But Enough About Me (18 page)

From there, the evening slid speedily downhill and they left as soon as they could.

I turned to Sean immediately after shutting the door. “Why were you acting that way?” I demanded.

He shrugged. “I just don't see why I have to be involved with your family. I don't ask you to meet mine.”

“But I would. I would, gladly.”

He tried to hug me, his way of warding off arguments. “Relax,” he said.

I broke away. “That is so passive aggressive,” I said irritably. “You constantly tell me to relax. Here's a news flash: Women hate being told to relax.”

“You're working yourself up,” he soothed.

“What's so bad about working myself up?” I hollered.

“Shhh,” he said, trying again to hug me.

“Goddammit!” I shouted. “Women hate to be shushed!”

After an hour of doing the dishes in silence, Sean jollied me back into a good mood.

“I'm sorry,” he said, giving me one of his twinkly smiles. “Why don't we invite Heather over? Hmm? And your parents, too.” We started cleaning up the dishes. “Hey, don't throw out that Baggie,” he said.

“But it has schmutz in it,” I said.

He shook his head. “It's called ‘sustainable living,'” he said, grabbing it and rinsing it out. “Earth Day is every day.”

I used to admiringly repeat his remarks to Heather. I would now use a stoner voice when I imitated him.

On rare occasions, celebrities will veer from their carefully bland, publicist-approved sound bites and make a blundering comment that exposes them as vapid or foolish. If this happens, do not examine your conscience. Print their transgression, and while you're at it, blow up that particular remark and use it as the pull quote in your story.

Would that I could follow my own advice. I just never had that killer instinct. I see the way that one horrible quote can live on in infamy, dogging a person until they are onto their third face-lift. So I cave. Consider this forehead-slapping self-obsessed quote from a young blond actress who is the object of obsession for millions of preteen girls.

I couldn't print it. I should have.

How about this horrifyingly dopey gem from a handsome, drug-friendly alternative rocker?

Dude, it was definitely fully a shame! I didn't have the heart to use it. It was just too embarrassing, and he wasn't an evil person, just dense. I have always been uncomfortable with that kind of power to manipulate, because the truth is that you could interview someone from the Brookings Institution in possession of five degrees and still make him or her look like a stooge. All you do is throw in all the “ums” and “uhs” and include the preinterview banal chitchat from the getting-to-know-you period before the tape recorder is turned on, time which is still perfectly fair to use.

That's my sad rationale for not “going for it.” I just can't. But if you find yourself in a similar position, you should.

The next morning I called Dinah for the postmortem on the Sean dinner. “Dine,” I said. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” she said cheerily. She really was so like my father.

“Why do you say ‘sure' before you know what I'm going to ask? You always do that. Then you're trapped. What if I'm asking for something major? You should stall and say ‘What is it?' Or ‘Let me check my book,' or ‘I'm pretty busy, but I think so.'”

She laughed. “But I would do you a favor.”

I sighed. “Doesn't it bother you that I don't say ‘sure' when you ask me for favors?”

She thought for a moment. “Not really,” she said. Dinah was that sunny. She assumed that all people were good, and telling the truth, and had honorable intentions unless there was stark evidence to the contrary. I often accused her of living in Disneyland. Her response? “I like living in Disneyland.” I ask you: What do you say to that? I once took her to Minneapolis to keep me company while I interviewed Pat Benatar at a tour stop. Dinah was right at home in the Midwest. At one point we went to a drive-through for burgers.

“How are you!” cried the fast-food employee, an older guy with ruddy cheeks and a wide smile.

“I'm doing just fine!” Dinah exclaimed. “We're visiting here from New York! Well, actually, I live in New Jersey, she lives in New York!”

“He doesn't care,” I muttered.

“Well, isn't that great!” shrieked the employee. “How are you liking it here?”

I shifted in my seat. People were queued up behind us, but of course nobody honked.

“People are so nice!” Dinah caroled. “We just can't believe it!”

The employee nodded good-humoredly. “I betcha you girls are going to the Mall of America!”

I poked Dinah. “Give him the money,” I said.

She chuckled. “We're going to the mall right after this!”

“Well!” he cried. “Isn't that going to be fun!” Back and forth they went as my fries calcified inside the bag that the employee held motionless above the car window.

There was no changing Dinah, so I abandoned my attempts at making her more guarded.

“Listen,” I said. “Tell me what you really thought of Sean.”

She hesitated. “Well, what do you think of him?”

“He says I'm his soul mate.”

“Yuck,” she blurted out. “Come on. You're not his soul mate.”

“No.”

“He's not my type of guy, but he seems nice,” she said. “I don't know. You don't seem like you have anything in common. And it looks to me like you have overhauled your whole life for him, but he doesn't appear to be bending for you. Come on, you hate camping. What do you want from him, exactly? What can you learn from him?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, he's made me more laid-back.”

“But you're not laid-back. You never have been. And it's
okay
not to be laid-back. You live in New York.” She sighed. “I know you've never been promarriage, but—”

“It's not that I'm against it,” I interrupted. “I'm just afraid of losing myself. I'm almost thirty and I feel like I'm just getting started.”

She tried for lightness. “Patrick got pretty emotional about meat, didn't he?”

I laughed. “It was like Roosevelt's ‘Four Freedoms' speech, only he tacked on a fifth one.”

“I mean, I can almost be a vegetarian for the logical reasons,” she said. “But Sean didn't have a reason for his view. Some people just do it because it's another lifestyle choice, another uniform. It seems to me that he's just doing it because it's cool. And what's with the stinginess? He seems willing to spend money, as long as it's yours.” I knew I shouldn't have told her about that expensive Pinot Grigio that he had ordered on
Rolling Stone
's tab at dinner last week.

She paused. “Look. I will say that he's very cute. And it's pretty clear that he adores you.”

That wasn't the most ringing endorsement, but I took it, and hurried her off the phone. I was the only one in my family who was single. My dating travails were a source of snorting amusement for my parents, who met each new “creative type” I brought home with polite reserve and arch comments about grooming and presentation. They were clearly holding out hope that I would meet some fraternity captain with a firm handshake and a bright future as an options analyst. Well, that was not going to happen.

After my conversation with Dinah, I found to my extreme irritation that her comments made me view Sean with more narrowed eyes. I had always been slightly impatient, but tolerant, of his foibles, but it curdled into full-blown aggravation one night after I came home from a long day of five phone interviews to find Sean scrambling up groggily from the couch. He was nude, of course. A worn copy of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
lay on the coffee table alongside a moldering hummus sandwich. “Hey,” he said sweetly, giving me a too-tight hug. He laughed and smelled
his pits. “Oops,” he said with a grin. “Sorry about that.” He bent over a pile of CDs, rummaging through them with his nut sack dangling like a turkey wattle. Then he shuffled off to the bathroom.

Damn you, Dinah.

Sean was oblivious to my rapidly curdling feelings. I began to believe the old adage that the qualities that initially attract will eventually repel. In my mind, “freewheeling” would soon change to “freeloading,” “groovy” would quickly become “gamy.”

“Hey, babe?” Sean called through the open door of the bathroom. “Can you bring me some more toilet paper?”

“Sure,” I said. I tossed a roll through the door and waited for a moment. “Sean,” I ventured. “I've noticed you haven't had that many illustrating jobs lately.”

I heard the sound of flushing. “No, but things will pick up,” he said cheerfully. “No worries.”

No worries. “Sean, what the hell are you talking about?” I snapped. “No worries? Ever? Worries don't exist?”

He emerged from the bathroom. “Hey, hey, hey,” he said, reaching for me. Did he wash his hands? I didn't hear the sink running.

As the days wore drearily on and his charms completely evaporated, I knew I had to get him out. If only he weren't so pleasant. To amuse myself while I devised an escape plan, I wrote haikus in my head every time he did something that thrummed my nerves. Which was often.

“Sorry about the roaches,” said Sean. “I was just trying to make compost.”

“You're not doing him any favors,” said Julie. “Get it over with.”

“You are missing out on the best season of
Oprah,
ever,” said Heather. “I'm just saying.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Lou. “I can't hear about this anymore. Just get rid of him.”

“What is it?” Sean said, his eyes anxious. My heart contracted. He really did not know. “What did you want to talk about?” He sat down on the couch. “Why do you look so serious?”

If it is done in the right way, exposure to stars can have a rejuvenating, even a therapeutic, effect. If you are feeling low, try to remember that your rendezvous with a celebrity does not need to be a nail-biting experience. Time with a celebrity can be well spent. They can make you laugh (particularly if it is David Spade, who had me giggling continuously for two days straight as we drove around his hometown of Phoenix). They like to convene in glamorous locales. And if a celebrity flirts with you, it is an undeniable mood-lifter.

This was the case when, soon after a breakup, I dragged myself to an interview with Barry White, and thank the good Lord that I did.

My recovery began the moment I arrived at White's cavernous suite at his usual spot, the Helmsley Palace in New York, and surrendered myself to his tender care. Barry White—and I say this unnecessarily—knew exactly how to treat a lady. He greeted me with a friendly, lingering kiss on the mouth, despite our never having met. As he swooped in, his crunchy goatee tickled my chin. He was wearing the largest black leather vest I had ever seen, and he was casually snacking on a bag of M&M's—the big kind that you get at the drugstore to share with your office-mates. His own music was throbbing in the background at a discreet, sensual level. “Come on in, baby,”
he said in that rumbling baritone of his. “You're a Taurus, aren't you?” I was. “Mmm-hmm, I knewww it. My mother was a Taurus.”

Here's the thing. When you're with someone like Barry White, a person who is so undeniably himself, you don't have to jockey to create atmosphere. He is the atmosphere.

He led me to the dining room, where a massive table had been laid out with a couple of iced buckets of champagne, crystal champagne flutes, bowls of caviar, and silver trays piled with toast points, and all the fixings: chopped egg, onion, capers. “What would you like, sweetheart?” he said. “It's beluga, baby.” He took a seat at one end of the table, and I at the other, like royalty. A tiny white man, clad in a tux, stood stiff-backed against one of the walls. “The lady would like some champagne,” White instructed, waving his hand, and the tiny white man hurried over to fill my glass. Our tuxedoed friend ladled caviar for us, too. “I'll take every-thanng,” White said.

As the interview commenced, I asked White to list his three best qualities, and to my overwhelming joy, he answered in the third person. Who doesn't love a man who refers to himself in the third person?

After tenting his fingers and thinking for a long moment, he laid down his reply. “Barry White's three best qualities are his love for music, his love for people, and his love for himself,” he said.

I was grateful for his booming voice, because I was a little hard of hearing after attending White's fabulous concert the prior evening, where I was surrounded by a group of Trinidadian middle-aged secretaries wearing the kind of bronze-sequined, shoulder-padded Cheetah-print separates that only a middle-aged Trinidadian secretary can get away with properly, and they would scream every time White would mop his glistening forehead with one of the many hankies that a disembodied arm would hand him from the side of the stage. The backdrop was an enormous bed headboard emblazoned with the initials B. W., and when he launched into “It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me,” he was accompanied by a coterie of lingerie-clad dancers who writhed in giant martini glasses. At the foot of each glass rested a small
bottle of lotion, and the gals would periodically apply the lotion to their legs. That, friends, is a show.

Because of the tiny white man's vigilance with the bubbly, I was soon blind drunk, happily listening to Barry unspool his many philosophies. “Taurus, you've got to listen to what the universe tells you,” he advised me. “So many people don't hear the truth when it's right there. It is right there.” I nodded vigorously. He wound up the evening by counseling me on relationships. When you fall in love, he said, you lose contact with reality. Love as hard as you can, and as strong as you can, but never, ever fall in love. I thanked him for the advice. It was better than an audience with the Dalai Lama, and the Dalai Lama wouldn't have given me another big wet kiss when, hours later, I finally wobbled toward the elevator.