Eve wasn’t trying to be difficult, but what the hell had happened at the Senbi show? She had texted Imogen, like, fifty times trying to figure out how to get backstage. Who didn’t check their phone? And why was Imogen lurking in the back rows of all the shows like a creepster anyway? What was she up to?
It was five a.m. on the second day of Fashion Week and, as she did every morning before the sun came up, Eve sat up in bed, her devices spread in front of her like a command center, drinking a diet Red Bull. She smiled as she saw that her #SleepyMe Instagram that she snapped before bed had 536 likes. She regrammed it from the official Glossy account. The caption read: ‘How adorbs is our Editorial Director before bed!!’ Sweet dreams.
All she wanted was for Imogen to get it. Late last night Eve sent Imogen an email asking if she could please make her a Google Doc with a list of all the designers she was trying to get to work with the Glossy app. She actually wrote back and asked what a Google Doc was. Seriously? Was she kidding?
Next Eve asked her what her non-Glossy email address was and – get this – she doesn’t have a Gmail account. She uses a Hotmail address for her personal email. Eve wasn’t even born when people stopped using Hotmail.
How did Andrew date that woman for so long? Sure, Imogen Tate was a brilliant fashion editor, but how could someone get so far in her career and be so inept about technology? It literally blew Eve’s mind. I mean. Come on.
She knew Imogen was going to assume the worst about Eve and Andrew, assume that they somehow met because of her. Of course, Eve had known all about Andrew and Imogen. She’d done a lot of due diligence on Imogen back in the day, all the best assistants did. She talked to a few reporters, a few old friends, she had read almost every email the woman had ever written. It helped her keep her boss’s life organized. And, well, it was also a little fun and juicy. She’d known that Andrew was one of Imogen’s exes.
When he first approached her at that Young Friends of Andrew Maxwell fund-raiser at Elspeth Pepper’s Hamptons house over the summer, Andrew had no idea that Eve knew Imogen, much less that she used to work for her. It was a party filled with people under the age of thirty who mattered – mostly the children of people who had mattered for longer, except for her. Eve was ready to impress. She wasn’t little Evie Morton from Kenosha anymore. She was a Harvard woman now and that meant something. Eve ordered a glass of white wine from the bar, but she wasn’t drinking it. She never drank. Hated to be out of control. She threw flirtatious looks Andrew’s way as he made the rounds of the room, shaking hands and, at one point, trying to underscore that he, too, was young and hip by doing the lawn mower dance on the makeshift dance floor. When he finished he met Eve’s gaze and she playfully stuck her tongue out at him before walking out to the stone terrace overlooking a pristine clay tennis court
‘Do you play?’ he asked her without introducing himself.
‘Not professionally.’ She turned to face him full-on, standing tall in the new five-inch Christian Louboutin sandals she’d purchased for this very moment. ‘My golf game’s better.’
He texted her the next day, inviting her to play eighteen holes.
Eve didn’t bother to mention to Andrew that she was gunning for a big new job at Glossy until she knew she’d hooked him. It wasn’t lying, just omission, and when he brought up that he knew Imogen she played dumb.
Men were stupid.
Andrew was clearly a man who had gotten plenty of women in his heyday, probably more than one at a time. Now he needed a wife. Bachelors made for odd political candidates. It was how rumors of toe-tapping in airport bathrooms began.
Eve clicked on the tab on the New York Post to reread the item about her and Andrew. Nearly half a day had passed but she still felt a rush over seeing her name in a gossip column. Then she opened her other email account to delete the ‘tip’ she’d sent over to the junior gossip columnist at the newspaper. ‘He is just in such tremendous shape. He’s like a blond John F. Kennedy Jr’ was a nice touch, she thought. Her mom had always been obsessed with looking at pictures of JFK Jr in People magazine.
Now that the press cared about them, where could they go to dinner tonight that would make a splash? Carbone? Michelle Obama and Kim Kardashian were there last night … not at the same table, but close enough that they were in the same picture. There were sure to be paparazzi lurking outside tonight.
Perfect.
She grabbed her Kindle to read aloud her quote for the day. From Sun Tzu, The Art of War: ‘Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.’
Imogen had less than a week to throw a party and barely any staff to help her do it. She thumbed through the dog-eared file cards in her old Filofax, which now resided deep in a drawer in the kitchen table, where it would be sheltered from any judgmental eyes. The spine of the thing sank low, heavy with two decades of contact information for everyone from Imogen’s tailor and cobbler to the chiefs of staff for two former first ladies of the United States, both of whom had sought Imogen’s advice when dressing for their inaugural balls. Flicking through the cards was a stroll through her personal and professional lives. In doing so she realized she was a bit of a contact hoarder. When someone passed away, Imogen believed it was bad luck to retire his or her card to the bin. Instead, she merely folded down the right-hand corner. It was an odd quirk she had never admitted out loud or explained to anyone. Day-to-day contacts were of course stored in her phone, like any other member of the twenty-first century, but when she planned parties and events she still preferred to curate a guest list with this old dinosaur.
All right. Eve wanted designers. Imogen knew it would be easy to get her loyal friends in the business to swing by – Carolina, Michael Kors, the Rag & Bone gents – plus a smattering of the young designers, the ones who show up at the opening of an envelope because they want the PR. Naturally, the hot Asian boy designer mafia would be there: Alexander Wang, Prabal, Jason Wu, Thakoon and Peter Som.
Proenza Schouler would be the big get, but Imogen knew better than to even bother. They didn’t show up anywhere these days unless they thought it would help land them in Italian Vogue. They were simply too cool for anything American. For a second she considered inviting Carolina Herrera, but she knew she also wouldn’t bother to show. Instead, she shot off an invite to her inimitable PR girl, Mercedes. No one tweeted parties like Mercedes. The girl was Proust with hashtags.
This was too last-minute. Imogen used to spend six months approving plans for Glossy’s annual Women in Fashion event, held without fail the last week of every March. Imogen tried to suppress the thought that Eve was hoping she would fail. Her ideal budget for this kind of thing would be $150,000 for a party and dinner at the Waverly Inn. The cocktail of the night would obviously be the French 75 in vintage cocktail glasses. In her perfect world, Imogen would hire Anthony Todd to do all the flowers and the table settings.
She allowed herself a minute to indulge in the memory of one of the best Fashion Week parties she had ever attended. Paris in 2004. Small. All the best ones are small. The publicist for Mr Valentino called the guests only a few hours before it was scheduled to start to build a sense of urgency around the whole affair.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ she cautioned in a low and sultry voice over the phone.
It started at eleven p.m. in the intensely glamorous basement of the Ritz hotel, all smoky mirrors and little lamps on low black lacquered tables with mother-of-pearl chairs. Everyone in the room looked extraordinarily sexy, like they’d just pranced off the pages of French Vogue. Through the smoke small groups of models shimmied together to too-loud Rolling Stones songs. A few actresses were there, the photographer Bruce Weber, a handful of those straight scuzzy British aristo/modelizer types like Jonny Rothschild and a couple of members of Duran Duran. No one talked to one another. There was no food, but an endless parade of waiters served the yummiest pink champagne from silver trays.
Enough daydreaming.
Eve had budgeted $5,000 for this event (an amount Eve wanted to be very clear that she found to be incredibly generous) – $5,000 for a space, staff, an open bar, passed hors d’oeuvres, entertainment and flowers. For a party for two hundred people, that broke down to $25 a head, which was $5 less per person than she had spent on Annabel’s last birthday party at the pottery painting shop on Christopher Street.
‘Get a liquor sponsor! Let’s have it at your house, it’s definitely big enough,’ Eve snapped when Imogen dared raise a single eyebrow at the budget.
Part of Imogen’s compensation package when she started out at Robert Mannering included having the company co-sign the mortgage on the $7 million town house on Jane Street that her family now occupied. Her deal with the devil. Sara Bray, the former creative director of a now-shuttered interior design magazine, and a longtime friend from the children’s school, helped Imogen with the interior of the house, a studied mélange of chic combined with comfort and warmth. A custom-mixed eau de Nil paint adorned the walls of the open and airy sitting room that dominated much of the first floor of the town house. Modern art, including a prized but very small Cy Twombly sketch, competed for wall space with Moroccan tapestries Alex haggled for in a night market in Tangier. A large old Victrola with a wide blue horn that Imogen picked up in an antiques shop on Royal Street in New Orleans held court in the corner. They’d kept the original molding and corrugated tin ceilings, but repainted them in an eggshell finish. Books climbed the eastern wall and family photos dotted the mantel of the working fireplace. A mixture of antiques with modern pieces and cozy overstuffed chairs appealed to both Imogen’s need for nostalgia and comfort and Alex’s adoration of clean and orderly lines. Walnut French doors opened onto a garden filled with handpicked Panton furniture. Wisteria bushes climbed the fence. For parties she added tiny, white magical fairy lights to the branches.
There had once been a spread on it in The New York Times’s Styles section, where Imogen posed prettily on the gray velvet chaise in the sitting room, issues of Glossy fanned artfully amid Grazia and French Vogue on the Yves Klein blue pigment coffee table. (‘She’s in Prada, but don’t call this EIC a devil,’ the caption jested.)
She loved giving parties. In the five years since they signed their formidable mortgage, Imogen had thrown a dozen parties at the house, mostly for the magazine, but occasionally for a friend’s birthday and once a fund-raiser for a New York State senator. Half of the events had been a roaring success. The other half simply succeeded by virtue of the fact that guests had arrived and dinner had been served. One truly memorable evening had Imogen arriving thirty minutes late to her very own dinner party after her guests made it through their first course. Sometimes a working mother tried to do it all and sometimes it happened to work out.
Ashley was dispatched to help with securing a liquor sponsor. Each day the girl impressed Imogen anew. She got things done, found elegant solutions, channeled creativity into technology. Imogen smelled a pure talent there, one that reminded her of her younger self – if her younger self had thoughts in 140 characters or fewer.
It was Ashley’s idea to use Paperless Post for the last-minute invites and Imogen capitalized on the eleventh-hour nature of the event in her text: ‘The best-laid plans have nothing on those made with an air of whimsy. Please join Glossy.com’s Imogen Tate and Eve Morton for a celebration of Glossy.com at the home of the editor in chief.’ She convinced her friend Danny, an up-and-coming chef of some regard, the kind who did things with foams and molecules, to help her with the catering for a mere $4,500. Male models, fresh off the bus from Des Moines, would work the room as cater waiters and bartenders for free just to get the chance to mingle with fashion’s finest.
She could pull this off.
All the mommies at school drop-off were desperate to score an invite to Imogen’s Fashion Week party.
‘It might be the most interesting thing I get to do all year!’ Sara, mom to Jack, said to Imogen as the two women walked through Country Village Elementary School’s wrought-iron gates and into the secluded green oasis, a daffodil-lined path dotted by protective trees.
Small, with huge black eyes and a short black pixie cut, Sara was a tax attorney who was self-conscious to a fault. Jack had the same eyes and practically the same haircut, on a head that was shaped like a peanut. There were two types of mommies at Imogen’s school, the ones who worked, and the ‘entrepreneurs,’ the mommies who stayed home but had their financier husbands bankrolling their organic skin-care products or cashmere handbag lines. For a brief spell, once Imogen had a few months of recovery under her belt, she experienced what it was like to be part of the tribe of stay-at-home mommies. For the first few weeks it was glorious. She attempted to cook her way through Jessica Seinfeld’s entire cookbook. Growing anxious, by week four, she wondered if she, too, could find success in organic lip balms.
The mom-trepreneurs, always in head-to-toe black spandex (more like a Catwoman costume than something anyone should wear to sweat), had the most fuck-off bodies, from all the spinning they did together. The working moms typically rushed in and out in short order, anxious to get to work on time, but today, with Fashion Week gossip to be discussed, even the working mommies didn’t mind lingering. The nannies kept to themselves.
‘I am sure it won’t be, but you’re obviously welcome to come,’ Imogen said. Sara let out a small yelp of happiness just as Bianca Wilder, the school’s resident Academy Award-winning actress mum, leaned in to join the conversation. Hollywood beautiful, Bianca’s eyebrows were perpetually arched in surprise. She possessed the tiniest rosebud-shaped mouth and skin that grew tighter each semester.
‘You look like you got some color,’ Sara commented on Bianca’s perfect tan. The woman’s hand fluttered upward to touch her cheeks, a look of horror crossing her face. Imogen remembered the days in the nineties when complimenting someone’s tan was a good thing. It meant they’d just finished up some fabulous jaunt to St Barth’s. Now tan was an insult.
‘I wore a hat when we were in Turks,’ Bianca said defensively.
‘It’s just the right amount,’ Imogen interjected. ‘Perfect glow.’
It had been only three years since Bianca had won her award for playing a paraplegic biologist living with the large apes in the Congo, but Imogen believed that her most accomplished role yet was the one she played at school, when she fancied herself the ‘normal mom.’ In the weeks after she won the award, she made a point to come to drop-off looking perfectly disheveled. Whenever someone congratulated her she insisted on saying things like, ‘Oh, I am so over myself,’ while rolling her eyes and laughing the way only an Oscar winner could. She would drop her voice next and add: ‘My real job is being Sophie’s mom. I mean, I work in Hollywood, but I don’t participate in Hollywood.’
Bianca worked hard at cultivating her faux intimacy with the other school moms and had a small army of plain mothers who followed her all over the neighborhood, always offering to do favors for her, like entertain her nanny and children for the weekend when she had to fly to London for the BAFTA Awards or feed her cat three times a day while she was shooting on location in Morea.
The actress pulled her hair into a jaunty ponytail. ‘How is the job going, doll?’ She hugged Imogen gingerly. Bianca shot a Glossy cover around this time last year. Imogen hadn’t been present at the shoot, but she had heard through the grapevine that the term ‘diva’ would have been a gross understatement to describe Bianca’s behavior. Some of the talent wanted to keep a skirt or a pair of earrings they’d worn during a cover shoot. Bianca wanted it all, from the underwear to the diamond studs … and she’d wanted the outfit in three more colors.
‘It’s different being back,’ Imogen said neutrally. ‘You know the magazine is now an app, which was a huge change. We have a new editorial director. She’s young and ambitious and sometimes a bit of a heavy lift. I had to get on Twitter and that was a disaster.’
Kara let out a groan and the other mothers looked at her questioningly.
‘Kara, you’re great on Twitter,’ Sara said.
‘Oh that isn’t me. I hired someone to tweet as me.’
Imogen wasn’t shocked and she was dying to ask the uncouth question.
‘What do you pay this person?’
‘We did pay her $120,000 a year,’ Kara said very matter-of-factly. ‘Until she up and quit last week. She said she needed to do something more meaningful. I think she tweets for some online dating company now. What’s the editorial director like, Imogen? Is she nice?’
Imogen considered her answer. There didn’t seem much point in sugarcoating it.
‘She can be charming, I’ll give her that,’ Imogen said resolutely. ‘But no. She isn’t nice. She isn’t nice at all.’
‘I can relate to that,’ Maryanne piped in. Maryanne was a financial advisor who recently left her job with a big bank to enter the start-up world. Her new company, MEVest, was a platform that provided simple wealth management. No matter the season Maryanne was always in a perfectly tailored black pantsuit with her hair in a crisp bob. Wearing dark-rimmed black glasses, she radiated an aura of cool and success. ‘The CEO of MEVest is a downright little bitch,’ Maryanne continued. ‘“Nice” isn’t in her vocabulary.’
‘Did she go to Harvard Business School too?’ Imogen laughed.
‘No. She’s practically right out of college. She started managing other students’ money while she was an economics and computer science undergrad at UPenn. I could tell you stories. The sense of entitlement is out of control. She honestly believes that everything out of her mouth is gospel. That she is the smartest person on the planet.’
That made Imogen laugh. ‘What’s the deal with these girls? Is it an age thing?’
Sara groaned. ‘Like the twentysomething we hired at the firm who wanted her own corner office after six months.’
Campbell, a cable television executive who rarely indulged in the mommy gossip, chimed in. ‘We have plenty of those. They believe they deserve six-figure salaries right out of college.’
‘Maybe it’s an age thing. Blame the millennials.’ Maryanne made air quotes around ‘millennials.’ ‘They say helicopter parents and too much praise turned this generation into monsters. But everyone said the same thing about the slackers of Generation X and I think we turned out okay.’ Maryanne glanced left and right and then dropped her voice conspiratorially.
‘We are not alone.’
‘What do you mean?’ Imogen asked.
‘Are you on Facebook?’
Imogen sighed. ‘Reluctantly.’
Kids streamed into the school around them, oblivious to the mom chatter, some still clutching the hands of their own parents, others absorbed in their self-determined packs.
‘You have to join this group called TECHBITCH.’ Maryanne mouthed the bad word since they were surrounded by children.
‘What is it?’ Imogen asked, intrigued. ‘What is a tech bitch? Is it a support group?’
‘Techbitch is like the verb. Like “Oh, I have so much to techbitch about.” Well, I guess it’s also a noun because a lot of people have a boss who is a total techbitch … like mine … and yours.’ Maryanne grinned. ‘This is an invite-only page on Facebook where people in the tech industry get to vent about their jobs. I think anyone can be invited, but mostly it’s women like us who are pretty new to tech and all of a sudden we have these twenty-two-year-old wunderkind CEOs and CTOs and CMOs as bosses—’
‘Eve is not my boss,’ Imogen interrupted, but Maryanne waved her comment away like it didn’t matter.
‘Whatever. People tell the most amazing stories. One woman went on a business trip to Miami and was forced to share a bed with her company’s CEO and CTO to save money. She woke up in the middle of them.’
Imogen’s hand went up to her mouth. ‘That happened to me. Eve thought it was totally okay for the two of us to just share a bed. I had to tell her there was nothing normal about it. I personally don’t think you should ever see your co-workers in their knickers.’ The other women looked at her in horror.
‘There has been a hilarious thread about CEOs who force their staff to learn coordinated dances and then perform them in the office,’ Maryanne said matter-of-factly.
‘One boss makes everyone wear the same color on Fridays and another one insists on taking selfies with the staff all day long. It’s hilarious. You’re going to love it.’
‘Is it anonymous?’
‘Yup. It hides who is doing the posting.’
The working mommies were all crowded together. Imogen was curious. ‘How many of you now have a younger boss?’ About half of the women raised their hands. Imogen tried another question. ‘Or how many of you work directly with someone who is techbitchy?’
Everyone’s hand went up.
My God. Imogen really had thought she was completely alone. She had no idea this was a thing happening across all industries.
Imogen was intrigued. ‘How do I join?’
‘Oh, I can invite you,’ Maryanne said. ‘But be careful, I swear you can spend all day on it.’
‘Well, I can’t wait to take a look this afternoon.’ Imogen smiled. Unsure exactly how to join a new Facebook group, she made a mental note to pop into the Genius Bar at the Apple Store on Prince Street to see if they would give her a quick tutorial on the way to work. That Genius Bar was her dirty little secret. The boys there knew her by name. Surprisingly, they were never condescending, and always cheerful about helping her learn how to do something new. It was Mike at the Genius Bar, the one with the nose ring and intense eyes who sang easy-listening songs under his breath, who helped her create a Facebook account. He did it while quietly humming Vanessa Williams’s ‘Save the Best for Last’ with perfect pitch. She preferred stopping off in the early morning when it was just her and an elegant group of blue-haired older ladies eager to learn the best scrapbooking applications.
Maryanne pulled out her iPhone.
‘What is your personal email?’
‘Oh, just send it to my Glossy account,’ Imogen said.
Maryanne scoffed. ‘You definitely don’t want this to go to your work email. You know if they ever let you go they can go through everything you write on there.’ Imogen hadn’t known that. She had never paid much mind to which email account she used. Her personal email was all muddled up with her work email. She gave Maryanne her Hotmail address, knowing exactly how uncool Hotmail made her sound. At least Maryanne didn’t flinch when she said it.
‘I am going to send you an invite to the TECHBITCH page when I get to the office. You’re just going to love it.’
Sure enough, when she arrived at the office, interspersed with emails promising penis enhancement and announcing new online J.Crew sales, there was an email in her Hotmail from Maryanne. In the text portion of the email was a warning: ‘I only give myself thirty minutes a day on here. I swear it could eat up all my productivity if I let it. Enjoy!!!!’ Imogen felt tingles of excitement, knowing she was about to do something naughty, as she clicked the link to access the password-protected page. She glanced over the shiny top of her Mac’s screen and through the glass wall into the main work area to make sure she wasn’t being watched. It was an irrational gesture, since no one could see her screen anyhow. She laughed when she arrived at the page. The profile picture was of a woman about her age sitting in front of a computer, pulling at her hair. Her expression showed an equal mix of frustration, anger and desperation. It was exactly how Imogen felt at least ten times a day.
Maryanne was right: everything was anonymous. Imogen could read the posts and the comments, but it never showed who was posting or commenting. Some of the posts were funny, others were sad, some downright bitter. All of them were completely relatable for Imogen.
‘Sometimes I feel like a ghost in my office. I have worked in the travel industry for twenty years. I consider myself something of an expert in the field, but at our travel start-up the real rock star is the twenty-three-year-old founder and CEO. People ignore me in meetings and defer to her, despite my years of experience. It stings, but I’ve started to learn that I need to humble myself. I can’t waste my energy being angry every time someone talks over my head or asks her what she thinks about something I know she has no idea about.’
‘My boss talks to me while she pees.’
‘Our CMO goes around the office braiding everyone’s hair whether they like it or not.’
‘My twenty-six-year-old CEO rolls her eyes every time I tell her I have to leave early (at seven!) to have dinner with my kids.’
‘My boss doesn’t know who Duran Duran is.’
‘I don’t know the difference between java and JavaScript and I am okay with that.’
It was fascinating to peer into the office lives of other people in a similar predicament to hers, to learn she wasn’t the only one being tormented by a twentysomething at work. Mixed in with the terrible comments was some sage advice.
‘Make sure to tell your millennial employees they are great … every single day.’
‘Don’t bother correcting their grammar.’
‘Don’t, under any circumstances, let their parents come to the office.’
‘Try to avoid calling them on the phone. It scares them.’
Imogen was both terrified and exhilarated at the idea of contributing something to this page. She was just worried that she would mess up. What if by some quirk in her privacy settings she was the only one on the whole page who didn’t remain anonymous? This could end up like the Twitter debacle all over again. She also wasn’t sure what to write. She could talk about how Eve leaked the Twitter stream about her. Was that TECHBITCH-worthy? She could tell them about how she was forced to share a bed or about how Eve insisted on wearing her tiny Hervé dresses everywhere they went while she tried to make Imogen dress more and more like a mom. There was certainly no shortage of things she could write about. Maryanne had been right. Before Imogen knew it, forty-five minutes had passed as she read the comments and daydreamed about contributing her own. She could fall down into this rabbit hole all day long. It was addicting and vindicating. For the first time in a long while, Imogen didn’t feel quite so alone. It may have been the first and last time she would ever utter these words, but as she closed the Facebook window she whispered, ‘God bless the Internet.’