The Devil Wears Prada (47 page)

 Miranda
was hanging on to B-DAD’s forearm with the fakest of smiles plastered
across her face. I didn’t have to hear what they were saying to know that
she was barely responding at the appropriate time. Social graces were not her
strength, as she had little tolerance for small talk—but I knew
she’d be on her best kiss-ass behavior tonight. I’d come to realize
that her “friends” all fell into one of two categories. There were
those she perceived as “above” her and who must be impressed. This
list was short, but it generally included people like Irv Ravitz, Oscar de la
Renta, Hillary Clinton, and any first-rate, A-list movie star. Then there were
those “below” her, who must be patronized and belittled so they
don’t forget their place, which included basically everyone else:
allRunway employees, all family members, all parents of her children’s
friends—unless they coincidentally fell into category number one—almost
all designers and other magazine editors, and every single solitary person in
the service industry, both here and abroad. Tonight was sure to be amusing
because these were category two people who would have to be treated like
category ones, merely because of their association with Mr. Tomlinson and his
brother. I always enjoyed the rare occasions when I got to watch Miranda try to
impress those around her, mostly because she wasn’t naturally charming.

 I felt
the first guests arrive before I saw them. The tension in the room was
palpable. Remembering my color printouts, I rushed over to the couple and
offered to take the woman’s fur wrap. “Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson,
thank you so much for joining us this evening. Please, I’ll take that.
And Ilana here will show you to the atrium, where cocktails are being
served.” I hoped I wasn’t staring during my monologue, but the
spectacle was truly outrageous. I’d seen women dressed like hookers and
men dressed like women and models not dressed at all at Miranda’s
parties, but never before had I seen people dressed like this. I knew it
wasn’t going to be a trendy New York crowd, but I was expecting them to
look like something out ofDallas ; instead, they looked like a dressier version
of the cast fromDeliverance .

 Mr.
Tomlinson’s brother, himself distinguished looking with silver hair, made
the horrible mistake of wearing white tails—in May, no less—with a
plaid handkerchief and a cane. His fiancée had on an emerald green
taffeta nightmare. It swirled and puffed and gathered and forced her enormous
bust up and over the top of the dress so that it appeared her own silicon
breasts might actually suffocate her. Diamonds the size of Dixie cups hung from
her ears, and an even larger one sparkled from her left hand. Her hair was
bleached white with peroxide, as were her teeth, and her heels were so high and
so skinny, she walked as if she’d been a running back in the NFL for the
past twelve years.

 “Dah-lings,
I amso delighted you could join us for a little pah-ty! Everyone loves pahties,
now don’t they?” Miranda sang in a falsetto voice. The soon-to-be
Mrs. Tomlinson looked as if she’d pass out. Right there before her was
the one and only Miranda Priestly! Her glee embarrassed us all, and the whole
wretched crowd moved into the atrium with Miranda leading the way.

 The rest
of the night went on much like the beginning. I recognized all the
guests’ names and managed not to utter anything too humiliating. The
parade of white tuxes, chiffon, big hair, bigger jewels, and barely
postadolescent women ceased to amuse me as the hours wore on, but I never grew
tired of watching Miranda. She was the true lady and the envy of every woman in
that museum that night. And even though they understood that all the money in
the world could never buy them her class and elegance, they never stopped
wanting it.

 I smiled
genuinely when she dismissed me halfway through dinner, as usual without a
thank-you or a good-night. (“Ahn-dre-ah, we won’t be needing you
anymore this evening. See yourself out.”) I looked for Ilana, but she had
already sneaked out. The car took only about ten minutes to arrive after I
called for it—I had briefly considered taking the subway, but
wasn’t sure how well the Oscar or my feet would’ve held
up—and I sunk, exhausted but calm, into the backseat.

 When I
walked past John on my way to the elevator, he reached under his little table
and pulled out a manila envelope. “Just got this a few minutes ago. It
says ‘Urgent.’ ” I thanked him and sat down in a corner of
the lobby, wondering who would be messengering me something at ten
o’clock on a Friday night. I tore it open and pulled out a note:

 Dearest
Andrea,

 It was
so great to meet you tonight! Can we please get together next week for sushi or
something? I dropped this off on my way home— figured you could use the
pick-me-up after a night like the one we just had. Enjoy.

 Xoxo,

Ilana

 Inside
was the picture of Miranda as Snake, only Ilana had enlarged this one to a ten
by thirteen size. I looked at it carefully for a few minutes, massaging the
feet I’d finally pulled from the Manolos, and looked into Miranda’s
eyes. She looked intimidating and mean and just like the bitch I stared at
every day. But tonight she’d also looked sad, and not a little lonely. Adding
this picture to my fridge and making fun of it with Lily and Alex wasn’t
going to make my feet hurt any less, or give me back my Friday night. I tore it
up and hobbled upstairs.

15

 “Andrea,
it’s Emily,” I heard a voice croak from the phone. “Can you
hear me?” It had been months since Emily had called me at home late at
night, so I knew it had to be serious.

 “Hi,
sure. You sound like hell,” I said, bolting upright in bed, immediately
wondering if Miranda had done something to make her sound that way. The last
time Emily had called this late was when Miranda had called her at eleven on a
Saturday night to demand that Emily charter her and Mr. Tomlinson a private jet
to get home from Miami since bad weather had canceled their regularly scheduled
flight. Emily was just getting ready to leave her apartment to attend her own
birthday party when the call came in, and she’d immediately called me and
begged me to deal with it. I hadn’t gotten the message until the next
day, though, and when I called her back, she was still in tears.

 “I
missed my own birthday party, Andrea,” she’d wailed the second she
picked up the phone. “I missed my own birthday party because I had to
charter them a flight!”

 “They
couldn’t get a hotel room for one night and come back the next day like
normal people?” I’d asked, pointing out the obvious.

 “Don’t
you think I thought of that? I had penthouse suites reserved for them at the
Shore Club, the Albion, and the Delano within seven minutes of her first phone
call, figuring she couldn’t possibly be serious—I mean, my god, it
was a Saturday night. How the hell do you charter a flight on a Saturday
night?”

 “I’m
guessing she wasn’t so into that idea?” I’d asked soothingly,
feeling genuinely guilty that I hadn’t been around to help her out and
simultaneously ecstatic that I’d dodged that particular bullet.

 “Yeah.
Not so into it at all. She called every ten minutes, demanding to know why I
hadn’t found her anything yet, and I had to keep putting these people on
hold to answer her call, and when I went back to them, they’d hang
up.” She gulped air. “It was a nightmare.”

 “So
what finally happened? I’m almost scared to ask.”

 “What
finally happened? Whatdidn’t finally happen? I called every single
private charter company in the state of Florida and, as you might imagine, they
weren’t answering their phones at midnight on a Saturday. I paged
individual pilots, I called domestic airlines to see if they had any
recommendations, I even managed to talk to some sort of supervisor at the Miami
International Airport. Told him I needed a plane in the next half hour to fly
two people to New York. Know what he did?”

 “What?”

 “He
laughed. Hysterically. Accused me of being a front for terrorists, for drug
smugglers, everything. Told me I had a better chance of getting hit by
lightning exactly twenty times than I did of securing a plane and a pilot at
that hour—regardless of how much I was willing to pay. And that if I
called back again, he’d be forced to direct my inquiry to the FBI. Do you
believe it?” She was screaming at this point. “Do you fucking
believe it? The FBI!”

 “And
I assume Miranda didn’t like that, either?”

 “Yeah,
sheloooooved that one. She spent twenty minutes refusing to believe that there
wasn’t a single plane available. I assured her that it wasn’t that
they were all taken, just that it was a difficult time of night to be
attempting to charter a flight.”

 “So
what happened?” I didn’t see this one ending happily.

 “At
about one-thirty in the morning she finally accepted that she wasn’t
going to get home that night—not that it mattered whatsoever, since the
girls were with their father and the nanny was around all day Sunday if they
needed her—and she had me buy her a ticket for the first flight out in
the morning.”

 This was
puzzling. If her flight had been canceled, I’d assumed the airlines
would’ve rescheduled her for the first flight out in the morning,
especially considering her
premier-advantage-plus-gold-platinum-diamond-executive-VIP mileage status and
the original cost of her first-class tickets. I said as much.

 “Yeah,
well, Continental scheduled them for their first flight out, which was at
six-fiftyA .M. But when Miranda heard that someone else had managed to get on a
Delta flight at six-thirty-fiveA .M., she went ballistic. She called me an
incompetent idiot, asked me over and over what good an assistant was if I
couldn’t do something as simple as arrange for a private plane.”
She’d sniffed and took a sip of something, probably coffee.

 “Ohmigod,
I know what you’re going to say. Tell me you didn’t!”

 “I
did.”

 “You
didn’t. You’ve got to be kidding. For fifteen minutes?”

 “I
did! What choice did I have? She was really unhappy with me—at least this
way, it seemed like I was actually doing something. It came to another couple
thousand bucks—not exactly a big deal. She was bordering onhappy when we
hung up. What else can you ask for?”

 By this
point we’d both started laughing. I knew without Emily’s telling
me—and she knew I knew—that she’d gone ahead and purchased
two additional business-class tickets on the Delta flight for Miranda just to
shut her up, to make the incessant demands and insults finally, blissfully,
cease.

 I was
nearly choking at this point. “So, wait. By the time you arranged for a
car to take her to the Delano—”

 “—it
was just before three in the morning, and she’d called my cell phone
exactly twenty-two times since eleven. The driver waited while they showered
and changed in their penthouse suite and then took them right back to the
airport in time for theirearlier flight.”

 “Stop!
You’ve got to stop,” I howled, doubled over at this charming series
of events. “This did not really happen.”

 Emily
stopped laughing and tried to feign seriousness. “Oh, really? You think
all of this is good? I haven’t even told you the best part.”

 “Oh,
tell me, tell me!” I was positively gleeful that Emily and I had, for
once, managed to find something funny at the exact same time. It felt good to
be part of a team, one half in the battle against the oppressor. I realized
then for the first time what a different year it would have been if Emily and I
could’ve truly been friends, if we could have covered and protected and
trusted each other enough to face Miranda as a united front. Things probably wouldn’t
have been quite so unbearable, but, except for rare times like these, we
didn’t agree on just about everything.

 “The
best part of all of it?” She was silent, dragging out the joy we shared a
few moments longer. “She didn’t realize this, of course, but even
though the Delta flight took off earlier, it was actually scheduled to land
eight minutes after her original Continental!”

 “Shut
up!” I’d howled, delighted with this delicious new nugget of
information. “You’vegot to be kidding me!”