Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Know (32 page)

To which I immediately worried and replied to ask if everything was OK, but he must have logged off right away because he never wrote back again. I made a mental note to call him at exactly three-thirty, loving the feeling of freedom that comes from knowing that She wouldn't be around to screw it up. But just in case, I pulled a piece of
Runway
stationery from the pile and wrote CALL A, 3:30 P.M. TODAY and taped it to the side of my monitor. Just as I was going to call back a friend from school who'd left a message on my home machine a week earlier, the phone rang.

‘Miranda Priestly's office,' I all but sighed, figuring that there wasn't a single person on earth I wanted to speak with at that moment.

‘Emily? Is that you? Emily?' The unmistakable voice filled the phone line and seemed to seep into the air in the office. Even though she couldn't have possibly heard from across the suite, Emily looked up at me.

‘Hello, Miranda. This is Andrea. May I help you with something?' How on earth was this woman calling? I quickly checked the itinerary that Emily had typed for everyone while Miranda was in Europe and saw that her flight had taken off a mere six minutes before and she was already calling from the seat phone.

‘Well, I should hope so. I've looked at my itinerary and I just noticed that hair and makeup for Thursday before dinner is not confirmed.'

‘Um, well, Miranda, that's because Monsieur Renaud wasn't able to get an absolute confirmation from the Thursday people, but he said it was ninety-nine percent that they'd be able to and—'

‘Ahn-dre-ah, answer me this: Is ninety-nine percent the same as a hundred? Is it the same as
confirmed
?' But before I could answer I heard her tell someone, most likely a flight attendant, that she wasn't ‘particularly interested in the rules and regulations regarding the use of electronics' and to ‘please bore someone else with them.'

‘But ma'am, it's against the rules, and I'm going to have to ask that you disconnect your call until we've reached a cruising altitude. It's simply unsafe,' she said beseechingly.

‘Ahn-dre-ah, can you hear me? Are you listening …'

‘Ma'am, I'm going to have to insist. Now please, hang up the phone.' My mouth was starting to ache from smiling so widely – I could only imagine how much Miranda was hating being addressed as ‘ma'am,' which, as everyone knows, connotes old lady all the way.

‘Ahn-dre-ah, the
stewardess
is forcing me to end this call. I'll call you back when the stewardess allows me to do so. In the meantime, I want hair and makeup confirmed, and I'd like you to begin interviewing new girls for the nanny position. That's all.' It clicked off, but not before I heard the flight attendant call her ‘ma'am' one last time.

‘What did she want?' Emily asked, her forehead wrinkling in intense worry.

‘She called me the right name three times in a row,' I gloated, happy to prolong her anticipation. ‘Three times, do you believe it? I think that means we're best friends, doesn't it? Who would've thought? Andrea Sachs and Miranda Priestly, BFF.'

‘Andrea, what did she say?'

‘Well, she wants the Thursday hair and makeup confirmed because clearly ninety-nine percent isn't reassuring enough. Oh, and she said something about interviewing for a new nanny? I must've misunderstood that one. Whatever – she'll call back in thirty seconds.'

Emily took a deep breath and willed herself to endure my stupidity with grace and style. It clearly wasn't easy for her. ‘No, I don't think you misunderstood at all. Cara is no longer with Miranda, so obviously she'll be needing a new nanny.'

‘What? What do you mean no longer “with Miranda”? If she's no longer “with Miranda,” then where the hell is she?' I found it really hard to believe Cara wouldn't have told me about her abrupt departure.

‘Miranda thought Cara might be happier working for someone else,' Emily said in what I'm sure was much more diplomatic phrasing than Miranda herself had used. As if Miranda had ever been attuned to other people's happiness!

‘Emily, please. Please tell me what really happened.'

‘I gathered from Caroline that Cara had grounded the girls in their rooms after they talked back to her the other day. Miranda didn't feel it was appropriate for Cara to be making these decisions. And I agree. I mean, Cara is not these girls' mother, you know?'

So Cara had gotten fired because she made two little girls sit in their bedrooms after they'd surely given her attitude? ‘Yeah, I see your point. It's definitely not a nanny's job to look out for the well-being of her charges,' I said, nodding solemnly. ‘Cara was out of line there.'

Emily not only didn't react to my dripping sarcasm, but didn't seem to detect so much as a hint of it. ‘Exactly. And besides, Miranda never liked that Cara didn't speak French. How are the girls supposed to learn to speak it without an American accent?'

Oh, I don't know. Maybe from their $18,000-a-year private school, where French was a required subject and all three of the French teachers were native speakers? Or perhaps from their own fluent mother who had herself lived in France, still visited a half-dozen times a year and could read, write, and speak the language with perfect, lilting pronunciation? But instead I said, ‘Hey, you're right. No French, no nanny. I hear you.'

‘Well, regardless, it's going to be your responsibility to find the girls a new nanny. Here's the number of the agency we work with,' she said, sending it to me in an e-mail. ‘They know how discriminating Miranda is – and rightfully so, of course – so they usually give us good people.'

I looked at her warily and wondered what her life had been before Miranda Priestly. I got to sleep with my eyes open for a little while longer before the phone rang again. Blessedly, Emily answered it.

‘Hello, Miranda. Yes, yes, I can hear you. No, no problem at all. Yes, I have confirmed hair and makeup for that Thursday. And yes, Andrea has already begun looking for new nannies. We'll have three solid candidates ready for you to interview on your first day back.' She cocked her head to the side and touched her pen to her lips. ‘Mmm, yes. Yes, it's definitely confirmed. No, it's not ninety-nine percent, it's one hundred percent. Definitely. Yes, Miranda. Yes, I confirmed it myself, and I'm quite positive. They're looking forward to it. OK. Have a nice flight. Yes, it's confirmed. I'll fax it right now. OK. Good-bye.' She hung up the phone and appeared to be shaking.

‘Why doesn't that woman understand? I told her the hair and makeup were confirmed. And then I told her again. Why did I have to tell her fifty more times? And do you know what she said?'

I shook my head.

‘Do you know what she said? She said that since this has all been such a headache for her, she'd like me to redo the itinerary so that it will reflect that hair and makeup is now confirmed and fax it to the Ritz so she'll have the correct one when she arrives. I do everything for that woman – I give her my
life
– and this is how she talks to me in return?' She looked ready to cry. I was thrilled for the rare opportunity to see Emily turn on Miranda, but I knew that a
Runway
Paranoid Turnaround was imminent, so I had to proceed with caution. Strike just the right note of sympathy and indifference.

‘It's not you, Em, I promise. She knows how hard you work – you're an amazing assistant to her. If she didn't think you did a great job, she'd have gotten rid of you already. She's not exactly scared to do it – you know what I mean?'

Emily had stopped tearing and was approaching the defiant zone where, even though she agreed with me, she'd defend Miranda if I said anything too outrageous. I'd learned about the Stockholm Syndrome in psych, in which the victims identify with their captors, but I hadn't really understood how it all played out. Maybe I'd videotape one of the little sessions here between Emily and me and send it to the prof so next year's freshmen could actually see it happening firsthand. All efforts to proceed carefully began to feel superhuman, so I took a deep breath and dove right in.

‘She's a lunatic, Emily,' I said softly and slowly, willing her to agree with me. ‘It's not you, it's her. She's an empty, shallow, bitter woman who has tons and tons of gorgeous clothes and not much else.'

Emily's face tightened noticeably, the skin on her neck and around her cheeks pulling taut, and her hands stopped shaking. I knew she was going to bulldoze me at any moment, but I couldn't stop.

‘Have you ever noticed that she has no friends, Emily? Have you? Sure, her phone rings day and night with the world's coolest people, but they're not calling to talk about their kids or their jobs or their marriages, are they? They're calling because they need something from her. It sure seems awesome looking in, but can you imagine if the only reason anyone ever called you was because they—'

‘Stop it!' she screamed, the tears streaming down her face again. ‘Just fucking shut up already! You march into this office and think you understand everything. Little Miss I'm So Sarcastic and So Above All This! Well, you don't understand anything. Anything!'

‘Em—'

‘Don't “Em,” me, Andy. Let me finish. I know Miranda is difficult. I know she sometimes seems crazy. I know what it's like to never sleep and always be scared she's calling you and have none of your friends understand. I know all that! But if you hate it so much, if you can't do anything but complain about it and her and everyone else all the time, then why don't you just leave? Because your attitude is really a problem. And to say that Miranda is a lunatic, well, I think there are many, many more people out there who think she's gifted and gorgeous and talented and would think you're a lunatic for not doing your best to help out someone so amazing. Because she is amazing, Andy – she really is!'

I considered this for a moment and decided she had a point. Miranda was, as far as I could tell, a truly fantastic editor. Not a single word of copy made it into the magazine without her explicit, hard-to-obtain approval, and she wasn't afraid to scrap something and start over, regardless of how inconvenient or unhappy it made everyone else. Although the various fashion editors called in the clothes to shoot, Miranda alone selected the looks she wanted and which models she wanted wearing each one; the sittings editors might be the ones at the actual shoots, but they were simply executing Miranda's specific and incredibly detailed instructions. She had the final – and often even the preliminary – say over every single bracelet, bag, shoe, outfit, hair style, story, interview, writer, photo, model, location, and photograph in every issue, and that made her, in my mind, the main reason for the magazine's stunning success each month.
Runway
wouldn't be
Runway
– hell, it wouldn't be much of anything at all – without Miranda Priestly. I knew it and so did everyone else. What it hadn't yet done was convince me that any of this gave her a right to treat people the way she did. Why was the ability to put together a Balmain evening gown and a brooding, leggy Asian girl on a side street in San Sebastian worshiped so much that Miranda wasn't accountable for her behavior? I still wasn't building the bridge, but what the hell did I know? Emily obviously got it.

‘Emily, all I'm saying is that you're a really great assistant to her, that she's lucky she has someone who works as hard as you do, who's so committed to the job. I just wish you'd realize that it's not your fault if she's unhappy with something. She's just an unhappy person. There's nothing more you could have done.'

‘I know that. I really do. But you don't give her enough credit, Andy. Think about it. I mean, really think about it. She is so incredibly accomplished, and she's had to sacrifice a lot to get there, but couldn't the same be said of supersuccessful people in every industry? Tell me, how many CEOs or managing partners or movie directors or whatever don't have to be tough sometimes? It's part of the job.'

I could tell we weren't going to see eye to eye on this one. It was clear that Emily was deeply invested in Miranda, in
Runway
, in all of it, but I just couldn't understand why. She wasn't any different from the hundreds of other personal assistants and editorial assistants and assistant editors and associate editors and senior editors and editors in chief of fashion magazines. But I just didn't understand why. From everything I'd seen so far, each one was humiliated, degraded, and generally abused by their direct superior, only to turn around and do it to those under them the second they got promoted. And all of it so they could say, at the end of the long and exhausting climb, that they'd gotten to sit in the front row at Yves Saint-Laurent's couture show and had scored a few free Prada bags along the way?

Time to just agree. ‘I know,' I sighed, surrendering to her insistence. ‘I just hope you know that you're doing her the favor by putting up with her shit, not the other way around.'

I expected a quick counter-attack, but Emily grinned. ‘You know how I just told her like a hundred times that her Thursday hair and makeup were confirmed?'

I nodded. She looked positively giddy.

‘I was totally lying. I didn't call a single person or confirm anything!' She practically sang the last part.

‘Emily! Are you serious? What are you going to do now? You just swore up and down that you'd personally confirmed it.' For the first time since starting work, I wanted to hug the girl.