The guard opened the door for me, bowed slightly, and smiled. He probably thought I
was a guest.
“Hi, miss, you must be Andrea. Ilana said to have a seat right over there, and she’ll be
out in a minute.” He turned away and spoke discreetly into a microphone on his sleeve
and nodded when he heard a response through his earpiece. “Yes, right over there, miss.
She’ll be here as soon as she can.”
I looked around the enormous entryway but didn’t feel like going through the dress-
adjustment hassle of actually sitting. Besides, when would I ever again have the chance to
be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, after hours, with apparently no one else there?
The ticket booths were empty and the ground-level galleries dark, but the sense of
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
history, of culture, was awesome. The silence itself was deafening.
After nearly fifteen minutes of peering around, being careful not to wander too far from
the aspiring Secret Service agent, a rather ordinary-looking girl in a long navy dress
crossed the massive foyer and walked toward me. I was surprised that someone with a job
as glamorous as hers (working in the special events office of the museum) could be so
plain, and I felt instantly ridiculous, like a girl from a small town trying to dress for a big-
city black-tie affair—which, ironically enough, was exactly who I was. Ilana, on the other
hand, looked like she hadn’t even bothered to change out of work clothes, and I learned
later that she hadn’t.
“Why bother?” She’d laughed. “It’s not like these people are here to look at me.” Her
brown hair was clean and straight but lacking in style, and her brown flats were
horrifically unfashionable. But her blue eyes were bright and kind, and I knew instantly
that I would like her.
“You must be Ilana,” I said, sensing that I somehow had seniority in the situation and
was expected to take charge. “I’m Andrea. I’m Miranda’s assistant, and I’m here to help
in any way I can.”
She looked so relieved, I instantly wondered what Miranda had said to her. The
possibilities were endless, but I imagined it had something to do with
Ilana’sLadies’Home Journal getup. I shuddered to think what wicked thing she’d uttered
to such a sweet girl and prayed she wouldn’t start to cry. Instead, she turned to me with
those big innocent eyes, leaned forward, and declared none-too-quietly, “Your boss is a
first-rate bitch.”
I stared, shocked, for just a moment before recovering. “She is, isn’t she?” I said, and we
both laughed. “What do you need me to do? Miranda’s going to be able to sense that I’m
here in about ten seconds, so I should look like I’m doing something.”
“Here, I’ll show you the table,” she said, walking down a darkened hallway toward the
Egyptian exhibits. “It’s dynamite.”
We arrived in a smaller gallery, perhaps the size of a tennis court with a rectangular,
twenty-four-seat table stretched down the middle. Robert Isabell was worth it, I could
see. He was the New York party planner, the only one who could be trusted to strike just
the right note with astonishing attention to detail: fashionable without being trendy, luxe
but not ostentatious, unique without being over the top. Miranda insisted that Robert do
everything, but the only time I’d ever seen his work before was at Cassidy and Caroline’s
birthday party. I knew he could manage to turn Miranda’s colonial-style living room into
a chic downtown lounge (complete with soda bar—in martini glasses, of course—ultra
suede, built-in banquettes, and a fully heated, tented balcony dance floor with a
Moroccan theme) for ten-year-olds, but this was truly spectacular.
Everything glowed white. Light white, smooth white, bright white, textured white, and
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
rich white. Bundles of milky white peonies looked as if they grew from the table itself,
deliciously lush but low enough to allow people to talk over them. Bone white china
(with a white checked pattern) rested on a crisp white linen tablecloth, and high-backed
white oak chairs were covered in luscious white suede (the danger!), all atop a plush
white carpet, specially laid for the evening. White votive candles in simple white
porcelain holders gave off a soft white light, highlighting (but somehow not burning) the
peonies from underneath and providing subtle, unobtrusive illumination around the table.
The only color in the entire room came from the elaborate multihued canvases that hung
on the walls surrounding the table, shocking blues and greens and golds from the
depictions of early Egyptian life. The white table as a deliberate contrast to the priceless,
detailed paintings was exquisite.
As I turned my head around to take in the wonderful contrast of the color and the white
(“That Robert really is a genius!”), a vibrant red figure caught my eye. In the corner,
standing ramrod straight under a looming painting was Miranda, wearing the beaded red
Chanel that had been commissioned, cut, fitted, and precleaned just for tonight. And
although it’d be a stretch to say that it had been worth every penny (since those pennies
added up to tens of thousands of dollars), she did look breathtaking. She herself was
anobjet d’art, chin jutted upward and muscles perfectly taut, a neoclassical relief in
beaded Chanel silk. She wasn’t beautiful—her eyes were a bit too beady and her hair too
severe and her face much too hard—but she was stunning in a way I couldn’t make sense
of, and no matter how hard I tried to play it cool, to pretend to be admiring the room, I
couldn’t take my eyes off her.
As usual, the sound of her voice broke my reverie. “Ahn-dre-ah, you do know the names
and faces of our guests this evening, do you not? I assume you have properly studied
their portraits. I expect you won’t humiliate me tonight by failing to greet someone by
name,” she announced, looking nowhere, with only my name indicating that her words
might somehow be directed toward me.
“Um, yes, I’ve got it covered,” I answered, suppressing the urge to salute and still
acutely aware that I was staring. “I’ll take a few minutes now and make sure I’m
positive.” She looked at me as if to sayYou sure will, you idiot, and I forced myself to
look away and walk out of the gallery. Ilana was right behind me.
“What’s she talking about?” she whispered, leaning toward me. “Portraits? Is she
crazy?”
We sat down on an uncomfortable wooden bench in a darkened hallway, both of us
overwhelmed with the need to hide. “Oh, that. Yeah, normally I would’ve spent the last
week trying to find pictures of the guests tonight and memorizing them so I could greet
them by name,” I explained to a horrified Ilana. She stared at me incredulously. “But
since she just told me I had to come today, I only had a few minutes in the car to look
them over.
“What?” I asked. “You thinkthis is strange? Whatever. It’s standard stuff for a Miranda
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
party.”
“Well, I thought there wouldn’t be anyone famous here tonight,” she said, referring to
Miranda’s past parties at the Met. Since she was a huge contributor, Miranda was often
granted the very special privilege of renting out, oh, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
OF ART for private parties and cocktail hours. Mr. Tomlinson had had to ask only once,
and Miranda was scrambling to make her brother-in-law’s party the best the Met had ever
seen. She figured it would impress the rich Southerners and their trophy wives to dine for
a night at the Met. She was right.
“Yeah, there won’t be anyone we’d recognize right away, just a lot of billionaires with
homes below the Mason-Dixon line. Usually when I have to memorize the guests’ faces,
they’re easier to find online or inWWD or something. I mean, you can generally locate a
picture of Queen Noor or Michael Bloomberg or Yohji Yamamoto if you have to. But
just try to find Mr. and Mrs. Packard from some rich suburb of Charleston or wherever
the hell they live and it’s not so easy. Miranda’s other assistant was looking for these
people while everyone else was getting me ready, and she eventually found almost
everyone in the society pages of their hometown newspapers or on various companies’
web sites, but it was really annoying.”
Ilana continued to stare. I think somehow I knew that I was sounding like a robot, but I
couldn’t stop. Her shock only made me feel worse.
“There’s only one couple I haven’t identified yet, so I guess I’ll know them by default,” I
said.
“Oh, my. I don’t know how you do it. I’m annoyed I have to be here on a Friday night,
but I can’t imagine doing your job. How do you take it? How do you stand being spoken
to and treated like that?”
It took me a moment to realize that this question caught me off-guard: no one had really
ever volunteered anything negative about my job. I’d always thought I was the only
one—among the millions of imaginary girls that would “die” for my job—who saw
anything remotely disturbing about my situation. It was more horrifying to see the shock
in her eyes than it was to witness the hundreds of ridiculous things I saw each and every
day at work; the way she looked at me with that pure, unadulterated pity triggered
something inside me. I did what I hadn’t done in months of working under subhuman
conditions for a nonhuman boss, what I always managed to keep suppressed for a more
appropriate time. I started to cry.
Ilana looked more shocked than ever. “Oh, sweetie, come here! I’m so sorry! I didn’t
mean anything by it. You’re a saint for putting up with that witch, you hear me? Come
with me.” She pulled me by the hand and led me down another darkened hallway toward
an office in the back. “Here, now sit for a minute and forget all about what these stupid
people look like.”
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
I sniffled and started to feel stupid.
“And don’t feel strange, you hear? I have a feeling you kept that inside for a long, long
time and you have to have a good cry every now and then.”
She was fumbling around in her desk for something while I tried to wipe the mascara
from my cheeks. “Here,” she proclaimed proudly. “I’m destroying this right after you see
it, and if you even think of telling anyone about it, I’ll wreck your life. But just look, it’s
amazing.” She handed me a manila envelope sealed with a “Confidential” sticker and
smiled.
I tore off the sticker and pulled a green folder out. Inside was a photo—a color
photocopy, actually—of Miranda stretched out on a restaurant banquette. I recognized it
immediately as a picture taken by a famous society photographer during a recent birthday
party for Donna Karan at Pastis. It had already appeared on the pages ofNew York
magazine and was bound to keep showing up. In it she was wearing her signature brown
and white snakeskin trench coat, the one I always thought made her look like a snake.
Well, it seems I wasn’t alone, because in this version, someone had subtly—expertly—
attached a scaled-to-size cutout of a rattlesnake’s rattle directly where her legs should
have been. The effect was a fabulous rendition of Miranda as Snake: she rested her elbow
on the banquette, cradled her chiseled chin in her palm, and stretched out across the
leather, with her rattle curled in a semicircle and hanging off the edge of the bench. It was
perfect.
“Isn’t it great?” Ilana asked, leaning over my shoulder. “Linda came into my office one
afternoon. She’d just spent the entire day on the phone with Miranda, selecting which
gallery they’d dine in. Linda naturally insisted on one gallery because it’s by far the best
size and most beautiful, but Miranda mandated that it be held in the other one near the
gift shop. They went back and forth for a while before Linda finally—after days of
negotiations—got permission from the board to hold it in Miranda’s gallery, and she was
so excited to call Miranda and tell her the great news. Guess what happened when . . .”
“She changed her mind, obviously,” I said quietly, feeling her irritation. “She decided to
do exactly as Linda suggested in the first place, but only once she was sure everyone
would jump through all her hoops.”
“Precisely. Well, this irritated the hell out of me. I’ve never seen the entire museum turn
itself upside down for anyone—I mean, christ, the president of the United States could
ask to have a State Department dinner here and they wouldn’t let him! And then your
boss thinks she can march in and order everyone around, make our lives a living hell for
days on end. Anyway, I made this pretty little picture as a pick-me-up for Linda. You
know what she did with it? Shrunk it on the copier so she could have a little one for her
wallet! I just thought you’d get a kick out of this. Even if it’s just to remind you that
you’re not alone. You’re definitely the worst off, but you’re not alone.”
PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com
I stuck the picture back in its confidential envelope and handed it back to Ilana. “You’re
the best,” I said, touching her shoulder. “I really, really appreciate it. I promise to never,
ever tell anyone where I got this, but will you please send this to me? I don’t think it’ll fit
in the Leiber bag, but I’d give anything if you’d send it to me at home. Please?”
She smiled and motioned for me to write my address, and we both stood up and walked
(I hobbled) back to the museum’s foyer. It was just about seven, and the guests were due
to arrive any minute. Miranda and B-DAD were talking to his brother, the honored guest
and groom, who looked like he had played soccer, football, lacrosse, and rugby at a
Southern school—one where he was always surrounded by cooing blondes. The cooing
blonde of twenty-six who was to become his bride was standing quietly by his side,
gazing up at him adoringly. She was holding a snifter of something and chortling at his
jokes.
Miranda was hanging on to B-DAD’s forearm with the fakest of smiles plastered across
her face. I didn’t have to hear what they were saying to know that she was barely
