Memoir installment #16

Getting fired: the aftermath

The morning after I was bounced, I woke up, and with a start remembered: nowhere to go. For the first time in 22 years, I didn't have an office, a role. I'd never in my life been let go from a job. I felt exactly half relieved and half heartbroken. I made some coffee, got back in bed and opened my laptop. Emails were pouring in from good friends and former friends, people I hadn't heard from in ages. The same thing was happening on my Facebook feed. Just a flood of kind wishes. I knew the Times would be running their piece that day, but I didn't read it (as it turns out, it was reasonably kind to me). I knew other news outfits would be covering my firing, and I avoided them all.  

    I spent the day writing back to everyone, and went to lunch with a friend who worked nearby. It was nice being in Greenwich Village on a sunny weekday. I decided this fired business would have a big upside. 

The second day of my unemployed life, I realized I needed to start taking care of the type of things assistants had been doing for me for a decade. They paid all my bills, for one thing. I called my bank and all the utilities, had everything put back in my name. It was a pain—I spent a lot of time that day on terminal hold—but also felt good. There's was, in those days, a kind of learned helplessness that happened if you were a Conde Nast editor in chief: you’d forget that you were perfectly capable of executing very basic tasks for yourself. I once heard a story about the editor of a revered Conde Nast publication who called his assistant back in New York from the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to have Housekeeping send him some towels. You get that way. It's terrifyingly easy. 

Nobody believes me when I tell them this, but giving up the perks was kind of a pleasure. Like the car and driver, for instance—I'd long ago grown tired of viewing the city from the back seat of a Town Car; it made life in New York feel like it existed at a remove, and I longed to be back in the thick of things. And as part of a larger effort to trim Lucky’s budget back into profitability, I'd started taking the subway home from work anyway. I'd have taken it to the office too, but I was pretty much my driver’s livelihood. He retired not long after I got fired. 

It was a drag, of course, to say goodbye to the clothing allowance, but that had been a perk so fantastic it was almost comical, and I knew that this job—and all the wondrous things that came with it—would one day drop out of my life just as mercurially as it dropped in. In the end, all that I really missed was the beauty closet. I miss it still.