Kate Moss does some damage

THE NEW SALES GUY STARTED on Monday. “Yes, I retired,” he says into the phone. “But the wheels fell off, so I got my butt into gear and now I’m back in the driver’s seat again.”

I am at a different job, and no longer have to work with Frances and her sparkly-eyed ways of dealing with things. I am art directing a women’s health and fitness magazine. I’ve been here for a six months. When I was offered the job, Mathew said it wasn’t a bad move career-wise but he warned me to expect a weird ride. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said I’d see for myself.

I look over the top of my computer at the sales guy who is hunched over his desk across the room from me.

I am sure he is as surprised as I am at having to share my office. His head is bent down over an ancient handwritten diary and he is doodling on a desk pad as he speaks into the phone tucked under his ear.

He might think he’s back in the driver’s seat, I think, but he’s on the wrong side of the road going in the wrong direction and he doesn’t have a clue. I wonder what it is exactly that made the wheels fall off. I think he is being terribly forthright about what was obviously a decline in fortune but perhaps he hopes to increase ad sales by incurring sympathy from his old drinking buddies. I estimate, by his florid skin tone and slight hand tremor, there is no shortage of either sympathy or drinking buddies. I glance around my windowless office and resent him being here.

“I don’t like him,” I tell my editor right from the start. “I bet he drinks a lot. I think he’s past his prime; he’ll never deliver. He’s only here because he goes way back with the publisher.”

My editor laughs and caresses her bare thighs with affection. She was a Glamour girl, had been their features editor for over a decade until power broker Maia Rosenthal donned her matchmaking cap and told my publisher she had the perfect editor for him. This was after our launch editor, a change-the-world and make-women-feel-better-about-their-bodies lass by the name of Jean Mackie had to be escorted weeping out of her office. The pressure proved too much, she said. She broke down, and just sat at her desk and cried. I went in one day and found her staring out the window, her desk pristine, her office immaculate.

“You want to take a look at this, Jean?” I said, offering her the layout I’d been working on.

She turned to me, a river of tears flooding her face.

I had no idea what to do. “I am so sorry,” I said, wondering all the while what I was sorry for or about. Truthfully, I wanted to run the other way as fast as I could. “Your office door was open, but if now isn’t a good time, I can come back later.”

She responded by wailing softly, dolefully. “I failed. I wanted to do something important. I wanted to change things, make things better for real women. But the advertisers aren’t interested and now everybody hates me because I have ruined the magazine.” She began to cry with increased volume.

I pushed a box of Kleenex at her, sat down and sighed.

“I don’t think people want reality,” I said. “They want to escape into a fantasy world where everybody looks like they stepped out of Swimsuit Illustrated. People will pay anything for a fantasy.”

That just made her cry harder and I wished I hadn’t said anything.

I sat across from her and tried to figure out what to do but thankfully the publisher arrived and motioned me out the door.

I exited with relief, closed the door quickly behind me, and escaped to my office. The next time I looked up, tall sodden Jean was being walked out. That was the last I ever saw of her.

So Bullard, the publisher, called Maia and asked for help. Maia rushed to his aid, and offered to guest edit an otherwise missing issue of the magazine, as well as promise to find him his perfect editor.

I worked with Maia for two months and I thought she was a bit psycho but since it was short term, it was manageable, even entertaining. Maia was a sex-addict, drug addict, attention addict, and I got the feeling she had her eye on a night with Mathew and myself in the biblical sense, if you get my meaning, which was just bizarre.

I told Mathew my suspicions and he laughed. “Wouldn’t put it past her,” he said. “I’ve heard she’s very into that kind of thing.”

Maia seemed to like me, because, as I say, she had designs of a certain nature and I also think she found my intensity amusing.

Eventually, she found us our editor, the queen of features from Glamour, and then she went back to working the industry. She had her eye on a bigger prize than our small mag, Maia did.

In my opinion, our new editor is a bit too old to be wearing the miniscule black leather mini-skirts she favours, even though her legs are still nothing short of spectacular.

“I would never date a man who doesn’t have a Porsche,” she told me once. “And a yacht, and a condo downtown, and a cottage on the lake, and takes at least two trips to Europe a year.”

She’s in her early forties, never married, so I guess her dream man hasn’t shown up yet.

Ellen Barkin look-alike, ageing beauty queen; that is Shanda Mayo, my editor, in a nutshell.

I am not sure about her though. I mean, I don’t really know if she is as into men as she says she is. I think this because of the way she rubs her legs whenever I’m around and how she brushes up against me when we meet in the hallway. She claims to like touching me because I am so small while she is so tall. She is slender as a willow and vicious to boot, unpredictable as a weather change on the east coast.

One thing for sure though, she certainly feels entitled. To the good life, the finer things, to being showered with all things material. She hails from the backend of trailer-trash Chilton, Alabama, and is poorly educated but street-smart and savvy. Plus, her body is stunning, absolutely perfect, and that’s why, bad attitude and hard face notwithstanding, she feels as entitled as she does.

But entitled though she might feel, I have studied Shanda carefully and clearly not all is going according to plan. She still wakes up alone in her rented apartment on the just-short-of-fabulous side of town. She takes out her garbage and heads for the beat-up old Lexus she’s had for a decade. And while the job at Glamour isn’t bad for the perks and prestige, she certainly hadn’t figured it would take her as long as it had to land her own gig. And then, to her poorly disguised disappointment, her own gig hadn’t even turned out to be one of the stylish big glossies; no, she was stuck making do with Bullard and his lower echelon empire and a game of lets-pretend-it’s-the-real-deal.

So, clear to me, and increasingly apparent to Shanda herself, her dreams of wealth, power, and a polished couture-lifestyle have yet to come to pass. And the bitterness she feels because her expectations have not been met, is beginning to show and this, I want to tell her, is not a good look.

Fiercely territorial, Shanda likes to keep her finger on the pulse of the latest trends, and she keeps a tight rein on sourcing cover models and is generally disinterested in my opinions. But I luck out; I have found an obscure shoot with the new model, the new “Kate Moss”: a tiny new waif, elfin, wide-eyed.

In the same way Kate Moss had heralded “heroin chic,” this tiny new girl now offers translucence. Gossamer, insubstantial ephemeral beauty is the newest craze. Beauty that cannot last; beauty that is so fragile it exists only for a moment before it vanishes. By its very insubstantiality, such beauty is valuable beyond measure.

Angelica Rose embodies it all. She is the face of the luminous moment, just as Kate had once been.

I mock up a few Angelica covers and pin them to Shanda’s door – my usual way of presenting ideas, as it allows her a moment of privacy to get her runaway emotions and generally volatile reactions under control.

But I have no warning of what is about to come my way.

I hear her stop in front of her office door and I listen for her reaction. Shanda is not one for reticence. But this time, there is an ominous silence.

Then I hear the sound of the covers being torn off the door and ripped to shreds. Shanda storms into my office, her briefcase swinging in one hand, her face twisted with fury.

“Never,” she shouts, “ever show me this girl again. She is a nothing, and a nobody. I don’t ever want to see her again.” She throws the torn covers on the ground and stamps on them for good measure.

Yes, she stamps on them. Then she goes to her office and slams the door.

I guess I should applaud her, because who knows how much damage tiny, waif-like Kate has unwittingly done to all our psyches and there’s no doubt that Angelica’s almost alien beauty would do the same. And yet, I don’t think this was what had angered Shanda. Frankly, I have no clue as to why she is angry at all.

“You could have just said no,” I say out loud to myself. I feel pinned to my desk in shock, my eyes glued to the floor littered with scraps of Angelina’s torn-up face.

The publisher, a wizened, scaly, skin-flaking man of about seventy-plus rushes in. He has developed a sixth sense for Shanda’s outbursts.

“I heard the noise,” he says, almost breathless. “What has she done now?”

He hates Shanda even though he was the one who hired her. Two weeks after her arrival, he refused to talk to her and used me as a go-between instead.

“Why,” he asked me time and time again, “must her office be such a mess? Talk to her, tell her to clean it up.”

I always said, yes, okay I would, but of course I never mention it to Shanda.

I am about to explain to him what had happened with Angelica and the covers when the managing editor arrives. Magda is a tall, somewhat Amazonian woman of exotic Eastern European descent, although she will never say exactly where her family is from.

We’d acquired Magda to help Jean but Jean had been beyond help. Magda had harboured hopes of being appointed editor herself, particularly in the face of Jean’s demise, but the publisher could never remember her name and when pressed, he said that Magda wasn’t the right face to represent the magazine and by that he really did mean “face.” That’s what he told me when I suggested he make Magda editor, although, of course, I have never told Magda.

Magda is in the process of having her teeth straightened, a gift from her husband, and I am constantly disconcerted by the incongruous flash of metal whenever she speaks. She always wears extremely high-heeled shoes, which puts her at about six foot two. Like Shanda, Magda favours very short skirts but, while her legs are long, they are heavy and solid. Her frizzy ginger hair is a veritable explosion of thinly-spiralled energy that cannot be quelled. Her large, beautiful golden brown eyes are closely set, her nose is long and wide, and she has a fondness for startlingly sharp red lipstick upon which she layers lacquered lipgloss. Finally, she has, at some point, suffered from bad acne.

When Maia did her stint as guest editor, it was clear that she had no designs on a night with Magda and indeed hardly seemed to register her presence.

Now Magda is hoping Bullard will fire Shanda and turn to her. I want to tell her that her hopes are slim to zero but it’s none of my business.

I explain about Angelica Rose being the new Kate Moss, and Shanda’s reaction to the covers.

“Let me see them onscreen,” the publisher demands. He had once been an editor at Playboy and had some odd ideas about things. “Hmm,” he says, leaning in way too close for comfort. “Where’s the pussy? I don’t see the clitoral stimulation here. Where’s the sex?”

Since Mathew had warned me before I joined this crew that it would be a weird ride and, since these kinds of comments were commonplace daily fare with Bullard, I’d quickly become acclimatized and learnt to ignore them.

Not so with Magda. She swells like a balloon, almost hissing as she inflates, and turns purple. I can’t say her reaction is not justified.

“This is not Playboy, Mr. Bullard,” she tells him through gritted metallic teeth. “We are a women’s health and fitness magazine!”

I agree with her wholeheartedly but am too cowardly to voice my support.

Bullard is unrepentant. “Sex sells,” he says. “We all want it, even you Martha.”

“It’s Magda,” she says for the umpteenth time.

“Well, at least you tried, a good effort,” the publisher commends me as he pats me on the back. He is trying out a new contraband skin-peeling medication and I worry he will leave flakes of dead epithelials all over me.

Thankfully, he strolls out.

I crane my neck and try to see over my shoulder.

“Here, let me help you,” Magda offers, aware of my concerns. She gets strips of tape and cleans the back of my shirt.

“I don’t even want to see what came off,” I tell her.

“He makes me so angry,” she lisps slightly through her braces. “Sexist pig. I hate him. I wish I didn’t have to work here. They told me it was all about women and empowerment, about making us feel better about ourselves, helping us accept our individuality and now it’s like we’ve got Helen Gurley Brown editing Playboy. It’s hell.”

“Well, look what happened to Jean, they obviously don’t want anything meaningful.” I stare at my screen. “Hey Magda, what do you think of Angelica Rose?”

Magda pauses for a moment while she picks at her braces and makes tiny sucking noises. She is thoughtfully considering the scraps of Angelica’s face that she has gathered from off the floor, turning them over and over in her hands.

“She’s bad for morale,” she finally says. “I look at her and all I can think is how big and solid I am and how I will always be big and solid, and I shouldn’t have had breakfast and I shouldn’t have lunch.”

“I think she’s lovely,” I look at my screen again. “I know perhaps I shouldn’t because she’s so unreal but there’s something about her that’s just so graceful, ethereal, light … I don’t know.”

Magda laughs. “She’s how you and so many other people want to look,” she says. “And you have more chance of it than I do but I tell you, trying to achieve that look will make your life hell. I am going to see how Shanda’s doing.”

Just then Shanda walks in, still frowning, her short, feathered blonde hair doing a perfect flip-up at the ends. She picks at her nails, which are, oddly enough, always in bad shape; chipped, uneven, striated. Magda and I had discussed this anomaly before and come to no conclusions.

“What did Mr. Bilious think of the cover?” she asks shortly.

“Not in favour,” I say neutrally. “Not enough pussy, no clitoral stimulation.”

She leans against the lightbox. “Sorry about that earlier,” she mutters. “I’m not in a great mood. I shouldn’t have torn those mock covers up.” She sighs and smooths her skirt.

Or stomped on them, I think. “It’s okay,” I say, “No more Angelica.”

And we never mention her again. I decide the best way to get us all on a united page is a mutual bitching session. When in doubt, find a new enemy. I never have to look far.

“Why does this sales dude have to share with me?” I ask. “He’s useless, totally useless and I just don’t get it; why must he be in here with me?”

We launch into a full-scale attack of the sales guy who is out trying his hand at a cold call.

Twenty minutes later we all feel much better and the day looks brighter.