“Thank you,” the woman said, holding her glass up to Paula’s.
“To your children,” Paula said. They each downed an enormous swallow of scotch.
“You love them and all they do is disappoint you,” the woman said wryly. “Do you have any?”
Paula raised an eyebrow. “No. It didn’t work out that way.”
“I have four. Enough for both of us. Cheers.” The women clinked glasses again and another shot went down the hatch, their tumblers now nearly empty. Paula signaled for a refill.
“Are all of your children here this week?” Paula asked.
“No, no. Just the two oldest.”
“What agency are they with?”
“Agency?” the woman asked, confused. “They have a small business.”
And it suddenly dawned on Paula with whom she was speaking. “You’re Dr. Bishop.”
“Yes,” the woman said, looking frustrated by the recognition. “I don’t speak for them,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “I’m just their mother.”
“You’re more than that,” Paula replied. “You’re on the board.”
“Yes,” the woman said uncertainly. “What outlet are you with?”
“I’m not a reporter,” Paula explained. “I’m Paula Booth. I’m Margot Villiers’s deputy at RAGE.”
A very large silence descended between them as the name sank in. Paula let a beat pass before she extended a palm, her boardroom manners irrepressible in any situation. “It’s very nice to meet you,” she said genuinely. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how impressive Mania is.”
Dr. Bishop shook her hand with an enthusiasm that Paula hadn’t expected. “And I don’t need to tell you how influential RAGE has been,” she replied immediately. “It’s an honor to meet you. Of course I know your name. You’ve been the coauthor of what, forty-five white papers on the garment industry?” she gushed.
“A lot of that work is done by our lobbyists. I’ve only been the catalyst,” Paula said graciously. “But…it’s been my whole life.” She gestured to her own outfit, a simple knee-length black tunic and polished boots. “I’m not much of a fashionista.”
“You don’t need to downplay your work to me. I’m in the chemistry department,” Dr. Bishop explained, “but at UCLA I work with the Future Materials Institute. It’s basically rocket science meets survivalism. We’ve used a great deal of data from RAGE to support our studies.”
“I’m glad you’ve found value in it,” Paula said, throwing back her drink as the bartender approached her with the bottle. “It might not be around much longer.” He filled her glass back up to the top.
“What do you mean?” Dr. Bishop pointed to her own drink.
“I mean that your children are putting RAGE out of business.” Paula tried not to sound bitter, just matter-of-fact.
“My children aren’t doing that. The market is.” Dr. Bishop could be matter-of-fact, too.
“Only because this generation fundamentally doesn’t understand the distinction between editorial and advertorial,” Paula snapped.
“Maybe, but who can actually tell the difference?” Dr. Bishop asked. “I mean that sincerely. It all has the same breathless promotional quality—‘Buy this product; buy into this idea.’”
“The difference,” Paula insisted carefully, “is that we’ve always made sure our breathless editorial copy was truthful.”
“Truth and transparency are different things,” Dr. Bishop replied, surprising Paula with her candor. “Look, if I’ve learned anything from what my children are doing, it’s that this generation considers it an honor to be chosen by a brand—to them, a brand is a business that somebody built, put their blood, sweat, and tears into. Young people value entrepreneurs. They don’t need an editorial middleman to tell them what’s okay and what’s not. They want to choose, to be the curators themselves, actively and publicly building their own taste profile.”
“You’re saying that young people don’t want to just imagine themselves being rich people; they want to be rich people,” Paula said, thinking out loud.
“They want the same things your editors want, except by connecting brands directly to consumers, Mania is completely transparent where RAGE is not. My kids argue that transparency is the new medium of media. Print, digital, it doesn’t matter. Honesty is the future,” she insisted. “Companies like yours are in bed with every advertiser that’s ever cut you a check and you know it—the difference is that you’ve been able to layer it in so many yards of privilege that you thought nobody could tell.”
“I suppose we labored under the assumption that the audience valued our privilege and held us to a corresponding moral standard,” Paula replied thoughtfully. “Let me ask you a question: How will your audience ultimately ensure that the products Mania promotes really are, as you say, local, ethical, and radical—‘ethical’ being the key word here. Whose ethics?”
“The market has taken care of that. Ethical manufacturing is a requirement now. You saw to that,” Dr. Bishop said confidently.
Paula nearly spit out her drink. “The second that we go out of business and I personally stop visiting factories and bullying retailers and manufacturers, that ends. Have you ever been to a garment factory? This isn’t academia—there are no moral actors in this business. There’s just me and there’s Margot, and we’ve had to behave like fascists to get things done our way. Pardon the comparison.”
“I’ve never been to any kind of factory,” Dr. Bishop admitted. “But how quickly can labor conditions possibly change? The workers wouldn’t allow it. This is the twenty-first century. That’s what transparency is all about.”
“Transparency is subjective. Let me show you.” The November issue would have to wait: this woman had a billion dollars in the pocket of her Chico’s jacket. Paula knocked back the remainder of her drink and summoned a car.
Cat leaned against a bookcase on the fifth floor of a desperately tacky eighties-era office building while the loud, sticky mob of the party swarmed around her. A tall mime, his face painted white and lips painted red, offered her a small bag of white powder.
“Turtally,” she murmured happily, assuming it was cocaine and hoping it would sober her up. She snorted some up her nose while Bess, sitting across from her in the laps of two other mimes, sipped from a plastic cup.
Someone passed Cat a drink; she drank it.
Someone grabbed her hand and brought her out onto the dance floor; she danced. An orange-bearded man wearing a Carolina Panthers Starter jacket was in the center of the room, playing two keyboards, and everyone was jumping and screaming in his direction. Cat closed her eyes, raised her arms, and let herself fall in with the crowd.
Somebody else’s sweat coated her arms.
Somebody else’s hair whipped into her mouth.