by Siel Ju
“You don’t need to apologize,” I said. I looked at him rather hard, but seeing that his face had turned sincere, I felt my expression mollify too. “Actually,” I said, “Christian and I broke up. Three weeks ago. It was a long time coming.”
A quick look of dark, cynical pleasure flitted across his face before he recomposed his expression into one of empathy and gave me an understanding nod. Oddly, this reaction made me see him more tenderly. Sure, he was glad that things had gone badly for me, but it was still the first sign I’d seen that he’d cared, that my being with Christian had ever bothered him. I tried to picture how it would have been had Jeff and I actually made a go of it together, but I couldn’t. We’d really been happier this way, using each other as a prop for one-upmanship, connecting only to show how focused we were in changing other, more important aspects of our lives. I shrugged to say I was over it, then nodded to the waitress for the check. He offered to pay, and when I let him, he counted out his bills in a careful manner that seemed both beleaguered and proud.
Fortune cookies in hand, we stepped outside. The fog was rolling in. The wet air hugged us as we walked, breathing in the musty scent of the sidewalk. The streets were still awake, quieter now, but trembling with energy. We passed the V-E-N-I-C-E sign strung up in lights, the homeless woman cocooned in her bright yellow blanket, the teenagers practicing skateboard tricks in the post office parking lot. When we got to the residential block we broke open our cookies. Mine said “You are realistic and others can relate to you.” His said “Cherish home and family as a special treasure.” After we read them aloud we nodded at each other, like the messages we got were about what we’d expected, and thus satisfying. I asked Jeff how things were going with Allison, and he started talking about her genially, how the production company where she’d been working at for years had just promoted her to a full-time position. I got the sense they’d moved in together, though he didn’t say it explicitly. His teeth twinkled animatedly under the streetlights. He asked me where I was living now and I told him I was back in Santa Monica. Saying this, I realized I felt happy, thinking about my little apartment with its new hardwood floors and its tiny parking spot. It seemed untainted—a place perfectly arranged to fit, clean and exact and waiting for my return.
We got to the corner of Abbot Kinney and stopped there, unsure what to do. Jeff offered to walk me to my car and I said that was okay, I was only a block away. Before he could hug me I stuck out a hand, with mock seriousness, and we shook hands firmly, mirth in our eyes. “Good luck,” he said. “With everything.” I wished him the same. Then we let go, I gave him a little wave, and we went our separate ways, he to his car, I to mine.
Sutures
I was at a competition of sorts that Friday morning, something of a cross between a beauty pageant and a modeling contest put on by upstart organic fashion companies. More than three hundred girls had ponied up the $20 application fee for a chance to be crowned “Spokeswoman for the Environment,” a title that came with $2,000, a shopping spree, and a fashion spread in a just-launched nature magazine. The twelve finalists had been selected and brought to an airy home decor store in West Hollywood that had been cleared out for the occasion. That’s where I sat now with a notebook and camera on a white fold-up chair, waiting for the show to begin.
I sat in a jaded agitation, not because of the show but because of what had happened before it, with Alek. I’d been seeing him for a few months and we were in that weird space where we had a fair sense of each other’s messy characters but still tiptoed around on good behavior for the time being. Alek was an affectionate guy I loved being alone with, but there was a rambunctious side to him that unnerved me in public, when he sang along to background music or interrupted strangers’ conversations, though people seemed to like him, responding in kind. He whistled loudly whenever he came across something he liked. I assumed this exuberance was a cultural thing, he’d immigrated to the US ten years ago when he was twenty-five, though I couldn’t say for sure because I didn’t really know any other Russians. He was in AA. He said he’d made a lot of money in finance but lost it all partying before going into rehab, which stuck the second time around. Now he owned his own small company, offering financial restructuring advice to struggling businesses. He seemed sincere in his quest to become a better person, to take life at face value, though I got the sense that he didn’t quite take me seriously. I was a freelance writer, and at the time I was covering a lot of kitschy events, restaurant openings and local festivals and the like, where the big attractions were the B- and C-list celebrities that showed up to promote one product or another. Though we were the same age, when I talked about my work, Alek listened carefully but with an expression that to me seemed somewhat paternal, like my work was a cute little hobby that he nevertheless needed to be encouraging about. It was that expression he’d given me over coffee and toast at my place that morning, and I continued to grouse over it at the event as I fiddled with the settings on my point-and-shoot.
I started to feel better though, as the start time neared. I was sitting in the front row, on a chair that literally had my name on it along with that of the magazine. PR girls milled about, jittery and eager to please, offering press kits and cucumber water. I sipped from a clear plastic cup feeling official, legitimate. I thought if Alek came with me to one of these, he might see me differently.
The event began. It was like a runway show with hiccups, the girls strutting out in trios to techno and posing in a row at the front, at which point the music would cut unceremoniously and each girl would drone on about the environmental aspects of the clothes and designers. The girls looked skittish standing there, most of them not professional models, one blond’s chin actually quivering desperately. Still, there was a certain dramatic insouciance to the whole thing. Lights popped. Digital cameras whirred through their gratuitous shutter noises. The writers held their voice recorders aloft, wrists cocked, or scribbled furiously, though none of us needed the notes; it was all in the press kits.
The finalist I planned to focus my article on was in the last trio. She was a twenty-six-year-old called Lana. I’d picked her because, according to the bios, Lana was a vegan and thus a good fit for the vegetarian magazine for which I was covering the event. Lana had even turned her husband vegan, when they’d married two years before. My editor said that if Lana won, it would be a triumphant feature profile, if not, a heartwarming underdog story. It was only when I googled Lana, clicking through to the fifth or sixth page, that I’d found out she wasn’t new to being in front of the camera, that she’d posed for a good amount of soft-core pornography before getting married. The photos still online seemed tastefully done, erotically lit with carefully draped hair and sheets. Lana had taken her husband’s name when she’d married but otherwise didn’t seem to have made much of an effort to change or hide her past identity, a choice about which I felt a nebulous respect. I wondered if I should mention the porn to my editor, or if doing so would just be spreading idle gossip. This wasn’t the Miss America pageant, after all. I wondered if the photos were how she’d met her husband, an older real estate guy who seemed moneyed. Since the wedding Lana volunteered for Farm Sanctuary and gave the occasional fermenting workshop at a local raw restaurant. In the press kit photos she looked like a fresh Audrey Hepburn type.
And Lana did have some of that poise in person too now, walking down the makeshift runway, though her posture was less precise, more inviting in a lax, giving sort of way. She made an impression, moving with a formulaic sashay in a blue dress. The cut was demure but the fabric slippery, the silk shivering on her skin. When she spoke, instead of reciting the product info in the press kits like the other girls, Lana said she was especially proud that the brand she was wearing made use of reclaimed materials and that all clothes should be (considering the detrimental environmental effects of making new clothing), organic or not. The fashion industry’s disposable attitude toward clothes led to a whole host of unseen travesties—child lab
or, sweatshop conditions, chemical leaching, water pollution, landfill waste—problems, she said, even many so-called green companies happily turned a blind eye to. “Of course,” she said, laughing indulgently, “I’m not talking about any of the companies here. These companies are making fashions that last, the kind you’ll want to pass down to your grandchildren, the very opposite of disposable!” The crowd seemed to be with her, nodding along. “Some of you might remember that old PETA campaign, ‘I’d rather go naked than wear fur,’” Lana went on. “Well, I say we start a new campaign. I’d rather go naked than wear new!”
There was agreeable applause. For a second I thought Lana was going to take off her dress; her left hand had started fiddling with a strap during the speech. But she didn’t. She put both hands on the mic and went on. “We’ve heard the mantra—reduce, reuse, recycle. But in my opinion, we could just reduce that saying down to reuse. When we reuse, we are reducing what we need. We are recycling what we have.” At this the emcee made a small wrap it up motion and Lana nodded at him energetically. “Okay, they’re telling me my time is up, but as you can see, I’m passionate about these issues!” She made a fist, and shook it jokily.
The crowd laughed and applauded again. I clapped along, skeptical, but interested in spite of myself. Lana stepped back and the last two girls gave their spiel, but no one was really paying attention anymore. After Lana’s performance, these girls’ recitations of press kit fodder sounded especially canned and false, boring, and even worse, status quo. The audience, mostly writers on the environmental beat, had grown restless, discomfited by the tainted histories of their own clothing but also empowered to do better, as if a new focus on recycled fashion would suddenly turn them sexy and articulate and charismatic too.
The emcee took the mic and stammered out a few ingratiating sentences about the fashion sponsors without whom which this event would not have been possible. Then more confidently, he introduced the next competition: swimsuits. “In the spirit of reuse,” he said, “the finalists are wearing what they already had in their wardrobes. None of these swimsuits are new!”
I thought it more likely that the competition hadn’t been able to find a swimsuit sponsor, but the announcement nonetheless had an exciting effect. The two cameramen shuffled closer. This time, all twelve girls came out in a long row. Most of the girls were in demure suits, the kind their mothers would have approved of, but Lana had on a skimpy red thing, with a bottom that looked close to, but wasn’t quite, a G-string. Her bikini top was more substantial, with solid cups and padding. Even more than the near nudity, Lana’s self-assurance stuck out like a bold, throbbing thumb, her simple contrapposto stance almost lascivious compared to the somewhat embarrassed, apologetic postures of the other girls. To her credit, Lana’s bikini looked like it could have been hand-crafted, something that had been fashioned out of a bigger, less stylish suit.
The cameramen ran back and forth, panning for angles. The crowd, largely women, clapped obligingly, with a mix of admiration and jealousy and, perhaps, muted annoyance. In fact, at that moment, I felt rather annoyed myself.
I didn’t consider myself to be an environmentalist, though an online search of my name told a different story, thanks to all the hippie articles I’d written for the vegetarian magazine over the years. Those bylines had certainly fooled Alek. On our third date, he’d brought me a bouquet of lilies, gleefully pointing out the VeriFlora certification label, his way of letting me know he cared about me, enough to google my name and act on what came up, in any case. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the certification didn’t matter to me; I knew exactly how much the leftie lilies had cost him, having written the article promoting them, after all. It’s not that I didn’t care at all about the environment—I’d watched An Inconvenient Truth and bought organic oranges at Trader Joe’s and separated my recyclables—but I felt the idea of environmentalism was something that circulated far outside and beyond me. I sensed that becoming an environmentalist would mean entering a sort of miasmic, otherworldly society, one that would require exploration with a Margaret Mead–like tenacity I had neither the interest nor time to develop.
Environmentalists seemed an angry, combative lot anyway, quick to point fingers with holier-than-thou attitudes while splintering into smaller and smaller factions in the manner of religious denominations. There were the older moneyed hippie types, with their gaggle of kids in charter schools and heirloom tomatoes in raised gardens. Then there were the younger ones, with their hipster glasses and punny blogs and titillating T-shirt slogans, like “Go Green: Fuck a Vegetarian!” Those kids puttered around documenting their “activism” for Tumblr accounts with their camera phones, proselytizing for the environment with a fervent yet deadpan kind of sincerity I had a hard time distinguishing from irony. It was those young bloggers that seemed to be having a good time at this contest now, tweeting out their picks while tittering Perez Hilton–style about the cellulite on one of the girls’ thighs before going on to say, “But she looked good in that dress. Natural. Thick,” then nodding at each other seriously. To them environmentalism seemed reduced down to sound bites and photo poses. And maybe in a way I was jealous of them, of Lana too, her youth and enthusiasm, of how effortlessly she went off script to make what she had to say sound important and urgent. Maybe this is what environmentalism needed, a pretty face, bikini waxes, one-word mantras. I imagined Lana at the award party to take place that night, being crowned the winner in her heels, giving a speech about changing identities and changing worlds, about being flexible enough to use whatever we had to save the planet. The speech would be motivating in its own nakedly optimistic way, as if any problem could be resolved, or at least made beautiful, if we just stripped down to work it. Sure, it was exactly the kind of thing that made Alek take my work unseriously, but I also thought if he were here, he would listen to her, let himself be drawn in.
Which I suppose explains why I felt annoyed. Lana’s call for change was infectious, yet what she was advocating as a solution—rehemming clothes to make them smaller, basically—seemed obscenely frivolous in light of the gravity of the problems for which she was to stand in as a spokesperson. It was hard to picture how Lana would actually advocate for serious change, like instituting a carbon cap or convincing people to relocate away from the New Jersey shoreline. Then again, maybe she could. Though there was an obvious, attention-mongering side to Lana’s personality, her act as a whole had been on message, inviting, her tone sincere and positive. People wanted to give her attention. Maybe she could in fact convince stalwart Jerseyans to relocate. I pictured her in her bikini at the beach, strutting inland at the head of a long line of families, who pedaled along behind her, sweating industriously as they pulled their kids and belongings in refurbished bicycle trailers. I imagined someone taking a photo of this exodus, then posting the photo on Facebook, where it collected likes. Lana certainly had a can-do attitude. If nothing else, her reused clothing solution was tangible, doable. She even knew how to make it look good. I kept letting my mind circle around this way until I grew exasperated with myself for thinking so much about it. I wasn’t selecting the head of the Environmental Protection Agency here. I was at a beauty pageant, for Christ’s sake.
After the lilies, I’d tried googling Alek too, but wasn’t able to find out much of anything about him. His full name sounded pretty unique to me, but apparently it was like John Smith among Russians, and unbeknownst to me until then, there was a gigantic Russian population in Los Angeles. Alek also just didn’t have the kind of job that put an online identity out there. Discovering this, I felt at a disadvantage. My articles revealed a lot about me—places I’d visited, people I’d interviewed and liked, my relative worth in the freelance writing market, and even my bra size, wedged into a pseudo-personal article I’d written on the difficulty of finding cute, organic underwear. On top of that, the writing painted a skewed picture of me. The upbeat, gregarious tone I was hired to pen presented me as a sort of urban Pollyanna, someo
ne in the know yet still unabashedly optimistic, almost chirpy. Thinking about the sincerity of my online persona made me wince, yet I really didn’t see any easy way of correcting this image. In contrast, Alek remained a blank slate. I could learn nothing about him except what he chose to tell me about himself, and I resented this, though he kept telling me he was an open book. “Ask me,” he’d say, facing me with this calm, patient expression, something I imagined he picked up from AA and its insistence on honesty. But I was reluctant to ask. I did find out a few things—he’d been married, he and his ex-wife had separated eight months ago, and he still paid the lease on the condo where she lived—but beyond that, any question I could think up seemed to reveal too much about my own vulnerabilities. I assumed he wasn’t quite divorced yet, but didn’t press to find out if he’d filed the papers. I felt asking about that would be like exacting some reassurance that he pictured something long-term with me, when in reality I was ambivalent myself. So I just kept grousing about it, not asking.
The chairs were whisked away and trays of champagne and mimosas brought around. The girls, back in the dresses from the beginning of the show, mingled with the now standing crowd. Lana was clearly a media favorite. She stood giving informal interviews close to the front, the better to pose for photos against the vinyl backdrop. The sponsors, most of them judges for the competition, watched as the journalists circled her, waiting their turn. There were a few judges outside the fashion industry too, including a short man with sad eyes who headed up the local Surfrider Foundation chapter, and a raw vegan cookbook author, a half-Japanese, half-German woman who was in her early forties but looked to be in her late twenties. I’d interviewed her a few months before for the vegetarian magazine’s “Ask a Chef” feature. She too was watching Lana, through the corners of her eyes. I guess I was watching Lana also, the way she leaned into her interviewers as she talked, asking their names, her expression engaged and welcoming, vaguely presidential.
