The Knockoff (6 page)

At least Imogen could be useful (if she went along with the program) in helping navigate some of those barriers. She held the keys to the kingdom for the new
Glossy
app
—if only
she got it just a little bit more.

Eve glanced down at her phone, seeing an email that made her give out a little yelp. It was last-minute, but who cared. This was huge. Eve quickly dashed off an email to Imogen.

From: Eve Morton ([email protected])

To: Imogen Tate ([email protected])

Subject: DISRUPTTECH!

We have to fly to San Francisco tomorrow afternoon. We got accepted to come to Disrupt Tech conference. Hza. C more here.

www.Disrupttech.com

T
he next evening Imogen pressed her forehead against the cool Plexiglas window in economy class on the plane, looking down at the lights of Manhattan as they curved around the island, twinkling on the dark canvas like jewelry laid out for a fancy party.

Imogen was wearing her layered traveling outfit, perfected over years of shuttling to international shows twice a year—a lightweight long-sleeved gray cashmere T-shirt, black ribbed cardigan, large Hermès gray and black scarf that doubled as a blanket on chilly plane rides and her low-slung Rag & Bone boyfriend jeans. Classic black Ray-Bans pushed her hair off her face. For the past fifteen years plane travel had been a welcome respite from the busyness of life on the ground—a space free of phone calls, text messages, emails and the Internet. She knew all that was changing, but she still clung to the notion of a flight as a few sweet hours of uninterrupted time to indulge in a digital blackout, along with her stash of celebrity trash magazines.

“Didn’t you bring your laptop?” Eve asked her right as they reached cruising altitude, snapping her own screen open in a salute.

“No. We’re only here for a day,” Imogen said, dipping her hand into her bag for her copy of
Us Weekly
.

“The plane has Wi-Fi,” Eve said incredulously, as though she
couldn’t imagine the availability of something as precious as the Internet going unused for a single wasteful second.

“That is so lovely for the plane,” Imogen replied, refusing to let a twentysomething antagonize her as she lost herself in a spread of “Hollywood Plastic Surgery Secrets.” She paused for a moment. Now could be a good time to try to reconnect with Eve. What sense did it make to start off on a bad foot? She folded her magazine onto her lap and placed a hand on Eve’s elbow.

Eve pulled out one of her earbuds with great irritation and let it dangle like a loose thread down her neck.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“So, tell me all about business school?” Eve was startled, but once she got going she was more than pleased to talk about what a transformative experience Harvard had been for her.

“If I had stayed at
Glossy
I would be just another lowly associate editor right now,” she said seriously. “Now look what I’m doing. I’m literally transforming this company. I mean, B-school was the best decision of my life.”

With that Eve turned her attention back to her computer, effectively ending the conversation.

Imogen gazed longingly toward business class. If she’d had more notice she would happily have used her own miles to be in those plush seats where they served actual food that didn’t come in rectangular boxes wrapped in plastic.

“Business class is a little ridiculous for a flight this short, don’t you think?” Eve snorted with derision as she noticed Imogen’s gaze. “I mean, you sit at your desk working for five hours a day. Why can’t you be content sitting in this seat? I did the San Fran route back and forth ten times last year.”

Imogen turned back to her magazine.

Just after they landed, a little past nine, Eve revealed they would be sharing a room at a Days Inn near the convention center.

“It’s like a slumber party,” Eve said matter-of-factly in the taxi.

“How many beds are in the room, Eve?”

“One king. We’re kind of like a start-up now, Imogen. We need to be on a start-up budget.”

“And there is some kind of pullout sofa in the room?” Imogen breathed the words out with false hope.

Eve stopped paying attention to her, focused as she was on taking yet another picture of herself, a copycat of the photographer Ben Watts’s famous “Shhhh” pose that all the models were doing. She sucked in her cheekbones and made the international sign for “be quiet” with the edge of her forefinger pressed to her painted lips. The intensity of Eve’s gaze was as though Ben Watts actually was on the other side of the smartphone camera lens. Imogen had to admit it was working for her.

“Eve?”

“You know the perfect selfie is all about the eyes, Imogen. People think it’s about the smile, but it isn’t. It’s about getting the eyes just right,” Eve said, completely ignoring Imogen’s question.

“The bed?” Imogen repeated.

“No. I don’t think there is another. No pullout.”

Before Imogen could ask anything else their taxi pulled in front of the run-down little motel, a scruffy stray cat scowling into its headlights. Eve hopped out and sashayed into the building and over to the front desk, leaving Imogen to pay the cabbie. The manners of this girl! It was like she was brought up in a barn.

She breathed deep into her belly. The night air was crisp here, refreshing and chillier than back home.

Once inside, she tried to talk to Eve again.

“So we will be sharing the bed?” Imogen asked.

“Of course. Like sisters!” Eve squeezed Imogen’s upper arm too hard as she stood at the hotel check-in desk smiling her Cheshire grin at the spotty-faced overnight clerk who just wanted to get back to watching his episode of
Storage Wars
.

Grown-ups who were not engaging in or planning to engage in sexual activity with each other did not share a mattress. Imogen hadn’t shared a bed with anyone except for her husband and her children in more than a decade.

“We’re not sharing a bed.”

Imogen had no say in the matter. To her amazement the hotel was fully booked, as were most of the nicer places around town. This particular
tech conference had grown in popularity, due in no small part to last year’s appearances by several A-list actors, the ones who had forgone the typical celebrity revenue stream of Japanese cosmetics commercials and cheap clothing lines in favor of investing in technology start-ups.

These accommodations were cheap in every sense of the word. The price for the two of them in that one room was a third of the cost of any Union Square hotels like the Fairmont or Le Méridien.

After three swipes of the faded magnetic strip on the key card they finally entered the small room. Imogen needed sleep.

“Tomorrow is going to be so rad, Imogen,” Eve said, sitting next to her in bed, as Imogen struggled to find a comfortable position. “We are going to kill it at this conference.” She raised her hand in a high five, and then, thinking better of it, lowered it and stuck out her pinky.

“Let’s pinky swear on it. That’s how awesome it’s going to be.” Imogen was at a loss for what to do. She extended her pinky as well, which Eve promptly grasped with her own smallest digit and shook it vigorously up and down.

“I’m bringing pinky swearing back,” Eve said, more to the entire shabby room than to Imogen. “Ooo, I should tweet that.” Eve spoke out loud to herself as she tapped the words into her keyboard. “Bringin da pinky swear back. Booya!” With that she rolled over and went to sleep.

Imogen was exhausted and jet-lagged, but her mind just wouldn’t shut down.

Did I really only come back to work the day before yesterday?
She was having trouble processing just how much had changed so quickly. She’d barely even had time to discuss it with Alex in the hour they had seen each other before bed the night before. Her lawyerly husband wanted her to talk to an employment attorney right away.

“You have rights,” he told her.

A right to what? She hadn’t been fired, hadn’t really even been demoted. The situation had merely changed and the ground had shifted from underneath her. She had gotten to say a quick good-bye to the children that morning after she packed her bag and now here she was in San Francisco. This was where Silicon Valley was, wasn’t it?

She tossed and turned in the bed, desperate to find a comfortable spot on the scratchy sheets. She felt blindsided—felt like a woman whose husband was having an affair right under her nose, who brought his mistress to dinner parties and called her his protégée. How could she not have known all of this was happening to her magazine?

All of this was because of that damned cancer. The surgery hadn’t been easy. Then there were the kids and Alex’s new case. Imogen hadn’t gone out professionally or socially while she was away, preferring to spend most weekends at their cottage in Sag Harbor. A workaholic for so many years, she’d had to let herself heal. This happened so fast. Eve just finished school in June and came back in July. The site would become an app next week.

Before dawn Imogen woke to the sound of an ice machine dropping its cubes insufficiently into something obviously not meant to contain ice. The frozen water plunked out of the chute into what sounded like a plastic bag.
Plop, squish, plop, squish. Plop, squish
. Eve snored away on the other side of the bed, eyes twitching beneath a purple sequined sleep mask.

Imogen opened one eye and then the other. Light filtered through cheap nylon curtains, revealing a too thick television set bulging off a plywood dresser, a relic of the nineties.

Like me
, Imogen thought with a smirk as she briefly flashed back to her last business trip—four days in Italy for the Milan collections the previous February. Those already seemed like the good old days. Back then a shiny black car would collect her from home and deposit her at the airport. She would be ushered into first class and handed a glass of champagne, a warm towel and a soft blanket. The flight attendants knew her name and wished her sweet dreams. She’d sleep for six hours, before being shepherded into a second shiny, fresh-smelling black car upon landing and taken to one of the nicest suites in the Four Seasons. Those rooms were so luxurious she didn’t mind sitting through thirty ready-to-wear presentations during the day. If she tried hard enough she could still feel those downy white sheets, adorned with a perfect white orchid accompanied by a small vellum card that simply read in beautiful black handwriting “Love. Tom Ford,” a flourished dash through the “Ford.”

Back in San Francisco, the ice machine down the hall gave up with a heavy groan followed by the sound of three swift kicks punctuated with an expletive Imogen could hear clearly through the paper-thin walls. Someone was truly unhappy about their inability to chill whatever it was they were drinking at the crack of dawn.

Imogen stretched as she got out of bed, her nose twitching at the smell of paint permeating the room. She spritzed her favorite Jo Malone, Red Roses, to sweeten the air as she opened the closet to search in vain for a hotel robe to take into the bathroom with her, but found only a few wire hangers.

“Dress ‘nerd,’ ” Eve advised her when she emerged from her own shower twenty minutes later, with just a towel wrapped around her waist. Between her left hip and her belly button swam a happy dolphin tattoo, its snout cocked to smile adoringly at Eve’s face. A small blush crept over Imogen’s cheeks. She was no prude. For years she had watched as models pranced around her in various states of undress. But Eve was not a model and this was no photo shoot. Her perfectly round and pert boobs, the lack of lines betraying evidence of a spray tan, fixed themselves on Imogen, bare and judgmental.

“Let’s put on some getting-ready tunes.” Eve bounced over to her bed, and, before Imogen could object, Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love” began blaring from a portable purple speaker in the shape of a heart.

This new version of Eve, the one who was no longer her assistant, didn’t provide much context. She assumed everyone already knew what she was thinking at any given moment, and so Imogen didn’t bother to ask what “dress ‘nerd’ ” even meant. The “nerdiest” she could glean from her limited traveling wardrobe on short notice was a crisp black blazer thrown over a pair of gently distressed faded black boy jeans she had planned to wear on the plane ride back, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, less a function of dressing nerd and more of needing reading glasses. In the scuffed-up bathroom mirror, Imogen thought she was channeling Jenna Lyons as she pulled her wheat-blond hair into a sleek ponytail and added a swipe of Vaseline to her lips. This was the classic “you’ll never guess how expensive it costs to look like I am wearing no makeup” look perfected by industry women of a certain age. Imogen had gained a few lines in the places where she showed
emotion, but that was what happened unless you were very willing to cut your face open on an increasingly regular basis. Instead, she relied on a trick told to her by her friend Donna Karan years ago at a cocktail party.

“A tight ponytail is an instant facelift,” the designer had recommended.

Imogen made it her signature style.

DISRUPTTECH! was sprawled all over the city, but that morning they traveled to an industrial warehouse space just south of Market Street. Inside, concrete walls were interrupted only by bold signage, fluorescent lights and droopy-faced boys with eyes glued to tablets the size of their sweaty palms. Imogen had never been the oldest person in the room before, and now she felt bad about feeling bad that she was without a doubt the only person as far as the eye could see who remembered the fall of communism. It was a room Imogen felt excluded from the second she walked through the doors. She attempted an internal pep talk. Why did she care that everyone here was so young? Everything—including people, she believed—got better with age. So why did this room of fresh energy make the muscles in her shoulder blades involuntarily tense toward her ears?

Glossy
’s purpose in coming out here, Eve had explained the night before, was to present the new
Glossy
app to thousands of DISRUPTTECH! participants. Today Eve would unveil the new product and Imogen would introduce her, which inspired in Imogen a feeling not unlike leaping out of an airplane with a knowingly faulty parachute. This situation was completely out of her control, but she played along and pretended that she, too, wanted to be a disruptor of things, just like everyone else in this brightly lit cell block celebrating technology and the future. Imogen remembered the good old days (not too long ago, mind you) when being disruptive was a bad thing—something toddlers did on planes. When did it become the buzz word for entrepreneurs and newly minted billionaires?

Until the launch of the
Glossy
app, the project was supposed to be spoken about in secret code words. Eve called it Cygnus, named for
the swan constellation, implying that the metamorphosis of a magazine into an app or a website was like turning an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. Imogen’s job during their demonstration was to represent the “ugly duckling,” the “old guard” of
Glossy
. Her role was to tell the audience
Glossy
’s creation narrative and forward-thinking history.
Glossy
had launched in the 1950s, but it was in the sixties that it really began to shake things up by breaking fashion traditions. It was the first magazine to put a miniskirt on the cover during the mod sixties youth quake, then Dick Avedon shot Veruschka in a bikini in a Paris
hammam
in the seventies.
Glossy
launched the careers of the eighties supermodels—Linda, Kate, Naomi and Christy.