How to Be a Grown-up Read Online Free Page B

slipped beside me and wordlessly handed me my coffee, which was somehow always still hot because Zoe was magic. “How’s it going?” I whispered.
    “Glen is having a hard time with the light.”
    “I see.” Actually I couldn’t because I was squinting. The day I had come to plan the shoot, there’d been one of those hard August rains where the sidewalk smells like earth. Now the sun was shining and the all-white living room was blinding. Literally. Beams banked off the high-gloss walls, the polished floors, the metal furniture—it was relentless. I slipped on my sunglasses.
    “What is that in your mouth?!”
    I spun around, about to spit out my gum, only to discover the owner of the house, in white platform shoes and white harem knickerbockers, glaring down at her toddler. The child gamely shrugged as her Filipino nanny came running down the floating Plexiglas staircase. “Mrs., I so sorry. She got out while I was changing the twins.”
    “Open!”
    The child dropped her lower jaw and the mother reached in and extracted a small black lump. A raisin?
    “Po, take her upstairs.” The mother deposited the item on the aluminum mantel. That’s when I saw the pile on the floor of identical lumps. Before I could introduce myself to her, she dialed her white phone. “Hello, this is Mrs. Heller. I bought the sunflower seed installation. Yes, well, my daughter put one in her mouth. Well, there was a problem with toxic ceramic dust at the Tate, right? So do I need to do anything? Well, should I have my nanny take her to the pediatrician? . . . Okay, I’ll tell my nanny to keep an eye out for that. So how does this work? Will Mr. Weiwei send me a replacement? Should I put the broken one in the mail? . . . You’re joking! They just arrived and there’s no warranty? That’s outrageous! I bought—well I don’t remember the number, but it has Taoist significance and I don’t want to be one short! Put Mary on the phone!”
    I tiptoed away so I could adjust the final compositions for Glen and keep my mind off Blake. I’m sure you’re wondering what there could be left to do to a house that’s had millions of dollars of attention lavished on it. Well, for one thing the flower arrangements that make the homes seem alive—those were always brought by us. I remember a shoot we did in a town house off Fifth. Five stories of authentic art deco no expense spared: gym, wine cellar, floor flown in from Italy, ceiling from France, but the wife had a standing order for a fishbowl of pink roses for the front hall. Roses from the deli. There was no other pink in the house; it made no aesthetic sense whatsoever, but there you go—
    Splash!
    Then we heard, “Oh fuckety fuck fuck.” Even sight unseen, the clipped vowels were instantly recognizable. So now we all knew what it took to make the great Kathryn Stossel swear: falling in standing water up to her calves. She rounded the corner, her sopping slingbacks dangling off her fingers. “Can someone get my assistant up here with some shoes? Tell her I’m wearing the navy Balenciaga.” She said it to no one in particular, but within the hour, her assistant would blow through the door. If Kathryn gave orders to an empty room, I’m sure the furniture would strive to fulfill them.
    Kathryn was the editor in chief of World of Decor , our boss, and official New York tastemaker when it came to all things aesthetic. Kathryn Stossel thinks the new Bergdorf’s tearoom is “charming,” and suddenly reservations were harder to get than any actual service once you were seated. From Farrow and Ball to Crate and Barrel, nobody would dare put anything on the $10 billion home goods market without consulting her.
    “Well, that’ll teach me to rush.” She kissed our apologetic hostess, who, I could tell, could not quite believe Kathryn was in her apartment. It had to be the culmination of everything she’d been hoping for since she was shown the first floor plan.
    Kathryn visited sets