Cake Time

by Siel Ju

  Soon she’ll be channeling a magnanimous queen receiving her subjects, I thought. Still, I had to talk to her. It was already decided that she would be my story. As the crowd ebbed I edged up and waited for a tall, balding man to wrap it up. He talked to Lana while pumping her hand urgently, not having let go after the handshake. She squeezed back, her eyes in a friendly crinkle. “I actually made that bikini myself,” she said. “From my mother’s old suit.”

  “Wow,” the man said. “Just, wow. You really practice what you preach.”

  He didn’t seem ready to step aside anytime soon, so I piped up. “What you said about reuse,” I said. “It seems to have really struck a nerve.”

  “I hope so,” she said brightly. She managed to extricate her hand and extended it to me. I introduced myself and the magazine, and when I did, she took in a sharp, excited breath. “I love you guys!” she gushed. “Honestly, you guys are the one magazine that I feel—gets it.” She looked at me meaningfully. At this the balding man slunk away reluctantly. I felt a strange mix of pride and embarrassment, like I’d gotten away with some small lie of omission. I noticed that up close, her face was a bit drawn, with a tightness to the jaw.

  I thanked her. “You’re obviously a gifted fashion designer yourself,” I said. “What advice do you have for women who, say, can’t sew?”

  “Oh, but they should learn!” she said. “The sewing machine—it should really be considered one of our major environmental tools. For women, especially. Our grandmothers had the right idea, don’t you think? They were so self-sufficient, making exactly what they needed for the family in the sewing room. The kitchen too!”

  I wanted to shoot back about this domestic women thing, but demurred. “We’re planning to do a feature. Maybe we could chat at the party?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Could I get a card? I have so much to talk to you about.”

  I handed her one somewhat reluctantly. When I turned to walk away I nearly collided with a passing tray of mimosas, and took a flute, as if in apology. Sipping against a wall, I decided that it was probably a good thing, after all, that Alek wasn’t here, even though I was still vaguely curious about how he might respond to Lana, if his interest would be as blatant as the balding man’s had been. Lana really had something that made men stand at attention. I remembered a conversation Alek and I had had, when we shared what we thought each other’s strengths and weaknesses were. The talk was an assigned exercise for some leadership course Alek was taking at the Landmark Forum, another one of his quests for self-improvement. I couldn’t really remember what he’d said my strengths were, but I recalled that when we got to the weaknesses part, he’d said that I had a trudging sort of attitude. At least that’s how I interpreted his words. The actual phrase he used was “opposite of full of life,” which depressed me then, to the point that for a few days, I really did go around feeling pretty lethargic. Later he said that wasn’t what he’d meant, that it was a language issue, and that the word opposite was too extreme, he’d just meant something less than totally full of life, and that perhaps that was a good thing, he liked that I had both feet on the ground. His explanation hadn’t made me feel much better, though the phrase “opposite of full of life” became a kind of joke between us later on. Thinking about it now, I wondered if what Alek had wanted, what he had expected after googling my articles, was something more like Lana.

  Irritated, I eavesdropped uninterestedly on the raw vegan author making small talk with a fashion designer. The author seemed to be jockeying for free clothes to wear during her book tour. “I only wear companies I feel proud to represent,” she said, “to spread the word, to other people.” I missed the next few words, but then heard her say “environmentalism with legs.”

  Sure, legs. Of course. I thought back to my interview with this cookbook author, conducted over a ridiculously early dinner at Lukshon, when the restaurant was otherwise empty. She’d taken me into her confidence immediately—I seemed to have this effect on interviewees—and confessed she was neither raw nor vegan. She had been for seven years, but eventually she’d gotten sick and started eating first cooked food then meat, having been told to do so by an acupuncturist, then a holistic Chinese health practitioner, then a medical doctor she finally consulted when her hair started to fall out. She looked surreptitiously around the restaurant before ordering the crispy whole fish. She said she generally didn’t eat animal products in public, because she didn’t want her fans to catch her on camera doing so. It would be bad for book sales. She said people thought a raw vegan diet made her look the way she did, but that really it was genetics, and that she counted calories and did a crazy amount of P90X. Of course, all this was off the record. Later that night, after she emailed a recipe from her book to feature with the interview, I checked her Twitter feed to read this: “Why do people want fake vegan leather to look like real animal leather? I want my fake leather to look really fake!” It had gotten fifty-three retweets, mostly from followers with handles like @goveganordie. Seeing this made me snort derisively, but I wasn’t actually that put off by her duplicity. I wrote for a vegetarian magazine, after all, and wasn’t a vegetarian. What I felt for her was mostly a distant, confused kind of pity, the sort I have for drug addicts, or world hunger. I saw her writhing desperately to force in a divider between her public image and private life, all for the sake of a few thousand Twitter followers. Her actual lived world seemed small, with just a Vitamix and a matching set of dumbbells. She said she hadn’t had a serious boyfriend in a long time, and I could see why, she had a rather pinched, aggressive personality that seemed to be standing guard over a sodden childhood wound. The whole raw vegan thing was part of this, something that gave her a concrete, exterior identity despite her private flouting of its rules. She seemed, in short, to be incapable of bridging the vast gap between her two selves, and resigned to living in the caustic gap between them, always looking over her shoulder.

  It was this gap that seemed to be missing from Lana’s life. Her insouciance, her devil-may-care attitude, confetti-ing nude photos of herself all over the internet, then marrying a rich guy and flitting about preaching reduce. No, reuse. I imagined Lana at her sewing machine darting her G-string, trying it on, then darting it a little smaller and trying it on again, this time taking photos of herself in front of the mirror and tweeting them.

  The cookbook author exchanged cards with the fashion designer in parting, then spotted me. She walked over and stood next to me in a familiar, collusive way, our arms touching, like we were close friends about to continue a private conversation we’d started long ago. She said she really didn’t have time for this, she needed to be getting ready for her book tour, which started next week. I ask her who her pick was.

  “The token Asian,” she said, and laughed tetchily.

  “I don’t know,” I said in a lilting, facetious tone. “She’s one of five blonds.”

  She laughed again, this time with a disgruntled shrug. She sipped her cucumber water.

  “You should have entered this yourself,” I said. “You would’ve won.”

  She flicked her wrist dismissively. “It’s not the kind of exposure I want,” she said. “It’s desperate.”

  I nodded, mulling this over. “I think she’ll win,” I said, pointing my chin at Lana.

  The cookbook author sniffed. “She’s so obvious. But you’re probably right.” She seemed to realize something, and straightened up. “This isn’t like an interview right now, is it? Do you want a quote or something, for your article?”

  At that moment the event photographer came and stood in front of us. Without prompting we turned a little sideways, put arms around each other, and smiled. The camera clicked three times.

  A few years before, I’d been a judge myself. It was for a cooking contest, organized by the vegetarian magazine, which had flown into LA three readers whose submitted recipes had garnered the most votes on Facebook. The weekend was an unusually busy one for the magazine—three of the edit
ors were in New York for Natural Products Expo East—which is why they’d made me judge, suddenly slapping me with the title of contributing editor to make it all seem less ad hoc. That’s how I found myself in the magazine offices in El Segundo one day, officiating behind a cheap, veneer wood cubicle desk, trying to chew in a knowledgeable and impartial manner under the anxious gaze of the three finalists, two from the Midwest, one from Texas.

  The most unexpected part of the ordeal was that the Texan, called Bryanna, was a very tall and obvious cross-dresser or transgender. I didn’t ask which. She’d shown up in a bright red dress, a high-necked thing overlaid with lace. Her sizeable shoulder muscles strained the sleeves taut, and her mannerisms were rough around the edges. Seated face to face, I congratulated Bryanna on making it this far, and she said liltingly, “I knew I’d make it in Hollywood one day.” Then she added, “Or at least in El Segundo,” and guffawed, slapping the table.

  Bryanna laughed and talked a lot, in a cloying, overly familiar way, eager to pretend she could be one of the girls. “That’s what she said,” she kept saying, turning anything she could into a teenage innuendo, and each time I and the other two finalists, all more stereotypically female, laughed politely. I think Bryanna’s attitude was intended to make it seem like she didn’t notice or care about the discomfort around her, but we all became hyper-aware of her growing anxiety. The tension reached a peak when it came time to make the videos, short clips of the finalists that the magazine wanted to post online.

  “Sit pretty,” the cameraman, a gay Filipino guy called JD, kept saying to Bryanna. “Nice and pretty.”

  “Like this?” she said, flicking her hair. She turned her face to the left. “This way?”

  “No, don’t move around,” JD said. “Sit pretty.”

  “This is my pretty side,” she said, with a testy laugh this time.

  What JD was trying to get Bryanna to do was pull her knees together. Her muscular white thighs were splayed apart mannishly and we could see halfway up her skirt. But no one wanted to actually say this, so we all just watched Bryanna try on different facial expressions. In the end JD zoomed in closer, to capture just her head.

  “That’s perfect,” he said after the first take, and took down the tripod.

  Bryanna looked confused; the other finalists had gone through a half dozen takes each. I thought she might protest. When she looked at me I smiled at her and nodded encouragingly. “You’re a natural,” I said. This seemed to placate her somewhat. After the finalists left, I watched the footage with JD. “You could have at least warned me she was going to be a six-foot-three tranny,” he said, elbowing me. I shrugged, laughing, though I felt irritated. I’d wanted to tell Bryanna that she didn’t have to try so hard, but I hadn’t known how to do so without making her feel even more self-conscious.

  And maybe it wouldn’t have helped anyway, maybe it would have been worse if Bryanna had been more relaxed. Maybe this was about as good as things could go for her, for all the contestants. The whole deal seemed ill-planned and unprofessional to me, and I felt bad for these three readers who’d taken the contest so seriously, fretting about presentation and plates getting cold, stammering a little as they explained to me what they were trying to “do” with their dish. Their servile, ingratiating attitudes toward me had made me cringe inwardly, ashamed for them, and for me too. I really knew nothing about food.

  Of course, Bryanna’s video was never posted. My editor picked one of the Midwesterners as the winner and, diplomatically, posted only her clip and photos. If Bryanna was unhappy about that, I never heard about it. For a few weeks I wondered about her. I wanted to understand her motivations. Unlike the Midwestern women who’d practically blended into the background, Bryanna had wanted badly to stick out, to be noticed, with her red dress and gigantic heels. Yet she must have known the kind of attention she’d receive would be the awkward, avoidant kind. Was that attention to her still better than none? Or did she imagine that this time, on her big trip to Los Angeles, she’d wear a red dress and somehow the world would see her differently, react to her the way it did to women like Lana?

  That night, at the closing party held at a new dance club in Hollywood, short videos of each of the finalists were shown to showcase their “environmental journeys.” The two hundred or so partygoers, mostly twenty-something blogger types in skinny jeans, stood impatiently on the dance floor with drinks in hand and heads cocked up, watching the projection on the white wall. The video footage itself looked amateurish, shot at home by the girls themselves, but the clips had been montaged together by a professional editor to give real drama and pathos to each girl’s life. Watching them, I slowly came to think that perhaps I’d judged these girls too quickly and harshly. Sure, some of the pretty ones looked like they’d done only token beach cleanups. But others, including Lana, who through her video I discovered was Russian too, had really been chosen for their environmental activism. Lana’s video told a typical immigration tale but with a twist; her parents had come to the US and settled not in a city to work, but in a really rural part of Montana to be hippies. Her father, now dead, had had some liver and kidney disease, probably due to polluted water he’d grown up drinking, and to combat it, the family grew and ate their own organic food. At this point Lana’s story bifurcated, on the one hand telling an idyllic tale of swimming naked and climbing trees, on the other describing a crushing poverty and hinting cryptically at some sort of murky familial abuse. At school she faced bullying and racism; she responded in her teenage years by cutting herself and growing a Mohawk. “I was so angry,” Lana said in the video, her eyes welling up. It wasn’t entirely clear how, but environmentalism had given her a productive way out of her anger.

  I wondered if the porn had also helped in some way. There was little in Lana’s story that reflected my own, but I felt an instinctual connection to her nonetheless. Others felt it too. She had revealed through the video a poignant kind of personal suffering that showed that what she’d gone through was unique, yet open and accepting of all of us, so that we could gaze at that suffering, touch it, involve ourselves in it. Of course the masochism to all this confessionalism was somewhat disturbing too, but we still all wanted to revel in it—the edited, sanitized version of it anyway, the once-festering, pulsing wound now disinfected but left unbandaged so we could run our fingers over the skin, clean and ruddy and swollen around the neat sutures.

  Afterwards, the party really began, with disco lights and a DJ playing house. I stood near the bar, watching people gyrate on the dance floor. I started picking out the finalists in this mass; they were spread out almost perfectly evenly through the crowd, each one ensconced in her own little pulsating orb of humanity. It was a little after eleven. I thought about leaving, Alek would be just getting out of his AA meeting, but the winner hadn’t been announced yet. I noticed the judges clustered together in a corner, deliberating.

  Suddenly Lana was beside me. She gave me a loose, exuberant hug. She looked like she’d already had a few drinks, her face a wet grin and her eyes loose in their sockets, very different from the sincere, tremulous look that had been captured on film. Still, her enthusiasm was infectious. We yelled at each other over the music. I told her I liked her video. She nodded back energetically; I could tell she hadn’t heard me right.

  “I totally didn’t think I’d make it this far,” she said, spitting a little. She started talking about the other girls, how they’d all been speculating about the judging process and where each of them stood. As she talked I watched her loose, happy face and wondered what secret it was she was keeping about her family. Her tipsy attitude now reminded me a bit of a girl that had lived on my floor freshman year in college, the one that had broken her hip when a guy she was having drunken sex with in a fraternity bathroom dropped her on the floor. I hadn’t been there, but apparently everyone else had been, had watched her get wheeled out by the paramedics with her pants down. She’d been in too much pain to care at the time, but afterwards, she’
d dropped out of college.

  If this type of thing happened now, there would be photos and videos documenting the incident, circulating among the kids’ digital devices to be gawked at, zoomed into, photoshopped. Suddenly I felt an overwhelming gratitude that I’d grown up in the days before cell phones and Facebook. At least then the past really could be glossed over, almost forgotten with the help of new friends and a new hometown. Now, even big cities afforded no anonymity; anyone could do a reverse image search.

  Not that I was against technology. On one of our earlier dates, neither Alek nor I could remember where we’d parked in the gigantic Santa Monica Place structure. Luckily the mall had just installed cameras, one pointed at the rear of every parked car. These cameras were linked up to little kiosks that let you locate your car by typing in the license plate. When Alek typed his in, the machine told us the floor and quadrant, and shot us back a real-time video of his car, waiting quietly in its spot. “This is perfect!” Alek said. “Every parking lot should have this.” When we got to his car he said, “Wave for the camera!” And we did. His easy exuberance rubbed off on me when I was with him. Later that night, cuddled on my bed, we pretended to watch Breaking Bad on my laptop for a while before starting to fool around. When he went down on me I closed the laptop—the dialogue was distracting—but after I came and we took the rest of our clothes off, he repositioned the laptop and asked, “Can I open this?” He said he wanted to see me. The blue light of the welcome screen glowed against our skin in a way that made the experience feel like a performance, and we moved against each other in a desiring yet somewhat ritualistic, programmatic fashion. Oddly, afterwards, I felt a lot closer to him. It was as if we’d revealed to each other for the first time the way we wanted ourselves to be seen.