The Knockoff (17 page)

“We’ve already moved millions of dollars of merchandise,” Eve kept on.

Lucia raised her hand. “I’m impressed by your website. I really am. I spent some time on it this weekend. I just don’t know if it is the right place to be selling the LvA brand. I don’t see the real benefit for us just yet. Dilution of our brand strength is a big concern for me.”

Without warning Eve leaned forward importantly and reached her arm across the table. Before Imogen knew what was happening, all five of the girl’s bright red talons were covering Lucia’s mouth.

“Shush,” she said, pressing her fingers into the fashion icon’s mouth. Imogen recoiled in horror. A nearby waiter dropped a saucer with coffee. Eve had just shushed Lucia van Arpels in public.

“Lucia.” Eve couldn’t mask the condescension in her voice. “I have an MBA from Harvard Business School. You need to trust me. I know what is good for your brand better than you do.”

Lucia’s eyes lit with rage, but she had lived enough lifetimes to know how to handle herself. In a single deft movement she raised her own hand to Eve’s and slowly peeled her fingers off her mouth.

“Thank you for enlightening me, Eve.” She reached behind her to grab her scarf. “Unfortunately I need to head to another meeting. We’ll talk soon.” Lucia’s gait was even and clipped as she made her way to the door.

Imogen raised her hand in the air to signal the waiter for the check so that she wouldn’t have to address what was happening.

“I think she’s in,” Eve said when Lucia was out of earshot.

Imogen felt her phone buzz with a text. It was Lucia.

>>>>Keep that little brat away from me. I will never do business with her. I don’t know how she was raised, but something is very wrong with her.<<<<

“Eve, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. What you just did was ridiculously rude. You know that, right?”

“What I just did was convince Lucia van Arpels to sell her dresses with us.” Eve showed no remorse.

Imogen briefly considered showing the text message to Eve, but thought better of it. Her loyalty now was closer to Lucia than to Eve.

“Eve, I think you just made a huge mistake.”

“What do you know anyway, Imogen? You never even look at the website.” Eve stood to leave her at the table.

“I’ll see you at the office.”

“I have another meeting,” Imogen said. “I’ll be in right after lunch.”

Eve shrugged. “Whatever.”

T
he examination table in her doctor’s office was surprisingly plush and spa-like. It could have been relaxing if she weren’t wearing a paper robe that tied loosely in the front and threatened to open with a sneeze.

Imogen thumbed at Instagram to try to distract herself, feeling a small rush of euphoria at how many likes her previous day’s photographs had gotten. She liked a photograph of Bridgett standing in the middle of Seventh Avenue with traffic whizzing by her. God only knew how she had taken that picture. She liked Ashley’s #IWoke UpLikeThisSelfie, her eyes even bluer without liner and mascara, her pale hair fanned over half her face.

She liked a photo of Massimo’s miniature Yorkie, Ralph. She liked a picture of a woman’s bright red nails, her fingers layered in elaborate cocktail rings, holding onto a Céline clutch in the same color. She checked the name on that picture, Aerin2006. The name wasn’t familiar, but she didn’t know a lot of people in her Instagram feed. She’d asked Tilly to help her find interesting accounts to follow and then left it in her nanny’s hands.

She was about to search through the rest of Aerin2006’s photos when Dr. Claudia Fong walked quietly into the room. She was an unassuming woman with small glasses and pin-straight long black
hair that reached almost to her backside. She shuffled when she walked and murmured when she talked. She was gentle and kind and the best oncologist in Manhattan according to last year’s
New York
magazine’s Best Doctors issue.

The doctor softly pressed in a circle around Imogen’s right nipple.

“The pain is on the left side,” Imogen said, too anxiously.

“I know that, Imogen.” Claudia smiled, used to anxious patients. “I need to check the healthy one before I check the one you say is bothering you.” Imogen nodded and resolved to keep her mouth shut and let the doctor do her job. When she moved to the left side she cautioned, “This may hurt,” before launching into her favorite diatribe about why New York continued to be an unsuitable place to live.

“Why do we live in New York, Imogen? Why? I keep asking myself that every single day. Humans aren’t meant to live like this and I don’t just mean the cold. We work all the time. We never have enough money. We never do those things that allegedly make New York such a great place to live.” She put air quotes around the words “great place to live.” “I keep telling my husband we should go to Santa Fe. I had an aunt in Santa Fe. Dry heat there.”

Imogen nodded supportively even as it began to hurt when the doctor pressed her fingers into the soft tissue around her nipple. Her breast felt like it was clamped in a vise every time the doctor pushed down, which was why Imogen was shocked when Dr. Fong finally smiled, Santa Fe a distant memory for the time being.

“I don’t feel anything at all abnormal, Imogen. But I want to do a mammogram just to be sure. Let’s get you back into the X-ray room and get one done straightaway so that we can assuage your fears.”

That wasn’t possible. Imogen knew that her cancer was back. She could feel it, feel it growing inside her and taking back control of her life. The mammogram would prove Dr. Fong wrong.

But it didn’t. Sitting in Dr. Fong’s office, the inside of her breast illuminated on a flat screen in front of her, even Imogen had to admit that both sides looked like they contained healthy tissue. Dr. Fong traced the edges of the illuminated breasts with a lighted pointer.

“See, here are the implants. You can tell because they are less dense than real tissue. But you still have some of your own tissue
right around the nipple and underneath the implants.” She pointed to a cloudy mass. “That tissue appears more dense, but it also appears completely healthy. Imogen, I think what you are experiencing is phantom pain.”

This made her feel hysterical. “You think I am making this all up?”

Dr. Fong quickly shook her head. “No, I don’t think that at all. Phantom pain is actually very real. It’s a lousy name. Sometimes it can originate in a patient’s head, but it is most often because the nerves are short-circuiting a little bit, as they are getting used to the surgery. They are sending pain messages to the brain when they shouldn’t be there. Pain is useful for us. Pain tells us when something is wrong with our bodies. Think of pain as a referee throwing up little red flags all over the place. In this case the pain made a mistake. There is nothing wrong with you, Imogen. I promise.”

“What should I do?”

“Try to relax through it. I’ll prescribe some more painkillers. I need you to keep up with the exercise of your chest and your arm.” Dr. Fong finished taking notes on her tablet and started writing out a prescription. “Keeping those muscles strong will help you heal even faster. Beyond that I can’t tell you much else except that I am incredibly pleased with your progress.”

Imogen felt relief coupled with annoyance. Phantom pain wasn’t something she wanted to say to people. It sounded like something she made up.

“What do I tell Alex?” Dr. Fong could tell that Imogen was displeased with the diagnosis.

“Tell him the truth. Your nerves are getting used to the new tissue and there is a learning curve. You don’t ever actually have to say the word ‘phantom.’ ”

Sometimes fake felt so real.

Imogen sank back onto the table and typed out a text to Alex:

>>>>Tests okay. You get to keep me.<<<<

W
as it possible the entire scene with Lucia van Arpels hadn’t happened, that Imogen had imagined the entire thing? She kept replaying it over and over in her head as she popped into the chemist to fill her prescription and then again on the way to the office—Eve’s hand moving in slow motion across the table. The whites of Lucia’s eyes expanding as she tried to comprehend what was being done to her. It couldn’t have been real. It was too much like a scene out of a movie. But when Imogen glanced down at her phone, there was Lucia’s text to her.

Eve was perched on a table in the kitchen regaling the staff about her meeting with Lucia when Imogen walked in to make an espresso.

“And then I just told her, ‘I know what is good for your brand.’ You should have seen her face.”

“Yes, you should have.” Imogen wished she weren’t still surprised at Eve’s nerve, but it managed to blindside her at least twice a day.

“Eve, let’s have a chat about this in my office.”

Eve popped off the table and did a small dance, biting her bottom lip and shaking her ass.

Imogen had no choice but to show Eve the text. “She won’t work
with you again, Eve. What you did just made you a techbitch in Lucia van Arpels’s world.”

The word “bitch” didn’t faze her in the least. If anything it energized her. The girl twirled a piece of hair around her finger. “It’s not my fault she can’t see that we’re the future. She needs us.”

“No, Eve, right now we need her more than she needs us. We need people like Lucia to want their designs sold with us. Lucia’s dresses are the kinds of things our readers will really want to buy.”

Eve shrugged. “So call her back. We’ll have another meeting.”

“She won’t take another meeting with you, Eve. That’s the point I am trying to make.”

“Fine. What do we do?”

Imogen sighed. “Money talks, Eve. We offer to buy two million dollars at wholesale to prove how serious we are about moving her inventory.”

Eve scoffed. “Two million dollars is crazy. That’s like thirty percent of our new round of investment.”

“It’s the only way to save this situation with Lucia. And I can tell you another thing, Eve. Lucia doesn’t have a big mouth, but her staff does, and unless you want to get us blackballed in this town, we need to find a way to mend this situation.”

Eve lifted her eyes and fixed Imogen with a look of utter bewilderment.

This was the part of the job that was making Imogen feel ill. When she described what she was doing to Massimo, he referred to it as being paid to open your kimono. Imogen was opening up her network to Eve. No, she was opening up her network to Glossy.com. That was how she had to think of it. She was doing what was best for the company. But at what price? How long could she protect
Glossy
’s reputation from Eve’s antics?

“Pay the bitch then.” Eve stood. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I was assertive in that meeting, Imogen. If I were a man in that meeting Lucia would’ve called me powerful.”

If she’d been a man in that meeting Lucia would have called her abusive
, Imogen thought irritably. She had always agreed with the
hypothesis that men in powerful positions could be complete bastards and be promoted, while women could be called cows for the smallest offense. Still, even Donald Trump couldn’t have gotten away with what Eve did.

“Maybe you should try keeping your hands to yourself in the next meeting, Eve.”

GChat between Eve and Ashley:

GlossyEV: I need to vent for a min. About Imogen. I MEAN SERIOUSLY?

Ash: ??

GlossyEV: Why doesn’t she understand how to do ANYTHING? I swear something is always wrong with her computer or her phone or her iPad. She swears it is never her. It is always the fault of the technology. I can hear her huffing in her office RIGHT NOW.

Ash: She’s getting better.

GlossyEV: It’s just cray that someone made it so far in their careers without ever learning how to use any kind of technology. I try to help her. I do. I am a nice person. You know I am a nice person. It’s just so frustrating. I can’t keep repeating myself. “Tell me my password again, darling,” she titters as though it’s adorable that she is as forgetful as an Alzheimer’s patient.

Ash: *shrug*

GlossyEV: And what about when she talks to the screen like extra loud like a dumb American in Europe for the first time. Just figure it out ALREADY. I don’t know how you do it. How r u so nice to her?

Ash: *shrug*

GlossyEV: ROFL

Ash: She’s learning. It’s getting better.

GlossyEV: Not fast enough.

Eve slipped out of her heels, Louboutin knockoffs she ordered from Korea, to stretch her calves. She rose onto her bare toes and rocked back on her heels a few times.

It was proven that people made decisions quicker when they stood up at work. Sitting at a desk all day made people lazy.

Eve’s desk was immaculate except for her devices: a laptop, an iPad mini, an iPhone and a Samsung Android. She craved order. All of the other girls back home had rooms filled with trophies and riding ribbons. Eve kept those things in a pretty little box under her bed. She prided herself on having a room as neat as a hotel suite.

She had been the right amount of assertive with Lucia. It wasn’t like she face-palmed her or anything. She’d made an affectionate gesture with her hand, that was all. Imogen needed to quit it with the overreaction.

How much longer did they need Imogen Tate here anyway? It was nice to keep her around for the transition, but was she more trouble than she was worth? She’d just cost them a lot of money. Worthington really liked her, but if Eve could prove that Imogen wasn’t a team player for the new Glossy.com maybe he wouldn’t want to keep her around anymore. He was a man after her own heart, one who thought in terms of cash instead of emotions. So what if he was a little Handy McGrabberson under the table during their meetings? He could paw at her bare thigh all day for all she cared. Maybe she would invite him out to dinner next week, slip into that low-cut new Alaïa dress she’d ordered (from the site, natch!) and see what he had to say about Imogen’s future with the company.