Fashionistas (12 page)

A
lex Keller is a franchise. He’s like V.C. Andrews, except he isn’t dead and his morbid plots only twist around movie stars. He has no plans to trademark his name.

“Delia’s been editing the section for the last two years,” he says. “She does everything. Researches events, generates ideas, takes publicists out to lunch, hires writers, writes stories, approves layouts, draws up contracts, selects photos, edits articles, sets deadlines, plans the editorial calendar.”

“You don’t do anything?” I ask, striving to keep the censure out of my voice. I’m trying not to sound appalled, as if I found deception on a scale this large commonplace, as if I don’t think it’s something that just governments do.

He shrugs. “I make it possible.”

This isn’t enough. “That’s all?”

“I meet with Lydia from time to time to keep up appearances.”

“From time to time?” Disdain creeps into my voice. What he’s describing isn’t a job, it’s a hobby, the sort of thing rich
people do between lunching at the Plaza and buying diamonds at Tiffany’s.

“Once a month, sometimes twice.”

“And Delia is cool with this?”

He’s surprised by my question. I can tell from the way he raises his eyebrows and stares at me. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

“She does the work—you get the credit,” I say, highlighting what I think is an obvious point. But nothing is ever as obvious as I think.

“Please,” he says with scorn, as if Delia were some sort of social or political cause he didn’t subscribe to, like Cartographers for Social Justice. “Delia is completely independent. She plans her days to best suit her, not me. She takes long lunches, comes in late and leaves early whenever she wants to. She works quickly and efficiently and doesn’t have to look busy when there’s nothing left to do because she works too quickly and too efficiently. She isn’t subjected to the whims of a tyrannical boss. I don’t ask her to get coffee, make my lunch reservations, pick up my dry cleaning, stay until nine o’clock to answer my phone or sort through a pile of receipts to itemize my expenses.”

I’m not immune to the allure of independence and self-sufficiency and the freedom from tyranny. When I was young and fresh out of college, this is the sort of job I thought I would have. This is precisely the sort of job I thought I’d have before I realized that administrative assistants don’t actually assist in the administration of things. They only make photocopies and fill out expense reports and distribute memos.

“Most of the important decisions are left to her,” he says, outlining more of the advantages of his franchise system. “She has all the responsibility of a high-pressure job but none of the accountability. It’s an ideal environment to learn about magazines in. Plus, she’s a shoo-in for the events editor job when I leave. Actually, she’d have the job already if Jane weren’t such a stickler about age. Fortunately for me, there’s no way she’d give my job to someone so young, even though
Delia can do it with her eyes closed. But in a year or two, there’ll be no stopping Delia. I’ll have to step aside or get run over.”

Delia is twenty-three. She’s the sort of go-getter overachiever that corporations all over America look for when they’re recruiting go-getter overachievers. She completed her undergrad degree at Fordham in three years and, because she wasn’t ready to leave her friends yet, she stayed on another year to get her master’s. The editorial assistant job at
Fashionista
was the first one she interviewed for and because both Alex Keller and the managing editor had liked her instantly, she was offered the job within twenty-four hours. She is one of those people who will be profiled in an NPR piece before she is thirty.
New York
magazine will include her in a “Thirty Under Thirty” article. She will be running a major publication, if not the world, before a dozen years pass.

I don’t have the same hang-ups with age that Maya does— I’ve never had an agent or goals or a boyfriend for more than six months—but Delia Barker makes me feel old. She makes me feel like the game is already over, like twenty-nine is not the jumping off point that other people say it is, like my life has fallen short of its potential. She is that subtle reminder that you were never intelligent enough, never beautiful enough, never clever enough. You were just always you and that barely covered the cost of admission.

No one has ever worried about my running them over.

B
y day, the mild-mannered Alex Keller is an architect.

“Well, not an architect exactly. But I’m close. Only one year of school left,” he says, in response to my amazed statement.

I’m wandering around his apartment, taking everything in. This time the bedroom door is open and I duck my head inside, noticing the drafting board in the corner, the shelves full of architecture texts, the models made from plywood that line the floor. I draw the obvious conclusion.

“One year left?” I ask, flipping through a book on structural support. It has been liberally marked up with a pencil and a yellow highlighter. There are calculations in the margins that look like the formula for cold fusion.

“One year.” Although he’s trying his best to hide it, Keller is nervous. He doesn’t know a thing about me and yet here I am, forcing his deepest, darkest secrets from him. This was not my intention. I meant only to come here and ask for his help in overthrowing Jane, but something more interesting has suddenly thrown itself into my path and I’m not about to walk away from it yet.

When I realized his phantomness was the product of extended absences and not smoke and mirrors, I’d assumed that he was doing something useless with his free time. I’d figured he was out shopping or at home watching bad daytime television or sitting in a darkened movie theater in the last row daydreaming of things he’d like to do. It never occurred to me that he was actually doing those things.

“How long?” I ask.

“How long?” He draws his eyebrows together in confusion.

“How long,” I say, nodding. “As in how long does it take to become an architect and how long have you been scamming
Fashionista?
”

He flinches at the word
scam
and stares at me for a long time, trying to decide how much to reveal. It’s obvious from his stance that he doesn’t want to tell me a thing. He doesn’t want to reveal any of it, but he has enough sense to know when it’s too late to close the barn door. Vig Morgan is a reporter, even though she never actually gets to report on anything. My decoder ring might be a little rusty from disuse but I still know how to follow a lead. With one call to Walters and Associates, I could discover the entire truth. Keller would be hard-pressed to come up with a convincing lie and would know better than to tell me he was working on a story.
Fashionista
only covers interiors and we don’t care why a house stands as long as it does.

“That’s a tricky question,” he says after the silence. “Cooper Union’s program is five years for a bachelor’s degree, but they accepted all my distribution requirements from my first undergrad degree, so that brought it down to four years. However, four years is for a full-time student, which I wasn’t in the beginning.”

I don’t know if he’s being intentionally evasive or simply burying his response under a mountain of detail. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

He looks at me with innocent green eyes. “Yes, it does. It takes four years to become an architect.”

“You’ve been scamming Ivy Publishing for four years?”

“Actually, I’ve been availing myself of their generosity for more than five years, but only on a part-time basis,” he says, as if this caveat excuses his behavior. It doesn’t. Nor does it explain Delia.

“How long has someone else been doing your job?” I ask.

Keller disappears into the kitchen and returns with a beer. “Do you want?” he asks, holding up a bottle of Beck’s.

“Sure,” I say, accepting the drink. I’m standing awkwardly against one of the white walls and he indicates with a head gesture that I should take the couch. I look at it for a moment and then comply. Quik is lying on the floor next to the couch and he thumps his tail slowly as I lean down to pet him. Quik looks exactly the same as he did the day before and not at all like a dog whose only chance at happiness has been destroyed.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” I say sincerely, feeling bad about the damage I had unwittingly done. “I didn’t mean to screw anything up for you. I just came by to talk about something and never got around to it because I was having too much fun hanging out with you and Quik.”

“That’s all right,” he says, sitting on the arm of the couch with his beer. “Quik’s a charmer. Kelly will come around. If not, we’ll find someone else. It’s not a disaster.”

Although this is what I think, I’m not convinced that he really does. Just a half hour before he was railing at me for the awful turn I’d done his dog and now, because I know the truth of his identity, he’s trying to be agreeable.

He takes a gulp of Beck’s before launching into the story of his perfidy. “Delia has been doing my job full-time for almost two years. My assistant before her, Howard, only did half of it. At that point, I was still telecommuting. I’d write, assign and edit articles between classes. I used a lot of writers from the West Coast because their hours were more amenable to my schedule. I could juggle the two things easily and the quality of the section didn’t suffer at all.”

I’m not surprised he could do both. The events section isn’t brain surgery. The two-hundred-word blurbs on celebrity events are completely formulaic. You start with a sentence describing the room—flowers, candles, a few yards of hot-pink silk draped over giant Oscar statuettes. Then you get four or five gushing quotes from celebrities. If it’s a D&G party with a high school theme, you ask about their favorite subject. If it’s a Jaguar auction to raise money for AIDS research, you ask about their first car. If it’s a premiere for an action blockbuster about a shopping mall overrun by a tidal wave, then you ask about their worst shopping experience. Finally, you conclude with some zippy kicker that’s cute and smart. It’s fluff, complete and total fluff, and someone like Alex Keller can do it with his eyes closed.

“Things got harder when I started the externship two years ago,” he continues. “It’s a really intense learning environment and suddenly I didn’t have time to make the calls and edit the articles. I had a stack of homework this thick and actual projects to work on. It was exciting and overwhelming and when Howard handed in his notice, I thought it was all over. I figured I’d have to suck it up and pay for school myself. But then Delia came in for an interview. She was the first person I saw.” Keller is more relaxed now and he smiles at me without the tight lines around his lips. I don’t know if it’s the confession or the alcohol but something here is good for his soul. “Delia is a dynamo. I knew she’d be perfect the second she walked into my office in her requisite navy-blue interview suit. She had the experience—three years running the student paper at Fordham—and the intelligence. She got her undergrad and master’s in eighteenth-century literature in less than four years and completely on scholarship. She was outgoing, had a winning smile and said all the right things. I knew the publicists would love her. And I was right. They do. It’s been an ideal arrangement.”

“Pay for school yourself?” I ask, when he’s done lavishing compliments on Delia.

He looks away, not ready to confess all despite the beer.

“What did you mean, pay for school yourself?”

“Tuition reimbursement,” he answers, his voice soft.

“Ivy Publishing is paying for your architecture degree?”

He has the grace to blush. “The company is very generous and will reimburse you for up to three courses a semester. It’s in the employee handbook.”

This is true. Ivy Publishing is paying for Christine’s classes at Peter Kump and the French Culinary institute. But it’s not the same. She shows up for work every day. “It says that because they know you can’t possibly carry a full course load and work a full-time job at the same time.”

Keller shrugs. “Apparently they were wrong.”

I can’t argue with this logic. “Didn’t someone notice that you were taking classes in the middle of the day, all day?”

“A summer intern once asked me about it, but I took her to a party to kick off some boy band’s world tour and that was the last I heard of it.”

“That’s contributing to the corruption of a minor,” I say, only half serious.

His eyebrows draw together again. “No, it isn’t.”

“You offered her a bribe.”

“She was over eighteen.” He finishes off his beer and returns to the kitchen to throw the bottle into the recycling bin. “I was about to take Quik out when you arrived. Fancy taking him for a walk again?”

“This is going to take some getting used to,” I say, getting to my feet. I very much fancied taking Quik for a walk again.

Keller hands me the leash. “Not at all. You’re a natural. I had no idea you weren’t a professional yesterday.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Quik shows no enthusiasm at the prospect of fresh air and remains still as I attach the lead. “It’s going to take me a while to get used to your being nice. You’re an ogre in the office.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to foster a friendly environment where people feel comfortable just dropping by my office,
would I?” he explains with a self-mocking smile. “And I’m not that bad, am I?”

“You freaked out on me once because I used the copier outside your office,” I remind him.

“Only a fool comes between a man and his favorite copier. Itchy has never let me down,” he says with his winning smile, as if my overly sensitive nerves were to blame and not his infamous hair-trigger temper. “Clearly you have no idea how frustrating it is to actually take time out of your life to go into the office and not be able to find a working copier.”

No, I have no idea how frustrating that is, I think, as he opens the door and leads Quik into the hall. I have to take time out of the office to go into my life.