I could tell we weren’t going to see eye to eye on this one. It was clear that Emily was deeply invested in Miranda, in Runway, in all of it, but I just couldn’t understand why. She wasn’t any different from the hundreds of other personal assistants and editorial assistants and assistant editors and associate editors and senior editors and editors in chief of fashion magazines. But I just didn’t understand why. From everything I’d seen so far, each one was humiliated, degraded, and generally abused by their direct superior, only to turn around and do it to those under them the second they got promoted. And all of it so they could say, at the end of the long and exhausting climb, that they’d gotten to sit in the front row at Yves Saint-Laurent’s couture show and had scored a few free Prada bags along the way?
Time to just agree. “I know,” I sighed, surrendering to her insistence. “I just hope you know that you’re doing her the favor by putting up with her shit, not the other way around.”
I expected a quick counter-attack, but Emily grinned. “You know how I just told her like a hundred times that her Thursday hair and makeup were confirmed?”
I nodded. She looked positively giddy.
“I was totally lying. I didn’t call a single person or confirm anything!” She practically sang the last part.
“Emily! Are you serious? What are you going to do now? You just swore up and down that you’d personally confirmed it.” For the first time since starting work, I wanted to hug the girl.
“Andy, be serious. Do you honestly think that any sane person is going to say no to doing her hair and makeup? It could make his whole career—he’d be crazy to turn her down. I’m sure the guy was planning to do it all along. He was probably just rearranging his travel plans or something. I don’t have to confirm with him, because I’m that sure he’ll do it. How could he not? She’s Miranda Priestly!”
Now I thought I would cry, but instead I just said, “So what do I need to know to hire this new nanny? I should probably get started right away.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, still looking delighted with her own cleverness. “That’s probably a good idea.”
The first girl I interviewed for the nanny position looked positively shell-shocked.
“Oh my god!” she’d howled when I asked her over the phone if she’d mind coming to the office to meet with me. “Oh my god! Are you serious? Oh my god!”
“Um, is that a yes or a no?”
“God, yes. Yes, yes, yes! To Runway? Oh my god. Wait until I tell my friends. They’ll die. They’ll absolutely die. Just tell me where to be and when.”
“You understand that Miranda’s away right now, so you won’t be meeting with her, right?”
“Yep. Totally.”
“And you also know that the job is being a nanny to Miranda’s two daughters, right? That it won’t have anything to do with Runway?”
She sighed as if to resign herself to the sad, unfortunate fact. “Yes, of course. A nanny, I totally get it.”
Well, she hadn’t really gotten it, because even though she looked the part (tall, impeccably groomed, reasonably well dressed, and seriously underfed), she kept asking which parts of the job would require her to be at the office.
I shot her a specialty Withering, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Um, none. Remember, we talked about this? I’m just doing some initial screening for Miranda, and we just happen to be doing it in the office. But that’s it. Her twins don’t live here, you know?”
“Right, right,” she’d agreed, but I’d already nixed her.
The next three the agency had waiting in the reception area weren’t much better. Physically, all fit the Miranda profile—the agency really did know exactly what she wanted—but not one had what I’d be looking for in a nanny who’d be taking care of my future niece or nephew, the standard I’d set for the process. One had a master’s in child development from Cornell but glazed over when I tried to describe the subtle ways this job might be different from others she’d held. Another had dated a famous NBA player, which she felt gave her “insight into celebrity.” But when I’d asked her if she’d ever worked with the children of celebrities, she’d instinctively wrinkled her nose and informed me that “famous people’s kids always have, like, major issues.” Nixed. The third and most promising had grown up in Manhattan and had just graduated from Middlebury and wanted to spend a year as a nanny to save some money for a trip to Paris. When I asked if that meant she spoke French, she nodded. The only problem was that she was a city girl through and through and therefore didn’t have a driver’s license. Was she willing to learn? I’d asked. No, she’d answered. She didn’t believe that the streets needed another car clogging them. Nix number three. I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out a tactful way of telling Miranda that if a girl is attractive, athletic, comfortable with celebrity, lives in Manhattan, has a driver’s license, can swim, has an advanced degree, speaks French, and is completely and entirely flexible with her time, then chances are she does not want to be a nanny.
She must have read my mind, because the phone rang immediately. I did a few calculations and realized that Miranda would have just landed at de Gaulle, and a quick glance at the second-by-second itinerary Emily had so painstakingly constructed showed she would now be in the car on her way to the Ritz.
“Miranda Pri—”
“Emily!” she practically shrieked. I wisely decided now wasn’t the time to correct her. “Emily! The driver did not give me my usual phone, and as a result I don’t have anyone’s phone number. This is unacceptable. Entirely unacceptable. How am I supposed to conduct business with no phone numbers? Connect me immediately to Mr. Lagerfeld.”
“Yes, Miranda, please hold just a moment.” I jabbed the hold button and called out to Emily for help, although I would’ve had better luck simply eating the receiver whole than actually locating Karl Lagerfeld in less time than it took Miranda to get so annoyed that she’d smash down the phone and keep calling to ask, “Where the hell is he? Why can’t you find him? Do you not know how to use a phone?”
“She wants Karl,” I called over to Emily. The name immediately sent her flying, racing, tearing through papers all over her desk.
“OK, listen. We have twenty to thirty seconds. You take Biarritz and the driver, I’ll get Paris and the assistant,” she called, her fingers already flying across the keypad. I double-clicked on the thousand-plus name contact list that we shared on our hard drives and found exactly five numbers I’d have to call: Biarritz main, Biarritz second main, Biarritz studio, Biarritz pool, and Biarritz driver. A quick glance over the other listings for Karl Lagerfeld indicated that Emily had a grand total of seven, and there were still more numbers for New York and Milan. We were dead before we started.
I’d tried Biarritz main and was in the middle of dialing Biarritz second main when I saw that the flashing red light had stopped blinking. Emily announced that Miranda had hung up, in case I hadn’t noticed. Only ten or fifteen seconds had passed—she was feeling particularly impatient today. Naturally, the phone rang again immediately, and Emily responded to my pleading puppy eyes and answered it. She didn’t get halfway through her canned greeting before she was nodding gravely and trying to reassure Miranda. I was still dialing and had—miraculously—made it to Biarritz pool, where I was currently talking to a woman who didn’t speak a single word, a single syllable, of English. Maybe this was the obsession with speaking French?
“Yes, yes, Miranda. Andrea and I are calling right now. It should only be a few more seconds. Yes, I understand. No, I know it’s frustrating. If you’ll allow me to just put you on hold for ten seconds or so, I’m sure we’ll have him on the line. OK?” She punched “hold” and kept right on jabbing numbers. I heard her trying in what sounded like horrifically accented and broken French to talk to someone who appeared to not know the name Karl Lagerfeld. We were dead. Dead. I was getting ready to hang up on the crazy French woman who was shrieking into the receiver when I saw the flashing red light go out again. E
mily was still frantically dialing.
“She’s gone!” I called with the urgency of an EMT performing emergency CPR.
“Your turn to get it!” she screamed back, fingers flying, and sure enough, the phone rang again.
I picked it up and didn’t even attempt to say anything, since I knew the voice on the other end would speak up immediately. It did.
“Ahn-dre-ah! Emily! Whoever the hell I’m talking to . . . why is it that I’m speaking with you and not with Mr. Lagerfeld? Why?”
My first instinct was to remain silent, since it didn’t appear that the verbal barrage was over, but as usual, my instincts were wrong.
“Hell-ooo? Anyone there? Is the process of connecting one phone call to another really too difficult for both my assistants?”
“No, Miranda, of course not. I’m sorry about this—” My voice was shaking a little, but I couldn’t get it under control. “—it’s just that we can’t seem to find Mr. Lagerfeld. We’ve already tried at least eight—”
“Can’t seem to find him?” she mimicked in a high-pitched voice. “What do you mean, you ‘can’t seem to find’ him?”
What part of that simple five-word sentence did she not comprehend, I wondered. Can’t. Seem. To. Find. Him. Seemed rather clear and precise to me: We can’t fucking find him. That is why you’re not talking to him. If you can find him, then you can talk to him. A million barbed responses raced around my head, but I could only sputter like a first-grader who’d been singled out by the teacher for talking in class.
“Um, well, Miranda, we’ve called all of the numbers we have listed for him, and he doesn’t appear to be at any of them,” I managed.
“Well of course he’s not!” She was almost screaming now, that precious, well-guarded cool was precariously close to collapsing. She took a deep, exaggerated breath and said calmly, “Ahn-dre-ah. Are you aware that Mr. Lagerfeld is in Paris this week?” I felt like we were doing English As a Second Language lessons.
“Of course, Miranda. Emily has been trying all the numbers in—”
“And are you aware that Mr. Lagerfeld said he’d be available on his mobile phone while he was in Paris?” Every muscle in her throat strained to keep her voice even and calm.
“Well, no, we don’t have a cell number listed in the directory, so we didn’t know that Mr. Lagerfeld even had a cell phone. But Emily is on the phone with his assistant right now, and I’m sure she’ll have that number in just a minute.” Emily gave me the thumbs-up right before she scribbled something and exclaimed, “Merci, oh yes, thank you, I mean, merci” over and over again.
“Miranda, I have the number right here. Would you like me to connect you now?” I could feel my chest puff out with confidence and pride. A job well done! A superior performance under the most pressure-filled conditions. Never mind that my really cute peasant blouse that had been complimented by two—not one, but two—fashion assistants was now sporting sweat stains under the arms. Who cared? I was about to get this stark raving mad lunatic of an international caller off my back, and I was thrilled.
“Ahn-dre-ah?” It sounded like a question, but I was only concentrating on trying to figure out a pattern for indiscriminate name mix-ups. At first I’d thought she did it deliberately in an attempt to belittle and humiliate us even more, but then I figured out that she was probably quite satisfied with the levels of belittlement and humiliation we endured and so she did it only because she couldn’t be bothered to keep straight details so inane as her two assistants’ names. Emily had confirmed this by saying that she called her Emily about half the time but called her a mixture of Andrea and Allison—the assistant before her—the other half. I felt better.
“Yes?” Squeaking again. Dammit! Wasn’t it possible for me to have just a tiny bit of dignity with this woman?
“Ahn-dre-ah, I don’t know what all the fuss is over finding Mr. Lagerfeld’s mobile number when I have it right here. He gave it to me just five minutes ago, but we were disconnected and I can’t seem to dial correctly.” She said the last part as though the entire world was to blame for this irritation and inconvenience except for herself.
“Oh. You, um, you have the number? And you knew he was on that number the whole time?” I was saying it for Emily’s benefit, and it only served to enrage Miranda even more.
“Am I not making myself perfectly clear here? I need you to connect me to 03.55.23.56.67.89. Immediately. Or is that too difficult?”
Emily was slowly shaking her head in disbelief as she crumpled up the number we’d both just fought so hard to get.
“No, no, Miranda, of course that’s not too difficult. I’ll connect you right away. Hold just a minute.” I hit “conference,” dialed the numbers, heard an older man shout “Allo!” into the phone, and hit conference again. “Mr. Lagerfeld, Miranda Priestly, you’re connected,” I stated like one of those manual operators from the Little House on the Prairie days. And instead of putting the whole call on mute and then hitting speaker so Emily and I could listen in on the call together, I just hung up. We sat in silence for a few minutes as I tried to refrain from badmouthing Miranda immediately. Instead, I mopped some dampness from my forehead and took long, deep breaths. She spoke first.
“So, let me just get this straight. She had his number the entire time but just didn’t know how to dial it?”
“Or maybe she just didn’t feel like dialing it,” I added helpfully, always enthusiastic for the chance to team up against Miranda, especially considering how rare the opportunities were with Emily.
“I should’ve known,” she said, shaking her head like she was horribly disappointed with herself. “I really should’ve known that. She always calls to have me connect her to people who are staying in the next room, or who are in a hotel two streets over. I remember I thought that was the weirdest thing, calling from Paris to New York to have someone connect you to someone in Paris. Now it just seems normal, of course, but I can’t believe I didn’t see that one coming.”
I was about to run to the dining room for lunch, but the phone rang again. Operating under the lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice theory, I decided to be a sport and answer the phone.
“Miranda Priestly’s office.”
“Emily! I am standing in the pouring rain on the rue de Rivoli and my driver has vanished. Vanished! Do you understand me? Vanished! Find him immediately!” She was hysterical, my very first time hearing her that way, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it was the only time.
“Miranda, just a moment. I have his number right here.” I turned to scan my desk for the itinerary I’d set down a moment earlier, but all I saw were papers, old Bulletins, stacks of back issues. Only three or four seconds had passed, but I felt as if I were standing right next to her, watching as the rain poured down on her Fendi fur and caused the makeup to melt down the side of her face. Like she could just reach out and slap my face, tell me I’m a worthless piece of shit with zero talent, no skill set, a complete and total loser. There wasn’t time to talk myself down, remind myself that this was merely a human being (theoretically) who wasn’t happy to be standing in the rain and was taking it out on her assistant 3,600 miles away. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.
“Ahn-dre-ah! My shoes are ruined. Do you hear me? Are you even listening? Find my driver now!”
I was at risk of some inappropriate emotion—I could feel the knot in the back of my throat, the tightening of the muscles in the back of my neck, but it was too early to tell if I would laugh or cry. Either one: not good. Emily must have sensed as much, because she leapt out of her seat and handed me her copy of the itinerary. She’d even highlighted the driver’s contact numbers, three in all, one for the car phone, his mobile phone, and his home phone. Naturally.
“Miranda, I’m going to need to put you on hold while I call him. Can I put you on hold?” I didn’t wait for a response, which I knew would drive her crazy, and threw the call on hold. I dialed Paris again. The good news was the dri
ver picked up on the first ring of the first number I tried. The bad news was he didn’t speak English. Although I’d never been self-destructive before, I couldn’t help but smash my forehead firmly into the Formica. Three times of this, and Emily had picked up the line at her desk. She’d resorted to screaming, not so much in attempt to make the driver understand her own bad French, but simply because she was trying to impress upon him the urgency of the current situation. New drivers always took a little breaking in, mostly because they foolishly believed that if Miranda had to wait forty-five seconds to a minute extra, she’d be all right. This was precisely the notion of which Emily and I were to disabuse them.
We both put our heads down a few minutes later, after Emily had managed to insult the driver enough that he’d hightailed it back to where he’d left Miranda three or four minutes earlier. I wasn’t particularly hungry for lunch anymore, a phenomenon that made me nervous. Was Runway rubbing off? Or was it just the adrenaline and nerves mixing together to guarantee no appetite? That was it! The starvation so endemic at Runway was not, in fact, self-induced; it was merely the physiological response of bodies that were so consistently terrified and all-around anxiety-ridden that they were never actually hungry. I vowed to look into this a little more and perhaps explore the possibility that Miranda was smarter than all of this and had deliberately created a persona so offensive on every level that she literally scared people skinny.
“Ladies, ladies, ladies! Pick those heads up off those desks! Can you imagine Miranda seeing you now? She wouldn’t be very happy!” James sang from the doorway. He had slicked back his hair using some greasy, waxy stuff called Bed Head (“Hot name—how can you resist?”) and was wearing some sort of skintight football jersey with the number 69 on both the front and the back. As always, a picture of subtlety and understatement.