cool was precariously close to collapsing. She took a deep, exaggerated breath and said
calmly, “Ahn-dre-ah. Are you aware that Mr. Lagerfeld is in Paris this week?” I felt like
we were doing English As a Second Language lessons.
“Of course, Miranda. Emily has been trying all the numbers in—”
“And are you aware that Mr. Lagerfeld said he’d be available on his mobile phone while
he was in Paris?” Every muscle in her throat strained to keep her voice even and calm.
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“Well, no, we don’t have a cell number listed in the directory, so we didn’t know that
Mr. Lagerfeld even had a cell phone. But Emily is on the phone with his assistant right
now, and I’m sure she’ll have that number in just a minute.” Emily gave me the thumbs-
up right before she scribbled something and exclaimed, “Merci,oh yes, thank you, I
mean,merci ” over and over again.
“Miranda, I have the number right here. Would you like me to connect you now?” I
could feel my chest puff out with confidence and pride. A job well done! A superior
performance under the most pressure-filled conditions. Never mind that my really cute
peasant blouse that had been complimented by two—not one, but two—fashion assistants
was now sporting sweat stains under the arms. Who cared? I was about to get this stark
raving mad lunatic of an international caller off my back, and I was thrilled.
“Ahn-dre-ah?” It sounded like a question, but I was only concentrating on trying to
figure out a pattern for indiscriminate name mix-ups. At first I’d thought she did it
deliberately in an attempt to belittle and humiliate us even more, but then I figured out
that she was probably quite satisfied with the levels of belittlement and humiliation we
endured and so she did it only because she couldn’t be bothered to keep straight details so
inane as her two assistants’ names. Emily had confirmed this by saying that she called her
Emily about half the time but called her a mixture of Andrea and Allison—the assistant
before her—the other half. I felt better.
“Yes?” Squeaking again. Dammit! Wasn’t it possible for me to have just a tiny bit of
dignity with this woman?
“Ahn-dre-ah, I don’t know what all the fuss is over finding Mr. Lagerfeld’s mobile
number when I have it right here. He gave it to me just five minutes ago, but we were
disconnected and I can’t seem to dial correctly.” She said the last part as though the entire
world was to blame for this irritation and inconvenience except for herself.
“Oh. You, um, you have the number? And you knew he was on that number the whole
time?” I was saying it for Emily’s benefit, and it only served to enrage Miranda even
more.
“Am I not making myself perfectly clear here? I need you to connect me to
03.55.23.56.67.89. Immediately. Or is that too difficult?”
Emily was slowly shaking her head in disbelief as she crumpled up the number we’d
both just fought so hard to get.
“No, no, Miranda, of course that’s not too difficult. I’ll connect you right away. Hold
just a minute.” I hit “conference,” dialed the numbers, heard an older man shout “Allo!”
into the phone, and hit conference again. “Mr. Lagerfeld, Miranda Priestly, you’re
connected,” I stated like one of those manual operators from theLittle House on the
Prairie days. And instead of putting the whole call on mute and then hitting speaker so
Emily and I could listen in on the call together, I just hung up. We sat in silence for a few
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minutes as I tried to refrain from badmouthing Miranda immediately. Instead, I mopped
some dampness from my forehead and took long, deep breaths. She spoke first.
“So, let me just get this straight. She had his number the entire time but just didn’t know
how to dial it?”
“Or maybe she just didn’t feel like dialing it,” I added helpfully, always enthusiastic for
the chance to team up against Miranda, especially considering how rare the opportunities
were with Emily.
“I should’ve known,” she said, shaking her head like she was horribly disappointed with
herself. “I really should’ve known that. She always calls to have me connect her to
people who are staying in the next room, or who are in a hotel two streets over. I
remember I thought that was the weirdest thing, calling from Paris to New York to have
someone connect you to someone in Paris. Now it just seems normal, of course, but I
can’t believe I didn’t see that one coming.”
I was about to run to the dining room for lunch, but the phone rang again. Operating
under the lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice theory, I decided to be a sport and answer the
phone.
“Miranda Priestly’s office.”
“Emily! I am standing in the pouring rain on the rue de Rivoli and my driver has
vanished. Vanished! Do you understand me? Vanished! Find him immediately!” She was
hysterical, my very first time hearing her that way, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to
learn it was the only time.
“Miranda, just a moment. I have his number right here.” I turned to scan my desk for the
itinerary I’d set down a moment earlier, but all I saw were papers, old Bulletins, stacks of
back issues. Only three or four seconds had passed, but I felt as if I were standing right
next to her, watching as the rain poured down on her Fendi fur and caused the makeup to
melt down the side of her face. Like she could just reach out and slap my face, tell me
I’m a worthless piece of shit with zero talent, no skill set, a complete and total loser.
There wasn’t time to talk myself down, remind myself that this was merely a human
being (theoretically) who wasn’t happy to be standing in the rain and was taking it out on
her assistant 3,600 miles away. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.
“Ahn-dre-ah! My shoes areruined . Do you hear me? Are you even listening? Find my
drivernow! ”
I was at risk of some inappropriate emotion—I could feel the knot in the back of my
throat, the tightening of the muscles in the back of my neck, but it was too early to tell if I
would laugh or cry. Either one: not good. Emily must have sensed as much, because she
leapt out of her seat and handed me her copy of the itinerary. She’d even highlighted the
driver’s contact numbers, three in all, one for the car phone, his mobile phone, and his
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home phone. Naturally.
“Miranda, I’m going to need to put you on hold while I call him. Can I put you on hold?”
I didn’t wait for a response, which I knew would drive her crazy, and threw the call on
hold. I dialed Paris again. The good news was the driver picked up on the first ring of the
first number I tried. The bad news was he didn’t speak English. Although I’d never been
self-destructive before, I couldn’t help but smash my forehead firmly into the Formica.
Three times of this, and Emily had picked up the line at her desk. She’d resorted to
screaming, not so much in attempt to make the driver understand her own bad French, but
simply because she was trying to impress upon him the urgency of the current situation.
New drivers always took a little breaking in, mostly because they foolishly believed that
if Miranda had to wait forty-five seconds to a minute extra, she’d be all right. This was
precisely the notion of which Emily and I were to disabuse them.
We both put our heads down a few minutes later, after Emily had managed to insult the
driver enough that he’d hightailed it back to where he’d left Miranda three or four
minutes earlier. I wasn’t particularly hungry for lunch anymore, a phenomenon that made
me nervous. WasRunway rubbing off? Or was it just the adrenaline and nerves mixing
together to guarantee no appetite? That was it! The starvation so endemic atRunway was
not, in fact, self-induced; it was merely the physiological response of bodies that were so
consistently terrified and all-around anxiety-ridden that they were never actually hungry.
I vowed to look into this a little more and perhaps explore the possibility that Miranda
was smarter than all of this and had deliberately created a persona so offensive on every
level that she literally scared people skinny.
“Ladies, ladies, ladies! Pick those heads up off those desks! Can you imagine Miranda
seeing you now? She wouldn’t be very happy!” James sang from the doorway. He had
slicked back his hair using some greasy, waxy stuff called Bed Head (“Hot name—how
can you resist?”) and was wearing some sort of skintight football jersey with the number
69 on both the front and the back. As always, a picture of subtlety and understatement.
Neither of us so much as glanced at him. The clock said it was only four, but it felt like
midnight.
“OK then, let me guess. Mama’s been calling off the hook because she lost an earring
somewhere between the Ritz and Alain Ducasse and she wants you to find it, even though
it’s in Paris and you’re in New York.”
I snorted. “You think that would put us in this condition? That’s ourjob . We do that
every day. Give us something difficult.”
Even Emily laughed. “Seriously, James, not good enough. I could find an earring in
under ten minutes in any city in the world,” she said, all of a sudden inspired to join in for
reasons I didn’t understand. “It’d only be a challenge if she didn’t tell us what city she’d
lost it in. But I bet even then we could do it.”
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James was backing himself away from the office, a look of feigned horror on his face.
“All right, then, ladies, you have a great day, you hear? At least she hasn’t fucked you
both up for good. I mean, seriously, thank god for that, right? You’re bothtooootally sane.
Yeah. Um, have a great day . . .”
“NOT SO FAST THERE, YOU PANSY!” shrieked someone very loud and very high-
pitched. “I WANT YOU TO MARCH YOUR WAY BACK IN THERE AND TELL
THE GIRLS WHAT YOU WERE THINKING WHEN YOU PUT THAT SHMATA ON
THIS MORNING!” Nigel grabbed James by the left ear and dragged him into the area
between our desks.
“Oh, come on, Nigel,” James whined, pretending to be annoyed but obviously delighted
that Nigel was touching him. “You know you love this top!”
“LOVE THAT TOP? YOU THINK I LOVE THAT FRATTY, GAY-JOCK LOOK
YOU’VE GOT GOING? JAMES, YOU NEED TO RETHINK HERE, OK? OK?”
“What’s wrong with a tight football jersey? I think it looks hot.” Emily and I nodded in
quiet alliance with James. It may not have been exactly tasteful, but he did look
incredibly hip. And besides, it was kind of tough to be taking fashion advice from a man
who was, at that precise moment, wearing zebra-print boot-cut jeans and a black V-neck
sweater with a keyhole cut out in the back to reveal rippling back muscles. The whole
ensemble was topped off with a floppy straw hat and a touch (subtle, I’ll give him that!)
of kohl eyeliner.
“BABY BOY, FASHION IS NOT FOR ADVERTISING YOUR FAVE SEX ACTS ON
YOUR SHIRT. UNH-UNH, NO IT’S NOT! YOU WANNA SHOW A LITTLE SKIN?
THAT’S HOT! YOU WANNA SHOW SOME OF THOSE TIGHT, YOUNG CURVES
OF YOURS?THAT’S HOT. CLOTHING IS NOT FOR TELLING THE WORLD
WHAT POSITION YOU PREFER, BOYFRIEND. NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
“But, Nigel!” A look of defeat was carefully constructed to disguise how pleased he was
to be the center of Nigel’s attention.
“DON’T ‘NIGEL’ ME, HONEY. GO TALK TO JEFFY AND TELL HIM I SENT
YOU. TELL HIM TO GIVE YOU THE NEW CALVIN TANK WE CALLED IN FOR
THE MIAMI SHOOT. IT’S THE ONE THAT GORGEOUS BLACK MODEL—OH
MY, HE’S AS TASTY AS A THICK, CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE—IS ASSIGNED
TO WEAR. GO ON NOW, SHOO. BUT BE SURE TO COME BACK HERE AND
SHOW ME WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE!”
James scampered off like a recently fed bunny rabbit, and Nigel turned to look at us.
“HAVE YOU PUT IN HER CLOTHING ORDER YET?” he asked no one in particular.
“No, she won’t choose until she has the look-books,” Emily answered, looking bored.
“She said she’ll do it when she gets back.”
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“WELL, JUST BE SURE TO LET ME KNOW AHEAD OF TIME SO I CAN CLEAR
MY SCHEDULE FOR THAT PARTY!” He took off in the direction of the Closet,
probably to try to catch a glimpse of James changing.
I’d already lived through one round of Miranda wardrobe ordering, and it hadn’t been
pretty. When at the shows, she went from runway to runway, sketchbook in hand,
preparing herself to come back to the States and tell New York society what they would
be wearing—and middle America what they’d like to be wearing—via the only runway
that actually mattered. Little did I know that Miranda was also paying particular attention
to the outfits cruising down the runways because it was her first glance at what she
herself would be wearing in the upcoming months.
A couple weeks after returning to the office, Miranda had handed Emily a list of
designers whose look-books she’d like to see. As the usual suspects rushed to get their
books put together for her—their runway photographs often weren’t even developed,
never mind airbrushed and bound, before she demanded to see them—everyone
atRunway was put on alert that the books would be arriving. Nigel would need to be
ready, of course, to help her flip through them all and select her personal outfits. An
accessories editor should be on hand to choose bags and shoes, and perhaps an extra
fashion editor to ensure that everyone was in agreement—especially if the order included
something big, like a fur coat or an evening gown. When the various houses had finally
pieced together the different items she’d requested, Miranda’s personal tailor would come
toRunway for a few days to fit everything. Jeffy would completely empty out the Closet,
and no one would really be able to get any work done at all, since Miranda and her tailor
would be holed up in there for hours on end. On the first go-round of fittings, I’d walked
by the Closet just in time to hear Nigel shouting, “MIRANDA PRIESTLY! TAKE THAT
RAG OFF THIS SECOND. THAT DRESS MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A SLUT! A
COMMON WHORE!” I’d stood outside with my ear pressed to the door—literally
risking life and limb if it were to swing open—and waited for her to upbraid him in that
