Foreign Exposure

by Lauren Mechling

  The fabulousness of Imogen’s wardrobe soon eclipsed my misgivings. Unfortunately, 1920s boudoir-style fishnets aren’t exactly the ideal accessory for a job interview. “Maybe I should just buy some hose,” I said after a few minutes of fruitless searching. “Surely something will be open—it’s almost nine, isn’t it?”

  “Dunno, sounds risky. Let’s go see what Pippa has.”

  “Conducting a panty raid on my hostess on my first morning in her house? I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Lily said. “You’d be doing her a favor. What if you showed up looking like a slob at her friend’s office? It’d be embarrassing.”

  I conceded the point and we headed downstairs.

  “Besides,” she went on, “the Foxes have left already. Their cars arrive every morning at six-thirty to take them to the Harbour Club.”

  “For what, sailing?”

  “No.” Lily grinned. “It’s this fancy-schmancy health club in Notting Hill. Most of its members are so high-profile that they keep this little basket of headscarves at the front door so that péople can conceal their faces before stepping onto the street. Robin reads the papers over breakfast there, and Pippa and her personal trainer work out alongside the rest of the top fifties.”

  “The top fifties?”

  “It’s this list they just published of the top fifty female earners in London. Pippa is somewhere in the midtwenties, right after the woman who started the make-your-own soap franchise.”

  “Right, how could I not have guessed,” I said, experiencing a moment of Baldwin déjà vu. Once again, I was the only person whose parents weren’t regularly mentioned in newspapers and society broadsheets.

  Lily and I had just walked into the Foxes’ surprisingly bland bedroom. The walls were pale yellow; the bedding white and standard-issue. There were no photographs or paintings or figurines, none of the doodads that littered the rest of the house, just a hardcover book on each bedside table: True Republicanism on one and a Graham Greene story collection on the other. It was a sad room somehow, not the fun mess I would have expected.

  “Now stop looking so paranoid,” Lily said once inside Pippa’s walk-in closet. “This is the mi casa es su casa-est of casas.” She opened a couple of drawers before finding Pippa’s hosiery stash. We considered four options and settled on a nude-toned sandal-toed pair. I was putting back the rejects when I noticed a tennis bracelet and piece of paper at the bottom of the drawer, a receipt from the Savoy Hotel indicating that Philippa Sanders had ordered a five-hundred-pound bottle of claret to Room 412.

  “What the—?” I passed the receipt to Lily. “Who’s Philippa Sanders—is that her maiden name?”

  Lily examined the piece of paper, her lip curling up as she read it. “Those foxy, foxy Foxes,” she said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t put anything past them.”

  Back upstairs, we finished getting dressed together. It was the kind of girly fun I always wished my sister and I could share. As it was, Ariel offered me cash rewards to rethink whatever “weird” or “heinous” outfit I’d chosen. Lily stepped into a pair of black clam diggers and put on a white T-shirt, inside out and backwards.

  “Wow, looking good,” I said approvingly.

  Lily reddened on cue. “Oh, shut up, will you?”

  Outside, the morning was exquisite: the air warm but not sticky, the sky a brilliant Tiffany blue. We walked a few blocks along Regent’s Canal and exchanged smiles with an elderly man who was sponging down the side of his houseboat. When we reached the Warwick Avenue Tube station, Lily gave me a brief rundown on Underground lines and transfers and Oyster cards, but I didn’t understand a word of it, so she took me to a newsagent inside the station and bought me a cute laminated map. “You’re sure you don’t want me to ride with you part of the way?” she asked.

  “I’ll be fine, I promise. You have monologues to memorize, and I should really brush up on current affairs before the Charles Lappin cross-examination.”

  “As long as he’s a friend of the Foxes, you’re fine,” Lily told me. “Trust me—this is a town that runs on family connections.”

  “Yes, but it’s not my family,” I pointed out.

  She cocked her head to the side. “It is now.”

  Once Lily had left, I returned my attention to the newsstand. Dad believed the best way to get to know a place is to read all of the newspapers from start to finish, but this comprehensive approach was not an option here. There were about thirty-five newspapers, and with my attention span I’d need a week to read them all.

  After some deliberation, I decided to go for a diversity of viewpoints and settled on the two papers that looked most un-alike: the staid, traditional Daily Telegraph and the comparatively crude News of the World tabloid. The train came quickly, and I got into a narrow, cramped car.

  The low ceiling’s arch was severe, forcing all of us commuters not standing directly in the train’s center to hunch over. When a seat freed up at Marylebone station, I pushed forward to claim a square cushion upholstered in a loud purple and blue pattern. Once comfortably seated, I pulled out the newspapers. I examined the serious Telegraph first, but I didn’t have much luck with an article headlined “Burrell to Take Lib Dems Forward,” and I gave up completely midway through a boring feature on women and calcium supplements. I then proceeded to the juicier, brain-rotting News of the World, which actually turned out to be pretty interesting. One story was about a reality show contestant who had just left his girlfriend, Camilla, for his housemate Camille. A chocolate and bacon diet promised to burn away “half a stone” in a week. And in an eye-catching story headlined “Up in Smoke!” a child services office failed to notice that single mothers “on the dole” were spending their government checks for milk and diapers on cigarettes. The two-page photo spread accompanying the article showed a grid of pictures of haggard-looking women with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths. Though at first I thought the story was silly, by the time I’d reached the end of the violently outraged text, I was so absorbed that I almost missed my stop.

  Among the Astronauts

  COMPARED WITH NEW YORK, LONDON WAS HUGE—not so much in population as in sheer acreage. My hair must have grown a quarter of an inch in the time it took my first train to reach Waterloo station that morning, and that wasn’t even close to my final destination. At Waterloo I transferred to the Docklands Light Railway, a train that ferried me to the Muckracker offices at Canary Wharf.

  Lily, who had been coming to London all her life, had described Canary Wharf and the surrounding Docklands as one of the liveliest parts of London, but as I shuffled onto a concourse of moving sidewalks and chain stores, I couldn’t help but question her enthusiastic claim. Lively? Lunar was more like it. To me, Canary Wharf suggested a strip mall development on the moon. It consisted of a labyrinth of brand-new skyscrapers, all clean and glossy and intimidatingly vertical. Because all the buildings looked so similar, it took me a good ten minutes to find the address Pippa had given me.

  When at last I got to the building, I walked into a lobby filled with immense paintings of lipstick tubes. At the security desk, I had to write my name on a clipboard and show my driver’s license to the guard. “From Texas, are you?” he asked, continuing to study it for some time before handing it back. “You a mate of the Bushes, are you?”

  There was something hostile in his tone, so I tried to sound winsome as I said, “Nope, can’t say that I am. They’re not even really from Texas, you know.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, miss, I suppose they must hail from the other Texas? Right, then. Now, what brings you across the pond this morning?”

  “I have a business meeting with Charlie Lappin,” I said primly. “At the Muckraker.”

  “Right, bear with me one moment,” he said, typing something into his computer. “Don’t have any muckrakers to speak of, but I have found your Mr. Lappin.” He punched a few more keys and printed out a visitor’s pass. “Here we are now—cheerio and best of luck to you. Le
t’s ’ope you don’t muck it up like those Bushes.”

  I stuck the pass on my dress and followed the guard’s directions to the elevator. As I rode up to the twenty-eighth floor, I became uneasy. I hadn’t understood most of what that guard had said down there; I just vaguely sensed that he was making fun of me. Again I wished I’d prepared for this interview a little more. Instead of poring over the exposé of pedophiles employed by the London Zoo, I should’ve familiarized myself with some real news stories, or at least figured out the basic platforms of the U.K.’s major political parties. Once on Charlie Lappin’s floor, I took a seat in a low white leather chair as instructed by the receptionist, who promptly returned to filing her nails. In a last-ditch attempt at cramming, I removed the Daily Telegraph from my shoulder bag, but instead of perusing the Home Front pages as planned, I found myself studying the curious décor of Charlie Lappin’s waiting room.

  I’m not sure what I expected, really, of a political journal’s reception area—maybe a row of international flags, like at the UN, or television monitors playing African news conferences? All I knew was that nothing about the lime green waiting room suggested a heavy-duty political think tank. The walls were covered with eight-by-ten headshots of remarkably bedraggled people with pasty skin and pronounced undereye circles. Despite the bright messages scrawled in Sharpie across these pictures—“Lots of love from Roz xxx” and “Cad Charlie, with all due admiration”—most of the people in them looked sickly or perhaps even beat up. They were all political prisoners, I thought, and the Muckraker must be involved in some noble human rights campaign.

  After several minutes, the office door opened and a young man flounced past me on his way to the elevator bank. He was tall and adorable, with black rectangular glasses, straight brown hair that flopped haphazardly over his face, and the poreless skin of an infant. I wondered if he, like so many guys I find attractive, was gay. He was, after all, wearing a checkered shirt, bright red chinos, and shiny Oxford shoes—an outfit too flamboyant even for Quinn. He’d just vanished behind a set of double doors when the intercom buzzed and the secretary, who was now massaging a green cream into her cuticles, nodded to indicate that Charlie Lappin was ready for me.

  With some trepidation I approached the editor in chief’s door and was about to knock when a florid little man sprang out in a shamrock green suit and cartoonish red bow tie. Now, if I’d seen him on the street, I would never in a million years have pinned Charlie Lappin as, in Robin Fox’s phrase, “one of the most trenchant intellects in British journalism.” Charlie spoke hurriedly and seemed to have trouble looking me in the eye, targeting my forehead instead. “Sit down, sit down, very good, do make yourself comfortable. Now let’s see here—tell us your name again?”

  I did so, and he repeated it several times to himself. “Mimi Schulman, lovely, lovely. Now, Pippa Fox rang me about you yesterday afternoon, and as you must already know, one never refuses a protégée of Pippa Fox. How is dear Pippa, incidentally? Don’t see as much of her as I’d like. I pop round for weekend lunches on occasion, but usually I’m too bloody busy. I must say, I’ve always wondered what it must be like, living in that outrageous house of theirs—absolute bedlam, is it?”

  “Well, I only got there yesterday, so I couldn’t say for sure,” I said. “But so far, it seems like I lucked out.”

  “Quite, quite,” Charlie murmured happily. “Do you know, extraordinary as it may sound to you now, when I first met Pippa, in the late 1960s, she was a hippie who summered in a commune in Dorset? She spent the rest of the time trawling the King’s Road and making an absolute spectacle of herself at the Chelsea Drugstore. It’s quite difficult to imagine today, isn’t it?”

  “Wow, it sure is,” I said, though, remembering my host mother’s peacock muumuu and scattered conversation the day before, it wasn’t really. Besides, even my anal-retentive mother had a brief career as a flower child, and in nostalgic moods still breaks out the Joni Mitchell CDs every now and again.

  “But go on now, Pippa tells me you’re from Texas—tell us all about it. I’ve always gotten on quite well with Texans, I must say. As barmy as it sounds, I think a certain kinship exists between Texans and Brits, or certainly among our kind of people, if you know what I mean. We have something of the same . . . earthiness, I believe it is. And d’you know what, I read somewhere quite recently that Texas and England are exactly the same size. Fascinating, I found that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said uncertainly, when it became clear that Charlie was awaiting a response. I didn’t want to offend, but I was pretty sure he had his data jumbled. “I think Texas might be a little bigger than Britain, actually—I know for a fact that it’s bigger than France.”

  “Ah, bugger France!” Charlie interjected with sudden anger.

  “Yeah, France is completely overrated,” I said quickly. “I’ve only been here twenty-four hours, but already I know I’m in the best country in the world.”

  At this Charlie laughed. “Ah, you Yanks and your hyperbole—not to worry, I’m enchanted, do go on. I’d be fascinated to hear about a stranger’s impression of Merrie Olde.”

  “Let’s see,” I said. “Well, I love the bright red mailboxes, and the way people call strangers ‘love.’ I also really like the outrageous newspapers you have here. And speaking of which,” I said casually, “what do you think is going to happen to the Lib-Dems under the new leadership?”

  “New leadership?” Charlie blinked at me, momentarily confused. “As if I give a toss! Now listen to me,” he went on. “I think we’d best resolve this geographical debate straightaway; it’s preying on me.” He convulsed forward and pressed a button on his phone. “Anthony,” he said when a man’s voice came onto the speaker. “Be a good chap, won’t you, and find out the respective geographical areas of Texas and the U.K. for me, all right? And chop-chop, I’ve quite a bit of money riding on this one.”

  Charlie, winking at me, pressed some more buttons and this time a female voice answered. “Becky, darling, could you nip in here for just a minute? Bring in the paperwork necessary to add this fetching young American to our payroll records.” Then to me he said, “I’m afraid it’s not much, just the piddling stipend we give all interns—scarcely enough for a Travelcard. Still, you’ll find, in this business, that the fringe benefits can be most profitable indeed. Free haircuts and handbags and whatnot—you can dine on champagne and canapés all summer if you so fancy, though I imagine you’ll want to keep an eye on your girlish figure.”

  What was this place? Everything Charlie said made my brain spin. Free handbags? Canapés and champagne? The Foxes had told me I’d be working at the Muckraker, a political commentary journal. On the other hand—I realized with a jolt—had they really? Come to think of it, at dinner the night before, Pippa had said nothing at all specific about the kind of magazine her old friend Charlie ran. Lily had mentioned the Muckraker in an e-mail to me in Berlin, but it now seemed entirely possible that the Foxes had decided on another plan of action and forgotten to inform me.

  “Can I ask a question?” I said in a small voice. “When you say parties, do you mean political parties? Or, like, fundraisers?”

  “That’s quite generous of you, though I suppose you could see them that way, if you’ve a very loose definition of political,” Charlie said. “You must be thinking of our ‘Worst-Dressed MPs’ spread in the last issue—we only do one of those a year. In general, we try to avoid that sort of subject. Look, if the prime minister was having it off with a nanny, we’d cover the story. Our readers can’t get enough shots of the princes’ girlfriends shopping in Sloane Street. But that about covers it.”

  He was still speaking when a petite blonde clicked into the room. With her long Pinocchio nose and inch-thick mask of makeup, she reminded me of an airline stewardess from my early youth—more polished than naturally blessed. “Becky darling,” Charlie said, “I’d like you to meet our newest research assistant straight from the Lone Star State, Mimi Schulman. Mimi, t
his is Rebecca Bridgewater, my other right hand. Becky here will sort you out with an ID card and national insurance number and all that rot.”

  “Halloo,” the woman said through a frozen smile, sounding none too thrilled about this task. “And you’ll be with us just for the summer, will you?”

  “Correct,” I said. “I have to go back to New York in August.”

  “I see,” she said impassively. Though her expression was inscrutable, I could tell she hadn’t taken a wild liking to me. “Well, and have you any particular skills we should know about?”

  “Oh, yes, do tell us,” her scatterbrained boss threw in.

  “Sure,” I said. And so, with Rebecca watching me blankly while Charlie urged me on with a series of exclamations—“Oh, fantastic!” and “You didn’t really?”—I gave a long-winded account of the whole Serge Ziff exposé.

  “Right. So the school didn’t get the money from him after all?” Rebecca asked when I’d finished.

  “Well, no. He’s been awaiting trial, actually.”

  “A shame, that,” she remarked. I couldn’t tell if she was talking about Serge’s predicament or Baldwin going unfunded.

  “Mimi came to us with glowing recommendations,” Charlie broke in. “She was sent to us by Lady Phillipa Fox, whom I believe you’ve met.”

  Rebecca visibly perked up. “But you don’t mean Lady Fox of the Beeb?”

  From one evening at the Foxes’, I’d learned that the Beeb meant the BBC, so it was with studied calm that I said, “That’s right. The one and only.”

  “How fantastic,” Rebecca said. “We’re quite lucky to have her sending young talent our way, then.”

  Her enthusiasm for all things related to Pippa—or, I should say, Lady Fox—was interrupted by a knock on the door. Charlie called out, “Entrez!” and in walked the creatively dressed dreamboat who’d caught my attention in the reception area. Up close, I could see that behind his black glasses were big googly brown eyes.