How to Grow Up (6 page)

“You should come,” Annie said casually. My heart stopped. I ceased to breathe.

“For real?” I asked, gripped with a panic that Annie was just being flip, sharing a passing idea with me, an idea I would cling to desperately and then embarrass myself in the near future trying to make it happen.

“Yeah, totally,” she said, excited at the idea but still sort of
no big whoop
about it. After all, this was her life now. “Fendi is paying for me and the band to have our own rooms at the Westin, but the singer doesn't like to sleep alone, so you can have mine.”

“Can I actually come to the shows?” I asked, feeling a little bit like a bitch. I mean, many would argue that a free five-star hotel in Paris during Fashion Week would be enough to warrant a trip to Paris. But to be so close to the
shows
—the
shows
! I had to ask.

“Yeah, duh,” Annie said. “Not all of them. I can't even go to all of them; only the band can. But I bet we can go to a bunch. Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Chanel. Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier might be hard, but we can do Karl Lagerfeld and Jeremy Scott. And the band is playing the Fendi party, so we can all go to that. Can you come? It's in two weeks.”

Gosh, Annie made it sound so simple!
Here, I booked your ultimate dream for you! A vacation you can't actually buy your way into; you have to be invited. Do you think you can make it? It will probably never, ever happen again!

“Of course,” I said, my heart pounding anew. “Of course I'll come to Paris Fashion Week with you!”

•   •   •

The question of coming to Paris Fashion Week on a couple of weeks' notice needed to be evaluated in two ways: whether it was financially feasible and whether it was a responsible decision. Could I afford a last-minute ticket to France, to stay at the Westin on Fendi's dime? Not only could I now afford it, but I even had this cool new leather hoodie to wear to the shows! However, was I able to leave town without recklessly abandoning my responsibilities? I was a single person, no ball and chain holding me back. No dependents, not even a pet to find a sitter for. But I did have a job, a fancy job teaching aspiring female writers at a college that paid me well enough to be able to afford an impromptu trip to Paris. The paradox was maddening.

If I arranged with a magazine to write about my time in Paris, then it would be
work
, and to not go would be to stunt my writing career. It was a question of balancing my teaching career—something wonderful that had come unexpectedly into my life—with my writing career, something vital that I had fought long and hard for, against considerable odds. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Surely my boss would understand I'd have to miss a few weeks. Just in case she didn't, I decided not to tell her.

This wasn't the same as lying, exactly. I arranged for a writer with more teaching experience than I had, a professor who had actually gone to grad school, to fill in for me. To make sure I maintained a presence in their life, I arranged to have the
students e-mail me their stories while I was in Paris. I was pretty confident I'd get away with it. I rarely saw any other faculty, be they my superiors or fellow adjuncts, so if nobody saw my face for a couple of weeks, no big deal.

“I have to go to Paris to write about Fashion Week for a magazine,” I told my students the week before I left, hoping this was impressive enough to quell any abandonment issues that might arise. I reassured them they'd be well cared for in my absence, and that we would talk remotely. And then, there was a knock at my door. Surprise, I was being observed! By a tenured faculty member, a woman with wild, dark curly hair who sat at the back of my class and listened as I coaxed my students away from the rape, madness, and sci-fi that filled their stories. I did a hyperquick intake of my teaching style. It tended toward hippie (maybe I'd earned the right to that oatmeal-colored top after all!), encouraging them to let their freak flag fly and conducting group meditations, but then I'd get supercranky schoolmarm on them, ripping their little freak flags to shreds. Later the observer reported back to the department head that I was simply wonderful. My department head contacted me and offered me a job the following semester, teaching at the graduate level. I was thrilled, and took the job.

“Great, come by my office next week,” my boss said. My heart sunk. Next week. The week I would be in Paris. I could bump our meeting to the following week, but I'd be in Paris then, too. With a pit in my stomach, I realized that I was going to have to tell my boss about my diabolical plan. I grasped at a shabby hope that maybe she would understand. Maybe she'd always
wanted to write about some beloved world just out of her reach, and had it been granted to her, she, too, would risk security to take advantage of it.

Yeah, right. My boss was as livid as I'd expected. Not only was I abandoning my class, but I'd intended to lie about it. My defense was weak, but passionate. “You invited me to teach here not only because I am a writer, but because of the kind of writer I am. That I offer perspectives outside the academy, class, and gender perspectives. My literary career is completely self-created, and if I don't grab hold of the opportunity to write about Paris Fashion Week, it's like I am undoing all the hard work and personal sacrifices I've made to get such an opportunity.”

Of course, the same could be said about the opportunity to be a well-paid teacher at a prestigious college. Even to my own ears my pleading rang a little tawdry—was I really begging off from college to go to
fashion shows
? Once again I could feel the degraded place fashion occupies in the world of serious, intellectual women. It was like I was asking for time off to get hair extensions and a boob job. I was at an important crossroads. If I left for Europe, I would be leaving against her will and the will of the school. Was I going to hold on to a stable job that gave me not only great pay, but
health insurance
?
Or was I going to Paris Fashion Week?

This question was one I'd pondered hundreds of times in my life, metaphorically. I was always having to pick between a metaphorical teaching job—stability, the tried-and-true path, the sure bet—and metaphorical Fashion Week: art, writing, the once-in-a-lifetime chance, the irresponsible, reckless, and
memorable. One would think that having grown up broke would make one desperate for financial stability, eager to rest in the economic security of a good job. Rather, it gave me the freedom to take chances. I knew how to get by on next to nothing. I wasn't letting anyone down by not being a college professor—my parents hadn't expected me to amount to much. Against a fair amount of odds I'd built my life into something that constantly fed me surprises, and no matter what, I found a way to get by.

For years I'd quit my menial jobs whenever they got in the way of me doing something for my writing—participating in a reading, going on tour. I'd dealt with my persistent fear of poverty not by working my ass off to snag high-paying jobs, but with a Zen-like acceptance of life's impermanence, and a fragile comfort in the
now
. As in,
Right now you're okay. Right now you have some money, have a home, are well fed. And if poverty strikes again, what will happen? You'll have less, and you'll be fine. You'll write, and be with friends, and live cheaply. Just like before.

Finally, I turned to the ultimate conundrum decider—the old deathbed scenario. When I was on my deathbed, would I want to look back on a life filled with fear-based fidelity to a series of jobs that were not my true passion?

No. I wanted to have lived. To have taken chances. To
not
have settled for the poor person's reduced experience of life, shackled to a job, making ends meet, but to have lived as much like a rich person as I could, with their fuller experience of the world, with travel and art and proximity to things beautiful. I wanted to live like I wasn't afraid, like life was there for my taking.

When I was on my deathbed, surrounded by young, adoring fans, would I regale them with the time I taught a fiction class?

No. I would tell them about the time I went to Paris Fashion Week.

And so I chose Paris, as if there was ever a question. And I gathered purse-loads of glamorous anecdotes to share with whoever might be sitting by my deathbed hoping for a story. I would tell them about how, in the mad rush of people trying to get backstage after the Jeremy Scott show, I nudged up against Kanye West. His then-girlfriend, Amber Rose, was wearing one of the mint-green cropped motorcycle jackets the designer had just sent down the runway, along with a pair of Chanel sunglasses topped in the brand's iconic dripping gold chains. At Vivienne Westwood, staged in what looked like a condemned French bank, I watched Pamela Anderson horse-stomp along the model path, wearing a tutu starched to look permanently blown up by a gust of wind over her bum. A stand of paparazzi on risers held their cameras like a brass section about to play; when she rounded the bend and headed straight for them the clash of flashes was blinding. Backstage at Stella McCartney I recognized a curly-haired woman as my favorite photographer, Nan Goldin. I struck up an awkward conversation with her, and was rescued by a television crew asking her what she thought of Paris Fashion Week. “Yes,” she replied enigmatically, referencing the surreal responses Andy Warhol would give to journalists. When Olivier Theyskens's last collection for Nina Ricci came to a close, an army of models in strange shoes with no heels and long whispery gowns
and odd hats that dipped into their faces stormed the runway en masse to the thundering sound of the Cure's
Pornography
, and I actually cried from the whirl of emotion the spectacle produced inside me. Backstage at Karl Lagerfeld I watched Sophia Loren sip champagne in a long fur coat. Olivier Zahm, the grizzled, roguish editor of
Purple Fashion
magazine, asked me to lie upon a carpeted floor at a hotel room after-party, so he could best photograph the tattoo on the back of my leg for his blog. I obliged. At the Loewe show—which I learned was pronounced
Low-vay
and not
Low
—I sat directly across from Anna Wintour and her tremendously cool sidekick, Grace Coddington, all of us at tiny, elegant tables heaped with espresso and champagne.

When the band took the stage at the Fendi party, tears sprang to my eyes, and I turned around to see that Annie was crying, too. Like me and like Annie, the band commanding Fashion Week's attention had been raised poor, in broken families, and there we all were, together in Paris. It was weird and amazing, nothing short of a miracle. For a flashing moment I understood and believed in destiny. We were all exactly where we were supposed to be, and an incomprehensible chain of choices and happenstance had brought us here, together. Then, Kate Moss rudely shoved me so that her friend could pass by, breaking me from my reverie.
This
is what I was living for.

•   •   •

The telephone rang as I was taking an afternoon nap in my luxury hotel, exhausted from a late Fashion Week after-party night and an early morning with Karl Lagerfeld, marveling at the
maniacal excess of the furred motorcycle helmets he'd sent down the catwalk. It was Annie. “Meet us in the lobby in
literally
five minutes. We're going to the Fendi showroom and I think we'll all be able to get stuff.” I've never dressed so fast in my life. I ran down to the Versailles-inspired lobby and found Annie, Jo—the band's lead singer—and an Italian representative of Fendi. We rode in a little car to the Paris showroom, where we were given espressos and trays of sushi, both of which I consumed desperately. I was as food deprived as I was sleep deprived, my schedule of party and fashion not allowing a ton of time for eating.

The nice Fendi man gave us all souvenirs of our brush with luxury—golden combs stamped with FENDI, which lived in embossed leather comb holsters. I would have been satisfied with such swag, even if it
was
the Fashion Week equivalent of a flashlight keychain at an independent film festival.

After giving Jo a detailed tour of the showroom, the man thoughtfully left the celebrity to “shop” in peace. I'm saying “shop” because Jo wasn't paying for anything. Not the leather dresses, not the fur capelets. Not the stilettos or the jewelry or the purse after purse after purse. I remembered being in the van with Annie at the end of our road trip, keeping each other awake with fashion magazines.
What would you have from this page, if you could have anything you want?

“Grab a purse,” Jo hissed at us, “and throw it in my pile.” Had we cast some crazy spell over ourselves during that maniacal sleep-deprived drive? A spell that took some years to manifest, but here we were, in the Fendi showroom, and what would I have from this page, being able to have anything I want?

There was not a moment of hesitation about which purse I desired. It consisted of the slashed, long-haired pelt of some poor animal I hoped had died a natural death, not that I thought too much about it. There was no time for thinking, not when the Fendi man could return at any minute. No time to think about the probable pony that had created my purse, or the snake that had provided the handles. No time to wonder if the tigereye stones—or, for that matter, the wooden marbles that had been dipped in gold leaf—had been ethically sourced. For this was the most exquisite purse I had ever seen. I flung it at Jo and she flung it onto the pile and the door flung open and in came the Italian.

He browsed through the enormous pile of clothing Jo had helped herself—and me, and Annie—to, murmuring appreciatively about her impeccable good taste. When he got to my purse he clucked his tongue. “So chic,” he said, nodding. “Very special. You pair with some jeans and—voilà.”

I felt deeply validated. The man packed up Jo's loot and brought us all back to the Westin. Jo passed me the purse in the hallway, with all the intrigue of a drug deal.