Fat Chance (12 page)

“Now you tell me.” He looks into my eyes. “To think that all these years I've been hangin' out with the wrong women. So tell me all about the foods of love.” He feigns a naughty grin. “What do you eat to fan the flames?”

“Fowl for foul play. No…ah, let's see, there are lots. Seafood, because of the high phosphorus content, shark-fin soup, don't ask me why, but the Chinese swear by it. Then there's the Japanese fugu fish. You do know about it?”

He shakes his head.

“Aka the puffer fish. It's been a gourmet food of love in Japan for centuries. But there's a catch—not to pun—if it's not prepared properly, it's deadly. It's supposed to be so lethal that just about an ounce can kill more than fifty thousand diners. And, by the way, there are no antidotes to the poi
son. By law in Japan, it can only be made by chefs who have taken a course and received a license, and only about thirty percent of the chefs pass the exam. But that hasn't stopped unlicensed chefs from preparing it, so you're playing Russian roulette if you order it. But I guess the game and the danger turns people on.”

Taylor takes out his cell: “Hello, Japan Airlines?”

“There's more,” I say. “The most potent aphrodisiac they say is made by mixing a teaspoonful of its testes with hot sake. Sounds yummy, right?”

“You think Wolfgang knows how to make fugu?” He slaps his hand on the table. “I'm in. Fugu sake this minute.” He holds his hand up with a dramatic flourish as if he were summoning a waiter. I'm enjoying this.

“What else, what other foods?”

“I'll give you the column as soon as I write it. I can't give away all my secrets.”

“Promise me you'll make me a Valentine's dinner using all that stuff. A steaming pot of it, okay?”

“Why do you need me? You mean to tell me that you don't have your own fugu chef? I can't believe that. I thought everyone in Hollywood did. Make sure that's written into your next contract.” Neither of us says anything as the food is served. Then Taylor looks up.

“You love to make fun of us out here, don't you?” He shakes his head. “Betcha can't wait to get home to your snowy city, and tell all your friends how you goofed on us.” I look back at him. Nobody is ever completely kidding.

“No…I'm sorry, Taylor. I'm acting like a jerk. I'm tough on people sometimes, I don't know why.”

“You're funny,” he says, levelly, “I like you, I mean it. I never met anyone like you.”

“Too bad your luck has run out.”

“I'm startin' to figure you,” he says, nodding. I watch him slice off a triangle of rare beef and chew it slowly. The pregnant pause. Why do I feel as though his performance was rehearsed? As though he has the timing of a professional. I watch him chew. Even that's sexy. The rhythmical way that jaw worked. The man should pose for the National Livestock and Meat Board. Never mind mad cow, hoof and mouth, or animal rights, turn the camera on that face, and a diehard vegan would beg for beef.

He looks back at me. “It's warm out here,” he says, as if in passing. “Maybe you should think about staying for a while. The house is big enough…you need a chance to chill.”

W
e drive to the beach after dinner. The mist-covered moon casts an opalescent glow on the black water. As I walk, the damp sand massages my feet, and I'm aware of the light touch of Taylor's hand draping my shoulder. My senses are elevated to a higher frequency whenever I'm around him as if I'm visiting some distant, more vibrant reality. When his voice breaks the silence, it almost startles me.

“Tell me about the mind-set of the perpetual dieter. Give me a day in the life.”

I tighten my jacket around me. “She—because it's usually a she—is consumed with the idea of losing weight, but since her mind's always on
not
eating, she's obsessed—like a junkie—with her next fix. She has to eat, yet that's the very stuff that's killing her, so she has to develop a whole new framework for thinking about what food is, and what it does. Relearn behaviors that she's known from childhood.”

“Brain surgery,” he says, turning up the collar of his jacket.

“Mmm, hmm, but on yourself. And aside from the brain, the body is working against you. You know what the set point theory is?”

“No, but I think you're going to tell me.”

“There seems to be a certain weight that your body stays at when you're eating normally and not trying to lose weight—the set point. The theory holds that there is an internal control mechanism tucked into the brain that seems to want your body to maintain a certain level of fat.”

“Passport to survival,” Taylor says, picking up a stone and skipping it across the water.

“Exactly. So when you diet and lose fat, the body adapts to protect you from starvation, and boom, your resting basal metabolic rate goes down—you require less fuel to keep the furnace going. Bottom line—especially if you've dieted a lot—is that you find that the same pathetic number of calories you're eating on your diet isn't meager enough to allow you to lose the kind of weight that you did before on that regimen. You're confused now. Why aren't you losing anymore? You plateau, get frustrated. Why diet anymore when it doesn't work? Screw it, you're angry and you start eating like mad to get back at yourself—”

“Half of L.A.”

“You hate your stubborn, uncooperative body and want to punish it, so you eat and eat out of anger and frustration, and become
fatter
than you were before you started the damn diet. One desperate approach to weight management is the bulimic route. As I'm sure you know, that's when you eat and then clean out your system by regularly throwing up or using laxatives, enemas and diuretics, and sometimes, at the same time, exercising to excess. By continually abusing your lower GI tract, you lose
the ability to eliminate normally, and if you throw up enough your esophagus becomes inflamed and your glands swell.”

“Jolie can tell you about the throwing up.”

I turn to him. Why am I not surprised? “I didn't know.”

“She's over it now, but she went through that when she was a teenager.”

We walk on for a few minutes without speaking.

“In the worst-case scenario,” I say, “purging can lead to heart failure because you're losing life-sustaining minerals like potassium. If the disorder is anorexia, you simply starve yourself to death. Although these women—and most are women—have a tremendous fear of food and gaining weight—they're preoccupied with food, sometimes even hoarding it and making a great show of collecting recipes. A lot of these women are also depressed, irritable, withdrawn and have little interest in sex. When weight loss continues to advance, they may find it hard to concentrate, have memory loss and withdraw. It's really like a slow death. And some women are bulimic and anorexic.

“In some of the worst cases of anorexia, sufferers subsist on as little as a couple of hundred calories a day. Imagine eating nothing more during the day—and for days at a time—than a yogurt and a couple of bananas.”

“Well at least my patients will love me, right?” Taylor says, trying to puff out his chest.

“No, actually, they'll be afraid of you and be distrustful. You're the guy who'll make them eat all of those fattening foods they've been avoiding.”

“So what do I do?”

“Try to convince them that you want to see them grow healthy, not fat.”

He weighs that one for a while, then shakes his head.
“Don't think I was cut out for medicine,” he says. “So what else is involved?”

“You use your degree in psychotherapy in addition to bar-iatric medicine because this group needs intensive counseling first—individual and family counseling, lots of support and sometimes medication. The most serious cases end up hospitalized. Basically, all your women will feel so frustrated that they'll sink into depression, or worse, feel as though they'd like to kill themselves.”

I take an envelope out of my bag and hand it to him. “I thought this would interest you. She doesn't have anorexia, but it's typical of the kind of letters I get. This woman thinks she's the only one in the world who feels this way.”

Taylor frowns. “They really let their hair down with you.”

I nod. “Those are your patients. So what are you going to do to help them?”

“I start by seducing them with my compassion, my un
derstanding, my warmth—at least according to the script. A lot of their motivation to change comes from wanting to look good to please me.”

That's familiar.
“How does it turn out?”

“Four drop out, three make some progress, one kills herself, and one falls in love with me and becomes thin, turns into this dynamite dish and I fall for her. We leave the place together to set up our own clinic.”

“Gee, how realistic. I can't wait to see it.”

Taylor raises an eyebrow. “Maybe they can give you a cameo role.”

“As what, the stiff?”

He half smiles. “Maybe the journalist who comes to do a story on me.”

“Is she thin or fat?”

“You tell me,” Taylor says.

I don't answer.

“So is that
your
life?” Taylor asks. “Losing and gaining, anger, frustration?”

“I've been there, but I hope not anymore.”

“What's your secret?”

“I'm a Taurus—bullheaded. When I want something, I make it happen. At least for now, I've got the body beat. I worked out like a demon, I ate less and I lost the weight. I feel good about that.”

“Do you usually get what you want?”

“How did the conversation get turned around to me? Why don't we stick to the script?”

He slips his arm under mine. “I want to know what makes you tick.”

“You do,” I say mockingly. Not knowing what else to do, I imitate one of his crazed fans, madly pulling at my hair, “Mike, you're so gorgeous, I can't stand it…” I break into
hysterics, pretending to stick a paper in his face. “Here, give me your autograph, sign this…PUHLEEZ!”

“You want it right now?” he asks, pulling me toward him.

“Taylor,” I say, pushing him away. “You're in the right profession.”

It turns out the photo of Marcus Camby made the cover of the
Daily Record:
“DOWN AND OUT.” The picture credit: Tamara Brown. I make a note to send her a bottle of Dom. Ty sends roses. Everyone in her family called, she says in a voice that I barely recognize. The last time that happened, her uncle died.

Just one picture, one flick of the shutter, and the photograph opens up the promise of a new life for her.
That
shot might have been a fluke, but from now, if I know Tamara, her shots will be informed, calculated.

Valentine's Day is coming up and at 6:00 a.m. L.A. time, Tamara's in chat mode and brings me up to date. She complains that with me out of town, she had to go to the library for help.

“So I ask the white-haired librarian for the section on aphrodisiacs, and she looks at me like I'm from another planet. ‘There is none,' she says, and points me toward food science instead.”

Am I hearing right?

“Medicine comes from plants, so somewhere inside one of those books, there had to be tips for a cook interested in heating up romance.”

I'm laughing so hard that I'm sure I'm waking up the whole house. I can envision her thumbing through books methodically, pausing to scan sections on cayenne pepper, rump roasts, and crème fraîche. Tamara's idea, of course, was to come up with the ultimate seduction meal. The plan is for Ty to start reading her book that is set at a weight-loss center. And then…he could forget about going home.

But he's divorced. She has to go slowly. “He's probably scared,” she says, “doesn't want to be a two-time loser.” Then there's the business of working in the same office. If it didn't work out, it would be awkward to keep running into each other.

But what to make? She decides on oysters to start, but then? “Listen to this,” Tamara says. She's flipping through a book called
Foods for Love, The Complete Guide to Aphrodisiac Edibles
by Robert Hendrickson, and his possible main courses including phallic-armed octopi, the reproductive organs of jellyfish, scorpion fish and pickled beaver tails. And if those don't fit the bill, Hendrickson describes other exotic and/or disgusting turn-ons such as salted crocodile semen, the orange-colored roe of prickly sea urchins, considered by the Japanese and French to be an aphrodisiac either raw or pickled, and swan's pizzle, the immense elongated muscle of the four-foot tridoca clam, the tails of blowfish…

Was it something in my drink from last night?

“So what do you think?” she says finally.

“Swan's pizzle.”

“What?

“Just KID-DING. Let's see…to fuel his carnal instincts, go
carnal—steak. I never met a man who didn't like beef. Creamy mashed potatoes, and maybe spinach for the token vegetable. And if you're going to hell anyway, cheesecake for dessert or a fruit tart. Either you'll turn him on or you'll kill him.”

“What about oysters to start?” she says.

“Tricky, but if he likes them…lots of phosphorus.”

“What would I do without you, Maggie?”

“You started doing better the day I left.”

“Pure luck.”

“Fat chance.”

She has her menu. Oysters, filet mignon, mashed potatoes and fresh spinach. I turn over and go back to sleep.