talkin' sweet about nothing

The women’s toilets in the Coach head office were lit dimly by amber sconces fixed into the Cole & Son embossed wallpaper, with four sconces interspersing three circular branded engraved mirrors. It was moody and overdone, pretentious in a very Coach way that Emily was possibly starting to grow fond of. The shelves below the mirrors were lined with a selection of Aesop hand soap and lotion. On days when Emily felt in control of her career, style, diet, skincare, and interpersonal relationships (the relevance of those facets of her life arranged in degree of importance, career first, obviously) she liked to use the Resurrection Aromatique Soap. It had an indulgently soft texture with a delicious herbaceous scent. She loved it. But it was only used on the good days when she could be unconcerned by the scent maybe clashing with her perfume; not Coach Eau de Parfum. God. It doesn’t matter how often the beauty department gifts her bottles of that ghastly pink stuff, she just can’t wear it. It would be like dousing herself in mango Pinkberry. At this very moment, she is wearing Ck One; reliable and clean. This is her image. Clean and reliable. Not herbaceous and botanical, no matter how much she may secretly like the soap. She’s not a bloody gardener for fucks sake.

On days when she does not feel in control of her career, style, diet skincare, or interpersonal relationships, she forgoes the Resurrection soap and chooses Reverence instead. Today, she pumps the soap bottle three times, inhales the antiseptic scent, then washes her hands for three minutes, scrubbing and scrubbing until the fine grade milled pumice beads have thoroughly exfoliated her hands and mind of anxiety.

She scrubs and scrubs and scrubs until the luxury soap has destroyed her entire skin barrier. She looks down at her hands, now pink and scratchy, then looks back up at her face reflected in the mirror. She scoffs.

This is ridiculous. She rinses her hands and scoffs again. There is no sane reason for her to be nervous today. She is glowing and sharp, last month’s Botox settled comfortably into her skin, her cheekbones sharply defined from her sugar fast, and her lips painted in Guerlain Rouge. Her Dior denim corset is just as perfect as the day she stole it from the flagship store’s stockroom. The wrinkle under her neck has been temporarily yet effectively blurred by a carefully applied layer of Chanel Sublimage Le Correcteur. She looks bloody gorgeous. Her Friday lunch presentation went fantastically, the Saudi investors already impressed with her brand legacy progression, and the receptionist didn’t even fuck up her coffee order this morning. Her mother even sent her a text yesterday congratulating her on the recent bonus. Yes, her mother did also say that Emily’s failure to marry Benji Barnes was dreadfully embarrassing, and that she shan’t show her face at the Charlton family’s Christmas Reunion in the Cotswolds this year because of it, but then, Emily never liked that bloody reunion anyway. The dismissal was a blessing really.

Emily Charlton is a beautiful, successful, and independent woman. She should not be nervously eroding the skin on her palms because she is planning on leaving the office forty minutes early so she can go have a drink with Andrea Sachs, all of people.

It’s not even forty minutes early, because everyone else normally leaves at five anyway, because they don’t understand the grind needed to make greatness. Even for Coach, proprietor of mid-tier faux luxury leather goods and frozen yogurt scented perfumery, Emily believes fashion excellence is within reach. Coach will be the next great icon of retail. All they had to do to achieve it, to sell it, was to work. And then work some more. And then more. And then harder. And then even harder. This is what the average employee didn’t understand. This is why they all felt it acceptable to leave at five in the afternoon. Emily herself never left before six. Well, she usually never left before six. But then today, at eleven thirty-seven in the morning, Andrea messaged her.

Hey! I haven’t forgotten about our date 😉 Cocktails at Bramble? Not the one in Brooklyn lol. I know you never would. But they just opened a pop-up in Soho and I think you’d love it!

Emily did not reply to this Instagram message, because one; it was an Instagram message, and who does Andrea think Emily is? A wide-eyed and wide-legged OnlyFans model? And two; Bramble? Really? Does Emily look like an infant who has never tasted a serviceable negroni before? And three; she was just about to enter the meeting with the Saudi investors and present the twenty-year legacy plan which could dictate the next generation of fashion. She was busy.  

But after the meeting finished, Emily did have to admit to herself, that she wanted to see Andrea. While she regretted declaring her stupidly childish dreams of being pals with the girl, because Andrea never shut up about it, it was true that Emily liked her. Emily didn’t have many female friends. Certainly not female friends who would simply giggle whenever she habitually insulted them. Before Benji had dumped her, he mentioned that she needed some friends like that. It’s perhaps the only intelligent statement he ever came up with on his own. So she had replied, on Instagram messenger of all things.

Emily: Yes. Soho. What time?

Andrea: Emily 🙄you kill me. I need to get home before ten to call a friend so could we meet early, half 6? See you then! x

Andrea had plenty of female friends who always seemed to be roving freely around the world. Journalists and artists and those sorts of erratic careers. Emily found it all distastefully hippy-esque, like writers were still pretending to Jack Kerouac their way through life. Vomitus. But pertinently, this meant that Andrea had sent some hazy messages about needing to do calls at strange times to strange places. Andrea only had one friend who lived solidly in New York. Emily was aware that this friend was called Lily, and that she was an artist with two charming toddlers and a husband who taught anthropology at NYU, and that she led the board of directors at MoCADA and had curated several well-reviewed exhibitions there. Lily liked designer handbags; Dior, Fendi, and Nina Ricci, but not Coach. Lily also openly called Andrea her ‘best-friend’ and used emojis with wild abandon, her photo captions reading like a Keith Haring drawn by a cheerleader recently presented with one half of a heart locket.  

Emily knew all these things from sudden and intense research done over Instagram and LinkedIn (she paid for the professional account which meant people couldn’t tell she had looked at their profile) the moment she had sat down on the toilet in the office bathrooms and accepted that she was actually going to have to see Andrea again.

They had met twice since the whole Benji-Miranda shitshow-fiasco and each time Emily had stripped her hands bare of all oils with the Reverence soap before. She couldn’t explain why Andrea made her nervous. At first, she put it down to embarrassment. Andrea had seen her at her most pathetic, not only after the time Miranda critiqued her very being and creative soul, but the first time, after getting totalled by a yellow cab and scattering thirty Hermes silk scarves across midtown.

But after their second meeting, at a trendy coffee shop which refused to make Emily’s coffee order correctly at first (Andrea said that extra hot no foam lattes weren’t cool anymore, and that young people preferred black cold brew, but Emily just rolled her eyes and continued to glare at the barista until he burnt his hand on the steam wand) she realised that wasn’t why Andrea made her nervous. She can’t say what it was, but it wasn’t embarrassment. Emily had never felt embarrassment for very long.

She smooths down her hair and exits the bathroom. Ten to six. She’ll still get to Bramble on time. There’s only two other people still working on her floor. She nods towards them, an unnamed intern and Susan from Dispatches, and thinks to mention their commitment in their next quarterly reviews. Only if she can frame it in a way which would shame all the others who left before them though.