Cat's Meow (12 page)

She laughed lightly. “Oh, no. You’ve no experience, and we’re not looking for freeload—I mean, freelancers.”

“But—twenty-three thousand dollars a year?”

“Sweetie, you
do
have a trust fund, don’t you?” she inquired, as if the very idea that I would not have one was a subject of utmost hilarity. Didn’t she know even trust funds ran out? And as for royalty checks from rerun episodes of my one canceled sitcom, which neither TV Land nor Lifetime wanted (although it did prove quite popular in the Philippines and former Soviet republics)—these residuals netted me a fat $5 a month. So at $23,000 a year, I’d be making less than India’s armpit waxer.

“It’s yours if you want it. So, it’s agreed then? Twenty-three thousand dollars a year, plus benefits, which includes medical and dental and plastic.”

“Plastic?”

“Surgery—but only one lipo a year. You’re expected to keep your end up. Weigh-in is nine sharp every morning. And silly me, I almost forgot—there is one last thing,” she said, whipping out a strange contraption that looked like a flashlight with an LCD display. “It’s a fat analyzer,” Lark explained. “Don’t worry, we had models in the office who were ninety-nine pounds and twenty-four percent fat.” She chuckled. She pointed it toward my arm and read the results.

“You’re forty-seven percent fat,” she reported matter-of-factly, putting it away with a slightly perturbed look on her face.

How could that be? I never ate anything and adhered to a strict SSV diet—smoke, starve, and vomit, that is.

“It’s a little high, especially for us,” she said awkwardly. She looked at me skeptically for a moment, then grinned. “But what the hell! Everyone starts out
immense
! And we desperately need someone to organize the fashion closet. It’s a complete nightmare right now.
Vogue
hosted a charity benefit last weekend and, well,”
she giggled to herself, “the staff attacked the racks! You’ll have to track down the eighteen-karat Chanel dress—I’m not sure who took off with it.”

Organize the fashion closet?
Please
. I had no choice but to pass on the position. After all, organizing closets was what I had hired my au pair to do. I suddenly missed Bannerjee keenly. She had made my life so easy and carefree. But now she was stuck in China while I tried to come up with enough money to bring her and the baby home.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can accept,” I demurred politely.

“Really?” Lark asked, her face falling. “We really do need someone to start immediately. Miguel Adrover’s new collection is bound to arrive any day now and we desperately need someone to keep an eye on it. You did say you were available, didn’t you?”

“I’ll think about it,” I lied.

“All right, up to you, but between you and me, I’ve got to tell you these jobs don’t last long,” she warned, pointing to a fat stack of résumés piled two feet high on her desk. “I know hundreds of girls who would kill to be in your shoes right now.” I nodded, but then, I was wearing five-hundred-dollar Dolce & Gabbana sandals, so that was true enough.

Lark and I exchanged limp double-cheek air kisses, and I promised I would let her know soon. I walked out of the silver offices of the Condé Nast building feeling very blue indeed. I was so discouraged I didn’t even have the heart to scam an interview at
W, Elle, or Harper’s Bazaar
. What was I going to do? I had sent Mummy several incredibly urgent cablegrams, but had yet to receive any word. And without a job, I wouldn’t have enough money to pay for the baby. No baby, no Stephan. I could tell he was drawn to me because of my magnanimous gesture. “You’re not like the other girls, are you, Cat McAllister?” he’d said.

My car and driver pulled up to the curb when I heard what was now a familiar screech from the limousine ahead.

“Cat! Cat! Over here!”

I walked over to the sound. “Teeny?”

She rolled down the tinted windows of her
stretch
limousine. (Shudder—but at least it wasn’t white.) “I thought that was you! What were you doing at
Vogue
?”

“Oh, nothing important,” I said, feigning casualness. “I’m just incredibly bored all day and I thought, ha-ha, why not try to see if I could help them out at the magazine.”

Teeny cocked an eyebrow. “Really?” she asked. “They’re great—I love the magazine to death, of course, but they never feature any of our clothes. I just don’t understand,” she sniped. “I mean, everyone
wears
Tart Tarteen; why I’ve got all the important Hollywood stylists in and out of our showroom every day.”

She pulled me closer to whisper. “You know, Cat, I was thinking … you should come work for my company. I’m looking for a spokesmodel. I’ll pay you a good salary. Better than Condé Nast, even. What are they offering you? Five hundred thousand dollars for a contributing editor’s position? Full mortgage? Town house? Hamptons beach?”

“Really?” I asked, the possibility of all that lovely money blinding me to the fact that this was
Teeny
we were talking about.

Teeny nodded vigorously. “You’ll do mall openings, television commercials, conventions …”

Conventions? Mall openings? I slowly sank back down to earth.

Teeny smirked when she saw the look on my face. “Well, think about it, would you?”

“Oh, Teeny?” I asked, before she rolled up her window.

“Yes?” she asked, eyes wide.

“I was just wondering if you’ve received any calls for me. At the apartment, I mean.”

“For you?” she repeated thoughtfully, her smile faltering. “I could ask the maids, but no, I don’t think so. You did tell everyone you had moved?”

“Yes.” I sighed. “Everyone.”

With a heavier heart than before, I rang India on my way back to the hotel.

“So how did it go?”

“Terrible. I’m forty-seven percent fat.”

“What?”

“They offered me a job as a fashion assistant!”

“Yuck.”

“And while I was leaving, I bumped into Teeny. And can you imagine? She offered me a job!”

“The
nerve
” India spat. “To do what?”

“You really don’t want to know.”

“I can only imagine.”

“And I asked her if she had received any calls for me and she said she hadn’t.”

“She’s lying. But don’t worry, darling, you’ll bump into him soon enough and you can explain everything.”

“What about your Mr. Moneybags? Given any thought toward blackmail?”

“I have, but I just don’t have it in me. After all, I’m still a
lady
. And if he prefers Venus de Milosevic over me, he can have that two-bit skank.”

“Sweetie, I’m at my wits’ end here. If I don’t find a job quickly—a good one—I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m a week away from being homeless—I just got my hotel bill. Did you realize they charge for room service! If I had known, I would have got up and walked over to the minibar myself. And there’s Banny and the baby still trapped in China. Oh, I don’t know what to do.”

“I think I might just have the answer for both of us. Meet me on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Eighteenth Street in an hour. In Chelsea.”

T
he address India gave me was an unremarkable postwar apartment building on Eighth Avenue. I wondered what this had to do with solving our financial difficulties. Perhaps she was taking me to an escort agency. I didn’t know if I was comfortable with that. Oh, it’s fine for
other
people. Heidi Fleiss is one of my favorite dinner guests—it’s so amusing to play Guess Who’s Come to Dinner with Heidi and her former clients, Charlie Sheen almost had a heart attack—but I’ve already mentioned my personal indifference to matters of physical intimacy.

I buzzed “Laurence, Apt. 3” as India instructed, and discreetly peeked through the iron grating of the double-locked doors to see if I could spot any of these mistresses of the night. India appeared in the hallway of the first floor. She stood in the doorway of an apartment and beckoned me to hurry. “Quickly! Quickly!” she mouthed. I pushed my way through the first door, then the second, almost tripping over the faded welcome mat. “What’s all this?” I asked.

She ushered me inside a first-floor apartment, and I walked in to find a small, dark room illuminated by the glow of a computer screen. A young, slightly disheveled man sat in front of an oversize computer monitor. I presumed he was the resident “madam.” Oh, well, I thought, maybe I could work the phones instead of actually “working the phones.”

He didn’t ask me to disrobe, however, nor did he begin to explain the finer points of running a high-class-hooker establishment. Instead the young man said, “Hi, I’m Billy Laurence.”

“Excuse me?” I gasped. “Not the Billy Laurence?”

“The one and only,” he said.

“But you’re the editor of
Arbiteur
!”

“Wow, you’ve heard of us? I mean, of course you have,” he quickly added.

Of course I’d heard about
Arbiteur
. It was an obscure online publication to the greater public at large, but one that had garnered a sure foothold among the fashion addicts of New York, Paris, and Milan, including
moi
, due to the way it incorporated streaming video, the latest technology, and the most cutting-edge editorial shoots in its sassy fashion reporting. I had stumbled across it by accident during my numerous Web searches for Stephan’s website. Billy Laurence carried the longest title I’d ever encountered: CEO/editor/art director/tech support. I was shocked to find he was a wistful-looking postadolescent who didn’t shave regularly and took to wearing pajamas at four o’clock in the afternoon. Not that this was rare during these babes-in-cyberland times.

“So you’re Cat,” Billy said happily. “India’s told me so much about you.” He gave me a hug and two double-cheek air kisses. “Welcome to
Arbiteur
.”

“This is it?” I cried, looking around. Billy’s “office” was a cluttered desk with random computer equipment—Web cams, scanners, CPU’s, laser printers. Across from his desk was a faded black leather couch where hundreds of models’ look books, party invitations, and an array of press release packets touting experimental beauty regimes were piled in a haphazard manner. The fax machine was chugging away, and the television was tuned to a mute Judge Judy, while technomusic boomed in the background.

“Yes, I’ve found there’s really no need for a very large staff to run a global fashion website.”

“But this is it? Just you? What about all the names on the masthead?”

“Imaginary,” Billy admitted cheerfully. “It’s something of a secret, actually, so please don’t tell anybody. Otherwise the firm’s credibility will be shot. After all,
Arbiteur
had its best quarter yet, and I’ve just landed another round of blue-chip advertising.”

“Wow.”

“Thank you,” Billy said shyly.

India explained that several years back, Billy was a drag queen in the East Village—they first met in the bathroom of a club where Billy was in charge of giving out drink tickets to favored friends and club regulars. Billy, then known as “Miss Demeanor,” was a West Coast transplant and an aspiring fashion stylist. He wrote occasional pieces for Scandinavian style magazines and helped nonprofit arts organizations stage fashion shows.

By a sheer stroke of luck, India read a small mention about
Arbiteur
in a copy of The
Wall Street Journal
that her formerly generous patron had left in her apartment. Recognizing Miss Demeanor’s real name, India realized that the founder of this hot new Internet company was none other than the young drag queen who used to borrow her mascara. While I was getting my fat evaluated by a Condé Nast gatekeeper, India had looked him up and persuaded him into hiring both of us to work for his newly formed company.

“I decided I can’t do everything on my own. So when India volunteered to be my eyes and ears around town, I thought, perfect,” Billy explained.

“I’m going to write a gossip column called ‘
Depeche Merde
.’ Isn’t that fabulous?” India cooed.

I looked at her in awe.

“India’s sure to get the scoop on the latest lesbian-model love affairs and socialite suicides,” Billy said proudly. “As I remember, nobody likes dirt as much as India.”

“But of course,” India agreed. “I’m going to be the new media virus.”

“And what am I going to do?” I asked excitedly.

India and Billy looked at each other questioningly.

“Well, that’s up to you,” Billy said. “What
can
you do?”

“I … well … I know how to shop,” I ventured.

“You can be our market editor!” India declared. “Billy, Cat knows everything about fashion. Where to find it. How to wear it. What’s in, what’s out. What it’s all about.”

“Great. I really need someone to write show reviews during Fashion Week.”

“Sure, I can do that.” I nodded, although as far as writing was concerned, my experience went only as far as signing credit slips, but I was sure I could try.

“By the way, I’ve always been curious about the name …
Arbiteur
” I said. “Is it French? I thought the French for
arbiter was arbitre
?”

“It is?”