Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont. Lauren Weisberger
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Wasn’t it possible for me to have just a tiny bit of dignity with this woman?
‘Ahn-dre-ah, I don’t know what all the fuss is over finding Mr Lagerfeld’s mobile number when I have it right here. He gave it to me just five minutes ago, but we were disconnected and I can’t seem to dial correctly.’ She said the last part as though the entire world was to blame for this irritation and inconvenience except for herself.
‘Oh. You, um, you have the number? And you knew he was on that number the whole time?’ I was saying it for Emily’s benefit, and it only served to enrage Miranda even more.
‘Am I not making myself perfectly clear here? I need you to connect me to 03.55.23.56.67.89. Immediately. Or is that too difficult?’
Emily was slowly shaking her head in disbelief as she crumpled up the number we’d both just fought so hard to get.
‘No, no, Miranda, of course that’s not too difficult. I’ll connect you right away. Hold just a minute.’ I hit ‘conference,’ dialed the numbers, heard an older man shout ‘Allo!’ into the phone, and hit conference again. ‘Mr Lagerfeld, Miranda Priestly, you’re connected,’ I stated like one of those manual operators from the Little House on the Prairie days. And instead of putting the whole call on mute and then hitting speaker so Emily and I could listen in on the call together, I just hung up. We sat in silence for a few minutes as I tried to refrain from badmouthing Miranda immediately. Instead, I mopped some dampness from my forehead and took long, deep breaths. She spoke first.
‘So, let me just get this straight. She had his number the entire time but just didn’t know how to dial it?’
‘Or maybe she just didn’t feel like dialing it,’ I added helpfully, always enthusiastic for the chance to team up against Miranda, especially considering how rare the opportunities were with Emily.
‘I should’ve known,’ she said, shaking her head like she was horribly disappointed with herself. ‘I really should’ve known that. She always calls to have me connect her to people who are staying in the next room, or who are in a hotel two streets over. I remember I thought that was the weirdest thing, calling from Paris to New York to have someone connect you to someone in Paris. Now it just seems normal, of course, but I can’t believe I didn’t see that one coming.’
I was about to run to the dining room for lunch, but the phone rang again. Operating under the lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice theory, I decided to be a sport and answer the phone.
‘Miranda Priestly’s office.’
‘Emily! I am standing in the pouring rain on the rue de Rivoli and my driver has vanished. Vanished! Do you understand me? Vanished! Find him immediately!’ She was hysterical, my very first time hearing her that way, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it was the only time.
‘Miranda, just a moment. I have his number right here.’ I turned to scan my desk for the itinerary I’d set down a moment earlier, but all I saw were papers, old Bulletins, stacks of back issues. Only three or four seconds had passed, but I felt as if I were standing right next to her, watching as the rain poured down on her Fendi fur and caused the makeup to melt down the side of her face. Like she could just reach out and slap my face, tell me I’m a worthless piece of shit with zero talent, no skill set, a complete and total loser. There wasn’t time to talk myself down, remind myself that this was merely a human being (theoretically) who wasn’t happy to be standing in the rain and was taking it out on her assistant 3,600 miles away. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.
‘Ahn-dre-ah! My shoes are ruined. Do you hear me? Are you even listening? Find my driver now!’
I was at risk of some inappropriate emotion – I could feel the knot in the back of my throat, the tightening of the muscles in the back of my neck, but it was too early to tell if I would laugh or cry. Either one: not good. Emily must have sensed as much, because she leapt out of her seat and handed me her copy of the itinerary. She’d even highlighted the driver’s contact numbers, three in all, one for the car phone, his mobile phone, and his home phone. Naturally.
‘Miranda, I’m going to need to put you on hold while I call him. Can I put you on hold?’ I didn’t wait for a response, which I knew would drive her crazy, and threw the call on hold. I dialed Paris again. The good news was the driver picked up on the first ring of the first number I tried. The bad news was he didn’t speak English. Although I’d never been self-destructive before, I couldn’t help but smash my forehead firmly into the Formica. Three times of this, and Emily had picked up the line at her desk. She’d resorted to screaming, not so much in an attempt to make the driver understand her own bad French, but simply because she was trying to impress upon him the urgency of the current situation. New drivers always took a little breaking in, mostly because they foolishly believed that if Miranda had to wait forty-five seconds to a minute extra, she’d be all right. This was precisely the notion of which Emily and I were to disabuse them.
We both put our heads down a few minutes later, after Emily had managed to insult the driver enough that he’d high-tailed it back to where he’d left Miranda three or four minutes earlier. I wasn’t particularly hungry for lunch anymore, a phenomenon that made me nervous. Was Runway rubbing off? Or was it just the adrenaline and nerves mixing together to guarantee no appetite? That was it! The starvation so endemic at Runway was not, in fact, self-induced; it was merely the physiological response of bodies that were so consistently terrified and all-around anxiety-ridden that they were never actually hungry. I vowed to look into this a little more and perhaps explore the possibility that Miranda was smarter than all of this and had deliberately created a persona so offensive on every level that she literally scared people skinny.
‘Ladies, ladies, ladies! Pick those heads up off those desks! Can you imagine Miranda seeing you now? She wouldn’t be very happy!’ James sang from the doorway. He had slicked back his hair using some greasy, waxy stuff called Bed Head (‘Hot name – how can you resist?’) and was wearing some sort of skintight football jersey with the number 69 on both the front and the back. As always, a picture of subtlety and understatement.
Neither of us so much as glanced at him. The clock said it was only four, but it felt like midnight.
‘OK then, let me guess. Mama’s been calling off the hook because she lost an earring somewhere between the Ritz and Alain Ducasse and she wants you to find it, even though it’s in Paris and you’re in New York.’
I snorted. ‘You think that would put us in this condition? That’s our job. We do that every day. Give us something difficult.’
Even Emily laughed. ‘Seriously, James, not good enough. I could find an earring in under ten minutes in any city in the world,’ she said, all of a sudden inspired to join in for reasons I didn’t understand. ‘It’d only be a challenge if she didn’t tell us what city she’d lost it in. But I bet even then we could do it.’
James was backing himself away from the office, a look of feigned horror on his face. ‘All right, then, ladies, you have a great day, you hear? At least she hasn’t fucked you both up for good. I mean, seriously, thank god for that, right? You’re both tooootally sane. Yeah. Um, have a great day …’
‘NOT SO FAST THERE, YOU PANSY!’ shrieked someone very loud and very high-pitched. ‘I WANT YOU TO MARCH YOUR WAY BACK IN THERE AND TELL THE GIRLS WHAT YOU WERE THINKING WHEN YOU PUT THAT SHMATA ON THIS MORNING!’ Nigel grabbed James by the left ear and dragged him into the area between our desks.
‘Oh, come on, Nigel,’ James whined, pretending to be annoyed but obviously delighted that Nigel was touching him. ‘You know you love this top!’
‘LOVE THAT TOP? YOU THINK I LOVE THAT FRATTY, GAY-JOCK LOOK YOU’VE GOT GOING? JAMES, YOU NEED TO RETHINK HERE, OK? OK?’
‘What’s wrong with a tight football jersey? I think it looks hot.’ Emily and I nodded in quiet alliance with James. It may not have been exactly tasteful, but he did look incredibly hip. And besides, it was kind of tough to be taking fashion advice from a man who was, at that precise