I landed in my seat, head spinning, mouth dry, and totally disoriented, just before her first Jimmy Choo crossed the threshold. She didn’t so much as glance in my direction or, thankfully, seem to notice that the real Emily wasn’t at her desk. I had a feeling that the meeting she’d just had with Mr. Ravitz hadn’t gone so well, although it could have just been her lingering resentment at having to leave her office to go see someone else in theirs. Mr. Ravitz was, so far, the only person in the entire building whom Miranda rushed to accommodate.
“Ahn-dre-ah! What is this? Please tell me, what on earth is this?”
I raced into her office and stood before her desk, where we both looked down at what was, quite obviously, the same lunch she ate whenever she didn’t go out. A quick mental checklist revealed that nothing was missing or out of place or on the wrong side or cooked incorrectly. What was her problem?
“Um, it’s, uh, well, it’s your lunch,” I said quietly, making a genuine effort not to sound sarcastic, which was difficult, considering my statement was supremely obvious. “Is something wrong?”
In all fairness, I think she just parted her lips, but to my near-delirious self, it looked like she was baring actual pointed fangs.
“Is something wrong?” she mimicked in a high-pitched voice that sounded nothing like my own, nothing human. She narrowed her eyes to slits and leaned closer, still refusing, as always, to raise her voice. “Yes, there’s something wrong. Something very, very wrong. Why do I have to come back to my office to find this sitting on my desk?”
It was like trying to solve one of those twisted riddles. Why did she have to come back to her desk to find this sitting on it, I wondered. Clearly, the fact that she had requested it an hour earlier was not the correct answer, but it was the only one I had. Did she not like the tray it was on? No, that wasn’t possible: she’d seen it a million times and hadn’t ever complained about it. Had they accidentally given her the wrong cut of meat? No, that wasn’t it, either. The restaurant had once mistakenly sent me off with a wonderful-looking filet, thinking that she was sure to enjoy it more than the tough ribeye, but she’d almost had a full-fledged heart attack. She’d made me call the chef personally and scream at him over the phone while she stood over me and told me what to say.
“I’m so sorry, miss, really I am,” he’d said softly, sounding like the nicest guy in the world. “I really just thought that since Ms. Priestly is such a good customer that she’d prefer to have our best. I didn’t charge her extra, but don’t worry, it won’t happen again, I promise.” I felt like crying when she ordered me to tell him that he would never be a real chef anywhere besides some second-rate steak emporium, but I had done it. And he had apologized and agreed, and from that day on she’d always gotten her bloody ribeye. So it wasn’t that, either. I had no idea what to say or do.
“Ahn-dre-ah. Did Mr. Ravitz’s assistant not tell you that we had lunch together in that wretched dining room just a few moments ago?” she asked slowly, as though she were trying to keep herself from losing control completely.
She what? After all of that, after all the running and the Sebastian ridiculousness, and the angry phone calls, and the ninety-five-dollar meal, and the Tiffany song, and the food arranging, and the dizziness, and the waiting to eat until she came back, and she’d already eaten?
“Uh, no, we didn’t get a call from her at all. So, uh, does that mean you don’t want this?” I asked, motioning to the tray.
She looked at me as if I had just suggested she eat one of the twins. “What do you think that means, Emily?” Shit! She’d been doing so well with my name.
“I guess that, uh, well, that you don’t want it.”
“That’s very perceptive of you, Emily. I’m lucky you’re such a quick study. Now remove it. And make sure this does not happen again. That’s all.”
A quick fantasy flashed forward, one in which I would, just like in the movies, sweep my arm across the desk and send the whole tray flying across the room. She would watch and, shocked into contriteness, apologize profusely for speaking to me like that. But the clicking of her nails against the desk brought me back to reality, and I quickly picked up the tray and carefully walked out of her office.
“Ahn-dre-ah, close the door! I need a moment!” she called. I guess that having a gourmet lunch appear on her desk that she didn’t feel like eating had been a really stressful part of her day.
Emily had just returned with a can of Diet Coke and a package of raisins for me. This was supposed to be the snack to tide me over to lunch, and of course there wasn’t a single calorie or gram of fat or ounce of added sugar in the whole thing. She dropped them on her desk when she heard Miranda calling and ran over to shut her French doors.
“What happened?” she whispered, eyeing the untouched tray of food that I was holding, frozen to the spot near my desk.
“Oh, it seems our charming boss already had her lunch,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “And she just reamed me out for not predicting, not divining, not being able to look directly inside her stomach and know that she wasn’t hungry anymore.”
“You’re kidding me,” she said. “She yelled at you because you ran to get her lunch—just like she asked—and then couldn’t possibly have known that she’d already eaten somewhere else? What a bitch!”
I nodded. It was a phenomenal change of pace to have Emily actually take my side for once, not to lecture me on all the ways I Just Don’t Get It. But, wait! It was too good to be true. Like a sun that falls out of the sky, leaving only pink and blue streaks where it had shone seconds before, Emily’s face flashed from angry to contrite. The Runway Paranoid Turnaround.
“Remember what we talked about before, Andrea.” Oh, yes, here it comes. RPT, twelve o’clock. “She doesn’t do it to hurt you. She doesn’t mean anything by it. She’s just way too important to get held up on the little stuff. So don’t fight it. Just throw out the food, and let’s move on.” Emily fixed her features in a determined look and took a seat in front of her computer. I knew she was wondering right then and there if Miranda had had our outer office areas bugged and had heard the whole thing. She was red and flustered and very obviously displeased with her lack of control. I didn’t know how she had survived as long as she had.
I thought about eating the steak myself, but the mere thought that it had been on Miranda’s desk only moments earlier made me feel nauseated. I took the tray to the kitchen and tilted it so every single item would just slide directly into the garbage—all the expertly cooked and seasoned food, the china plate, the metal butter container, the salt box, the linen napkin, the silver, the steak knife, and the Baccarat glass. Gone. All gone. What did it matter? I’d get it all over again the next day, or whenever it was that she may again be hungry for lunch.
By the time I’d made it to Drinkland, Alex looked annoyed and Lily looked wasted. I immediately wondered if Alex somehow knew that I’d been asked out on a date today, by a guy who was not only famous and older, but also a complete and total dickhead. Could he tell? Did he sense it? Should I tell him? No, no need to get into it with him when it was so insignificant. It wasn’t like I was admitting to being interested in some other guy, not like I would actually ever act on it. So there was nothing to gain by mentioning the conversation at all.
“Hey there, fashion girl,” Lily slurred, waving her gin and tonic toward me in a salute. Some of it splashed down the front of her cardigan, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Or should I say, future roomie? Get a drink. We need to have a toast!” It came out sounding like “toath.”
I kissed Alex and sat down next to him.
“Don’t you look hot today!” he said, eyeing my Prada outfit appreciatively. “When did this happen?”
“Oh, today. Right around the time it was all but spelled out that if I didn’t fix my look I might not have a job anymore. Pretty insulting stuff, but I have to say, if you’ve got to put something on every day, this stuff isn’t half bad.
“Hey, listen,
guys. I’m really, really sorry I’m late. The Book took forever tonight, and as soon as I dropped it off at Miranda’s she had me run to the corner deli and pick up some basil.”
“I thought you said she had a cook,” Alex pointed out. “Why couldn’t he do it?”
“She does indeed have a cook. She also has a housekeeper, a nanny, and two children. So I have no idea why I was the one sent out for dinner spices. It was especially annoying since Fifth Avenue doesn’t have any corner delis, and neither does Madison or Park, so I had to go all the way to Lex to find one. But, of course, they didn’t sell basil, so I had to walk up nine blocks until I found an open D’Agostino’s. It took me an extra forty-five minutes. I should just expense a fucking spice rack and start traveling with it wherever I go. But let me tell you, those were a really, really worthwhile forty-five minutes! I mean, think of how much I learned shopping for that basil, how better prepared I am for my future in magazines! I’m on the fast track to becoming an editor now!” I flashed a winning smile.
“To your future!” Lily cried, not detecting a single hint of sarcasm in my diatribe.
“She’s so far gone,” Alex said quietly, watching Lily with the look of someone watching a sick relative sleep in a hospital bed. “I got here on time with Max, who already left, but she must’ve been here for hours already. Either that, or she drinks really fast.”
Lily had always been a big drinker, but it wasn’t weird, because Lily was a big everything. She was the first one to smoke pot in junior high and the first one to lose her virginity in high school and the first to go skydiving in college. She loved anyone and anything that didn’t love her back, so long as it made her feel alive.
“I just don’t understand how you can sleep with him when you know he’s never going to break up with his girlfriend,” I’d said about a guy she’d been secretly seeing our junior year.
“I just don’t understand how you can play by so many rules,” she’d shot back instantly. “Where’s the fun in all your perfectly planned, mapped-out, rule-filled life? Live a little, Andy! Feel something! It’s good to be alive!”
Maybe she had been drinking a little more lately, but I knew that her first-year studies were incredibly stressful, even for her, and that her professors at Columbia were more demanding and less understanding than the ones she’d had wrapped around her finger at Brown. It might not be a bad idea, I thought, signaling to the waitress. Maybe drinking was the way to handle it. I ordered an Absolut and grapefruit juice and took a long, deep swig. It made me feel more sick than anything, because I still hadn’t had time to eat anything except the raisins and the Diet Coke Emily had scraped together for me earlier that day.
“I’m sure she’s just had a rough couple of weeks in school,” I said to Alex as though Lily weren’t sitting with us. She didn’t notice we were talking about her because she was preoccupied giving some yuppie guy at the bar heavy-lidded, come-hither looks. Alex put his arm around me and I snuggled closer on the couch. It felt so good to be near him again—it seemed like it had been weeks.
“I hate to be a buzz-kill, but I really have to get home,” Alex said, pushing my hair back behind my ear. “Will you be OK with her?”
“You have to leave? Already?”
“Already? Andy, I’ve been here watching your best friend drink for the past two hours. I came to see you, but you weren’t here. And now it’s almost midnight, and I still have essays to correct.” He said it calmly, but I could see that he was upset.
“I know, I’m sorry about that, I really am. You know that I would’ve been there if I could’ve helped it at all. You know that—”
“I do know all that. I’m not saying you did anything wrong or that you could’ve done anything differently. I understand. But try to understand where I’m coming from, too, OK?”
I nodded and kissed him, but I felt awful. I pledged to make it up to him, to pick a night and plan something really special for just the two of us. He did, after all, put up with a lot from me.
“So, you won’t even stay over tonight?” I asked hopefully.
“Not unless you need help with Lily. I really need to get home and work on those papers.” He hugged me good-bye, kissed Lily on the cheek, and headed toward the door. “Call me if you need me,” he said as he walked out.
“Hey, why’d Alex leave?” Lily asked, even though she’d been sitting there through the entire conversation. “Is he mad at you?”
“Probably,” I sighed, hugging my canvas messenger bag to my chest. “I’ve been a shit to him lately.” I went to the bar to ask for an appetizer menu and by the time I came back, the Wall Street guy had curled up on the couch next to Lily. He looked to be in his late twenties, but his receding hairline made it impossible to know for sure.
I grabbed her coat and tossed it at her. “Lily, put that on. We’re leaving,” I said while looking at him. He was on the shorter side, and his pleated khakis didn’t help his pudgy figure. And the fact that his tongue was now two inches from my best friend’s ear didn’t make me like him any more.
“Hey, what’s the rush?” he asked in a whiny, nasal voice. “Your friend and I are just getting to know each other.” Lily grinned and nodded, trying to take a gulp from her drink but not realizing her glass was empty.
“Well, that’s very sweet, but it’s time for us to go. What’s your name?”
“Stuart.”
“Nice to meet you, Stuart. Why don’t you give Lily here your number and she can give you a call when she’s feeling a little better—or not. How does that sound?” I flashed him a smile.
“Uh, whatever. No worries. I’ll catch you guys later.” He was on his feet and headed to the bar so fast that Lily hadn’t yet noticed he’d left.
“Stuart and I are getting to know each other, aren’t we, Stu?” She turned to the place where he had sat and looked confused.
“Stuart had to run, Lil. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
I pulled her drab green peacoat on over her sweater and yanked her to her feet, where she swayed precariously until she regained her balance. The air outside was searing and cold and I figured it’d help her sober up.
“I don’t feel so good.” She was slurring again.
“I know, sweetie, I know. Let’s get a cab back to your apartment, OK? Do you think you can make it?”
She nodded and then leaned over very casually and threw up. All over her brown boots, with some of it splashing up the sides of her jeans. If only the Runway girls could see my best friend now. I couldn’t help thinking.
I sat her down on a window ledge that looked reasonably like it wouldn’t have an alarm and ordered her not to move. There was a twenty-four-hour bodega right across the street, and this girl clearly needed some water. When I got back, she’d thrown up again—this time all down her front—and her eyes looked droopy. I’d bought two bottles of Poland Spring, one for her to drink and one for cleaning, but she was too gross now. I dumped one all over her feet to wash away the sick, and half of the second one over her coat. Better to be soaking wet than covered in puke. She was so drunk she didn’t even notice.
It took a little persuading to get a cabbie to let us in with Lily looking in such bad shape, but I promised a really big tip on top of what was sure to be a really big fare. We were going from the Lower East Side to the far Upper West, and I was already figuring out a way to expense what was sure to be a twenty-dollar ride. I could probably just write it off as a trip I had to make in search of something for Miranda. Yes, that would work.
The trip to her fourth-floor walk-up was even less fun than the cab, but she’d become more cooperative after the twenty-five-minute ride, and she even managed to wash herself in the shower after I’d undressed her. I pointed her in the direction of her bed and watched as she collapsed face-down when her knees hit the box spring. I looked down at her, unconscious, and was momentarily nostalgic for college, for all the things we’d done together then. It was fun now, no question, but it would never again
be as carefree as then.
I briefly wondered if Lily might be drinking too much these days. After all, she did seem to be drunk pretty consistently. But when Alex had brought it up the week before, I’d assured him it was because she was still a student, still not living in the real world with real, adult responsibilities (like pouring the perfect Pellegrino!). I mean, it’s not like we hadn’t together done too many shots at Señor Frog’s on spring break or too ambitiously worked our way through three bottles of red wine while celebrating the anniversary of the day we’d first met in eighth grade. Lily had held my hair back as I sat with my face resting on the toilet seat after a postfinals binge, and pulled over four times once while driving me back to my dorm after a night that had included eight rum and Cokes and a particularly horrid karaoke rendition of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” I’d dragged her back to my apartment on the night of her twenty-first birthday and tucked her into my bed, checking her breathing every ten minutes, and finally fell asleep on the floor next to her after I’d made sure she’d live through the night. She had awakened twice that night. The first time was to throw up over the side of the bed—making a sincere effort to make it into the garbage can I’d set up beside it but getting confused and vomiting down the side of my wall instead—and once more to apologize sincerely and tell me she loved me and I was the best friend a girl could have. That’s what friends did: they got drunk together and did stupid things and looked out for one another, right? Or was that all just college fun, rites of passage that had a time and a place? Alex had insisted that this was different, that she was different, but I just didn’t see it that way.
I knew I should’ve stayed with her tonight, but it was nearly two and I had to be at work in five hours. My clothes smelled of vomit and there was no way I could find a single appropriate piece of clothing in Lily’s closet to wear to Runway—especially with my new upgraded look. I sighed and pulled a blanket over her and set her alarm for 7:00 A.M. so just in case she wasn’t too hungover, she’d have a shot at making it to class.