Cherries In The Snow (4 page)

Holly knows style like ice cream knows sugar. In the last year alone, she has made thick gray tights look cool, not to mention orange nail polish, large polka dots, and Converse sneakers.

‘Man,' she added as she worked, ‘you're going to get at least eight Vicodin out of this.'

I looked down at the bloodstained sheet. The hospital would wash it out and another person with a different injury would end up lying here, encased in the ghost of my disastrous love affair. It made me smile. As Holly rouged my cheeks, I must have looked like a corpse, but I felt more alive than I had in forever.

I thought of the mess, the love, the intensity. Me, a real-life Lolita with my own older man wrapped up in knots over me. When I first started seeing Isaac, Holly had found me a pair of rose-tinted heart-shaped Lolita sunglasses at a thrift store and left them on my bed as a joke.

‘I needed these years ago!' I'd laughed and put them on. I ended up wearing them during sex, but they kept clunking Isaac's nose and I took them off. I have no clue where they are now.

‘I told him I didn't want him here. I told him I never wanted to see him again.'

‘Huh. I don't know what took you so long.'

I do: A writer! A real writer, putting his writer's mind next
to mine. Older, wiser, connected. Always encouraging me. In which case, why had I not written anything during the whole time I'd been with him? Nothing. Nada. Not a jot.

Holly looked at herself in her compact mirror, then snapped it shut like a castanet. She kissed me on the forehead. ‘Happy birthday, my darling.'

I had forgotten. I could feel it on my forehead, her lipstick kiss, the seal of something that had been decided and set in writing, but what?

I first came to Manhattan from a London suburb that smells funny but contains no funny people. I miss it not a bit. London was a doctor's waiting room for New York, full of old dog-eared copies of the
Tatler
, each of which, in a conundrum worthy of the
X-Files
, you have already read though it is a magazine you make a point of never reading. The only thing I miss about London is my father.

He is so kind, my father. Although he is by birth a Turkish Jew, he's also a Buddhist without knowing it. Separated from him, I have transferred most of my love to Sidney Katz, who is lounging on my sofa and of whom I now demand: ‘If I'm in love with you, then why aren't you in love with me? I don't believe I could feel the connection this strongly if you weren't feeling anything in return.'

Syllogistic logic, it's true, but I am desperate. No response. I try a new tack, lowering my voice to a Marilyn quaver. ‘Please love me?'

Blank stare. This isn't washing. My volume control slips.

‘God, you're so cool. You're so bloody cool, aren't you? You don't need anyone. Well, guess what? You need me! I picked you up off the street and brought you into my home and I never did nothing but treat you right.'

I sound like a B-list country singer – ramblin' Sadie Steinberg, the Jewish cowgirl – and still he isn't budging.
Humiliation burning in my throat, I return to washing the dishes, scrubbing each plate with a force more appropriate to a criminal removing bloodstains, as opposed to Ding-Dong crumbs. I never wash dishes except as a last resort. It's a political belief I hold that women, as an act of protest, should not do housework or cook, except breakfast, at which I excel. Pancakes, French toast, omelets. Problem is, if I cook I have to wash up, so I prefer not to have men stay. The men I date, they tend to have better kitchens than me anyway.

Generally with dishes, I put them in the fridge until they're piled up too high to fit and then I throw some of them away. I have the good grace to be ashamed of tossing out perfectly good plates, so I do it late at night, under cover of darkness and dropping off clothes for the homeless at the same time. This plate tossing – to conjure, falsely, a little Greek merriment – is a monthly ritual that smashes a little piece of my self-respect each time I do it. But I can't stop.

So there I am, washing the dishes, needing Sidney Katz to notice me. The act of scrubbing seems foreign, like trying to make a girl come. How could I possibly know what's too hard or too soft? There's nothing wrong with people who enjoy housework. I just don't feel
that way
about it myself.

I peek down and sideways through the triangle of space between my bosom and my arm. His eyes are boring holes in my back. I drop a fork and spin around to face him, drunken Sue Ellen style. ‘Fucking hell, I love you!'

He looks at me quizzically.

‘Jesus God in heaven, I want to have your babies.'

He starts to back away.

‘Ten or eleven. Or twelve.'

Horror in his eyes.

‘I want to have ten or eleven or twelve kittens with you.'

Sidney Katz leaps into his carpeted cat tree, the highest shelf, away from me.

‘We could give away the ones we didn't want.' Have them take dirty plates with them. ‘Think about it.'

His eyebrow whiskers twitch and he appears to be thinking. Dad helped me rescue Sidney the week he spent with me in New York. I see my father in Sidney's face.

‘May I eat your paw?'

From over his balcony, he proffers a paw wanly and I put it in my mouth.

‘Oh, Sidney Katz, you are too delicious.'

Inventory: I have a cat that looks like a cow – big splotches of black on white, big eyes as though he's perpetually about to be slaughtered. I spend sixty dollars a month on cat food, which like all the other nourishment in this apartment comes delivered and paid for by credit card. Sidney is one of many cats I have fostered in my home. I've brought them in from their hiding places beneath parked cars, behind trash cans, inside discarded boxes, and nurtured them back to health before placing them with good homes. But Sidney's the one that stayed. He's the only one I associate with my father.

I have forty-seven bras. My mother bought me the wrong bra size for years. Until I left home I had four-boob syndrome: enormous cleavage under all my T-shirts, bulging, uncomfortable, overflowing, and messy. You know when you see your house is a mess, there's no way you can get your mind clean and focused? For some of us it's our bodies that are the clothes on the floor, the haphazard towels, the dishes in the sink. That explains my bad grades and the way I couldn't look the teacher in the eye. When I left home, I got the right bra, and then I couldn't stop – that's my bra problem, which is my money problem.

I've slept with eight men. I have never had great sex. So what am I doing? I ask myself that question every time, which may be why my sex life is blah. It's hurt. It's been uncomfortable. It's been humiliating. It's been dull. It's been athletic. It's been amusing. But it hasn't been that thing, that life-changing, problem-quashing big event, and I feel like a failed feminist, unable to have orgasms on command as a political statement. I always think: The next one, the next one. I have little food in my cupboard save a half-loaf of white bread and one jar of honey. In the fridge I have a mango – or is it a papaya? – and a bottle of deep red nail polish. I have four undeveloped rolls of film dating back at least two boyfriends. I am far too frightened to get them developed, nor can I throw them away, so they languish on the shelf, photo-shop purgatory. I have shelves. A few. But not enough to keep the magazines from piling up, the CDs from spilling over, the books from resting on the toilet back.

I have a pretty great apartment. When I first moved here, I lived in a sublet share in Brooklyn and would ride into Manhattan on the subway dreaming of my own place. As much as I wanted to live in the city, the ride over the bridge was worth not living there. I'd lose myself in the graffitied buildings that loom as you enter Manhattan, spacing out in the spray-can swirls and insults, some of them beautiful, some of them reeking of boredom. During my second week I spotted that someone had graffitied the building next to the Jehovah's Witness Clock Tower with the word
Montana
in huge baby-pink letters. ‘Welcome to Montana,' it says, in the signature style of ‘Welcome to New York.' Weird. But I liked its bubbly letters. They seemed joyful and always left me in a good mood to house hunt. When I found this apartment, I was sure it would be a great place to write.

I should be writing. But for now there are simply too many things in my head:

The primary two, besides a mouse in my apartment, are that my British accent is going and so are my breasts. The decolletage and decorous inflection are my trademarks here and I cannot bear to lose them, though I know I will. Cabdrivers keep asking me if I'm Australian. Fucking Australian! A land so rife with killer spiders that I can hardly stand to say its name. But it's true, after five years in New York my accent is no longer British, not quite. I hear myself go
up
at the end of sentences where I used to go down, British shame versus the American need to be liked.

Then the breasts, two round spheres that I have always found every bit as comforting as my lovers do. If I could rest my weary head on them I would. I'm twenty-four; how can they be sagging? You don't see the difference, you swear. Fine. But I can see it. I can feel it. It's not right. When I was seventeen, they buoyed me through life like floatation devices. It isn't fair. Life isn't fair, I know, and there are far greater unfairnesses, it's true, but this is my unfairness. And I have been nurturing it for months like an expensive whiskey.

I told my mum when she called to see if I'd gotten her Christmas card.

‘I bet they're fine.' She laughed. ‘If they're like mine, they'll be great for another two decades.' They're not like hers.

I told my doctor when she was doing a biannual checkup.

‘They're healthy,' she snapped.

But who, at twenty-four, would not exchange health for beauty?

The only one who will tell the truth is Holly.

‘Look at them, Holly. NO, LOOK AT THEM!'

‘Hmmm,' she says sagely like a Swiss scientist stroking his
beard as he figures out an equation, ‘we'll get to the bottom of this.'

So now we're in her office conference room, where she has not one but two DVD players and one is paused on Angelina Jolie's nude scene in
Gia
(1998) and the other is paused on her nude scene in
Original Sin
(2001), and me, I'm nude from the waist up, standing in between them. Her eyes move from one screen to the other, in the manner of a football fan watching a penalty kick on action replay.

‘See!' she shrieks. ‘They aren't as perky as they were in
Gia
, but what was she, nineteen then? They aren't as high up in
Original Sin
, you can see that. But they're still awesome. Her tummy was bigger in
Gia
, wasn't it? So cute. Now go stand right next to the screen.'

She gasps. ‘See! See. They're
exactly
the same, they've moved exactly the same amount. They have sagged, that's for sure, but no more than Angelina's, and you can't say fairer than that.'

And because she has answered my question, because she can answer any question, I ask the first thing that pops into my head. ‘Should I adopt a Cambodian baby?'

‘Should we have Thai for lunch? Yes.' She picks up the phone and orders as I hustle back into my clothes.

‘Isaac was in an English paper today, the
Telegraph
,' says my mum, her voice staccato in place of the stilettos she can no longer fit her chubby feet into. ‘He attacked Colin Powell again, quite witty, I must say.'

‘Great.'

‘I will never understand about you and him.'

‘Me and Colin Powell or me and Isaac?'

‘Now don't joke, because I wouldn't so much as put it past you.'

With all the celebs my mum screwed when she was young, you'd think she would be proud of me. But I think somewhere deep down she still sees herself as a groupie and me, not as her daughter but as younger competition. This particular cloudless morning, our topic is so banal that it was threatening to become deep.

‘I get uncomfortable when I read stories about Jennifer Lopez,' says my mother, ‘because, you know, she's you, with better access.'

A pouting French waif of a waitress deposits my mushroom omelet in front of me with that Gallic combination of insouciance and loathing.

‘Hello, I want to marry you! Go away! Hello, I love you, goodbye! Hello, Ben Affleck, I want to marry you and make
children with you! Oh, go away, I'm bored of you. She's clearly deranged.'

Then comes her punch line.

‘But at least she sticks with men her own age.'

‘Yeah, yeah, Mum. Not this again.'

‘Not this again? We have been having this talk since you were thirteen.'

It's true. My romantic choices were preordained by a first edition copy of Nancy Friday's
My Secret Garden
, which my mother had left lying around. In it, women discuss their sexual fantasies. But it was published in 1973, and though the fantasies were nothing that wouldn't pass muster today, the heroes were horribly out-of-date:

‘And then Cat Stevens presses his erect manhood against my thigh.'

‘Martin Sheen buys me a drink, his hand creeping higher and higher up my skirt.'

‘Elliott Gould takes me tenderly by the hand and asks, “Have you met my friend Donald Sutherland?” '

It was an anachronistic book for a thirteen-year-old to read at the end of the twentieth century. The fantasy men had gone on to other drugs, were in and out of sobriety, career collapse and revival, other religions, other worlds. And yet I still have a soft spot for the heartthrobs of yesterday. My first sexual feelings were about Christopher Lee, who, even when he was young, was still very old. Isaac and I talked about old movies and about Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Kris Kristofferson and I validated him because I didn't make him feel old, or so I thought, but actually I did because he felt nostalgic for them whereas I was just discovering them. He didn't believe me when I swore that you could feel nostalgic for things you'd never experienced in the first place.