special way of hers, but all I heard was a quiet murmur of agreement and the rustling of
the fabric as she removed the dress.
Now that I had been there long enough, it seemed as though the honor of ordering
Miranda’s clothes would fall to me. Four times a year, like clockwork, she flipped
through look-books like they were her own personal catalogs and selected Alexander
McQueen suits and Balenciaga pants like they were T-shirts from L.L.Bean. A yellow
sticky on this pair of Fendi pencil pants, another placed squarely over the Chanel skirt
suit, a third with a big “NO” plastered across the matching silk top. Flip, stick, flip, stick,
on and on it went, until she had selected a full season’s wardrobe directly from the
runway, clothes that had most likely not yet even been made.
I’d watched as Emily had faxed Miranda’s choices to the different designers, omitting
any size or color preference, since anyone worth their Manolos knew what would work
for Miranda Priestly. Of course, merely being made to the correct size wasn’t enough—
when the clothes did arrive at the magazine, they’d need to be cut and tucked to make
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them appear custom-made. Only when the entire wardrobe was completely ordered,
shipped, snipped, and delivered expressly to her bedroom closet by chauffeured
limousine would Miranda relinquish last season’s clothes and heaps of Yves and Celine
and Helmut Lang would find their way—in garbage bags—back to the office. Most were
only four or six months old, stuff that had been worn once or twice or, most often, not at
all. Everything was still so incredibly stylish, so ludicrously hip, that it wasn’t yet
available in most stores, but once it was last season, it was about as likely to show up on
Miranda as a pair of pleather pants from Target’s new Massimo line.
Occasionally I’d find a tank top or an oversize jacket I could keep, but the fact that
everything was in a size zero was a bit of a problem. Mostly we distributed the clothes to
anyone with preteen daughters, the only ones who had a shot in hell of actually fitting
into the stuff. I pictured little girls with bodies like little boys strutting around in Prada
lipstick skirts and slinky Dolce and Gabbana dresses with spaghetti straps. If there was
something really dynamite, really expensive, I’d pull it from the garbage bag and stash it
under my desk until I could smuggle it home safely. A few quick clicks on eBay or
perhaps a little visit to one of the upscale consignment shops on Madison Avenue, and
my salary all of a sudden wasn’t so depressing. Not stealing, I rationalized, simply
utilizing what was available to me.
Miranda called six more times between the hours of six and nine in the evening—
midnight to threeA .M. her time—to have us connect her to various people who were
already in Paris. I fielded them listlessly, uneventfully, until I went to gather my things
and try to sneak out for the night before the phone rang again. It wasn’t until I was
climbing exhaustedly into my coat that I caught a glimpse of the note that I’d stuck to my
monitor just so this very thing wouldn’t happen: CALL A, 3:30P.M. TODAY. My head
felt like it was swimming, my contacts had long before dried to tiny, hard shards covering
my eyes, and at this point my head started to throb. No sharp pains, just that nebulous,
dull kind of ache where you can’t pinpoint the center but you know it will build and build
in a slow, burning intensity until you either manage to pass out or your head just
explodes. In the frenzy of all the calls that had produced such anxiety, such panic, from
across an ocean, I had forgotten to take the thirty seconds out of my day and call Alex
when he’d asked me to. Simply up and forgotten to do something so simple for someone
who never seemed to need anything from me.
I sat down in the now darkened and silent office and picked up the phone that was still a
little wet from my sweaty hands during Miranda’s last call a few minutes earlier. His
home line rang and rang until the machine picked up, but he answered on the first ring
when I tried his cell phone.
“Hi,” he said, knowing it was me from the caller ID. “How was your day?”
“Whatever, usual. Alex, I’m so sorry I didn’t call you at three-thirty. I can’t even get into
it—it’s just that things were so crazy here, she just kept calling and—”
“Hey, forget it. Not a big deal. Listen, now’s not really a great time for me. Can I call
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you tomorrow?” He sounded distracted, his voice taking on that faraway quality of
someone talking from an international payphone on the beach of a tiny village across the
world.
“Um, sure. But is everything OK? Will you just quickly tell me what you wanted to talk
about before? I’ve been really worried that everything’s not OK.”
He was quiet for a moment and then said, “Yeah, well it doesn’t seem like you were all
that worried. I ask you one time to call me at a time that’s convenient for me—not to
mention that your boss isn’t even in the country right now—and you can’t manage to do
that until six hours after the fact. Not really a sign of someone who’s genuinely
concerned, you know?” He stated all of this with no sarcasm, no disapproval, just a
simple summary of the facts.
I was twisting the phone cord around my finger until it cut off the circulation entirely,
making the knuckle bulge out and the tip turn white; there was also a brief, metallic taste
of blood in my mouth, the first realization that I had been gnawing on the inside of my
bottom lip.
“Alex, it’s not that I forgot to call,” I lied openly, trying to extricate myself from his
nonaccusatory accusation. “I simply didn’t have a single second free, and since it
sounded like something serious, I didn’t want to call just to have to hang up again. I
mean, she must have called me two dozen times just this afternoon, and each one is an
absolute emergency. Emily took off at five and left me all alone with that phone, and
Miranda just didn’t stop. She just kept calling and calling and calling, and every time I
went to call you, it’d be her again on the other line. I, uh, you know?”
My rapid-fire list of excuses sounded pathetic even to me, but I couldn’t stop. He knew I
had just forgotten, and so did I. Not because I didn’t care or wasn’t concerned, but
because all things non-Miranda somehow ceased to be relevant the moment I arrived at
work. In some ways I still didn’t understand and certainly couldn’t explain—never mind
ask anyone else to understand—how the outside world just melted into nonexistence, that
the only thing remaining when everything else vanished wasRunway . It was especially
difficult to explain this phenomenon when it was the single thing in my life I despised.
And yet, it was the only one that mattered.
“Listen, I have to get back to Joey. He has two friends over and they’ve probably torn
apart the entire house by this point.”
“Joey? Does that mean you’re in Larchmont? You don’t usually watch him on
Wednesdays. Is everything OK?” I was hoping to steer him away from the blatantly
obvious fact that I had gotten too wrapped up at work for six straight hours, and this
seemed like the best path. He’d tell me how his mom had gotten held up at work
accidentally or perhaps had to go see Joey’s teacher for conferences that night when the
regular babysitter canceled. He’d never complain of course—that just wasn’t his style—
but he’d at least tell me what was going on.
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“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine. My mom just had an emergency client meeting tonight.
Andy, I can’t really talk about it now. I was just calling before with some good news. But
you didn’t call me back,” he said flatly.
I wrapped the phone cord, which had begun to slowly unravel, so tight around my
pointer and middle fingers that they began to pulsate. “I’m sorry” was all I could manage,
because even though I knew he was right, that I was insensitive not to have called, I was
too worn out to present a huge defense. “Alex, please. Please don’t punish me by not
telling me something good. Do you know how long it’s been since anyone has called with
good news? Please. Give me that at least.” I knew he’d respond to my rational approach,
and he did.
“Look, it’s not that exciting. I just went ahead and made all the arrangements for us to go
back for our first homecoming together.”
“You did? Really? We’re going?” I’d brought it up a couple times before in what I’d
liked to believe had been an offhand and casual way, but in a decidedly non-Alex fashion
he’d been hedging on committing to our going together. It was really early to be planning
any of it, but the hotels and restaurants in Providence were always full months ahead of
time. I’d dropped it a few weeks earlier, figuring that we would figure something out,
find a place to stay somewhere. But somehow, of course, he’d picked up on just how
badly I wanted to go with him, and he’d figured out everything.
“Yeah, it’s done. We have a rental car—a Jeep, actually—and I reserved a room at the
Biltmore.”
“At the Biltmore? You’re kidding? You got a room there? That’s amazing.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve always talked about wanting to stay there, so I figured we should try
it. I even made a reservation for brunch on Sunday at Al Forno for ten people, so we can
each gather up the troops and have everyone in one place at one time.”
“No way. You did all of this already?”
“Sure. I thought you’d be really psyched. That’s why I was really looking forward to
telling you about it. But apparently you were too busy to call back.”
“Alex, I’m thrilled. I can’t even tell you how excited I am, and I can’t believe you
figured everything out already. I’m really sorry about before, but I can’t wait for October.
We’re going to have the best time, thanks to you.”
We talked for another couple minutes. By the time I hung up, he didn’t sound mad
anymore, but I could barely move. The effort to win him back, to find the right words not
only to convince him that I hadn’t overlooked him but also to reassure him that I was
appropriately grateful and enthusiastic had drained the last reserves of my energy. I don’t
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remember getting into the car or the ride home or whether or not I said hello to John
Fisher-Galliano in the lobby of my building. Besides a bone-deep exhaustion that hurt so
much it almost felt good, the only thing I remember feeling at all was relief that Lily’s
door was shut and no light peeked out from under it. I thought about ordering in some
food, but the mere thought of locating a menu and a phone was too overwhelming—
another meal that simply wasn’t happening.
Instead, I sat on the crumbling concrete of my furnitureless balcony and leisurely inhaled
a cigarette. Lacking the energy to actually blow the smoke out, I let it seep from my
mouth and hang in the still air around me. At some point I heard Lily’s door open, her
footsteps shuffling along the hallway, but I quickly turned out my lights and sat in the
darkened silence. There had just been fifteen straight hours of talking, and I could talk no
more.
13
“Hire her,” Miranda had decreed when she met Annabelle, the twelfth girl I’d
interviewed and one of only two that I’d decided were fit to even meet Miranda.
Annabelle was a native French speaker (she actually spoke so little English I had to have
the twins translate for me), a graduate of the Sorbonne, and the possessor of a long, hard
body, with gorgeous brown hair. She had style. She wasn’t afraid to wear stilettos on the
job and didn’t seem to mind Miranda’s brusque manner. In fact, she was rather aloof and
brusque herself and never really seemed to make any sort of eye contact. Always kind of
bored, a touch disinterested, and supremely confident. I was thrilled when Miranda
wanted her, both because it saved me weeks more of meeting nanny wannabes and
because it indicated—in some teeny, tiny way—that I was starting to get it.
Get what, exactly, I wasn’t sure, but things were going as smoothly as I could have
hoped at this point. I’d pulled off the clothing order with only a few noticeable screwups.
She hadn’t exactly been psyched when I’d shown her everything she’d ordered from
Givenchy and accidentally pronounced it precisely as it appears—give-EN-chee. After
much glaring and a few snide comments, I was informed of the correct pronunciation,
and everything went reasonably well until she had to be told that the Roberto Cavalli
dresses she’d requested hadn’t been made yet and wouldn’t be ready for another three
weeks. But I’d handled that and had managed to coordinate fittings in the Closet with her
tailor and had assembled nearly everything in the closet in her home dressing room, a
space roughly the size of a studio apartment.
The party planning had continued in Miranda’s absence and picked up again full-force
with her return, but there was surprisingly little panic—it appeared that everything was in
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order, and that the upcoming Friday was set to go off without a hitch. Chanel had
delivered a one-of-a-kind, floor-length red beaded sheath while Miranda was in Europe,
and I’d immediately sent it to the cleaners for a once-over. I’d seen a similar Chanel dress
in black in the pages ofW the month before, and when I pointed it out to Emily, she’d
nodded somberly.
“Forty thousand dollars,” she’d said, moving her head up and down, up and down. She
double-clicked on a pair of black pants onstyle.com , where she’d spent months scouring
for ideas for her upcoming trip to Europe with Miranda.
“Forty thousand WHAT?”
“Her dress. The red one from Chanel. It costs forty thousand dollars if you were to buy it
retail. Of course, Miranda isn’t paying full price, but she didn’t get this one for free,
either. Isn’t it wild?”
“Forty thousand DOLLARS?” I’d asked again, still unable to believe that I’d held a
single item worth so much money in my hands just hours earlier. I couldn’t help a quick
