Working at Fashionista is starting to feel like a potato famine.
It is now six o’clock and the trickle of people who have been coming in for the past hour suddenly arranges itself into a crowd. A man wearing Gucci slippers squeezes in between our chairs and starts waving his hand in the air in a desperate bid for attention. Theatrics like this rarely work in New York City bars.
“Get the check,” Maya says, but I’m already one step ahead. I’ve already made eye contact with the bartender, and at this moment he’s tallying up our tab.
Maya protests but I insist on treating. Although I’ve played the scene lugubriously out of deference to her feelings, this has been a celebration for me. Roger is out of our lives. And even though seventy-five dollars is a substantial portion of my drink budget for the month, it’s a small price to pay for the pleasure.
In the lobby, Maya vanishes into the bathroom, and I stand in the corner, watching people check in. A large group of Japanese tourists has just arrived and while the men are waiting in a cluster for room keys, their wives are milling around. Some are at the newsstand flipping through magazines; others are sitting in the lobby. The lobby itself is full of misfits—riveted aluminum lounge chairs, long lime-green benches that cut the room in half, wide orange wingbacks with brothel-like flourishes, armchairs with pictures of dogs silk-screened on. These are discordant objects that shouldn’t come together. They shouldn’t come together and anywhere else they wouldn’t, but somehow they do here against this gray backdrop.
Maya reappears a few minutes later. She steps out of the bathroom and is almost instantly accosted by a Japanese woman who wants her to take a picture of her and her friends, who have arranged themselves on the grand staircase. Maya complies happily, although her picture-taking skills are somewhat compromised by the copious amounts of alcohol she’s consumed. She covers the lens with her thumb. The Japanese women are too polite to comment and they thank her appreciatively, but they stay in formation. After we leave, they’ll call to one of their friends over by the magazine racks and ask her to take the shot.
Phase One
D espite the dramatic improvement in Keller’s sister’s life after her inclusion in our makeover issue, I don’t believe Keller owes me a favor or that he’d even acknowledge such a debt if it did exist. With all this uncertainty in mind, I decide to meet with him in person. I don’t want to have this conversation over the phone. I don’t want to conduct it over e-mail. I want to read his face and see how he reacts to my suggestion. Sometimes that’s the only way to know if you should advance or retreat.
I call his assistant, Delia Barker, to set up an appointment.
“Alex is booked,” she says into the receiver. “I can put you through to his voice mail.”
I don’t want his voice mail. “Are you sure he doesn’t have one single minute to spare in the next seven days?”
“Alex is booked,” she chirps again. “I can put you through to his voice mail.”
She sounds like a cuckoo bird, like an automated device that only tells you the time. I hang up the phone and walk over to her office just to make sure she’s flesh and blood. Deliais sitting there in her vanilla-scented room with her thick, black hair in a ponytail. She sees me in her doorway and takes out a calendar. “Alex is booked,” she says. “You can look for yourself.”
I accept the calendar and peruse his commitments: lunches, openings, junkets, meetings, photo shoots, jacket fittings, more meetings. Delia has filled in something for every minute, but it’s not just the next seven days. It’s the next seven months. This can’t be real. There has to be another set of books here, the set that you don’t show to the guys from the IRS. I stare at her consideringly. It’s obvious that Delia isn’t going to stray from the party line. Alex is
It is now six o’clock and the trickle of people who have been coming in for the past hour suddenly arranges itself into a crowd. A man wearing Gucci slippers squeezes in between our chairs and starts waving his hand in the air in a desperate bid for attention. Theatrics like this rarely work in New York City bars.
“Get the check,” Maya says, but I’m already one step ahead. I’ve already made eye contact with the bartender, and at this moment he’s tallying up our tab.
Maya protests but I insist on treating. Although I’ve played the scene lugubriously out of deference to her feelings, this has been a celebration for me. Roger is out of our lives. And even though seventy-five dollars is a substantial portion of my drink budget for the month, it’s a small price to pay for the pleasure.
In the lobby, Maya vanishes into the bathroom, and I stand in the corner, watching people check in. A large group of Japanese tourists has just arrived and while the men are waiting in a cluster for room keys, their wives are milling around. Some are at the newsstand flipping through magazines; others are sitting in the lobby. The lobby itself is full of misfits—riveted aluminum lounge chairs, long lime-green benches that cut the room in half, wide orange wingbacks with brothel-like flourishes, armchairs with pictures of dogs silk-screened on. These are discordant objects that shouldn’t come together. They shouldn’t come together and anywhere else they wouldn’t, but somehow they do here against this gray backdrop.
Maya reappears a few minutes later. She steps out of the bathroom and is almost instantly accosted by a Japanese woman who wants her to take a picture of her and her friends, who have arranged themselves on the grand staircase. Maya complies happily, although her picture-taking skills are somewhat compromised by the copious amounts of alcohol she’s consumed. She covers the lens with her thumb. The Japanese women are too polite to comment and they thank her appreciatively, but they stay in formation. After we leave, they’ll call to one of their friends over by the magazine racks and ask her to take the shot.
Phase One
D espite the dramatic improvement in Keller’s sister’s life after her inclusion in our makeover issue, I don’t believe Keller owes me a favor or that he’d even acknowledge such a debt if it did exist. With all this uncertainty in mind, I decide to meet with him in person. I don’t want to have this conversation over the phone. I don’t want to conduct it over e-mail. I want to read his face and see how he reacts to my suggestion. Sometimes that’s the only way to know if you should advance or retreat.
I call his assistant, Delia Barker, to set up an appointment.
“Alex is booked,” she says into the receiver. “I can put you through to his voice mail.”
I don’t want his voice mail. “Are you sure he doesn’t have one single minute to spare in the next seven days?”
“Alex is booked,” she chirps again. “I can put you through to his voice mail.”
She sounds like a cuckoo bird, like an automated device that only tells you the time. I hang up the phone and walk over to her office just to make sure she’s flesh and blood. Deliais sitting there in her vanilla-scented room with her thick, black hair in a ponytail. She sees me in her doorway and takes out a calendar. “Alex is booked,” she says. “You can look for yourself.”
I accept the calendar and peruse his commitments: lunches, openings, junkets, meetings, photo shoots, jacket fittings, more meetings. Delia has filled in something for every minute, but it’s not just the next seven days. It’s the next seven months. This can’t be real. There has to be another set of books here, the set that you don’t show to the guys from the IRS. I stare at her consideringly. It’s obvious that Delia isn’t going to stray from the party line. Alex is
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