‘The UBA’s been a problem from the start,’ Ellen Bactrian said. ‘What I told —’
The executive intern interrupted: ‘There doesn’t have to be a strict UBA, though, because we can take the piece out of WHAT IN THE WORLD and do it in SOCIETY PAGES. Is the miraculous poo phenomenon art, or miracle, or just disgusting.’ She seemed not to be aware that her limbs’ forward speed had increased; she was now forcing her workout’s program instead of following it. SOCIETY PAGES was the section of Style devoted to soft coverage of social issues such as postnatal depression and the rain forest. According to the magazine’s editorial template, SP items ran up to 600 words as opposed to WITW’s 400.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Meaning we include some bites from credible sources who think it is disgusting. We have Skip create controversy in the piece itself.’ It was true that her use of Atwater’s name in the remark was somewhat strategic — there were complex turf issues involved in altering a piece’s venue within the magazine, and Ellen Bactrian could well imagine the WITW associate editor’s facial expression and some of the cynical jokes he might make in order to mask his hurt at being shut out of the story altogether.
‘No,’ the executive intern responded. ‘Not quite. We don’t create the controversy, we cover it.’ She was checking her sports watch even though there were digital clocks right there on the machines’ consoles. Both women had met or exceeded their target heartrate for over half an hour.
A short time later, they were in the little tiled area where people toweled off after a shower. At this time of day, the locker room was steamy and extremely crowded. The executive intern looked like something out of Norse mythology. The hundreds of tiny parallel scars on the insides of her upper arms were all but invisible. It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are. The executive intern was saying: ‘The real angle is about coverage. Style is not foisting a gross or potentially offensive story on its readers. Rather, Style is doing soft coverage on a controversial story that already exists.’
Ellen Bactrian had two towels, one of which she had wrapped around her head in an immense lavender turban. ‘So Atwater will just rotate over and do it for SOCIETY PAGES, you’re saying? Or will Genevieve want to send in her own salaryman?’ Genevieve was the given name of the new associate editor in charge of SOCIETY PAGES, with whom Ellen Bactrian’s overman had already locked horns several times in editorial meetings.
The executive intern had inclined her head over to the side and was combing out a shower related tangle with her fingers. As was something of an unconscious habit, she bit gently at her lower lip in concentration. ‘I’m like ninety percent sure this is the way to go,’ she said. ‘Style is covering the human element of a controversy that’s already raging.’ At this point, they were at their rented lockers, which, in contradistinction to those on the men’s side, were full length in order to facilitate hanging. Painstakingly modified with portable inset shelving and adhesive hooks, both the women’s locker units were small marvels of organization.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Meaning it will need to be done somewhere else first. SOCIETY PAGES covers the coverage and the controversy.’ She favored Gaultier pinstripe slacks and sleeveless cashmere tops that could be worn either solo or under a jacket. So long as the slacks and top were in the same color family, sleeveless could still be all business — Mrs. Anger had taught them all that.
In what appeared to be another unconscious habit, the executive intern sometimes actually pressed the heel of her hand into her forehead when she was thinking especially hard. In a way, it was her version of Skip Atwater’s capital flush. The opinion of nearly all the magazine’s other interns was that the executive intern was operating on a level where she didn’t have to be concerned about things like color families or maintaining a cool professional demeanor.
‘But it can’t be too big,’ she said.
‘The piece, or the venue?’ Ellen Bactrian always had to pat the ear with all the studs in it dry with a disposable little antibiotic cloth.
‘We don’t want Style readers to already know the story. This is the tricky part. We want them to feel as if Style is their first exposure to a story whose existence still precedes their seeing it.’
‘In a media sense, you mean.’
The executive intern’s skirt was made of several dozen men’s neckties all stitched together lengthwise in a complicated way. She and a Mauritanian exchange student in THE THUMB who wore hallucinatorily colored tribal garb were the only two interns at Style who could get away with this sort of thing. It was actually the executive intern, at a working lunch two summers past, who had originally compared Skip Atwater to a jockey who’d broken training, though she had said it in a light and almost affectionate way — coming from her, it had not sounded cruel. Over Memorial Day weekend, she had actually been a guest of Mrs. Anger at her summer home in Quogue, where she had reportedly played mahjongg with none other than Mrs. Hans G. Böd. Her future seemed literally without limit.
‘Yes, though again, it’s delicate,’ the executive intern said. ‘Think of it as not unlike the Bush daughters, or that thing last Christmas on Dodi’s driver.’ These were rough analogies, but they did convey to Ellen Bactrian the executive intern’s basic thrust. In a broad sense, the cover the extant story angle was one of the standard ways BSGs distinguished themselves from both hard news glossies and the tabloids. On another level, Ellen Bactrian was also being informed that the overall piece was still her and the WHAT IN THE WORLD associate editor’s baby; and the executive intern’s repeated use of terms like tricky and delicate was designed both to flatter Ellen Bactrian and to apprise her that her editorial skill set would be amply tested by the challenges ahead.
Gaultier slacks held their crease a great deal better if your hanger had clips and they could hang from the cuffs. The voluptuous humidity of the locker room was actually good for the tiny wrinkles that always accumulated through the morning. Unbeknownst to Ellen Bactrian, lower level interns often referred to her and the executive intern in the same hushed and venerative tones. A constant sense that she was insufficient and ever at risk of exposing her incompetence was one of the ways Ellen Bactrian kept her edge. Were she to learn that she, too, was virtually assured of a salaried offer from Style at her internship’s end, she would literally be unable to process the information — it might well send her over the edge, the executive intern knew. The way the girl now pressed at her forehead in unconscious imitation of the executive intern was a sign of just the kind of core insecurity the executive intern was trying to mitigate by bringing her along slowly and structuring their conversations as brainstorming rather than, for instance, her simply outright telling Ellen Bactrian how the miraculous poo story should be structured so that everyone made out. The executive intern was one of the greatest, most intuitive nurturers of talent Mrs. Anger had ever seen — and she herself had interned under Katharine Graham, back in the day.
‘So it can’t be too big,’ Ellen Bactrian was saying, first one hand against the locker and then the other as she adjusted her Blahniks’ straps. She now spoke in the half dreamy way of classic brainstorming. ‘Meaning we don’t totally sacrifice the scoop element. We need just enough of a prior venue so the story already exists. We’re covering a controversy instead of profiling some freakoid whose b.m. comes out in the shape of Anubis’s head.’ Her hair had almost completely air dried already.