The Knockoff (16 page)

The sounds of the party—small talk and nibbling—resumed.

“That’s it?” Eve hissed into her ear. “That’s all you’re going to say? We spent five thousand dollars to make sure these people aren’t hungover? We invited them here to get them on board with our app.” What exactly had Eve wanted her to say?

“That isn’t how business is done in this world, Eve,” Imogen hissed back, irritated by Eve’s gumption when all she had done was save her neck. “These things take time, patience and schmoozing. I think I know more about how this is done than you do.”

“We need them now. We needed them yesterday. You didn’t even get the guest list right. I know most of the people here already.” Imogen looked around and knew that wasn’t true. Eve couldn’t have already been introduced to half these people, except possibly when they rang her phone years ago. “I wanted new people at this event and you didn’t deliver.”

Eve stalked off to the bathroom, leaving Imogen with her mouth agape. While she was talking Alex had joined the crowd at the back of the room. He picked his hand up to wave and then rushed forward when he realized she was upset.

“Great speech. Short and to the point. Let them drink at night and do their business during the day,” he reminded her. It was something Carter Worthington had told him years ago at one of their advertiser schmooze fests when Alex, after a few too many margaritas, had asked her boss what exactly was the point of spending so much money on their events.

“I have to deal with Eve.” Imogen kissed him quickly and then took off for the bathroom. She heard Eve before she saw her, giant heaving breaths echoing through the hall. Imogen knocked on the door to her own powder room. “Eve, it’s Imogen. Can I come in?” She heard the lock unclick.

Eve was covered in a fine layer of sweat. There were no tears on her cheeks, but her face kept contorting in a way that suggested it would prefer to be crying.

“I think I’m having a heart attack,” Eve sputtered. Her chest heaved, which caused her entire body to begin shaking.

Imogen grabbed a Kleenex from its tortoiseshell box to wipe off the edge of the sink before she leaned gingerly against it. She had experience with anxiety attacks. You had to wait them out. Back when they lived together in their shoddy little apartment, Bridgett suffered from at least one a week, brought on by anything from a bad day at
work to seeing a rat on the subway, before her doctors found the right cocktail of drugs to keep them at bay.

The bathroom was small and cramped. Imogen stood so close to Eve that it would have been easy to touch her. By stretching her arm out just a few inches she could have put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but the very idea of touching Eve now, this new iteration of Eve, made Imogen recoil. She stayed as far away from the girl as the confined space would allow, but still she could hear Eve gnashing her teeth together—a sound like a well-heeled boot crunching over gravel.

Eve’s breath came in stilted waves. “They hated me,” she moaned, pulling at her curls, yanking them down around her chin and then, like a child, putting the end of one in her mouth to suck on it. “Everyone here hates me. I failed tonight.” Imogen was worried the girl was going to hyperventilate. The tears finally came and Eve reached out to hold on to the hem of Imogen’s dress the way a drowning man would clutch at a life preserver. Only the mascara on her left eye had smeared. The right remained perfectly intact.

All of the party’s previous joy was siphoned away by each word from Eve’s mouth. “You need to breathe.” Imogen emptied out her glass of champagne and ran cold water into it. “Drink this.” She handed her two Xanax. “Take these. Wipe away your tears.” Did she sound too motherly?

Eve glared at her through her gasps, her face turning the color of merlot. “You wanted this party to suck, didn’t you?”

Imogen’s heart sank. Nothing she did was going to help. Eve had the manners of a psychopath. It was in these moments that Eve reminded Imogen of her old dog growing up, a Jack Russell who had been perfectly well behaved in their London flat, but revealed his true colors on a day trip out to Kent. Nutkin forcefully escaped from an open car window, running straight toward a small lamb that had been caught in the barbed wire at the edge of a field, its leg bent at a ninety-degree angle and bleeding. Once Nutkin smelled blood there was no turning back. He was an attack dog cloaked as a city dog. The shepherd’s boy got Nutkin with his shotgun shortly after the dog
killed the sheep. It was Nutkin’s fate. He was born like that. Eve was born like this.

Rage clouded Eve’s eyes as she glared up at Imogen. “Why do I even keep you around?”

Dropping her voice, Imogen glared back at the insolent little bitch.

“Watch it, Eve. I wanted this party to be a success just as much as you, and so far it is. You have some of the most powerful people in the fashion industry in that room right now and they are more than happy to speak to you about Glossy-dot-com. If I were you, I wouldn’t let that opportunity slip away.”

Eve lifted her face and stared dully into space before standing up and turning to the sink. Imogen barely had a second to jump out of the way before the girl vomited next to her. She watched as Eve chugged the glass of water and then threw the Xanax into her mouth.

“Get out. I need a few minutes.”

Imogen shook her head in disbelief. “Get yourself together before you come back to the party, please,” Imogen said coolly before she slipped sideways back out through the door, brushing against Andrew Maxwell, the only person standing in the small hallway between the sitting room and the backyard.

“Is she all right?”

“As a human being, no. Right now I think she will be fine. You certainly have your hands full, Andrew.” He moved his hand toward his head, wanting to run it through his hair, before thinking better of mussing it up and bringing it back down to his pocket.

“She’s just a perfectionist, Imogen. She just wants this project to succeed.”

Imogen gnawed on her bottom lip. “That isn’t what she wants. She wants this project to be all hers.” She regretted the words the second that they came out of her mouth, knowing that Eve probably heard them and that if she hadn’t, Andrew would most definitely repeat them.

When she emerged from the bathroom, Eve looked worse for the wear. Imogen tried to ignore her as Eve kept to the edges of the party, typing furiously on her phone, stopping only briefly to whisper in the
ear of Addison Cao, conspicuous as always in a blue crushed velvet suit, before hopping into a black Uber without saying good-bye.

Soon after Eve left, Imogen’s surprise arrived. She was going out on a limb here, but from the little bit she understood about how things went viral on the Internet, she thought she had a shot at making this work. Her friend Ginnifer (one of the mommy gang from school and a longtime volunteer with the ASPCA) arrived right at the stroke of nine with a crate of wiggly, squiggling rescue puppies. It wasn’t really her idea. It was Annabel’s. The night before, as she had fretted over the party being a disaster, her daughter peeked her head over her iPad.

“Just bring in a bunch of puppies,” Annabel said matter-of-factly.

It sounded ridiculous. “Why, darling?”

Her daughter shook her head. “Because…the Internet,” she said breezily as she walked up to her room.

Of course her daughter was right.

The crowd at the party went wild. So many Instagram videos were taken, phone batteries died. There was a miniature melee to get close to one particularly grumpy-looking little bulldog named Champ. Dog hair covered couture, but no one cared, and nine adorable puppies got homes they never could have dreamed of.

The party went until midnight. Once Eve left it turned into such a good time, the night becoming boisterous and buoyant. Or maybe it was all in Imogen’s imagination that everything grew louder and less serious. Furniture was pushed to the side of the room to allow for flailing limbs to catch a beat. The crowd danced like they were in the basement of the Ritz.

Fashion Goes to the Dogs

By Addison Cao, WWD columnist

Fashion went to the dogs last night at the Glossy.com party to celebrate yet another Fashion Week. Returning editor in chief Imogen Tate hobnobbed with fashion royalty old and new, including Donna Karan, Thakoon, Timo Weiland, and Carolina
Herrera, at her gorgeous West Village town house. By the end of the night, no one was paying any attention to the posh set. Seriously! It was all about the puppies. God bless the Internet. It just might be the most Instagrammed party of all of Fashion Week after Tate brought in a crate of adorable adoptables. #Perfection.

Not everyone was delighted. Glossy.com’s new editorial director, Eve Morton, slipped out of the bash early….

OCTOBER 2015

O
n a crisp fall Friday night Imogen found herself staring into the ruddy red face of Santa Claus. Ron Hobart, Imogen’s psychic and shrink (he was a package deal), bore a remarkable resemblance to Father Christmas. Editors and designers lived and died by him. “The Fashion Psychic” was his nickname. Not a single season passed without Donna and Tom ringing Ron to find the most advantageous date for their runway shows.

What most people didn’t know about Ron was that in addition to his knack for predicting successful dates and modeling careers, he held a PhD in clinical psychology from Johns Hopkins and was a licensed therapist. He was also a certified Reiki practitioner, if anyone cared to ask, which Ron hoped that they did.

More than a decade ago, during her first visit with the psychic, he told Imogen she would marry a tall, dark man with a distinctive birthmark. She laughed, convinced at the time she would absolutely marry the towheaded Andrew Maxwell. Six months later she met Alex and discovered a birthmark in the shape of a teddy bear on the back of his left thigh.

The moment Imogen arrived in Ron’s office, a steady stream of
tears fell down her cheeks. Ron let her cry, alternating between glancing over his half-moon glasses with compassion and quietly reading passages from a worn hardcover of Kahlil Gibran’s
The Prophet
as they sat opposite each other in ugly green armchairs atop wall-to-wall shag carpeting. A fake fire crackled in the background. Photographs of Ron with his idols, Deepak Chopra and Oprah, lined the mantel.

Finally calm enough to speak, Imogen caught her therapist up on what was happening with Eve. Their previous sessions had been mostly about wife drama, mommy drama, friend drama. Imogen rarely talked about work.

“What bothers you the most about this situation?” he asked her. Ron’s index fingers formed a steeple supporting his chins. “You don’t still fantasize about Andrew, do you? About the man Andrew is right now?”

“No.” Imogen shook her head in a genuinely violent way that convinced her this was the truth. “But I do fantasize about having other things that Eve has. I fantasize about being relevant again. I fantasize about people asking me to make big decisions and caring about my opinion, the way they care about Eve’s.” Imogen laughed back a sob. “I feel invisible. I’m the invisible older woman. I walk into a room and no one notices. No one looks up. Then I feel guilty for wishing people noticed me.”

“I don’t think you’re invisible.”

“You should come to my office.”

“You know what you need to do?”

“Be grateful.” Imogen said, curious if she was wandering into a trap. “I am grateful. I have a gratitude journal and everything.”

“You sound like Saint Gwyneth Paltrow desperately trying to sound humble.”

Imogen tried to swallow her frustration. “I feel like a fucking imposter every single day and I hate that. I’m forty-two, for Chris-sakes. I’m too old to feel stupid.”

Ron grimaced. “I think you need to weigh what you are getting out of this job with how much you can handle being bullied by a woman, who, as you describe her, is a sociopath.”

Ron grew quiet for a minute and rolled his eyes back in his head. His frame began to shake.

“What do you know?” she asked him warily, wishing, not for the first time, that her shrink and her psychic were not the same person.

Ron trembled his fingers, making a show that the cosmos was communicating directly with him. “This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” he said reluctantly. “A lot of things are going to change.”

Imogen sat straight up, her spine a pillar. “What is going to change?”

Ron looked at her woozily. He always claimed that peering into the future exhausted him. “I don’t think you will stay in New York. Not full-time anyway. I see you spending time in the South. And there is going to be a wedding.”

“Eve and Andrew?”

Ron nodded slowly. “I think so.”

“They just met!”

Her therapist shrugged. The universe had spoken to him.

The timer on his iPhone beeped. Their session was over. He rubbed his temples and stretched his arms above his head.

She gazed at the man’s chest-length white beard gamboling above his belly, which did quiver, not unlike a bowl full of jelly.

There was one more thing. “Ron, do you tweet?” Imogen asked shyly.

He raised a bushy eyebrow.

“I do indeed.”

“Will you follow me?”

I
mogen couldn’t ignore a burning sensation close to her left nipple. It came in waves that made her bite down hard on her lip. In a wash of guilt, she didn’t want to wake Alex. Had she been taking good enough care of herself over the past few months? Or had she been so focused on Eve and her job that she neglected to pay attention to her recovery? In the days following the surgery, when she pushed everything but healing out of her mind, she fixated on every detail, caring for the surgical drain and getting rid of the fluid every couple of hours. She religiously exercised her arm to keep the muscles strong, but she hadn’t done it since she went back to work. The doctors had warned her to stay on top of all these things to prevent an infection. She definitely didn’t want to wake Alex and complain.

“Mommy.”

“Hey, John-John. Why are you awake so early on a Saturday?”

“I had a nightmare.”

She lowered the seat of the loo and sat, lifting him on her lap, which only aggravated the pain in her breast.

“Tell me about the nightmare. Was the witch there?” He nodded his blond curls up and down. “I’ll bet she was scary. What did you do?”

“I hides.”

“Brave, smart boy. Where did you hide?”

“In a tree!”

“Trees are the best place to hide from witches!” Johnny’s frightened face turned proud.

“You know what I want you to do next time that mean and nasty witch pops into your dream, darling?”

“What, Mommy?”

“You don’t have to hide. You can stand right up in front of her. Close to her face.” Imogen put her face right in front of Johnny’s, making him giggle. “And you tell her, ‘You don’t belong here. I belong here. This is my tree and this is my dream.’ ”

“You’re so smart, Mommy. You’re smart and you’re so soft.” He nuzzled into her, rubbing the lace of her slip against the parts of her chest that hurt, but she balanced the pain with his need to be as close to her as possible.

“I always like to hear that, darling. Do you think you can go back to sleep?” He nodded again, this time his eyes already growing droopy. She bit down hard again on her lower lip as she lifted him up in both of her arms, favoring the right one. He made his small snuffling noises as she laid him in his bed. She peeked into the next room at Annabel. Her daughter had left her laptop on her bed. Imogen brought the machine downstairs instead of going into the bedroom to grab the one she and Alex shared and risk waking him.

When the screen flickered back to life Imogen closed out twelve tabs of instant messages, videos of Siamese cats, Reddit and a fan page for a band composed of three boys with asymmetrical haircuts. Facebook was the last page she closed out. Her daughter was the main reason Imogen forced herself to be on Facebook in the first place, thinking it added a layer of accountability to Annabel’s online life to know her mom was (albeit feebly) somewhere on the site too. She loved the photo Annabel had as her profile picture, an adorable shot of her trying to hold both Johnny and Coco on her lap. She didn’t want to snoop, never wanted to snoop, but couldn’t help but notice that there was a new comment on the page: “WHATz WRONG WITH YOU? Do you Cry when u look in the mirror bc u r so UGLY?”

Imogen physically doubled over as if she had been punched in the gut. Candy Cool again. It didn’t sound like anyone’s real name, but Imogen did the Google anyway to see if anything came up. Only the Facebook profile appeared, a picture of a smug little brunette with a perfect complexion except for small scar in the shape of a half-moon on the right side of her chin. Bitch.
Did I just call a ten-year-old girl a bitch?

Despite Tilly’s strategy of noninterference, Imogen’s immediate instinct was to protect her sweet and friendly daughter from the words, to toss the computer across the room, shut down Facebook or at the very least delete the offensive post. She began clicking with little direction around the comment, wishing there was a very clear button that just said, “Click me and this will be erased forever.” Damn it, why wasn’t there a button like that? An “erase me from the Internet forever” button.

Imogen tensed with frustration that she was so impotent. Then. Finally. She found an arrow at the top right corner of the comment and clicked a pull-down menu that allowed her to hide the offensive post from the timeline, feeling a small sense of accomplishment. Maybe she
could
protect her daughter from the evils of the Internet.

She refocused. Into Google she typed: Breast cancer AND pain. The top hit was Warning Signs of Breast Cancer. She was already too familiar with the light pink website. Sign eight was “a new pain in one spot that does not go away.” It was the same as before. They didn’t get all of the cancer. She had known this was a possibility. It was one she dwelled on during the early days after her surgery, worrying about going through this all over again and maybe again after that, living in a constant state of recovery, never being able to fully return to a normal life.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She cursed herself. She cursed her job. She cursed Alex for not taking the high-paying corporate job he was offered two years ago that would have meant she was no longer the breadwinner of this family, even though she had told him not to. She cursed Worthington for turning her goddamned magazine into an app that she didn’t understand. She just stared for a while. Out the window, across the street, she could see a small man
walking a very large dog, a Great Dane. Johnny loved Great Danes, had ever since he was small. He referred to them as the ponies of the Wet Billage, which was the way he had pronounced West Village until just last year. She desperately wanted a cigarette and understood the irony of wanting to smoke when she learned she had cancer again, and didn’t care. She wondered if she still had packs hidden in the house. When she first quit she used to hide them far back in the freezer just in case she needed one. She knew they weren’t in there now. That was a year ago. She’d been good, only bumming a fag here and there at a party after a cocktail or two. She needed to call the doctor. It wasn’t even seven a.m. No one would answer before nine. She threw on her favorite worn Lanvin cardigan and walked around the block to Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee to stand impatiently in line behind two women in tweed pants debating the benefits of adding lavender to their coffees. The mommies at school had started drinking lavender-infused everything. People will buy anything if they think it’s good for them. They will pay extra if it’s beautiful. A real lavender moment was happening right now.

Back outside on the street she said a quick hello to Jack, the shop owner, who was sitting on the bench outside the bright red door,
The Times
sprawled across his lap as he sipped on his hardcore Ethiopian brew. Jack was a former banker who had used his parents’ money to create more money and then lost most of it in a real estate deal gone wrong. The coffee shop was his second act, which came with a second wife and a new baby.

The smell of coffee wafted through the air, promising the next best thing to nicotine—caffeine. She felt more human already.

“I haven’t seen you in ages,” Imogen leaned in to kiss his scruffy cheek.

“We haven’t gone out since Kip was born.”

“You poor love. It gets better, I promise.” She must have been wincing.

“Imogen, are you okay?” She held back the tears threatening to spill down her cheeks.

“I’m fine, darling. A bit sleepy. Hoping a bit of your delicious coffee will snap me out of it.” He nodded in understanding.

“I can’t wait to sleep again.” He groaned. “Maybe once he’s eighteen?” Imogen laughed and nodded in mock seriousness. They made a small cheers with their respective caffeinated beverages and Imogen headed back toward her house.

Walking through the door, she felt the fire in her breast flare up again. She’d quit the serious painkillers just a week after her surgery. They made her feel woozy and not altogether there, but she couldn’t take it any longer. Her arm shook as she reached for the little orange bottle. The tears finally came when she couldn’t get the lid off. She swallowed three in quick succession and then lay down next to Alex.

Imogen woke to a light slap across her cheek.

“There you are. I nudged you, I squeezed you, I touched you inappropriately and you wouldn’t open your eyes. I was starting to get a little bit worried. Imogen Tate never sleeps past noon.”

She stretched her arms over her head and in doing so felt the pinch again, letting out a cry mixed with surprise and pain.

“What’s going on, babe?”

She didn’t want to keep it to herself any longer.

“The cancer’s back,” she whispered.

Alex’s face switched from cuddly hubby to rapid-fire litigator.

“What? That’s not possible.”

“It is. I’m in so much pain. It’s one of the symptoms. It’s one of the ways you know they didn’t get it all. I have pain in a new spot, a spot that never hurt before. It feels like it’s on fire.”

Alex grabbed his glasses off the night table.

“Show me.”

“Show you the website that told me this?”

“Show me your breast. Show me where it hurts.”

“You’re not a doctor.” Imogen pulled her sweater tighter across her chest.

Alex sighed. “I just want to try to help. I don’t know what else to do. Did you call the doctor yet?”

“No, I took a pill and fell asleep before I could.” Imogen grew defensive.

“I’ll call her. You stay here.” Alex was back to being sweet. She
couldn’t help but doze again once he left her alone in the bed. Sleep let her leave the pain behind.

“Your oncologist is out at the beach for the weekend for her daughter’s birthday. She will come back late tomorrow night and see you first thing on Monday morning. Can you hang on until then?” Alex said when he reappeared.

Imogen nodded and then shook her head.

“Shit! I have to meet with Eve and Lucia van Arpels for breakfast Monday morning.” Lucia van Arpels was the best-known women’s contemporary designer and the woman single-handedly responsible for the creation of the wrap dress in the seventies and its resurgence in the early 2000s. For sale at more than $400 a piece, the dresses were a staple of every professional woman’s closet. She hadn’t yet agreed to let Glossy.com sell her pieces and Imogen knew she was stubborn about which retailers—brick-and-mortar and digital—carried her dresses. Imogen thought she could persuade her, had even asked Eve if she could take care of this one on her own, but the girl was adamant about meeting Lucia. She would probably try to take a selfie with her.

“You can’t go.”

“I can’t miss it.”

She admired the furrow that cut through Alex’s brow as he was working something through in his head. “I’ll make you an appointment at eleven,” he said. “Go straight from breakfast.”

Tilly didn’t mind working a few extra shifts through the weekend. Imogen spent the rest of Saturday and Sunday trying not to lift anything or even to move. Both kids were beyond sweet, bringing their iPads into bed to watch movies with her as she drifted in and out of sleep, careful not to lean too hard on her chest.

Lucia van Arpels arrived everywhere fifteen minutes before she was scheduled to be there so that everyone else had to be there a half hour early if they wanted to beat her to the punch. Arriving first allowed Lucia to scope out the room, choose the best table and then pick the best seat at that table. She preferred to control a situation. Imogen
coveted the idea of that kind of control. And so the elegant woman was already on her second cup of coffee when Imogen arrived. High cheekbones made her look more severe than she actually was. Her brown hair all fell to one length and swung expertly atop the neckline of her simple cream cashmere sweater.

Molly Watson had introduced Imogen and Lucia years earlier and the two women had remained friendly ever since, sitting on many of the same boards. Lucia’s granddaughter was in school with Johnny. They were trading photos when Eve flounced in the door wearing a bright yellow LvA wrap dress. No one wore the dress of the designer to go meet the designer. Before she sat down Eve snapped her fingers in the air at a passing waiter.

“Can you bring me some lemons for my water?”

At that moment Lucia’s phone beeped. She gave an apologetic look as she rose and picked up the device.

“I’m so sorry. I have to take this quickly. We are about to do a major campaign in Japan and they are all about to head home for the day.” Imogen nodded.

“That’s rude!” Eve said as the waiter delivered a pot of coffee to the table and placed a saucer of limes in front of Eve.

Imogen watched Eve swirl Splenda into her drink. “We all take calls during meals. It’s how we live. You of all people know that.”

Eve looked at the sliced fruit with disdain. “I asked for lemons. Does that retarded waiter think lemons and limes are the same thing?” Imogen cringed, as Lucia returned to the table.

“Okay, ladies, you have my undivided attention.”

First Eve slid a piece of black rubber across the table. The bracelet: “Good, Great, Gorgeous,
GLOSSY.com
!” “So Lucia, I brought this for you. All of the girls in the
Glossy
office wear them.” The woman picked it up and turned it over in her hand, squinting at it in confusion.

Next, Eve established her list of bona fides. She prattled on about how she started working for Imogen at
Glossy
(she didn’t say “assistant”), went to Harvard for her MBA, graduated at the top of her class. Then she launched into her pitch.

“Allowing us to sell your products will seamlessly integrate magazine
content with retail sales. We have a reach of one million eyeballs in a single day, the majority of them high-earning young women.”

Eve was charming in her business school way. You could say a lot about the girl, but you could never say that she wasn’t smart.

Lucia flagged down a waiter to order a yogurt topped with fruit and a light sprinkling of granola.

“It has so much sugar,” she whispered to her tablemates. “Everyone thinks the granola is so healthy, but my nutritionist told me that it’s the granola that has been killing me.” Imogen ordered the same. Eve just asked for another coffee. She had been on a no-food diet for the past week.