The Knockoff (29 page)

Imogen gasped. Oh shit. Alice was right. Who posted the pictures? There it was, the main splashy story on the first page of Glossy.com.

IT
’
S TECH, BITCH!
screamed the headline. “Photos taken by Mack Schwartz,” read the byline. It was really just a gallery of the photos overlaid with the BUY IT NOW! graphics. That wasn’t what they had planned. The whole point of doing the shoot was to turn it into a beautifully laid out aspirational spread. These weren’t even retouched.

Imogen clicked through.

“You could have given me some kind of warning.”

“Alice, I’m so sorry. This is a mistake. I never approved any of this. I swear to you, I never would have done this without talking to you. Let me get to the bottom of this?”

“You’re supposed to be the editor in chief. That’s why I signed on to do this project in the first place. You think I agree to work with every blogger on the street? If you don’t have control over this, what do you have control over?”

Imogen went to interrupt her, but realized she didn’t have an answer.

“I’m sorry, Alice.”

“Kill it. Issue a correction. Make sure my check is in the mail and make it out to me and not my assistant.” The phone went dead. Imogen tried to figure out what to do next. Who was posting these pictures? Who had access to them? Ashley had them. She wouldn’t have posted them without speaking to her.

Who was in the office anyway?

She dialed Ashley. As the phone rang Imogen sank down onto the hardwood floor of the downstairs family room. They renovated this basement two years earlier and it was now the most lived-in room in the whole house besides the kitchen. Imogen gazed over at the bookshelves stuffed with children’s books, young adult books and family photos.

After five rings it went to Ashley’s voicemail. “Heya. It’s Ash. Are you seriously leaving me a message right now? You’re so old-school. Text me if ya want to hear back from me.”

Imogen stood and began pacing across the sitting room, trying to work out what to do. Should she just log on and try her hand at removing the photos from the site altogether? Alex, finally finished with his own work, called out to her: “Babe, are you in for a game of Monopoly?”

“Start without me.”

She was about to dial Eve when her phone rang. Ashley’s photo popped up on the phone. A selfie, her blue eyes wide and head cocked slightly to the side. How did that get there? Ashley must have programmed it herself.

“Hi, Ashley. I was just trying you.”

The girl’s voice was muffled, as though she were holding her hand over the mouthpiece.

“I saw. That’s why I am calling you back. What’s up?”

“Where are you? I can barely hear you. Can you talk louder?”

“I’m at Eve’s with everyone else.”

“With who else?”

“With the whole office.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Eve told us that we all had to come to her place to work from there because of the snow.”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“She told us not to say anything to you. She said you probably had to take care of your kids so it wasn’t worth it for us to bother you.”

“How did you all get there? Everything is shut down today.”

“Most of us walked. Sabine’s dad has a big SUV, so he let her take that out and she picked up some people on the Upper East Side, but they ran into a snowbank so they got here real late.”

Imogen didn’t know what to say. There was no way that Eve was being kind and giving her a snow day with her children. She wanted to make a fool of her for not being there working with everyone else.

“I emailed the staff this morning. Did you get it?”

“Eve wrote back to all of us two minutes after you did and told us to ignore it and find a way to her apartment. She said”—Ashley let her voice slip into Eve’s nasally one—“we can’t let productivity slip just because of a few flurries.”

Furious didn’t begin to describe the way Imogen was feeling, but she tried to shelve it for a few minutes to get to the bottom of what happened with the photo shoot.

“Ashley, why is the photo shoot online?”

The girl’s voice rose a little before she caught herself and realized she was meant to be whispering. “Ugh. Yeah. I know it sucks. Eve made me post it this morning.”

“What?”

“Eve said we needed original content up today since everyone on the East Coast is stuck home in the snow. We are running snow-day specials and getting heaps of people to buy from it. That’s good at least, right?”

“I organized that shoot. I was meant to have editorial approval. Alice wanted to retouch the photos. It was in her contract. They weren’t ready to be published.”

Now Ashley sounded confused and slightly defensive. “Eve gave us approval. The two of you are, like, the same, right? If she tells us we can do something, then it’s okay.”

“Ashley, we are not at all the same. I worked hard on that shoot. You know that. You worked hard with me and the way it looks on the site is not what we planned. My relationship—and Glossy.com’s—with Alice is now over.”

“Shit. Imogen, I need to go. Eve is screaming about something.” She lowered her voice even more. “She says we are going to have a snowed-in pajama party here. I don’t think she’s letting any of us go home…not that we could get home if we wanted to…”

The line went dead.

What good would it do to email Eve now? The entire office was there, probably sprawled across the floor of her one-bedroom apartment. Imogen would look foolish calling over there now.

She stared at the phone.

Too embarrassed to call Bridgett or Massimo, she scrolled down through her contacts and finally landed on
R
. She’d never made an emergency call to Ron before. It rang through to voice mail. What was the protocol for this? Did she leave a message? When did people just stop picking up their phones?

Still sitting cross-legged on the floor, Imogen received a text from the therapist.

>>>>Hold on. I’m going to Skype you.<<<<

She paused before writing back.

>>>>Ok.<<<<

He replied with a smiley face emoticon. Skype therapy? Of course. Why not?

She added a smiley face to show she wasn’t in truly dire straits. People in truly dire situations didn’t use emoticons.

Her cell phone flashed. She accepted the call and her therapist’s beard loomed large on the screen.

“Imogen? What did you want to talk about?” It was the first time she’d tried to use the video function on her phone. She didn’t know where to put the device. Farther away looked better, so she stretched
her arm as far from her body as it would go. Ron had no such compunction about how he appeared. She could see directly up both his nostrils.

“I’m so sorry, Ron. You must think I’m a complete nut for calling you like this.”

“Imogen. My business is nuts.”

“Fair point.” She laughed. “It’s just…I’m at a breaking point. I don’t know how much longer I can take her games and bullshit, Ron.”

“What did Eve do now?”

“It sounds so stupid to explain it. It sounds like some juvenile middle school prank, but that’s what my life has come to.” She went on to tell Ron all about the snow day and how Eve had the whole staff, except her, over at her house.

Ron paused for a moment before replying very diplomatically, “Do you think there was any chance, any chance at all, that Eve actually thought, ‘Hey, Imogen has two kids at home, maybe she does need the day off…maybe I don’t need to bother her.’ ”

That couldn’t be true. If it had been, Eve wouldn’t have made the decision unilaterally. She would have offered Imogen the chance to work with the rest of the team or to stay home with her kids. Eve had the staff come to her house and left Imogen out specifically to undermine her. Eve was a clever girl who knew exactly what she was doing when she posted that photo shoot. She knew it would ruin Imogen’s relationship with Alice. Eve had dealt with enough Alice Hobbs photo shoots when she had been Imogen’s assistant to know what the photographer was like.

Ron’s arm must have been getting tired because the screen was starting to waver and fall. Imogen could see a giant patch of his white skin.

“Jesus, Ron, are you wearing clothes?”

“No, Imogen. I’m not. I’m upstate at this wonderful naked retreat. It’s incredibly freeing. I actually think it’s something you could possibly benefit from.”

“Are you mad, Ron? I don’t want to go to a naked retreat. Keep the phone at eye level, please.”

“Of course. Sorry about that,” Ron continued. “You need to make a
choice. Is this what you really want to be doing? You’re a woman who loves a challenge. You want to win, but you’re also a woman getting over cancer and a mom with two young kids and a wife to a husband with an incredibly stressful job. Do you want to kill yourself every day working with this girl you hate?”

She thought about it. Right now, the future of magazines was like a road that ended at a sheer cliff with a drop so steep Imogen couldn’t see to the bottom. But she believed she had no discernible skills outside of putting a magazine together.

“Ron, are you saying this to me as my shrink or my psychic? Because if you know, like you actually know, something important about my future, now would be the time to tell me.”

“I’m saying it to you as a friend. I am taking off my shrink hat and my psychic hat. Evaluate if this job is still worth it to you. Do you need it?”

Imogen’s voice grew small. “I’m scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“Scared that no one will ever call again. Scared I’m over.”

“I can’t tell you what to do, Imogen, but I will ask you this: Do you want every day to be like this?”

She grew quiet again.

“Life is funny, you know. It isn’t a running text. It has chapters. You might have a very different ending than the one you imagined.”

“I know. I need to think.”

“Okay. You know you can Skype me anytime. I’m here for you.”
With no clothes on
, Imogen thought.

“I know, Ron.”

She made an air kiss at the screen to say good-bye and sank into the cushions of the couch and into the silence. A vase full of deli roses purchased earlier in the week by Tilly and Annabel sat on the low coffee table in front of her. About four days old, the peach roses were beginning to brown around the edges and wilt in the middle. Without thinking about it, Imogen held up her phone to snap a picture.

Imogen posted it to Instagram. Why should you only post happy
things to social media? Where was the Instagram for the sadness? “Dying rose” was her caption.

The Monopoly game was in progress when she returned, but she didn’t have it in her to play.

“I’m going to have to lie down for a disco nap before dinner.” Annabel had hotels on both Boardwalk and Park Place. Johnny controlled all four of the railroads. They were so intent the three of them barely raised their heads.

She lay on the bed on her back, trying to employ all of Ron’s meditation tricks. Sending awareness down to her toes and imagining them relaxing. Moving all the way up her legs. She tried to let her thoughts float away on a cloud. Tried counting backward from one hundred. Tried breathing in for ten seconds and out for twelve. The hamster wheel in her mind kept turning.

She wasn’t sure how long she did the relaxation exercises before she actually fell asleep. She must have rolled from her back onto her side because she didn’t wake up until she felt Alex curling behind her.

“Is it time for dinner?”

“Not yet. The kids went back out to play in the snow for an hour or so.”

Her body remained rigid and tense. Alex moved his hand up to her neck to rub away the tension.

“Baby, what’s wrong? What were all those phone calls? What did the Wicked Witch of the Lower East Side do now?”

That made Imogen smile just a little. They had started calling Eve the Wicked Witch of the Lower East Side when a mutual friend informed them she moved into the luxury high-rise above the Whole Foods on Houston Street between Bowery and Chrystie. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg supposedly kept a loft there, which is what made Eve so keen on it in the first place. Eve loved little more than proximity to fame.

“Eve demanded that the staff come to work at her house today and didn’t tell me about it.” Every time the words came out of her mouth, Imogen felt more and more immature. Thankfully her husband chose to take the matter seriously.

“Have you spoken to anyone about this? Have you talked to HR? Have you gone to Worthington? Her behavior is out of hand.”

“What can I say to them? Eve ordered everyone over to her house except for me. Come on, Alex. I’m not that petty.”

“Not just that…even though I think there are serious legal issues involved when a boss forces their employees to come to their home. I am talking about the firings, the verbal abuse in the office. All of it. Someone else besides you needs to step in and deal with it.”

Imogen didn’t want to talk to Worthington about it. Doing that would be admitting defeat.

She rolled over to face him.

“I have to.” Her husband put both of his hands on her cheeks.

“Why do you have to?”

Oh god, was he really going to make her say it? It was demeaning for her to say it. She loved him so much that she hated throwing this in his face.

Alex just knew. “You don’t need to be the breadwinner, Im.”

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

She squeezed her eyes shut in frustration at her idealistic husband.

“Open your eyes, Imogen.” She couldn’t. “I’m serious. Open them,” he said.

“There are twenty things we can change, not tomorrow, but things we can change about how we live so that you don’t need to make your big-time editor salary anymore. We can sell this house and move into an apartment…like everyone else in this city. I can go work at a big law firm. The kids can go to public school. We could move somewhere else entirely. We aren’t stuck. We’re well-educated people with great careers behind us. Nothing is more important to me than this family. We’ll find a way to make our lives work whether you have this job or not.”

Imogen didn’t know what to say. She knew Alex would support her, but she certainly hadn’t expected this.