Cherries In The Snow (5 page)

The movie star I dated came pretty close to being my perfect
man for a while. I'm not going to tell you who he is; suffice it to say that he's the greatest actor of his generation.

‘Mum, he's the new Brando.'

‘
I
did the old Brando. That was a challenge.'

I tell her the details of my love life that you're not supposed to tell your mum, not because we're so close but because I don't care what she thinks of me. I really don't give a shit. I told her about the time I tried anal sex.

‘Oh, really,' she said. ‘What did you think?' Like it was something that had been recommended by Oprah's Book Club.

I told her about the comedian I was dating, who, whether we met in public or in private, used to greet me by grabbing my ass and murmuring, ‘Mmm, you're like dessert.' At the time I assumed he meant I was a guilty pleasure. I tolerated it although in the back of my mind I was, like, Hey, would you squeeze the profiteroles? But now that I think about it, he was saying that a little of me goes a long way and that he felt ashamed and slightly sick after devouring me. These affairs: They never lasted more than a few months.

Then Isaac happened. And for a year I would have dropped anything and everything, wherever, whenever to be with him. He is a brilliant man.

When I'd tell my dad what crimes Isaac had committed that day, I sounded like I was commenting, blow by blow, on a star wrestler: ‘Then Isaac came up from behind with a broken dinner engagement!' ‘Then Isaac, completely without warning, went to visit his brother for five days!' I'd ring Dad, weeping softly from behind the locked bathroom door as Isaac banged on it halfheartedly a few times and then went back to bed. For months my father had been pleading with me.

‘Cry over an artist. Cry over a playwright. Please don't cry over a journalist.' He was talking about himself, the
accountant. My father's self-loathing is beyond measure, and it makes me love him more.

‘He's a political writer, Dad.'

‘He's not a writer. He's a huckster.'

My mum, ever the erstwhile groupie, shagged Woody Allen in 1973. As I said, Mum had sex with a lot of famous people. It was in the olden days and I don't think all of them treated her that well: They two-timed her or didn't call her when they should have. That's what my dad is really talking about when a celebrity diatribe spews forth. When Mum fell in love with Dad, she felt compelled to tell him exactly who she'd been with and what they'd done, and really, when he gets cross, he's just being chivalrous. He'll see a celebrity on TV, burst into a rage, and I'll know immediately that the man shagged my mum. It's frightening the people she's slept with:

‘Frank Sinatra is crap!'

‘Merle Haggard is crap!'

‘Robert Evans is crap!'

‘Jon Voight is crap on a stick!'

‘Maurice Chevalier is crap!' That was the worst. That completely ruined
Gigi
for me. Him thanking heaven for little girls and me knowing what my mum had been up to. Mum was very pretty back then. Very Nordic ice queen. I think she was amazed when she fell in love with my father, an accountant and not even a wealthy one, and moved to London to live with him. Now she has this insane love-hate relationship with celebrity because it meant so much to her and yet, in the end, it wasn't there for her and Dad was.

A big part of me wishes she had found a way for me not to have been born in England. I can't remember ever living there, although my accent, my hang-ups, and all my documents say I did for nineteen years. When I go back, I see endless,
gray sky and cringe: It looks like a dumpy drunk girl getting naked at a party.

‘I'm going to London!,' friends will tell me, as though they are impressing me with something luxurious. They think ‘I'm going to London!' is like a mink coat draped across a naked body. And then when they return:

‘It was very expensive.'

‘It rained the whole time.'

‘They talk funny. But not in a cute way.'

I was thinking today how Isaac ended in January and wondering if my despair might not have been seasonal rather than romantic. When I met him, I was wearing a spaghetti strap dress and dainty pink sandals, dressed up for Bruce Springsteen. Toward the end I was wearing long johns under my jeans, a turtleneck, moon boots, and a parka. I thought he had transformed me into a schlump, but maybe I should have just looked out the window. All that seething rage and discomfort was probably just the oppressive heat of my radiator.

In the end, it was a haircut that propelled me back into the world of men. Holly came home from work one day wielding black dye and a big pair of scissors. While Ivy and I were busy laughing at a Creed video, she sat behind me and cut four inches off. Then, while we were mocking Jay-Z, she slid in front of me and snipped quietly until I had thick bangs that stopped just above my eyebrows. Then she dragged me away from a Sting video, absolutely ripe for mockery, bent me back over the sink, and dyed my bleached hair the color of a beetle. As she blew it all straight, Holly filled in my lips with a brick-red lipstick. By now, Ivy had turned off the television and was standing before me squealing with delight.

‘I look like an East Village Bettie Page wannabe,' I said. ‘I know it.'

‘You don't,' answered Ivy, quieter than I had ever heard her before, ‘you look like a French starlet.' Amazingly, she was right.

It was a completely magical haircut that made men stop dead in the streets, in the supermarket, at the bodega. Men of every color, shape, and income. Some whistled, some shouted obscenities, others handed me their business cards. Some actually had decent, interesting lines.

‘Pleiades,' said a smooth-talking yogi at the bodega.

‘What?'

‘The freckles on your arm. They're in the shape of my favorite constellation: Pleiades. The plow.'

He was handsome, with close-cropped black hair, dark eyes, dark skin. He was buying soy milk, which I was surprised to see they carried, as I loaded up on Ding-Dongs. He had just come from yoga, he told me. ‘Excuse me. I feel a little blissed out.'

I couldn't see his body, as everything he wore was huge, his T-shirt and pants bagging ridiculously. He looked like a child in them and I couldn't guage his age … twenty-eight, twenty-nine? Too young for me. I wavered between the good looks and the soy milk, looking from one to the other and in a snap decided that we could never be. The way soy milk sits on coffee, flaking, no matter how you stir it. The bliss. No. It wouldn't work. He gave me his number, but I never called because if he looked closely enough at me in the first three seconds to see Pleiades the plow, he'd probably end up wanting me to spread my legs while he stared at my vagina. I've had one of those before. Knelt there, peering with such intensity that I never wanted to have sex again. I felt a little wistful as I left the yogi, handsome and blissful, but it was for the best.

‘Louise Brooks,' gasped a Frenchman in a coffeeshop. He looked like a Frenchman from central casting. As we talked, I imagined a beret hovering above his head like a halo. He wanted to take me to a Louise Brooks festival at the revival cinema. But I knew I would feel stupid, like someone going to an 'NSYNC concert with ‘ 'NSYNC' written on her cheek.

I've never been one to mind when men whistle from time to time. I'm the sort of girl who feels validated when a guy looks down her blouse. Plus, it seemed like a waste not to do anything with the haircut. Given all the attention, I even started to fear the moment when it began to grow out, when
the roots kicked in, that we might never be able to get it exactly right again. So I started dating.

There was this amazing restaurant mogul I really liked and he liked me back. Even though he was a millionaire, he always wore jeans and a sweatshirt: on our first official date he had on his University of Syracuse sweater. He was one of those men whose looks were enhanced by having gone gray too early and he looked a little like the young Steve Martin. But instead of him making me laugh, I kept cracking him up. He'd dated a lot of starlets, so every other sentence I said made him gasp with amazement, and he even took out a notebook once or twice to jot down something I'd said.

‘I have to remember that,' he said, smiling and putting his Mont Blanc pen back in his pocket.

He told me that he had been compelled, just from seeing the back of my head, to introduce himself to me at Magnolia Bakery. Things had been going really well.

And then one night, as he was leaning in toward me in the darkened VIP room of his latest success story, I whipped out a baby photo of myself and made him look at it. The lights were dim and all around older men had their hands on the thighs of young women – models/actresses, whatever. That title kills me. No boundaries in their job descriptions or in their lives, the girls around me melted onto the men who touch them until the men just wanted to scrape them off. I knew he thought I wasn't a whatever. He thought I was interesting, different.

‘No, look again. Aren't I cute?'

He looked at my hair. ‘You are so cute.'

‘No,' I said, angry, ‘in the photo.'

‘Yes, you're cute.'

‘How cute?'

‘Extremely.'

In the picture I was two years old and my hair was a wild mess of ringlets. I was wearing a pink-and-white-gingham romper and my dad as always was nestling me on his chest, my curls against his thick chest hair.

‘That's my dad.' He was wearing an open-neck shirt.

‘I'll call you,' said the restaurant mogul as he walked me to my door that night. He didn't try to come in.

He never did call me, and rather than feeling hurt or humiliated, I instead felt strangely compelled to e-mail him photos of me as a baby until he had his assistant call and ask me to stop.

Not long into the short-hairdo era, Holly and Ivy took me out to dinner and asked me if I wanted to work for them. Coming in such close proximity to my near-death experience, I felt like how Elizabeth Taylor must have done when she won the Oscar for
Butterfield 8
. I accepted gratefully, tearfully, and immediately knocked back a couple of glasses of champagne so I could forget to feel undeserving.

I had been informally helping the gals come up with product names for Grrrl ever since they started the company. I thought of it like a game of charades or word association. I always loved party games and this just seemed like an extension of that, but with futuristic lip-plumping technology. ‘Pink – fuchsia – shocking – sexy – ass-slapping – Ass-Slapping Pink!' Ass-Slapping Pink was an immediate hit. I wondered, when Ivy congratulated me on its success, whether the women wearing it followed the instruction as they wore it. I wondered just how much power a girl who names makeup might be able to wield.

That Friday I went into Grrrl's Fifth Avenue offices and signed a contract, which felt a little strange. Although the lawyer who oversaw it had a gray suit and immobile features, Guns N' Roses was playing in the background and the pen I signed with had purple ink. I was contracted exclusively to Grrrl cosmetics for one year and they would pay me forty thousand dollars plus health benefits. A single girl can live on
that in Manhattan as long as she only eats two meals a day. I picked breakfast and lunch. For dinner I'd usually have a bowl of Cheerios.

On my first day of work, I wore a black skirt, black jacket, white blouse, and patent-leather heels. I even walked to the office in Reebok sneakers then changed into the heels, like a real nine-to-fiver. The gals looked at me with disbelief.

‘What are you wearing?'

‘Office clothes?'

The next day I wore a denim miniskirt, thick turquoise wool tights, and a top I had copied from a Stella McCartney window display. It was just a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt with a lot of colored circles on the front. I sat in my apartment and drew them in pencil with a compass and then colored them in with paint from a hardware store. The gals thought the top was great and immediately set out to rip off two of the paint colors for their new mascara.

I loved my job immediately. It felt like life was a constant Rorschach test. Look at this lipstick. What do you see? And what is a Rorschach test, or indeed any quiz with multiple answers, but a chance to talk about yourself? My first week at Grrrl, I named the nail polishes for the spring season: Fragile Ego, Wallflower, Sophisticated Inebriate, and Jailbait. It was the party collection.

Men from the computer software company downstairs were always stopping by to chat to me or Vicki. I was jealous that all the men loved her.

‘They do not,' demurred Holly. ‘I don't find her attractive at all. You can't be five foot nothing and built like a child and then go around wearing ballet slippers and barrettes in your hair.'

‘You can,' I sniffed. ‘Almost every girl in the whole of the East Village wears ballet slippers and barrettes.'

‘But they have tattoos.' Ivy frowned. Her frowns came few and far between and her smiles have carved deep grooves beneath her cheeks. ‘They have piercings and their thongs peek out over their denim skirts. Vicki has that clear skin and glossy hair. She's always so nicely turned out, like her mother dressed her. I see this invisible stage mother instructing her to do pirouettes in the middle of parties.'

‘I've never seen her pirouette, but I have seen her do kind of a scissor kick on the sidewalk.'

‘Yeah. I hate that. I don't want to be mean, but she's thirty years old. She seems real attention-seeking. All I'm saying, since you brought it up, is that any man who is attracted to her would have to be a pervert.'

If you think it sounds brutal to describe a thirty-year-old woman as old, you should see the things I read in my mum's diary about the thirteen-year-old Led Zeppelin groupies who laughed at her when she was twenty-four. When she was my age.