The Devil Wears Prada (29 page)

 “Andrea,”
he sang, immediately walking over to my desk and smiling so genuinely it made
me feel guilty for not liking him.

 “Good
morning, Mr. Tomlinson. What brings you here so early?” I asked.
“I’m sorry to tell you that Miranda’s not in yet.”

 He
chuckled, his nose twitching like a rodent’s. “Yes, yes, she
won’t be in until after lunch, or so I believe. Andy, it really has been
too long since you and I caught up. Tell Mr. T. now: How is everything?”

 “Here,
let me take those,” I said, pulling the monogrammed duffel full of
Miranda’s dirty clothes that she’d given him to give to me. I also
relieved him of the beaded Fendi tote bag that had surfaced again recently. It
was a one-of-a-kind tote that had been hand-beaded in an elaborate crystal
design just for Miranda from Silvia Venturini Fendi, as a thank-you for all of
her support, and one of the fashion assistants had put its value at just under
ten grand. But I noticed today that one of the skinny leather handles had
broken loose yet again, even though the accessories department had returned it
to Fendi for hand-stitching two dozen times already. It was intended to hold a
delicate ladies’ wallet, perhaps accompanied by a pair of sunglasses or
maybe, if absolutely necessary, a small cell phone. Miranda didn’t really
care about that. She had currently crammed in an extra-large bottle of Bulgari
perfume, a sandal with a broken heel that I was probably supposed to get fixed,
the blotter-size Hermès daily planner that weighed more than an entire laptop,
an oversize spiked dog collar that I thought either belonged to Madelaine or
was for an upcoming fashion shoot, and the Book I had delivered to her the
night before. I would have hocked a bag worth ten thousand dollars and paid my
rent for a year, but Miranda preferred to use it as a trash receptacle.

 “Thank
you, Andy. You really are a big help to everyone. So Mr. T. would sure like to
hear more about your life. What’s going on?”

 What’s
going on?What’s going on?Hmm, well, let’s see here. Really not all
that much, I suppose. I spend most of my time trying to survive my term of
indentured servitude with your sadistic wife. If there are ever any free
minutes during the workday when she’s not making some belittling demand,
then I’m trying to block out the brainwash drivel that’s spoon-fed
to me by her assistant in chief. On the increasingly rare occasions that I find
myself outside the confines of this magazine, I’m usually trying to
convince myself that it really is OK to eat more than eight hundred calories a
day and that being a size six does not put me in the plus-size category. So I
guess the short answer is, not much.

 “Well,
Mr. Tomlinson, not too much. I work a lot. And I guess when I’m not
working I hang out with my best friend, or my boyfriend. Try to see my
family.”I used to read a lot, I wanted to say,but I’m too tired
now. And sports have always been a pretty big part of my life, but there
wasn’t time anymore.

 “So,
you’re twenty-five, right?” He non-sequitured. I couldn’t
even imagine where he was going with this one.

 “Uh,
no, I’m twenty-three. I only graduated last May.”

 “Ah-hah!
Twenty-three, huh?” He looked like he was trying to decide whether to say
something or not. I braced myself. “So tell Mr. T., what do
twenty-three-year-olds do in this city for fun? Restaurants? Clubs? That sort
of thing?” He smiled again, and I wondered if he really needed the
attention as much as he appeared to: there was nothing sinister behind his
interest, just a seemingly driving need totalk .

 “Um,
well, all sorts of things, I guess. I don’t really go to clubs, but bars
and lounges and places like that. Go out for dinner, see movies.”

 “Well,
that sounds like a lot of fun. Used to do that kind of stuff, too, when I was
your age. Now it’s just a lot of work events and fund-raisers. Enjoy it
while you can, Andy.” He winked like a dorky father would.

 “Yeah,
well, I’m trying,” I managed.Please leave, please leave, please
leave, I willed, staring longingly at the bagel that was just calling my name.
I get three minutes of peace and quiet a day, and this man was stealing all of
it.

 He
opened his mouth to say something, but the doors swung open and Emily stomped
in. She was wearing her headphones and moving to the music. I watched her mouth
drop open when she saw him standing there.

 “Mr.
Tomlinson!” she exclaimed, yanking off her headphones and tossing her
iPod in her Gucci tote. “Is everything OK? Nothing’s wrong with
Miranda, is it?” She looked and sounded genuinely concerned. An A-plus
performance: always the perfectly attentive, unfailingly polite assistant.

 “Hello
there, Emily. Nothing wrong at all. Miranda will be here shortly. Mr. T. just
came by to drop off her things. How are you doing today?”

 Emily
beamed. I wondered if she actually enjoyed his presence. “Just fine.
Thanks so much for asking. And you? Did Andrea help you with everything?”

 “Oh,
she sure did,” he said, throwing smile number 6,000 in my direction.
“I wanted to go over a few things about my brother’s engagement
party, but I realize that it’s probably a little early for that,
right?”

 For a
moment I thought he meant too early in the morning and I almost shouted
“Yes!” but then I realized that he meant it was too early in the
planning to discuss details.

 He
turned back to Emily and said, “You’ve got yourself a great junior
assistant here, don’t you think?”

 “Absolutely,”
Emily managed through clenched teeth. “She’s the best.” She
grinned.

 I
grinned.

 Mr.
Tomlinson grinned with extra wattage, and I wondered if he had a chemical
imbalance, perhaps hypomania.

 “Well,
Mr. T. had better be on his way. It’s always lovely chatting with you
girls. Have a nice morning, both of you. Good-bye now.”

 “‘Bye,
Mr. Tomlinson!” Emily called as he rounded the corner in the hallway on
his way to reception.

 “Why
were you so rude to him?” she asked as she pulled the flimsy leather
blazer off, only to reveal a flimsier chiffon scoop-neck that was laced all the
way up the front like a corset.

 “So
rude? I helped him unload her stuff and I talked to him before you got here.
How is that rude?”

 “Well,
you didn’t say good-bye, for one thing. And you have that look on your
face.”

 “That
look?”

 “Yes,
that look of yours. The one that tells everyone just how far above this you
are, just how much you hate it here. That may fly with me, but it won’t
with Mr. Tomlinson. He’s Miranda’shusband , and you just
can’t treat him like that.”

 “Em,
don’t you think he’s a little, I don’t know… weird? He
never stops talking. How can he be so nice when she’s such a… so
not as nice?” I watched as she glanced inside Miranda’s office to
make sure that I’d set the newspapers correctly.

 “Weird?
Hardly, Andrea. He’s one of the most prominent tax attorneys in
Manhattan.”

 It
wasn’t worth it. “Never mind, I don’t even know what
I’m saying. What’s going on with you? How was your night?”

 “Oh,
it was good. I went shopping with Jessica for gifts for her bridesmaids.
Everywhere—Scoop, Bergdorf’s, Infinity, everywhere. And I tried on
a bunch of stuff to get some idea for Paris, but it’s still really too
early.”

 “For
Paris? You’re going to Paris? Does that mean you’ll leave me alone
with her?” I hadn’t meant to say the last part out loud, but it had
slipped.

 Again, a
look like I was crazy. “Yes, I’ll be going to Paris with Miranda in
October, for the spring ready-to-wear shows. Each year she takes her senior
assistant to the spring shows so she can see what it’s really like. I
mean, I’ve been to, like, a million at Bryant Park, but the European
shows are just different.”

 I did a
quick calculation. “In October, as in seven months from now? You were
trying on clothes for a trip seven months from now?” I hadn’t meant
for it to sound as harsh as it did, and Emily immediately got defensive.

 “Well,
yes. I mean, obviously I wasn’t going to buy anything—so many of
the styles will have changed by then. But I just wanted to start thinking about
it. It’s a really huge deal, you know. Stay in five-star hotels, go to
the craziest parties ever. And my god, you get to go to the hottest, most
exclusive fashion shows in existence.”

 Emily
had already told me that Miranda went to Europe three or four times a year for
the fashion shows. She always skipped London, like everyone did, but she went
to Milan and Paris in October for spring ready-to-wear, in July for winter
couture, and in March for fall ready-to-wear. Sometimes she’d hit resort,
but not always. We’d been working like crazy to get Miranda prepared for
the shows coming up at the end of the month. I’d wondered briefly why she
wasn’t planning on bringing an assistant.

 “So
why doesn’t she take you to all of them?” I decided to just go for
it, even though the answer was sure to entail a lengthy explanation. I was
excited enough that Miranda would be out of the office for two whole weeks (she
spent one in Milan and one in Paris) and was giddy at the thought of getting
rid of Emily for a week of that. Visions of bacon cheeseburgers and
nonprofessionally ripped jeans and flats—oh hell, maybe even sneakers—filled
my head. “Why just in October?”

 “Well,
it’s not like she doesn’t have help over there. Italian and
FrenchRunway always send some of their assistants for Miranda, and most of the
time the editors help her themselves. But it’s at spring RTW that she
throws a huge party, the annual kick-off party that everyone says is the
biggest and best at all the shows, all year long. I’ll only go for the
week while she’s in Paris. So obviously she would only trustme to help
her there.” Obviously.

 “Mmm,
sounds like it’ll be a great time. So that means I just hold down the
fort here, huh?”

 “Yeah,
pretty much. But don’t think that it’ll be a joke. That will
probably be the hardest week of all because she needs a lot of assistance when
she’s away. She’ll be calling you a lot.”

 “Oh,
goody,” I said. She rolled her eyes.

 I slept
with my eyes open, staring at a blank computer screen, until the office began
to fill up and there were other people to watch. TenA .M. brought the first of
the Clackers, the quiet sipping of no-whip skim lattes to nurse the previous
night’s champagne hangovers. James stopped by my desk, as he did whenever
he saw Miranda wasn’t at hers, and proclaimed he’d met his future
husband at Balthazar the night before.

 “He
was just sitting at the bar, wearing the greatest red leather jacket I’d
ever seen—and let me tell you, he could pull it off. You should have seen
how he slipped those oysters on his tongue…” He audibly groaned.
“Oh, it was just magnificent.”

 “So’d
you get his number?” I asked.

 “Get
his number? Try get his pants. He was butt-ass naked on my couch by eleven, and
boy, let me tell you—”

 “Lovely,
James. Lovely. Not one for playing hard to get, are you? Sounds a little slutty
of you, to be honest. This is the age of AIDS, you know.”

 “Sweetie,
even you, Miss High and Mighty I-Date-the-World’s-Last-Angel,
would’ve been on your knees without a second thought if you saw this guy.
He’s absolutely amazing. Amazing!”

 By
eleven everyone had checked everyone else out, making notations of who had
scored a pair of the new Theory “Max” pants or the latest,
impossible-to-find Sevens. Time for a break at noon, when conversation centered
around particular items of clothing and usually took place by the racks lined
up against the walls. Each morning Jeffy would pull out all the racks of
dresses and bathing suits and pants and shirts and coats and shoes and
everything else that had been called in as a potential item to shoot for one of
the fashion spreads. He lined up each rack against a wall, weaving them
throughout the entire floor so the editors could find what they needed without
having to fight their way through the Closet itself.