Hot to Trop

In three hours – at 4 a.m. – I head to St. Tropez. When I found out, I was in tears.

I don’t care how glamorous it sounds. It doesn’t matter where you are – 18 hours a day (the average you work when travelling, unless it’s a one-shot interview, which this isn’t) is not glamorous anywhere. Besides, I worked all of last weekend and this weekend I had a party to go to and then the Cartier polo on Sunday, which I’ve been looking forward to for months. I didn’t need to be hot to Trop until late Sunday night (though I was stressing out a bit about getting from the polo to the airport).

When the deputy bureau chief called me an hour ago, it wasn’t a question of whether I could go. It was: Get there. When the magazine gets in this mode, they steamroller all objections. But comp time (and they are stingy with it) and them paying for my unused polo ticket are not the same as time with friends and an event I’ve been wanting to go to since last year.

I want to get eight hours’ sleep (maybe more), go to my second ballet class, paint my toenails, pick up my contact lenses (they’ve already been sitting at the opticians’ for weeks), check out the very last of the sales, and go to a drinks party in west London. (And I want the Fig to call, and to be apologetic in that call, but hello, in my dreams.) I do not want to navigate St. Tropez, a place where I surely do not belong, and will feel it acutely at every moment.

I couldn’t think of whom to call at midnight here and 7 p.m. on the east coast on a Friday night, so I called my grandmother. I talk to her nearly every day, but I’ve never complained about my job to her, partly because she loves to hear about the glamour of it, and partly because the job is why I live in London, at least three thousand miles further away from her than she'd like.

“I guess you’d better send out some resumes,” she said.

“How can I send out resumes when I’m never even sure I’m going to ever be around actually to go meet with anyone?” I said. Then I said something I’ve never said aloud before: “This job is ruining my life.”

She said she didn’t know enough about the field, and then started telling me a story about she and her friend Connie and a trip to France they took in the mid 80s. Halfway through, I started to laugh.

“I knew I could lighten your mood,” she said triumphantly.

I’ve been speaking to her nearly every day for the past four years, but she’s never played the role she played tonight, and she was brilliant.

In conversation, I often refer to my grandma as one of my favorite people on the planet. It’s amazing how even after all this time there are still new reasons why to add to the list.