Amy Chozick - Chasing Hillary

MY BOSS AT Condé Nast had me come into the office the morning of September 12, 2001. I walked through a nearly deserted Times Square. I tried to remind this editor that no planes were flying, but she was adamant that she get to a photo shoot in Paris.

On my way to the office, Russ finally called. Other than a brief phone call the day before when we both had to evacuate our Midtown offices, I hadn’t heard from him and was starting to worry. He was driving his Honda Civic from its alternate-side parking spot in Fort Greene all the way back to the driveway of his mom’s house in Tulsa, presumably listening to Dostoyevsky on tape. He said he was already in Missouri and had decided to move back to Austin. He’d been the only person I really knew in New York, and he’d abandoned me.

In that first year, just existing in New York exhausted me. I always got on an express train when I needed a local, watching fifteen superfluous stops fly by. I couldn’t walk three blocks without getting stopped by Greenpeace volunteers or some man with a clipboard who wanted to ask me a question about my hair. Not wanting to be rude, I’d always stop. No, I don’t have a perm. No, does it look like I use a deep conditioner?

On most nights, I’d collapse, fall asleep fully clothed with the lights on. I’d wake up between the hours of 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. in a pile of saliva, the sound of sirens outside and the shape of the links from my silver Seiko imprinted on my cheek.

FIVE MONTHS AND three weeks into my rovership, I got my first full-time job in New York. I would be the editorial assistant to the garden editor at House & Garden magazine. In the interview, Garden Editor, a fashionably malnourished redhead who wore fishnet stockings and leather skirts, had growled a little when I complimented her leopard-print blouse. “Careful,” she said. “It’s a jungle out there.” Her husband would leave messages like “Tell her I’ll be home at six and will need something hot to eat and cold to drink …”

My duties included running to the Flower District on Twenty-Eighth Street each morning, where the sidewalks become an urban jungle of houseplants and cut flowers that supply the city’s restaurants and hotels and penthouses.

I once got on the Condé Nast elevator hauling cherry blossom branches wrapped in butcher paper when an airy ballerina of a girl about my age strode on, an Hermès Birkin bag slung over her forearm. I only identified this purse—and its $10,000 price tag and waiting list—because of the week I’d spent in the fact-checking closet at Vogue .

“Oh my God, I love your bag. Is it new?” another gazelle of a girl asked.

“No,” the ballerina replied. “I got it like a week ago.”

I tried to time my commute so that I could share the elevator with New Yorker editor David Remnick. Stalker-like, I craved even the tiniest reminder (the back of a brown head of hair) that my dream was still in my grasp.

One time, I stepped off on the eighth floor, with the purple House & Garden awnings, wearing my usual brown plastic banana clip and thinking about my illustrious future writing gig at the New Yorker . When the doors started to close, I overheard a woman announce to the packed elevator, “Okay, who told her she could wear her hair like that?”

Garden Editor would disappear for weeks to scout luscious private grounds in England and France and Morocco. She’d come back with a Longchamp tote stuffed with receipts for me to file and reams of film for me to develop into slides and arrange by theme (“Tuscan,” “xeriscape,” “Cape Cod”). She’d then present the hundreds of photos, which looked identical to the untrained eye, to the editor in chief, who would deem the gardens sufficiently tony (or not) to earn a spread in the magazine.

One afternoon I was arranging the slides into plastic sleeves, and after fifteen images of topiaries and a couple of bonsai, I landed on photos of the garden editor sprawled out naked, posing seductively for Mr. Hot-to-Eat.

In retrospect, I could’ve handled the situation more professionally, but I’ve never claimed to be a good editorial assistant. My gasp must’ve come out louder than I intended because a crowd of colleagues assembled around my cubicle. They held the slides now scattered over my desk up to the light howling that the garden editor “isn’t a real redhead after all.”

It was at that exact moment that Editor in Chief walked by and set her Siberian husky–like eyes on me as if I were some game animal she wanted to mount to the wall of her Pelham colonial.

She tried to have me fired for being “indiscreet” and embarrassing the garden editor. Luckily, the managing editor took pity on me (or anticipated a workplace lawsuit) and talked the editor in chief out of it.

I needed the paycheck and the health insurance, but part of me wished she had fired me so I could’ve filed for unemployment. My roommate at the time had just landed a real writing gig at Variety after being laid off from his job at AOL’s Moviefone. (He’d imitated the languid voice that reads showtimes: “To file for unemployment, press 1. To clear out your cubicle, press 2 …”) I envisioned parlaying unemployment into writing an explosive tell-all in New York magazine or the New York Observer called “The Garden Editor’s Bush.”

I knew my time at House & Garden was up when James Truman, the Condé Nast editorial director who would soon resign to bum around Andalusia and continue his studies with Tibetan Buddhists, flipped through a rough copy of the May issue and instructed Editor in Chief to swap out the cover story for a tiny blurb I wrote on a Chelsea flower shop that stuffed carnations into discarded Café Bustelo cans. This so infuriated Editor in Chief that she sent around a note reminding the entire staff (cc’ing me) that editorial assistants should under no circumstances be allowed to write.

I printed out the email and tucked it in my battered copy of A Confederacy of Dunces , which sat on my new IKEA bookshelf along with two volumes of poetry by Elizabeth Bishop and Isaac Babel’s Complete Works , which I’d borrowed from Russ and never given back.

The dunces, all in confederacy against me …

I TOOK A pay cut to work for a fancy literary agent who wore black leather pants and was on a strict South Beach diet. She’d email two words, “Protein Run,” and off I’d go to buy her hard-boiled eggs or almonds.

Every Friday we had to print out all our email correspondence from the week, and she’d hand the pages back to us on Monday marked up in red ink where she’d fixed typos and stylistic errors. Or, in my case, she explained at length why it was inappropriate to ask the agency’s clients for career advice. She had a point, but the only reason that I wanted the job was because her roster of authors included some of my journalistic heroes.

“You can do that. I mean, we all do that, but don’t ever include it in the correspondence. Duh,” another assistant in the Park Avenue office told me. She knew about my screwup because in addition to Literary Agent editing our emails, her five or so other employees all had to read each other’s marked-up correspondence. This led to grammatical shaming in the break room.

“Can you believe he used the passive voice in a message to Knopf ?” this same assistant said as she showed me how to arrange a hamburger patty on a bed of lettuce as Literary Agent liked. “You’d never think he was a Rhodes scholar.”

Just when I was starting to appreciate this semantic sadism as a useful crash course in email writing, Literary Agent fired me. She thought I’d stolen office supplies, which wasn’t technically true. She asked me to order twelve of her preferred purple highlighters and instead I’d accidentally ordered twelve cases (each of which contained ten highlighters). Paranoid she’d see this Mount Everest of purple in the tiny supply closet and erupt, I took ten of the cases home and put them under the bed figuring I’d gradually restock the office supply with this stash. But as I tried to explain this, Literary Agent just put up her hand in a please-stop-talking position. Ten years later, I was still pulling purple highlighters from underneath my bed.