The Devil Wears Prada (37 page)

 My first
instinct was to remain silent, since it didn’t appear that the verbal
barrage was over, but as usual, my instincts were wrong.

 “Hell-ooo?Anyone
there? Is the process of connecting one phone call to another really too
difficult forboth my assistants?”

 “No,
Miranda, of course not. I’m sorry about this—” My voice was
shaking a little, but I couldn’t get it under control.
“—it’s just that we can’t seem to find Mr. Lagerfeld.
We’ve already tried at least eight—”

 “Can’t
seem to find him?”she mimicked in a high-pitched voice. “What do
you mean, you ‘can’t seem to find’ him?”

 What
part of that simple five-word sentence did she not comprehend, I wondered.
Can’t. Seem. To. Find. Him. Seemed rather clear and precise to me: We
can’t fucking find him. That is why you’re not talking to him.
Ifyou can find him, thenyou can talk to him. A million barbed responses raced
around my head, but I could only sputter like a first-grader who’d been
singled out by the teacher for talking in class.

 “Um,
well, Miranda, we’ve called all of the numbers we have listed for him,
and he doesn’t appear to be at any of them,” I managed.

 “Well
of course he’s not!” She was almost screaming now, that precious,
well-guarded cool was precariously close to collapsing. She took a deep,
exaggerated breath and said calmly, “Ahn-dre-ah. Are you aware that Mr.
Lagerfeld is in Paris this week?” I felt like we were doing English As a
Second Language lessons.

 “Of
course, Miranda. Emily has been trying all the numbers in—”

 “And
are you aware that Mr. Lagerfeld said he’d be available on his mobile
phone while he was in Paris?” Every muscle in her throat strained to keep
her voice even and calm.

 “Well,
no, we don’t have a cell number listed in the directory, so we
didn’t know that Mr. Lagerfeld even had a cell phone. But Emily is on the
phone with his assistant right now, and I’m sure she’ll have that
number in just a minute.” Emily gave me the thumbs-up right before she
scribbled something and exclaimed, “Merci,oh yes, thank you, I mean,merci
” over and over again.

 “Miranda,
I have the number right here. Would you like me to connect you now?” I
could feel my chest puff out with confidence and pride. A job well done! A
superior performance under the most pressure-filled conditions. Never mind that
my really cute peasant blouse that had been complimented by two—not one,
but two—fashion assistants was now sporting sweat stains under the arms.
Who cared? I was about to get this stark raving mad lunatic of an international
caller off my back, and I was thrilled.

 “Ahn-dre-ah?”
It sounded like a question, but I was only concentrating on trying to figure
out a pattern for indiscriminate name mix-ups. At first I’d thought she
did it deliberately in an attempt to belittle and humiliate us even more, but
then I figured out that she was probably quite satisfied with the levels of
belittlement and humiliation we endured and so she did it only because she
couldn’t be bothered to keep straight details so inane as her two
assistants’ names. Emily had confirmed this by saying that she called her
Emily about half the time but called her a mixture of Andrea and
Allison—the assistant before her—the other half. I felt better.

 “Yes?”
Squeaking again. Dammit! Wasn’t it possible for me to have just a tiny bit
of dignity with this woman?

 “Ahn-dre-ah,
I don’t know what all the fuss is over finding Mr. Lagerfeld’s
mobile number when I have it right here. He gave it to me just five minutes
ago, but we were disconnected and I can’t seem to dial correctly.”
She said the last part as though the entire world was to blame for this
irritation and inconvenience except for herself.

 “Oh.
You, um, you have the number? And you knew he was on that number the whole
time?” I was saying it for Emily’s benefit, and it only served to
enrage Miranda even more.

 “Am
I not making myself perfectly clear here? I need you to connect me to
03.55.23.56.67.89. Immediately. Or is that too difficult?”

 Emily
was slowly shaking her head in disbelief as she crumpled up the number
we’d both just fought so hard to get.

 “No,
no, Miranda, of course that’s not too difficult. I’ll connect you
right away. Hold just a minute.” I hit “conference,” dialed
the numbers, heard an older man shout “Allo!” into the phone, and
hit conference again. “Mr. Lagerfeld, Miranda Priestly, you’re
connected,” I stated like one of those manual operators from theLittle
House on the Prairie days. And instead of putting the whole call on mute and
then hitting speaker so Emily and I could listen in on the call together, I
just hung up. We sat in silence for a few minutes as I tried to refrain from
badmouthing Miranda immediately. Instead, I mopped some dampness from my
forehead and took long, deep breaths. She spoke first.

 “So,
let me just get this straight. She had his number the entire time but just
didn’t know how to dial it?”

 “Or
maybe she just didn’t feel like dialing it,” I added helpfully,
always enthusiastic for the chance to team up against Miranda, especially
considering how rare the opportunities were with Emily.

 “I
should’ve known,” she said, shaking her head like she was horribly
disappointed with herself. “I really should’ve known that. She
always calls to have me connect her to people who are staying in the next room,
or who are in a hotel two streets over. I remember I thought that was the
weirdest thing, calling from Paris to New York to have someone connect you to
someone in Paris. Now it just seems normal, of course, but I can’t
believe I didn’t see that one coming.”

 I was
about to run to the dining room for lunch, but the phone rang again. Operating
under the lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice theory, I decided to be a sport
and answer the phone.

 “Miranda
Priestly’s office.”

 “Emily!
I am standing in the pouring rain on the rue de Rivoli and my driver has
vanished. Vanished! Do you understand me? Vanished! Find him
immediately!” She was hysterical, my very first time hearing her that
way, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it was the only time.

 “Miranda,
just a moment. I have his number right here.” I turned to scan my desk
for the itinerary I’d set down a moment earlier, but all I saw were
papers, old Bulletins, stacks of back issues. Only three or four seconds had
passed, but I felt as if I were standing right next to her, watching as the
rain poured down on her Fendi fur and caused the makeup to melt down the side
of her face. Like she could just reach out and slap my face, tell me I’m
a worthless piece of shit with zero talent, no skill set, a complete and total
loser. There wasn’t time to talk myself down, remind myself that this was
merely a human being (theoretically) who wasn’t happy to be standing in
the rain and was taking it out on her assistant 3,600 miles away. It’s
not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.

 “Ahn-dre-ah!
My shoes areruined . Do you hear me? Are you even listening? Find my drivernow!
”

 I was at
risk of some inappropriate emotion—I could feel the knot in the back of
my throat, the tightening of the muscles in the back of my neck, but it was too
early to tell if I would laugh or cry. Either one: not good. Emily must have
sensed as much, because she leapt out of her seat and handed me her copy of the
itinerary. She’d even highlighted the driver’s contact numbers,
three in all, one for the car phone, his mobile phone, and his home phone.
Naturally.

 “Miranda,
I’m going to need to put you on hold while I call him. Can I put you on
hold?” I didn’t wait for a response, which I knew would drive her
crazy, and threw the call on hold. I dialed Paris again. The good news was the
driver picked up on the first ring of the first number I tried. The bad news
was he didn’t speak English. Although I’d never been
self-destructive before, I couldn’t help but smash my forehead firmly into
the Formica. Three times of this, and Emily had picked up the line at her desk.
She’d resorted to screaming, not so much in attempt to make the driver
understand her own bad French, but simply because she was trying to impress
upon him the urgency of the current situation. New drivers always took a little
breaking in, mostly because they foolishly believed that if Miranda had to wait
forty-five seconds to a minute extra, she’d be all right. This was
precisely the notion of which Emily and I were to disabuse them.

 We both put
our heads down a few minutes later, after Emily had managed to insult the
driver enough that he’d hightailed it back to where he’d left
Miranda three or four minutes earlier. I wasn’t particularly hungry for
lunch anymore, a phenomenon that made me nervous. WasRunway rubbing off? Or was
it just the adrenaline and nerves mixing together to guarantee no appetite?
That was it! The starvation so endemic atRunway was not, in fact, self-induced;
it was merely the physiological response of bodies that were so consistently
terrified and all-around anxiety-ridden that they were never actually hungry. I
vowed to look into this a little more and perhaps explore the possibility that
Miranda was smarter than all of this and had deliberately created a persona so
offensive on every level that she literally scared people skinny.

 “Ladies,
ladies, ladies! Pick those heads up off those desks! Can you imagine Miranda
seeing you now? She wouldn’t be very happy!” James sang from the
doorway. He had slicked back his hair using some greasy, waxy stuff called Bed
Head (“Hot name—how can you resist?”) and was wearing some
sort of skintight football jersey with the number 69 on both the front and the
back. As always, a picture of subtlety and understatement.

 Neither
of us so much as glanced at him. The clock said it was only four, but it felt
like midnight.

 “OK
then, let me guess. Mama’s been calling off the hook because she lost an
earring somewhere between the Ritz and Alain Ducasse and she wants you to find
it, even though it’s in Paris and you’re in New York.”

 I
snorted. “You think that would put us in this condition? That’s
ourjob . We do that every day. Give us something difficult.”

 Even
Emily laughed. “Seriously, James, not good enough. I could find an
earring in under ten minutes in any city in the world,” she said, all of
a sudden inspired to join in for reasons I didn’t understand.
“It’d only be a challenge if she didn’t tell us what city
she’d lost it in. But I bet even then we could do it.”

 James
was backing himself away from the office, a look of feigned horror on his face.
“All right, then, ladies, you have a great day, you hear? At least she
hasn’t fucked you both up for good. I mean, seriously, thank god for
that, right? You’re bothtooootally sane. Yeah. Um, have a great
day…”

 “NOT
SO FAST THERE, YOU PANSY!” shrieked someone very loud and very
high-pitched. “I WANT YOU TO MARCH YOUR WAY BACK IN THERE AND TELL THE
GIRLS WHAT YOU WERE THINKING WHEN YOU PUT THAT SHMATA ON THIS MORNING!”
Nigel grabbed James by the left ear and dragged him into the area between our
desks.

 “Oh,
come on, Nigel,” James whined, pretending to be annoyed but obviously
delighted that Nigel was touching him. “You know you love this
top!”

 “LOVE
THAT TOP? YOU THINK I LOVE THAT FRATTY, GAY-JOCK LOOK YOU’VE GOT GOING?
JAMES, YOU NEED TO RETHINK HERE, OK? OK?”

 “What’s
wrong with a tight football jersey? I think it looks hot.” Emily and I
nodded in quiet alliance with James. It may not have been exactly tasteful, but
he did look incredibly hip. And besides, it was kind of tough to be taking
fashion advice from a man who was, at that precise moment, wearing zebra-print
boot-cut jeans and a black V-neck sweater with a keyhole cut out in the back to
reveal rippling back muscles. The whole ensemble was topped off with a floppy
straw hat and a touch (subtle, I’ll give him that!) of kohl eyeliner.

 “BABY
BOY, FASHION IS NOT FOR ADVERTISING YOUR FAVE SEX ACTS ON YOUR SHIRT. UNH-UNH,
NO IT’S NOT! YOU WANNA SHOW A LITTLE SKIN? THAT’S HOT! YOU WANNA
SHOW SOME OF THOSE TIGHT, YOUNG CURVES OF YOURS?THAT’S HOT. CLOTHING IS
NOT FOR TELLING THE WORLD WHAT POSITION YOU PREFER, BOYFRIEND. NOW DO YOU
UNDERSTAND?”

 “But,
Nigel!” A look of defeat was carefully constructed to disguise how
pleased he was to be the center of Nigel’s attention.