Outtakes from a Marriage (13 page)

“Stuck,” is probably what he really wrote, the letters scratched hastily onto the page in a doctor’s illegible scrawl, his mind on lunch. “Stuck in transference.”

“He’s a paid boyfriend. You’re still hot, you can get a real boyfriend for free,” Beth used to scoff. She calls her shrink Carol. She and Alison have always laughed at me for calling mine Dr. James. It’s just that my dad has ruined most first names for me. I didn’t even want to know if Dr. James was a Ben or a Benjamin because the first conjured one kind of man and the second, another, both equally unappealing. And I needed to use the title Dr. as a constant reminder of the clinical reality of our relationship, a reminder of the “boundaries” of the clinical setting, the ethical boundaries that Dr. James was always harping about.

Ethical boundaries. At one time, I viewed Dr. James as quite noble for respecting them; now I wondered if it was just a polite way of rejecting me. He was probably violating boundaries left and right with that blond chick who had the eleven o’clock slot.

I Googled
Joe Ferraro
one more time.

That night, I modeled my Golden Globe dress for Ruby. She had been begging me to show it to her ever since I brought it home, but I hadn’t exactly been in the mood. Now I decided that modeling my new gown was just the thing to snap me out of my brooding angst-cycle. “Don’t come in yet,” I called to her when I heard her fidgeting at the doorknob. I wanted her to see it looking perfect, but now the lining was all bunched up around my thighs. “Hold on,” I said, and then when I had it all sorted out, I said, exuberantly, “Okay, Ruby. C’mon in!”

Ruby threw the door open with an expectant smile. She stood there for a moment and the smile slowly disappeared.

“Well?”

“Mom,” she began, “no offense, but…”

“What?”

“It’s seriously goth. You look like…like you’re going to Ozzy Osbourne’s funeral or something.”

“I think it’s cool,” I said.

“It’s covered with spiderwebs, Mom. It looks like a Halloween costume. And the bottom is all frayed. It’s not even finished.”

“Those are flowers, not spiderwebs,” I said, but when I looked down at them now, I wasn’t so sure. “It’s supposed to look frayed and unfinished. That’s the look.”

“You’re—
we’re
—just at an age where we have to think carefully about what we’re wearing,” Beth said later that night, after I’d convinced her to come over for a second opinion. “That dress would look great on Mary-Kate Olsen. It would have looked great on you when you were nineteen, too. Now, though, it looks a little…spinsterish.”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t utter that word,” I said, and as I pulled the dress over my head, Beth said, “You’ll find a great dress. You deserve a perfect dress. There’s still time.”

I called Jonathan at the salon first thing Tuesday morning and he took matters into his own hands. He called me back ten minutes later and said, “Monica at Vera Wang will meet you in the showroom this afternoon at two.”

“Great,” I said. “It’s on Madison in the eighties, right?”

“No, dear, that’s the shop,” Jonathan said. “The showroom is in the thirties, in the design district.”

At two o’clock I met a pretty young woman named Monica at the showroom. She was about twenty-three, and her dark brown eyes were lined with charcoal liner, her smiling lips were glistening and red. She wore a pencil skirt with a crisp white blouse neatly tucked into it, and a pair of ballet flats. I followed her into a large dressing room where she had hung about a dozen gowns.

“Jonathan told me you’re probably about a six,” she said, but she was looking at my midsection doubtfully.

“A six…or an eight,” I said.

“Okay, well, why don’t you just slip something on and we’ll get started?” she said, gesturing toward the hanging gowns.

“Great,” I said, and waited a moment before I realized that Monica wasn’t going to leave the dressing room. Back in college, Alison and her model friends used to talk about how they spent most of their time in designer showrooms in the nude. Still, I was overcome with shyness about removing my clothes. First of all, I was wearing an unflattering pair of white cotton underpants and a heavily padded bra. I just hadn’t expected anyone to see them. Also, it occurred to me that it was entirely possible that petite Monica had never seen a normal middle-aged body up close before, and that the shock might be too much for her. Should I explain about the little pouch of skin that hangs over caesarean scars? Would she faint dead away when she saw that without the bra, my bosom consisted of two tired, deflated sacs? As Monica stood there, smiling patiently, I adopted the psychological split that is used by people with multiple personality disorders, and all women at the gynecologist’s office, and I disrobed.

The first dress resolved the size issue for us. I was an eight, not a six, and Monica cheerfully darted out of the room and returned with a pile of size eights. What can I say? Vera Wang gowns are beautiful and flattering, and we quickly settled on a simple gown, elegant and blue. Monica immediately brought in a seamstress to start the alterations.

“This is the first fitting, but I think we’ll need two, especially since you need to sew inserts into the front panel,” Monica said. “We’re short on time, so I think you should have your second fitting in Los Angeles.”

I stood in front of the three-way mirror, and while the seamstress pinned up my hem, I dialed Joe’s number.

[
eleven
]

D
r. Alexa Calder’s office was on the ground floor of a Park Avenue apartment building. I had expected to find a waiting room filled with taut, pinched socialites that Wednesday morning, ten days before the Golden Globes. Instead, there was a middle-aged businesswoman typing madly into her BlackBerry and a harried-looking mother with a teenaged son who, with his cheeks an angry road map of acne, was clearly the patient. The receptionist asked me to fill out a form that she handed to me on a clipboard. I chose a seat across from Acne Boy and his mom and began to answer questions about my skin.

As questionnaires go, this one was pretty dull.
Do you use sunscreen? Does your skin react to products with fragrance? Have you noticed any moles that are new or seem to be changing in size or appearance?
I normally enjoy medical questionnaires for the most part. I mean, how often do you get to describe your organs to somebody who is actually interested in the fact that your uterus is tipped or that your breasts are fibrous? Not often enough, in my opinion. Skin, though, skin is boring, and in my case, a source of tremendous guilt. Of all my organs, my skin has been the most abused. I spent my youth self-basting in Bain de Soleil while working on boats and docks and napping on beaches. My nose and shoulders peeled all of their seven layers of skin each summer. Now I had fine lines on my face and not-so-fine lines on my chest. I had inherited a scowl from my father and a nicotine addiction from my mother, and though I had quit smoking before Ruby was even conceived, I was starting to get little vertical lines above my lip. A long horizontal mirror was mounted on the waiting room wall opposite me and I scowled into it for a moment, seeing the familiar deep groove in my forehead, right between my eyebrows.
Maybe I should leave,
I thought.
I’m not in the mood for a lecture on how poorly I’ve treated my skin. Maybe I should just go.
But I didn’t leave. I filled out the rest of the questionnaire and returned it to the receptionist.

When I sat back down, I grabbed a brochure from the holder on display in the center of the magazine table. The boy with the acne was called inside and so I picked up one of the brochures. “Now you can look as vibrant as you feel!” said the headline. There was a gorgeous woman with flawless skin and sun-streaked hair standing on a mountain, gazing serenely off into the distance. The brochure outlined the range of “injectable fillers” available to the clients of [here, somebody had stamped Dr. Alexa Calder’s name and address]. There was Restylane and Dermagen, CosmoDerm and bovine collagen and even human collagen. Human collagen, I learned as I flipped through the brochure, is harvested from the discarded foreskins of babies.

Women are paying doctors to inject babies’ foreskins into their lips. Why had I never read or heard anything about that? I thought of all the women I had seen shopping in Bergdorf ’s and Barneys, with lips as protuberant as duck’s bills. What would an alien culture make of a world where the mothers at the upper stratum of society ritually inject discarded tissue from mutilated baby penises into their lips? I wish I could say that I rose from my chair in indignation and strode from the office, slamming the door behind me. But I didn’t. I made a mental note to ask the doctor if she had any plans to inject human tissue into my face, and if the answer was yes, to ask her if the tissue had been tested for HIV. Beauty had suddenly become an “every man for himself” proposition for me, and I couldn’t afford to worry about whose flesh was going where.

Ten minutes later, I was seated in an examination room into which Dr. Calder stepped calmly, all smiles and glowing, uncreased skin. She introduced herself and asked me what I’d like to have done. She spoke in a professional, soothing tone and she smiled as she spoke, but all the while her eyes moved hungrily around my face.

“I’m going to the Golden Globes and I want to get rid of this frown line,” I said, pointing to my forehead. Dr. Calder glanced up at it and nodded. Then her gaze wandered to the other parts of my face.

“Here’s what I’d like to do…” she began.

When I left Dr. Calder’s office, two hours and twenty-eight hundred dollars later, I stopped to look at myself in the same waiting-room mirror. My skin was a little red, but except for some minor swelling around my upper lip and some tiny injection marks above my eyebrows, I looked pretty much the same as when I first came in, which was surprising, considering what I had been through.

“Microdermabrasion. That’s a given,” Dr. Calder had said after a few minutes of pinching and pulling at my face. “And when’s the last time you had a glycolic peel?”

“Well, I’ve never had one.”

“Never? Okay, I certainly recommend that you have regular facials and include a glycolic peel. It’ll help get rid of a lot of this dead skin—this crepey-looking skin around your forehead and chin. I have glycolic facials all the time and my skin always looks amazing afterward. Today we’ll just do the microdermabrasion since you have an event in, what, almost two weeks?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I know because I have three other clients going. Two are nominees. Now, what about these smile lines?”

“I know. The crow’s-feet. I just don’t think they’re that noticeable.”

“They’re actually smile lines. They’re just not noticeable to you because you don’t smile in the mirror the way you smile at other people. You have smile lines that run halfway down your cheeks. It’s actually the first thing I noticed about you when I walked in here.”

“Really? They’re that bad?”

“They’re not bad, they’re not good. They just say, ‘I’m not thirty-five anymore.’ Without those lines you’d look younger.”

And so it went. I was talked into microdermabrasion, as well as Botox in my forehead, in my smile lines, and in my chin, where Dr. Calder said I was starting to get some “dimpling.” “You want to start immobilizing these muscles now,” she said, and I wondered how the immobilization of muscles squared itself with the Hippocratic oath. Restylane, a synthetic filler—“Nobody’s foreskin,” Dr. Calder had laughed when I asked her—was to be used on the little vertical lines above my lip. “Chances are you would have gotten them even if you’d never smoked. They’re from puckering your lips. We all do it all the time,” she assured me, and then she said, “I’d like to put just a little bit in your lips. Just a little around the edge of the lip. Just to plump them up a little.” She assured me that nobody would notice that I’d had anything done. “You’ll just look, generally, younger.”

How do you say no to looking generally younger?

“It’ll feel like the exfoliating part of a facial. It doesn’t really hurt,” Dr. Calder said as she began the microdermabrasion.

“I don’t care if it hurts,” I replied, because it seemed like it should hurt, this stripping of years. Like all female transformations—onset of menses, sexual maturity, childbirth—all these female milestones were marked with blood and pain, so why shouldn’t this one?

“Now the Botox. Just a little prick,” Dr. Calder said. She began poking my forehead with the tiny needle, and it really wasn’t that bad when she was working on my forehead. She moved on to the area around one of my eyes.

That hurt.

Then she stopped, busying herself at the counter where a nurse had laid out an arsenal of syringes.

“All done?” I asked.

“No, my needle was just getting dull, so I had to change it. Here we go.” Then she attacked my needle-dulling hide with a fresh needle. She poked here and there, over and over, and each time, just as I became used to the cold pain of the stainless-steel needle in my raw skin, she withdrew it and inserted it someplace else.

“Now for your lips,” she said, and she whipped out the bigger needle. She pumped Restylane into my lips, a process that was slow and excruciatingly painful. Tears streamed from my eyes. My fingers seized the examining table and I tried to remember all those childbirth breathing techniques.

Breathing. I knew that breathing was key.

“Just a little more.” “Hold on.” “Just a little more over here,” said Dr. Calder, the experienced coach. Then, finally, she was done. “There’ll be a little swelling for the next couple of days, but it’ll go down, so don’t be alarmed.”

I had said it already, but I said it again: “I don’t want to be one of those fish-lip ladies.”

“Oh no, no, no,” said Dr. Calder. “Trust me. You’re gonna love it. In a few days.”

Ruby had a basketball game that afternoon at Trinity School and I arrived in the gymnasium a few minutes before the game was scheduled to begin. I followed several other parents up into the bleachers, and when I looked down, Ruby was standing with her teammates in a circle around her coach. She had her arm draped casually over the shoulder of one of her teammates and she was nodding at something the coach was saying to her. Then the girls fanned out across the floor for their pregame drills. I watched Ruby lope across the court, her strawberry-blond ponytail bouncing playfully over the word
Ferraro,
which was emblazoned on the back of her jersey.

I always love to watch Ruby play, especially during warm-ups when everything is a little more casual and relaxed. I followed her long, muscular legs up and down the court and admired her athletic ease and the cool camaraderie she shared with her teammates. Somebody passed her the ball and she jogged down the court, dribbling it once, then twice just in front of her; once, then twice off to the side; and then, just before turning back to the drill line, she placed one hand beneath the ball, one hand behind it, and sent it arcing up and into the basket with a clever little flick of her wrists.

“Go, Ruby!” I wanted to call out. But I didn’t say anything, I just smiled and clenched my fist. It’s uncool to call out to your kid during warm-up. Ruby had taught me that. Other important game-watching “don’ts” I had learned from experience included: bounding across the court when your child is hit in the nose; calling the referee a jackass; shouting “Yes!” when a girl from the opposing team makes a blunder; shouting “Go, Rube!” or “Nice shot, Rube!” or anything with the word
Rube
attached.

“People probably think you’re calling me names!” Ruby had sulked after a game, before I had kicked the Rube habit. “I’m not a Rube!”

“Why did you have to name me Ruby?” she used to ask us regularly. Ruby hated her name. “It’s so ugly!” “It’s a fat person’s name.” “It’s what you call a Labrador.”

Joe once made the mistake of telling her the partial truth, which was that we loved the name because it was in so many great songs. The rest of the truth, which we kept to ourselves, was that my dad didn’t know any Rubys. He had no opinion of them—we had checked.

“Songs?” Ruby cried when we told her. “Normal people are named after saints. I’m named after…songs?”

“We were young when we had you,” was all I really had to offer.

The game was about to begin. I saw Ruby glance up into the bleachers a few times. Finally she saw me and gave me a dismissive nod, then it was her turn to shoot. She dribbled the ball around to the side of the net and popped it in again.

Yeah, Rubes!
I thought, but I didn’t say anything. My lips were sealed. Throbbing, but sealed.

When the game began, and moderate cheering was allowed, I called out to Ruby and her friends—“Go, Catherine!” “Nice shot, Lily”—but then I had to stop moving my lips. The lip pain had been mild when I left Dr. Calder’s office, but it had slowly built up into a searing, pounding crescendo of white-hot agony before the first quarter of the game was over. When I ran my tongue over my lips they felt huge, but I pacified myself with the thought that a canker sore often feels massive to the tongue when it’s barely discernible to the eye.

By the end of the second quarter, my eyes were watering and I was fantasizing about my lips being packed in ice.
Ice, just a big bucket of ice,
I thought,
and I’ll never ask for anything else in my life. Heat and pain. Hot. Pain.
These were my only thoughts until the halftime bell rang. From clear across the gymnasium I saw Ruby glance at me as she joined her teammates on the bench, and then I saw her do a double take. Her eyes fixed in panic upon my face, making her leap up from her seat and run across the court to where I sat near the top of the bleachers.

“Oh my God, Mom! What happened to you?”

“What?” I said. I tried to position the flotation devices that I used to call lips into a smile.

“Your lips! They’re all bruised and swollen!”

Now the parents sitting around me all craned their heads around to have a look.

“Oh God,” said the man in front of me. He winced and looked away.

“Oh,” said his wife, looking a little bit longer. Then she turned and whispered something to the husband, who turned back for another look. My hand flew to my lip.

“The door,” I mumbled. “I slammed my mouth against…the door.”

“What door?” asked Ruby.

“The door to a taxi. It’s fine, really, Ruby. Great playing out there…”

“Mom! Don’t you think you should go to the emergency room or something?”

I could see the shoulders on the woman in front of me shake with mirth.

“No! I’m fine!”

“Jeesh!” said Ruby. “Okay.”

Somehow I made it through the rest of the game. I called Dr. Calder’s office the minute I got home. “My lips are killing me. And they’re bruised and swollen as hell!” I cried.

“They really shouldn’t be that painful, but bruising and swelling is normal,” she told me. “The swelling should go down in a few days, and the bruising should be gone by the end of the week.”

“I wish you’d told me all this before I went to my daughter’s basketball game!”

“You went to a basketball game? Oh my God, I’m so sorry, Julia. I just assumed you knew. It’s all spelled out in those release forms you signed.”

“Who reads release forms?”

“I always do. Look, tell people it’s from the microdermabrasion. Some people do get all swollen from that. And call me if the pain continues. It sounds like you might be having a reaction to the Restylane. Even if you are, the pain should subside in the next day or two.”