The Knockoff (19 page)

“Break time is over.” Eve clapped her hands and with that everyone scattered back to their desks, leaving the egg yolks coagulating on the floor.

Eve had noticed Imogen when she walked into the room, but waited until her game was over to acknowledge her. “Hey, Imogen. I thought you had gone home for the night.”

“I just popped downstairs for a macchiato.”

“Where’s the coffee?” Eve countered, smiling knowingly.

“I drank it on the walk back. Could we chat in my office?”

Eve shrugged and trailed behind her. The lights had been turned out and the computer shut down. Imogen knew that wasn’t how she had left things just ten minutes earlier.

“Did you turn off my computer?”

“Of course not.” Eve rolled her eyes aggressively. “I never come into your office. One of the cleaning ladies must have done it or something.”

“Who was that girl you just let go? She was bawling in the elevator.”

Eve flicked her hand. “Just an assistant. I let all of them go today.”

Imogen wanted to reply slowly to make sure the right words came out of her mouth. “We need assistants. Have you talked to HR about hiring new ones tomorrow?”

“No need. I have a plan. It’s going to save us a ton of money so that we can hire new content producers in their place.”

Imogen raised her eyebrows, indicating Eve should continue her explanation.

“I’m outsourcing all of the assistant duties offshore. One of my friends from B-school just started the most amazing virtual assistant company. For just five dollars an hour you can farm out all the menial work we have those office assistants doing. We can have them transcribe interviews, make appointments, order office supplies. They’ll even order delivery food for you. It’s so disruptive. It’s genius.”

Imogen shook her head. “You know the point of having assistants in the office is to eventually train them up to work on more and more things and then to promote them. I started out as an assistant. You started out as an assistant, remember.” Imogen took in a deep breath, catching a whiff of Eve’s Miss Dior perfume.

Eve flicked her hand again. “Yes, but we don’t need them anymore. That’s how things used to get done. I’m creating a new system, Imogen.”
Now Eve was scowling. “Why can’t you accept the changes I am making around here. I brought
Glossy
into the twenty-first century and I want to bring you with me, but you aren’t helping me.”

“Some of the old systems actually work, Eve. We don’t need to throw everything out to start something new just for the hell of it.”

Eve continued. “Come on. Let me do my job. I am letting you do yours. Go home and spend time with your kids. I know you weren’t getting a macchiato. You just came back up here to lecture me. Point taken. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The women were all back at their desks, their headphones on and their fingers flying furiously over their keyboards. Imogen felt stunned, but was reluctant to make a scene. She made her way to the elevator, careful not to put her heel in gooey egg along the way.

I
mogen arrived home and drew herself a long bath, pouring a glass of wine and trickling a bit of lavender oil into their antique claw-foot tub. She liked her lavender better in her tub than in her coffee. She and Alex discovered the tub at a tiny antiques shop upstate in Phoenicia and spent hours negotiating for it, only to find out that it had a terrible leak once they got it home. They had to have the entire thing resealed and it cost them a small fortune, but Imogen loved it so much she believed it was completely worth all of the trouble. It was deep enough that she didn’t have to slouch to slide her entire body beneath the water. She was able to submerge herself up to the middle of her neck in water scalding almost to the point she couldn’t stand it.

Annabel was asleep when she got home. Imogen kept thinking back to those comments she’d seen on her daughter’s Facebook page. What kind of monster would write that kind of thing to a little girl? She didn’t know how to bring it up without looking like she was spying on her daughter, a surefire way, she knew, to make any and all personal conversations end before they even had a chance to begin.

Everything was a mess. Her daughter was being bullied online and she was being bullied at work. She woke each day with a pit in her stomach about the very thought of walking into that office
and seeing Eve. Not a morning passed when Eve didn’t comment on something Imogen didn’t know or had done wrong. She didn’t send a document in the right format. Why didn’t she understand how to access the photographs they now stored in the cloud and not on the server? You know you don’t have to reply all to emails! You know you should reply all to emails more often! Could she tweet more?

There was now a very clear line drawn through the story of her life, Before Eve and After Eve. It should be Before Cancer and After Cancer, but Imogen wasn’t certain that the cancer had more of an impact on her well-being than the reappearance of Eve in her life.

We all have tropes that run rampant in our heads. Before Eve, Imogen thought endlessly about being the best editor in chief out there, about beating the competition, about selling more magazines. That little voice told her that
Glossy
could always be better if she just tried harder. Now that little voice changed its tune. Now she was no longer good enough. Now it told her to just give up because she couldn’t survive here.

She stretched her leg out, which felt good, and wiggled her toes. Decades of six-inch heels did feet no favors.

The hot water from the faucet falling created a pleasantly thumping crescendo and Imogen indulged in a new fantasy. What if they just left? What if they gave up the wildly expensive mortgage on their town house and the private school tuitions? What if they packed it all up and moved to New Orleans? Taking a large swallow of wine, she remembered how much she fucking loved New Orleans.

What would it cost to live in New Orleans? Maybe a fifth of what it cost them to keep up appearances in New York? She picked up her phone from the little vintage bamboo table she kept by the tub and fumbled with her wet hands for the real estate app, the one Tilly downloaded for her. Careful to keep the device above the water, Imogen pecked in some parameters. New Orleans—Garden District—Bedrooms (4+).

So many options. She shook bits of water off her thumbs so she could scroll down the smooth screen. Then she fell in love.

It was a nineteenth-century historical manse in the Garden District. Peculiar and beautiful, with its all-white exterior and robin’s-egg-blue
trim, a formidable wrought-iron fence wound lazily around the property. Enlarging the picture allowed a glimpse of a rickety porch swing. The price for this gem was less than 20 percent of what they’d paid for this town house.

Down south, Alex could put up a shingle as a local attorney, fixing DUIs and divorces. The kids could go to public school. She’d find the space to figure out what she wanted to do next, what she could do next. Photography? Interior design? Both fields were different and digital now, but she had an eye. It was the only place in the world besides New York City where she felt like she could thrive as a creative person.

Butterflies fluttered in her belly. She was excited. New Orleans would be new and fresh. A challenge, sure, but a new challenge. Goddamn it. Did everything always have to go in a straight line? Her career could move across a diagonal. What if Alex came home and she just said, “Leave your goddamned job”? She could have choices!

Imogen finished her wine. Why didn’t she bring the bottle upstairs?

The phone slipped from her hand onto the bath mat.

You think New York is everything, until it isn’t anymore.

She sighed. It really was just a dream. Sure, getting rid of the house and the private school would give them some breathing room, but both Imogen and Alex had aging parents, both with little in the way of retirement savings. Then there was her pile of medical bills, growing all the time, which needed the attention of her jaunty Robert Mannering Corp. insurance plan.

The weight of an entire family cleaved to her shoulders. No matter how much hot water she put in the tub now a chill crept over her and goose pimples prickled the surface of her skin.

DECEMBER 2015

An excerpt from “Recess Theory,” by Axelrod MacMurray:

We need to be happy in order to be productive. We need to push the boundaries of the workplace and allow adults to tap into their inner child in order to maximize success and innovation. It is important for the adult employee to be given time to be social in an unstructured and creative way during the work day and it is incumbent upon managers to foster this. The focus of the play should not have a goal. Used properly in the workplace, an hour of playtime will ultimately increase your output exponentially
.

I
n 2013, a squat, balding Harvard Business School professor named Axelrod MacMurray (Stanford PhD, Harvard MBA) wrote a book proposing the “Recess Theory.” It was based on a proprietary study conducted over several years by Dr. MacMurray himself that proved even adults needed an hour of unstructured “play” to bolster their productivity in other parts of their lives.

After Eve took MacMurray’s class in 2014, she very briefly became his most devoted student and sometime late-night companion.

Their fleeting, but apparently playful and productive, time together could have been what inspired Eve to take the whole office on an outing to Spirit Cycle for a spin class. All of the mommies at school swore by Spirit Cycle, this kind of New Agey take on cardio spin that was supposed to unite body and soul. Imogen thought it sounded like bollocks. She’d been a runner in her twenties and through most of her thirties. Mainly she just ate right and did Pilates with her trainer. In the same way that she’d missed the Atkins craze in the early 2000s, spin somehow passed her by.

It would be nice to get out of the office early though. The Spirit Cycle studio was close to her town house and she planned to go home straight after, which significantly lifted her mood as she walked into the dark cycling studio with its bright yellow bikes and inspirational words written on the walls.

Eve strutted into the studio, a vision in Spirit Cycle yellow pants and stringy top, her hair pulled up into a high ponytail on top of her head.

“Yeah, Spirit!!! I love it here. We’re gonna get our spirit on.” She high-fived the instructor as the other girls from the office climbed onto their bikes. Imogen had taken the funny shoes with the metal clips on the bottom from the front desk and clomped the rest of the way back into the cycling room, but once she found herself on the bike she hadn’t a clue how the bloody things worked. She tried angling her foot flat against the pedal, hoping it would quickly clip in. Nothing happened. She made these odd clanging sounds as pedals and shoes around the room mated in satisfying
click-clicks
.

The anxiety of not doing it properly just compounded each time her foot slid off the pedal without that requisite
click
.

Ashley planted herself on one side of Imogen in the front row. Eve was on the other. Ashley quietly reached down to guide Imogen’s toe into place.
Click
.

The instructor bounced up and down on a podium lit only by candles that smelled like grapefruit.

“Heya, Spirit sisters!” she hollered into a headset mounted on top of her white-girl dreadlocks. Eve leaned in to Imogen to whisper, “The instructor is Angelina Starr. She’s, like, a spin goddess.”

Angelina Starr? It is obviously a stage name
, Imogen thought.
When did spin instructors start warranting stage names?
Angelina Starr was too tanned and too made-up to be breaking a sweat. She wore nothing but a teensy yellow bandeau top and teeny-weeny black Lycra panties.

Eve and the girls in the room who were obviously Spirit regulars chanted back in unison, “Heya, Angelina!”

“Everyone got everything?”

“I would quite like a water.” Imogen raised her hand politely, which made Angelina sneer.

“Oh, would you now? Could I get you some skim milk with that? Would you like Splenda too? How about I come over there and braid your hair?” As Imogen’s jaw dropped, Angelina just as quickly turned her attention back to the rest of the room.

“Who’s ready to get their SPIRIT on?” the instructor yelled.

“We are,” they singsonged in a chorus.

Jay-Z’s
Black Album
began blasting through hidden speakers as the instructor mounted her bike and began a monologue.

“We’re here for us. We’re here for one another. No one speaks during this class. We ride together. You are here for you and for your Spirit sisters. We are all one. Before we start riding you are going to write down your Spirit sister’s name. She’s right next to you. You will write down her name and you will put it in your shoe.” A group of employees all wearing matching yellow Spirit shirts walked around the room with small pieces of paper and miniature golf pencils.

Eve scrawled her name in cursive and thrust the small piece of paper at Imogen.

“Put my name in your shoe,” she commanded in a voice devoid of emotion.

Was this the stupidest thing Imogen had ever been asked to do?

“And now your Spirit sister’s name will give you energy all the way from your feet up to your heart,” the instructor continued. “Let’s ride. You Spirit warriors in the front row. You owe it to your sisters to set an example. I would rather you slapped my face than slowed down your ride.”

What was happening with the temperature in the room? Imogen
suddenly felt much too hot. Buckets of sweat poured down the back of her neck. They had obviously turned the heat up to make you feel like you were working out harder than you actually were. The shoes just felt unstable. She must not be clipped in correctly. Imogen slowed to wiggle her foot out of its cage in an attempt to clip it back in properly, but Angelina Starr began staring a hole straight into her soul.

“The front row must keep the rhythm!” she screamed, obviously to Imogen in particular. “Left. Right. Left. Right.”

Pumping her legs to the beat, Imogen wondered why the fuck the spin-mommies at school paid $50 a pop for this. Carefully choreographed movements with your feet strapped to pedals flailing wildly out of control was unnatural, like being tortured. People paid good money to be abused here?

The lights went out. It was pitch-black except for the spooky Salem-like candles in a circle around the instructor.

“Put your right hand on your head!”

“Crunch your tummy!”

“If you yawn, I WILL spit in your face!!!!!!”

“Tuck your booty! Tuck your booty!”

Naturally, Eve was a pro. She bobbed her high ponytail left then right, left then right, tucking and tucking. All the while singing along to the hip-hop songs with the enthusiasm of a Hitler youth.

“You’re a better you because you’re here!! You’re successful!! You’re amazing! You are the best you that you can be right here, right now. You love yourself so much. Life is messy! What matters is how we clean it up!!!!” the instructor screamed as Eve pumped both her fists into the air and bellowed, “WOOOOOOOOO!” This wasn’t just a fitness class. It was therapy by way of sweat. You came for the cardio, you stayed for the aphorisms.

Imogen hated it. Near the end of the class her hair was soaked with sweat. Places hurt that shouldn’t hurt. She was reminded of the Leonard Cohen lyric, “I ache in the places where I used to play.” She’d almost forgotten Eve’s name languishing on a piece of paper inside her shoe. Reluctantly, Imogen rose with the rest of the room for one final push toward the finish line.

“Faster. You can see it in the distance. That’s your goal. That’s why
you came here tonight. You are the best version of you right now. Right in this moment.”

Imogen pushed harder and harder on the pedals, her legs beginning to move slightly out of control. She could see the finish line in her mind. She raced even faster, no longer paying attention to Eve or Ashley or any of the women in the room.

Click
. Her right foot slipped off the pedal. She toppled over to the side. No one missed a beat. Imogen was sandwiched on her bottom in between her bike and Eve’s.

After she caught her breath, Imogen looked left and right. Eve’s pedal whirred in front of her face like a lawn mower blade.

“Spirit sister…help?” Imogen squeaked. And yet her Spirit sister couldn’t be bothered to stop until that bike reached the finish line. Eve just kept cycling.

Ashley had sneakily put her headphones on in the class and was completely oblivious to what was happening.

No one would help her. With Eve’s legs whirring around it was nearly impossible for Imogen to rise without being maimed. She found herself slithering forward on her stomach toward the podium, where she could finally pull herself up.

As she walked herself to the door and tossed her offensive, faulty shoes in the bin, the class just kept spinning.