With the basket on the passenger seat, I lit another cigarette and rubbed my freezing bare feet so my toes could resume gripping the clutch and brake pedal. Clutch, gas, shift, release clutch, I chanted, trying to ignore the kitten’s pitiful meows every time I accelerated. She alternated between crying, hissing, and some sort of unidentifiable high-pitched screeching. By the time we reached Miranda’s building, the kitten was nearly hysterical. I tried to soothe her, but she could sense my insincerity – and besides, I had no free hands to poke through the bars to offer a reassuring pat or nuzzle. So this was what four years of diagramming and deconstructing books, plays, short stories, and poems were for: a chance to comfort an over-pampered fur ball while trying not to demolish someone else’s really, really expensive car. Sweet life. Just as I had always dreamed.
I managed to dump the car at the garage and the cat with Miranda’s doorman without further incident, but my hands were still shaking when I climbed into the chauffeured Town Car that had been following me all over town. The driver looked at me sympathetically and made some supportive comment about the difficulty of stick shifts, but I didn’t feel much like chatting.
‘Just heading back to the Elias-Clark building,’ I said with a long sigh as the driver pulled around the block and headed south on Park Avenue. Since I rode the route every day – sometimes twice – I knew I had exactly eight minutes to breathe and collect myself and possibly even figure out a way to disguise the ash and sweat stains that had become permanent features on the Gucci suede. The shoes – well, those were beyond hope, at least until they could be fixed by the fleet of shoemakers Runway kept for such emergencies. The ride was actually over in six and a half minutes, and I had no choice but to hobble like an off-balance giraffe on my one flat, one four-inch heel arrangement. A quick stop in the Closet turned up a brand-new pair of knee-high maroon-colored Jimmy Choos that looked great with the leather skirt I grabbed, tossing the suede pants in the ‘Couture Cleaning’ pile (where the basic prices for dry cleaning started at seventy-five dollars per item). The only stop left was a quick visit to the Beauty Closet, where one of the editors there took one look at my sweat-streaked makeup and whipped out a trunk full of fixers.
Not bad, I thought, looking in one of the omnipresent full-length mirrors. You might not even know that mere minutes before I was hovering precariously close to murdering myself and everyone around me. I strolled confidently into the assistants’ suite outside Miranda’s office and quietly took my seat, looking forward to a few free minutes before she returned from lunch.
‘And-re-ah,’ she called from her starkly furnished, deliberately cold office. ‘Where are the car and the kitten?’
I leaped out of my seat and ran as fast as was possible on plush carpeting while wearing five-inch heels and stood before her desk. ‘I left the car with the garage attendant and Madelaine with your doorman, Miranda,’ I said, proud to have completed both tasks without killing the car, the cat, or myself.
‘And why would you do something like that?’ she snarled, looking up from her copy of Women’s Wear Daily for the first time since I’d walked in. ‘I specifically requested that you bring both of them to the office, since the girls will be here momentarily and we need to leave.’
‘Oh, well, actually, I thought you said that you wanted them to—’
‘Enough. The details of your incompetence interest me very little. Go get the car and the kitten and bring them here. I’m expecting we’ll be all ready to leave in fifteen minutes. Understood?’
Fifteen minutes? Was this woman hallucinating? It would take a minute or two to get downstairs and into a Town Car, another six or eight to get to her apartment, and then somewhere in the vicinity of three hours for me to find the kitten in her eighteen-room apartment, extract the bucking stick shift from its parking spot, and make my way the twenty blocks to the office.
‘Of course, Miranda. Fifteen minutes.’
I started shaking again the moment I ran out of her office, wondering if my heart could just up and give out at the ripe old age of twenty-three. The first cigarette I lit landed directly on the top of my new Jimmys, where instead of falling to the cement it smoldered for just long enough to burn a small, neat hole. Great, I muttered. That’s just fucking great. Chalk up my total as an even four grand for today’s ruined merchandise – a new personal best. Maybe she’d die before I got back, I thought, deciding that now was the time to look on the bright side. Maybe, just maybe, she’d keel over from something rare and exotic and we’d all be released from her wellspring of misery. I relished a last drag before stamping out the cigarette and told myself to be rational. You don’t want her to die, I thought, stretching out in the backseat. Because if she does, you lose all hope of killing her yourself. And that would be a shame.
I knew nothing when I went for my first interview and stepped onto the infamous Elias-Clark elevators, those transporters of all things en vogue. I had no idea that the city’s most well-connected gossip columnists and socialites and media executives obsessed over the flawlessly made-up, turned-out, turned-in riders of those sleek and quiet lifts. I had never seen women with such radiant blond hair, didn’t know that those brand-name highlights cost six grand a year to maintain or that others in the know could identify the colorists after a quick glance at the finished product. I had never laid eyes on such beautiful men. They were perfectly toned – not too muscular because ‘that’s not sexy’ – and they showed off their lifelong dedication to gymwork in finely ribbed turtlenecks and tight leather pants. Bags and shoes I’d never seen on real people shouted Prada! Armani! Versace! from every surface. I had heard from a friend of a friend – an editorial assistant at Chic magazine – that every now and then the accessories get to meet their makers in those very elevators, a touching reunion where Miuccia, Giorgio, or Donatella can once again admire their summer ’02 stilettos or their spring couture teardrop bag in person. I knew things were changing for me – I just wasn’t sure it was for the better.
I had, until this point, spent the past twenty-three years embodying small-town America. My entire existence was a perfect cliché. Growing up in Avon, Connecticut, had meant high school sports, youth group meetings, ‘drinking parties’ at nice suburban ranch homes when the parents were away. We wore sweatpants to school, jeans for Saturday night, ruffled puffiness for semiformal dances. And college! Well, that was a world of sophistication after high school. Brown had provided endless activities and classes and groups for every imaginable type of artist, misfit, and computer geek. Whatever intellectual or creative interest I wanted to pursue, regardless of how esoteric or unpopular it may have been, had some sort of outlet at Brown. High fashion was perhaps the single exception to this widely bragged-about fact. Four years spent muddling around Providence in fleeces and hiking boots, learning about the French impressionists, and writing obnoxiously long-winded English papers did not – in any conceivable way – prepare me for my very first post-college job.
I managed to put it off as long as possible. For the three months following graduation, I’d scrounged together what little cash I could find and took off on a solo trip. I did Europe by train for a month, spending much more time on beaches than in museums, and didn’t do a very good job of keeping in touch with anyone back home except Alex, my boyfriend of three years. He knew that after the five weeks or so I was starting to get lonely, and since his Teach for America training had just ended and he had the rest of the summer to kill before starting in September, he surprised me in Amsterdam. I’d covered most of Europe by then and he’d traveled the summer before, so after a not-so-sober afternoon