How to Be a Grown-up (4 page)

“Thank you, Clive.”

“You okay, kid?”

“The older I get, the more I love that you still call me that. Bye.”

The cab pulled up outside the high rise and, one ear-popping elevator ride to the edge of our atmosphere later, I was greeted at the penthouse by the same sight as always: some pristine backdrop of sumptuous serenity being crisscrossed by manic twentysomethings wearing surgical booties over their shoes. These homes would never have so much—energy—in them again.

Splash! “Shit.”

Among this abode’s many thrilling attributes, the entrance gallery had been built over a water feature, like a lily pond, and you had to leapfrog across alabaster squares to get to the living room. According to the interview these photographs would accompany, the owners wanted guests to “slow down,” forcing them to “take in the view.” Because otherwise they might miss the three-story-high windows looking all the way out to the Atlantic.

Splash. “Shit.”

“Can you all
please
stop falling in the Zen gateway! You are all so fucking gormless.” That was Glen, our photographer from South London. He talked like a Guy Ritchie film and was permanently angry.

Zoe slipped beside me and wordlessly handed me my coffee, which was somehow always still hot because Zoe was magic. “How’s it going?” I whispered.

“Glen is having a hard time with the light.”

“I see.” Actually I couldn’t because I was squinting. The day I had come to plan the shoot, there’d been one of those hard August rains where the sidewalk smells like earth. Now the sun was shining and the all-white living room was blinding. Literally. Beams banked off the high-gloss walls, the polished floors, the metal furniture—it was relentless. I slipped on my sunglasses.

“What is that in your mouth?!”

I spun around, about to spit out my gum, only to discover the owner of the house, in white platform shoes and white harem knickerbockers, glaring down at her toddler. The child gamely shrugged as her Filipino nanny came running down the floating Plexiglas staircase. “Mrs., I so sorry. She got out while I was changing the twins.”

“Open!”

The child dropped her lower jaw and the mother reached in and extracted a small black lump. A raisin?

“Po, take her upstairs.” The mother deposited the item on the aluminum mantel. That’s when I saw the pile on the floor of identical lumps. Before I could introduce myself to her, she dialed her white phone. “Hello, this is Mrs. Heller. I bought the sunflower seed installation. Yes, well, my daughter put one in her mouth. Well, there was a problem with toxic ceramic dust at the Tate, right? So do I need to do anything? Well, should I have my nanny take her to the pediatrician? . . . Okay, I’ll tell my nanny to keep an eye out for that. So how does this work? Will Mr. Weiwei send me a replacement? Should I put the broken one in the mail? . . . You’re joking! They just arrived and there’s no warranty? That’s outrageous! I bought—well I don’t remember the number, but it has Taoist significance and I don’t want to be one short! Put Mary on the phone!”

I tiptoed away so I could adjust the final compositions for Glen and keep my mind off Blake. I’m sure you’re wondering what there could be left to do to a house that’s had millions of dollars of attention lavished on it. Well, for one thing the flower arrangements that make the homes seem alive—those were always brought by us. I remember a shoot we did in a town house off Fifth. Five stories of authentic art deco no expense spared: gym, wine cellar, floor flown in from Italy, ceiling from France, but the wife had a standing order for a fishbowl of pink roses for the front hall. Roses from the deli. There was no other pink in the house; it made no aesthetic sense whatsoever, but there you go—

Splash!

Then we heard, “Oh fuckety fuck fuck.” Even sight unseen, the clipped vowels were instantly recognizable. So now we all knew what it took to make the great Kathryn Stossel swear: falling in standing water up to her calves. She rounded the corner, her sopping slingbacks dangling off her fingers. “Can someone get my assistant up here with some shoes? Tell her I’m wearing the navy Balenciaga.” She said it to no one in particular, but within the hour, her assistant would blow through the door. If Kathryn gave orders to an empty room, I’m sure the furniture would strive to fulfill them.

Kathryn was the editor in chief of
World of Decor
, our boss, and official New York tastemaker when it came to all things aesthetic.
Kathryn Stossel thinks the new Bergdorf’s tearoom is “charming,”
and suddenly reservations were harder to get than any actual service once you were seated. From Farrow and Ball to Crate and Barrel, nobody would dare put anything on the $10 billion home goods market without consulting her.

“Well, that’ll teach me to rush.” She kissed our apologetic hostess, who, I could tell, could not quite believe Kathryn was in her apartment. It had to be the culmination of everything she’d been hoping for since she was shown the first floor plan.

Kathryn visited sets in person only when the decorator was a big name because a certain dance had to be performed:
We love your design
so much
we want it in the magazine, but Rory here is going to rearrange it. No reason
. That was because what looked stunning in person frequently did not photograph well. Subtle layers of deepening gray looked monochromatically flat and needed the fuchsia bedspread from the guest room hung behind the couch like a wall covering. Or sometimes for texture, I needed to grab a fluffy pillow from a kid’s—or a maid’s—room. Also, people frequently got so excited about being selected that they’d run out to make their homes
even better
. So we’d arrive on the day to a host of horrors. I’ve switched out drapes, moved couches, rehung art, all under the watchful eye of a decorator who’d like to hit me over the head with the nearest Cycladic bust.

“Ah, Kathryn, darling, there you are.” Kevin Kliborne, the designer, did a sort of glissade over to her. Rumor had it that he changed his last name from Cliborne for his insignia. And, before that, from Pinkus—for obvious reasons.

“Kevin.” Tight smile. Kathryn detested being called darling. In addition to it being the Twinkie of greetings, as she put it, it was also the endearment of choice from her ex-husband. “How is it going?”

“We’re having a little trouble with the light,” Glen piped in as she put her sunglasses on. “We could do the exterior rooms at night?”

“No.”

“At dusk?”

“No.”

“Come back when it rains?”

“Glen,” she said crisply, “our brand is sumptuous homes captured in sumptuous morning sun.” He scurried away to strategize, and possibly find a bathroom to get stoned in, and that’s when I noticed her hands were shaking.

“Kathryn, could I get you some juice?”

She let out a puff of a laugh. “I can’t remember the last time I had juice.” Behind her oversized glasses, the corners of her eyes were watering. Which, technically, is crying. But that was not a verb one could hitch to Kathryn. She put a hand on the back of my arm. “I didn’t know we had you today.”

“And every day if you want me,” I told her. “Maya started pre-K this morning, and I’m ready to dive back in.”

“Hmmm,” she hummed and looked away, inspecting Clive’s choices. “Mrs. Heller?” she called out. “Can I use your powder room?”

“Absolutely! In the hallway just off the gallery!”

Kathryn casually led me in that direction, while chatting without pause about how the epoxy floors had been bonded and sanded so it would seem like one continuous white surface without seams, not a single seam, until we were the only two people in the hallway and then she yanked me into the bathroom with her.

It was a small space paneled in mirrors, so that we were reflected every which way into infinity. There was no imaginable scenario where I would ever pull my pants down—it was like a dressing room on steroids.

“This was so designed by a man,” Kathryn observed.

“Kathryn, what’s going on?”

“Asher is trying to fuck me.”

I looked at her quizzically, not least because this was now only the second time since we’d known each other that I’d heard her swear.

“Not literally. Oh, dear God, how disgusting.” As the editor in chief of
Narcissus
, the glamorous final word on all things Hollywood, Asher Hummel was essentially a professional sibling to Kathryn. Each presided over one of Stellar Media’s most profitable assets, under the cross-eyed paternal gaze of Mort Studecker, the octogenarian media mogul. “He’s gunning to get me out.”

“But how could he? You
are
Stellar.”

Kathryn picked up a linen towel from a stack and twisted it, the veins in the back of her tennis hands popping. “If it were still the nineties, we’d have just noodled along with me thinking he’s a buffoon and him thinking I’m a bitch. We could have kept exchanging Christmas presents and gotten on with our lives. But this is not the nineties, we need a deft hand, and he is not a deft hand; he’s a monkey.”

“What happened?” I felt like I was hiding out between classes with the captain of the cheerleading squad. I wanted to offer her my hair spray.

“I have kept our ad pages up with garters, suspenders, bubble gum, and safety pins.”

“You have a phenomenal track record,” I agreed.

“But Asher’s ad pages are neck and neck with mine. What Mort doesn’t take into account is that you can sell ads next to celebrity portraits in your sleep.” The towel started to fray.

“Has Asher done something?”

“I should not be telling you this.” She blew out. “God, there is no place for my eyes to land in here! What was this room built for? Tiny orgies?” She snapped her head hard to the right, her neck going pop pop pop. “A few months ago Asher suggested that Stellar invest in this new website, called JeuneBug, founded by these twelve-year-olds straight out of B-school. The whole thing was untested, and I recommended against it.
Today
I find out that Asher talked Mort into investing five million dollars. Five million! So I go into this JeuneBug and ask to see the mechanicals for the launch, and I am politely rebuffed.”

“They
rebuffed
you?” I was aghast.

“I was told these girls only answer to Asher—and he’s not thinking with his head.” She raised her eyebrow. “I hate this apartment. It feels like we’re trapped in someone’s bonded teeth.” Then she peered at me, a thought forming as she lifted her glasses into her chin-length bob. “They need someone in interiors. Now, I can’t put you up for it, can’t endorse you, or even let them know we’re friends. But a job like this could change the playing field for you.”

“Well, I could use a change, that’s for sure. But working for twelve-year-olds who rebuff
you
? I don’t know.”

Her green eyes were like jewels in her tan face. “I have a deep gut feeling you could be perfect. And I am never wrong.”

I had to laugh. “See, that’s why you’re you,” I said.

“Hm?” She dropped the towel in the mirrored basket.

“I’m wrong all the time.”

Chapter Three

Sophomore year I scored a pair of green cowboy boots at the Salvation Army that were the epitome of Sheryl Crow prairie chic. I wore them with one of my grandpa’s old suit vests and other accessories you’d find in a Wild West photo-stand.

Hoping my “artistic phase” was coming to a close, my parents had optimistically gotten me a summer job as a bank teller, a position that required a week’s training in a windowless room in the bowels of an office park. For eight hours a day, under the scrutiny of a po-faced woman, I processed bank slips that had been filled in with the names of Disney characters. Minnie Mouse wanted to withdraw eighteen dollars and put five into a certified check for Donald Duck. Goofy wished to make a transfer to his savings account. Daisy was trying to make a penalized withdrawal from her retirement account, perhaps having gotten hooked on methadone. It was the giggles that got me fired.

My parents were mutely distressed in a way that only makes sense now that I’m a mom—and wife.

After spending the night smoking behind the garage while listening to the Smashing Pumpkins on my Walkman, I got up, pulled on those boots, and went door to door on Main Street. By the end of the day, I’d landed a waitressing gig, which suited me much better, and a boyfriend, who didn’t suit me at all. But he kept me deliciously distracted for eight weeks and, according to Facebook, eventually got married in Vegas wearing a cape. That was the last time I lived at home.

The morning after Blake left for Pete’s shoot, I woke knowing it was time for me to take the reins. While he was regrouping—and by
regrouping,
I mean having his ego reinflated by a production that remunerated in compliments and beer—me and my cowboy boots needed to figure this out.

Before the doormen had even hosed the sidewalk, I got Clive to make the call to this JeuneBug and set the interview. If they were in desperate need of “shepherding,” as Kathryn put it, then I aimed to Little Bo Peep their asses off.

The next day, the city was still on broil, and by the time I got the kids to school and myself to Herald Square, I was making one of those Faustian bargains: I would wear any amount of heavy down, slog through any amount of snow, just please, God, let it get cold. I couldn’t remember what freezing felt like, but it had to be better than this.