The Devil Wears Prada (9 page)

 “Crazy,
isn’t it? She is the coolest woman ever,” she gushed, snatching the
sheets off her desk and gazing at them with what can only be described as lust.
“Have you ever seen more amazing things in your life? This is last
year’s list. I just pulled it out so we know what to expect since the
gifts have begun coming in already. That’s definitely one of the best
parts of the job—opening all her presents.” I was confused.We
opened her presents? Why wouldn’t she open them herself? I asked as much.

 “Are
you out of your mind? Miranda won’t like ninety percent of the stuff
people send. Some of it is downright insulting, things I won’t even show
her. Like this,” she said, picking up a small box. It was a Bang and
Olufsen portable phone in their signature sleek silver with all rounded edges
and the capability to remain clear for something like 2,000 miles. I had been
in the store just a couple weeks earlier, watching Alex salivate over their
stereo systems, and I knew the phone cost upward of five hundred dollars and
could do everything short of holding a conversationfor you. “A phone? Do
you believe someone had the nerve to send Miranda Priestly aphone ?” She
tossed it to me. “Keep it if you want it: I would never even let her see
this. She’d be annoyed that someone sent somethingelectronic .” She
pronounced the word “electronic” as though it were synonymous with
“covered in bodily fluids.”

 I tucked
the phone box under my desk and tried to keep the smile off my face. It was too
perfect! A portable phone was on my list of stuff that I still needed for my
new room, and I’d just gotten a five-hundred-dollar one for free.

 “Actually,”
she continued, flopping down again on the floor of Miranda’s office,
Indian-style, “let’s put in a few hours wrapping some more of these
wine bottles, and then you can open the presents that came in today.
They’re over there.” She pointed behind her desk to a smaller
mountain of boxes and bags and baskets in a multitude of colors.

 “So,
these are gifts that we’re sending out from Miranda, right?” I
asked her as I picked up a box and began wrapping it in the thick white paper.

 “Yep.
Every year, it’s the same deal. Top-tier people get bottles of Dom. This
would include Elias execs, and the big designers who aren’t also personal
friends. Her lawyer and accountant. Midlevel people get Veuve, and this is just
about everyone—the twins’ teachers, the hair stylists, Uri, et
cetera. The nobodies get a bottle of the Ruffino Chianti—usually they go
to the PR people who send small, general gifts that aren’t personalized
for her. She’ll have us send Chianti to the vet, some of the babysitters
who fill in for Cara, the people who wait on her in stores she goes to often,
and all the caretakers associated with the summer house in Connecticut. Anyway,
I order about twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of this stuff at the
beginning of November, Sherry-Lehman delivers it, and it usually takes nearly a
month to do all the wrapping. It’s good she’s out of the office now
or we’d be taking this stuff home with us to wrap. Pretty good deal,
because Elias picks up the tab.”

 “I
guess it would cost double that to have the Sherry-Lehman place wrap them,
huh?” I wondered, still trying to process the hierarchy of the
gift-giving.

 “What
the hell do we care?” she snorted. “Trust me, you’ll learn
quickly that cost is no issue around here. It’s just that Miranda
doesn’t like the wrapping paper they use. I gave them this white paper
last year, but they just didn’t look as nice as when we do it.” She
looked proud.

 We
wrapped like that until close to six, with Emily telling me how things worked
as I tried to wrap my mind around this strange and exciting world. Just as she
was describing exactly how Miranda likes her coffee (tall latte with two raw
sugars), a breathless blond girl I remembered as one of the many fashion
assistants walked in carrying a wicker basket the size of a baby carriage. She
hovered just outside Miranda’s office, looking as though she thought the
soft gray carpeting might turn to quicksand under her Jimmy Choos if she dared
to cross the threshold.

 “Hi,
Em. I’ve got the skirts right here. Sorry that took so long, but no
one’s around since it’s that weird time right before Thanksgiving.
Anyway, hopefully you’ll find something she’ll like.” She
looked down at her basket full of folded skirts.

 Emily
looked up at her with barely disguised scorn. “Just leave them on my
desk. I’ll return the ones that won’t work.Which I imagine will be
most of them, considering your taste .” The last part was under her
breath, just loud enough for me to hear.

 The
blond girl looked bewildered. Definitely not the brightest star in the sky, but
she seemed nice enough. I wondered why Emily so obviously hated her. It’d
been a long day already, what with the running commentary and errands all over
the city and hundreds of names and faces to try to remember, so I didn’t
even ask.

 Emily
placed the large basket on her desk and looked down on it, hands on her hips.
From what I could see from Miranda’s office floor, there were perhaps
twenty-five different skirts in an incredible assortment of fabrics, colors,
and sizes. Had she really not specified what she wanted at all? Did she really
not bother to inform Emily whether she’d be needing something appropriate
for a black-tie dinner or a mixed-doubles match or perhaps to use as a bathing
suit cover-up? Did she want denim, or would something chiffon work better? How
exactly were we supposed to predict whatmight please her?

 I was
about to find out. Emily carried the wicker basket to Miranda’s office
and carefully, reverentially, placed it on the plush carpeting beside me. She
sat down and began removing the skirts one by one and laying them in a circle
around us. There was a beautiful crocheted skirt in shocking fuchsia by Celine,
a pearl gray wraparound by Calvin Klein, and a black suede one with black beads
along the bottom by Mr. de la Renta himself. There were skirts in red and ecru
and lavender, some with lace and others in cashmere. A few were long enough to
sweep gracefully along the ankles, and others were so short they looked more
like tube tops. I picked up a midcalf, brown silk beauty and held it up to my
waist, but the material covered only one of my legs. The next one in the pile
reached to the floor in a swirl of tulle and chiffon and looked as though it
would feel most at home at a Charleston garden party. One of the jean skirts
was prefaded and came with a gigantic brown leather belt already looped around
it, and another had a crinkly, silver-material overlay on top of a slightly
more opaque silver liner. Where on earth were we going here?

 “Wow,
looks like Miranda has a thing for skirts, huh?” I said, simply because I
had nothing better to say.

 “Actually,
no. Miranda has a slight obsession with scarves.” Emily refused to make
eye contact with me, as though she’d just revealed that she herself had
herpes. “It’s just one of those cute, quirky things about her you
should know.”

 “Oh,
really?” I asked, trying to sound amused and not horrified. An obsession
with scarves? I like clothes and bags and shoes as much as the next girl, but I
wouldn’t exactly declare any of them an “obsession.” And
something about the way Emily was saying it wasn’t so casual.

 “Yes,
well, she must need a skirt for something specific, but it’s scarves
that’s she’s really into. You know, like her signature
scarves?” She looked at me. My face must have betrayed my complete lack
of a clue. “You do remember meeting her during the interview, do you
not?”

 “Of
course,” I said quickly, sensing it’d probably not be the best idea
to let this girl know that I couldn’t so much as remember Miranda’s
name during my interview, never mind remember what she was wearing. “But
I’m not sure I noticed a scarf.”

 “She
always, always, always wears a single white Hermès scarf somewhere on
her outfit. Mostly around her neck, but sometimes she’ll have her
hairdresser tie one in a chignon, or occasionally she’ll use them as a
belt. They’re like, her signature. Everyone knows that Miranda Priestly
wears a white Hermès scarf, no matter what. How cool is that?”

 It was
at that exact moment that I noticed Emily had a lime green scarf woven through
the belt loops on her cargo pants, just peeking out from underneath the white
T-shirt.

 “She
likes to mix it up sometimes, and I’m guessing that this is one of those
times. Anyway, those idiots in fashion never know what she’ll like. Look
at some of these, they’re hideous!” She held up an absolutely gorgeous
flowy skirt, slightly dressier than the rest with its little flecks of gold
shimmering from the deep tan background.

 “Yep,”
I agreed, in what was to become the first of thousands, if not millions, of
times I agreed with whatever she said simply to make her stop talking.
“It’s horrendous-looking.” It was so beautiful I thought
I’d be happy to wear it to my own wedding.

 Emily
continued prattling on about patterns and fabrics and Miranda’s needs and
wants, occasionally interjecting a scathing insult about a coworker. She finally
chose three radically different skirts and set them aside to send to Miranda,
talking, talking, talking the whole time. I tried to listen, but it was almost
seven, and I was trying to decide whether I was ravenously hungry, utterly
nauseated, or just plain exhausted. I think it was all three. I didn’t
even notice when the tallest human being I’d ever seen swooped into the
office.

 “YOU!”
I heard from somewhere behind me. “STAND UP SO I CAN GET A LOOK AT
YOU!”

 I turned
just in time to see the man, who was at least seven feet tall, with tanned skin
and black hair, pointing directly at me. He had 250 pounds stretched over his
incredibly tall frame and was so muscular, so positively ripped, that it looked
as though he might just explode out of his denim… catsuit? Ohmigod! He
was wearing a catsuit. Yes, yes, a denim, one-piece catsuit with tight pants
and a belted waist and rolled-up sleeves. And a cape. There was actually a
blanket-size fur cape tied twice around his thick neck, and shiny black combat
boots the size of tennis rackets adorned his mammoth feet. He looked around
thirty-five years old, although all the muscles and the deep tan and the
positively chiseled jawbone could have been hiding ten years or adding five. He
was flapping his hands at me and motioning for me to get up off the floor. I
stood, unable to take my eyes off him, and he turned to examine me immediately.

 “WELL!
WHO DO WE HAVE HEEEEERE?” he bellowed, as best as one can in a falsetto
voice. “YOU’RE PRETTY, BUT TOO WHOLESOME. AND THE OUTFIT DOES
NOTHING FOR YOU!”

 “My
name’s Andrea. I’m Miranda’s new assistant.”

 He moved
his eyes up and down over my body, inspecting every inch. Emily was watching
the spectacle with a sneer on her face. The silence was unbearable.

 “KNEE-HIGH
BOOTS? WITH A KNEE-LENGTH SKIRT? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? BABY GIRL, IN CASE
YOU’RE UNAWARE—IN CASE YOU MISSED THE BIG, BLACK SIGN BY THE
DOOR—THIS ISRUNWAY MAGAZINE, THE FUCKINGHIIPPEST MAGAZINE ON EARTH. ON
EARTH! BUT NO WORRIES, HONEY, NIGEL WILL GET RID OF THAT JERSEY MALL-RAT LOOK
YOU’VE GOT GOING SOON ENOUGH.”

 He put
both his massive hands on my hips and twirled me around. I could feel his eyes
looking at my legs and tush.

 “SOON
ENOUGH, SWEETIE, I PROMISE YOU, BECAUSE YOU’RE GOOD RAW MATERIAL. NICE LEGS,
GREAT HAIR, AND NOT FAT. I CAN WORK WITH NOT FAT. SOON ENOUGH, SWEETIE.”

 I wanted
to be offended, to pull myself away from the grip he had on my lower body, to
take a few minutes and mull over the fact that a complete stranger—and a
coworker, no less—had just provided an unsolicited and unflinchingly
honest account of my outfit and my figure, but I wasn’t. I liked his kind
green eyes that seemed to laugh instead of taunt, but more than that, I liked
that I had passed. This was Nigel— single name, like Madonna or
Prince—the fashion authority whom even I recognized from TV, magazines,
the society pages, everywhere, and he had called me pretty. And said I had nice
legs! I let the mall-rat comment slide. Iliked this guy.

 I heard
Emily tell him to leave me alone from somewhere in the background, but I
didn’t want him to go. Too late, he was already heading for the door, his
fur cape flapping behind him. I wanted to call out, tell him it had been nice
to meet him, that I wasn’t offended by what he said and was excited that
he wanted to redo me. But before I could say a thing, Nigel whipped around and
covered the space between us in two strides, each the length of a long jump. He
planted himself directly in front of me, wrapped my entire body with his massive,
rippling arms, and pressed me to him. My head rested just below his chest, and
I smelled the unmistakable scent of Johnson’s Baby Lotion. And just as I
had the presence of mind to hug him back, he flung me backward, engulfed both
of my hands in his, and screeched: