Fashionistas (6 page)

I
was in my third month as Jane’s editorial assistant when the fax machine arrived. It came by UPS, which refuses to leave packages in front of apartment doors, so even before the beeping and squealing modern convenience entered my home, it was already a great inconvenience. In order to get it, I had to walk over to Washington and Houston, wait twenty-five minutes as they looked for it in the back and then carry it home in my arms.

Nobody told me the fax machine was coming, and when I asked Harvey, the office manager, what it was about, he shrugged, looked abashed and mumbled something about needing to order staples from the catalog. I wasn’t completely clueless. Jane had taken to calling me late at night and telling me to fax documents to her, to the publisher, to writers, to designers, to her parents. When I’d remind her that I didn’t have faxing capabilities, she always seemed vaguely stunned, as if I were subsisting without the basic requirements of life, like food and water. She righted that injustice (“No, you don’t have to thank me. Giving is what I do”) and in
stantly began treating my apartment as
Fashionista
’s downtown annex.

The midnight requests began to pile up (“It’s still lunchtime in Tokyo”) and after a week of the graveyard shift, I stopped answering the phone. Jane would leave long, suspicious messages—“Pick up, Vig. Are you there, Vig? Vig, if you’re there, this is very important. The future of the magazine rests on it. Don’t play with me, Vig. All right, Vig, here’s what I need you to do as soon as you get home, if you are indeed away from home and not listening to this message as it comes in”—dictating letters that I was to type up, print out and fax to studio execs and event planners immediately. But I never typed up, printed out and faxed a letter to a studio exec or event planner immediately. I always waited until I got to work the next day. Jane never noticed the difference.

Then one day she started faxing me work. She started faxing me contracts and articles and expecting me to have everything done by the next morning.

She’d say, “Where’s that expense report? I need it by ten.”

She’d say, “Give me those spreadsheets I sent over last night. I’ve got a meeting first thing.”

She’d say, “Bring the invite list to Publicity right now. They’re waiting for it.”

As soon as I realized what was going on, I put a stop to it. I disconnected the fax machine and looked baffled when Jane asked me what was wrong with it. Six hours later there was a repairman at my door. He immediately diagnosed the problem—the dangling plug was a dead giveaway—and reminded me that most appliances need electricity to run. I submitted silently to the humiliating lecture, and the next time I interfered with the fax, I opened it up and pulled out a wire. Another repairmen was sent with undue haste. He was mystified as to how the circuit came loose. Was I sure I didn’t have any mischievous nieces and nephews who liked to play with colorful wires?

Several months passed like this, with me breaking or jam
ming the machine like it were a parking meter in front of my house that I refused to pay, and Jane became increasingly skeptical. She became more and more suspicious, and although she laid numerous charges at my feet, she could never make them stick. When the motherboard short-circuited quite inexplicably (“I’m quite sure, sir, that I don’t know what that orange sticky stuff is”) the repairmen shook their heads in disgust, called the machine a lemon and walked away.

After that, Jane made threats but she never delivered. There was much talk of faxes but she knew better than to give me another one. I was no longer an amateur. I was now a seasoned pro and what I knew about fax machines could keep them in disrepair for years. Far better to avoid a showdown altogether than to come up short twice in a row.

M
aya works with strangers. She freelances at a variety of magazines and although she toils alongside the same people month after month, she barely exists to them. She hasn’t been introduced en masse in a big, splashy staff meeting, and her life and times are of little interest. When she sneezes, no one says bless you. When she comes in with a sexy tan, no one asks where she’s been. When she wears a cute new sweater, no one compliments her.

“If it were just any sweater, I wouldn’t have expected anything,” she explains, finishing off her third cosmopolitan.

Through the wood slats that cover the Paramount’s semi-circle windows, I can see light from streetlamps. It’s almost dark. I’m flirting with the notion of going back to the office to turn off my computer and perhaps blow out the candle when the bartender sweeps by and delivers fresh drinks. I stay firmly rooted to the spot. If Christine doesn’t feel compelled to extinguish my candle as a product of her Midwestern only-you-can-prevent-forest-fires upbringing, then the cleaning woman will.

“But this wasn’t just any sweater,” she continues. “It had little beads and pink slivers of sequin sewn around the edges. It was darn cute.”

“Not a word?”

“Not a word,” she says sadly. “And I had the whole conversation planned in my head. They’d say, Cute sweater. I’d say, Thanks, I picked it up at the Donna Karan outlet outside Ithaca. They’d say, Oh, you were in Ithaca this weekend? And I’d say, Yes, I was visiting a friend. We went tubing. Them: Tubing? Me: Yes, it’s like skiing but much more repetitive.”

Maya used to freelance for
Fashionista
—I had hooked her up with the copy chief—but she jumped ship after a few months because she couldn’t stand the way we do things. She couldn’t stand having to clear every single word or comma change with the editors and writers and researchers. And she hated having to justify in the margin each correction (dangling modifier, sentence-verb agreement, predicate nominative case). Copyediting is deadly dull work, the sort that requires a mind-numbing attention to detail, and it’s thoroughly unglamorous.
Fashionista,
with its system of checks and balances, somehow found a way to increase the tedium of the job.

“It was warm in the office, but I kept my sweater on, hoping that someone would notice its cuteness.”

“Almost all hope is cruel,” I say carelessly.

Ordinarily Maya would contradict me but today her usual optimism is dulled by rejection—Roger’s and Marcia’s—and she nods forlornly.

A prolonged silence follows.

“I’m involved in a plot,” I say out of nowhere. This thought has been circling my brain for almost twenty-four hours now and it has to go somewhere. It has to be expressed or permanently crushed.

“Hmm?” Consumed by her own misery, she’s forgotten my presence.

I’m reasonably sure that there is no one from
Fashionista
in the bar, but I scope out the perimeter just to be certain. I lean over and whisper. “I’m involved in a plot to bring down the editor in chief.”

Maya’s eyes bug out. “A plot?”

“A plot.”

“What kind of plot?” she asks, leaning forward. Maya is genuinely interested. My talk of plots has managed to break through her wall of self-pity.

I give her the rough outline of the plan and she stops me to ask details. “Gavin Marshall?” she says, as if trying to recall the name. She draws a blank.

“I’ve never heard of him, either. But he’s a big deal over in England,” I say. “I looked up a few articles about him today. He’s the son of an earl. He grew up in a mansion that’s a national landmark. I think his great-great-grandfather was the prime minister during the Crimean War. He went to all the best schools—Eton, Oxford and the Royal Academy of Art,” I say, running off a list of his advantages. “I think the only hardship he’s ever had in his life was convincing Daddy to let him mutilate a cow in the Victorian plunge pool.”

Maya is quiet for a moment. She’s putting it all together and trying to come to a conclusion. “Do you think it’ll work?”

I laugh. “Not a chance. I’ll most likely get fired over the whole mess, but I’m leaning toward it anyway.” Having said these words aloud, I’m overcome by an unexpected emotion. Although I haven’t felt it in a while, I know it’s excitement. Nothing else feels this way.

“You’d risk your job?”

I nod enthusiastically. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m as surprised as you. When I woke up yesterday morning, I was pretty satisfied with my job.”

Maya takes a sip of her cosmo and tilts her head. “What’s changed?”

An excellent question. “I’m not really sure. Somewhere between talking to a new editor who’s receptive to ideas that
are typically un-
Fashionista
and meeting with one of my editors who gave me another classic
Fashionista
assignment, I’ve become disgusted with my job. We don’t
do
anything. We take the same three strands of yarn every month—celebrity, fashion and beauty—and weave them into different patterns. It’s so deadening,” I say, recalling today’s assignment to track down famous skate-skiers. The topic is new, but the copy is old, and after several days of talking to publicists and personal assistants, I will produce five hundred words on why you should be trading in your old snowboard. The article will have too many adjectives and several exclamation points and it will make you wonder if you’re really missing out on something, but don’t be fooled. It’s just rhetoric. It’s just
Fashionista
trying to convince you that celebs, like blondes, really do have more fun. “Do you remember how excited I was when I got this job?” I ask.

Maya nods. Of course she remembers. I’d been sleeping on her couch at the time.

“We’d only been out of college for two years, but it felt like I’d been fetching coffee for the editor of the
Bierlyville Times
for more than a decade. Back then, I didn’t think there was anything in the world more glamorous than living in Manhattan and reporting on celebrities.” I take a sip of gin and tonic and sigh heavily. “How’s that for Missouri-bred naiveté?”

Maya doesn’t comment on my Midwestern simplicity. She was raised in a Connecticut suburb less than forty minutes away, and there was never anything glamorous about the big city. It was just a place to go on Saturday nights to get drunk. “Fight the power,” she says, raising a fist in the air in a halfhearted display of revolutionary fervor. “And if mutiny doesn’t work out and they fire your ass, don’t worry. You can go freelance. I’ll help you get started—there’s plenty of work.”

Despite the fact that she works with strangers, Maya is always upbeat about freelancing. She’s like one of those im
migrants who comes to the New World and writes letters home about untold wealth and success. In the past, I’ve been resistant to her lavish claims. I know the streets aren’t paved with gold. I know that most people aren’t prosperous in the land of prosperity. I know this and I cling to my Old World ways. But sometimes you have no choice. Sometimes events propel you across oceans. Working at
Fashionista
is starting to feel like a potato famine.

It is now six o’clock and the trickle of people who have been coming in for the past hour suddenly arranges itself into a crowd. A man wearing Gucci slippers squeezes in between our chairs and starts waving his hand in the air in a desperate bid for attention. Theatrics like this rarely work in New York City bars.

“Get the check,” Maya says, but I’m already one step ahead. I’ve already made eye contact with the bartender, and at this moment he’s tallying up our tab.

Maya protests but I insist on treating. Although I’ve played the scene lugubriously out of deference to her feelings, this has been a celebration for me. Roger is out of our lives. And even though seventy-five dollars is a substantial portion of my drink budget for the month, it’s a small price to pay for the pleasure.

In the lobby, Maya vanishes into the bathroom, and I stand in the corner, watching people check in. A large group of Japanese tourists has just arrived and while the men are waiting in a cluster for room keys, their wives are milling around. Some are at the newsstand flipping through magazines; others are sitting in the lobby. The lobby itself is full of misfits—riveted aluminum lounge chairs, long lime-green benches that cut the room in half, wide orange wingbacks with brothel-like flourishes, armchairs with pictures of dogs silk-screened on. These are discordant objects that shouldn’t come together. They shouldn’t come together and anywhere else they wouldn’t, but somehow they do here against this gray backdrop.

Maya reappears a few minutes later. She steps out of the bathroom and is almost instantly accosted by a Japanese woman who wants her to take a picture of her and her friends, who have arranged themselves on the grand staircase. Maya complies happily, although her picture-taking skills are somewhat compromised by the copious amounts of alcohol she’s consumed. She covers the lens with her thumb. The Japanese women are too polite to comment and they thank her appreciatively, but they stay in formation. After we leave, they’ll call to one of their friends over by the magazine racks and ask her to take the shot.