I'll Eat When I'm Dead Read online

  “SIRI, WHAT TIME IS IT?” Cat asked, unable to read the clock until she had her contacts in.

  “It’s 10:25 a.m.,” Siri replied.

  Cat bolted out of bed. She looked around her apartment—an unrenovated loft off the Morgan Avenue stop in Bushwick—and scanned the room for a pack of cigarettes. A yellow box came into focus nearby. She grabbed the pack off the nightstand, popped one in her mouth, and pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail in a lame attempt to keep the smoke out of her hair. An old book of matches from the long-defunct Mars Bar was tangled in her sheets and she lit the cigarette, then strode quickly across the cold, dirty floor to the bathroom. She set the cigarette in an ashtray, spritzed her face and arms with a large spray bottle marked “CARIBBEAN SEA WATER DO NOT DRINK” in permanent marker, squirted more in her hair, grabbed the cigarette again, took a deep drag, then rooted around in a jar on the sink for a black liquid eyeliner to distract from the bags under her eyes. Two quick swipes later, she grabbed a pair of thin, gold-framed vintage Oliver Peoples eyeglasses from a selection of spectacles on a shelf she’d installed next to her bathroom vanity. She peed, brushed her teeth, and applied deodorant before springing out of the bathroom and diving into her closet.

  Cat’s closet was the only part of her apartment that was actually a built-out room with walls. She grabbed two black silk tank tops, a pair of perforated black lambskin pre-Galliano Margiela leggings, her black leather cowboy boots, and a set of large, ultra-oxidized heavy bronze bracelets from Nigeria that always left her with little bruises. She pulled a large leather tray off the closet’s top shelf and fished a white grosgrain ribbon out of it, which she wove into her hair in a plait. After snaking into her clothes, she stubbed out her cigarette and sprayed herself down with an industrial-strength bottle of Febreze stolen from the maid’s cart at The Standard Hotel. Cat had tried electronic cigarettes for a few years, just like everyone else, but after people everywhere had gone bald overnight in an epidemic of vape-related hair loss, she’d decided it was safer to stick with regular old carcinogens and gone right back to American Spirits. So had millions of other ex-smokers, and now, in a regulatory mea culpa, cigarette prices were almost reasonable again.

  Finally, she grabbed the paperback copy of Welcome to the Desert of the Real that she was halfway through and shoved it, along with her cigarettes, into a black leather Alexander Wang shopper with pointed rose-gold feet on each corner.

  “Cigarettes, phone, wallet, metro card, keys,” she said out loud as she reached the door, a recitation she made every time she left the house. Check check check check check: all still in her handbag from the night before. She shut the door, locked the heavy dead bolt, and booked it for the subway.

  At 12:45, Cat finally stood on the four-story showboat main escalator. Huge, nearly prehistoric ferns salvaged from a Cooper scion’s overgrown Great Neck mansion surrounded her in a humid wall, and she tried not to sweat as she rode up to the elevator bank. Although the $112 million lobby was meant to inspire the legions of employees tasked with channeling the zeitgeist each month, it just reminded Cat of the infinite escalators in London tube stations, where the urge to slide down the center railing was almost overwhelming. Someday, she thought, letting her fingers drag off the edge of the rubber banister. When I quit this place in a blaze of glory.

  But today, the very thought of sliding made Cat dizzy. Late. Sweaty. Tired. Today is going to be r-u-f-f ruff, she thought. She looked down and took a long, thirsty gulp of her iced Trenta Red Eye from the Starbucks around the corner, then fished an Adderall out of her purse’s side pocket, broke off half into a sugary orange chunk, and crunched it between her teeth. Please kick in soon, she thought.

  “Kit-Oh!” yelled out a Sloaney voice behind her. Boots clomped up the escalator steps ten yards below, and a tousled head of expertly colored and blown-out caramel-blonde hair ascended in double time. Cat hoped it looked like she was coming back from coffee and not showing up two and a half hours late to work, for the immaculate hair and boots belonged to Whig Beaton Molton-Mauve Lucas, an oft-photographed socialite, clotheshorse, and twice-divorced mother of two, known simply as Lou, who was a temporary fill-in for Cat’s now-dead boss and close friend, Hillary. Among other affectations, like dropping most vowels and willfully mispronouncing even her own surname, Lou thought calling Catherine Ono “Kit-Oh” was hilarious. Cat disagreed.

  It was their second month working together, and while Cat was doing her best to be friendly, she was still trying to figure out what she and Lou had in common. So far, it was just tequila—but in some cultures that was plenty to forge a lasting work relationship. When Lou got within a foot, Cat smelled faint traces of jasmine and honeysuckle, a subtle smell that dozens of women in the RAGE office had adopted over the past few years. Lou is trying to fit in every way she can, Cat realized, and she suddenly felt appreciative of the gesture, however small.

  “Hi, Lou. Love your color,” Cat complimented her, pointing to Lou’s hair.

  “Oh thaaaaank you!” Lou smiled. “Jane has been in the sun all summer and she has such amazing color, we just chopped off a lock of it and brought it in to Tricomi.”

  “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 o
f 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”?

  Later that night, on the phone to her parents in Los Angeles, Molly would casually refer to the magazine as simply “Book,” thinking she sounded sophisticated. After she hung up, Molly’s father would say, “I think she gets dumber every year.”

  When Lou returned from the Coca-Cola machine with a cold press and a single glass filled with ice, Molly followed her into her nearly bare office, formerly occupied by Hillary. Molly sat down in the sky-blue Le Corbusier swivel chair in front of Lou’s desk, Moleskine and purple jelly pen in hand, ready to take notes, while Lou sat behind the desk on a shiny exercise ball she’d swapped in for the existing Aeron chair. She expertly popped the cap off the bottle of cold press using a monogrammed gold Dunhill lighter and poured the coffee into a glass and slid it across to the intern.

  “Mummy’s little helper,” she woofed at Molly, who smiled nervously.

  Molly didn’t think you were supposed to drink cold press straight, but she didn’t want to be rude, so she took a sip. Jesus, that’s bitter. She looked up to see Lou gaily swigging from the bottle as though it were water.

  Lou stared at the laptop left open on the desk in front of her, displaying a completely blank spreadsheet in CoopDoc, Cooper’s in-house, cloud-based version of Excel.

  “So,” said Lou.

  “Yes,” said Molly.

  “How many.”

  “How many…what?” asked Molly.

  “How many bloody blue bits do we need for NEEDS September?”

  “I think twelve. But it can be fewer than that if we shoot some really big.”

  “All right. Twelve. We can do that. Twelve blue things you just absolutely fucking need. Well. Okay. Yves Klein, let’s start there. Can you call Zoe at YSL? Let’s see what they’re doing with everything from the Marrakech house this year—I know they do a home line based off Majorelle for spring every year. Tell her I want six things in bleu. We can use two of those, probably. Then I want you to call this place I went to last year in Nah-miii-biii-ah. It’s this eco retreat and elephant sanctuary and this sort of wonderful yogic cleansing place that you heli into and they have these blue harnesses for their elephants, for their little baby elephants, and they make the dye out of some kind of Namibian flower, so let’s get a few of those. You could repurpose it for a large dog or child, or maybe you could wear it like a vest. And, hmm, more blue, maybe we should go to some showrooms. Oh—AND I’ve been thinking about tiling the upstairs bath blue so we’ll need some blue porcelain tiles anyway, maybe a blue toilet to match. Let’s find an Italian one. Is it too kitsch to have a cerulean potty? What do you think?”

  Molly was still scribbling furiously, trying to write down the correct keywords for further googling. What time is it in Namibia, anyway?

  In her own office next door, Cat stared at the wall of windows behind her desk, which she’d painted over last year with an enormous white rectangle that blocked the view of New Jersey. The rectangle—known as Plus-Minus Sign, or PMS—was how Cat documented the Roman winds of her aesthetic favor upon the world’s objects. The left column had a large black plus sign painted at the top; the right column, a minus sign. Cat added or subtracted a new item from each column every week using a black erasable marker. Today the PMS read:

  + —

  sailing instead of driving “luxury”

  human ivory woodworking

  dread the 1920s

  eating raw meat self-help

  butt-tight overalls new safari anything

  painted cinderblock walls strappy shoes

  charm bracelets shorts

  Although Lou’s outfit invoked at least two of Cat’s current minuses, she reconsidered Lou’s shorts. They were basically a large pair of underwear, which Cat approved of wholeheartedly. You had to be really courageous, really narcissistic, or the usual industry combination of both to wear underwear as pants to work. Perhaps, Cat considered, I can genuinely work with Lou after all.

  Cat didn’t like any outfit, accessory, aesthetic, or genre that reduced women to what she considered to be traditional female prisons: the happy homemaker, the sexy librarian, the bitch in a power suit, the carefree athlete, the sophisticated socialite, the bad girl, and so on. These tropes were not only done to death, but they weren’t, she felt, modern; they didn’t account for the global diaspora of cultures and pressures that affected how women chose to present themselves each day. All those old hats did was show a woman how to occupy a place she’d already been hundreds
of times before.

  A woman draws attention everywhere she goes with everything she does—whether she wants to or not, Cat knew. The management of that attention was the full-time focus of the fashion industry, and she was heavily invested in the conversation. Every look she created and every reference she styled was seen, appreciated, and digested by millions of women around the world. Magazines were where women watched themselves being watched; where they learned how to be. Cat was passionate about delivering a complex version of female identity politics to everyone—or to anyone, she acknowledged, who had the fourteen bucks to buy a copy of RAGE.

  When Cat had dropped out of her doctoral program in art history at the University of Chicago, her parents had been deeply disappointed. Hell, I was disappointed, too, she remembered, but the best position she could have gotten as an academic was as a mere adjunct: the job market was simply too crowded. By the time she’d started writing the second chapter of her thesis, two whole cohorts ahead of her were still unemployed, milling around campus with tragic, unwanted-puppy looks on their faces. They would never get full-time jobs—not when they were already marked with the scent of failure. Cat was no better and deep down she knew it, so when she ran out of funding after five years, her thesis far from complete, she decided to throw in the towel. The stars hadn’t aligned, and she gave up, surrendered without protest, for the very first time in her life, feeling like a complete and total failure, an outlook that she didn’t reverse until years later. Academia was the first career she’d ever tried and the first thing she’d ever quit. Three months after her funding appeal had been rejected, with her credit card maxed out and her checking account in overdraft, she’d prayed for a miracle and texted Sigrid, a close friend from boarding school, to lament her condition.

  Suddenly Hillary Whitney—a graduate of the very same boarding school and one of Sigrid’s former roommates—was on the phone, asking Cat to be her assistant at RAGE and promising that Cooper could turn her student visa into a work visa. Cat had jumped at the opportunity to work for the magazine and for Margot Villiers, a woman she’d long admired. Margot was the only public feminist Cat could think of who wasn’t painted with the word bitch; instead, newspapers, journals, magazines, and history books described her using words and phrases otherwise reserved for men. Legendary, futurist, visionary, perfectionist, creative genius, hard-nosed leader; never difficult, high-strung, radical, or temperamental. No woman, including President Warren, had ever managed that.