Cherries In The Snow (27 page)

‘Your friend from school?'

‘Yeah, she likes it, so I pretend. But really it scares me.'

‘Listen. Life is scary. Let's talk about the things that make it better. The little things.'

‘A rubber ducky in the bath?'

‘Pomegranate seeds spat on the sidewalk.'

‘Spilling berry juice on a white shirt.'

‘Really?'

‘I love it!'

‘The
National Enquirer
on a Friday.'

‘My mommy says that's the devil.'

‘It is. The devil has all the best shots of movie stars looking fat.'

‘Your tummy is flat.'

‘So?'

‘And mine is fat.'

‘Montana, what the hell are you talking about?'

‘It sticks out.'

‘Your tummy sticks out because you're a little girl.' I am really shocked. I knew she had a self-esteem problem, but I thought she had
too much
self-esteem.

‘When I was a little girl, I was ugly and gawky and had a beautiful mother and my daddy thought I was beautiful. Your daddy loves you so much.'

‘I know.'

Marley comes out with the boxed-up profiteroles, which I have forgotten all about. I feel awkward with them.

‘We'll have these later.'

She eats them in bed. She lets me lie with her over the covers. ‘You're cozy. I'll bring you your toothbrush.'

‘I'd like to stay the night. Is that okay?'

‘Yes.'

‘See you in the morning. And we'll have a lovely time.'

‘Hmmm. We'll have an okay time.'

I shrugged. ‘Good enough.'

Then I got into bed with Marley.

‘I love you, Sadie.'

I exhale a long breath, long enough to wear as a wraparound silk scarf, flapper-girl style. I love him too.

Love in my heart, puffing it up like lips kissed red and full, I am sent back to Los Angeles to oversee the placement of the first ever Grrl billboard West Coast, right on the Sunset Strip.

‘Give her the corporate credit card this time,' says Ivy, ‘so she can do what she likes.'

Something about flying back to the scene of my last neurotic breakdown causes me to slip backward in my trust. As soon as we land at LAX, the full heart of love starts to lose air and all I can think about is that Page Six story on Marley and Vicki and Marley being so very handsome and so very alone in New York City without me. I believe him that nothing happened with him and Vicki, I do. I have to believe him. But it's unleashed a new crazy in me. I want to check his e-mail. I need to check his e-mail. I need to know I'm right to trust him, to put all of my trust in him. I need to know I'm right to have real orgasms instead of fake ones and to give him all my heart. I think about it the whole cab ride from the airport to the hotel and as soon as I get there I plug in my laptop. This is wrong wrong wrong. Don't do it, Sadie, don't do it. I go to AOL. I look at it and look at it. Then I type in her name: MONTANA. And Marley's in-box comes up. There are no unread messages. But there are three sent messages. Two to me, both professing love and lust. And one … one to someone else.

Oh, my God. I don't know who Portia is, but I know that her breasts don't sag. I want to call my father, but I can't collapse on him the way I want to over the phone. He can't help me. I am already crying. His voice will just make me lose it completely. Instinctively, I call Holly. I dial the number and then I hang up. She is too preoccupied. She won't care.

I grab my diary and search desperately for the number I need. The only one that can help. I find it, where I made a note in my diary, and punch in the numbers like I'm in a fight with the phone.

‘Hello, my name is Sadie Steinberg, and I need to see Dr Ron Kitchen as soon as possible.' I have the corporate credit card in my trembling hand.

‘He has a two-year waiting list.'

‘I don't care, this is an emergency.'

‘Hold on, let me get the other line.'

She clicks away and I try not to sob. Then she clicks back.

‘I guess it's your lucky day. That was a cancellation. Can you make it here by eleven?'

‘Where are you?'

She gives me the address and I jump into a taxi. Looking out the window at the ice-blue L.A. sky, I am sure I see a witch on a broom point at me and cackle as she writes the words ‘Surrender Dorothy!' I look behind me until the words begin to vapourize. There's too much traffic, so I run the last block. I get there, panting, at one minute past eleven. My chest is still rising up and down when the doctor examines it.

‘What I would do,' he says, taking out a pen, ‘is lift here
and here' – he marks my skin with swift stripes – ‘and fill you out on the top half of the breast.' His skin, at once deeply tan and completely unlined, has a painted-on sheen to it. His short brown hair and chiseled cheekbones suggest that this man who carves soap stars was once one himself. The walls of his office, like his waiting room, are painted blue with hovering clouds and pert-titted Greek goddesses. Or given their blond pubic hair, Nordic goddesses. ‘This needs to be raised,' he continues, the word
need
making a mockery of all the times Marley kissed them, ‘I would pull the muscle back and reattach it behind your neck, almost like a bra, but one underneath your skin …' His phone line buzzes, and as he answers, he continues to mark me with his free hand. ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh,' he says into the phone, then turning to me, ‘Excuse me, Saucy.' ‘It's
Sadie.
' ‘Excuse me, Sadie. I'll be back in a minute.'

‘Saucy? This guy has done one too many porn stars. I look up at the Nordic goddesses and suddenly Marley is in the mural too, entwined in their oil-painted arms, his fingers wrapped in their hair. Oh, my God, I am going insane. Ten minutes pass and the doctor does not return. I start to hyperventilate. I look up at the mural where Marley is now energetically fucking one Nordic goddess from behind and then I look down at the markings on my breasts. They rearrange themselves to form the word
ugly
. This is it. I have lost my mind. I scramble for my cell phone and flick through the list of numbers.

I don't know who to call. I don't know who to call. I don't know who to call.

So I call Jolene.

‘Please help me, I'm in a plastic surgeon's office, Dr Ron Kitchen, I've made a terrible mistake, I wanted to have my boobs done, but… I gotta get out of here. Wait, he's coming back.'

I close the phone and sit up rigidly, trying to ignore Marley's sex show as the doctor draws more lines.

‘While we're at it, you could also use some lipo here …' He moves his hand to my hip, and cold as it is, it gives me a flash to Marley's warmth, his hands around my waist. The doctor is at it another ten minutes, me biting my lip not to cry, he never once asking what it is I want as he moves his pen down my body.

All of a sudden I hear a commotion. Then they burst into the room. Jolene and Montana, a receptionist chasing them, like Batman and Robin trying to lose the Joker.

‘What are you doing?' Jolene asks me. ‘What are you doing?' She barks at the doctor. ‘Get away from her.' Montana stares him down.

‘This girl has two of the most beautiful breasts I have ever seen in my life. You people are sick fucks. You take a perfect twenty-four-year-old girl and tell her she needs work? Look to your souls, you bastards!'

‘Put your clothes on, Sadie.' Jolene points to my sundress on the chair. Montana hands it to me, helps pull it over my head. Jolene stays eye-to-eye with the doctor. Then she takes Montana's hand and my hand, and leads us out of the office and through the waiting area, where the receptionist is still flailing and the doctor follows us right to the door.

Montana turns as we walk through it and hisses to the receptionist, the doctor, and the assembled
Playboy
hopefuls: ‘Fuckers!'

In the truck we drive at breakneck speed back to their house.

‘What were you thinking? What on earth were you thinking?' screeches Jolene.

‘But, Jolene, you've had surgery.'

There are tears streaming down her face as she answers, ‘And I am not proud of it.'

‘Mommy, don't cry,' says Montana, and pats her hair.

‘I got my nose job when I was nineteen years old with money I saved from stripping. Crappy doctor that was. I got the corrective surgery when I was thirty-nine and a millionaire. I got lipo when I became the poster girl for my own corporation. You think I would give a shit otherwise? I am stuck, I am stuck in this hall of mirrors because of all the money I got under the mattress.'

‘Is that really how you feel?'

‘Yeah. It is.'

Montana takes a tissue and delicately wipes her mother's eyes. There are some mascara stains, so I fish in my purse and find a sachet of Walk of Shame. I tidy her up. As I do so, I sneak a peek at Montana and whisper urgently, when I think her attention is distracted, ‘He's cheating.'

Jolene's eyes widen. ‘Bullshit.'

‘No. I know that he is.'

‘No. I know that boy and he may be many things, but he is not a cheater. Whatever you think you know, you're wrong.'

I want to show her the e-mail, but then I would have to admit I hacked in. Even though she's just rescued me from one of the most humiliating situations I've ever been in, telling her I've hacked into the account of her child's father just seems too awful. Maybe it's because it involves the written word and somewhere in my rotting heart I still think of myself as a writer. I file it away to break down over when I return to New York.

When we get back to the house, we all climb into the reclining bed, Montana in between us, and watch
The Little Mermaid
. Jolene looks past Montana's head and smiles at me as the little mermaid sings a song with a Jamaican crab.

‘Now she,' says Jolene, ‘has a rockin' body.' We laugh. Different laughs – hers throaty and rude, mine high and needy – same joke.

I don't read any magazines on the flight home. I make notes for lipsticks the whole way. It's hard to think of the new Cherries in the Snow in California, where all the women are so tan and wearing pale lip gloss. Although I have sent him an e-mail to say that I will be fine on my own, Marley is there to collect me at the terminal. He stinks of paint. It has been such a long weekend and my eyes are on fire enough without that paint stinging them.

‘Fuck off!' I shout, the other arrivals staring at us. ‘Get the fuck away from me!'

‘What's going on?' He blanches. ‘What happened?'

‘You know what happened. I don't love you anymore. I don't think I ever did. I don't love you and I sure as hell don't love your freakin' daughter. We have no future together and I never want to see you again.'

‘Oh,' he says, and, ‘Oh.' I can see that it takes the wind right out of his sails. His big brown eyes are holding back the floodgates, I can see that, and he turns and leaves before I can watch them burst. I take a cab home. I cry all the way. Inside the apartment, I collapse onto Sidney Katz, weeping into his fur, and he lets me, taking the tears stoically, until I am spent. I feed him, pet him, and head to work. Stopping at the door, I say, ‘Thank you, Sidney,' and I think he nods like ‘It's nothing.'

The office feels like a ghost town. Holly and Ivy are out to lunch, though,
not
, notes Vicki dramatically, with each other. She asks me if I want to go to Sephora with her. I hate her too, but I am feeling so low I say yes. I scoop up a hand basket at the entrance and start dropping things in it faster than you can say ‘Alpha-hydroxy exfoliating beads.' We traipse up and down the aisles, first the Benefit counter, where I pick up two wands of their Bad Girl mascara, then Nars, where I choose a green eye shadow they called Sea Foam, but I would have named Cabbage Patch Kid. Then we cut across to Paula Dorf (the great thing about shopping at Sephora with Vicki is that it shuts her up), where I grab their mattifying oil and a nifty little product that converts eye shadow to liquid liner. I pay for my loot before Vicki has finished in the Hard Candy aisle. The Spanish girls who work at the register have been ordered, I think, to look French, their hair slicked down into severe chignons.

I stand near the exit and spray a perfume on myself while I wait for Vicki to pay. Maybe if I smelled of my real smell instead of Versace vanilla, things wouldn't turn out like they do. Because that's when I see him, walking toward the exit, a little black Sephora bag in his hand. The girls in Sephora don't watch CNN. The middle-aged women do and they eye him, flashing menopausal at the Dr. Perricone eye-cream counter.

Isaac sees me. ‘Sadie Steinberg!' He laughs. I laugh too. I know who I am.

‘Isaac.'

Immediately his hand is in mine, presumptuous. And warm. Vicki backs away. She is already on her way back to the office to tell. She will tattle tales until it becomes appropriate again, an old lady with nothing better to do than peering through her window, the voice of the twitching net curtains that populated the London suburb I left so long ago.

Isaac does not let go of my hand and I look at his hand before I look up at him. Long fingers, slim; he's usually on a diet like my mother, but it only ever seems to affect his extremities, his fingers and toes. I remember instantly what he looks like naked. I do not let go of his hand as I look up. The hair more salty, less peppery; still a good-looking Jew.

‘What are you doing here?' he asks, gesturing around Sephora.

‘I live in New York City and I'm a girl. And you?'

I have embarrassed him, which I regret straightaway. I want him to be an arrogant dick like he always was. I want him to be the opposite of Marley. Or the way Marley was before I knew he was screwing around. Fuck, they're all the same in the end, so you might as well go home with the obvious bastard instead of the one who throws yoga in your face before he breaks your heart.