The Knockoff (14 page)

“You look like you got some color,” Sara commented on Bianca’s perfect tan. The woman’s hand fluttered upward to touch her cheeks, a look of horror crossing her face. Imogen remembered the days in the nineties when complimenting someone’s tan was a good thing. It meant they’d just finished up some fabulous jaunt to St. Barth’s. Now tan was an insult.

“I wore a hat when we were in Turks,” Bianca said defensively.

“It’s just the right amount,” Imogen interjected. “Perfect glow.”

It had been only three years since Bianca had won her award for playing a paraplegic biologist living with the large apes in the Congo, but Imogen believed that her most accomplished role yet was the one she played at school, when she fancied herself the “normal mom.” In the weeks after she won the award, she made a point to come to drop-off looking perfectly disheveled. Whenever someone congratulated her she insisted on saying things like, “Oh, I am so over myself,” while rolling her eyes and laughing the way only an Oscar winner could. She would drop her voice next and add: “My real job is being Sophie’s mom. I mean, I work in Hollywood, but I don’t participate in Hollywood.”

Bianca worked hard at cultivating her faux intimacy with the other school moms and had a small army of plain mothers who followed her all over the neighborhood, always offering to do favors for her, like entertain her nanny and children for the weekend when she had to fly to London for the BAFTA Awards or feed her cat three times a day while she was shooting on location in Morea.

The actress pulled her hair into a jaunty ponytail. “How is the job going, doll?” She hugged Imogen gingerly. Bianca shot a
Glossy
cover around this time last year. Imogen hadn’t been present at the shoot, but she had heard through the grapevine that the term “diva” would have been a gross understatement to describe Bianca’s behavior. Some of the talent wanted to keep a skirt or a pair of earrings they’d
worn during a cover shoot. Bianca wanted it all, from the underwear to the diamond studs…and she’d wanted the outfit in three more colors.

“It’s different being back,” Imogen said neutrally. “You know the magazine is now an app, which was a huge change. We have a new editorial director. She’s young and ambitious and sometimes a bit of a heavy lift. I had to get on Twitter and that was a disaster.”

Kara let out a groan and the other mothers looked at her questioningly.

“Kara, you’re great on Twitter,” Sara said.

“Oh that isn’t me. I hired someone to tweet as me.”

Imogen wasn’t shocked and she was dying to ask the uncouth question.

“What do you pay this person?”

“We did pay her $120,000 a year,” Kara said very matter-of-factly. “Until she up and quit last week. She said she needed to do something more meaningful. I think she tweets for some online dating company now. What’s the editorial director like, Imogen? Is she nice?”

Imogen considered her answer. There didn’t seem much point in sugarcoating it.

“She can be charming, I’ll give her that,” Imogen said resolutely. “But no. She isn’t nice. She isn’t nice at all.”

“I can relate to that,” Maryanne piped in. Maryanne was a financial advisor who recently left her job with a big bank to enter the start-up world. Her new company, MEVest, was a platform that provided simple wealth management. No matter the season Maryanne was always in a perfectly tailored black pantsuit with her hair in a crisp bob. Wearing dark-rimmed black glasses, she radiated an aura of cool and success. “The CEO of MEVest is a downright little bitch,” Maryanne continued. “ ‘Nice’ isn’t in her vocabulary.”

“Did she go to Harvard Business School too?” Imogen laughed.

“No. She’s practically right out of college. She started managing other students’ money while she was an economics and computer science undergrad at UPenn. I could tell you stories. The sense of entitlement is out of control. She honestly believes that everything out of her mouth is gospel. That she is the smartest person on the planet.”

That made Imogen laugh. “What’s the deal with these girls? Is it an age thing?”

Sara groaned. “Like the twentysomething we hired at the firm who wanted her own corner office after six months.”

Campbell, a cable television executive who rarely indulged in the mommy gossip, chimed in. “We have plenty of those. They believe they deserve six-figure salaries right out of college.”

“Maybe it’s an age thing. Blame the millennials.” Maryanne made air quotes around “millennials.” “They say helicopter parents and too much praise turned this generation into monsters. But everyone said the same thing about the slackers of Generation X and I think we turned out okay.” Maryanne glanced left and right and then dropped her voice conspiratorially.

“We are not alone.”

“What do you mean?” Imogen asked.

“Are you on Facebook?”

Imogen sighed. “Reluctantly.”

Kids streamed into the school around them, oblivious to the mom chatter, some still clutching the hands of their own parents, others absorbed in their self-determined packs.

“You have to join this group called TECHBITCH.” Maryanne mouthed the bad word since they were surrounded by children.

“What is it?” Imogen asked, intrigued. “What is a tech bitch? Is it a support group?”

“Techbitch is like the verb. Like ‘Oh, I have so much to techbitch about.’ Well, I guess it’s also a noun because a lot of people have a boss who is a total techbitch…like mine…and yours.” Maryanne grinned. “This is an invite-only page on Facebook where people in the tech industry get to vent about their jobs. I think anyone can be invited, but mostly it’s women like us who are pretty new to tech and all of a sudden we have these twenty-two-year-old wunderkind CEOs and CTOs and CMOs as bosses—”

“Eve is not my boss,” Imogen interrupted, but Maryanne waved her comment away like it didn’t matter.

“Whatever. People tell the most amazing stories. One woman went on a business trip to Miami and was forced to share a bed with her
company’s CEO and CTO to save money. She woke up in the middle of them.”

Imogen’s hand went up to her mouth. “That happened to me. Eve thought it was totally okay for the two of us to just share a bed. I had to tell her there was nothing normal about it. I personally don’t think you should ever see your co-workers in their knickers.” The other women looked at her in horror.

“There has been a hilarious thread about CEOs who force their staff to learn coordinated dances and then perform them in the office,” Maryanne said matter-of-factly.

“One boss makes everyone wear the same color on Fridays and another one insists on taking selfies with the staff all day long. It’s hilarious. You’re going to love it.”

“Is it anonymous?”

“Yup. It hides who is doing the posting.”

The working mommies were all crowded together. Imogen was curious. “How many of you now have a younger boss?” About half of the women raised their hands. Imogen tried another question. “Or how many of you work directly with someone who is techbitchy?”

Everyone’s hand went up.

My God. Imogen really had thought she was completely alone. She had no idea this was a thing happening across all industries.

Imogen was intrigued. “How do I join?”

“Oh, I can invite you,” Maryanne said. “But be careful, I swear you can spend all day on it.”

“Well, I can’t wait to take a look this afternoon.” Imogen smiled. Unsure exactly how to join a new Facebook group, she made a mental note to pop into the Genius Bar at the Apple Store on Prince Street to see if they would give her a quick tutorial on the way to work. That Genius Bar was her dirty little secret. The boys there knew her by name. Surprisingly, they were never condescending, and always cheerful about helping her learn how to do something new. It was Mike at the Genius Bar, the one with the nose ring and intense eyes who sang easy-listening songs under his breath, who helped her create a Facebook account. He did it while quietly humming Vanessa Williams’s “Save the Best for Last” with perfect pitch. She preferred
stopping off in the early morning when it was just her and an elegant group of blue-haired older ladies eager to learn the best scrapbooking applications.

Maryanne pulled out her iPhone.

“What is your personal email?”

“Oh, just send it to my
Glossy
account,” Imogen said.

Maryanne scoffed. “You definitely don’t want this to go to your work email. You know if they ever let you go they can go through everything you write on there.” Imogen hadn’t known that. She had never paid much mind to which email account she used. Her personal email was all muddled up with her work email. She gave Maryanne her Hotmail address, knowing exactly how uncool Hotmail made her sound. At least Maryanne didn’t flinch when she said it.

“I am going to send you an invite to the TECHBITCH page when I get to the office. You’re just going to love it.”

Sure enough, when she arrived at the office, interspersed with emails promising penis enhancement and announcing new online J.Crew sales, there was an email in her Hotmail from Maryanne. In the text portion of the email was a warning: “I only give myself thirty minutes a day on here. I swear it could eat up all my productivity if I let it. Enjoy!!!!” Imogen felt tingles of excitement, knowing she was about to do something naughty, as she clicked the link to access the password-protected page. She glanced over the shiny top of her Mac’s screen and through the glass wall into the main work area to make sure she wasn’t being watched. It was an irrational gesture, since no one could see her screen anyhow. She laughed when she arrived at the page. The profile picture was of a woman about her age sitting in front of a computer, pulling at her hair. Her expression showed an equal mix of frustration, anger and desperation. It was exactly how Imogen felt at least ten times a day.

Maryanne was right: everything was anonymous. Imogen could read the posts and the comments, but it never showed who was posting or commenting. Some of the posts were funny, others were sad, some downright bitter. All of them were completely relatable for Imogen.

“Sometimes I feel like a ghost in my office. I have worked in the
travel industry for twenty years. I consider myself something of an expert in the field, but at our travel start-up the real rock star is the twenty-three-year-old founder and CEO. People ignore me in meetings and defer to her, despite my years of experience. It stings, but I’ve started to learn that I need to humble myself. I can’t waste my energy being angry every time someone talks over my head or asks her what she thinks about something I know she has no idea about.”

“My boss talks to me while she pees.”

“Our CMO goes around the office braiding everyone’s hair whether they like it or not.”

“My twenty-six-year-old CEO rolls her eyes every time I tell her I have to leave early (at seven!) to have dinner with my kids.”

“My boss doesn’t know who Duran Duran is.”

“I don’t know the difference between java and JavaScript and I am okay with that.”

It was fascinating to peer into the office lives of other people in a similar predicament to hers, to learn she wasn’t the only one being tormented by a twentysomething at work. Mixed in with the terrible comments was some sage advice.

“Make sure to tell your millennial employees they are great…every single day.”

“Don’t bother correcting their grammar.”

“Don’t, under any circumstances, let their parents come to the office.”

“Try to avoid calling them on the phone. It scares them.”

Imogen was both terrified and exhilarated at the idea of contributing something to this page. She was just worried that she would mess up. What if by some quirk in her privacy settings she was the only one on the whole page who didn’t remain anonymous? This could end up like the Twitter debacle all over again. She also wasn’t sure what to write. She could talk about how Eve leaked the Twitter stream about her. Was that TECHBITCH-worthy? She could tell them about how she was forced to share a bed or about how Eve insisted on wearing her tiny Hervé dresses everywhere they went while she tried to make Imogen dress more and more like a mom. There was certainly no shortage of things she could write about. Maryanne had
been right. Before Imogen knew it, forty-five minutes had passed as she read the comments and daydreamed about contributing her own. She could fall down into this rabbit hole all day long. It was addicting and vindicating. For the first time in a long while, Imogen didn’t feel quite so alone. It may have been the first and last time she would ever utter these words, but as she closed the Facebook window she whispered, “God bless the Internet.”

I
mogen had $500 to spend on flowers for their big party. A complete party order from L’Olivier would top $5,000. Eve’s thoughts on the subject were clear: “Fuck flowers. They won’t add to my ROI.” Imogen believed flowers could make or break the ambience of a party. The scent elevated the mood and completed a scene. When they first started dating, Alex picked up on her love of fresh flowers right away without her even having to mention anything. Once a week without fail he would bring home the most beautiful arrangements of lilies, hydrangeas and roses, letting her believe all the while that he had been the creative genius behind their construction. Years later she learned he had befriended the owner of a small Koreatown flower shop, charming her with the few phrases he knew in Korean and spending way too big a chunk of his assistant U.S. attorney salary to purchase them each week. Song Lee still owned that shop in what was now a flourishing flower district. Imogen crossed her fingers that Song would be game to help her now.

She headed downtown from Lincoln Center during lunchtime the day before the party, enjoying the twenty-five-block walk, replacing her high-heeled Isabel Marant booties with ballet flats.

Much to her dismay, Song was not there. A beautiful girl with a hint of Song’s strong cheekbones, wearing a tight orange tank top
over brown leather leggings, tapped away at an iPad behind the cash register.

“Mom went to Korea for a few months to take care of my grandma. She’ll be back in October if you’re planning, like, a wedding or something,” the girl said in perfect English without looking up. It was a marked contrast to Song’s charmingly broken language skills. A name tag above her right breast read
ELEN
.

Imogen smiled. “I’ll miss your mom’s expert eye. She always knows how to help me stretch a dollar when it comes to decorating for my events, but maybe you could help me. We are throwing a party for Glossy.com tomorrow night.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “I love
Glossy
!! I just downloaded your new app.” Imogen tilted her head in interest. “It’s great. I ordered a pair of Charlotte Olympia cat slippers yesterday. BUY IT NOW!” She raised her fist in the air as she shouted out the site’s signature tagline.

“Yes, BUY IT NOW.” Imogen made a small shake of her own fist in solidarity, and then awkwardly received a fist bump from Elen, which made her feel quite silly.

“I can help you pick some things. You sure are cutting it close, huh? Most fancy companies place their orders months in advance. We’re gonna have to work with what we have in the back. How much do ya want to spend?”

Imogen didn’t want to say the number. She felt ashamed telling this girl who’d just spent $545 on those Charlotte Olympia cat slippers that she had less than that for flowers for a “fancy” party. So she fibbed.

“The party is pretty low-key…small, very intimate guest list. We already did a
huge
flower order last month. I would have ordered it with you, but we had to use one of the company’s big vendors. I just need accent flowers now really. I am so embarrassed I didn’t think to order them sooner. In fact”—Imogen winked—“I am just going to pay for them in cash out of my own pocket right now so that no one will notice the oversight.” She pulled five crisp hundred-dollar bills out of her wallet.

“Your party is tomorrow night?”

“It is!”

“I can help. This is perfect for the leftovers.”

“The leftovers?”

“The flower industry is soooo wasteful.” Elen rolled her eyes. “We always over-order and we never give flowers to a customer unless they will last for a full week after the day the person buys them. That makes it look like we are selling shoddy flowers. Not good, ya know? So the leftovers are flowers that look great today and will probably be good until, like, next Tuesday. They’re just a little older than the new flowers. Sometimes we give them to the deli owners at a good price. A lot of them just get thrown out. Come on. I’ll show you.”

Elen led Imogen through the narrow store, past the finely organized refrigerators of lilies, orchids, peonies, dahlias, amaryllis, tulips and succulents. They walked through a door so short Imogen slouched to enter the back room, the heart of the shop, the part the customers never got to see. The floor here was cement and covered in a light dusting of sawdust. Off to the right was another glass-doored fridge, this one a little dirtier, a little older, singing a dull hum to the two women.

“There. Those are the leftovers. Go through them. I can give you a great price for whatever you take. I remember you now. Mom talks about you. She says your husband is a real babe.” Imogen was still pleased any time someone told her how attractive he or she found Alex. She didn’t need the validation. She
knew
her husband was a babe, but it made her feel good that she was the one who’d landed him, even if it was through a weird twist of fate and a drug-addicted ex-boyfriend.

“That he is. I am an incredibly lucky woman.” D.I.L.F.—that’s what one of the other moms drunkenly said about Alex during a school Christmas party.

Despite its dusty face, the leftover fridge was a treasure trove of beautiful flowers, some with a brown leaf here or a droopy petal there, but mainly still perfectly intact. Imogen sympathized with this lot, whose expiration date came sooner than they expected, before they had a chance to fulfill their destiny walking down the aisle at someone’s wedding.

Imogen buried her face in a bunch of magnolias, their heady
vanilla scent sending her back to the very first photo shoot she had done in New Orleans. Molly brought her down there just a few months after she landed in America. Imogen had never seen anything like that city. The smells, the crumbling old mansions in the Garden District, the melting pot of brown, white and black faces, jazz wafting through the trees…it was like living in a movie. There was always a party going on. Oh my god…and the food. She’d eaten beignets from Café Du Monde every morning. The imaginary smell of the sweet dough with the real magnolias made her want to buy a plane ticket. She took them all from the fridge.

Elen was once again engrossed in her electronic device when Imogen emerged, her arms laden down with the leftovers. The girl surveyed the bunch. “I’ll charge you $450 for ’em all, and then give me the remaining $50 and I’ll get them where you need them to go.” Imogen provided her address and texted Tilly to expect a delivery.

Eve was sitting on the couch in Imogen’s office.

“What are you wearing tomorrow night?” Imogen still felt jarred every time Eve was so casual with her. She knew it was unfair that she felt this way, and with anyone else she would have felt guilty for still thinking of her as her subordinate once they had been promoted to a position like Eve’s, but something inside her still expected Eve to address her with the respect she gave during their first two years together. Imogen didn’t want her lounging on her couch, her dress creeping high on her thighs, long legs stretched into the middle of the room, her hands behind her head.

“I asked Zac to pull me something from his new collection,” Imogen replied, crossing her own legs as she sat down.

“Can I do that too?”

“It might be too late, but I can give him a call.”

“Is he coming to the party? I just love him.”

“I’m not sure yet.”

Eve pouted, pushing her thin lower lip over the even thinner top one.

“Can’t you make him come?”

Imogen laughed. “I can’t make anyone do anything.”

“We can ban him from the site.”

“We won’t ban one of the best women’s designers in the business from our app. How does that benefit us?”

“Is anyone even coming? Jesus, your job is to be fabulous. Are you going to be able to pull this off?”
How much longer can I endure this little brat talking to me like this?

“The party will go down as a night to remember. It’s going to be wonderful, Eve. You’re a size two right now, yes? Let me put in a quick call. We’ll get a few options over here for you to try on later this afternoon.”

Alex took the kids out to a movie for the night, freeing Imogen to spread her promptly delivered leftover flowers on newspaper she’d laid out around the sitting room. Tilly directed her to look at Pinterest, where the new hipster trend was #DeliFlowers—flower arranging with cheap store-bought stems.

The process of the flower arranging became strangely meditative. Matching color with color and shape with shape and then shape with color energized all of her senses and made Imogen feel creative in a way she hadn’t in months. She clutched a bunch of white magnolias with pale pink peonies, lilies of the valley and chamomile in her right hand, using a pair of nail scissors to snip off a few brown leaves before wrapping a black ribbon firmly around the stems. She was adding odd branches and greens to a tall mason jar when her cell phone rang. Holding a wide white ribbon in place with her teeth, she put Massimo on speakerphone.

“Darling, what are you doing?” he purred.

“Making flower arrangements for the party tomorrow night.”

“You know you can hire people to do that kind of thing, right?”

“Isn’t it more fun to do it this way?” Imogen knew that without telling him Massimo would infer that her getting her hands dirty had something to do with Eve.

“I won’t keep you then. Just wanted to say I’ll see you at seven tomorrow.”

“Oooh, I am so happy you’re going to be able to make it. I know there are a million parties tomorrow night.”

“But no other party will have Imogen Tate.” She laughed at that. “I’ll let you go.”

“Well, thank you for calling, sweetheart. I’m happy to know that at least one person will be coming.”

“Oh, stop it. Priscilla will be wheeling me about, so there will be at least two people there!” Imogen loved him so much. “Oh, and Im. I don’t know if you’ve heard but herbs and weeds are all the rage in flower arranging these days. Just a tip!”

Herbs. What did that mean? What kind of herbs? Weeds?

Imogen wandered into the tiny backyard garden she’d started, then stopped, and started and stopped more than a dozen times. Gardening was something she actually enjoyed, but life consistently got in the way of a real commitment to a green thumb. In the back, by a very small goldfish pond, was Annabel’s small plot of neatly planted vegetables, bordered by her herb garden—rosemary, thyme and mint all madly overgrown. She grabbed a bunch of mint and rosemary.
What the hell?
she thought, as she added them to each of the arrangements.

An hour later Imogen was faced with ten centerpieces that made her bloom with pride.

“Better than I could have done.” Alex snuck up behind her, wrapped his arm around her middle and kissed her on the shoulder. “Did Song help?”

Imogen shook her head and leaned into her husband. “Song’s in Korea! I met her daughter Elen.”

“Elen was about twelve years old last time I saw her,” her husband said, scratching his head. Imogen laughed.

“It’s been too long since you’ve gotten me flowers then. You must’ve seen her about six years ago, because she’s now a very beautiful young woman and I have no doubt that you would’ve noticed her.”

“I don’t notice any beautiful women except my wife.” He nuzzled her neck, the daylong growth of his beard scratching her in a way both pleasurable and familiar.

“Where are the kids?”

“Upstairs. I fed them too much popcorn. They’re in a food coma, both ready to hit the sack.” Alex yawned. “So am I. Joining me?”

“In a little bit. I want to finish up here, if that’s all right?”

“Of course.” Alex surveyed the flowers again. “That Elen is almost as talented as her mother, the woman who helped me win my wife.”

Imogen didn’t know why, but she wanted to keep her newfound talent to herself for the time being, make it something that only she knew she was any good at.

“She’s a talented girl! I’ll be up in just a few minutes. Start reading to the kids and I’ll come along soon to finish up.”

Oh, how she missed the days of a glam squad coming into the office to get all the girls—all the editors and advertising reps—ready for a big event together. Hairstylists, manicurists and makeup artists used to descend in a pack on Robert Mannering Corp., turning the office into a giant spa for an entire day before a party.

Now Imogen just asked Allison, her favorite stylist from the salon, to come over and give her a blowout at the house.

“Who’s coming tonight?” Annabel perched on the ottoman at the foot of Imogen’s bed, her orange backpack at her feet, ready for a night at Suki Abraham’s house down the street.

“Whoever was free,” Imogen said distractedly, trying not to let the guest list make her too nervous. Ashley had a lengthy list of RSVPs, which flooded in just minutes after the Paperless Post had gone out, all typed out by diligent assistants, but Imogen knew better than anyone that everyone simply RSVP’d for everything during Fashion Week and then scattered where the wind and their Town Cars took them. She never wanted to be early for her own party, but this time she couldn’t be too late either.

Imogen had to ignore a barrage of texts from Eve.

>>>>What r u wearing?<<<<

>>>>How shld I do my hair?<<<<

>>>>Whoze coming??<<<<

>>>>Y aren’t U ANSWERING MEEEE!!!!!
<<<<