Bess walked into the elevator and examined herself in its mirrored walls. Not too bad, she thought, looking down at her electric-blue Pappagallo flats for rips, tears, or smudges, smoothing her ankle-length silk tuxedo trousers, and tucking her deliberately threadbare men’s white V-neck into the side of the waistband. Her jewelry today was simple and bright: a stack of rose-gold pyramid-stud bracelets from Hermès covered one wrist, and a pair of dangling yellow-gold earrings—from the Egyptian section of the gift shop at the Met, purchased long ago with her fifth-grade allowance—hung casually from her ears.
When the elevator stopped on the forty-sixth floor, Bess walked into the main entrance of RAGE’s offices. The reception area still gave her a thrill every time she entered: RAGE’s front lobby walls were made of a creamy-white marble, shot through with jagged bolts of mint and lavender, seamlessly paneled between a polished black concrete ceiling and floor. RAGE Fashion Book was etched in three-foot platinum-leafed letters across the wall opposite the elevator bank.
The front “desk” was a sculpture by the architect Maya Lin, made of stacked gradient disks of a now-extinct ash tree suspended on four thin wires. There was a silver rotary telephone in place of a receptionist, as Margot Villiers, RAGE’s editor in chief, had decided long ago that the first face of RAGE should never, ever, be a person—just this empty, Lynchian room with a single telephone, through which you could dial a two-digit extension for any of the seventy-five women in the office.
There were no obvious doors save for the elevators. Bess crossed the floor and waved her phone again, this time in front of a brass plate set into the far-left corner of the back wall. The north and south walls of the lobby were made of marble so thin that the light shone through them, and when prompted by an authorized phone like Bess’s they split down the middle, slid back on tracks, and functioned as automatic doors. Margot called them the Beinecke doors, after the rare books library at Yale, walled in the same tissue-thin rock.
The walls slid away, revealing the magazine’s offices—open plan, like a newsroom. Bess made a beeline through the custom black Lucite cubicles for the southwest corner. Her own cube was stacked high with boxes, jewelry, invitations, gift bags, flowers, and a precariously perched laptop, on which she recorded who sent what object where and whether or not it was featured in a shoot. She tossed her backpack behind her chair and set her phone on top of the contact charging dock wedged into the corner of her desk.
Today, a Monday, was an accessories day for Bess. A total of 342 bracelets had been sent in the weeks before—solicited and unsolicited—and she had to account for each one in a spreadsheet, giving it a genre, a color-coded price point, a possible assignment for any of the upcoming shoots scheduled in the next five months, and then, finally, handwrite a thank-you note to the jeweler on RAGE stationery before putting the bracelet in one of the velvet trays that would eventually wind up in the office of Catherine Ono, her boss, close friend, and senior editor at RAGE. She sighed, thinking, I need more coffee for this. Bess walked over to a vintage Coca-Cola dispenser, popped in a quarter, and pulled out a squat, sweating black bottle of cold-pressed coffee. After diluting one-third of the bottle in a glass of ice water, she walked back to her desk and set her phone to silent. It was time to get to work.
Bracelet, rose gold, hinged band, with raised white enamel dots.
Very Julianne Moore in A Single Man.
Price point: Green ($5,000+).
Possible shoots: Day Drinking, January issue; Astronauts’ Wives, December issue; or Dotty for It, the Sylvia-Plath-in-a-mental-hospital-themed feature for the October issue, shooting in three weeks.
Bangle, lavender Lucite and bronze, laser-cut etchings à la Stargate.
Pat Cleveland goes to a garden party in 2035.
Price point: Mint ($10,000+).
Possible shoots: FUTURAFRIQUE, November issue; Gone Yachting (A Gowanus Story), October issue.
Bracelet, chartreuse ?-inch-diam. rope and platinum Monopoly playing pieces.
Rich children.
Price point: Yellow ($15,000+).
Possible shoots: Tea Party All Night: A Celebration of Suri Cruise, October issue; 1% (and Rising!), December issue.
Bess was so focused that she hardly noticed the office filling up around her when the clock struck eleven o’clock. The Beinecke doors parted over and over as RAGE staffers spilled onto 46, their near-uniform of summer silks in post-neon colors filling the office with little glowing blocks of color and activity as they poured into their Lucite cubes. That summer, the women of RAGE favored filmy sundresses with modish hems and lurid accessories; the shorter girls stomped around in oversized sandals, soles heavy and dense, while the taller ones, like Bess, leaned toward slipper-style flats. Makeup was out this year, so no one wore any. Skin care was in. The only embellishment Bess had on her face was a thick set of individually applied mink lashes that cost $900 per application, giving her the look of a soft-focus Twiggy.
Intern Molly eventually whirled in on a pair of six-inch leopard-print calf-hair pumps, their two-inch baby-blue platforms trimmed in red and gold. Her royal blue minidress had an extended trompe l’oeil collar in black, and her pile of hair was tinted in shades of the same baby blue as the platforms on her pumps.
“HiBessI’mSoSorryI’mLateIMissedTheTrainAndThereWereNoCabs,” blurted Molly as she hung her Céline handbag—this season’s, Bess noticed—from a hook on the side of Bess’s cube.
“That’s fine, Molly,” Bess replied kindly. “You can stay a bit later. Cat and I have to leave early. We’ll get a to-do list to you this afternoon. For now, please finish addressing those envelopes from last week.”
Molly visibly relaxed. Her hairstyle—an intricate series of plaits that ended in an extension-boosted fishtail—must have taken at least two hours at Barrett’s Braid Bar, and she was grateful that Bess didn’t comment on it. Bess knows that it’s more important to look right and be a little late, Molly thought, than to be ugly and be on time. This was a certainty that Molly would carry with her throughout her entire life.
Bess, indeed, had no intention of embarrassing Molly or anyone else, under any circumstance. The middle child of four, Bess adjusted cheerfully to the people around her, and going out of her way to make others more comfortable made Bess more comfortable in turn; she was the rare Manhattan native who grew sweeter with each passing year instead of more calcified. Still, it was true that some part of her natural ease came from her family’s astonishing resources, a fact she rarely, if ever, admitted. Bess instead devoted a significant amount of time each day to calculating the exact ratio of basic to bitch—placing the threadbare cotton T-shirt, for example, next to the Hermès bangles—in a misguided attempt to tone down the gleam of her family’s wealth.