Primates of Park Avenue (11 page)

Even as I decided for a fact that I must have a Birkin, I felt tired and defeated just considering it. I also felt fired up and ready for the kill. Manhattan has a funny way of turning your desires inside out. So that you can see their seams, what they are really made of. Here on the Upper East Side, I was learning, we organize our wants and our identities, in part, around specific rarefied gets or rather, “impossible-to-gets.” A Birkin signifies many things, and one of them is the utter plaintiveness of not-having, even (especially) in a world of excess. Sure, the Birkin is something you want, but it is also the essence of the experience of wanting, with deferral and disappointment and waiting and hope sewn into its every stitch.

When you ask yourself
why
everyone in Manhattan, including you, wants a Birkin, and why there is such a fervor for the thing itself, it is easy to fall into circular logic. The answer is so self-evident:
Because I just do.
There are more-nuanced theories, of course. In a town that values its signifiers of privilege and success—obsesses over them, really—the Birkin is a megastatus symbol, perhaps the ultimate one, for women. And, not coincidentally, also for the men who can get them for us. “A wife with a Birkin is an
excellent
narcissistic extension for a successful man,” Manhattan clinical psychologist Stephanie Newman mused when I asked for her thoughts. “He gets to prove how powerful and special he is—he got her this expensive, rare thing.” For the one in every million women who insists that No, no, no, she doesn’t want a Birkin, I can only say, give her one and see if she doesn’t use it. The cachet, the social turbocharge it provides, would be too much to resist, sort of like choosing the Hyundai over the Porsche when both sets of keys are proffered. I don’t think so. You want it because it is somehow, vaguely, within reach—a stretch, but not utterly impossible. And because it is beautiful. And, it’s true, because you would command a very particular, twisted form of Manhattan respect, also known as envy, from others—other women in the know, other women whose opinion you value and whose admiration you covet—with a Birkin.

It is a game among a certain set to incite the envy of other women, I was realizing as I logged my days on the Upper East Side. Much has been written about the male gaze—how it objectifies, redraws the hierarchy between men and women, renders one a looker and one the to-be-looked-at. But to live on the Upper East Side, it was dawning on me, is to see and feel the “looks” exchanged between women, or imposed upon us by each other—a gaze that is not infrequently ravenous, competitive, laser-like in its precision and intent. The gaze draws you into the game, even if you don’t want to play. It is a way of defending yourself, sometimes, of propping yourself up.
Don’t you
give me that look
, you say with your look;
that’s not nice
! Other times women use it to build themselves up by tearing another down:
Where is the
flaw?
women ask with this gaze, assessing other women. Where is the imperfection in what you have—your belt, your shoes, your outfit, your hair—that will reassure me, make me feel it is not so good after all, that you are no better than me? Birkins, lusted after and “scarce,” bring out the girl-on-girl hostility, the female fascination latent in so many interactions and gazes between women in Manhattan, gazes that crisscross the sidewalk and the street and the restaurant of the moment and the charity event—at the Pierre or Cipriani—as we check out one another’s shoes and other accessories laden with significance, with sumptuous, shiny, covetous, delicious
meaning
that our husbands and children are blind to. There are the covert and not-so-covert gazes as we wait for elevators in school hallways, gazes that take in an entire wardrobe in an instant, women swallowing other women whole like boa constrictors, in order to digest them and pick apart the details later:
Who is she? Why does she have one?
Who’s she married to? What does she do? Why her
and not me?
Relations between women on the Upper East Side are charged as they are perhaps nowhere else in the country or the world, and handbags, like cars, just might serve a lot of different functions all at once. A communication about where one stands in the inevitable hierarchy of Manhattan, a barometer of your wealth and connectedness and clout in a city where money and connections and clout are everything. A fashion statement. A security blanket, a way of self-soothing in a uniquely stressful town.

My request wouldn’t surprise my husband, I knew, because I had been talking about Birkins for years. Not in the same unironic way as Other Women, I hoped, but still. “There’s one!” I would tell him, pointing and squinting, excited as a naturalist spotting a rare South American bird in Central Park in winter. If I were lucky, I would have an opportunity to size up the bag and the owner, convinced that this juxtaposition would let me know whether it was a fake. The bag, I mean.

My obsession with the Birkin had faded and waned and returned over the course of two decades, periodically reactivated by stress (such as a Birkin sighting) like a dormant virus. Even now, twenty years after my first sighting, at a different, more financially comfortable point in my life, a point when I could almost justify such a crazy expenditure, getting one would require some doing. And some calling in of favors. And, horror or horrors for an antisocial writer, perhaps even some ingratiating. But first, some obsessing. That I could handle. No problem. Upper East Side mommies are experts at obsessing, after all. Whether it’s terrorism, finding a summer camp, researching a child’s impetigo or graphomotor issues, or downsizing from a classic nine so we can get a place in Aspen without selling the one in the Hamptons, I was learning, we obsess and obsess, spending long hours locating and then devouring the websites that abet and nourish our fixations. On our laptops and iPads, we follow our daydreams of the perfect summer vacation or stalk the shoe that will transform our wardrobes and improve our lives. My friend Candace has bookmarked seventeen real estate sites in her quest, one she readily admits she will never really pursue, to move to Bronxville. “It makes me feel better,” she says with a shrug.

My obsessive quest led me inevitably to websites like bagsnobs.com and Iwantabirkin.com. I spent night after night after my son was in bed on eBay, researching Birkins—the prices, the hardware, the details that separated the Real from the fake. One night, after I had been cooped up there literally for hours, my husband came into my “office”—the former maid’s room, off our kitchen—and I quickly, shamefacedly logged off a site. “What was that?” he wanted to know as my computer screen swallowed an image of a blue-jean-colored 35cm Birkin. “What were you looking at?” I answered him honestly: “Sorry. It’s porn.” This piqued his interest, until he realized I meant
handbag
pornography.

“Well, why not?” Lily asked me as our kids played in the park one sunny day. “They’re made like tanks, those Birkins. They’re really one of the few truly well made handbags left.” From her perch in the fashion world, she made the whole idea of getting a Birkin sound
sensible
.

Over lunch, I spoke to Candace and we agreed, shaking our heads, running the numbers, that the Birkin cost a quarter of a year’s tuition at a private school, as much as a winter warm-weather vacation. It was two or even three months of maintenance. Twice as much as a table at the
Nutcracker
benefit. “Well, when you put it that way,” Candace said, pushing her chopped salad around on her plate slowly, thoughtful now, her expression changing, “it’s not
really
that bad . . . if you keep it forever, which you will. And you use it all the time. And you stop buying other bags. When you monetize that . . .”

My friend JJ’s mother, who had told us the anecdote about the celebrity’s wife, had five Birkins and at least as many Kellys (or were they Kellies?) and JJ suggested she might introduce me to her salesperson at Hermès. “Just get it,” she said. Even though we don’t get paid much for what we do; even though you need one like you need a pair of sequined boots in the rain forest; even though it is insanely, stupidly impractical. Don’t just stand there, wanting, Lily and Candace and JJ were saying.
Do
something. This might have been my strangest and most self-indulgent call to action ever.

My husband had just sort of groaned when I told him. It was unlike me, really, to make a request for something expensive. It has always given me a certain sick feeling when women act as if their finances and financial well-being have nothing to do with their husbands’, as if these baubles don’t cost the couple as a unit. My husband knew that I was basically stand-up in this regard—when he asked what I wanted for the requisite push present when our older son was born, I requested that he put some money in my IRA, to the horror of one of my girlfriends, who’d asked for diamonds—and that counted for a lot. “I just think that I should have a Birkin bag,” I explained. “I just really, really want one.” Okay, my husband agreed. What color? He would get it tomorrow. I laughed—a loud, braying, mirthless, ungenerous laugh that seemed to alarm him. Then I sighed. He
couldn’t
, I explained. I handed him a list of contacts I had written out, starting with JJ’s mother’s name and cell. “What’s this?” he asked, his eyes narrowed, squinting. “This is your dealer,” I said. “Or your fence. Or whatever. Please be nice to her. I really want this bag.”

My husband would have to call JJ’s mother—we’ll call her Myra—who would in turn call her Hermès salesperson—let’s call her Deirdre—who would in turn assist my husband when he came in. But first, Myra, bless her heart, had a heart-to-heart with Deirdre. JJ called me and reported gleefully that her mother had told Deirdre that I was a well-known author (“Yes, I’ve heard of her,” Deirdre had said)—here JJ and I shrieked with laughter at the idea of someone being so polite that she would fudge having heard of a nobody like me—and that I would be a very good customer, and that I deserved a Birkin, and that I wanted black leather, 35 centimeters, with gold hardware. Even though Myra really thought this was a big mistake; I should get palladium, which, she explained, was seasonless.

This conversation completed and the groundwork set, my husband was notified by Myra that he could go in to meet Deirdre, which he did, and Deirdre very sweetly informed him that she was going to do her best, she was calling Paris, and she was trying very hard to make it happen; it just might not be by my birthday, which was, after all, right around the corner and she was, after all, bypassing the wait list, which was, depending on whom you spoke with, either three years long, a bunch of BS, or closed. The night my husband conveyed all this to me, I lay awake in bed at 2:00 a.m., having just started out of my sleep with the realization that I didn’t even know how much this bag would cost, exactly. “I mean, I get mine in Paris and Rome and with the exchange rate, I don’t even know. I don’t know how much they are in New York,” Myra had told me when I haltingly, fumblingly asked about exact price in one of our phone conversations. “I only bought my Kellys here.”