The Knockoff (2 page)

Imogen smiled at her. She was good at accepting praise, but this
was difficult for even the most seasoned egotist to swallow. “Well, now that you’ve been here and seen all of this up close, what do you think?”

Eve looked around the room with her saucer-sized green eyes. “It is even better than I expected. I just know that I can learn so much from you and I’ll do whatever it takes to make your life run as smoothly as possible.”

She added, “Give me a chance. I’ll change your life.” That line should have sent chills up Imogen’s spine, but she was no Cassandra, and she was desperate for someone hardworking and eager who could start right away.

Eve Morton did exactly what she promised. She was on the ball. She was prompt. She was a fast learner and an overachiever who proved her worth in matters large and small. All day long they talked to each other through Imogen’s open door. Imogen’s baby son, Johnny, had pneumonia for weeks on end soon after Eve took the position. Together they crafted a furtive system that kept the rest of the magazine in the dark about Imogen leaving for hours to take care of him. Eve sat guard outside her office, routing all calls to Imogen’s cell phone and assuring visitors that she was hard at work and must not be disturbed. Eve would print new versions of the layouts and bring them to Imogen’s town house after everyone else had gone home for the evening. Imogen would make her changes by hand and Eve would whip them into impressive mock-ups before the next morning’s meeting. Her help was invaluable.

From the very beginning Imogen had been struck by how desperate Eve was to conform and please. If someone mentioned they needed a restaurant reservation, Eve would send them five options. If they said they liked her bracelet, she would buy them one for their birthday. When Imogen added new honey-colored highlights to her hair, Eve did the same.

The girl’s wardrobe graduated from basic J.Crew to much more aspirational designers, funded mainly by a string of older gentlemen suitors who consistently picked her up from the office in their Town Cars late at night. Eve kept her ambition tucked inside her like a set of
those Russian nesting dolls. Each time she shed a layer, she appeared more confident, more self-assured.

Just as Imogen was seriously considering promoting her to assistant editor, after two and a half years of dedicated service, Eve knocked on Imogen’s door with red rings around her eyes. To please her father, a hard-nosed high school football coach with the most state championship wins in Wisconsin, a man who wished he had a son who would be a big-time banker and not a daughter who worked in fashion, Eve had taken the GMAT and applied to business school. She’d never expected to get in, but Harvard offered her a scholarship to get her MBA. Eve couldn’t say no to her dad.

And so Imogen lost the best assistant she ever had. As a parting gift, Imogen presented Eve with a red vintage Hermès twill silk scarf.

Eve sent flowers twice when she learned Imogen was sick. One of the bouquets came with a card that said “Get Well Soon,” with a picture of a sad kitten nudging an older and chubbier orange tabby cat. The other, a vase of ivory magnolias, Imogen’s favorite flower, came with no real card at all. Just a piece of paper with “Eve” scrawled large across it.

Before the elevator doors opened into the executive suite that housed Worthington’s office, Imogen gave herself a small pep talk. She was Imogen Tate, successful editor in chief, the woman responsible for breathing new life into
Glossy
and turning it around when everyone said it couldn’t be done. She had won awards and wooed advertisers. On her brief ride up, Imogen had decided to play the next moments as dispassionately as she possibly could with Worthington. Her boss liked and respected her because she was always so levelheaded. Imogen considered her ability to read both people and a room to be one of her best qualities.

Her shoulders thrust back, she coolly strode past Worthington’s two homely assistants. The publisher’s fourth wife, a former beauty queen and one of his old assistants (while he was married to his third wife), mandated their plainness because she knew exactly what her husband was capable of doing with ambitious young women. One of the young assistants moved to block Imogen, but—too late—was
tripped up by an unflattering floor-length skirt. When Imogen broke through the imposing oak doors, Worthington, always an early riser, and especially more so now that the company was doing so much business with Asia, was standing parallel to a wall of windows overlooking downtown Manhattan. The office was a mixture of steel, glass and dark wood—cruise ship Art Deco—with German brass sconces that had once graced the ballroom of a Cunard ocean liner. With his puffy fingers looped lazily around the top of his putter, he resembled a Hirschfeld sketch of a well-fed executive. He was an ugly man, made handsome by virtue of being wealthy. With his bulbous nose and tiny pink ears he was Piggy from
Lord of the Flies
, all grown up as an alpha male. She’d heard him described as hilarious, eccentric, a genius and a lunatic, all by women who had once been married to him.

“Imogen,” he boomed. “You look incredible. Have you lost weight?” His eyes cruised up and down her frame, resting too long at her breasts. Was he trying to figure out if these breasts were an improvement?
Yes, Carter, these breasts are about ten years younger, perkier and firmer. Perhaps a tad rounder. Thank you for noticing
, Imogen couldn’t help but think. When a mechanic replaced an engine, he always gave it a little tune-up.

Determined to maintain an air of quiet control, she smiled, easing into the buttery leather of the couch to the right of the putting green, and got straight to the point. “I am delighted to see that you have rehired Eve Morton.” Copies of Worthington’s new memoir were placed at right angles on the steel Gemelli coffee table. His jowls, air-brushed into a jawline, sat above the bold title letters on the bottom of the cover—WORTH.

“Yes. Yes. Smart girl, that Eve. She has an MBA from Harvard, you know…and legs that go on for miles…like a young Susan Sarandon. Man, that broad could party back in the day.” He winked to no one in particular. Imogen had long ago grown accustomed to the fact that women, including Susan Sarandon, in Worthington’s lexicon were broads, chicks and gals, all an assemblage of beautiful or not beautiful parts, rather than a competent whole. He spoke in the language more befitting an Atlantic City cardsharp than a Manhattan publisher. Her boss was never interested in idle chatter, but
still Imogen wondered if he had any clue that today was her first day back in the office. And what having an MBA from Harvard and legs that went on for miles had to do with working on a website of a magazine, Imogen hadn’t a clue. Imogen had friends who had gone off to business school in the late nineties and early 2000s. She had no idea what it was like when Eve went, but for many of those friends, MBAs meant two years of adult summer camp with keg parties and field trips: delayed adulthood that indiscriminately catapulted them into the next tax bracket.

She could tell that Worthington had a measure of goodwill toward Eve, so she played along.

“Top of her class, apparently. I am so excited that we have her back,” Imogen said with a perfectly calibrated smile. “The website can always use good people.”

“It’s going to be much more than a website, Imogen. To be honest, I don’t entirely get what it is going to be myself, but I think it will make us a shitload of money!” Worthington paused as if to consider the benefits of once again making the company an enormous amount of money. It wasn’t too long ago that the consulting firm of McKittrick, McKittrick and Dressler set up shop at Mannering to try to figure out why the company, particularly the magazine division, was bleeding cash. It didn’t take a $500-an-hour consultant to figure out where the money was going. There was the editor at large who kept an apartment in the first arrondissement in Paris for weekend trips with a revolving door of young male suitors. There was a permanent suite at the Four Seasons in Milan available for senior staff to enjoy during the fashion shows and other alternating weekends. There were the riders installed in editor in chief contracts (Imogen’s included) for cars, clothes and dry cleaning. Worthington released a sigh for the good old days as he knocked his golf ball a couple of inches into the hole of the putting green.

He continued: “I’m happy you are excited about it. I was worried that you wouldn’t take the news well. I know how devoted you are to the glossy pages. I was worried you wouldn’t like the switch over to a digital magazine. In fact, I was worried you might just leave us for good. But we all know it’s time for this company to put digital first.”

What was a digital magazine?
Nothing coming out of his fishlike mouth made any sense. Of course she was devoted to those glossy pages of the magazine. It was her job. Did he mean that they would be putting more of the magazine on the Internet? Was that why they brought in Eve? Maybe today’s MBA programs taught you how to finally make money from putting a magazine on the Internet, something Imogen hadn’t really thought was possible. In just the past few years there had been so much change. Publishing was a different world now. She knew that. Blogs, websites, tweets, linking and cross-posting. These were all things people cared about.

Worthington pulled a shiny new ball from his pocket and continued, “The new business model that Eve came up with is unlike anything I have ever seen. It is Amazon meets Net-a-Porter on steroids. And to think…we get a cut of every single item we sell. This is what will save the company. Not to mention the money we are saving on printing and shipping.”

As the weight of this new information sank in, Imogen felt the office walls move inward. The muscles behind her eyes tightened and twitched. Her head pounded and her stomach twisted. She dug her fingernails into the fleshy parts of her palms.
Pull yourself together
. She’d been a fool to think she could leave her job for months and expect everything to be just as she left it.

Imogen strained for another smile.

“Carter, what are you trying to tell me? What is happening to my magazine?”

He looked at her, very matter-of-factly, and then said in a tone he typically reserved for his five-year-old twins, “Your magazine is now an app.”

B
y the time she made it back down to the
Glossy
floor from Worthington’s office, a sea of new faces had gathered in the conference room for the morning meeting. Imogen had expected to have more time to prepare to see her staff. Over the past week she’d practiced the speech she would make during this very meeting on her first day back. Looking through the glass walls, she didn’t recognize anyone sitting around the table or slouched against the wall at the back of the room. Her managing editor, Jenny Packer, and creative director, Maxwell Todd, were conspicuously missing. Imogen’s eyes searched for a familiar face as she walked in and took a seat at the head of the long white table. Now she recognized a couple of people from sales and marketing, but she still didn’t see any of her editors.

A young woman across the room smiled giddily at her. As soon as she made eye contact Imogen knew it was a mistake.

“Imogen Tate!!!!” the girl squealed. “I just love you. I am so happy that you are back! You’re like a fashion goddess. A goddess. I just tweeted that you were sitting here in our meeting and I got, like, fifteen retweets already. All of my friends are completely jealous of me for getting to sit here in this room and breathe the air you are breathing.” She reached her hand—nails painted a neon pink and decorated
on the tips with what looked like vanilla cake frosting—across the table. As she clasped it with her own, Imogen spied a chunky black rubber bracelet on the girl’s wrist with pink writing: “Good, Great, Gorgeous,
GLOSSY.com
!”

“I’m Ashley. I’m your assistant. I’m also the community manager for the site?” Ashley’s voice was childlike and twinkly and she ended the last sentence like it was a question even though Imogen was sure she hadn’t meant it as one. Imogen had been looking for a new assistant when she left, so it would be helpful not to waste energy trying to find a new girl, but she was skeptical of this packaged deal. How was this girl going to be both her assistant and do whatever it was the community manager did?

“Which community exactly are you managing, darling?” Imogen asked as she took in Ashley’s long corn-silk hair and huge pale blue eyes with absurdly long eyelashes that might have even been real. Her bee-stung lips were coated in a dark red lipstick that shouldn’t have worked, but somehow just made her look more intense and beautiful. She was certainly an original in this room of girls who otherwise all looked the same.

Ashley laughed and jumped out of her seat with the energy of a Labrador puppy, her hair rippling in a silky wave. “
The
community. I manage all the social media. Twitter, Crackle, Facebook, Pinterest, Screamr, YouTube, Bloglogue, Instagram, Snapchat and ChatSnap. We’re actually outsourcing the Tumblr right now to a digital agency, but I’m still working with them on it.”

Imogen nodded, hoping to convey that she understood more than half of those words.

Just then, Eve walked into the room balancing her laptop in one hand and an iPad in the other. Eve shot daggers toward Ashley and reprimanded her. “This isn’t a sorority meeting, girls.”

Imogen had no university degree. Molly Watson had scooped her up as a shopgirl back in London when she was just seventeen and she had been hard at work ever since. Still, Imogen had immediate uncomfortable associations with sorority girls, imagining them as a prelude to the Real Housewives of New York, beautiful bitchy bullies.

She surveyed the gang of new women gathered around the table, most of them in their early twenties. Where was
her
staff? The fashion sense of these girls was of two flavors, hooker or gym bunny—too-tight dresses or coordinated track pants and hoodies.

No one here in this room followed the unwritten rules of how the fashion industry dressed. Sure, magazines were filled with bright colors and over-the-top accessories, a cast of characters in elaborate designs all bedecked in taffeta, techno leather and, more than once, an entire rainbow of furs. But the people who created fashion were, for the most part, simple and bare in their personal style. You could tell who belonged from the interlopers who snuck past security at Fashion Week because the fashion editor typically wore something effortlessly thrown together—a Céline look, perhaps a YSL blouse with a vintage Hermès trench. Their clothes maintained a sense of uniform and calm in a chaotic world. There was a reason Grace Coddington still wore black every single day. Most of the top editors and designers never even wore nail polish. Imogen had never seen a speck of color on Anna Wintour’s nails—perhaps her toes, but never on her hands.

Everyone in the room pecked away at the small screens of iPhones and tablets. Imogen felt strangely naked and lacking without her own device, which she had left idle at her desk. She had never once brought a phone into a meeting. It was rude.

The
tip-tapping
slowed but did not come to a complete stop when Eve clapped her hands together.

“Let’s do this! As all of you can see we have a new addition to the meeting today.” Eve smiled over at her. “Some of you know Imogen Tate, our editor in chief, but many of you don’t. She has been out on sick leave for the last six months.” Imogen winced at those words. “Sick leave.” That wasn’t what she wanted to call it. She’d been on sabbatical, or hiatus. “Now she is back just in time for the launch of
Glossy
’s amazing new website and app. Let’s all make sure to give her a warm Glossy.com welcome this week!” Before Imogen could even rise out of her seat to make her speech to the staff, the meeting moved forward at a rapid clip. This was a completely new Eve from the one
who had sat outside her office and answered phones. This one fired on all cylinders. She appeared more clever, brighter and funnier than Imogen remembered.

A woman Imogen recognized as a booking assistant gave a brief rundown of a photo shoot scheduled for later in the week. Eve went through a complicated series of statistics: unique page views, organic traffic, referral traffic, cross-channel insight. Imogen wasn’t quite sure what to make of any of it. She wrote the numbers down on the first blank page of her Smythson notebook along with the few words she was able to decipher, keeping a smile on her face throughout the entire ordeal. She was Imogen Tate. She was still the editor in chief. She had been one of the first fashion magazine editors to lobby for her magazine to have its own website, but she had never actually worked on it. Who was going to teach her how all this worked?

The moment Eve finished talking about something called the conversion rate, she let loose another clap and yelled with intense urgency:

“Go, go, go!”

Everyone pushed clear of the table in tandem and, in silence, darted back to their desks balancing their MacBook Airs on one hand like waitresses carrying trays. Imogen walked over to Eve, but too late realized that Eve was already speaking into earbuds plugged into her phone. Eve pointed at her wrist, which had no watch, and mouthed the words “just a minute” to Imogen.

She would just nip into the loo for a second to get her bearings. Sitting in the stall, Imogen rubbed her temples. What the hell was going on? This was an entirely new office from the one she’d left behind. Eve didn’t seem to know her place in the pecking order of this magazine anymore. Where was the respect? Imogen’s staff was nowhere to be found.

From twenty feet away Imogen could see a crowd in her office. Now, that was a nice touch. A small welcome back party, perhaps?

Drawing closer, she could see the new girls perched on every available surface in the room while Eve furiously drew a grid in purple marker on a whiteboard behind Imogen’s desk.

She cleared her throat loudly, but it did nothing to slow the momentum of the meeting.

“Eve!” Imogen said, even louder than she had expected.

“Imogen, hey. Join us. We are just jamming on some new ideas in here.”

Jamming on ideas? “Do you usually jam here in my office?”

Eve nodded earnestly. “We do. The engineers were up all night. They’re napping in the conference room.” She shrugged her broad shoulders. “You weren’t here so we’ve been using the space.”

Who just waltzes into someone’s office and begins doodling on a wall?

“How about we jam later, ladies? Let me get up to speed a little?”

The young women in the room swiveled their heads between Imogen and Eve, unsure who had the authority in this situation. Eve raised an eyebrow, perhaps considering putting up a fight before thinking better of it.

“Sure thing.” She snapped her fingers three times into the air. “Let’s huddle by my desk.” She looked over her shoulder as the staff fell in a line behind her. “Come over if you want, Imogen.”

“Eve,” Imogen called out. “Please take this with you.” She hoisted the pink monstrosity of a beanbag chair out of the corner and into Eve’s arms. It was heavier than it looked. “It doesn’t belong in here, darling,” Imogen said firmly.

When Imogen made it into to her seat she saw her lonely iPhone was still perched at the top of her handbag. It squawked at her as if it knew that all of the other devices had been invited to the meeting. Sitting on the keyboard was a black bracelet like Ashley’s: “Good, Great, Gorgeous,
GLOSSY.com
!” Assuming it was some freebie from the marketing department, Imogen tossed it in the bin. Her computer screen was a mess of blinking notifications. She right-clicked her mouse and let out a small gasp. The monitor lit up like an arcade game, icons on the bottom bounced excitedly up and down and notification messages dotted the upper left side of the display, one after another. Her email in-box was at capacity. Imogen felt a distinct loss of control. Her eyes didn’t know where to look first. How could she
reach Ashley, her new assistant? She needed someone to clear her in-box. There was no longer an assistant’s desk outside her office, and the exuberant girl was nowhere to be found.

Quickly scrolling through the most recent ten messages, Imogen realized that everyone had worked through that morning meeting. During a time when she thought she was supposed to detach from her electronics, brainstorm with her colleagues and plan their day, everyone else had been sending “Reply All” emails.

It felt as if Imogen had been in one meeting and the rest of the staff had been in another. An entire subtext was missing from her experience of the conversation in the conference room.

The photo shoot they discussed was already scheduled. A photographer, not the one she recommended, had been booked. Hair and makeup were still outstanding.

Wait.

No.

She scrolled up.

Hair and makeup had been booked. The cost for catering was too high.

This was déjà vu in reverse.

She picked up the phone sitting on the desk and dialed Eve’s extension. It went to the voice mail of a man with a gruff Long Island accent. Of course Eve didn’t have the same extension she had when she worked for Imogen. Did Eve even have a phone on her desk? Where was Eve’s desk?

Imogen depressed the receiver with her index finger, hit zero for reception and was immediately diverted to an automated system requiring her to enter the first four letters of a person’s first or last name. She typed in three-eight-three.

“To reach Eve Morton, please press three or dial six-nine-six.”

No answer. Imogen hung up and tried again.

When she finally picked up, Eve’s voice on the other end of the line was cautious, surprised and laden with a hint of suspicion.

“Hello?”

“Eve. It’s Imogen. I wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“Why are you calling me?”

Was the girl daft? She repeated herself, slower and slightly louder this time. “I wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“I can heeeeeeaaaar you. Why didn’t you just email me?”

“It’s faster just to pick up the phone.”

“No one talks on the phone. Email me. Text me. I am in the middle of, like, fifty things. Please don’t call.” The line went dead. No one talks on the phone? Eve behaved as though Imogen had just done something truly anachronistic, like send her a smoke signal or a fax.

A blinking red dot on the upper quadrant of the monitor distracted her. She clicked. It was a notification that she had one of the company’s internal instant messages.

Oh good. Her assistant, Ashley, had sent a message to check in.

“You’re so cutez! ROFL!” That wasn’t exactly an offer of assistance. The message was followed by a short link to a site called Bitly. Bitly, Imogen reasoned by virtue of the adorable suffix, must be some kind of new kissing cousin to Etsy, the handmade crafts site that the other moms in her school salivated over on their iPhones during drop-off, comparing notes on the latest macramé plant hanger they had shipped from an artisan in Santa Fe who was more than one-half Cherokee.

Bitly was perhaps something similar, but for smaller wares—miniature macramé plant hangers?

But the link didn’t take her to a site called Bitly. She was redirected to something called Keek.com. Imogen looked left and then right. Keek.com sounded vaguely like the pelvic floor exercises Imogen had learned in her prenatal classes. What exactly had Ashley sent her?

Underneath the neon-green Keek logo was a video. Imogen made sure to turn the volume down on the computer before hitting play.

She gasped again and held her breath.

The video was of her.

Oh no. There she was, yawning in the meeting. Yawning not once, but twice in quick succession. On the screen her eyes closed for a brief instant.

Ashley had taken a video of her without her knowledge. In a meeting. And then posted it on the Internet. What a grand invasion of her privacy!
Who just films someone without asking? Who just films
someone when they are doing nothing at all but sitting in a meeting?
She looked tired. Her sharp black crepe dress from The Row looked dull and old against the bright yellow hoodie of the woman sitting next to her. Ashley’s camera must have millions of megapixels. Imogen could see each and every last wrinkle fanning around her eyes as she opened her mouth wide. She couldn’t even remember yawning once, much less twice. There was a caption on the video: THE RETURN OF IMOGEN TATE to @Glossy. #Hurrah #Love #Bosslady #Shesback.