“Out. Now. Or I’m going to have to carry you myself,” he commanded, looking tough and very cute and not a little proud of himself.
Freak Boy threw up his hands and made clucking noises. “I’m outta here. Call me sometime, Lily. You were great last night.” He moved quickly through the bedroom door toward the living room with Alex in pursuit. “Man, she sure as hell is a feisty one,” I heard him say to Alex right before the front door slammed shut, but it didn’t appear that Lily had heard. She had pulled on a T-shirt and managed to pull herself out of bed.
“Lily, who the hell was that? He was the biggest jerk I’ve ever met, not to mention absolutely disgusting.”
She shook her head slowly and appeared to be concentrating very hard, trying to remember where he’d entered her life. “Disgusting. You’re right, he is absolutely disgusting, and I have no idea what happened. I remember you leaving last night and talking to some really nice guy in a suit—we were doing shots of Jaeger, for some reason—and that’s it.”
“Lily, just imagine how drunk you had to be to agree to not only have sex with someone who looks like that, but to bring him back to our apartment!” I thought I was pointing out the obvious, but her eyes widened into surprised realization.
“You think I had sex with him?” she asked softly, refusing to acknowledge what seemed certain.
Alex’s words from a few months before came back to me: Lily did drink more than was normal—all the signs were there. She was missing classes regularly, had gotten arrested, and now had dragged home the scariest-looking mutant of a guy I’d ever laid eyes on. I also remembered the message one of her professors had left on our machine right after finals, something to the effect that while Lily’s final paper had been stellar, she’d missed too many classes and handed things in too late to give her the “A” she deserved. I decided to tread carefully. “Lil, sweetie, I don’t think the problem is the guy. I think it’s the drinking that’s causing it.”
She had begun brushing her hair, and it wasn’t until now that I realized it was already six o’clock on a Friday night and she was just getting out of bed. She wasn’t protesting, so I continued.
“It’s not that I have any issue with drinking,” I said, trying to keep the conversation relatively peaceful. “Clearly, I’m not antidrinking. I just wonder if it’s gotten a little bit out of control lately, you know? Has everything been OK at school?”
She opened her mouth to say something, but Alex popped his head in the door and handed me my shrieking cell phone. “It’s her,” he said and left again. Argghhh! The woman had a very special gift for wrecking my life.
“Sorry,” I said to Lily, looking at the phone warily as the display screamed MP CELL over and over again. “It usually only takes a second for her to humiliate or reprimand me, so hold that thought.” Lily set down her brush and watched me answer.
“Miran—” Again, I’d almost answered the line as though it were her own. “This is Andrea,” I corrected, bracing for the barrage.
“Andrea, you know I expect you there at six-thirty tonight, do you not?” she barked into the phone without a greeting or identification of any sort.
“Oh, um, you had said seven o’clock earlier. I still need to—”
“I said six-thirty before and I’m saying it again now. Siiiiix-thiiiiirty. Get it?” Click. She’d hung up. I looked at my watch. 6:05 P.M. This was a problem.
“She wants me there in twenty-five minutes,” I stated out loud to no one in particular.
Lily looked relieved for the distraction. “Let’s get you moving then, OK?”
“We’re midconversation here, and this is important. What were you going to say before?” The words were right, but it was clear to both of us that my mind was already a million miles away. I’d already decided there was no time to shower, as I now had fifteen minutes to zip myself into black-tie and get into a car.
“Seriously, Andy, you’ve got to move. Go get ready—we’ll do this later.”
And once again I was left with no choice but to move quickly, heart racing, climbing into my gown and running a brush through my hair and trying to match some of the names with the pictures of the evening’s guests that Emily had helpfully printed out earlier. Lily watched the whole thing unwind with mild amusement, but I knew she was worrying about the incident with Freak Boy, and I felt terrible I couldn’t deal with it right then. Alex was on his phone with his little brother, trying to convince him that he really was too young to go to a movie at nine o’clock and that their mother wasn’t cruel in forbidding him to do so.
I kissed him on the cheek as he whistled and told me that he’d probably meet some people for dinner but to call him later if I wanted to meet up, and ran as best one can in stilts back to the living room, where Lily was holding a gorgeous piece of black silk fabric. I looked at her questioningly.
“A wrap, for your big night,” she sang, shaking it out like a bedsheet. “I want my Andy to look just as sophisticated as all the big-money Carolina rednecks she’ll be serving tonight like a common waitress. My grandmother bought it for me years ago to wear to Eric’s wedding. I can’t decide if it’s gorgeous or hideous, but it’s black-tie enough and it’s Chanel, so it should do.”
I hugged her. “Just promise if Miranda kills me for saying the wrong thing that you’ll burn this dress and make sure I’m buried in my Brown sweatpants. Promise me!” She grabbed the mascara wand I was waving about and started working on me.
“You look great, Andy, really you do. Never thought I’d see you in an Oscar gown going to one of Miranda Priestly’s parties, but, hey, you look the part. Now go.”
She handed me the dangling, obnoxiously bright Judith Leiber bag and held the door as I walked into the hallway. “Have fun!”
The car was waiting outside my building and John—who was shaping up to be a first-class pervert—whistled as the driver held the door open for me.
“Knock ’em dead, hottie,” he called after me with an exaggerated wink. “See ya late-night.” He had no idea where I was going, of course, but it was comforting that he thought I’d at least be coming home. Maybe it won’t be that bad, I thought as I settled into the cushy backseat of the Town Car. But then my dress slid up over my knees and the back of my legs touched the ice-cold leather seats, and I lurched forward. Or, maybe, it will suck just as much as I think it will?
The driver jumped out and ran around to open the door for me, but I was standing on the curb by the time he’d made it around. I’d been to the Met once before, on a day trip to New York with my mom and Jill to see some of the tourist sights. I didn’t remember any of the actual exhibits we saw that day—only how much my new shoes had hurt by the time we got there—but I recalled the never-ending white staircase out front and the feeling that I could climb those stairs forever.
The stairs stood where I remembered them but looked different in the haze of dusk. Still accustomed to the short, miserable days of winter, I thought it seemed strange that the sky was just darkening and it was already six-thirty. That night the stairs looked positively regal. They were prettier than the Spanish Steps or the ones outside the library at Columbia, or even the awe-inspiring spread at the Capitol building in D.C. It wasn’t until I’d made it to about the tenth one of those white beauties that I began to loathe them. What cruel, cruel sadist would make a woman in a skintight, floor-length gown and spiked heels climb such a hill of hell? Since I couldn’t very well hate the architect or even the museum official who’d commissioned him, I was forced to hate Miranda, who could usually be blamed for directly or indirectly causing all the misery and bad will in my life.
The top felt like a mile away, and I flashed back to the spinning classes I used to take when I still had time to go to the gym. Some Nazi instructor would sit atop her little bike and bark out orders in perfect military staccato: “Pump, pump, and breathe, breathe! Climb, people, climb that hill. You’re almost at the top! Don’t lose it now! Climb for your life!” I closed my eyes and tr
ied to envision pedaling instead, the wind in my hair, running over the instructor, but climbing, still climbing. Oh, anything to forget the fiery pain that shot from little toe to heel to back again. Ten more steps, that was all that was left, just ten more, oh, god, was that wetness in my shoes blood? Would I have to walk before Miranda in a sweaty Oscar gown and bloody feet? Please, oh please, say that I was almost there and . . . there! The top. The feeling of victory was no less than that of a world-class sprinter who’d just won her first gold medal. I inhaled mightily, clenched my fingers to fight off the urge for a victory cigarette, and reapplied my Fudgsicle Lipsmackers. It was time to be a lady.
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 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’s Ladies’ 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 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 an objet 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 say You 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 think this is strange? Whatever. It’s standard stuff for a Miranda 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 in WWD 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.”