New York City, 1978
Vivian Kessler kept a small back office behind the front room where the actual “discovering” happened, and it was there, on a Saturday morning in February, that Kit — thirteen and increasingly hard to mistake for anything but exactly what she was, a girl on the edge of something — first watched a modeling contract get negotiated from the inside instead of the outside.
“Two hundred for the half-day, and I want first refusal if the account wants her for the fall line too,” Vivian was saying into the telephone, one hand over the receiver, the other flipping through a folder of tear sheets with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had done this ten thousand times and intended to make it look effortless every single one of them.
“No — no, Marjorie, I’m not doing two-fifty for the season, I did that math already, that’s what you offered Anne-Marie Delacroix’s girl and she’s two years older with double the bookings. Two hundred flat, first refusal, or I call Eileen Ford’s people and we’re done here.”
Kit sat in the corner chair Vivian kept for exactly this purpose — for daughters and mothers to wait in while business got handled — and did not pretend to read the magazine in her lap.
She watched Vivian’s face instead, the particular stillness of someone holding a number she knew was fair and simply waiting for the other party to arrive at the same conclusion without being told twice.
It was, Kit thought, the same stillness her father wore across a negotiating table, the same stillness Yekaterina had once worn across from men who assumed a young woman’s patience would run out before their own.
Some skills, it turned out, didn’t care what industry they were deployed in.
“You understood all of that?” Vivian asked afterward, hanging up, catching Kit’s expression.
“She offered less than you’re worth and you didn’t take it.”
“I offered less than you’re worth, sweetheart. Learn the difference now — nobody hands a woman her number, she has to already know it walking in.” Vivian said this lightly, the way she said most true things, but Kit filed it the way she filed everything now, in the same private ledger where she kept her father’s talk of yields and her mother’s talk of rooms.
Know your number before you walk in.
Never take the first offer even when it’s close.
The work itself, that spring, was steadier than the year before — a junior collection for a department store’s Easter catalog, two afternoons for a pattern company that put her face on the front of a Butterick envelope Kit found genuinely funny to hold in her own hands, a single, unexpectedly serious booking for a regional magazine spread on “the new East Coast prep,” shot by a photographer who actually cared about the light.
None of it was glamorous by the standards Diane imagined when she used the word famous, but Kit understood, watching the small checks accumulate in her custodial account beside the flat gray Series E bonds her father still believed were the whole of her financial education, that steadiness was the actual asset.
Anyone could get one good photograph.
Getting booked again, and again, by people who didn’t need to be talked into it twice — that was the beginning of a brand, though Kit didn’t yet have that particular word for it.
Cordelia Ashe, predictably, had entered the same waters that year, signed by a rival agency her mother described at every opportunity as “much more selective,” and the two girls now crossed paths often enough at go-sees and casting calls that a kind of cold formal détente had developed between them, all surface politeness and undersurface calculation.
“They booked you for the Butterick thing,” Cordelia said one afternoon, in the waiting room of a studio on West Thirty-Fourth, in the particular tone of someone stating a fact she found slightly beneath discussing.
“Pattern envelopes. How quaint.”
“It pays better than you’d think,” Kit said pleasantly, which was true, and which she said precisely because it wasn’t the answer Cordelia wanted — Cordelia wanted a flinch, a defensive note, something to feed on, and Kit had gotten very good, over four years, at declining to feed anyone anything at all. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping . com.
Cordelia’s mouth thinned, and she went back to her magazine, and Kit understood — the way Yekaterina had once understood the exact moment a rival board member’s confidence had quietly, permanently cracked — that she had just won a very small, very real point in a game Cordelia didn’t yet realize was being played by different rules than the ones she thought she knew.
The city outside the studio windows was, that year, beginning — just barely, just at the edges — to feel less like a place bracing for its own collapse.
A new mayor named Ed Koch had taken office in January promising, loudly and constantly, to drag New York back from the fiscal brink, and whatever anyone thought of his manner, Richard reported at dinner that the bond markets seemed cautiously willing to believe him, which was, in Richard’s world, the only review that mattered.
Disco had taken over the radio so completely that even Chapin’s staid assembly hall had, unbelievably, hosted a roller-disco fundraiser that spring, all the girls in borrowed skates and wrap dresses copied badly from the real Diane von Furstenberg version everyone’s mother actually owned.
Studio 54’s velvet rope had become, in Margaux’s circle, less a scandal than a fact of the social landscape, the kind of place you discussed attending the way you discussed the weather — inevitable, occasionally punishing, worth navigating correctly.
Diane, gloriously unbothered by any of the calculations running underneath Kit’s days, dragged her to the roller-disco fundraiser and spent the whole evening falling down laughing while Kit, who had never in either life had cause to learn to skate, discovered she was good at it almost immediately — balance, it turned out, was balance, whether you were holding a boardroom’s attention or holding your footing on eight polyurethane wheels.
“See, this is the thing about you,” Diane said, breathless, hauling herself up off the rink floor for the fourth time while Kit glided past her, entirely upright.
“You’re not even trying and you’re already better at it. It’s annoying, Kit.”
“I’m trying,” Kit said, which was almost true — she was trying, the way she tried at everything, quietly and completely, in a way that looked from the outside like effortlessness because she’d learned, a long time ago in a life Diane would never hear about, that showing your work was usually a mistake.
She was thirteen years old that spring, sliding toward fourteen, with a growing folder of tear sheets, a small and steadily compounding bank balance, a rival who hadn’t yet realized she was outmatched, and a best friend who loved her without ever needing to understand the parts of her that didn’t fit in a Peter Pan collar.
It was, Kit thought, watching the disco ball throw fractured light across Chapin’s borrowed roller rink, a perfectly good place to be building from — quietly, steadily, one small contract and one small victory at a time, exactly the way every real fortune she’d ever helped build had actually started.
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