Fashionistas (14 page)

J
ackie is angry because at her doctoral defense they put her on the defensive.

“It was a terrible, awful, horrible experience that I never want to talk about,” she says, bringing up the topic over corned beef sandwiches.

I’m happy to discuss movies or weekend plans or this month’s Celeb Watch section, but she has other ideas. She is still fresh from the battlefield and wants to show off her wounds.

“It was just devastating. They kept asking me the same questions over and over again, changing the wording each time and I kept saying, ‘No, I don’t know the Marxist implications of bell-bottoms,’ ‘No, I don’t understand what Hush Puppies have to do with the value of the Japanese yen,’ ‘No, I didn’t study the economic ramifications of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.’ And why would I? My thesis was on the literature of fashion. What does that have to do with money?” She sighs heavily and bows her head, as if she’s just lived through the ordeal again here in a midtown deli. “God, the
way they just kept pounding me with the same question—it was brutal, “she says with a shudder, as though this were some sort of interrogation technique used on prisoners of war and not an everyday teaching method designed to help students realize they already know the answer.

Jackie is
Fashionista
’s only Ph.D., and Jane gets a kick out of having an overeducated assistant. For her, it’s like having the winner of the Westminster dog show fetch her morning paper. Jackie’s original plan was to get her feet wet in corporate America while waiting for a position to open up in academia but now she’s not so sure. Now she’s thanking her lucky stars that she has a job far, far away from those cruel tormentors in their ivory towers.

Jane, of course, is receptive to the idea of Jackie staying. She can’t lord her doctorate-assistant over everybody’s head if she doesn’t have one. “She says there’s a future for me at the magazine.”

There is a future for Jackie at the magazine, but things move slowly at
Fashionista
and Jackie will have to put up with a lot before she can grab the brass ring of career advancement. I slurp the last ounce of my soda. “I’m getting another,” I say, waving an empty Coke can in the air. “Do you need anything?”

She nods and extracts a dollar. “One piece of Bazooka.”

“My treat,” I say benevolently. “Consider it a graduation present.”

“Thanks.” She smiles and slides the dollar across the table. “I’ll take four quarters then.”

I sigh and take the money, admitting that I walked right into that one. Jackie isn’t running out to do her laundry or looking for a metered space to park her SUV. She’s collecting change. She’s collecting it because an episode of
Oprah
informed viewers that saving all your coins can net you fifty dollars a month. Taking this advice to heart, Jackie has made the pursuit of change a full-time occupation and sometimes you see her counting pennies at her desk when she thinks
no one is looking. She now wears cargo pants and weighs her pockets down so heavily with pieces of eight that she sounds like a Salvation Army Santa. The jingling serves as an early-warning system and most times you can duck into an empty cubicle to avoid her.

Although she tries hard to be liked, Jackie is a difficult person to spend time with. This is her first year in New York and she wears her pricey Brooklyn Heights apartment and entry-level salary like a cross. She believes her suffering is more acute than yours, that she’s the only one in Manhattan who doesn’t have enough money. But the truth is that nobody here has enough money, and after a while, you get tired of her attitude. You get tired of her air of persecution and the way she looks at you—with a combination of fear and suspicion, as if she’s Marie Antoinette and you’re a blood-mad peasant.

I steel myself for another twenty minutes of thesis talk and poverty laments and return to the table. The only reason I’m here is because of Jackie’s access to Pieter van Kessel. She comes from a family of fashion-industry insiders, which is how she got a position at
Fashionista
before one became available. Her mother, a well-known designer for Christian Dior, called up Jane and asked if she had a job for her daughter. Emily, Jane’s old assistant, who barely finished college with a 2.8, was fired on the spot.

“So, I was thinking of trying to get an interview with van Kessel for one of the winter issues,” I say, broaching the subject cautiously and hoping I’m not as transparent as I feel. I’ve made lunch seem like a spontaneous thing, like the thought hadn’t crossed my mind before we bumped into each other by the elevators at 1:27, but the thought had crossed my mind. It had been zigging and zagging through my brain for hours, and I’d been listening to her jingle-jingle all morning, waiting for the sound to fade. When it finally did, I jumped out of my chair and raced after her.

“Yeah?” she asks, interested. “You think he’s good?”

Although Jackie has spent the past five years studying how clothes affect cultural and social identities in different societies, she doesn’t know a thing about fashion. As far as she’s concerned, an Empire waist is France after Waterloo. She only went to Pieter van Kessel’s show because her mother was in town and she only invited me along because she needed someone to act as a buffer. I sat in between the two made-moiselles Guilberts and ran interference until the show started. The lights dimmed and the clothes captured my attention and I left Jackie to fend for herself. As I watched black ball gowns with wide ruffles and silver blouses with flounced sleeves go by, mother and daughter hissed at each other like angry cats. I leaned forward to give them better access.

“I think he has potential,” I say, not wanting to rave and gush and give myself away. I’ve never been this excited about a story before and I’m afraid. I’m afraid that if Jackie or Jane or the fashion gods learn of my enthusiasm, they’ll take Pieter van Kessel away.

“That’s what Mom said, but I didn’t see it.”

I’m not surprised. She never once turned her eyes toward the runway. “Your mom should know. She’s been around designers for years. How did she hear of van Kessel?” The show had been amazingly low-key. There were a few fashion photographers there, and aside from us and a well-known critic from the
Times,
there wasn’t any press.

“His partner used to be John Galliano’s right-hand man. Hans sent Mom the tickets,” she explains. “He was the small guy who she was talking to after the show. Remember, he was wearing the red velvet smoking jacket and you said he looked like Hugh Hefner?”

Few people leave Givenchy and one of fashion’s superstars to toil alongside a nobody in a dirty basement on the Lower East Side. “That was bold.”

“Mom called it career suicide,” Jackie says, change jangling as she crosses her legs. “You shouldn’t have any trouble getting an interview with Pieter. Mom said the turnout at the
show was a disappointment. He’d probably be happy that you even know his name.”

I’m not so sure of this. In my experience, designers, even up-and-coming ones, expect you to know their name. They tend to live in hermetically sealed universes in which everyone knows who they are and is wowed by their ideas and flattered when they condescend to talk about their work. “I don’t know…”

“Sure he will,” she says, impatient now with the topic. We haven’t talked about her for almost fifteen minutes and she’s starting to wither from the lack of attention. “I’ll call Mother and she’ll arrange something with Hans. Don’t worry about it.” She looks at her watch. “I’ve got to get back to the office. I have to call my travel agent and book a flight to Athens for Christmas,” she says with a sigh, as if spending a week in Greece were a hardship. “I promised Mother that I would do it today.”

“Athens?” I ask, as though I don’t already know everything about her vacation plans. There are few untrod paths with Jackie.

“Yes, Mother wants to go island-hopping. I wish I could look forward to it but I can’t. My sister, who always makes these outings bearable, just had a baby, so she won’t be coming. It will just be my mother and me and lots of blue water. And the worst thing of all is that Athens is one of my favorite cities and I would love to hang out for a few days after she leaves but it’s too expensive. With my rent and salary, I always have to be mindful of my pennies. Mother is paying for the airfare, but I’d have to foot the bill for room and board if I stayed on, which means getting an efficiency in a dreary little pension in the worst part of town. I still have several months to save, but I have to be so careful. My apartment isn’t stabilized or anything and even though I’ve only been there a few months, I’m worried about what they’re going to raise it to next year. I mean, I’m already stretched so thin that I can barely afford to use the telephone. Can you believe how much they charge for local calls?”

This is the noise that accompanies me along Fifty-first, down Sixth and up the elevator to the twenty-second floor, but I’m not listening. Jackie’s self-involved monologue is only background music. In my head, I’m already writing an article on Pieter van Kessel.

A
llison’s conversations with her dad are not so much dialogues as lists of complaints.

“The restaurant’s host came over while we were still eating dessert and asked us to leave because they needed the table,” she says, relating her recent experience at Pó, one of those tiny eateries in the Village that you have to make reservations a month in advance for. “We’d been there too long.”

Pause.

“An hour and a half.”

Pause.

“No, I know that’s not long. And we had gotten the six-course tasting menu.”

Pause.

“Yes, the six-course tasting menu has six courses.”

Pause.

“Oh, I did the math all right. It comes out to fifteen minutes a course. I don’t see how we could have eaten faster. And after five courses, it’s no wonder we were a little slow with dessert.”

I’ve heard the Pó story several times today already, although this is by far the most streamlined version. She is not telling him what she ate (shaved cucumber salad, shitake mushroom ravioli, pan-seared salmon, braised lamb, assortment of cheeses and warm chocolate cake with cinnamon ice cream) or the restaurant’s pedigree (once owned by TV chef Mario Batali, who now owns the restaurant across the street from where she lives. No, it’s not very good. They put snails in everything). She is just telling him the facts. Allison never lingers over phone calls to Dad. Their relationship is cursory and abrupt and fulfills a sort of mutual obligation they both feel toward Allison’s deceased mother.

“Of course I’m writing a letter to the owner,” she assures him. Writing letters is a huge part of the Harper routine. Whether Allison actually composes these documents and sends them out I don’t know but she certainly pays lips service to the notion. “I’ll cc the Better Business Bureau and
New York
magazine.”

Pause.

“Yes, I know. He was a complete bird brain.”

This is the signal I’ve been waiting for and I call Kate and Sarah to let them know that Allison will be off the phone in a minute. I know this because, in the end, these conversations with her father always come down to one of three vital life lessons: people are bird brains, you can only rely on yourself, everything is worse than you expect.

“All right. I’ll talk to you then.” Allison hangs up and sighs. This, too, is par for the course. She would rather not have these talks with Dad. They just make her miss Mom more. Before she can pick up the phone to call Libby or Greta or Carly to complain about being an emotional orphan, I stick my head over the thumbtack wall.

“Meeting,” I say.

Allison looks up at me in surprise, marveling at my timing. It does not occur to her that I hear every word she speaks. I hear every syllable she utters, every drawer she opens, every
click she makes with the stapler. “All right. I’ll just notify the others.”

“I already called Kate and Sarah. They should be by in a second.”

She looks at me sharply for a second; then her eyes stray to the telephone. She’s wondering if a second is enough time to talk about Daddy.

“Hey there,” says Kate, approaching our cubicles eagerly. “What’s up?”

“Progress report,” I say, fighting a smile. This feeling of accomplishment, this sense of a job well-done, is new and odd and I want to savor it.

Allison’s eyes pop out. “You’ve made progress?”

“That’s what I’m here to report.”

“What are you here to report?” asks Sarah, approaching with an iced cappuccino in one hand and a bag of biscotti in the other.

“Progress,” I say again.

“Great, let’s take this to the bathroom,” says Allison, whose fear of being overheard is limited only to plots to bring down the editor in chief. Today she’s wearing a beautiful pleated skirt, mesh sandals and a classic black V tee but somehow she looks shlumpy. The outfit is expensive and even if she bought the entire ensemble at Century 21—although I doubt very much she found that skirt in their picked-over racks—it still had to cost half a week’s take-home pay. That’s the thing with
Fashionista.
Its employees are indentured servants to their wardrobes.

The walk to the bathroom on the other side of the office is long and Allison fills the time with yet another rendition of dinner at Pó. This time she goes into minute detail of how the shitake mushroom ravioli was served and, although she’s trying to discourage people from dining there, her diatribe digresses into an advertisement for the restaurant. By the time we get there, my mouth is watering and I have to ask Sarah for a biscotti.

It’s odd to eat in a bathroom, even one with leather couches and plush carpeting, and I nibble on the cookie, trying to enjoy it. Sarah is completely at ease. She has the air of a woman who often takes breaks in luxury lounges adjacent to toilets.

Allison checks the bathroom stalls to make sure they’re empty before raising the topic that is so dear to her heart. “Tell us everything. Has Keller agreed to help?”

I nod. “He said he’ll put the Gilding the Lily show on November’s calendar.”

Kate looks at me. “Was he very hard to persuade?”

“He was a bit stubborn at first but then he gave in.”

“How’d you convince him?” Kate asks.

“I reminded him that he owed me a favor since I changed his sister’s life,” I say, because there is no reason for them to know the truth. Keller’s double life is not my secret to tell.

Sarah raises her eyebrows in surprise. “And that worked?”

Allison flicks her a look of distaste. “Of course it worked. I told you he owed her a favor. That’s why she’s the linchpin.” Allison turns to me. “Excellent. Now on to the next phase. What we need to do—”

“I’ve already done it.”

Allison is shocked. “What?”

“This morning I went into Jane’s office with coverlines and accidentally spilled a folder with information about the exhibition,” I explained. “Jane saw the memo and was all over it. I couldn’t even get it back. She pretended to throw it in the garbage but I know as soon as I closed the door she fetched it out of the trash.”

Sarah high-fives me and then giggles. “I can’t believe we’re actually doing this.”

Kate is equally moved and sits down on the couch to contemplate a future without Jane. Only Allison isn’t pleased.

“You left a paper trail?” she asks coolly.

I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. “I suppose so. But it’s just an unofficial memo. And it only has my name on it.”

She nods slowly. I feel as though I’m being judged. “And you wrote the memo?”

“I did but I incorporated all the things you mentioned at our first meeting,” I say, trying to appease her. Although we are a fashion and lifestyle magazine, we are owned by one of the largest publishing companies in the country and are tied up in corporate values. Project ownership is still a big deal. “I might have written it but it was basically your words. I can print you out a copy if you’d like to see it.”

Afraid to seem too petulant, she assures me that’s not necessary. “It’s just that you should have talked to me about it first. I don’t like being left out of the loop.”

“When I heard that Jane was on the rampage because Marguerite spent the weekend in Maine with a prince, I decided to strike while the iron was hot.” I look her in the eye. “I didn’t intentionally leave you out of the loop.”

Allison manages a thin smile. “Well, let’s not do it again. When we formed this group we promised to work as a team. We’re all in this together,” she says, but what she really means is that they’re all in this together and I’ve only been invited along for the ride because they had to. I’m the linchpin.

But that’s the problem with us linchpins. We tend to be loose cannons.