Imogen felt a bolt of newfound energy as she bounded out of bed the first morning of Fashion Week. The day’s schedule was packed, beginning at nine a.m. She perused the bright red Fashion Calendar pages folded into her pale blue Smythson diary in the cab to Lincoln Center, making circles around fifty-seven out of three-hundred-plus events she knew she would attend in the next eight days.
It was starting to feel like fall. Imogen pulled her jacket tighter around her middle and breathed in crisp air, wet leaves and diesel punctuated by something mysterious and sweet, not unlike maple syrup. She took in the scene as she exited the taxi and approached the grand fountain in front of the complex. Photographers hungrily milled about the open space looking for someone famous or elaborately dressed to shoot. Street-style posers skulked behind them, begging to be snapped. If there was a polar opposite to DISRUPTTECH! this was it. In place of soft-bellied men in flannel were statuesque women in stilettos and dark sunglasses.
If you were someone who belonged at Fashion Week, you strode right up the stairs toward the head of security, Max Yablonsky, and his squad, and looked them directly in the eye. Citadel Security was a crew of Queens- and Brooklyn-bred tough guys right out of a story by Nick Pileggi. Yablonsky knew how to weed out the gate-crashers who kept their eyes down, focused on their iPhones or fumbling in their bags for anything that resembled an invite, but was actually a receipt from the nail salon.
Flanking Yablonsky were the brothers Tom and Mike Carney, a former court officer and former transit police officer, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the entrance to Fashion Week, who would engage in endless banter while on their feet for ten hours at a time.
Max wrapped Imogen in a bear hug so tight she was overwhelmed by his scent of cigars, sweat and Old Spice.
‘How’s my favorite fashion gal?’ he asked. It was a wonderful thing to be referred to as a gal, even by a man old enough to be her father.
‘I’m great, Max. How are the kids?’ Yablonsky, a high school dropout, had put four kids through Georgetown and Notre Dame as the leading security provider for everything fashion-related in New York City. Imogen adored Max. But she knew mentioning his children was a mistake that could cost her the next fifteen minutes.
‘Can I look at the new pictures on my way back out, darling?’ She squeezed his arm. ‘I want to make sure I get a seat.’
‘Imogen Tate. You know they always have you in the front row.’ She winked at him and strode past the Carney brothers.
The one thing DISRUPTTECH! and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week did have in common was the branding. Everywhere you looked there were floor-to-ceiling banners and branded kiosks. There was a MAC pop-up makeup salon. Two new Mercedes S-Class sedans, with models casually draped across their hoods flanking a small bar area serving $17 miniature bottles of Piper Heidsieck champagne and $8 espressos. Bins filled with Smartwaters and teeny-tiny cans of Diet Coke dotted the room. A wall of Samsung Galaxy tablets broadcast the shows in a corner. A second smart wall updated instantly in real time with Instagrams from the shows. My photos need to be on that wall, Imogen thought. She was beginning to see things differently.
In the mid-2000s Fashion Week went entirely digital with iPad check-in. Clipboard girls checking invites were replaced by a legion of iPad girls, scrolling through lists of names on their shiny screens. Row after row of Fashion GPS machines allowed you to scan a bar code to receive your seating assignment. Where it used to be a scrum of editors and buyers crowded around a single entryway, now the landscape was as efficient as airline check-in. Imogen strode over to the GPS terminal and expertly scanned her printed bar code for the Senbi Farshid show, glancing around to see who else was in the room as she waited for her confirmation to print. Just coming through the doors in a sea of bodyguards were Olivia Wilde and Jessica Chastain, both in full looks from Marc Jacobs. Sofia Coppola walked slowly by herself behind the movie stars, understated and beautiful as always. As junior reporters mobbed the two starlets, Coppola strode right up to her own GPS and quietly printed her ticket. An even larger crowd stampeded toward the entrance. Who could that be for? Imogen wondered. Gwyneth Paltrow perhaps? No, Leandra, the Man Repeller, an Instagram-famous blogger with delicious street style.
A reality star was trailed by a camera crew, her overfilled face bursting with pride that she had arrived at Fashion Week when only a year earlier she had been the bored bride of a celebrity podiatrist in California. Small women with big handbags threw elbows to scuttle in front of Asian men in large black overcoats. Everywhere you looked there was fur, real and faux, despite the temperature hovering above fifty.
Imogen didn’t even bother to glance down when her little slip of paper popped excitedly from its slot like a lottery ticket. She knew she would be in the front row, eleventh seat in. All the magazine editors sat in the front row, since it put them within breathing distance of the clothes. Plucking a design off one runway and then pairing it with something from another show and then translating them into a photo shoot for the magazine would set the bar for how these clothes would be worn by women around the world. Photographs of clothes never did them justice. You needed to see how they moved on a model, what the color did under the lights and how the fabric felt to the touch. The attention to detail, even the music that accompanied the models down the runway. All crafted an emotional and visual message. That was how you knew what to include on the pages of a magazine. It was a mysterious and complicated process, one that Imogen believed began in her front-row seat.
Plus, this way the designer could spy on the editors. The black cloth that separated the runway from the staging area was see-through if you pressed your face against it. If an editor didn’t smile, a wounded designer would conspiratorially pull ads from her book. Imogen would go backstage afterward to do her obligatory oooohhs and ahhhhhs. Molly Watson was the one who had taught her the importance of going backstage at every single show to congratulate the designer.
‘Lord knows you didn’t want to sit at their show for three hours,’ she had told Imogen. ‘At the very least they need to see your face and know you were there.’ Most designers were exhausted after a show but would hold court for their loyal subjects. Valentino was the exception. The Italian sat alone, off in a corner, slowly sipping a glass of champagne.
Imogen was caught off guard walking into the Senbi show. Two hands grasped either side of her buttocks and gave them a very firm squeeze. ‘You saucy minx!’ She turned to see Bridgett Hart.
‘When did you get in?’ Imogen hugged her.
‘Three hours ago on the red-eye.’ Her old friend and roommate, now the most sought-after stylist in Hollywood, had been in Los Angeles for two weeks pulling dresses for a very cool and chic seventeen-year-old starlet who was expected to be nominated for an Academy Award in just a couple of months. Bridgett always developed a kind of bonhomie with her clients. She wasn’t just their stylist, she was their girlfriend. ‘You’re seeing the most beautiful, most private and most insecure women in the world completely bare,’ she once told Imogen. ‘They need to feel like it’s their best friend sitting in the room.’
Bridgett looked no worse for the travel. She was a champ at sleeping on planes and Imogen hadn’t seen her look at all tired since she discovered thrice-weekly oxygen facials in 1999 and somehow expertly wrote the expense off on her taxes each year. She’d been scouted as a model at seventeen, while living in the suburbs of Toronto. The scout flew her to New York, where she lived with Eileen Ford for her first year before she positively blew up. They’d given her the model nickname Birdie, not because she looked particularly avian, but because shoots made her so nervous she barely ate a thing.
Imogen first met her on a shoot for Moda and soon after they moved in together.
Birdie was the first black girl to land both a CoverGirl beauty campaign and a Vogue cover. Her body was disarming, featuring curves that Victoria’s Secret was always dying to get in their catalog (even though she kept turning them down!). Her green cat eyes loved the camera. But it was her warm wide smile that took over her face and kept getting her gigs. She had hated being a model. Hated the long hours, the overnight flights, the skeevy photographers asking her to fuck them all the time. She confided in Imogen that she never planned to have a career as a celebrity stylist; it had simply become her second act. Years of being photographed had taught her exactly what would and wouldn’t work on women’s bodies. Soon after she started styling she began booking major campaigns, including Versace, Valentino, Max Mara. The Italians loved her. She was great to look at and talented to boot. Ralph Lauren had begged her to work for him full-time as his creative eye, but for Birdie, one client was never enough of a challenge.
Early on in her career, the chairman of LVMH had pulled her aside to give her some financial advice. She did everything he said and became one of their first shareholders, building herself a small fortune.
Imogen’s friend was the embodiment of someone who lived life to the fullest even during its most mundane moments. To this day, Bridgett sent Imogen a postcard every single time she landed in a new city. Bridgett was outspoken and outrageous, which made her a hell of a lot of fun. She was also loyal, sometimes to a fault, particularly when it came to men who didn’t deserve her.
‘I assume I get the pleasure of sitting next to you?’ Imogen said, linking her arm through Bridgett’s.
‘I wouldn’t expect any less.’ Bridgett grinned. Publicists had been putting the two together in the front row for years now.
‘What is your seat, darling?’ Imogen asked.
‘Twelve A.’
‘And so I must be eleven A. Brilliant. I can’t wait to hear all about Hollywood.’
‘And I can’t wait to hear all about Eve!’ The two women laughed at the movie reference like the girls they were when they met twenty years earlier. Imogen had managed to fill her friend in on what was happening in the office in only a few brief emails but emails couldn’t possibly tell the whole story.
They easily glided past one of the senior publicists at the entrance to the main hallway. At the entryway to the Main Stage, the runway where all of the major shows were held, a diminutive iPad girl surveyed the crowd with a lazy eye.
‘Ticket?’ she said in a nasally twang, glancing down at her screen. The two women handed their small passes over. ‘Ms Hart, follow me to your seat, twelve A. Ms Tate, please wait one moment and someone will escort you to VIP Standing.’
The words didn’t make any sense to Imogen. She had a ticket in the front row and there was nothing at all VIP about standing. She had never stood at a show. And this show of all shows! She was here as a favor. She was just here to support her friend. Imogen was the first editor to put Senbi’s collection on a cover model. She had helped to put her on the map.
‘Is Senbi playing a hilarious prank? I always sit in seat eleven A, not just for this show, but for all the shows. Please take me to my seat now.’ Bridgett had assumed Imogen was directly behind her and was now absorbed into the paparazzi flashbulbs.
iPad girl rolled her stubby finger along her screen.
‘I believe Orly is in seat eleven A. You know Orly. She has the best of all the fashion blogs – FashGrrrrrl-dot-com. Actually. Oh, Orly, HELLLLLLLLO!’
Behind Imogen was the aforementioned Orly. The girl couldn’t have been older than twelve. Her chin-length bright blue hair turned out violently at the ends as if the Flying Nun and Ken Kesey had borne a love child. She wore a green cape over an orange Senbi onesie with seven-inch Stella McCartney wedges. She looked wonderful and startling all at once. Frameless glasses with a small camera attached to the right lens perched on her pixie face.
‘Love your work,’ Orly said to Imogen as iPad girl gushed over the diminutive elf, begging her for an autograph. Orly leaned in and kissed the check-in wench’s iPad, leaving a bright pink lip mark as a signature, before sashaying to seat 11A.
‘Imogen Tate doesn’t stand.’ Whose voice was that? Low and husky, vaguely condescending. Eve. How long had she been standing there, watching?
‘She can take my front-row seat,’ Eve said loudly. She repeated herself. ‘I want to give my front-row seat to Imogen Tate.’
She would rather stand than accept help from Eve, who was now breathing heavily onto her neck.
‘I do stand now, Eve. I am so excited to stand … right now.’ Imogen straightened up to the full five feet eleven inches she commanded in her heels. ‘We’re all about the consumer and the consumer is in the standing section. I want to be where the readers are. I want to see how they react to the clothes. I’ll be backstage with Senbi after the show anyway. I’ll see you later.’
The girl with the iPad, still recovering from her brush with Orly’s greatness, forgot her social graces when dealing with anyone with a VIP Standing ticket. ‘Move over along the wall. We’ll let you in right before the show starts.’
As Imogen carefully found her way to the edge of the hallway, a security guard shouted, ‘Along the wall! Move it along the wall!’ This was what prison would be like; I feel like I’m in Orange Is the New Black, Imogen thought.
The scrum of VIP Standing ticket holders was a little rougher around the edges than the line of people filing past them. They had more hairs out of place. Their eyeliner was just a little heavier and their designer outfits hung less than expertly on their bodies, announcing the fact that they purchased them at bargain prices at the sample sale rather than at the department store. The guests swooshing past iPad girl didn’t just have better clothes than the people in VIP Standing, they had better bone structures.
Imogen ducked her head so that none of the seated ticket holders would see her as she shuffled dutifully toward the wall. The more people that came, the hotter it got in the hallway. Imogen could feel drops of sweat begin to pool at her temples as she picked up on bits and pieces of conversation.
‘This is my first show, I am so excited.’
‘Did you hear about the streaker at the Prabal show?’
‘What’s going on here?’
‘How long will we have to wait?’
‘Did you text Alexandra? If she knew we were out here she would lose her shit.’
‘They’re, like, not letting anyone in at all?’
‘And you of all people not being let in.’ Imogen craned her neck but didn’t recognize who ‘you of all people’ was.
‘Should I eat this pretzel?’
‘Is that yogurt on it or chocolate?’
‘Chocolate.’
‘Then no.’
A frizzy-haired woman dropped her water bottle on Imogen’s toe and furiously apologized just as the iPad girl walked over to tell them they were finally allowed to come in. Imogen’s eyes darted immediately to the front row.
Bridgett was sitting opposite Orly, with Jennifer Lawrence, her number-one client, to her left, and Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley on her right. They were just a few seats away from Jessica Chastain and Olivia Wilde. Across from them the front seats were filled with girls Orly’s age and maybe five years older, all wearing the same funny glasses and balancing laptops on their knees. At the very end of that row was Eve, wearing the same glasses. Eve’s glasses had yellow temples to match her canary cocktail dress. Next to Eve sat Massimo in his wheelchair. He had an appropriately horrified look on his face, which told Imogen exactly what he thought about everything happening in that room.
‘Bloggers and YouTube stars,’ she heard a voice say behind her. Imogen turned her head to see Isobel Harris, a longtime buyer for Barneys. She shifted her bag to her other shoulder to be able to lean over in the sea of standing bodies to give her a hug. God, Isobel must be in her fifties by now, but she looked incredible in a black blazer and gray cigarette pants. Imogen had known Issy since before she met her husband, who was now a famous playwright. Back then he was a waiter at Balthazar, and Isobel, ten years his senior, was in marketing at Chanel. She’d turned around to look at his ass when he brought her another glass of champagne. He caught her and that was it for the two of them.
‘We have been usurped, darling. All the designers want those kids in the front row. Look how they did the seating arrangements.’ Isobel pointed with a perfectly sculpted but polish-free index finger to the row with Anna, André, Bridgett, Jennifer, Jessica and Olivia. ‘There on the one side you have anyone worth documenting. And on the other you have the documenters. They’re all live-streaming this show right onto their sites with their Google Glass.’
‘What is a Google Glass?’ Imogen abandoned the need to act like she had any idea what was going on.
‘Those ridiculous glasses they’re all wearing. They’re called Google Glass … not glasses, Glass. They’re a smartphone in an eyeglass. They take pictures and videos when you talk to them or tap on their sides. Google gave them to thirty fashion influencers for Fashion Week.’
‘How do you know all this?’
Isobel shrugged. ‘It was in Women’s Wear Daily pretty much all summer,’ she said, before catching herself and remembering how Imogen had spent her summer. ‘I’m an idiot. I should have asked you the second I saw you. How are you feeling?’
‘I’m wonderful. I really am. I feel great. I do feel a little bit like I am playing catch-up here.’ It was the first time Imogen had admitted to anyone outside of her inner circle that she didn’t have a perfectly capable grasp of what was happening in the industry.
Isobel gave her another hug. The two women were jostled by the other standees, some of whom Imogen recognized as other veteran buyers and fashion journalists, people who would normally have a seat. As the lights blinked, signaling five minutes until showtime, Isobel saw Addison Cao, the wily reporter from the Women’s Wear Daily’s Eye column, beelining for her.
‘Whaaaaaaaaat is Imogen Tate doing in the standing section?’ he interrupted, his voice rising a pitch on each word’s final syllable.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ Imogen said, playfully reaching out to tickle Addison’s ample midsection. Only a gossip columnist could get away with being so rotund in this industry. No one was judging him or putting pictures of him in the gossip pages.
‘I lost seven pounds on a juice cleanse,’ Addison said, allowing ‘cleanse’ to sound like ‘clanze’ as he smoothed his palms down the front of his pressed trousers.
The two of them proceeded with the stock complaints of Fashion Week that everyone traded at these kinds of things.
‘The schedule is too crowded this year.’
‘Nothing is going to start on time.’
‘After the shows I am absolutely going to the ashram.’
With the niceties out of the way, Imogen leaned in to whisper in Addison’s ear, inhaling his scent of body odor and hash browns. ‘Do you want to know why I am really back here?’ she purred. Addison had a definite preference for young Asian men, but everyone liked a little sexy talk right into his ear.
‘I do.’ He breathed heavily.
Imogen launched into the same bullshit she’d made up at the door when she ran into Eve. She said she wanted to see the show from the consumer’s perspective, not the editor’s. ‘I’ve spent fifteen years in that front row. It’s gotten dull. Let the Orlys of the world experience it for once in their lives. I want to see what my readers see and my readers are not going to be sitting in the front row.’ Imogen borrowed some of the talking points from Eve’s DISRUPTTECH! talk. ‘Glossy is a multimedia brand that caters directly to the consumer who loves fashion just as much as we do. In this day and age the magazine editor needs to look at things from a different perspective.’ She had no idea if she even meant half the words coming out of her mouth, but they kept coming. Addison had no compunction about using a pen and paper. He furiously scribbled away in his reporter’s notebook.
‘I just adore you, Imogen Tate.’ He slammed the notepad shut with the efficiency of a vise. ‘Can we take a selfie together?’ Imogen smiled and nodded, wrapping her arm as far as it would go around Addison’s midsection. He reached his arm into the air to take a photo from above.
‘You don’t get a double chin if you do it this way,’ he said.
‘Very smart, Addison.’
Like everyone else in the room, Imogen readied her iPhone as the house lights went down. If someone were to travel forward in time from just ten years earlier, what would they think seeing all these people doing the exact same thing, the bright faces of their phones leveled in front of them as they ignored reality in favor of their screens? It wasn’t too long ago that the unwritten protocol of a fashion show dictated that no cameras were allowed.
‘VIP Standing’ could have been worse. It was true that from this vantage point she was actually able to photograph the entire runway and the faces of the A-listers along the front row. She began clicking away at the first look. Tilly had taught her all about hashtags, reminding her that it would be important for her to tag @Glossy, the site’s main Twitter and Instagram feed, and to use the tags #MercedesBenzFashionWeek and the general catchall #Fashion. Tilly also instructed her to be creative.
‘Have fun with a hashtag. Instagram followers love creativity.’
And so Imogen created the tag #ScenesFromTheBackRow and took upward of thirty pictures, one for each model who came down the runway. She commented on cut and color, using three different filters that complimented the lighting and the distance, giving the white runway a magical aura. Eve must have been looking at her Twitter feed on her laptop, or perhaps somehow she could see it on the Glass contraption out of the corner of her eye. Imogen could see her craning her neck to try to see where Imogen was standing, but the lights were so bright on the runway the rest of the room was bathed in darkness.
Imogen didn’t wait for the last walk-through, when all the models would come out onto the catwalk together and Senbi would take her bows at the end of the stage. Like Theseus winding through the labyrinth, she found her way through ‘VIP Standing’ into ‘Mediocre Standing’ and then into ‘Shouldn’t Even Be Allowed in Here to Stand Standing’ and began walking toward the back of the stage, slipping quietly behind a curtain. On the other side, a security guard, one of Max’s guys, ran over to examine the breach.
‘Ms Tate. Why didn’t you just come through the runway entrance?’
She placed a hand on the small of his back. ‘Oh, I wanted to avoid the bun fight on the runway. Wanted to try to make it back here first so I could congratulate Senbi.’
‘Of course, Ms Tate.’
By the time Eve joined the rest of the crowd walking in from the runway, Imogen was chatting and laughing with Senbi, who seemingly had no idea where Imogen had been forced to perch during the presentation. Imogen marveled at the woman’s beauty each and every time they met. Genes from Vietnam and Egypt had constructed themselves in such a perfect way, making for almond-shaped eyes and skin the color of cocoa flecked through with gold. Eve glared at the two of them as they examined the inseam of a pair of palazzo pants. Behind them hairdressers and makeup artists furiously prepared models for the next show before placing a black bag over their heads, Abu Ghraib-like, so that the models could be dressed without getting makeup all over the clothes. One hairstylist was determined to build a foot-high elaborate updo fashioned around pieces of netting and held in place by what looked to be an entire bottle of hair spray. Imogen watched as another makeup artist intently sought the perfect smoky eye, first adding a shimmery beige MAC eye shadow and then darker and darker lines for contour before applying a black cream liner along the lash line to finish the look.
Imogen was mid-sentence when she saw Eve elbow one of the bloggers in the ribs to get her to move to the side.
‘Is your phone broken?’ Eve barked at Imogen.
‘Not that I know of, darling.’ Imogen glanced at her iPhone for the first time in seven minutes. She had six texts from Eve.
>>>>Are you going backstage?<<<<
>>>>I’m going backstage.<<<<
>>>>Should we meet backstage?<<<<
>>>>Are you already backstage?<<<<
>>>>Where the hell are you?<<<<
>>>>How do I get backstage?<<<<
It was as though Eve thought that the texts went directly from her hand into Imogen’s brain. She chose to ignore it for the time being.
‘Eve, I am not sure if you have had the pleasure, but I would love to introduce you to my dear friend Senbi.’ ‘Friend’ wasn’t a stretch. Senbi and her partner had adopted their first child around the time Johnny was born, and then the two women took water babies classes together.
‘Senbi, I am so happy to finally meet you,’ Eve said. ‘You’re so awesome!’ Senbi looked Eve over coolly.
‘Your voice is so familiar.’
‘Eve used to answer my phones,’ Imogen said, smiling sweetly at Eve.
‘I’m the editorial director of Glossy-dot-com now.’ Eve tried to recover. ‘Awesome! We would love to have you involved in the new Glossy platform. It’s a multimedia applica—’ The designer cut her off.
‘Imogen told me all about it. If she’s in charge, then I’m in.’ The designer triple-kissed Imogen’s cheeks. ‘I have to go pay homage to the peanut gallery.’
Imogen noticed Orly inching her way toward her, that blue helmet of hair bobbing up and down as she walked.
‘I loved the hashtag ScenesFromTheBackRow. Genius idea. I regrammed you and linked to your feed from FashGrrrl. That’s exactly what I felt like at my first fashion show. You really get it.’ Orly was suddenly swarmed by other bloggers and Imogen was worried that when their Glasses all got too close to one another a circuit would short and the entire backstage would go up in flames like the prom scene in Carrie.
For the rest of the day, no matter her seating assignment (it varied each time from VIP Standing to front row), Imogen found her way into the standing section. Addison kept winking at her. She saw Orly tapping on her temple, live-streaming her live Instagramming. Eve sulked from the front row. Bridgett texted her:
>>>>You are one savvy and sexy bitch<<<<
Imogen wrote back.
>>>>Today I am. Let’s see about tomorrow.<<<<
Leaving the tents after the final show, Imogen found herself once again in the company of Addison Cao.
‘Imogen, I have a question for you. A friend was whispering in my ear and I am trying to wrap my head around an item for tomorrow. What do you know about Andrew Maxwell and Eve Morton?’
Hearing his name spoken out loud was jarring. Until a year earlier Imogen genuinely thought Andrew Maxwell had disappeared from the face of the Earth and she was content in letting herself believe that was true. Andrew was quite possibly the worst dating decision she had ever made. If only she had been as good at spotting narcissists in her twenties as she was now in her forties, but back then she had merely been dazzled by his confidence, his charm and his habit of dating the most eligible girls in Manhattan. One of those super-preppies, he wore a pink shirt so often that Massimo and Bridgett took to calling him simply ‘Pink Shirt.’ Andrew – always Andrew, never Andy – resembled a young Robert Redford with floppy blond hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. His parents were newly rich from mortgage investments in the eighties and their Madison Avenue penthouse was filled with painfully expensive but not especially tasteful art. Their money meant he didn’t actually need to do anything and so he didn’t, except for excessive amounts of cocaine and Imogen for two years. The things young girls will abide by to have an attractive man on their arms are disgusting and Imogen abided by a lot in those days. His broad smile and easy charisma hid his uncertainty about what kind of man he wanted to be when he finally grew up.
She had just moved into a teensy studio of her own on West Fourth Street, a third-floor walk-up with barely enough room for a bed, but spacious French windows that looked down on the tree-lined West Village street.
When he was wooing her, after a late-night encounter at Moomba, Andrew sent ten bouquets a day to the apartment. The two of them flew all over the world on his parents’ private jet. He couldn’t stand to be apart from her and soon she let him move into her tiny flat. Only a few months into their cohabitation Andrew got fat, grotesquely fat. He had nothing to do during the day, and so while Imogen would go off to work every day as an associate editor, he slept away his hangovers and ordered takeaway from the dodgy Chinese joint down the street with stray cats milling about the cash register. Sometimes she would come home in the middle of the afternoon after a particularly grueling early morning shoot only to find him downstairs watching soap operas with the old Armenian woman in the studio below Imogen.
‘You know, you should get to know your neighbors,’ he slurred at her as he leaned his weight against her, walking back up the stairs. ‘You’re such a snob.’
One day Imogen opened the telephone bill to find $1,300 in charges to a 1-900 phone sex line. His parents were these billionaires and here she was living in a tiny flat she could barely afford and he rang up a phone bill more than double her rent. He stumbled in late that night with two black eyes and denied everything. Then he went into the bathroom for twenty minutes, finished up the bag of cocaine in his pocket and confessed to it all. His mother, dripping in jewelry and smelling of bourbon and desperation, picked him up in the morning to ship him off to a fancy rehab out in the Nevada desert. Three months later Imogen met Alex. She answered the door early on a Sunday morning, wearing one of Andrew’s old custom-made pink button-down shirts, boxer shorts and stolen white hotel slippers, still licking her battle scars from her bad relationship and nursing a French 75 hangover. What time is it? she wondered, first considering the time in New York and then switching to consider the time it was wherever Andrew had been scuttled off to.
A gorgeous man stood there holding out a sheaf of papers. His black hair was a mess of curls just long enough to brush the top of his pugilist’s jaw. She was staring too hard, which she realized when a smile touched his slightly chapped but full lips.
‘I’m sorry, could you repeat what you just told me?’ she asked the handsome stranger. He was there to serve Andrew with court documents. Some bugger Andrew picked a fight with in a bar must have realized he had deep pockets and was suing him for assault and battery.
‘He doesn’t live here anymore. He’s off drying out in the desert.’
Alex couldn’t leave until he got the documents into Andrew’s hands or got a new address where he could be served in person. Imogen invited him in for tea and ran to the bathroom to pull her disheveled bed-head hair into a tight pony, dab on some under-eye concealer, smudge some gloss over her lips and spray mint into her mouth. She couldn’t help but smirk as she emerged to find him making himself barely comfortable on her tiny chintz armchair, before she rang Andrew’s deranged mother for his forwarding address. In the hour it took for her to return Imogen’s call, she learned that this young lawyer was the first child in his family to go to college, and he had followed it up with Yale Law School. He didn’t give a shit about clothes and he didn’t need to since he kept his six-foot-three-inch physique trim from boxing in his dad’s gym on the Lower East Side. Style is much more than a designer name on your back, Imogen observed. He was different from anyone she had dated. Smart as a whip, he believed in equality and democracy, values that drove him to work long nights advocating for the rights of those who couldn’t advocate for themselves. He had ambitions to enter politics, but for the time being he was happy where he was, grateful even. He seemed particularly grateful to find himself in Imogen’s apartment.
After Imogen located the elusive Andrew and Alex dispatched a courier to the western part of the country, the young lawyer professionally excused himself. Imogen was distraught that he waited nine days to call her for dinner. On that first date they shut down Piadina on West Tenth Street, giggling for hours at a tiny wooden table in the cramped basement filled with cigarette smoke, the smell of roasted garlic and Dean Martin crooning from a speaker hidden behind a bookshelf in the corner. The wax on the candlestick centerpiece burned all the way to the rim of the Chianti bottle it perched in before their night was over.
She noticed he sipped his wine slowly, inhaled just a whiff as he raised his glass and then sloshed it around a little in his mouth so that he could truly enjoy it, so different from Andrew, who drank in large swallows, more interested in the intoxication it produced than the taste. He looked at her while they ate, really stared, his eyes hungry, all over her body, not even hiding the fact that he enjoyed taking in her milky white décolletage, which was maybe too obvious in a low-cut cashmere sweater. For the first time since she’d started dating boys back home as a teenager, her stomach didn’t do nervous somersaults. Instead she felt an intense sense of calm with this man. Here you are, she thought to herself. It was that simple. Here you are.
She held out as long as she could, but a few weeks later they had amazing sex in his tiny studio in the East Village, which was dominated by books and a giant bed. He undressed her slowly and kissed her everywhere. He was the least selfish lover she’d ever had.
Alex was the rare breed of man who got on with your granny as well as your male best friend – the opposite of Andrew. For every designer dinner she was invited to, the publicist would always ask whether Alex was available to accompany her. Imogen was so proud to walk into a room with this towering, handsome man. His casual elegance and the fact that he lived inside an episode of Law & Order made him a favorite dinner companion.
It had been easy to let Andrew slip away. There was no Google then, or if there was, Imogen didn’t know about it. There was certainly no Facebook. By the time those things became staples in everyone’s life, Imogen was a happily married woman. Even socially, she and Andrew rarely crossed paths after that. A year ago she read that he was now a United States congressman and, last she heard, running for the Senate.
She never imagined hearing his name in the same breath as Eve’s, but she wasn’t willing to give herself away to Addison.
‘I’m sure you know more than I do, darling.’
‘Oh, as usual I don’t know too much. I know Eve set her sights on him around July and has been spotted coming out of his apartment building at One Fifth Avenue six times in the past three weeks very early in the morning.’
‘Lots of people live in that building, Addison.’
‘Lots of people don’t have a private stairwell into the garage.’
‘How about I do a little investigating for you and you make it worth my while, by doing a teensy item on Glossy-dot-com’s fantastic new Instagram campaign: Hashtag ScenesFromTheBackRow?’
‘I like the way you negotiate, Tate. I’ll text you tomorrow.’ Addison fancied himself to be J. J. Hunsecker, if Hunsecker’s phone at the “21” Club were replaced with a tablet.
Imogen was complete crap at being a source, but Bridgett wasn’t.
‘I haven’t heard anything about Pink Shirt and the Pink Bandage Dress. But I’ll ask some of the people who would know,’ she said when Imogen called her. Bridgett was stuck backstage doing an on-camera interview with Extra for the next hour.
But before either of them could assist Addison in his quest for information, Imogen got a Page Six text alert.
>>>>Congressman Andrew Maxwell of the Ninth Congressional District of New York has a new lady love. We hear the 49-year-old politician is dating 26-year-old editorial director for Glossy.com Eve Morton.<<<<
Imogen clicked the link to read more and was rewarded with a picture of Andrew and Eve, her hair pulled into a first lady chignon, his neatly shellacked into a Ken doll helmet. He was in a tux and she wore a floor-length red Badgley Mischka gown.
The new couple stepped out earlier this week at the mayor’s residence, Gracie Mansion, for a dinner reception honoring his Royal Highness of Thailand. Maxwell, who won election to Congress two years ago, has been spending time with the young New York-based entrepreneur, who graduated from NYU and then Harvard Business School before returning to New York to launch a digital application at Robert Mannering Corp.
Maxwell and Morton were recently spotted together in the Hamptons, prompting rumors of a relationship. We are told that despite their 23-year age difference they looked very affectionate and that it was quite clear they were a couple. ‘They were holding hands and kissing in corners,’ one of our spies tells us about a rendezvous they had in East Hampton over the summer. Other society spies gushed about how great the pair looked together. ‘He is just in such tremendous shape. He’s like a blond John F. Kennedy Jr,’ one of them told us. They made it official in pictures at the other night’s event, holding hands as they posed for photographs. Just an hour after we contacted them for comment, their photo was erased from the website of society photographer Billy Farrell only to appear again moments later. We guess their teams couldn’t make up their mind about how to spin this one, especially since Maxwell used to date Morton’s current Glossy colleague Imogen Tate.
Ugh. Why did they have to drag her into it?
Her phone flooded with text messages from Bridgett and then Massimo.
>>>>Eve and Pink Shirt. Ewwwww<<<<
>>>>Power and sobriety have obviously clouded Pink Shirt’s judgment<<<<
>>>>We’ve been scooped.<<<<
That little bitch was stealing her life.