responding at the appropriate time. Social graces were not her strength, as she had little
tolerance for small talk—but I knew she’d be on her best kiss-ass behavior tonight. I’d
come to realize that her “friends” all fell into one of two categories. There were those she
perceived as “above” her and who must be impressed. This list was short, but it generally
included people like Irv Ravitz, Oscar de la Renta, Hillary Clinton, and any first-rate, A-
list movie star. Then there were those “below” her, who must be patronized and belittled
so they don’t forget their place, which included basically everyone else: allRunway
employees, all family members, all parents of her children’s friends—unless they
coincidentally fell into category number one—almost all designers and other magazine
editors, and every single solitary person in the service industry, both here and abroad.
Tonight was sure to be amusing because these were category two people who would have
to be treated like category ones, merely because of their association with Mr. Tomlinson
and his brother. I always enjoyed the rare occasions when I got to watch Miranda try to
impress those around her, mostly because she wasn’t naturally charming.
I felt the first guests arrive before I saw them. The tension in the room was palpable.
Remembering my color printouts, I rushed over to the couple and offered to take the
woman’s fur wrap. “Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson, thank you so much for joining us this
evening. Please, I’ll take that. And Ilana here will show you to the atrium, where
cocktails are being served.” I hoped I wasn’t staring during my monologue, but the
spectacle was truly outrageous. I’d seen women dressed like hookers and men dressed
like women and models not dressed at all at Miranda’s parties, but never before had I
seen people dressed like this. I knew it wasn’t going to be a trendy New York crowd, but
I was expecting them to look like something out ofDallas ; instead, they looked like a
dressier version of the cast fromDeliverance .
Mr. Tomlinson’s brother, himself distinguished looking with silver hair, made the
horrible mistake of wearing white tails—in May, no less—with a plaid handkerchief and
a cane. His fiancée had on an emerald green taffeta nightmare. It swirled and puffed and
gathered and forced her enormous bust up and over the top of the dress so that it appeared
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her own silicon breasts might actually suffocate her. Diamonds the size of Dixie cups
hung from her ears, and an even larger one sparkled from her left hand. Her hair was
bleached white with peroxide, as were her teeth, and her heels were so high and so
skinny, she walked as if she’d been a running back in the NFL for the past twelve years.
“Dah-lings, I amso delighted you could join us for a little pah-ty! Everyone loves
pahties, now don’t they?” Miranda sang in a falsetto voice. The soon-to-be Mrs.
Tomlinson looked as if she’d pass out. Right there before her was the one and only
Miranda Priestly! Her glee embarrassed us all, and the whole wretched crowd moved into
the atrium with Miranda leading the way.
The rest of the night went on much like the beginning. I recognized all the guests’ names
and managed not to utter anything too humiliating. The parade of white tuxes, chiffon,
big hair, bigger jewels, and barely postadolescent women ceased to amuse me as the
hours wore on, but I never grew tired of watching Miranda. She was the true lady and the
envy of every woman in that museum that night. And even though they understood that
all the money in the world could never buy them her class and elegance, they never
stopped wanting it.
I smiled genuinely when she dismissed me halfway through dinner, as usual without a
thank-you or a good-night. (“Ahn-dre-ah, we won’t be needing you anymore this
evening. See yourself out.”) I looked for Ilana, but she had already sneaked out. The car
took only about ten minutes to arrive after I called for it—I had briefly considered taking
the subway, but wasn’t sure how well the Oscar or my feet would’ve held up—and I
sunk, exhausted but calm, into the backseat.
When I walked past John on my way to the elevator, he reached under his little table and
pulled out a manila envelope. “Just got this a few minutes ago. It says ‘Urgent.’ ” I
thanked him and sat down in a corner of the lobby, wondering who would be
messengering me something at ten o’clock on a Friday night. I tore it open and pulled out
a note:
Dearest Andrea,
It was so great to meet you tonight! Can we please get together next week for sushi or
something? I dropped this off on my way home— figured you could use the pick-me-up
after a night like the one we just had. Enjoy.
Xoxo,
Ilana
Inside was the picture of Miranda as Snake, only Ilana had enlarged this one to a ten by
thirteen size. I looked at it carefully for a few minutes, massaging the feet I’d finally
pulled from the Manolos, and looked into Miranda’s eyes. She looked intimidating and
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mean and just like the bitch I stared at every day. But tonight she’d also looked sad, and
not a little lonely. Adding this picture to my fridge and making fun of it with Lily and
Alex wasn’t going to make my feet hurt any less, or give me back my Friday night. I tore
it up and hobbled upstairs.
15
“Andrea, it’s Emily,” I heard a voice croak from the phone. “Can you hear me?” It had
been months since Emily had called me at home late at night, so I knew it had to be
serious.
“Hi, sure. You sound like hell,” I said, bolting upright in bed, immediately wondering if
Miranda had done something to make her sound that way. The last time Emily had called
this late was when Miranda had called her at eleven on a Saturday night to demand that
Emily charter her and Mr. Tomlinson a private jet to get home from Miami since bad
weather had canceled their regularly scheduled flight. Emily was just getting ready to
leave her apartment to attend her own birthday party when the call came in, and she’d
immediately called me and begged me to deal with it. I hadn’t gotten the message until
the next day, though, and when I called her back, she was still in tears.
“I missed my own birthday party, Andrea,” she’d wailed the second she picked up the
phone. “I missed my own birthday party because I had to charter them a flight!”
“They couldn’t get a hotel room for one night and come back the next day like normal
people?” I’d asked, pointing out the obvious.
“Don’t you think I thought of that? I had penthouse suites reserved for them at the Shore
Club, the Albion, and the Delano within seven minutes of her first phone call, figuring
she couldn’t possibly be serious—I mean, my god, it was a Saturday night. How the hell
do you charter a flight on a Saturday night?”
“I’m guessing she wasn’t so into that idea?” I’d asked soothingly, feeling genuinely
guilty that I hadn’t been around to help her out and simultaneously ecstatic that I’d
dodged that particular bullet.
“Yeah. Not so into it at all. She called every ten minutes, demanding to know why I
hadn’t found her anything yet, and I had to keep putting these people on hold to answer
her call, and when I went back to them, they’d hang up.” She gulped air. “It was a
nightmare.”
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“So what finally happened? I’m almost scared to ask.”
“What finally happened? Whatdidn’t finally happen? I called every single private charter
company in the state of Florida and, as you might imagine, they weren’t answering their
phones at midnight on a Saturday. I paged individual pilots, I called domestic airlines to
see if they had any recommendations, I even managed to talk to some sort of supervisor
at the Miami International Airport. Told him I needed a plane in the next half hour to fly
two people to New York. Know what he did?”
“What?”
“He laughed. Hysterically. Accused me of being a front for terrorists, for drug
smugglers, everything. Told me I had a better chance of getting hit by lightning exactly
twenty times than I did of securing a plane and a pilot at that hour—regardless of how
much I was willing to pay. And that if I called back again, he’d be forced to direct my
inquiry to the FBI. Do you believe it?” She was screaming at this point. “Do you fucking
believe it? The FBI!”
“And I assume Miranda didn’t like that, either?”
“Yeah, sheloooooved that one. She spent twenty minutes refusing to believe that there
wasn’t a single plane available. I assured her that it wasn’t that they were all taken, just
that it was a difficult time of night to be attempting to charter a flight.”
“So what happened?” I didn’t see this one ending happily.
“At about one-thirty in the morning she finally accepted that she wasn’t going to get
home that night—not that it mattered whatsoever, since the girls were with their father
and the nanny was around all day Sunday if they needed her—and she had me buy her a
ticket for the first flight out in the morning.”
This was puzzling. If her flight had been canceled, I’d assumed the airlines would’ve
rescheduled her for the first flight out in the morning, especially considering her premier-
advantage-plus-gold-platinum-diamond-executive-VIP mileage status and the original
cost of her first-class tickets. I said as much.
“Yeah, well, Continental scheduled them for their first flight out, which was at six-fiftyA
.M. But when Miranda heard that someone else had managed to get on a Delta flight at
six-thirty-fiveA .M., she went ballistic. She called me an incompetent idiot, asked me
over and over what good an assistant was if I couldn’t do something as simple as arrange
for a private plane.” She’d sniffed and took a sip of something, probably coffee.
“Ohmigod, I know what you’re going to say. Tell me you didn’t!”
“I did.”
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“You didn’t. You’ve got to be kidding. For fifteen minutes?”
“I did! What choice did I have? She was really unhappy with me—at least this way, it
seemed like I was actually doing something. It came to another couple thousand bucks—
not exactly a big deal. She was bordering onhappy when we hung up. What else can you
ask for?”
By this point we’d both started laughing. I knew without Emily’s telling me—and she
knew I knew—that she’d gone ahead and purchased two additional business-class tickets
on the Delta flight for Miranda just to shut her up, to make the incessant demands and
insults finally, blissfully, cease.
I was nearly choking at this point. “So, wait. By the time you arranged for a car to take
her to the Delano—”
“—it was just before three in the morning, and she’d called my cell phone exactly
twenty-two times since eleven. The driver waited while they showered and changed in
their penthouse suite and then took them right back to the airport in time for theirearlier
flight.”
“Stop! You’ve got to stop,” I howled, doubled over at this charming series of events.
“This did not really happen.”
Emily stopped laughing and tried to feign seriousness. “Oh, really? You think all of this
is good? I haven’t even told you the best part.”
“Oh, tell me, tell me!” I was positively gleeful that Emily and I had, for once, managed
to find something funny at the exact same time. It felt good to be part of a team, one half
in the battle against the oppressor. I realized then for the first time what a different year it
would have been if Emily and I could’ve truly been friends, if we could have covered and
protected and trusted each other enough to face Miranda as a united front. Things
probably wouldn’t have been quite so unbearable, but, except for rare times like these, we
didn’t agree on just about everything.
“The best part of all of it?” She was silent, dragging out the joy we shared a few
moments longer. “She didn’t realize this, of course, but even though the Delta flight took
off earlier, it was actually scheduled to land eight minutes after her original Continental!”
“Shut up!” I’d howled, delighted with this delicious new nugget of information.
“You’vegot to be kidding me!”
When we finally hung up, I was surprised to see that we’d been talking for more than an
hour, just like a couple of real friends would. Of course, we immediately reverted back to
just-contained hostility on Monday, but my feelings for Emily were always a bit more
affectionate after that weekend. Until now, of course. I sure didn’t like her enough to hear
whatever surely irritating or inconvenient thing she was preparing to dump on me.
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“Really, you sound horrible. Are you sick?” I tried valiantly to interject a touch of
sympathy in my voice, but the question came out sounding aggressive and accusatory.
“Oh yeah,” she rasped before breaking into hacking coughs. “Really sick.”
I never really believed it when anyone said they were really sick: without a diagnosis of
something very official and potentially life-threatening, you were well enough to work
atRunway . So when Emily finished hacking and reiterated that she was really ill, I didn’t
even consider the possibility that she wouldn’t be at work on Monday. After all, she was
scheduled to fly to Paris to meet Miranda on October 18 and that was only slightly more
than a week away. And besides, I’d managed to ignore a couple strep throats, a few bouts
of bronchitis, a horrific round of food poisoning, and a perpetual smoker’s cough and
cold and hadn’t taken a single sick day in nearly a year of work.
I’d sneaked in a single doctor’s appointment when I was desperate for antibiotics with
one of the cases of strep throat (I ducked into his office and ordered them to see me right
away when Miranda and Emily thought that I was out scouting for new cars for Mr.
Tomlinson), but there was never time for preventative work. Although I’d had a dozen
sets of highlights from Marshall, quite a few free massages from spas that felt honored to
have Miranda’s assistant as a guest, and countless manicures, pedicures, and makeovers, I
