Cherries In The Snow (22 page)

Marley squeezes me a bit too hard. Jolene continues, ‘Honey, the obsession with beauty is so intense in this culture that it's bound to go full circle. Of course women are going to want to know where they might be able to go with ugly instead.'

‘I guess,' I answer limply. Here was a woman to talk Poe and politics with. I want to. But I can't get a conversational hard-on in front of her. She is too intimidating. Intimidate … that's a good name for a true red lipstick.

‘Hello!' She snaps her fingers in front of me. ‘Are you there? Honey, are you hungover?'

‘No,' I say too loud, giving the room a start and myself a headache.

She's smart. I like what she's saying. I get it. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it bums me out too. I don't want to be known as the girl who works for the ugly makeup company.

‘Well, listen, I've looked at the names you've been putting on those little tubes and I think they're fabulous. That's the first thing I do when I shop for makeup, look at the names.'

‘But you didn't buy any of it?'

‘Honey, I really don't buy anything. I get
sent it all
.'

‘Sounds like a good life.'

‘It's all right,' says Marley sharply, and the two of them exchange looks.

‘Okay, I gotta go. I'll see you later, baby girl.' She kisses Montana on the mouth, kisses Marley on the cheek, and then
comes toward me. I try not to screw up my eyes. Phew. A brief peck on the cheek, closer to the ear than to the mouth. Montana follows her to the door and waves and waves at the black limo as it pulls away. Marley gently nudges her back inside. He wants her to bathe, but she is reluctant to take off her tutu. As he washes her, she makes me stand in the doorway holding the damn thing so that she can admire it the whole time she bathes.

‘Make it look like it's dancing,' she instructs, and I twirl the skirt from side to side while she grins. ‘I love this tutu, Papa. It is the best present ever.'

‘You got it for her?' I ask.

‘Yeah,' he replies, looking at me strangely, because what's the big deal? And I look into my strange heart because what
is
the big deal?

‘I'm going to hang this in your room, okay?' I tell Montana as he dries her.

‘Be careful with it!' she warns. I hang it lovingly on a wall hook opposite her bed. Hanging there with nothing inside it, it looks like the final remains of a dancer who died of anorexia. As I look at it, I understand what's bugging me and I feel terribly ashamed. He gave it to
her
and not to me. And because he gave it to her, I want it.

That night after Marley and I have sex I can't sleep. I flick through the
New Yorker
at his bedside but soon find myself compelled to creep out of bed and down the hall into Montana's room. She is fast asleep, tiny snores hopping in and out the perfect O of her pink mouth. The tutu is still hanging on her wall. Sliding past her like a cat burglar, I first touch the leotard, then I touch the lacy ruffle of the skirt. I ever so gently pick it up off the hook and carry it down to the living room. Shrugging off my pajamas, I unzip the back and before I know what I'm doing, I step into it. Somewhat big on Montana, it
stretches generously to make it almost halfway up my thighs. There the generosity expires. It stops on my thighs, refusing to budge. I am tugging at it in front of the mirror when I hear a terrible rip. I am trying to struggle out of the leotard when, like a bloodhound, Montana appears at the door. She starts to scream and Marley comes rushing down.

‘What's wrong, baby, what's wrong?'

‘Daddy! Daddy, she ripped my tutu! Daddy!' and she falls upon her father, who clutches her in his arms. They look like bear and bear cub. Bear protecting his young from a predator. The tutu is a ring around my thigh.

‘I'm sure she wasn't trying on your tutu,' says Marley, although anyone with the gift of sight can see that I was. ‘That's ridiculous. Um, Sadie?'

‘I was really good at ballet when I was her age,' I say lamely.

‘Right.'

‘I still am. Watch.' I do a little hop. It rips some more.

Montana screams, a guttural scream.

I excuse myself, go to the bathroom, step out of the tutu, and hand it back through the crack in the door. Marley takes it from me. I get my clothes, dress, and start out the door, without another word, for my apartment. He leaves her crying for a second and follows me out.

‘Sadie … are you, um, okay?'

Montana is howling. I zip my jacket up to my nose, turn around, and under my breath mutter, ‘Sheesh, what a crybaby.'

‘What did you say?' he says furiously.

I look at him a moment. ‘I was talking about myself.'

On cue, a tear slides down my cheek. He searches my face but decides to let me go. As soon as I get home, I start to absolutely bawl. I think I'm halfway through a panic attack when I get enough breath to realize why it is I'm crying so
hard. It's because I've been caught out. A kid using tears to distract from the fact that she's done something wrong. But there's no one here to distract. Sidney Katz looks right up close in my face. But Sidney Katz, though I don't like to admit it, is, after all, a cat. I laugh out loud, a hollow stage laugh that, like the tears, finds no audience. Then, tearless and laughless and, most damningly for a woman still stretching for girlhood, applauseless, I realize the other reason I had hysterics. It's a good reason: I am certain I have lost my love.

I know he is going to break up with me. I am loopy, unlovable, how could he not? And almost instantly pride kicks in, slapping heartache to the sidewalk and kicking cocky in its face. I cannot allow some twenty-eight-year-old graffiti artist to dump me. I decide I have to break up with him first. I do a Jedi mind-trick, turning on my computer, for the first time in days, and send him an e-mail.

None of this is true. I have not been meaning to say anything other than that he makes me feel beautiful and I am in love with him. I do not send my best to his delightful daughter. I hit send and go to bed, taking a couple of migraine pills to get through the night.

The next day I am woken by the ringing of my phone, which I locate under a pile of shopping bags.

I know it will be Marley, chastened by my e-mail, desperate
for my love back. Ha. Power trick. I lie on my back on the bed, wait as many rings as I can, and then pick up. ‘Hello, you.'

But it's the wrong ‘you'. It isn't Marley. It's my dad. At the sound of his voice, for the very first time in my life, I feel not comfort but panic. He hasn't much to say and I ring off as soon as I can. I don't want to keep the line tied up. Marley doesn't call. And doesn't call. And after not calling, he doesn't even call. For several days, almost on the hour, I pick up the receiver, hover my fingers over the keyboard, and then hang up. Vicki shoots me knowing looks from her desk and Ivy shoots me sympathetic looks and Holly, well, she's in and out of the office so much, I'm not sure she looks directly at any of us all week long.

I begin to feel exquisite pain, a snowflake of pain, an antique lace slip of misery, immaculate, admirable handiwork whose interwoven pattern has to it a delicate beauty.

‘I guarantee you,' says Ivy, ‘that he is feeling just as bad as you, if not more so.'

We go out for coffee. I sob my eyes out.

‘You do realize, don't you, that you're taking on his pain too. Because men can't deal with it, they give it to women.'

‘You know a lot about men and women.'

‘I'm essentially with a man, aren't I?'

‘Yeah. I guess.'

‘Look, every feeling and thought exists and if its owner doesn't absorb it and drink it, then it's floating around in the hemisphere until it gets breathed in somewhere. It has to be breathed in and exhaled as something different. If the owner doesn't do it, then whoever's close to the owner does.'

Ivy has become this very wise woman. She's stopped wearing all the fuck-you glitter and her skin is so pretty. I don't think Holly is so much more beautiful than her anymore. Not
really. It is nice to hang out with Ivy. She is … nice. I try to pay the check, but Ivy insists on getting it.

‘I do technically own the company.'

I forget that most of the time. We go back to work where all of Ivy's good advice goes out the window and I check my e-mail every five minutes. Literally.

‘You should just hack into his account,' says Vicki, looking up from her
In Style
.

‘That's awful! I would never do that.'

‘It's a woman's inalienable right to read her lover's or exlover's or future lover's personal e-mails.'

‘You spend way too much time online.'

I hear her e-mail ping. As she reads her latest message she says, ‘I bet his password is his daughter's name.'

‘That's too stupid.'

But it is. That's his password. My heart lurches as his webmail appears on my screen. All there are is e-mails from me. He has arranged them in a file. ‘The Jewess.' I have my own file! This keeps me going for the rest of the day. He cares. He really cares. I log off and my heart rate falls back to normal. But when I get into bed and try to sleep that night, it starts thumping away again. Just as I am about to pop a headache pill, Ivy rings my doorbell. It looks like she's been crying.

‘Where's Holly?'

‘I don't know. She hasn't been home. I'm used to her dallying. But this one, this one is becoming more serious, I can tell.'

‘Do you want to stay the night?'

‘No. I'm good. I'm okay. It is what it is.'

I give her a hug and she goes home. Her lack of control over her romantic situation shows me how much control I do have over mine. If I want it. When she leaves, I dial the number and this time I don't hang up. He answers sleepy. I pray he is alone.

‘Marley?'

‘Sadie!' He is pleased. He sounds happy to hear my voice!

‘I missed you, Marley. I missed you so much.'

‘If you missed me, then why didn't you just call? I would have loved to have heard from you.'

‘Because that's not what girls are supposed to do.'

‘You're not a girl. You're a woman. And that's what women do.'

‘Why didn't you call me?'

‘You told me not to. That's how men are. We do what we're told.'

‘I'm sorry I sent an e-mail breaking up with you.'

‘I was devastated.'

‘Oh, Marley. My Marley. I was scared you were going to break up with me.'

‘Sadie, it's not a contest.'

‘I know. I'm so hard to handle, I'm selfish, and I'm sad.'

‘Now I've gone and lost the best baby I ever had.'

‘You like Joni Mitchell. A guy who loves Joni Mitchell. What was I thinking, how could I lose you?'

‘You haven't lost me. I'm here, aren't I? I'm confused, but I'm here.'

‘I'm confused. Life is confusing, right? I mean, take Jolene.'

He inhales. ‘What about her?'

‘Marley, the woman I met last week is not the woman you've been describing. Not at all. It kind of freaked me out, Marley. She's really scary. You made her sound like a wood nymph.'

‘I think, Sadie, I think that all it is, is that I like to look for the good in people instead of the bad.'

I am silent, chastened.

‘She's my present because we have a child together. She's my present because she got me clean and was there when I
became the man I am. Otherwise she's my past. Come on, can you really see me riding in limos and handing her the packages of free shit she never has to pay for?'

‘No. Not at all.'

‘Well, then. Why do you think we broke up?'

I breathe a sigh of relief. But when I take the air back in, I bring with it a new fear: he doesn't want to be with her because her life is so shallow. What the hell is mine? And isn't it just getting more so? I stare at the list of lipsticks tacked above my desk. If I succeed, then I am still just a success in cosmetics, the ultimate fakery. If I fail, then I can't even succeed at the shallowest job in the world. Suddenly I don't just want to think of the next Cherries in the Snow. I want whatever it is to get nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

‘Marley, I have to pack for L.A. We're opening a Grrrl counter at Fred Segal and Holly wants me to check on it. I'm glad I called. I wouldn't want to fly without making things okay. Can you come over?'

‘I'll be right there.'

When he gets here, I open the door and start crying too hard to look at him. It is really unattractive, snot and red eyes.

‘I just really love you. I really do. It hurts. I don't like it.'

‘Who wants to live a life with the edges taken off? Not a writer.'

‘Oh, God.' I throw my arms around his neck and he carries me into the bedroom. And he makes it all go away. And I make it go away too. There is no job, no selling out, there is even, he confesses later, no Montana.

‘You should call Jolene when you're in L.A. Really you should. She'd be very offended if you didn't.'

Of course I have absolutely no intention of doing any such thing.

Marley drops me at the airport, waving at me as I wheel in and out of people with my green luggage. Then I am buckled into my seat, flicking through
Elle
to see where Grrrl is featured this month, when I come across an article about L.A.'s top breast-implant specialist, Dr. Ron Kitchen. I keep coming back to it, and when I am eventually able to put it down, I pick up the
Star
. The cover trails a new look. The new look is apparently pedophilia because all of the celebrities they feature are under twenty. Apparently one of the Olsen twins is anorexic. They seem to have picked a sister at random because they both look hella-skinny to me. On the next page I discover that teen sensation Lindsay Lohan may have had implants. I look at the photo. Real or fake, they are quite marvelous, jutting from her halter top like round scoops of ice cream. She is seventeen. I am twenty-four, which is almost twenty-seven, which is ten years older than her. When I'm not feeling competitive with eight-year-olds, I'm being competitive with Hollywood box-office behemoths.