Face Value (7 page)

“So, Kate, how was your first night in New York? You enjoyed Jean-Paul’s opening?”

“Yes . . . he seemed nice, didn’t he?” "You English people ... all you say is ’nice’ and ’lovely’ ... and ’brilliant.’ ” She spoke very fast. Or was Kate speaking very slowly?

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“And ‘sorry.’ You’re always apologizing.” She got up and moved back to the chair behind the desk, checked her coffee cup for any remaining dregs of coffee, and pulled off her large gold earrings.

“Well, I suppose it’s the differences that make us all interesting, ” Kate offered, cheerily, flicking a stray racoon-colored fringe off her face. Why was she being so gnarly this morning?

Alexis stared blankly at her. For these “differences” she was paying $160,000?

“Okay, so next three months. Fire away.”

“Next three months? Is that how far ahead you’re working?”

“Hold on,” said Alexis impatiently. She pressed the buzzer on her intercom. “Lizbet, can you get Jane-Louise in? I need a beauty features meeting. Oh, and call in Clarissa, will you?”

Kate panicked. She knew this was the bit where she was required to come up with something good, to be the beauty director flown in at great expense and with a huge contract, bigger and better than all the local competition. But, like her neighbor’s daughter Joanne, who’d spent the entire nine months of her pregnancy having reflexology and reading about birthing pools only to be stunned and surprised at the eventual and natural conclusion to this abdominal swelling-up when, guess what, a baby arrived, Kate had spent the last month thinking about getting here and not about what she would do when she actually was here.

There was an awkward silence as they waited for one of the summoned faces to appear.

“Um . . . can I borrow a pen?” asked Kate. “And some paper. I’m sorry, I left my notebook back in the office.”

Alexis begrudgingly handed over her pen and a piece of paper. “Don’t press too hard.”

Silence again.

“Are you . . . er . . . from New York originally?” asked Kate, flicking the lid of Alexis’s pen without realizing she was doing it.

Alexis glared. Kate stopped flicking.

A willowy girl with long brown hair, blow-dried immaculately, and beige makeup so flawless it looked as if it had been airbrushed on, came in and sat down.

“Hi, I’m Jane-Louise, features director,” she said, shaking Kate’s hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Hi, I’m—”

“Jane-Louise, could you bring Kate up to speed with where we are?”

“Sure, no problem. Should we wait for Clarissa?”

“What for?” said Alexis, disparagingly. Kate picked up straightaway on her disdain for her deputy. Was that a good thing, she wondered, or a bad thing? It was clear that Jane-Louise thought better of contradicting Alexis when she was in one of these moods. Tipped to be the person most likely to take over Alexis’s job should she ever leave, she must be just as anxious as Alexis to see what the newcomer could come up with.

Clarissa walked in and sat down next to Jane-Louise.

“Okay,” began Jane-Louise, picking up a notebook. “So we have Laetitia Mitzi on the cover for October. We were looking for something following on from autumn trends, but it can’t be about film star glamour, because that’s the story Fashion is doing with Laetitia.”

“Kate?” Alexis waited expectantly. The phone rang.

Alexis answered, looking irritated. “Sure. Hello . . . Yes, she’s right here. Kate?” She handed Kate the phone.

“Hello . . . Mum?” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and raised her eyes heavenward, mouthing, even though it was blatantly obvious, “It’s my mum.” Clarissa sniggered.

“Mum, I can’t talk now, I’m in a meeting.” Oh, God, how embarrassing. She hadn’t even thought of her mum since she’d arrived, hadn’t been able to, didn’t even know what time it was there. “Yes, I’m fine. I’m sorry I didn’t phone last night. . . . Well, the time difference. Yes, I know it’s late for you. I’m sorry. Listen, I’ll call you later, okay? Okay, not later, tomorrow. Yes, your time. No, it’s all fine.” She hissed: “All right . . . love you, too.”

She put the phone down and blushed. Her bloody mother. Everyone looked at Alexis expectantly.

Alexis’s face cracked into a huge grin, breaking into a loud laugh. The others, obviously surprised, dutifully followed suit.

“I love it! That’s so English! Her mom calls in the middle of her first meeting! I knew I made the right decision bringing you out here, Kate. You’re real! Natural! Like pure energy! Now where were we?”

Kate took a deep breath.

“October. Er . . . mothers and daughters. What we think about our . . . moms . . . as they age, and what they think about the way we look.”

“Fantastic. So fresh,” said Alexis. She sighed, turning her back on the assembled staff to stare out of the window at Central Park. The blaze of green, with microdot-size Rollerbladers, joggers, nannies pushing prams, soothed Kate’s jet-lagged eyes. The sky was blue; it looked hot, but not sultry. Kate had a sudden urge to go outside, start exploring. She’d heard it was easy to walk Manhattan’s straight up-and-down streets, to take the ferry around the Statue of Liberty, run across the Brooklyn Bridge. Get out there! She had to stop daydreaming, focus on what she was being paid to do.

“We could do it on Bianca Lazenby and her daughter, Serena, ” said Jane-Louise, approvingly.

“Fine. Sort it out,” said Alexis, signaling the end of the meeting.

Clarissa dashed out of the office and made for the powder rooms, leaving Kate to stroll the corridors alone. Jane-Louise came running after her.

“I just wanted to say, I think that was a great idea. You’ll be fine, don’t worry. Alexis . . . well, her bark is so much worse than her bite, don’t worry about it. And she’s a huge fan, we all are! . . . If you ever want someone to lunch with, let me know.”

“Oh, thank you. I can’t today, but tomorrow?” They were all huge fans, imagine that.

Jane-Louise laughed, a delicate, reverberating laugh.

“Oh, no, sweetie, this week and next’s all full. But we’ll find a window in about three weeks, yes?” She turned, and Kate watched her enviably. She didn’t walk so much as float. Why couldn’t she do that?

“Oh, Kate!” Jane-Louise was turning back. Maybe she was going to cancel something for her. “I’ll be seeing you later at the supplement meeting.”

“Supplement?” That was cool. She could write about vitamins; Lise had been into those. She’d got her some of those little fizzy sachets of vitamin C that helped with hangovers.

"The girls didn’t tell you yet? I guess they haven’t had a chance. The big plastic surgery supplement. We do it every year. It’s a huge circulation booster, and you know how Alexis is! Circulation, circulation, circulation! The meeting’s at four, so we’ll get your ideas then, I guess? If they’re like that last one, it should be a breeze!”

“Sure . . . plastic surgery supplement!” For some inexplicable reason Kate clasped a strand of racoon-striped hair and started twirling it between her fingers, a girly, nervous manner-ism she’d seen Lise do when she was talking to boys but was otherwise completely alien to her.

“Sure . . . no problem. See you!”

Sure. No problem. See you.
What was she, some twelve-year-old schoolgirl? And more to the point, what the hell was she going to come up with on plastic surgery?

Back in her office, Kate’s desk was clear. Finally. After much sighing and huffing, Clarissa had moved back to her former desk. Kate turned on her computer and opened up a blank page. She began to write. She needed to do this, needed to be able to think on a screen, particularly as she had no one yet to banter with, to confide in. She had tried calling Lise from the hotel this morning, but she wasn’t answering her mobile for some reason. Tania had been in a meeting, which was bizarre as they hardly ever had meetings, and it had been pointless leaving a message. She didn’t think she’d be allowed to use the office phone for international calls, and besides, how could she talk, with Clarissa lapping up every word? She started typing:

I have spent ten years working on a magazine. Okay, the first three were spent making cups of tea and changing Badass’s cat litter, but no one here needs to know that. Magazines are all the same. The subject matter is different, that is all. There are deadlines. There are ideas. These things change, but the basic working order is the same. My brilliance is shining. At least, it will if I give it a bit of a polish. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.

Clarissa and Cynthia were staring at her. She suddenly realized they were probably waiting to be told what to do. She didn’t have a clue what to tell them to do. She’d never told anyone what to do before, apart from Badass, who, it hadn’t escaped her attention, was a cat. And her mum, who wasn’t. Start with a question.

“So . . . what are you working on right now?” she began cautiously. She went to chew her thumbnail, then stopped herself and twisted her hair instead. Be cool. Be poised. Be Jane-Louise.

Clarissa sighed. Did that girl have asthma or something? “I’ve just written a two-thousand-word story on backstage at the runways—autumn trends.”

“And I did a news piece on the same thing. Product related—you know, which lipstick is most like the lip color used on which show,” added Cynthia.

“Good . . . great . . . but it’s not exactly rocket science, is it?”

“Well, Diana, your predecessor, always used to say you can’t reinvent the wheel,” said Clarissa. She folded her arms across her chest. So they were playing clichés now, were they?

“And I agree. But you can pump a little air into the tires now and again, no?”

Cynthia giggled.

Clarissa was stone-faced. “Air?”

“Listen, girls, this is my chance—our chance—to do something different. Sure, we give them the news pieces, the lipstick swatches, but what else can we do?” Keep asking the questions. Keep asking the questions. Especially as the answers weren’t exactly forthcoming.

“And I gather,” she continued, “we’re doing a plastic surgery supplement. Cynthia, could you please dig out past copies from the last ten years? I haven’t seen it before, and we’ll need to have ideas by four this afternoon.”

Something in their expressions prompted her to throw another question out into the open. “But then you knew that, didn’t you, girls?”

Cynthia turned bright red. Clarissa stared ahead, sullenly, avoiding eye contact.

“We haven’t had a chance . . .”

“To talk to me, no. But an e-mail would have helped before I got here. Get me the past copies ASAP; I can read them at Lolly Steinberger’s.”

Cynthia giggled. Clarissa smiled a not very nice, lovely, or brilliant smile.

“It’s
Bergerstein
,” she said snidely.

“I knew that,” said Kate, squaring her shoulders and placing her hands firmly on her hips. “I was just checking you were listening.”

six

The craggy, smoky voice creaked its way mellifluously over the thick double bass and through the speakers, waiting for a moment of silence between the late-night bar banter to make itself heard:

Jean-Paul Suchet, her first-night artist, leaned toward Kate and whispered breathily:

“Marmalade thighs. What is zis marmalade?”

“A type of jam, popular in England, made with orange peel,” replied Kate.

She loved the
Asylum Years
album. It had a picture of a diner on the front of it, not entirely dissimilar to the one she was now sitting in. Alcohol had rendered her as some kind of ghost of Saturday night, although probably not the one Tom Waits had envisaged when he wrote the song. So Jean-Paul was a musical philistine. At least they still had one common interest: being foreign in a city full of foreigners.

“Do you ’ave marmalade thighs? Like in ze song, Katy?” He lingered over the word “marmalade” as if he was with each syllable painting it on her legs with one of his artist’s brushes and then licking it off.

“No. Jean-Pauly. But I have orange-peel skin,” she replied without missing a big fat double-bass beat.

He looked confused for a second, then laughed, ostentatiously loud for such a small bar at such a small hour.

“Ah! You ’ave cellulite!” The music disappeared just as he spoke. The couple to their left looked up and—Kate could swear—looked her over.

“Yes, I ’ave cellulite, orange-peel skin, dimpled, uneven skin, bumpy contours . . . in fact I have recently collected more words for it than I have actual cellulity bumps, if you know what I mean. So what?”

It was now four weeks since Kate had arrived in New York. She had never lived by herself before, yet even without her mum to cook breakfast or pick her clothes up off the floor, she found her one-bedroom, wooden-floored, loft-style apartment in the Meatpacking District a joy. There was scarcely any furniture bar a desk, a sofa, and a bed, and the windows were always on the grimy side, but she had sunlight streaming through them and a bright blue sky as the backdrop for a skyline of water tanks, fire escape ladders, and silver air vents pumping steam. The peeling paint on her exposed brickwork had been painted for an authentic distressed look. She had a porter called Preston who teased her for her accent and cheekily commented on her lack of male visitors. She had all the takeaway numbers on speed-dial, a pretzel stall on her doorstep, and at the end of her block there was a community basketball court, just like the ones you always saw in the movies, with crisscross fencing all around it. She woke to the sound of trucks rumbling down to the warehouses by the docks; she fell asleep as the frenetic nightlife sprung into action all around her. But not tonight. Tonight she had Jean-Paul Suchet banging on her door.

She had managed to fend off his advances successfully until this evening, when he had not bothered phoning but just turned up. He was clutching two tickets to see some band she’d never heard of, but which, he promised was the next big thing.