Ohmigod! He was wearing a catsuit. Yes, yes, a denim, one-piece catsuit with tight pants and a belted waist and rolled-up sleeves. And a cape. There was actually a blanket-size fur cape tied twice around his thick neck, and shiny black combat boots the size of tennis rackets adorned his mammoth feet. He looked around thirty-five years old, although all the muscles and the deep tan and the positively chiseled jawbone could have been hiding ten years or adding five. He was flapping his hands at me and motioning for me to get up off the floor. I stood, unable to take my eyes off him, and he turned to examine me immediately.
‘WELL! WHO DO WE HAVE HEEEEERE?’ he bellowed, as best as one can in a falsetto voice. ‘YOU’RE PRETTY, BUT TOO WHOLESOME. AND THE OUTFIT DOES NOTHING FOR YOU!’
‘My name’s Andrea. I’m Miranda’s new assistant.’
He moved his eyes up and down over my body, inspecting every inch. Emily was watching the spectacle with a sneer on her face. The silence was unbearable.
‘KNEE-HIGH BOOTS? WITH A KNEE-LENGTH SKIRT? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? BABY GIRL, IN CASE YOU’RE UNAWARE – IN CASE YOU MISSED THE BIG, BLACK SIGN BY THE DOOR – THIS IS RUNWAY MAGAZINE, THE FUCKING HIIPPEST MAGAZINE ON EARTH. ON EARTH! BUT NO WORRIES, HONEY, NIGEL WILL GET RID OF THAT JERSEY MALL-RAT LOOK YOU’VE GOT GOING SOON ENOUGH.’
He put both his massive hands on my hips and twirled me around. I could feel his eyes looking at my legs and tush.
‘SOON ENOUGH, SWEETIE, I PROMISE YOU, BECAUSE YOU’RE GOOD RAW MATERIAL. NICE LEGS, GREAT HAIR, AND NOT FAT. I CAN WORK WITH NOT FAT. SOON ENOUGH, SWEETIE.’
I wanted to be offended, to pull myself away from the grip he had on my lower body, to take a few minutes and mull over the fact that a complete stranger – and a coworker, no less – had just provided an unsolicited and unflinchingly honest account of my outfit and my figure, but I wasn’t. I liked his kind green eyes that seemed to laugh instead of taunt, but more than that, I liked that I had passed. This was Nigel – single name, like Madonna or Prince – the fashion authority whom even I recognized from TV, magazines, the society pages, everywhere, and he had called me pretty. And said I had nice legs! I let the mall-rat comment slide. I liked this guy.
I heard Emily tell him to leave me alone from somewhere in the background, but I didn’t want him to go. Too late, he was already heading for the door, his fur cape flapping behind him. I wanted to call out, tell him it had been nice to meet him, that I wasn’t offended by what he said and was excited that he wanted to redo me. But before I could say a thing, Nigel whipped around and covered the space between us in two strides, each the length of a long jump. He planted himself directly in front of me, wrapped my entire body with his massive, rippling arms, and pressed me to him. My head rested just below his chest, and I smelled the unmistakable scent of Johnson’s Baby Lotion. And just as I had the presence of mind to hug him back, he flung me backward, engulfed both of my hands in his, and screeched:
‘WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, BABY!’
‘He said what?’ Lily asked as she licked a spoonful of green tea ice cream. She and I had met at Sushi Samba at nine so I could update her on my first day. My parents had grudgingly forked over the emergencies-only credit card again until I got my first paycheck. Spicy tuna rolls and seaweed salads certainly felt like an emergency, and so I silently thanked Mom and Dad for treating Lily and me so well.
‘He said, “Welcome to the dollhouse, baby.” I swear. How cool is that?’
She looked at me, mouth hung open, spoon suspended in midair.
‘You have the coolest job I’ve ever heard of,’ said Lily, who always talked about how she should’ve worked for a year before going back to school.
‘It does seem pretty cool, doesn’t it? Definitely weird, but cool, too. Whatever,’ I said, digging in to my oozing chocolate brownie. ‘It’s not like I wouldn’t rather be a student again than doing any of this.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure you’d just love to work part-time to finance your obscenely expensive and utterly useless Ph.D. You would, wouldn’t you? You’re jealous that I get to bartend in an undergrad pub, get hit on by freshmen until four A.M. every night, and then head to class all day, aren’t you? All of it knowing that if – and that’s a big, fat if – you manage to finish at some point in the next seventeen years, you’ll never get a job. Anywhere.’ She plastered on a big, fake smile and took a swig of her Sapporo. Lily was studying for her Ph.D. in Russian Literature at Columbia and working odd jobs every free second she wasn’t studying. Her grandmother barely had enough money to support herself, and Lily wouldn’t qualify for grants until she’d finished her master’s, so it was remarkable she’d even come out that night.
I took the bait, as I always did when she bitched about her life. ‘So why do you do it, Lil?’ I asked, even though I’d heard the answer a million times.
Lily snorted and rolled her eyes again. ‘Because I love it!’ she sang sarcastically. And even though she’d never admit it because it was so much more fun to complain, she did love it. She’d developed a thing for Russian culture ever since her eighth-grade teacher told her that Lily looked how he had always pictured Lolita, with her round face and curly black hair. She went directly home and read Nabokov’s masterpiece of lechery, never allowing the whole teacher-Lolita reference to bother her, and then read everything else Nabokov wrote. And Tolstoy. And Gogol. And Chekhov. By the time college rolled around, she was applying to Brown to work with a specific Russian lit professor who, upon interviewing seventeen-year-old Lily, had declared her one of the most well read and passionate students of Russian literature he’d ever met – undergrad, graduate, or otherwise. She still loved it, still studied Russian grammar and could read anything in its original, but she enjoyed whining about it more.
‘Yeah, well, I definitely agree that I have the best gig around. I mean, Ralph Lauren? Chanel? Frederic Marteau’s apartment? Quite a first day. I have to say, I’m not quite sure how all of this is going to get me any closer to The New Yorker, but maybe it’s just too early to tell. It’s just not seeming like reality, you know?’
‘Well, anytime you feel like getting back in touch with reality, you know where to find me,’ Lily said, taking her MetroCard out of her purse. ‘If you get a craving for a little ghetto, if you’re just dying to keep it real in Harlem, well, my luxurious two-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot studio is all yours.’
I paid the check and we hugged good-bye, and she tried to give me specific instructions on how to get from Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street to my own sublet all the way uptown. I swore up and down that I understood exactly where to find the L-train and then the 6, and how to walk from the 96th Street stop to my apartment, but as soon as she left, I jumped in a cab.
Just this once, I thought to myself, sinking into the warm backseat and trying not to breathe in the driver’s body odor. I’m a Runway girl now.
I was pleased to discover that the rest of that first week wasn’t much different than the first day. On Friday, Emily and I met in the stark white lobby again at seven A.M., and this time she handed me my own ID card, complete with a picture that I didn’t remember taking.
‘From the security camera,’ she said when I stared at it. ‘They’re everywhere around here, just so you know. They’ve had some major problems with people stealing stuff, the clothes and jewelry called in for shoots; it seems the messengers and sometimes even the editors just help themselves. So now they track everyone.’ She slid her card down the slot and the thick glass door clicked open.
‘Track? What exactly do you mean by “track”?’
She moved quickly down the hallway toward our offices, her hips swishing back and forth, back and forth in the skintight tan Seven cords she was wearing. She’d told me the day before that I should seriously consider getting a pair or ten, as these were among the only jeans or corduroys that Miranda