Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont. Lauren Weisberger

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СКАЧАТЬ begun looking for new nannies. We’ll have three solid candidates ready for you to interview on your first day back.’ She cocked her head to the side and touched her pen to her lips. ‘Mmm, yes. Yes, it’s definitely confirmed. No, it’s not ninety-nine percent, it’s one hundred percent. Definitely. Yes, Miranda. Yes, I confirmed it myself, and I’m quite positive. They’re looking forward to it. OK. Have a nice flight. Yes, it’s confirmed. I’ll fax it right now. OK. Good-bye.’ She hung up the phone and appeared to be shaking.

      ‘Why doesn’t that woman understand? I told her the hair and makeup were confirmed. And then I told her again. Why did I have to tell her fifty more times? And do you know what she said?’

      I shook my head.

      ‘Do you know what she said? She said that since this has all been such a headache for her, she’d like me to redo the itinerary so that it will reflect that hair and makeup is now confirmed and fax it to the Ritz so she’ll have the correct one when she arrives. I do everything for that woman – I give her my life – and this is how she talks to me in return?’ She looked ready to cry. I was thrilled for the rare opportunity to see Emily turn on Miranda, but I knew that a Runway Paranoid Turnaround was imminent, so I had to proceed with caution. Strike just the right note of sympathy and indifference.

      ‘It’s not you, Em, I promise. She knows how hard you work – you’re an amazing assistant to her. If she didn’t think you did a great job, she’d have gotten rid of you already. She’s not exactly scared to do it – you know what I mean?’

      Emily had stopped tearing and was approaching the defiant zone where, even though she agreed with me, she’d defend Miranda if I said anything too outrageous. I’d learned about the Stockholm Syndrome in psych, in which the victims identify with their captors, but I hadn’t really understood how it all played out. Maybe I’d videotape one of the little sessions here between Emily and me and send it to the prof so next year’s freshmen could actually see it happening firsthand. All efforts to proceed carefully began to feel superhuman, so I took a deep breath and dove right in.

      ‘She’s a lunatic, Emily,’ I said softly and slowly, willing her to agree with me. ‘It’s not you, it’s her. She’s an empty, shallow, bitter woman who has tons and tons of gorgeous clothes and not much else.’

      Emily’s face tightened noticeably, the skin on her neck and around her cheeks pulling taut, and her hands stopped shaking. I knew she was going to bulldoze me at any moment, but I couldn’t stop.

      ‘Have you ever noticed that she has no friends, Emily? Have you? Sure, her phone rings day and night with the world’s coolest people, but they’re not calling to talk about their kids or their jobs or their marriages, are they? They’re calling because they need something from her. It sure seems awesome looking in, but can you imagine if the only reason anyone ever called you was because they—’

      ‘Stop it!’ she screamed, the tears streaming down her face again. ‘Just fucking shut up already! You march into this office and think you understand everything. Little Miss I’m So Sarcastic and So Above All This! Well, you don’t understand anything. Anything!’

      ‘Em—’

      ‘Don’t “Em,” me, Andy. Let me finish. I know Miranda is difficult. I know she sometimes seems crazy. I know what it’s like to never sleep and always be scared she’s calling you and have none of your friends understand. I know all that! But if you hate it so much, if you can’t do anything but complain about it and her and everyone else all the time, then why don’t you just leave? Because your attitude is really a problem. And to say that Miranda is a lunatic, well, I think there are many, many more people out there who think she’s gifted and gorgeous and talented and would think you’re a lunatic for not doing your best to help out someone so amazing. Because she is amazing, Andy – she really is!’

      I considered this for a moment and decided she had a point. Miranda was, as far as I could tell, a truly fantastic editor. Not a single word of copy made it into the magazine without her explicit, hard-to-obtain approval, and she wasn’t afraid to scrap something and start over, regardless of how inconvenient or unhappy it made everyone else. Although the various fashion editors called in the clothes to shoot, Miranda alone selected the looks she wanted and which models she wanted wearing each one; the sittings editors might be the ones at the actual shoots, but they were simply executing Miranda’s specific and incredibly detailed instructions. She had the final – and often even the preliminary – say over every single bracelet, bag, shoe, outfit, hair style, story, interview, writer, photo, model, location, and photograph in every issue, and that made her, in my mind, the main reason for the magazine’s stunning success each month. Runway wouldn’t be Runway – hell, it wouldn’t be much of anything at all – without Miranda Priestly. I knew it and so did everyone else. What it hadn’t yet done was convince me that any of this gave her a right to treat people the way she did. Why was the ability to put together a Balmain evening gown and a brooding, leggy Asian girl on a side street in San Sebastian worshiped so much that Miranda wasn’t accountable for her behavior? I still wasn’t building the bridge, but what the hell did I know? Emily obviously got it.

      ‘Emily, all I’m saying is that you’re a really great assistant to her, that she’s lucky she has someone who works as hard as you do, who’s so committed to the job. I just wish you’d realize that it’s not your fault if she’s unhappy with something. She’s just an unhappy person. There’s nothing more you could have done.’

      ‘I know that. I really do. But you don’t give her enough credit, Andy. Think about it. I mean, really think about it. She is so incredibly accomplished, and she’s had to sacrifice a lot to get there, but couldn’t the same be said of supersuccessful people in every industry? Tell me, how many CEOs or managing partners or movie directors or whatever don’t have to be tough sometimes? It’s part of the job.’

      I could tell we weren’t going to see eye to eye on this one. It was clear that Emily was deeply invested in Miranda, in Runway, in all of it, but I just couldn’t understand why. She wasn’t any different from the hundreds of other personal assistants and editorial assistants and assistant editors and associate editors and senior editors and editors in chief of fashion magazines. But I just didn’t understand why. From everything I’d seen so far, each one was humiliated, degraded, and generally abused by their direct superior, only to turn around and do it to those under them the second they got promoted. And all of it so they could say, at the end of the long and exhausting climb, that they’d gotten to sit in the front row at Yves Saint-Laurent’s couture show and had scored a few free Prada bags along the way?

      Time to just agree. ‘I know,’ I sighed, surrendering to her insistence. ‘I just hope you know that you’re doing her the favor by putting up with her shit, not the other way around.’

      I expected a quick counter-attack, but Emily grinned. ‘You know how I just told her like a hundred times that her Thursday hair and makeup were confirmed?’

      I nodded. She looked positively giddy.

      ‘I was totally lying. I didn’t call a single person or confirm anything!’ She practically sang the last part.

      ‘Emily! Are you serious? What are you going to do now? You just swore up and down that you’d personally confirmed it.’ For the first time since starting work, I wanted to hug the girl.

      ‘Andy, be serious. Do you honestly think that any sane person is going to say no to doing her hair and makeup? It could make his whole career – he’d be crazy to turn her down. I’m sure the guy was planning to do it all along. He was probably just rearranging his travel plans or something. I don’t have to confirm with him, because I’m that sure he’ll СКАЧАТЬ