Fashionistas Read online

  I’m sitting next to Greg, Beth’s fiancé, a meek Walter Mitty type whose vivid inner life is not a determined fact. His stare is often blank and empty, and it’s very easy to assume that he’s not piloting an eight-engined navy hydroplane in his mind.

  “How are you, Vig?” he asks me, revealing that he knows my name. We have been thrown together a few times at Maya functions, but this is the first time he’s ever addressed me directly.

  Before I can answer, Beth, who is sitting adjacent to me, breaks off her story about Edna McCarthy’s highlighting disaster (zebra stripes!) and says, “Yes, how are you, Vig?” Her voice has a convincing touch of sincere concern but I’m not fooled. She is only asking because the manual says she should and she’s not about to be outmannered by her timid fiancé.

  “I’m fine. Things are busy at work,” I say, giving the sort of stock answer you do to aunts and uncles you only see at Christmas and Easter. “How are things with you?”

  I direct this question to Greg, but he doesn’t answer. He’s been with Beth for so long that he doesn’t open his mouth or take a deep breath or even formulate a thought. He knows the routine too well to bother with these things. “Greg has some very exciting news.” She pauses here to give me a second to prepare myself. “He just got a promotion. Say hello to Slokam-Beetham’s new junior VP of marketing management.”

  “Congratulations,” I say, although I don’t really believe this position exists. It sounds like nothing.

  Beth beams. “Thanks. We’re so happy. It’s what we’ve been waiting for. Now we can start looking at houses.”

  I ask the requisite follow-up question—“Oh, where are you going to look?”—even though I know the answer. They’re going to look within five minutes of Beth’s mother, in Riverside, in Cos Cob, in Old Greenwich.

  While Beth rattles off the expected response with one curve ball, Westport, tossed in for good measure (now that Martha has moved!), I glance at Greg, whose expressionless face suddenly reminds me of a goldfish staring dumbly at the world outside its glass bowl. Jump out, I want to say, jump out and breathe the air. But I don’t. I won’t interfere in things that I know nothing about. Maybe fresh air will suffocate him.

  The conversation turns to topics outside my demo (18 to 35, urban, single) like fixed-rate mortgages and quality of schools and property taxes and I excuse myself. There are some things I cannot listen to, even to be polite.

  In the kitchen, Maya is grating manchego. “How’s it going out there?” she asks, sprinkling the cheese on the asparagus tartlet appetizer.

  “They’re having a very grown-up discussion about school districts. Beth is reciting reading-level statistics and percentages of kids who go on to college. It’s making me very depressed,” I say, leaning against the counter and watching her work. “Are you sure you don’t need help?”

  “Here. Lightly season the salad.” She hands me a pepper grinder. “I know. It gets to me too sometimes—the house, the SUV. I don’t get it,” she says, putting the appetizer into the oven.

  “It’s not that,” I insist, but it is that—at least partly. I don’t want the house in the suburbs and the gas-guzzling SUV and the uniform green lawn and the smug satisfaction of having a guest room. Space, just like everything else, is a commodity, and sometimes it comes at too high a price. But I envy their clear-sightedness. I envy the confident way they know what they want. The people in the other room are immaculate; there isn’t a speck of doubt on them.

  “What is it?”

  I’m incapable of doing anything lightly and the salad suddenly looks speckled. I take out the leaves hardest hit, mostly the top layer, and throw them in the garbage when Maya isn’t looking. Then I toss the salad with orange plastic tongs. “I don’t know. I think it’s their certainty. They know what they want,” I say, trying to put my finger on it, “and they’re going after it without paralyzing themselves with too much thought.”

  “They want to be their parents. It’s not something they think about,” she says dismissively. Then she inspects my handiwork, wipes her hands on a striped dish towel and withdraws a bottle of red wine from the cabinet. “You lasted more than a half hour,” she observes, uncorking the cabernet sauvignon after a small struggle. “I expected you to come hide in the kitchen long before now.”

  Although Maya is still fond of the old high school gang, she can’t spend too much time in their company without wanting to hit her head against a brick wall. There is an unremitting sameness about who they are: investment bankers and lawyers and insurance salespeople and accountants.

  “It’s the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,” she said one night over Midori martinis—tumbled, of course.

  We were in the lounge at the Soho Grand hotel, dwarfed by giant lampshades and bathed in golden light. “Yes,” I said, although I think the world has many more crimes than this.

  “It’s a poem,” she explained, “that always reminds me of my friends from high school.

  Let not young souls be smothered out before

  they do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.

  It’s the world’s one crime its babes grow dull

  its poor are oxlike, limp and leaden eyed.

  Not that they starve but starve so dreamlessly.

  Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap.

  Not that they serve but have no gods to serve.

  Not that they die but that they die like sheep.

  “They’re not so bad,” I say now, thinking now how easy it is to starve dreamlessly.

  Maya laughs, assuming I’m only being polite, and pours the wine. But it’s more than a reflex, more than just instinctive diplomacy, that sparks the statement. Childhood friends are continuity, uninterrupted connections between selves, and you hold on to them. You hold on to them and you love them, but sometimes they’re not quite comfortable. New York City and Greenwich are like the Galapagos and mainland Ecuador. There’s a wide gulf between the two, and a different language has developed over time.

  Terms of Reference, August 19: Cultivate Hustle

  “Hustle?” I ask, squinting my eyes to make sure I read the word right. Maya has given me my own copy of her new life manual. She reduced the font to seven point, printed out three months’ worth of terms and bound the fifty pages together with a thin blue ribbon. The end result is a book with print so small it’s like the condensed version of the OED—you need a magnifying glass to read it.

  “What’s this?” I asked earlier, when she’d handed me the crude notebook.

  “It’s the pocket edition. You’re my sponsor,” she said in a tone that suggested she was spelling out the obvious.

  “Your sponsor?”

  “Yes, my sponsor. It’s your job to keep me on track,” she explained, as if giving herself a keeper were an everyday experience. “I’m like an alcoholic and these are my steps to recovery. When you think I’m straying from my core objectives, you have to reel me back in.”

  I accept the responsibility of sponsorship because I don’t believe it’s a long-term commitment. Maya will get bored with accountability and regimens within a week and move on to something else. This is her way. In the dozen years I’ve known her, there have been many first days of the rest of her life.

  “What does ‘cultivate hustle’ mean?” I ask now, laying the book on the table—the pocket edition is too thick for a pocket—and starting the long cleaning process. Maya’s small kitchen doesn’t have much counter space and to compensate she stacks dishes and puts them on the floor. She wants to leave them on the floor overnight but I can’t do that. I can’t sleep knowing mice are treating her kitchen like the fairground in Charlotte’s Web. I put a pile of salad plates into the sink.

  “You know hustle,” she says, watching me with disapproval. It’s her house and her dinner party and there is no way she can let me clean up without feeling agitated. I use my thumb to scrape off dried cheese and Maya huffs angrily. My every action is like a rebuke. “Here—” she pushes m
e aside and puts on yellow rubber gloves “—let me do that.”

  “I know hustler.”

  Maya gives me a disgusted look and explains. “Since I no longer have an agent and quite possibly might never get a new one—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You haven’t even started loo—”

  Maya interrupts with a dripping yellow hand. “Uh-uh. August 15,” she says.

  Her comment is nonsensical and I stare at her for a second. “What?”

  “Terms of reference, August 15.”

  I find August 15 and read aloud. “Face reality.”

  “Check,” she says. “The reality of the situation is that I don’t have an agent and there’s the very real possibility that I’ll never have an agent again. I’ve got to deal with that.” She squirts blue dishwashing liquid onto a sponge. “Actually, I did deal with it, four days ago. I’ve moved on to new challenges.”

  “But, Maya, you’re going to get a new—”

  “Buh!” she says, raising her hand like a traffic cop’s. “I’ll have none of that soul-destroying optimism in my house, only clear-eyed cynicism tempered with despair.”

  “That sounds horrible,” I say, appalled.

  My clear-eyed honesty earns me an annoyed look. “Vig, you’re my sponsor. Either support me in everything I do or let me find someone else.”

  Neither option is acceptable, so I change the subject. “You were explaining hustle….”

  “Yes, since I no longer have an agent and quite possibly might never get another one, I need to find a satisfactory backup career in case best-selling author doesn’t work out. I can’t copyedit all my life.”

  Copyediting is one of those tedious jobs you’re glad someone else has to do, like data entry or toll collecting, and I’m not surprised that Maya wants to get out. Editors treat copy departments as though they are necessary evils that must be endured—like traffic on the way to your summer share—and I’m amazed that she’s lasted this long.

  “What do you want to do?” I ask. This is the question I ask myself almost every morning when I wake up and the answer always escapes me. I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, so I stay at Fashionista year after year hoping one day blinding inspiration will strike. Maya is different. She’s always known the answer and suddenly it doesn’t seem fair that she find a second dream before I find a first.

  Maya shrugs. “I’m taking suggestions. I’m supposed to know by August 30, so please get your ideas in by the twenty-eighth at the latest.”

  There is now a clean stack of dishes next to the sink along with bowls and serving utensils and I pick up a towel. I don’t know where anything goes, and I start opening and closing cabinets until I see something familiar.

  “In the meantime,” she continues, “I want to try writing magazine articles. That’s where hustle comes in. I need to be more proactive in pitching ideas. Waiting for you to become editor in chief and start assigning me stories doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “I didn’t know you were so invested in my career,” I say, a green plastic colander in hand. I’m staring at the cabinets, trying to remember which one has the plastic bowls. This is like a game of Concentration and I’m losing. “What magazines are you going to pitch?”

  “It seems like a good idea to start with the ones I copyedit for. I know people there.”

  Maya works mostly for women’s magazines such as Glamour and Cosmo and Marie Claire. Their field of interest is small and articles travel a limited circuit from sex and relationship back to beauty and health. I can’t see Maya embracing any of these things. “You know you’re just going to be writing stories about antioxidants and ten ways that it’s okay to change for your man.”

  She makes a pained expression. “It’s never okay to change for your man.”

  I point a spatula at her. “Terms of reference, August 19— Stop thinking independently.”

  “You’re not helping,” she says, rinsing a red, green and yellow plate. Maya’s collection of dishes has been culled from flea markets and thrift stores across the country. No two plates are alike, but they all have pictures of pretty flowers on them.

  I am helping. This is what she asked of me: clear-eyed cynicism. “Look, even if you do manage to shrug off the label of copyeditor—and I’m not saying you will; these magazines pigeonhole you early and they pigeonhole you deep—you’ll be bored out of your mind. I know you, Maya. Test-driving sunscreens is not the sort of thing that will get you out of bed in the morning. It’s unsatisfying and dull and so dour and humorless that you might as well be writing stock reports for AT&T,” I say angrily. Service items are fact-gathering missions; they’re black and white. Maya is Technicolor. She’s a Matisse painting and Venetian glass.

  This isn’t what she wants to hear, and she takes her anger out on a defenseless whisk. It is bent in all the wrong places by the time she’s done cleaning it. “It’s a beginning,” she says, her temper under control now. She tosses the deformed whisk into the drying rack. “I have to start somewhere and this is it. I’ll cultivate hustle, write a few articles for women’s magazines, put together a portfolio of clips, make a name for myself as an ingenious writer who makes even dull topics interesting and then wait for the good assignments to pour in. A couple of hundred words on which suntan lotion provides the best UVA and UVB protection is a small price to pay. All I have to do is cultivate hustle. It’ll be fine,” she adds in a calm voice, as though she is comforting me and not herself, “you’ll see.”

  I’m not so sure I will see but I don’t say anything. I only hold my hand out for a wineglass and wipe it dry with a damp cotton towel. Maya is convinced that small changes ripple across the pond of your existence. She believes that they snowball into massive alterations that affect everything. But life is not like that. You are not an airline. You can’t remove a single olive from every salad served in first class and save one point two million dollars.

  An Idea Germinates

  Roger’s cell phone is programmed to play the theme song to an obscure Swedish children’s television show that aired for two years in the early seventies. Childish but not Swedish, Roger exuberantly showed off his new ring one night over dinner, playing the quickly grating tune over and over again until the couple at the table next to us quietly asked him to stop. Embarrassed, Maya averted her gaze, I hung my head in shame, and Roger spent the rest of the meal talking with food in his mouth and complaining in between telephone calls that people don’t have manners anymore. It seems that some people never did.

  I hear the familiar la-da-do-dada now and cringe. The Met is crowded with summer tourists and the European portrait rooms are thick with sweaty people in fanny packs, but I know that if I turn around I’ll see him. He is right behind me, and between Portrait of a Man and Portrait of a Bearded Man, I’m cornered. I hold myself still like a leopard in the underbrush and hope he passes, but I have no camouflage. My summer dress is bright blue and I stand out like a beacon against the old Dutch masters.

  Roger says, “Vig darling,” and I turn around. Since he and Maya are no longer dating, I’m not required to affect pleasure. I’m not required to affect anything at all, and I give him a look of pure disgust when he raises a hand to indicate that he’ll be off the phone in a second. I did not come to the Met to stand in Roger Childe’s waiting room.

  I point across the room to indicate the direction in which I’m going and walk away. My instinct is to scurry out of the building, but I settle with hiding behind a pair of German-speaking tourists who are admiring a Rembrandt. Next to me a woman is drawing the picture with thick gray charcoals and I’m distracted for a moment by her skill. I’m also sketching austere portraits, but I’m using a No. 2 pencil. I’ve never done this before and my clumsy fingers don’t glide across the paper. They stumble and limp and sometimes even fall. I feel self-conscious and silly, but I refuse to let these wayward emotions quell my enthusiasm.

  I’m here because I want to be Tech
nicolor. This is the revelation that struck me last night as I was railing against hustle and drying colanders and putting away dishes. I don’t want to write boring service items either. The world is so much more interesting than the type of teeth-whitening strips you use.

  Enter Pieter van Kessel, a young Dutch designer whose fashions borrow liberally from Rembrandt and Frans Hals. His fall show impressed me and stayed with me and gave me dangerous ideas above my station. I squashed them, of course. I crushed them ruthlessly beneath my heel because up-and-coming designers are not the sort of thing Fashionista covers. Rising stars are not in our cosmos. At least not under the Jane regime.

  But suddenly I’m eager to plan for the best-case scenario. It will mean going back to Keller’s apartment and braving his anger and calming him down enough to gain his compliance. It will mean researching a story idea that has very little chance of coming to fruition. But this is how it has to be done. I still don’t believe in the cultivation of hustle, but you can’t wait for the world to come to you. You have to go after the things you want. And I want van Kessel. I want to meet him and talk to him and write about his designs. I want to publish a story about the making of a superstar before he plays to packed stadiums.

  My moment of distraction is fatal. While I’m contemplating the woman’s clean lines and my future, the German-speaking couple moves on to the next painting and I’m left without cover.

  “Vig,” Roger says again, either oblivious or unoffended by my hasty retreat. He’s off the phone now and holding the hand of a beautiful redhead in a skintight leather dress. Roger is a creepy guy, the sort who thinks up catchy nicknames for serial killers or peeks into the women’s bathrooms, but I don’t think of him as the type to go for skintight leather dresses. J. Crew only makes tasteful jackets.