Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  The only time I felt close to her was when I was creating content. I found myself following in her footsteps and assuming her poses more and more: at Jack’s Wife Freda, I ordered what she always ordered; at the Met, I stood in front of her favorite painting (a Matisse); and at Central Park, I bought a hot dog like she always did and ate it on a park bench, half laughing, as she once had, because ketchup was threatening to drip through my fingers. It wasn’t a conscious decision to copy her at first. Her posts had penetrated my brain so deeply, it was not always readily apparent where they ended and my own creativity began. All I knew was that whenever I did it, I was suffused with a familiar warmth. It felt like flowing into a mold, slowly rising until the outlines were filled and I felt something chime within me. Much of the time, I brought Julia and Blake along, and we’d shoot at the Met or in Central Park. Neither of them mentioned the changes I’d made to my appearance. Actually, we all just acted as if I’d always looked like this and acted like this. And if they noticed I’d started to blatantly copy Gemma’s posts, they didn’t mention it.

  Everything was falling into place. Yes, these were halcyon days, with only a few hiccups. There was a mass shooting in upstate New York, and a march was organized around Lincoln Square. I woke up early to make a sign, spending hours drawing and painting a uterus, which I sprinkled with pink glitter. More regulated than, I wrote in big block letters, and then painstakingly copied a drawing of an assault rifle I had found on the Internet. It was the perfect sign to bring, and I was itching with excitement to post a picture of it, but I wanted to wait until we’d gotten to the march. Julia and Blake and I made plans to get there at ten a.m., just as things were beginning to heat up, but in my excitement, I left the damn thing on the subway, and then had to put up an Instagram holding Blake’s sign, which was subpar at best.

  Julia and Blake were both pretty good at taking pictures, though Julia occasionally made snide comments about how she wasn’t a fucking paparazzo, but I knew they’d both keep doing it as long as I kept tagging them. I was generous like that; happy to spread the wealth. I bought a used copy of Bukowski and had Blake take a picture of me reading it on a checkered picnic blanket I’d bought expressly for the purpose. We trekked out to the beach and drank rosé from mason jars with pink-and-white paper straws. At Coney Island, the content was ironic, a double feint so that we could seem above all the lame, narcissistic shit we were doing, while continuing to do it unapologetically. In the evenings, I opened and catalogued the packages that kept coming to my house, and set aside time to respond to all my fans, writing little messages or at least Liking the Comments they left on my posts. Julia and Blake gave me shit for not going out, but I suddenly had no patience for dinners out with the faceless men, no taste for the rich food, and in the morning I didn’t like to be hungover because then I looked all puffy in my pictures.

  I’d more or less stopped eating.

  * * *

  —

  Soon, I was walking through the revolving door at the Condé Nast headquarters for the fitting. I remember laughing thinking about all the castings I’d gone to in the past, realizing only then how pointless they had all been.

  The offices reminded me of the airport, which suited my mood fine. Though I hadn’t traveled anywhere in a long time, airports remained, in my mind, potent whirlpools of fear and excitement, my father ranting the whole ride there that we’d miss our flight, making us sprint through security, only shutting up when he got to the bar, with thirty minutes to spare before boarding. My mother would say nothing; she’d simply roll her eyes behind his back, and then we’d go buy magazines, gorge on the fantasies they sold us, make shopping lists, and tell each other what we planned to wear on vacation.

  The lobby was large, gray, and impersonal, with ceilings as tall as three stories; sunlight poured in through the windowed front, but somehow it still managed to feel cold. The man behind the front desk asked for my ID, made a call to the JOY offices, then ran my bag through the scanner. He printed out a sticker with my name and a blurry black-and-white photo I hadn’t noticed him taking. I made a mental note to Instagram it later with a cryptic humblebrag. I was wearing COS Limited-Edition Wide Leg Linen Pants in Black, an Equipment Poplin Short Sleeve Blouse with Tortoise Shell Buttons in Black, and the same Totême Flip-Flop Heels in Black that Gemma had worn to The Rising, all of which I had bought for the occasion.

  In the elevator, I took a few deep breaths. The point of this, I reminded myself, was not to familiarize myself with the shoot’s wardrobe. The point was to charm their pants off. The point was the cover. The point was the campaign. The point was millions of dollars and being able to tell my father to fuck right off. I straightened my shoulders. The metal doors of the elevator showed my reflection, distorted in the imperfect, striated surface. My head was a blur of pink and yellow. My perm had mellowed, but my eyebrows were still pale. It occurred to me that at one point, much earlier, Gemma might have stood in this very spot, she might have stood exactly as I was now standing, a thumb tucked under the strap of her shoulder bag, looking at her reflection and perhaps even thinking similar thoughts about the imperfect, striated surface and the way she styled her hair. I was struck with an eerie sensation, as if I were in two places at once—or rather, that I could have been in either of those places, at either of those times. Had a sequence of random events occurred otherwise, I would have been in Gemma’s place and she would have been in mine. “I” could have been anyone, had events gone slightly differently. Even Gemma, I thought, as the doors slid open.

  There was a girl waiting for me when I got out. She stuck her hand out and introduced herself, then led me through the double glass doors, on which the word JOY was spelled out in big plastic letters.

  “How’s your day going?” she asked brightly, rounding another corner at a fast clip. Besides their labyrinthine layout, the offices of JOY were surprisingly banal: fluorescent lighting, gray carpet, hunched figures backlit by the buzzing blue glow of computer screens. The only thing that distinguished JOY’s offices from, say, those of a toothpaste brand were the racks of clothing that lined the narrow pathways, and the well-dressed and suspiciously gaunt figures that flitted between them.

  “Pretty good, thanks.”

  “Things are pretty hectic, huh?” Her tone was familiar, knowing; she’d obviously watched my Stories that morning, a series of shots of myself doing yoga and “meditating,” waxing poetic about the need for self-care in our hyper-stressed world.

  “Exactly,” I said. “I mean, that’s why this morning was so important.”

  She jerked her head back a little bit and said something indefinite like “Yeah…I’m sure,” and I supposed I’d embarrassed her about having watched me that morning. People are weird like that.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, trying to make her feel better. “I mean, that’s why we all do it, right?”

  She didn’t seem to get my meaning, or maybe she was too embarrassed still to acknowledge it. Anyway, we’d come to a halt outside a glass-walled conference room, and I could already see Benoit and Cate.

  “Mickey, dear.” Benoit had already gotten up and was walking towards me. He kissed me once on each cheek. I turned to say goodbye to the girl but she had already gone. Benoit took me by the elbow and ushered me into the room.

  I didn’t even have to introduce myself. Cate clapped her hands when I walked in, and smiled at me brilliantly. “There she is,” she said, coming up to me and squeezing my forearm. “Lovely to meet you.” She spoke with a British accent and was striking in the way that fashion people often are, which is to say that she wasn’t attractive in the conventional sense, but nonetheless, you couldn’t seem to look away. Close to six feet, pale, with a pixie cut so blond it was white and a horsey smile. She was wearing a thin plaid shirt, not flannel but something more gauzy, and leather pants—part of her signature punk aesthetic.

  A woman made up very much in Cate’s im
age but of Asian descent introduced herself as Kim. She had a pixie cut nearly identical to Cate’s, only hers was dyed a pale pink, and I wondered if she had had the cut before she was hired, if a similar aesthetic to Cate’s had been a prerequisite for the job, or if she had adopted it once under Cate’s wing.

  We all sat at the conference table, and I leaned back and felt a rush of adrenaline seeing the way they looked at me. It was the way men looked at me right before I went to bed with them.

  Kim cleared her throat, glanced briefly at Cate as if for permission, and then began: “So we’re super excited about this shoot. We think it’s going to—”

  “It’s going to push buttons,” Benoit cut in, and laughed.

  “It’ll be a conversation starter for sure,” Kim continued.

  “A statement,” Cate corrected her. “It’ll make a statement.”

  I was listening alertly, scanning for micro-expressions, tonal shifts in their voices…I sensed it was time for me to say something. “Statements are good,” I said, offsetting the banality of the comment with an ironic expression, a little half nod of the head. Repeating what someone said was good. That was charming. Everyone knew that was charming.

  “Well, exactly. That’s why—when we were looking for a girl, it was like—” Cate snapped her fingers. “We’ve got her.” She pointed at me, then closed her fist as if she’d caught something in her hand.

  “You know I found this one in a bookstore?” Benoit said to the others. “I was looking for Rilke, you know, I lost my copy, and this little lady crashes right into me in the aisle.”

  I laughed. “Right, and Gemma was all like, um, hi,” I said. Something passed over Benoit’s face, but it was too brief for me to analyze. His mouth opened. I heard the beginning of a word—quizzical, a question—I thought it was the beginning of her name. But then Kim broke in, gushing.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “That’s so you.” She meant me. “Discovered while reading Rilke in the bookstore!” I was impressed at how quickly Kim had transmuted the anecdote, how I had become the one reading Rilke, not Benoit, and saw instantly that this was the story that would get passed around as part of my creation myth. It only took me a half second to respond.

  “It was Letters to a Young Poet, one of my favorites,” I said smoothly.

  Cate shook her head in appreciation. “Clever girl. That’s why you’re perfect for this.”

  Benoit nodded in agreement. “We’re just so sick of models, you know?”

  “Oh god, models bore me to death these days!”

  “Exactly, we want real girls, you know?”

  “Anyone can stand in front of a camera and smile. But, you know, nowadays it’s more than that. It’s about personality. Authenticity.”

  Personality was a cozy way of saying personal brand. Whereas actual personalities tend to be fickle and elusory, personal brands can be depended upon and easily understood. Personal brands are SEO-friendly and searchable. Personal brands can be keyworded. Of course, the process by which a personality is transformed into a personal brand is a flattening one—but I like to look at it as a distillation, rather than an attenuation. Make no mistake, though, both personal brands and personalities are performative. What I said: “Oh, I totally agree.”

  “That’s what got me so excited about you, you know, you really stand for something. So, okay—” Cate clapped her hands together and stood up abruptly. “The shoot.”

  She walked over to a rack of clothing, and it was understood that we should all follow. “So we really want this to be about owning your sexuality, owning your body—” Cate extracted a red vinyl contraption of indecipherable utility. “It’s 2019, you know? Women want more than just eye candy. They want fashion that says something, that means something.”

  “You know that opening scene in Belle de Jour, when she’s being whipped?” Benoit asked.

  “We thought it was really brave what you did,” Kim put in.

  The thing on the hanger revealed itself to be a kind of bra, the sort of thing you usually see in a sex shop: an outline in vinyl. The only thing covering the nipples were two hands holding the middle finger up. The fingernails were painted pink.

  “It’s really about girl power,” Cate went on, and then corrected herself, with a wry smile, over her shoulder. “Woman power.” Cate turned and held the bra up to my collarbone, and looked at it against my skin. Woman power, but we—the models—were always called girls. That’s what they were really after: womanhood slipped over girls’ bodies.

  “That’ll be rad,” Kim said. Cate did not respond. She was pinching her bottom lip between her thumb and forefinger, a habit I would come to recognize in her whenever she was considering something.

  “I’m not sure it’ll work with the breasts,” she said, returning it to the rack and extracting a pair of high-waisted leather underwear with the words Fuck the Patriarchy graffitied on it.

  “Chic, yes?” she asked the room. “We had them custom made.” She winked at me and then lifted a white men’s shirt from the rack. “We tuck a little, leave the rest open, very Helmut.”

  Kim nodded. “Who makes it, though?”

  Cate glanced briefly at the label on the shirt. “J.Crew.”

  Kim made a note. “Good, they won’t care about the stains.”

  “It won’t be a lot of blood.”

  “And advertising will be happy.”

  Benoit explained to me, “We’re going to do something really exciting—”

  “Really raw,” added Cate. “Unlike anything we’ve done before.”

  Unlike anything we’ve done before. I was giddy. That sounded like a cover. That sounded like fucking money. I knew better than to ask any further questions. I just nodded coolly. Blood? Who cared about blood? I was going to be rich. Cate handed me the dress shirt and motioned for me to change behind a little curtain in the corner of the room. I had trouble getting the underwear on, leather underwear being just about the most ridiculous invention you could dream up. But once I had the entire look on, I had to admit Cate’s genius. It worked. I looked like pure sex. It had CK written all over it. I walked outside the little curtained corner and felt their eyes on me. Benoit flipped his aviators on top of his head and peered at me.

  “I just realized I’m wearing my sunglasses inside,” he said.

  “Hans, you always do,” Cate said absently.

  “I probably look like an asshole,” he said, and then he flipped them back over his eyes. “But they’re prescription.”

  “What do you think?” Cate asked, a knuckle rubbing back and forth on her bottom lip.

  “I think I look like pure sex,” I said, and they both startled, as if a piece of furniture had spoken. Clearly the question was not for me.

  “It’s not really about sex,” Cate said testily.

  “Not at all about sex,” Benoit said.

  Fuck, I thought. I laughed nervously and tried to course correct. “Oh no, of course, I meant like, the patriarchal idea of sex, but like, the female empowerment version of it. That’s the whole irony, isn’t it?”

  Cate smiled, and relief washed over me. She wagged a finger at me. “Clever girl.”

  They took my picture, and they pinned the Polaroid up on a felt wall. Then Cate handed me what looked and felt like a burlap sack, and I went back to the curtained corner. Sweating, I removed the shirt and underwear from my body and slid the sack over my head and found that truly, it was indistinguishable from a burlap sack. In fact, I later learned it was a $3,000 Dolce & Gabbana dress made from burlap to look like a burlap sack. I walked out. Cate stepped back and eyed me up and down.

  Kim sucked in her breath quickly. “They’ll murder us if we stain this one,” she said.

  Cate was pinching her bottom lip again.

  “Who cares,” said Benoit.

  “We’ll be careful,” Cate said.


  Kim made a note. I wanted to say something to further redeem myself for my idiotic comment about “pure sex,” but I couldn’t think of anything. Then Cate was hugging me around the waist. She smelled like tobacco—not cigarette smoke, but the kind of stylized scent common among fragrances that make a big deal about being “unisex.” I had an impulse to kiss her on the mouth. She stepped away, and I saw that she was fastening a thick leather belt around my waist. It looked like something a horse might wear. Gemma’s cover flashed in my mind: she’s wearing a white cotton dress, essentially a nightie, cradling a baby lamb, bits of hay stuck in her hair, her cheeks rosy…In the inside spread, she’s covered in mud. I mean, completely bathing in it in that white dress, smiling up at the camera.

  “I remember Gemma telling me about the mud on her cover shoot,” I said, laughing nervously. “I’m sure that dry-cleaning bill was no fun either.”

  Of course, it was bait: I wanted to see how they’d react to the words cover shoot. I wanted them to know I knew Gemma, that I was on her level. I wanted them to think I’d done my homework. Cate, who was crouched at my waist, looked up at me quizzically.

  “Who?” she asked, having apparently not heard me.

  “Gemma.”

  “Mud?” said Kim. “That’s obviously quite different.”

  Cate shook her head, confused. “You know, I have to admit, the covers sometimes blend together.”

  “It was her first. Right before she did CK with you guys.”

  “I mean, mud obviously doesn’t stain in the same way,” Kim went on inanely. I looked over at Benoit, who was studying me curiously, amusedly, I thought. Cate stood and stepped back to look at me. She bit her lip, seemed to be thinking.