As promised, the location van for the photo shoot, really a rickety mobile trailer for hair, makeup and catering, was parked in front of the Four Seasons at seven a.m.
Ashley sauntered up the steps of the van at 6:59, her hair pulled into a high ponytail at the crown of her head and cascading down the sides of her cheeks in large curls.
‘Am I late?’ Wearing Adidas original sneakers, torn-up Rag & Bone jeans and a perfectly crisp white tuxedo shirt, the girl glanced down at her phone, and, seeing the time, smiled with a sense of pride. ‘Nope. I am a minute early,’ she said as she sipped from a large Starbucks cup with ‘Ash’ scrawled in cursive on the side. She thrust a second Starbucks into Imogen’s hand. ‘Macchiato, skim milk.’ Imogen noticed Ashley had one bare ear and that the other was adorned by a huge sculptural jeweled cluster from Marni. It wouldn’t have worked on anyone else.
Grateful for the caffeine, Imogen recoiled at hearing the whoop of a siren outside. Probably an ambulance or a fire truck, but a second and third whoop made her stick her head outside the trailer door just as two police officers raised a hand to knock.
‘Hello, gentlemen.’ Imogen beamed at them through gritted teeth.
‘Hello, ma’am. We need to see the permit you have for this vehicle.’
‘Of course. Absolutely no problem. Hold on one quick second.’ She moved inside the door and lowered her voice.
‘Ashley, do you have a copy of the permit for the van?’ Ashley’s blank stare answered the question for her. ‘You did remember to get us a permit for the van to park here, didn’t you?’
Ashley’s head moved back and forth. ‘Eve said she was taking care of it.’ Ashley’s body tightened into a defensive posture. She slowly raised the Starbucks cup to her mouth to take a sip.
‘There were so many details. I booked the models and the hair and the makeup and then Eve wanted new hair and makeup. She wanted Allison Gandolfo from John Barrett at Bergdorf and she was hard to get in touch with and then I booked this van and I called the Four Seasons and Eve said to let her take care of the—’
Imogen cut her off. ‘So we have no permit?’
‘I’ll email her. She hasn’t sent me any details about one though.’ Ashley moaned. ‘I could have missed an email. I’m also trying to tweet and Facebook and Tumbl and Pin and Gram around the clock!’ It was no wonder to Imogen that Ashley had a hard time being wonderful at being either an assistant or a social media manager. She was stretched so thin she had no time to master either one and instead was forced to operate at half capacity for each of the jobs. Imogen drew in a deep breath. She’d never done what she was about to do and honestly had no idea if she could pull it off.
After a second of searching, Ashley shook her head.
‘She never sent one.’
Imogen opened the doors.
‘Officers, can I invite you in for some coffee?’
‘Ma’am, we really just need to see that permit.’
‘I am so rude. Can I introduce myself? I’m Imogen Marretti.’ She used her married name, but spoke in her most proper British accent. ‘Have we met before? You look so familiar. Maybe at the policeman’s ball. My husband, Alex, works in the U.S. Attorney’s office and he loves you gentlemen so, so much. He raves about all of the hard work you do. Come on in and let me get you a coffee while I work on finding that permit.’ The two police officers followed her up the trailer steps and pulled out chairs at the small dingy table in the back.
‘We know your husband, ma’am,’ the first officer, a handsome guy in his late twenties, said. His name badge read OFFICER CORTEZ. ‘Good guy, that Alex Marretti. He put away a coupla drug dealers I brought in last year.’
‘I didn’t know his wife worked in the movies though,’ the other one, burly with a bald head, black bushy eyebrows and the jawline of an ox, replied as though he were the most hilarious man in the room. The burly one had no idea that the fly on his pants was down, Imogen noted with a small degree of satisfaction. She waited until no one else was looking and then winked at him and touched the zipper of her own pants. He gave her a grateful smile.
‘How adorable are you? I’m not in the movies. I’m a magazine editor. Hold on just one second and let me work on finding you that permit.’ She went back to Ashley. ‘Go to that little bakery down the street and get us a box of doughnuts.’ The girl wrinkled her nose at the mention of trans fats and processed sugars, but complied without saying a word.
Imogen made the motions as though she were looking through her laptop for a very specific email or document. She was actually composing an email to Eve asking if she had the permit for the trailer to be parked there.
‘I’m sure I’ll be able to find it in just a moment,’ she said over the top of her screen. ‘I’m so, so sorry to make you handsome men wait like this. I know how busy the city keeps you guys. This is my first shoot back. I don’t know if Alex shared this with his work colleagues, but I was out on medical leave for a few months and I am really just getting my sea legs back.’ Imogen despised playing a damsel in distress, but with a certain breed of man, it was the one role that could get you exactly what you wanted. She hated the next word even more, but lowered her voice, ‘Cancer.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that, ma’am.’
‘Please call me Imogen.’ She paused and then let a stricken look cross her face. ‘I am so stupid,’ she cried. ‘I can’t believe I did this. I just cannot believe it.’
Cortez looked up and cocked his head in a question.
Imogen continued, ‘We asked for a permit for the wrong day.’
The bald one shook his head a little, but Cortez’s eyes implored him.
‘We don’t normally do this, Imogen, but we could maybe let that permit slide.’
Imogen had never expected it to work.
Cortez placed a hand over hers.
‘You’re under a lot of stress.’ Cortez tried again. ‘Seriously. We want to help. Your husband helps us keep the bad guys off the street every single day. How about we put some police tape around this here trailer and no one will bother you for the rest of the day.’
Imogen reached over and hugged the man.
‘Also, Officer? Would you mind terribly not telling Alex about this? I would be so embarrassed if he knew I wasn’t able to hold it together at work like this. I don’t want him to worry about me.’
Just then Ashley returned with a box of pastries. No sooner had she placed the box on the table than a chubby hand reached in and raised one to his lips, stopping just before he took a bite.
‘What is this?’ He looked at the baked good with the confusion of a basset hound given lettuce.
‘It’s a donnoli,’ Ashley declared. ‘Half doughnut. Half cannoli. It’s like the new Cronut or something.’ She was proud to have found such a gourmet delicacy in midtown. The officer just shook his head.
‘Well, I’ll be,’ he said and took a bite, frosting catching in his bristly mustache.
Cortez rolled his eyes slightly at his partner and nodded to Imogen. ‘Today is our little secret.’ Men loved feeling complicit in a secret with a beautiful woman.
The police officers ambled down the steps and began wrapping the trailer in police tape as though it were a crime scene. Imogen texted her husband.
>>>>Asst. forgot permit. Had to cry and drop your name with the police. Hope is ok.<<<<
>>>>Use what you got. Get ’em gorgeous.<<<<
An email arrived from Eve a couple of seconds later with just one line: ‘Isn’t getting a permit for YOUR photo shoot YOUR job?’
Thankfully everyone else was about twenty minutes late for the shoot. Coco and Hilary miraculously arrived at the exact same time, both clean-faced with freshly washed hair, blank canvases ready to be painted.
‘Okay, Ashley, now tell me about this makeup change that Eve asked for?’ Imogen turned to her assistant, who was busily tweeting something. ‘I thought we lined up Pat McGrath.’ Ashley barely looked up as she replied.
‘Eve wanted someone cheaper so she booked makeup herself.’
Imogen tried not to show how livid she was. ‘Do you know who it is?’
‘Someone she ended up getting for free.’
‘Ashley, please pay attention. We need to make sure this shoot goes off without a hitch. It’s your job to pay attention right now.’
‘It’s also my job to tweet.’ Imogen could tell the girl regretted the words the second they left her mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ashley said. ‘I’m a little overwhelmed.’
Move forward, Imogen thought. Breathe. At least the hair and makeup people were here, unlike the permit.
Both Hilary and Coco were hungry, but most definitely not for donnolis.
‘Do you have any gluten-free breakfast bars?’ Coco asked.
Hilary chimed in, ‘Can I get a protein shake?’
Imogen looked at Ashley, who shrugged and held up her hands.
She would need to figure out catering too.
This time Ashley didn’t need to be told anything before she left the trailer in search of an organic grocery store at the same time Imogen realized that no one had thought to bring a steamer for the clothes – all now crinkled from transit.
Alice arrived right on time at nine thirty, her tiny frame swathed in what looked like four layers of cardigans and cashmere wraps in varying shades of gray.
‘I can’t believe I am actually going to shoot this on my phone,’ she said incredulously. ‘I’m excited. But nervous.’ It was the most small talk Imogen had ever heard come out of Alice Hobbs’s mouth. Fashion photographers were notoriously bad communicators, at least out loud. They were somehow always able to convey a grand vision for their photographs through one-word grunts, hand gestures and small tap dances, but conversation was simply not their forte.
‘I think you will be as genius shooting with an iPhone as you are with a twenty-thousand-dollar camera.’ Imogen smiled. ‘Please excuse me for one second while I check on something.’
She texted Tilly to find a way to bring her steamer from home.
Hair and makeup were rolling along fine, not perfectly, but fine. Imogen stepped in for a beat to show one of the stylists exactly how to do a wraparound braid on Hilary. She wanted Coco done up like Rita Hayworth in the strapless gown from Gilda, all large loose curls and pushed up breasts. She would hold an e-cigarette instead of the real thing and lean seductively against the wall wearing Google Glass.
The pair of stylists stared at her blankly when she mentioned Rita Hayworth. Ashley walked through the trailer.
‘Ashley, you know who Rita Hayworth was, right?’
‘Of course I do. All my style icons are dead … or over fifty.’ Ashley often talked in tweets, small clips of sound bites with abbreviated words. Imogen pulled a photograph up on her phone.
The next five hours were a frenzy of activity as more models arrived, along with the CEO of MeVest, the biz dev woman from Blast!, a woman who’d pioneered a pair of high-tech yoga pants that wicked away sweat and odor and never needed to be washed. They all had their hair and makeup done and cycled in and out of the restaurant for the photos. Imogen had hired two freelance stylists to be on hand to dress the women. Both pros, they carried out their tasks without a hitch. Once Tilly arrived with the steamer, Imogen gave Ashley a lesson on how to remove all creases and wrinkles from the clothes. Was she really doing this?
‘This is a lot of work,’ Ashley said, holding the steamer lazily in her left hand as the water dripped onto the trailer’s floor.
‘You’re my assistant, Ashley. This is your job. Do you know the kinds of things I used to do as an assistant? The very first creative director at the very first magazine I worked at threw a Stuart Weitzman shoe at my face because he hated how I steamed something. It nicked my eye.’ It was Imogen’s version of an ‘I walked four miles uphill to school in the snow’ story, but she told it to Ashley anyway. ‘When I was an assistant at Moda I got to the shoots two hours early to prep all of the clothes.’
‘I can help, darling,’ Imogen heard a Southern drawl and turned to see a well-dressed brassy blonde, pillowy all over her body. Paula Deen in very, very expensive clothes.
‘Moooooom.’ Ashley’s fair skin tinged red as the bottom of a Louboutin. ‘I told you to just hang out and be quiet.’
‘Ashley,’ Imogen said with a small smile. ‘Do you want to introduce me?’
Obviously embarrassed, Ashley murmured, ‘Imogen, meet my mom, Constance. Constance, this is my boss, Imogen Tate. I’m so sorry about this, Imogen. My mom loves Alice’s work and she just wanted to come hang out.’
‘I came to help out,’ the older woman interjected. ‘I know how busy you girls are. Let me do some dirty work. What can I do?’ She looked like she had never done an ounce of dirty work in her life, but she took the steamer right out of Imogen’s hand and got to work.
Constance was obviously a woman of means and from the tidbits Ashley had revealed, a woman without a career of her own. ‘She is, like, obsessed with my job,’ Ashley had once told Imogen. ‘She lives vicariously through me.’
Imogen moved on to the next fire that needed to be put out.
Mina Ekwensi, a Nigerian model who had just come on the scene a few months earlier, had freakishly large feet, yet another thing that Ashley had not bothered to account for.
‘It’s fine,’ Mina told Imogen as she squeezed her size-eleven foot into a size-nine shoe. ‘Sometimes we suffer for our art.’ Imogen watched in frustration as the model hobbled to the restaurant’s entrance.
Imogen hardly had a moment to sit down and collect her thoughts before the entire thing was over. At four p.m., Alice walked out of the restaurant, triumphant, iPhone held over her head. She beamed at Imogen.
‘It might be some of my best work. And on a phone, no less.’ She looked down at the phone and up at Imogen. ‘Thanks for letting me do this.’
There was no way Alice could have seen the bike messenger whirring down the sidewalk. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but the trailer, the one with no permit with the yellow police tape wound around it, was blocking the bike lane. It was that bit of the afternoon, about an hour before the glass towers began spewing people onto the streets, where the sidewalks were less crowded than the road. The messenger was in a hurry. Imogen barely saw him until it was too late.
The tires screeched as he braked before causing a true collision, but his wheel still caught Alice square in the thigh, forcing the small woman to the ground. They say the brain slows down when terrible things happen. Imogen saw the phone’s entire arc through the air before it landed on the sidewalk, bounced twice and fell squarely in the gutter, which was filled with motor oil and rancid water. It was submerged in seconds.
‘Nooooooooo,’ Imogen shouted, diving for the puddle, splashing the grime all over her black cashmere turtleneck. She picked up the device and poked at it, aware that she now had a small audience staring at her as she knelt on the dirty New York City sidewalk. The screen was shattered, but she thought it might still turn on. She hit the power button. The phone whirred and lights flickered. Like an old dog, wanting nothing more than to please its master one last time, it made a valiant attempt to boot up for her. She silently willed it to work, promising to alleviate all manner of venial sins from her life if some higher power would just let this phone turn on so that Alice’s photos could be downloaded. But just as Imogen promised to stop saying ‘fuck’ in front of the children and eating dark chocolate-covered espresso beans, the phone gave its last whimper and drowned right there in her hands.
Crying wouldn’t do any good. More than $100,000 had been lost in that puddle. Imogen couldn’t even look up at Alice, who, although shaken, appeared to be fine.
‘You’re okay? Right?’ Imogen asked.
The woman nodded.
‘And you only used one phone for the shoot?’ Imogen asked, still staring at the dark screen.
‘Yeah.’
Imogen struggled to maintain a poker face as she rose and then walked straight into the trailer, where she locked the door. Leaving decorum on the sidewalk Imogen hurled herself onto the trailer’s small couch facedown and pounded her fists onto the plastic wall.
God, she was falling apart. When had she ever really done this? Fallen apart? Never … the answer was never.
When the doctors first found her lump, Imogen had ignored them for six days. For nearly a week she didn’t tell anyone, just kept going about her business. She knew the second that she admitted something was wrong everything would change forever. She had been right. Now she wanted to cry, but the moment felt too small for tears.
What the fuck had her life come to? She’d paid her bloody dues. She had steamed clothes. She had scrubbed studio floors. She had booked models and gotten permits for fifteen bloody years. Those fifteen years meant she didn’t have to do those things anymore. She’d worked her ass off so that she could happily sit at a desk and say yes and no and have lunches and make deals and never have to get down on her knees on a sidewalk and stick her hand into a disgusting puddle. She couldn’t do it anymore. She didn’t want to do this anymore. Eve had won. She had broken her. This is what it had taken, a photo shoot quite literally gone down to shit. Something like this had happened to her only once before, ten years ago. She had been doing a shoot on the Staten Island Ferry with Pamela Hansen. They had the boat for two hours and had to pay the city an exorbitant fee just for that. Ten years wasn’t so long ago, but still the professionals then preferred film. They shot at a breakneck pace, congratulating themselves on a job well done by popping a bottle of Dom Pérignon once they reached land at the Whitehall Terminal. Only after they were all slightly tipsy did they realize the camera had not been loaded with film. Thankfully, they had the money to shoot again the next day. Now that wasn’t an option.
Imogen didn’t hear the knocking at the door, didn’t realize Ashley was on the floor next to her until she touched her shoulder. She flinched at the touch.
‘Is anyone else in here with you?’ Imogen whispered.
‘No. The door is locked.’
‘I had the other trailer key.’
‘Did anyone else see me?’
‘No. I was careful.’
Imogen still didn’t want to look up.
When she finally spoke again, Ashley’s voice was calm and authoritative in a way that Imogen hadn’t heard it before.
‘I think I can fix this,’ she said.
‘Did you get the phone to turn on?’
Imogen turned to the side and propped herself up on an elbow, not entirely ready to pull herself all the way into a sitting position just yet. ‘Alice’s phone is completely donesky. But there’s another phone,’ Ashley said.
Imogen was ready to lie back down. ‘No, there isn’t. Alice only shot with one phone. She just told me.’
‘Yeah, Alice did. But did you meet Alice’s assistant Mack?’
Imogen vaguely remembered a fabulous young gay dressed all in black from his leggings to his eyeliner, trailing behind Alice with an armful of lighting equipment. He was tall and lean and looked like he needed to be coaxed into fresh clothes each morning.
‘I didn’t meet him,’ Imogen said.
‘He’s great. We talked a little when he helped me finish steaming. Anyway, he was behind Alice the whole time she was shooting. He had his own phone. I think he was taking his own pictures.’
That made Imogen sit up.
‘We have backup photos?’
‘We might have backup photos.’
Mack was a reluctant hero who knew better than to outshine his boss and mentor. God bless industries that had a very clear pecking order. Ashley managed to pry the phone from his hands.
Imogen could tell it was good from Ashley’s face as she swiped through the photographs. She walked over to look over her assistant’s shoulder.
They weren’t Alice Hobbs photographs, but they were damn close. Mack hadn’t just shot behind Alice. He had worked the room, finding angles that even Alice hadn’t thought of. At one point he climbed up above the models, shooting them being shot in a moment that was so meta Imogen fell completely in love with it.
To her credit, Alice behaved as though Mack’s pictures were a gift from heaven. She wasn’t so easily ruffled, but Imogen could tell her ego was suffering a small blow.
‘He is very talented,’ she said to Imogen. ‘He’s been with me three years. I got him right out of Pratt. I bet I lose him now.’ Imogen took a look at Mack, still sitting in the corner waiting for his instructions.
‘You haven’t lost him yet, but you should sure as hell promote him.’
Imogen walked over to him and wrapped him in a huge hug.
‘Mack, you saved the day.’ The young man showed the start of a smile in a lopsided and handsome way, only the left corner of his mouth rising toward his cheekbone.
‘You like them?’
‘Like them? I love them. I would have loved them even if we hadn’t lost Alice’s photographs. You, my dear, are a true artistic talent. You’re one to watch!’
His grin reached from Madison to Fifth Avenue.
Ashley came up from behind and threw her arms around the two of them.
‘Do we need to go back to the office?’
‘We do.’
‘Mack, we will be in touch with you and Alice.’
‘Of course, ma’am,’ Mack said, straightening his curved shoulders a little. ‘Thanks, ma’am’ – Imogen still flinched a little at the word ‘ma’am.’
‘Ashley, why don’t you Uber us a car,’ Imogen said. ‘Actually, no. I think I can do it myself. I can Uber.’