the Word of God. Each name elicited a nod, a sigh, a smile, a mutter, a head shake, or an eye-roll, although I recognized only a handful of them. Nicole Richie. Karenna Gore Schiff. Natalie Portman. Gisele Bundchen. Kate and Andy Spade. Bret Easton Ellis. Rande Gerber. The entire cast and crew of Sex and the City. Nod, sigh, smile, mutter, shake, roll. It went on for nearly three hours, and by the time they’d finished debating the merits and pitfalls of every single individual – what each might add to the party and, therefore, the coverage or, worse, what they might take away – I was more exhausted than I would have been had I just hung up on Mrs Kaufman. By two o’clock, when Elisa asked if I wanted to grab a coffee with her, I couldn’t say yes fast enough.
We each smoked a cigarette on the walk over and I was struck by the sudden and overwhelming desire to be sharing a plate of falafel on the bench outside UBS with Penelope. Elisa was providing some sort of running commentary on office politics, who really ran the show (her), and who really wanted to (everyone else). I called upon my valuable can-talk-to-anyone-about-anything skill and kept asking her questions while tuning out her answers entirely. It wasn’t until we were settled into a corner table with our coffees – Elisa’s was skim, decaf, and dark – that I actually heard something she said.
‘Oh. My. God. Will you fucking look at that?’ she hissed.
I followed her gaze to a tall, lanky woman who was wearing a very unremarkable pair of jeans and a basic black blazer. She had sort of drab, brownish hair and a fairly mediocre body, and everything about her seemed to say ‘average in every way.’ Elisa’s excitement seemed to indicate the woman was a celebrity, but she didn’t look the least bit familiar to me.
‘Who is it?’ I asked, leaning in conspiratorially. I didn’t really care, but thought I should.
‘Not “who,” “what”!’ she practically scream-whispered. She hadn’t yet moved her eyes from the woman.
‘What?’ I asked, still clueless.
‘What do you mean, “what”? Are you kidding? Do you not see it? Do you need glasses?’ I thought she was mocking me, but she reached into her oversized tote bag and pulled out a pair of wire-rims. ‘Here, put these on and check that out.’
I continued to stare, clueless, until Elisa leaned in closer and said, ‘Look. At. Her. Bag. Just try and tell me it’s not the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen.’
My eyes went to the large leather bag the woman had nesting in the crook of her elbow while she ordered her coffee. When it came time to pay, she rested it on the counter, rooted through it, and pulled out her wallet before returning the bag to her arm. Elisa groaned audibly. It looked like any other bag to me, just bigger.
‘Ohmigod, I can barely stand it, it’s so amazing. It’s the crocodile Birkin. Rarest of them all.’
‘A what?’ I asked. I briefly considered pretending to know what she was talking about, but it felt like too much effort at that point in the day.
She peered at me, examining my face as though she’d just remembered that I was there. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’
I shook my head.
She took a deep breath, sipped her coffee for strength, and placed her hand on my forearm as if to say, Now listen closely because I’m telling you the only piece of information you’ll ever need to know. ‘You’ve heard of Hermès, right?’
I nodded and saw a wave of relief wash over her face. ‘Sure. My uncle wears their ties all the time.’
‘Yes, well, much more important than their ties are their bags. The first huge hit was the Kelly bag, named for Grace Kelly when she began carrying it. But the really big one – about a thousand times more prestigious – is the Birkin.’
She looked at me expectantly and I murmured, ‘Mmm, it looks lovely. Very nice bag.’
Elisa sighed. ‘It sure is. That one’s probably in the twenty-grand range. It’s so worth it.’
I inhaled so quickly that I swallowed wrong and actually choked. ‘It’s how much? You’re joking. That’s impossible! It’s a purse.’
‘It’s not a purse, Bette, it’s a way of life. I would pay that in a heartbeat if I could just get my hands on one.’
‘I can’t imagine people are lining up to spend that much on a bag,’ I pointed out. Which, in my defense, sounded eminently logical at that moment. I couldn’t have known just how stupid I sounded, but luckily Elisa was prepared to inform me.
‘Christ, Bette, you really have no clue, do you? I didn’t think there was anyone left on the planet who wasn’t at least on the list for a Birkin. Put yourself on immediately and maybe – just maybe – you’ll get one in time to give your daughter one someday.’
‘My daughter? Twenty thousand dollars for a bag? You’re kidding.’
At this point Elisa collapsed in frustration and put her head down on the table. ‘No, no, no,’ she moaned, as though in great pain. ‘You just don’t get it. It’s not just a bag. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a statement. It summarizes who you are as a person. It’s a reason for living.’
I laughed at her melodrama. She bolted upright in her seat again and began talking at a rapid-fire pace.
‘I had a friend who fell into a horrible depression after her favorite grandmother died and her boyfriend of three years broke up with her. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t drag herself out of bed. She got fired because she never showed up for work. Huge bags under her eyes. Refused to see anyone. Never answered her phone. When I finally showed up at her apartment after months of this, she confided that she was considering suicide.’
‘How awful,’ I murmured, still racing to keep up with the rapid subject change.
‘Yeah, it was awful. But you know what got her through? I’d stopped at the Hermès store on the way over to her apartment, asked for an update … just in case. And you know what? I was able to tell her when I got there that she was only eighteen months away from her Birkin. Do you believe it? Eighteen months!’
‘What did she say?’ I asked.
‘What do you think she said? She was ecstatic! The last time she’d checked it was going to be five years, but they’d trained a whole new crew of craftsmen and her name was due up in a year and a half. She got in the shower that very moment and agreed to go to lunch with me. That was six months ago. Since then she got her job back and has another boyfriend. Don’t you see? That Birkin gave her a reason to live! You simply cannot kill yourself when you’re that close … it’s just not an option.’
It was my turn to examine her to see if she was joking. She was not. In fact, Elisa looked positively radiant from her retelling of the story, as though it had inspired her to live her own life to the fullest. I thanked her for educating me in the ways of the Birkin and wondered what, exactly, I had gotten myself into. This was a far cry from investment banking, and I clearly had a lot to learn.
It was seven-thirty in the evening on day four of my working at Kelly & Company as a party planner. The newsstand near my apartment had only a single copy of the New York Daily News with Will’s column by the time I headed home after work. I’d been reading ‘Will of the People’ nearly every week since the time I’d learned the alphabet, but for some reason I’d never managed to subscribe to any of the papers that ran it. Of course, I had never broached the subject of the column’s gradual shift to a soapbox for Will’s crotchety rants about every social ‘tragedy’ that had befallen his beloved city, but it was becoming increasingly more difficult to keep my mouth shut.
‘Bette! Great column today, if I do say so myself!’ my doorman, Seamus, howled boozily as he pulled open the door to my building and waved a copy of the paper.