Nine Women, One Dress(25)
My friends began texting me—“You’re in the Bahamas?” “Who are you with?” “You got vacation time from Sotheby’s already?”
I invented a boyfriend, Charles, to go along with my dream job and my fabulous coolness. To avoid any risk of being found out and having to lie to people’s faces, I turned down all invitations, excusing myself on the grounds of prior commitments related to said boyfriend, job, and fab coolness. The more excuses I made, the more pictures I posted to back them up. The busier I looked, the more popular and sought-after I became and the more likes I racked up. Every like fed my suffering ego. It was a dizzying cycle, and pretty soon I was on Instagram all the time, managing my pretend life.
Bloomingdale’s seemed to be the perfect resource for all things Instagram-likable. A tight forty-five-degree-angled selfie shot in the housewares department holding my cool new immersion mixer: 198 likes; napping on six on my new Calvin Klein bedding, photo-enhanced with Beyoncé’s favorite filter, Valencia: 243 likes; rushing to work with just a peek of my new Hermès bag in the corner, Lo-Fi filter: 372 likes and one covetous comment: Is that the new Berline bag? #SoJel comment.
It became a full-time job. Every Monday I would check the New York Social Diary calendar and map out my fictional appearances for the week. I would turn down an invitation to dinner with a “Sorry, opening-night gala at the Met!” Which I then had to follow with a photo of me in a Carolina Herrera gown from the fancy designer floor, with the always flattering Mayfair filter: a whopping 379 likes! I attended all the right charitable events in all the right designers—Gucci, Galliano, and Gabbana—and just last week I wore the most perfect little black Max Hammer, which Natalie, the saleswoman, told me was the dress of the season, to the New York Public Library benefit. No filter, 432 likes, one regram.
That Max Hammer dress helped me make an awesome connection in the art world; maybe this whole fake-life thing could help me get a real life after all. Apparently Thea Baxter, who graduated from Brown a few years before me and now works at Christie’s, is one of my 900 new Instagram followers. On one of my many lazy Monday mornings she called me (Yes! Called me!) to say she had seen my Max Hammer post and had been searching all over for me at the library benefit, but to no avail. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself: while I was managing my virtual life by matching up the hottest NYC event with the hottest look at Bloomie’s, she was looking for me IRL. She went on to ask me about my responsibilities at Sotheby’s but, lucky for me, quickly turned her sights to what she really wanted to know: my salary.
“That Max Hammer dress you were wearing was gorgeous. You killed it. What are they paying you over at Sotheby’s?”
I hemmed and hawed, mumbling something about not wanting to talk about money, as I Googled starting salaries at Sotheby’s.
“C’mon, I’ll tell you what my starting salary was at Christie’s,” she pleaded.
“Fifty-two thousand,” I lied, adding a few grand to the Google results to annoy her.
“Are you off today?” she asked.
I paused and contemplated my two choices. “Yes,” I answered and held my breath.
“Oh, they give you Columbus Day off?” she whined, obviously at work.
I guess it’s October, I thought, realizing I had never checked to see what was new on Netflix this month. I looked around my bed for the remote.
“You know, we’re looking to expand our Asian Contemporary department before the new year. Would you consider a move?”
I stopped looking for the remote. “I wrote my senior thesis on Japanese avant-garde!”
“I know—I’ve done my research.”
I was surprised.
“I’ll invite you to our Christmas party and introduce you to my boss.”
“That would be wonderful. I’m definitely interested,” I answered.
We hung up and I felt the first glimmer of hope for my future. I opened up Instagram and took a selfie, sitting on my bed in the room I’d grown up in, eating Oreos from the package. My signed poster of the Spice Girls was slightly visible in the background. I wrote #hopeful. It was my first honest post in forever. And then, of course, I deleted it.
CHAPTER 14
Come Monday
By Felicia (aka Arthur Winters’s Executive Assistant)
I was glad Arthur was honest with me. He came right out and told me that I had to leave because he was meeting Sherri and the girls at Elio’s. I mean, I guess I had assumed that it was over with Sherri or he wouldn’t have asked me to the Four Seasons to begin with, but people have strange rules about dating nowadays. I guess Arthur was following today’s rules, not the old-fashioned ones we grew up with. Truth be told, I was too happy to care, even if I had, after all these years of avoiding it, become the other woman.
Our relationship was illicit all around. Office protocol says that employees cannot date each other. Partners can certainly not date their secretaries. Secretary—I said it again. It’s become a bad word, taboo, along with stewardess and garbage man. Assistants—partners cannot date their assistants. I don’t consider myself to be old-fashioned, yet much of my lingo dates me, and I don’t get half the words these young associates and their assistants use: bandwidth, wheelhouse, low-hanging fruit. I wish they’d just say what they mean. As I ate my buttered sesame bagel and glanced at the girl in the next cubicle eating tofu and quinoa out of a bamboo bowl, with chopsticks, I was again thankful to be working for someone of my generation. God, I hope I didn’t blow that by sleeping with the boss.