The longtime girl Friday for the associate editor of SURFACES, which was the section of Style that focused on health and beauty, had also been among the first of the magazine’s interns not to bother changing into pumps on arrival but instead to wear, normally with a high end Chanel or DKBL suit, the same crosstrainers she had commuted in, which somehow for some strange reason worked, and had for a time split the editorial interns into two opposed camps regarding office footwear. She had also at some point spent a trimester at Cambridge, and still spoke with a slight British accent, and asked generally now whether anyone else who traveled abroad much had noticed that in German toilets the hole into which the poop is supposed to disappear when you flush is positioned way in front, so that the poop just sort of lies there in full view and there’s almost no way you can avoid looking at it when you get up and turn around to flush. Which she observed was so almost stereotypically German, almost as if you were supposed to study and analyze your poop and make sure it passed muster before you flushed it down. Here a senior shade who seemed always to make it a point to wear something garishly retro on Mondays inserted a reminiscence about first seeing the word FAHRT in great block letters on signs all over Swiss and German rail stations, on childhood trips, and how she and her stepsisters had spent whole long Eurail rides cracking one another up by making childish jokes about travelers’ various FAHRTs. Whereas, the SURFACES head intern continued with a slight cold smile at the shade’s interruption, whereas in French toilets, though, the hole tended to be way in the back so that the poop vanished ASAP, meaning the whole thing was set up to be as elegant and tasteful as possible. . although in France there was also the whole bidet issue, which many of the interns agreed always struck them as weird and kind of unhygienic. There was then a quick anecdote about someone’s once having asked a French concierge about the really low drinking fountain in the salle de bains, which also struck a nerve of risibility at the table.
At different intervals, two or three of the interns who smoked would excuse themselves briefly and step out to smoke and then return — Tutti Mangia’s management had made it clear that they didn’t really want like eight people at a time out there under the awning.
‘So then what about the US toilets here, with the hole in the middle and all this water so it all floats and goes around and around in a little dance before it goes down — what’s up with that?’
The design director’s intern wore a very simple severe Prada jacket over a black silk tee. ‘They don’t always go around and around. Some toilets are really fast and powerful and it’s gone right away.’
‘Maybe up on eighty-two it is!’ Two of the newer staff interns leaned slightly toward each other as they laughed.
Laurel Manderley’s roommate, who at Wellesley had played both field hockey and basketball and was a national finalist for a Marshall, asked how many of those at the table had had to read those ghastly pieces of Swift’s in Post Liz Lit where he went on and on about women taking a crap and how supposedly traumatic it was for the swain when he found out that his beloved went to the bathroom like a normal human being instead of whatever sick mommy figure Swift liked to make women into, quoting the actual lines, ‘“Send up an excremental Smell/To taint the Parts from whence they fell/the Pettycoats and Gown perfume/And waft a Stink round every Room,”’ which a few people hazarded to say that it was maybe a little bit disturbing that Siobhan had seemingly memorized this. . and thereupon the latter part of the discussion turned more toward intergender bathroom habits and the various small traumas of cohabitation with a male partner, or even just when you reached the stage where one or the other of you were staying over a lot, and the table conversation broke up into a certain number of overlapping smaller exchanges while some people ordered different kinds of coffee and Laurel Manderley sucked abstractedly on an olive pit.
‘If you ask me, there’s something sketchy about a guy whose bathroom is all full of those little deodorizers and scented candles. I always tend to think, here’s somebody who kind of denies his own humanity.’
‘It’s bad news if it’s a big deal either way. It’s never a good sign.’
‘But you don’t want him totally uninhibited, don’t get me wrong.’
‘Because if he’s going around farting in front of you or something, it means on some level he’s thinking you’re just one of the guys, and that’s always bad news.’
‘Because then how long before he’s sitting there on the couch all day farting and telling you to go get him a beer?’
‘If I’m out in the kitchen and Pankaj wants a beer or something, he knows he better say please.’
The shade who wore Pucci and two other research interns were evidently going with three guys from Forbes to some kind of infamous annual Forbes house party on Fire Island over the holiday weekend, which, since the Fourth was on Wednesday this year, meant the following weekend.
‘I don’t know,’ THE THUMB’s head intern said. ‘My parents pass gas in front of each other. There’s something sweet about it, like it’s just another part of life together. They’ll keep right on talking or whatever as if nothing happened.’ THE THUMB was the name of the section of Style that contained mini reviews of film and television, as well as certain types of commercial music and books, each review accompanied by a special thumb icon whose angle conveyed visually how positive the assessment was.
‘Although that in itself shows there’s something different about it. If you sneeze or yawn, there’s something said. A fart, though, is always ignored, even though everybody knows what’s just happened.’
Some interns were laughing; some were not.
‘The silence communicates some kind of unease about it.’
‘A conspiracy of silence.’
‘Shannon was on some friend of a friend thing at the Hat with some awful guy in she said an XMI Platinum sweater, with that awful Haverford type of jaunty misogyny, that was going on and on about why do girls always go to the bathroom together, like what’s up with that, and Shannon looks at the guy like what planet did you just land from, and says well it should be obvious we’re doing cocaine in there, is why.’
‘One of those guys where you’re like, hello, my eyes are up here.’
‘Carlos says in some cultures the etiquette actually calls for passing gas in some situations.’
‘The well known Korean thing about you burp to say thank you.’
‘My parents had this running joke — they called a fart an intruder. They’d look at each other over the paper and be, like, “I do believe there’s an intruder present.”’
Laurel Manderley, who had had an idea, was rooting through her Fendi for her personal cell.
‘My mom would just about drop over dead if anybody ever cut one in front of her. It’s just not even imaginable.’
A circulation intern named Laurel Rodde, who as a rule favored DKNY, and who wasn’t exactly unpopular but no one felt like they knew her very well despite all the time they all spent with one another, and who usually barely said a word at the working lunches, suddenly said: ‘You know, did anybody when they were little ever have this thing where you think of your shit as sort of like your baby and sometimes want to hold it and talk to it and almost cry or feel guilty about flushing it and dream sometimes of your shit in a little sort of little stroller with a bonnet and bottle and still sometimes in the bathroom look at it and give a little wave like, bye bye, as it goes down, and then feel a void?’ There was an uncomfortable silence. Some of the interns looked at one another out of the corner of their eye. They were at a stage where they were now too adult and socially refined to respond with a drawn out semicruel ‘Oooo-kaaaay,’ but you could tell that a few of them were thinking it. The circulation intern, who’d gone a bit pink, was bent to her salad once more.