The Knockoff Read online

  With no pages left to plan out and then produce, the job of a managing editor, what Jenny did was now obsolete.

  “You need to learn how to code.” Jenny expertly mimicked Eve’s newly affected accent, a cross between Boston and old New York with a lot of soft vowels and condescension, as she recounted to Imogen what Eve told her when she had asked what her new responsibilities were at the website. “ ‘You’re drowning in the ocean and I am throwing you a life jacket to pull you into the digital future’ is what she said to me.”

  “So fucking patronizing!” Imogen shook her head. “What code does she want you to learn? Morse code?” That was the only kind of code Imogen could think of. She knew it was wrong the second it came out of her mouth. If she were being honest with herself, she would admit she had buried her head in the sand these past few years when it came to the Internet. “It’s not my problem” and “It’s not what I do” were the phrases that came to mind. Other people had simply taken care of it.

  Jenny gave a wry smile and moved her hand across the few inches between them to pat her on the arm. “HTML, Ruby on Rails, the things that make a website. Don’t feel bad. I didn’t know what the hell the stupid little cow was talking about either, but I’ve been doing some research. Here is the thing—I just don’t think that’s where my heart is. I’m no engineer and I don’t want to be. Steve and I may take some time and live in the house in Hudson Valley. I might finish my novel. I used to be someone important in this office and she’s made me feel like an unwelcome guest. She never asks my opinion, never tells me when meetings are. She’s just waiting for me to quit.”

  “Let me talk to her,” Imogen said. “I can fix this.”

  Was Jenny looking at her with something akin to pity?

  “Thank you, and I appreciate it. Truly. But I think I’ve already made up my mind. Mannering is offering buyouts, you know. They want to get rid of all of us old-timers and our inflated salaries.” Jenny made a disgusted face and air quotes around the word “inflated.” I don’t see any reason I shouldn’t take it.”

  For the next two hours Imogen’s only goal was to keep an anxiety attack at bay.

  As the clock struck six, her eyes blurring from working without her reading glasses, Imogen let herself stray to the website of Women’s Wear Daily to peruse a bit of industry gossip. She came across news that made her heart sink. Molly Watson, the woman responsible for her entire career in magazines, had been fired after forty years at Moda magazine, according to an article by the media columnist Addison Cao.

  “Ms. Watson will be replaced with a group of ‘pop-up editors,’ a rotating cast of iconic designers, stylists and former editors, who will each play the part of editor in chief for a month before passing the baton to the next boldfaced name.”

  Imogen’s big title, the one she’d coveted for so many years, no longer felt like such a big deal at all. Editor in chief was apparently something anyone could do for a month at a time.

  She spun her chair around to face the windows behind her desk in an effort to hide the swell of emotion brought on by the news of Molly’s termination. Molly, who always did the right thing. Molly, who always took the high road in an industry known for low blows. Molly was the reason she was here at all.

  Her mentor first spotted Imogen while she was working at the R.Soles cowboy boot shop on King’s Road in Chelsea, London, in the early nineties.

  Slightly gangly from a late adolescence, Imogen had dyed black hair then, back-combed into a beehive supported by heaps of hair-spray. She didn’t walk out of the house without her black liquid-liner cat eyes and Spice lip liner. Weighing nearly nothing, she hardly filled out a teeny-weeny vintage blue gingham minidress. White cowgirl boots over black fishnet stockings completed the look.

  Rusty, who owned the shop, gave Imogen the freedom to style it however she wanted. One cold January morning she dragged a red leather sofa in from the street. Rusty painted the floor black and made a nook in the corner to sell well-worn leather biker jackets, the really beaten-up, James Dean kind. She fashioned a collage of Elvis Presley photos—the little boy to the hound dog, all in black and white—no pictures after thirty allowed. Imogen sold truckloads of R.Soles cowboy boots to boarding-school brats with Mockney accents and beatnik uniforms. They walked in packs up and down the King’s Road during the summer holidays chain-smoking Marlboro Lights when they weren’t vacationing in Barbados. They adored Imogen’s real South London accent and would bring her single ciggies and cups of tea from Chelsea Kitchen down the street.

  Rusty was generally off his head and always dressed in Day-Glo sportswear with black high-tops. He danced around the shop listening to Paul Oakenfold trance music on his Discman, his arms waving wildly in front of him. That was how he nearly clocked Molly Watson when she walked in one sunny Saturday in July. She was American, cool and rich, and had her two young, handsome English nephews with her.

  “I’ll take two pairs for each of them, size two and three, and here’s my card,” she said to Imogen, all in one breath. “Who put the store together? I love it. Was it you?”

  From then on Imogen was under Molly’s wing. But where was Molly now?

  <<< CHAPTER THREE >>>

  Most of the young women were already in the office when Imogen arrived at nine the next day, hunched over their laptops and pecking away at keyboards while wearing giant headphones in varying colors of the rainbow like doughnut-shaped earmuffs. Aside from the tapping, the room was silent. Imogen wandered over to a setup of food that resembled a movie set’s craft services in the corner of the room. Her eye was first drawn to a Pepto-pink sign reading WE ARE WHAT WE EAT! Next she noticed the bowls of fresh fruit and translucent cylinders filled with nuts, seeds and granola that sat on the counter.

  “It means we never have to leave.” Ashley snuck behind her without making a sound, like the ghost-faced children in Japanese horror movies. After making herself known, she bounced eagerly around Imogen in a pair of black leather leggings that hugged her lithe figure, and pointed to the chia pudding and Greek yogurt at eye-level in the glass-doored refrigerator next to eight different kinds of kombucha. “All of the healthy things are up here, but the good stuff is down here.” Ashley knelt on the floor and pulled open cabinets adjacent to the fridge to reveal Popchips, gummy candies, Snickers bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

  “It’s positive psychology. You have to work for the stuff that makes you fat so they keep it out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind. Eve modeled it on Google. We also just got a service that brings in breakfast each morning plus dinner at seven. On Tuesdays we get vegan tacos. Taco Tuesday!” The girl smiled at the alliteration. Imogen knew the days of the two-martini lunch had ended with the second Bush presidency, but the idea of eating every meal in the office seemed horrific.

  Back at her desk, Imogen typed “Glossy.com” into her Internet browser. Lists and quizzes dominated the right rail of the page. Imogen was intrigued by “5 Things You Must Buy at This Hermès Pop-up Store,” and less pleased about “Take This Quiz: What Shoe R U?” and “10 Ridiculously Hot Celebrities with Adorable Cats Wearing Fall Booties.” Splashed across the top half of the site was a carousel of rotating photos from a shoot Imogen had styled just before leaving for her surgery. It was sexy and provocative and looked almost as provocative on her screen as it did on the pages of her magazine. Small tabs at the bottom of the screen told her that 12,315 people had liked the photograph and 5,535 shoppers had bought something featured in the shoot. She clicked on an indelicate pair of Wolford tights and was presented with the original pair, retailing for just under $100. As she scrolled down the price decreased, all the way to a $2.99 pair of sheer black L’eggs.

  —

  Surprisingly, quickly, it was five p.m. and Imogen was happy the snack food was there. She was starving and actually felt uncomfortable asking Ashley to order her something.

  The company had issued her a new laptop and she had no idea how it worked. I
n the past her assistants had printed most of her emails. Ashley came in to try to show her the basics of cloud computing. After ten years of having the exact same system in place, Glossy employees no longer saved anything on their actual computers.

  “This way you can work on anything from anywhere,” Ashley explained, carefully going through everything Imogen needed to know with the patience of a kindergarten teacher.

  There were four different passwords to get through what Ashley described as four different “firewalls.” Imogen wrote them in her notebook.

  “You should probably memorize them,” Ashley said. “Eve is bonkers about security.”

  Why did Imogen have to learn any of this? That is exactly what assistants were for. Right? All of this felt like a giant waste of her time. She should be thinking big picture, not staring at a bloody screen all day. She couldn’t wrap her head around the new, allegedly “intuitive” database that existed only on the Internet. She kept saving things only to have them disappear into the ether of the web. Each click brought an error message and a sense of frustration.

  God, this was infantilizing. “Okay. I’ve got it,” Imogen said and clicked on one of the file folders. “No, wait. I don’t have it.”

  “It takes some getting used to,” Ashley said sympathetically. “We can try again tomorrow.”

  Imogen reached out to grab the girl’s arm. “One more thing. Help me set up my printer. I don’t want you to have to print all of my emails out for me.”

  “How about I do that first thing in the morning,” Ashley replied cheerily. “Join us for cocktails after work. Eve is leaving early today for the first time in months. We think we can sneak out behind her.”

  Imogen always loved hanging out with the younger girls in her office. Nurturing young talent was one of her favorite parts of her job. She wished she could bottle their energy.

  “Let me call my nanny.”

  —

  There is something delightful but also terrifying about drinking with twenty-two-year-olds. First comes the sense of freedom when no one pointedly looks at her watch, making offhand comments about how the nanny is passive-aggressive after nine p.m. Then there is the sheer panic of abandoning adult drinking rules one sets at the age of thirty: say no to shots, never drink anything blue, drink one glass of water for every alcoholic beverage. Those rules exist for a reason, and yet Imogen took her first tequila shot of the evening standing at the bar while their group waited for a table. This was the kind of place people in their twenties gravitated to after work, all fit bodies pressing up against one another, knowing a few drinks could get you into bed with someone new for the night. The difference between this scene and similar ones Imogen encountered when she was in her own twenties was that everyone was deeply absorbed in their phones instead of scoping the crowd. They texted, they tweeted and they checked Facebook, oblivious to the world around them. Was there even a point to being in the same room as one another anymore? Their entire lives were condensed in the palms of their hands.

  As the temperature in the crowded bar rose, the girls from the office all removed their high-cropped leather motorcycle jackets in various shades of taupe to reveal perfectly tanned shoulders.

  They were very excited about a new mobile app called “Yo.”

  “What does it do?” Imogen asked.

  “It just lets you say ‘yo’ to someone,” Mandi said.

  “What does that even mean?”

  Mandi giggled a little. “It just means yo.” She wiggled her head and waved her hand in the universal signal for hello.

  “That’s ridiculous!” Imogen said, with the certainty that it was absolutely ridiculous. Mandi shrugged and Ali nodded her head vigorously.

  “I mean. I can’t even. Ridiculous or not,” Ali said, “they just got a million dollars in funding. There’s another app that lets you just text pictures of tacos. I think they got funded too.”

  Spending time with her junior editors in the past consisted mainly of coffees and the occasional cocktail party. This was incredibly intimate. The lines of propriety were erased. Yet these girls still treated her with respect. She noticed they were all wearing that black bracelet.

  When it came time to order wine, the girls deferred to Imogen. Perry from Marketing shyly handed her the not terribly extensive wine list.

  “You probably know way more about wine than we do,” Perry deferred. That was true, Imogen did know something about picking a good wine, the kind of wine that wouldn’t break a twentysomething’s bank account but didn’t need to be swallowed quickly to bypass the taste buds either. She ordered two bottles of the Borsao rosé for the group. As they waited for it to arrive at the table, the buzz of Patrón wearing away, Ashley groaned about how her mother was driving her insane.

  “Menopause,” she carped. Imogen chose to ignore the sideways glances cast her way. Did these girls really believe menopause was something that happened the second you turned forty? She had a four-year-old at home and a menstrual cycle like clockwork. But she decided to cut them some slack. When she was twenty-two she too had thought everyone over thirty was the same age—old. Imogen had been nervous when she turned forty and noticed that waiters began calling her ma’am in an unironic way. One of her friends, who was closer to fifty than forty (if you stole a peek at her driver’s license), referred to forty as the “rush hour of life.” Victor Hugo called it the “old age of youth.” Imogen still felt reasonably young, but beyond that she was certain that she was in the prime of her life.

  “It used to drive me crazy too, when my mother popped across the pond unexpectedly,” Imogen chimed in. “My mum always arrived bearing some kind of English gift—Waitrose tea bags, sacks of lavender or a hot water bottle. She would never knock before coming into the apartment since she managed to get a key from the super, so I was always in some embarrassing state when she arrived.”

  She recounted to the group of gathered co-workers how, when she was their age, she once worked a celebrity shoot for four days straight in Los Angeles. She returned to New York City on the night of her birthday, having smuggled a silver sequined Versace minidress from the set. She donned it, along with a pair of strappy silver dancing shoes, in the cab, putting a sheer pashmina between her and the cabbie as she stripped down in the backseat. All the other assistants from Moda met her at a smoky lounge in the Village, the name of which she could no longer recall. At the end of the evening Imogen stumbled home with a Hugh Grant look-alike. When her mum walked through the door carrying scones and a handmade patchwork quilt the next morning, the floppy-haired gentleman had his very white backside poking up toward the ceiling.

  The group of women at the table laughed appreciatively at her story but Imogen could tell they were not entirely sure who Hugh Grant was.

  “Where are your parents from?” Imogen asked Ashley, bring the conversation back to the irritating mother.

  “We’re on Eighty-Fifth and Park,” the girl replied. “At least you had an ocean between you and your mom. Try being with your parents all the time.”

  Ashley lived with her parents? Imogen tried to conceal a look of surprise.

  “Are you staying with them until you find your own place?”

  “Yeah, I figure I’ll be there a couple more years.” Ashley spoke around a bit of asparagus wrapped in a thin layer of prosciutto she had selected from the appetizers the waiter brought out, along with several plates stacked high with arugula covered in finely shaved Parmesan. “The building is getting a new gym next summer.”

  As the other girls at the table nodded in unison, Imogen grew more confused.

  “You don’t want your own place sooner than that?”

  “Why would I? We all live with our parents.” The others nodded again. “Well, Mandi doesn’t, but that’s because her parents live in, like, Idaho.”

  “Virginia,” Mandi interjected.

  “Or something,” Ashley finished her sentence. “Your parents still pay for your lo
ft in Williamsburg. Why would we get our own apartments when we get everything we need at our parents’ places? They have all the right food. There is laundry service. Besides. Who can afford to live in Manhattan on our salaries?”

  The jumbo, matching Chanel 2.55 bags the girls all slung over their shoulders made sense now. Imogen herself had survived on $35,000 a year when she first came to the city, living with two young women in a railroad apartment on the Upper East Side she’d found in the back-page listings of The Village Voice. The walls had been painted a prominent purple and the stairs always smelled vaguely of illicit sex. The place was so small that if someone took a hot shower in the narrow bathroom, the window in the kitchen on the apartment’s far side would fog up with steam.

  “We wouldn’t be able to afford anything with a doorman,” Perry said. “And who wants to have to walk up stairs?”

  Imogen found their conversation fascinating. They were not unlike the Spaniards she had met one summer in Madrid who flocked to public parks and crowded subways to make out and sometimes more because they lived with their parents until marriage. She also felt sad for them. These women would never know the joys of sharing a tiny space with two other girls, all in the same boat, all trying to make ends meet over Pringles and bits snuck home from a fancy store opening. One time her roommate Bridgett snuck an entire bottle of Dom Pérignon down the front of her Calvin Klein shift dress. They bought strawberries on the street and melted a Hershey’s bar over their always-present yellow Bic lighters to make chocolate-covered treats as they sipped the golden liquid with the most delicate bubbles that had ever touched their tongues. Then they stayed up that night talking until dawn about the women they wanted to be when they were finished being the girls who stole champagne and smoked a pack of Marlboros in a day. It was during that conversation that Imogen first declared she wanted to be the editor in chief of a women’s fashion magazine. No one laughed. All of them had equally serious and lofty ambitions, most of which had now come to fruition in their forties.