The Knockoff (13 page)

“You know, you should get to know your neighbors,” he slurred at her as he leaned his weight against her, walking back up the stairs. “You’re such a snob.”

One day Imogen opened the telephone bill to find $1,300 in charges to a 1-900 phone sex line. His parents were these billionaires and here she was living in a tiny flat she could barely afford and he rang up a phone bill more than double her rent. He stumbled in late that night with two black eyes and denied everything. Then he went into the bathroom for twenty minutes, finished up the bag of cocaine in his pocket and confessed to it all. His mother, dripping in jewelry and smelling of bourbon and desperation, picked him up in the morning to ship him off to a fancy rehab out in the Nevada desert. Three months later Imogen met Alex. She answered the door early on a Sunday morning, wearing one of Andrew’s old custom-made pink button-down shirts, boxer shorts and stolen white hotel slippers, still licking her battle scars from her bad relationship and nursing a French 75 hangover.
What time is it?
she wondered, first considering the time in New York and then switching to consider the time it was wherever Andrew had been scuttled off to.

A gorgeous man stood there holding out a sheaf of papers. His black hair was a mess of curls just long enough to brush the top of
his pugilist’s jaw. She was staring too hard, which she realized when a smile touched his slightly chapped but full lips.

“I’m sorry, could you repeat what you just told me?” she asked the handsome stranger. He was there to serve Andrew with court documents. Some bugger Andrew picked a fight with in a bar must have realized he had deep pockets and was suing him for assault and battery.

“He doesn’t live here anymore. He’s off drying out in the desert.”

Alex couldn’t leave until he got the documents into Andrew’s hands or got a new address where he could be served in person. Imogen invited him in for tea and ran to the bathroom to pull her disheveled bed-head hair into a tight pony, dab on some under-eye concealer, smudge some gloss over her lips and spray mint into her mouth. She couldn’t help but smirk as she emerged to find him making himself barely comfortable on her tiny chintz armchair, before she rang Andrew’s deranged mother for his forwarding address. In the hour it took for her to return Imogen’s call, she learned that this young lawyer was the first child in his family to go to college, and he had followed it up with Yale Law School. He didn’t give a shit about clothes and he didn’t need to since he kept his six-foot-three-inch physique trim from boxing in his dad’s gym on the Lower East Side. Style is much more than a designer name on your back, Imogen observed. He was different from anyone she had dated. Smart as a whip, he believed in equality and democracy, values that drove him to work long nights advocating for the rights of those who couldn’t advocate for themselves. He had ambitions to enter politics, but for the time being he was happy where he was, grateful even. He seemed particularly grateful to find himself in Imogen’s apartment.

After Imogen located the elusive Andrew and Alex dispatched a courier to the western part of the country, the young lawyer professionally excused himself. Imogen was distraught that he waited nine days to call her for dinner. On that first date they shut down Piadina on West Tenth Street, giggling for hours at a tiny wooden table in the cramped basement filled with cigarette smoke, the smell of roasted garlic and Dean Martin crooning from a speaker hidden behind a bookshelf in the corner. The wax on the candlestick centerpiece
burned all the way to the rim of the Chianti bottle it perched in before their night was over.

She noticed he sipped his wine slowly, inhaled just a whiff as he raised his glass and then sloshed it around a little in his mouth so that he could truly enjoy it, so different from Andrew, who drank in large swallows, more interested in the intoxication it produced than the taste. He looked at her while they ate, really stared, his eyes hungry, all over her body, not even hiding the fact that he enjoyed taking in her milky white décolletage, which was maybe too obvious in a low-cut cashmere sweater. For the first time since she’d started dating boys back home as a teenager, her stomach didn’t do nervous somersaults. Instead she felt an intense sense of calm with this man.
Here you are
, she thought to herself. It was that simple.
Here you are
.

She held out as long as she could, but a few weeks later they had amazing sex in his tiny studio in the East Village, which was dominated by books and a giant bed. He undressed her slowly and kissed her everywhere. He was the least selfish lover she’d ever had.

Alex was the rare breed of man who got on with your granny as well as your male best friend—the opposite of Andrew. For every designer dinner she was invited to, the publicist would always ask whether Alex was available to accompany her. Imogen was so proud to walk into a room with this towering, handsome man. His casual elegance and the fact that he lived inside an episode of
Law & Order
made him a favorite dinner companion.

It had been easy to let Andrew slip away. There was no Google then, or if there was, Imogen didn’t know about it. There was certainly no Facebook. By the time those things became staples in everyone’s life, Imogen was a happily married woman. Even socially, she and Andrew rarely crossed paths after that. A year ago she read that he was now a United States congressman and, last she heard, running for the Senate.

She never imagined hearing his name in the same breath as Eve’s, but she wasn’t willing to give herself away to Addison.

“I’m sure you know more than I do, darling.”

“Oh, as usual I don’t know too much. I know Eve set her sights on him around July and has been spotted coming out of his apartment
building at One Fifth Avenue six times in the past three weeks very early in the morning.”

“Lots of people live in that building, Addison.”

“Lots of people don’t have a private stairwell into the garage.”

“How about I do a little investigating for you and you make it worth my while, by doing a teensy item on Glossy-dot-com’s fantastic new Instagram campaign: Hashtag ScenesFromTheBackRow?”

“I like the way you negotiate, Tate. I’ll text you tomorrow.” Addison fancied himself to be J. J. Hunsecker, if Hunsecker’s phone at the ‘21’ Club were replaced with a tablet.

Imogen was complete crap at being a source, but Bridgett wasn’t.

“I haven’t heard anything about Pink Shirt and the Pink Bandage Dress. But I’ll ask some of the people who would know,” she said when Imogen called her. Bridgett was stuck backstage doing an on-camera interview with
Extra
for the next hour.

But before either of them could assist Addison in his quest for information, Imogen got a Page Six text alert.

>>>>Congressman Andrew Maxwell of the Ninth Congressional District of New York has a new lady love. We hear the 49-year-old politician is dating 26-year-old editorial director for Glossy.com Eve Morton.<<<<

Imogen clicked the link to read more and was rewarded with a picture of Andrew and Eve, her hair pulled into a first lady chignon, his neatly shellacked into a Ken doll helmet. He was in a tux and she wore a floor-length red Badgley Mischka gown.

The new couple stepped out earlier this week at the mayor’s residence, Gracie Mansion, for a dinner reception honoring his Royal Highness of Thailand. Maxwell, who won election to Congress two years ago, has been spending time with the young New York–based entrepreneur, who graduated from NYU and then Harvard Business School before returning to New York to launch a digital application at Robert Mannering Corp.

Maxwell and Morton were recently spotted together in the Hamptons, prompting rumors of a relationship. We are told
that despite their 23-year age difference they looked very affectionate and that it was quite clear they were a couple. “They were holding hands and kissing in corners,” one of our spies tells us about a rendezvous they had in East Hampton over the summer. Other society spies gushed about how great the pair looked together. “He is just in such tremendous shape. He’s like a blond John F. Kennedy Jr.,” one of them told us. They made it official in pictures at the other night’s event, holding hands as they posed for photographs. Just an hour after we contacted them for comment, their photo was erased from the website of society photographer Billy Farrell only to appear again moments later. We guess their teams couldn’t make up their mind about how to spin this one, especially since Maxwell used to date Morton’s current
Glossy
colleague Imogen Tate.

Ugh. Why did they have to drag her into it?

Her phone flooded with text messages from Bridgett and then Massimo.

>>>>Eve and Pink Shirt. Ewwwww<<<<

>>>>Power and sobriety have obviously clouded Pink Shirt’s judgment<<<<

And one from Addison.

>>>>We’ve been scooped.<<<<

That little bitch was stealing her life.

E
ve wasn’t trying to be difficult, but what the hell had happened at the Senbi show? She had texted Imogen, like, fifty times trying to figure out how to get backstage. Who didn’t check their phone? And why was Imogen lurking in the back rows of all the shows like a creepster anyway? What was she up to?

It was five a.m. on the second day of Fashion Week and, as she did every morning before the sun came up, Eve sat up in bed, her devices spread in front of her like a command center, drinking a diet Red Bull. She smiled as she saw that her #SleepyMe Instagram that she snapped before bed had 536 likes. She regrammed it from the official
Glossy
account. The caption read: “How adorbs is our Editorial Director before bed!!” Sweet dreams.

All she wanted was for Imogen to get it. Late last night Eve sent Imogen an email asking if she could please make her a Google Doc with a list of all the designers she was trying to get to work with the
Glossy
app. She actually wrote back and asked what a Google Doc was.
Seriously? Was she kidding?

Next Eve asked her what her non-
Glossy
email address was and—get this—she doesn’t have a Gmail account. She uses a Hotmail
address for her personal email. Eve wasn’t even born when people stopped using Hotmail.

How did Andrew date that woman for so long? Sure, Imogen Tate was a brilliant fashion editor, but how could someone get so far in her career and be so inept about technology? It literally blew Eve’s mind. I mean. Come on.

She knew Imogen was going to assume the worst about Eve and Andrew, assume that they somehow met because of her. Of course, Eve had known all about Andrew and Imogen. She’d done a lot of due diligence on Imogen back in the day, all the best assistants did. She talked to a few reporters, a few old friends, she had read almost every email the woman had ever written. It helped her keep her boss’s life organized. And, well, it was also a little fun and juicy. She’d known that Andrew was one of Imogen’s exes.

When he first approached her at that Young Friends of Andrew Maxwell fund-raiser at Elspeth Pepper’s Hamptons house over the summer, Andrew had no idea that Eve knew Imogen, much less that she used to work for her. It was a party filled with people under the age of thirty who mattered—mostly the children of people who had mattered for longer, except for her. Eve was ready to impress. She wasn’t little Evie Morton from Kenosha anymore. She was a Harvard woman now and that meant something. Eve ordered a glass of white wine from the bar, but she wasn’t drinking it. She never drank. Hated to be out of control. She threw flirtatious looks Andrew’s way as he made the rounds of the room, shaking hands and, at one point, trying to underscore that he, too, was young and hip by doing the lawn mower dance on the makeshift dance floor. When he finished he met Eve’s gaze and she playfully stuck her tongue out at him before walking out to the stone terrace overlooking a pristine clay tennis court

“Do you play?” he asked her without introducing himself.

“Not professionally.” She turned to face him full-on, standing tall in the new five-inch Christian Louboutin sandals she’d purchased for this very moment. “My golf game’s better.”

He texted her the next day, inviting her to play eighteen holes.

Eve didn’t bother to mention to Andrew that she was gunning for
a big new job at
Glossy
until she knew she’d hooked him. It wasn’t lying, just omission, and when he brought up that he knew Imogen she played dumb.

Men were stupid.

Andrew was clearly a man who had gotten plenty of women in his heyday, probably more than one at a time. Now he needed a wife. Bachelors made for odd political candidates. It was how rumors of toe-tapping in airport bathrooms began.

Eve clicked on the tab on the
New York Post
to reread the item about her and Andrew. Nearly half a day had passed but she still felt a rush over seeing her name in a gossip column. Then she opened her other email account to delete the “tip” she’d sent over to the junior gossip columnist at the newspaper. “He is just in such tremendous shape. He’s like a blond John F. Kennedy Jr.” was a nice touch, she thought. Her mom had always been obsessed with looking at pictures of JFK Jr. in
People
magazine.

Now that the press cared about them, where could they go to dinner tonight that would make a splash? Carbone? Michelle Obama and Kim Kardashian were there last night…not at the same table, but close enough that they were in the same picture. There were sure to be paparazzi lurking outside tonight.

Perfect.

She grabbed her Kindle to read aloud her quote for the day. From Sun Tzu,
The Art of War:
“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

Imogen had less than a week to throw a party and barely any staff to help her do it. She thumbed through the dog-eared file cards in her old Filofax, which now resided deep in a drawer in the kitchen table, where it would be sheltered from any judgmental eyes. The spine of the thing sank low, heavy with two decades of contact information for everyone from Imogen’s tailor and cobbler to the chiefs of staff for two former first ladies of the United States, both of whom had sought Imogen’s advice when dressing for their inaugural balls. Flicking through the cards was a stroll through her personal and professional
lives. In doing so she realized she was a bit of a contact hoarder. When someone passed away, Imogen believed it was bad luck to retire his or her card to the bin. Instead, she merely folded down the right-hand corner. It was an odd quirk she had never admitted out loud or explained to anyone. Day-to-day contacts were of course stored in her phone, like any other member of the twenty-first century, but when she planned parties and events she still preferred to curate a guest list with this old dinosaur.

All right. Eve wanted designers. Imogen knew it would be easy to get her loyal friends in the business to swing by—Carolina, Michael Kors, the Rag & Bone gents—plus a smattering of the young designers, the ones who show up at the opening of an envelope because they want the PR. Naturally, the hot Asian boy designer mafia would be there: Alexander Wang, Prabal, Jason Wu, Thakoon and Peter Som.

Proenza Schouler would be the big get, but Imogen knew better than to even bother. They didn’t show up anywhere these days unless they thought it would help land them in Italian
Vogue
. They were simply too cool for anything American. For a second she considered inviting Carolina Herrera, but she knew she also wouldn’t bother to show. Instead, she shot off an invite to her inimitable PR girl, Mercedes. No one tweeted parties like Mercedes. The girl was Proust with hashtags.

This was too last-minute. Imogen used to spend six months approving plans for
Glossy
’s annual Women in Fashion event, held without fail the last week of every March. Imogen tried to suppress the thought that Eve was hoping she would fail. Her ideal budget for this kind of thing would be $150,000 for a party and dinner at the Waverly Inn. The cocktail of the night would obviously be the French 75 in vintage cocktail glasses. In her perfect world, Imogen would hire Anthony Todd to do all the flowers and the table settings.

She allowed herself a minute to indulge in the memory of one of the best Fashion Week parties she had ever attended. Paris in 2004. Small. All the best ones are small. The publicist for Mr. Valentino called the guests only a few hours before it was scheduled to start to build a sense of urgency around the whole affair.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she cautioned in a low and sultry voice over the phone.

It started at eleven p.m. in the intensely glamorous basement of the Ritz hotel, all smoky mirrors and little lamps on low black lacquered tables with mother-of-pearl chairs. Everyone in the room looked extraordinarily sexy, like they’d just pranced off the pages of French
Vogue
. Through the smoke small groups of models shimmied together to too-loud Rolling Stones songs. A few actresses were there, the photographer Bruce Weber, a handful of those straight scuzzy British aristo/modelizer types like Jonny Rothschild and a couple of members of Duran Duran. No one talked to one another. There was no food, but an endless parade of waiters served the yummiest pink champagne from silver trays.

Enough daydreaming.

Eve had budgeted $5,000 for this event (an amount Eve wanted to be very clear that she found to be incredibly generous)—$5,000 for a space, staff, an open bar, passed hors d’oeuvres, entertainment and flowers. For a party for two hundred people, that broke down to $25 a head, which was $5 less per person than she had spent on Annabel’s last birthday party at the pottery painting shop on Christopher Street.

“Get a liquor sponsor! Let’s have it at your house, it’s definitely big enough,” Eve snapped when Imogen dared raise a single eyebrow at the budget.

Part of Imogen’s compensation package when she started out at Robert Mannering included having the company co-sign the mortgage on the $7 million town house on Jane Street that her family now occupied. Her deal with the devil. Sara Bray, the former creative director of a now-shuttered interior design magazine, and a longtime friend from the children’s school, helped Imogen with the interior of the house, a studied mélange of chic combined with comfort and warmth. A custom-mixed eau de Nil paint adorned the walls of the open and airy sitting room that dominated much of the first floor of the town house. Modern art, including a prized but very small Cy Twombly sketch, competed for wall space with Moroccan tapestries Alex haggled for in a night market in Tangier. A large old Victrola with a wide blue horn that Imogen picked up in an antiques shop on Royal Street in New Orleans held court in the corner. They’d
kept the original molding and corrugated tin ceilings, but repainted them in an eggshell finish. Books climbed the eastern wall and family photos dotted the mantel of the working fireplace. A mixture of antiques with modern pieces and cozy overstuffed chairs appealed to both Imogen’s need for nostalgia and comfort and Alex’s adoration of clean and orderly lines. Walnut French doors opened onto a garden filled with handpicked Panton furniture. Wisteria bushes climbed the fence. For parties she added tiny, white magical fairy lights to the branches.

There had once been a spread on it in
The New York Times
’s Styles section, where Imogen posed prettily on the gray velvet chaise in the sitting room, issues of
Glossy
fanned artfully amid
Grazia
and French
Vogue
on the Yves Klein blue pigment coffee table. (“She’s in Prada, but don’t call this EIC a devil,” the caption jested.)

She loved giving parties. In the five years since they signed their formidable mortgage, Imogen had thrown a dozen parties at the house, mostly for the magazine, but occasionally for a friend’s birthday and once a fund-raiser for a New York State senator. Half of the events had been a roaring success. The other half simply succeeded by virtue of the fact that guests had arrived and dinner had been served. One truly memorable evening had Imogen arriving thirty minutes late to her very own dinner party after her guests made it through their first course. Sometimes a working mother tried to do it all and sometimes it happened to work out.

Ashley was dispatched to help with securing a liquor sponsor. Each day the girl impressed Imogen anew. She got things done, found elegant solutions, channeled creativity into technology. Imogen smelled a pure talent there, one that reminded her of her younger self—if her younger self had thoughts in 140 characters or fewer.

It was Ashley’s idea to use Paperless Post for the last-minute invites and Imogen capitalized on the eleventh-hour nature of the event in her text: “The best-laid plans have nothing on those made with an air of whimsy. Please join Glossy.com’s Imogen Tate and Eve Morton for a celebration of Glossy.com at the home of the editor in chief.” She convinced her friend Danny, an up-and-coming chef of some regard,
the kind who did things with foams and molecules, to help her with the catering for a mere $4,500. Male models, fresh off the bus from Des Moines, would work the room as cater waiters and bartenders for free just to get the chance to mingle with fashion’s finest.

She could pull this off.

All the mommies at school drop-off were desperate to score an invite to Imogen’s Fashion Week party.

“It might be the most interesting thing I get to do all year!” Sara, mom to Jack, said to Imogen as the two women walked through Country Village Elementary School’s wrought-iron gates and into the secluded green oasis, a daffodil-lined path dotted by protective trees.

Small, with huge black eyes and a short black pixie cut, Sara was a tax attorney who was self-conscious to a fault. Jack had the same eyes and practically the same haircut, on a head that was shaped like a peanut. There were two types of mommies at Imogen’s school, the ones who worked, and the “entrepreneurs,” the mommies who stayed home but had their financier husbands bankrolling their organic skin-care products or cashmere handbag lines. For a brief spell, once Imogen had a few months of recovery under her belt, she experienced what it was like to be part of the tribe of stay-at-home mommies. For the first few weeks it was glorious. She attempted to cook her way through Jessica Seinfeld’s entire cookbook. Growing anxious, by week four, she wondered if she, too, could find success in organic lip balms.

The mom-trepreneurs, always in head-to-toe black spandex (more like a Catwoman costume than something anyone should wear to sweat), had the most fuck-off bodies, from all the spinning they did together. The working moms typically rushed in and out in short order, anxious to get to work on time, but today, with Fashion Week gossip to be discussed, even the working mommies didn’t mind lingering. The nannies kept to themselves.

“I am sure it won’t be, but you’re obviously welcome to come,” Imogen said. Sara let out a small yelp of happiness just as Bianca
Wilder, the school’s resident Academy Award–winning actress mum, leaned in to join the conversation. Hollywood beautiful, Bianca’s eyebrows were perpetually arched in surprise. She possessed the tiniest rosebud-shaped mouth and skin that grew tighter each semester.