick-off party that everyone says is the biggest and best at all the shows, all year long. I'll only go for the week while she's in Paris. So obviously she would only trust me to help her there.' Obviously.

‘Mmm, sounds like it'll be a great time. So that means I just hold down the fort here, huh?'

‘Yeah, pretty much. But don't think that it'll be a joke. That will probably be the hardest week of all because she needs a lot of assistance when she's away. She'll be calling you a lot.'

‘Oh, goody,' I said. She rolled her eyes.

I slept with my eyes open, staring at a blank computer screen, until the office began to fill up and there were other people to watch. Ten A.M. brought the first of the Clackers, the quiet sipping of no-whip skim lattes to nurse the previous night's champagne hangovers. James stopped by my desk, as he did whenever he saw Miranda wasn't at hers, and proclaimed he'd met his future husband at Balthazar the night before.

‘He was just sitting at the bar, wearing the greatest red leather jacket I'd ever seen – and let me tell you, he could pull it off. You should have seen how he slipped those oysters on his tongue …' He audibly groaned. ‘Oh, it was just magnificent.'

‘So'd you get his number?' I asked.

‘Get his number? Try get his pants. He was butt-ass naked on my couch by eleven, and boy, let me tell you—'

‘Lovely, James. Lovely. Not one for playing hard to get, are you? Sounds a little slutty of you, to be honest. This is the age of AIDS, you know.'

‘Sweetie, even you, Miss High and Mighty I-Date-the-World's-Last-Angel, would've been on your knees without a second thought if you saw this guy. He's absolutely amazing. Amazing!'

By eleven everyone had checked everyone else out, making notations of who had scored a pair of the new Theory ‘Max' pants or the latest, impossible-to-find Sevens. Time for a break at noon, when conversation centered around particular items of clothing and usually took place by the racks lined up against the walls. Each morning Jeffy would pull out all the racks of dresses and bathing suits and pants and shirts and coats and shoes and everything else that had been called in as a potential item to shoot for one of the fashion spreads. He lined up each rack against a wall, weaving them throughout the entire floor so the editors could find what they needed without having to fight their way through the Closet itself.

The Closet wasn't really a closet at all. It was more like a small auditorium. Along the perimeter were walls of shoes in every size and color and style, a virtual Willy Wonka's factory for fashionistas, with dozens of slingbacks, stilettos, ballet flats, high-heeled boots, open-toe sandals, beaded heels. Stacked drawers, some built-in and others just shoved in corners, held every imaginable configuration of stockings, socks, bras, panties, slips, camisoles, and corsets. Need a last-minute leopard-print push-up bra from La Perla? Check the Closet. How about a pair of flesh-colored fishnets or those Dior aviators? In the Closet. The accessories shelves and drawers took up the farthest two walls, and the sheer amount of merchandise – not to mention its value – was staggering. Fountain pens. Jewelry. Bed linens. Mufflers and gloves and ski caps. Pajamas. Capes. Shawls. Stationery. Silk flowers. Hats, so many hats. And bags. The bags! There were totes and bowling bags, backpacks and under-arms, over-shoulders and minis, oversize and clutches, envelopes and messengers, each bearing an exclusive label and a price tag of more than the average American's monthly mortgage payment. And then there were the racks and racks of clothes – pushed so tightly together it was impossible to walk among them – that occupied every remaining inch of space.

So during the day Jeffy would attempt to make the Closet a semi-usable space where models (and assistants like myself) could try on clothes and actually reach some of the shoes and bags in the back by pushing all of the racks into the halls. I'd yet to see a single visitor to the floor – whether writer or boyfriend or messenger or stylist – not stop dead in his or her tracks and gape at the couture-lined hallways. Sometimes the racks were arranged by shoot (Sydney, Santa Barbara) and other times by item (bikinis, skirt suits), but mostly it just seemed like a haplessly casual mishmash of
really expensive stuff
. And although everyone stopped and stared and fingered the butter-soft cashmeres and the intricately beaded evening gowns, it was the Clackers who hovered possessively over ‘their' clothes and provided constant, streaming commentary on each and every piece.

‘Maggie Rizer is the only woman in the
world
who can actually wear these capris,' Hope, one of the fashion assistants – weighing a whopping 105 pounds and clocking in at six-one – loudly announced outside our office suite while holding the pants in front of her legs and sighing. ‘They would make my ass look even more gigantic than it already is.'

‘Andrea,' called her friend, a girl I didn't know very well who worked in accessories, ‘please tell Hope she's not fat.'

‘You're not fat,' I said, my mouth on autopilot. It would've saved me many, many hours to have a shirt printed up that said as much, or perhaps to just have the phrase tattooed directly on my forehead. I was constantly called on to assure various
Runway
employees that they weren't fat.

‘Ohmigod, have you seen my gut lately? I'm like the fucking Firestone store, spare tires everywhere. I'm huge!' Fat was on everyone's minds, if not actually their bodies. Emily swore that her thighs had a ‘wider circumference than a giant sequoia.' Jessica believed that her ‘jiggly upper arms' looked like Roseanne Barr's. Even James complained that his ass had looked so big that morning when he got out of the shower that he'd ‘contemplated calling in fat to work.'

In the beginning I'd responded to the myriad am-I-fat questions with what I thought to be an exceedingly rational reply. ‘If you're fat, Hope, what does that make me? I'm two inches shorter than you and I weigh more.'

‘Oh, Andy, be serious.
I
am fat.
You're
thin and gorgeous!'

Naturally I thought she was lying, but I soon came to realize that Hope – along with every other anorexically skinny girl in the office, and most of the guys – was able to accurately evaluate other people's weight. It was just when it came time to look in the mirror that everyone genuinely saw a wildebeest staring back.

Of course, as much as I tried to keep it at bay, to remind myself over and over that I was normal and they weren't, the constant fat comments had made an impression. It'd only been four months I'd been working, but my mind was now skewed enough – not to mention paranoid – that I sometimes thought these comments were directed intentionally to me. As in: I, the tall, gorgeous, svelte fashion assistant, am pretending to think I'm fat just so you, the lumpy, stumpy personal assistant will realize that you are indeed the fat one. At five-ten and 115 pounds (the same weight as when my body was racked with parasites), I'd always considered myself on the thinner side of girls my age. I'd also spent my life until then feeling taller than ninety percent of the women I met, and at least half the guys. Not until starting work at this delusional place did I know what it was like to feel short and fat, all day, every day. I was easily the troll of the group, the squattest and the widest, and I wore a size six. And just in case I failed to consider this for a moment, the daily chitchat and gossip could surely remind me.

‘Dr Eisenberg said that the Zone only works if you swear off fruit, too, you know,' Jessica added, joining the conversation by plucking a skirt from the Narcisco Rodriguez rack. Newly engaged to one of the youngest vice presidents at Goldman Sachs, Jessica was feeling the pressures of her upcoming society wedding. ‘And she's right. I've lost at least another ten pounds since my last fitting.' I forgave her for starving herself when she barely had enough body fat to function normally, but I just couldn't forgive her for
talking
about it. I could not, no matter how impressive the doctors' names were or how many success stories she prattled on about, bring myself to
care
.

At around one the office really picked up pace, because everyone began getting ready for lunch. Not that there was any eating associated with the lunch hour, but it was the prime time of day for guests. I watched lazily as the usual array of stylists, contributors, freelancers, friends, and lovers stopped by to revel in and generally soak up the glamour that naturally accompanied hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of clothes, dozens of gorgeous faces, and what felt like an unlimited amount of really, really, really long legs.

Jeffy made his way over to me as soon as he could confirm that both Miranda and Emily had left for lunch and handed me two enormous shopping bags.

‘Here, check this stuff out. This should be a pretty good start.'

I dumped the contents of one bag onto the floor beside my desk and began sorting. There were Joseph pants in camel and charcoal gray, both long and lean and low-waisted, made from an incredibly soft wool. A pair of brown suede Gucci pants looked as though they could turn any schlub into a supermodel, while two pairs of perfectly faded Marc Jacobs jeans looked like they were custom cut for my body. There were eight or nine options for tops, ranging from a skintight ribbed turtleneck sweater by Calvin Klein to a teeny, completely sheer peasant blouse by Donna Karan. A dynamite graphic Diane Von Furstenburg wrap-dress was folded neatly over a navy, velvet Tahari pantsuit. I spotted and immediately fell in love with an all-around pleated Habitual denim skirt that would fall just above my knees and look perfect with the decidedly funky floral-printed Katayone Adelie blazer.