“That’s brilliant, Lou. If she ever wants to look like Mia Farrow, you could sell the whole mop to Rusk and make a custom color blend…just think: Lucas Blond Balayage.”
Cat wasn’t joking. She’d seen the Lucas daughters the week before when their nanny brought them to visit the offices, and their perfectly healthy little-girl hair—seasoned only by the sun from sailing in Cap d’Antibes, Montauk, and the Dutch Antilles with their father—was a tone that Cat was sure every old bag of bones in New York would pay through their hollowed-out noses for.
Lou roared, a big, horsey Lou-laugh. Whenever she laughed, spoke, or really made any kind of noise with her mouth, it was as though her jaw nearly detached from her face and became a separate object. It was all Cat could do not to stare openly at Lou’s enormous, perfectly capped white teeth as her words boomed out through them.
“We’ll just have to pray one of them goes through a Sinéad period before hitting puberty. God, Kit-Oh, you must be broiling in those leggings.”
Cat looked down. Oh—right. In her hangover rush, her body confused by the industrial air conditioner in the loft, she’d worn leather leggings in July.
“Oh, no, I’m fine, Lou—they’ve got tiny holes for air,” she said.
“So is Margot in yet?” Lou asked nervously as they stepped into the elevator, referring to RAGE’s venerable editor in chief.
Cat desperately tried to recall if Margot was even in town that day. “I feel like she’s in Milan for the rest of the week, but let’s check with Bess—she’s the only one who actually listens to Paula, anyway.”
Paula Booth had worked for Margot Villiers for nearly thirty years. They ran RAGE together with a pair of iron fists. Though it was Paula’s title, “Assistant” was hardly her job description; in truth, she was somewhere between a deputy and a surrogate. She had two assistants of her own and a personal secretary but, for some reason unknown to Cat, never had an editorial title tacked before her name on the masthead. Yet Paula led each Tuesday’s big edit meeting where she often ran through Margot’s schedule toward the end, when Cat usually had stopped paying attention altogether. Bess tended to write down everything Paula said, because the sixty-year-old—known for always wearing black, never smiling, being semipermanently attached to the telephone, and having a short temper—didn’t like repeating herself ever.
Lou, as a temp, a newcomer, and a genuine publishing outsider, was still terrified of both Margot and Paula. A socialite and friend of Hillary’s who had been on the pages of RAGE dozens of times, she’d been recruited—rather quickly—into Hillary’s job after the accident because of her experience as a subject in magazines, not as a writer or an editor.
At Hillary’s funeral, a photographer for The New York Times had taken a photo of Lou as she gave her condolences to Margot and featured it on the cover of the Styles section’s tribute to Hillary. Two days later, Paula and Margot offered Lou the job. Cooper had needed to hire someone who understood, instinctively, what RAGE’s customers would covet, they’d explained, and Lou in turn thought it might be glamorous to work—especially at a job that so many people would have killed for. They’d settled on an interim contract position naming Lou as contributing fashion director for six months. Paula and Margot assured Cat behind closed doors that they’d wanted to promote her into Hillary’s job, but, being an EU citizen, she’d need a full green card—her current visa wouldn’t support the types of travel required for the job—and they needed more time to get Cooper’s approval. Lou’s interim role was just a part of the process.
Cat hadn’t resented their decision. Hillary had been one of her closest friends, and she would have felt disloyal lobbying for the position. Lou’s stepping in allowed Cat some real time to grieve and search for balance in her life, and no one at RAGE expected that Lou—who’d never had a paying job before—would want to stay beyond her six-month contract, anyway.
As she and Lou walked together to their offices, the new crop of interns stared, openmouthed, at the ghostly pale six-foot-one half-Japanese, half-Belgian senior editor dressed like an off-duty model at a dive bar and the five-foot-two alarmingly tan semifamous blonde Brit beside her who wore mud-encrusted riding boots, dark khaki microshorts, and a white linen trapeze top with ropes of turquoise and topaz around her neck.
Constance Onderveet, the magazine’s managing editor, peered through the glass wall of Margot’s office, her eyes narrowed and critical, a look Cat tried to defuse by smiling and waving. Constance smiled uncertainly back, while Paula, on the phone in her own office next door, mercifully kept her back to Cat’s entrance. Constance is calculating exactly how late I am, Cat thought, realizing that she’d crossed some kind of invisible boundary. Thankfully, Bess looked up from her desk a moment later and smiled her sunny grin at both Cat and Lou.
“Hi!” she said, pausing from her bracelet sorting. “I’m on bracelets all day, but let me know what you need. Margot is out in Paris, but she’s back tomorrow. Paula’s on a rampage. Constance is reworking Judy and the Technicolor Housecoat, so we will have to pull more brooches—it was Havisham, but now it’s more early Cindy Sherman throwing eggs on the floor. I put a tray in your office, Cat; and Lou, we need picks for the blue page for September’s NEEDS. Molly is feeling very blue today so she’ll help you.”
As always, Cat was awed by Bess’s organizational skills. Lou looked over at Molly, the blue-haired intern.
“Moll!” Lou called out with delight. “You ARE blue today. I love it. If Boots says so, then it must be done. Blue’s the thing for Book, then. I want a coffee and then let’s get started.”
Lou chucked her striped linsey-woolsey tote—custom-made for her by female prisoners in Uzbekistan through a collaboration with Barneys, a project cut sadly short by the elaborate pleas for help sewn into many of the final product’s linings—at the doorway of her office and marched over to the Coca-Cola coffee dispenser. Molly stood there awkwardly, unsure of whether or not she should have gotten the coffee for Lou. Lou also seemed unsure whether or not she should have asked Molly for it, like she would a maid or a flight attendant. Lou was a bit lost in the working world, still, and in that sense, intern and boss were perfectly matched. Molly was glad that at least Lou was kind, even if it was in that ropy British backslapping kind of way. And had she really just called Bess “Boots” and RAGE Fashion Book just plain “Book”?