Just like in the movies: as I’m waiting in Dr. Weiss’s minimalist, security-guarded lobby, the elevator doors open, ejecting a tall, thin woman in a wide-brimmed black hat, huge black sunglasses, and a bandaged face. I can’t help myself. I peek to see if she’s someone, but she ducks her head and scurries out of the building. I watch through the tinted plate-glass windows as a uniformed chauffeur jumps out of a waiting butter-yellow Jaguar, opens the rear door, and gently helps her in. I can’t believe that this woman and I have anything in common. I just wish it was the car and not the doctor.
“I’m here for a consult,” I tell Dr. Weiss, a man who seems to be in his forties but whose face is so smooth, I wonder if he might be operating on himself.
He hands me a round mirror. “What’s bothering you?” he asks.
“Growing old in a town that worships youthful beauty,” I answer.
Dr. Weiss smiles and waits.
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me what’s wrong with my face?” I say.
“There’s nothing wrong with your face. I’m just here to help you feel more comfortable with what you see in the mirror.”
I sigh and point to the lines between the edges of my mouth and my nose. Dr. Weiss nods. Then I point to the wrinkles at the sides of my eyes. He nods again. “What would it cost to fix all that?” I ask.
“I’m giving you the friends-and-family discount, since Lolly referred you,” he answers. “So it would be eight hundred and fifty dollars.”
“What about my lips?”
Dr. Weiss squints at my mouth through his magnifying head lamp. “I could give you a bit of Restylane, but that’s it. We don’t want you looking like Daffy Duck.”
I close my eyes for a moment and I see the way Helena ducks her head when I try to kiss her, when I ask her if she wants to have a sexcapade with me this weekend. Would a few shots of toxins in my face give me more of a shot with Helena? Could she be that superficial? Could I?
“Do it,” I say.
“Are you sure? You said you were here for a consult.”
“I’m sure.”
A few days later, when the swelling goes down, I look at myself in the mirror and I don’t just feel more comfortable with what I see. I’m ecstatic with what I see. And I’m also totally weirded out by what I see, which is a person who looks a lot like me.
I can’t believe I actually paid someone to change my face.
Helena comes over for dinner. I don’t tell her what I did, and she doesn’t notice. Or maybe she notices and doesn’t say. Her obliviousness rolls off me. My problem with Helena can be solved, as Scarlett O’Hara would say, another day. I might not have gotten my girlfriend’s attention, but at least I got a better face.
—
SOME OF MY FRIENDS don’t like Helena. Some of them like her, but they don’t like the way she talks to me. I know what they mean. Helena can be caustic and arrogant and withholding with her own emotions, even as she’s fiercely advocating for mine.
My shitty opinion of myself, and attendant go-to strategy of blaming myself for everything all the time, drives Helena nuts. She campaigns ceaselessly against it. When I have a misunderstanding with a friend or a coworker, when I get an assignment from a new editor and my insecurities supersede my confidence, when a single gray day makes me kvetchy and blue, Helena becomes my personal translator, interpreting my motivations and actions far more positively than I can. She’s a fixer of problems logistical, technological, and professional, an installer of streaming TV players and timesaving iPhone apps, a steadfast friend, a tireless hiking buddy, an Olympic-level mom.
Therein lies the rub. I love sleeping—sleeping—with Helena, and baking cookies for Helena, and shopping for Bungalito furnishings with Helena, and being coddled and spoiled by Helena, and coddling and spoiling her. Sadly, none of this adds up to passion, to whispered midnight intimacies, to lust. It’s not magic between Helena and me. Helena and I don’t look into each other’s eyes and say, “I love you.” We say, “Love you” to each other, the way my brother and I do.
Helena doesn’t like to kiss or walk with our arms around each other or hold hands. When we’re at a party or hanging out with friends, we’re usually on opposite sides of the room. One night she takes me to happy hour at the piano bar in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire, and the Old Hollywood vibe gets me so excited, I jump into her lap. With stiff arms and tight lips, she removes me. “I don’t do that in public,” she says.
I find myself acting out in small, sometimes dangerous ways, trying to shock Helena into . . . what? Becoming someone she’s not? Feeling things she doesn’t? I go rogue while we’re hiking, leaving Helena on the authorized trail, bushwhacking my way up the mountain through the sagebrush, determined to touch the Hollywood sign. A helicopter overhead chops the silence, blaring a warning that I’ll be arrested if I don’t leave the area now. I slip and slide all the way down the hill, dust myself off, find myself bloodied and bruised. “Scofflaw,” Helena says, shaking her head.
I ride my bike to the Nokia Theatre and sneak into the Emmy Awards, posing as a geriatric paparazzo. Helena laughs and admires my photographs of the dress rehearsal.
I cut off most of my hair. Helena doesn’t comment.
I invite my friends to skinny-dip in Helena’s pool, assuming it will make her uncomfortable. It doesn’t.
I get judgy when a friend of hers gets too drunk at one of my parties.
My bad behavior bothers me more than it bothers Helena, probably because I understand what it means. I wish I were in love with Helena, but I’m not. I try everything I can think of to change that. I wear the La Perla. I bake the cookies. I buy the gifts. Nothing changes. I tell Helena what I feel, that we’re twisting ourselves into knots, trying to be what we’re not.
Helena disagrees. Even in her fighting to go on with me, she proves why we need to stop. She doesn’t shout or cry; she makes rational arguments. She says I’m still hung up on my wife, idealizing my dead marriage, comparing her unfavorably and unfairly, She’s right, of course. I plead guilty to all charges. Still, I feel what I feel and I want what I want, and I remain convinced I’ll never have it with Helena.
She says passion is a flash in the pan. “Companionship,” she says. “That’s the lasting thing.” I tell her that I understand her priorities, but they’re not mine. I want a lover who walks through the door on fire to kiss me, a lover I’m on fire to kiss. I give her house keys back to her. She gives mine back to me.
Two days later Helena sends me a bouquet big enough to hide the man who delivers it, dozens of peonies and roses, long-stemmed, blushing white. The card says, “I love you. I’ll try.” I put the bouquet in my car and drive it to Clara’s house, where it won’t be beckoning at me, weakening my resolve to do the right thing. Clara takes the flowers, shaking her head.
“What?” I say.
“Do you really want to know what I think?”
“Maybe,” I say.
“Helena’s great,” Clara says. “The two of you are great together. And you’re doing to her what your wife did to you.”
“Huh?”
“Six months ago you were begging your wife to take your calls,” Clara says. “Now Helena’s begging you to take hers.”
“One thing has nothing to do with the other,” I say. Driving home, breathing in the lingering scent of all those flowers, I can’t help but wonder if Clara’s right.
—
I CREATE A NEW PROFILE on OKCupid. I start going to restaurants with strangers—female strangers this time, because I’m looking for more than hot sex, although I wouldn’t turn it down. None of the women I meet is anywhere near as smart, lively, or loving as Helena. None of them knows what’s going on with my job, which is getting weirder and weirder by the day. I’m not used to filling my weekends the way I did in my first months in L.A., going to movies alone, tagging along with coupled fri
ends. Sundays are endless again.
Clara asks if I want the vase back, now that Helena’s bouquet has died. “Don’t you miss her?” she asks. “Jules and I do.”
What sane sixty-two-year-old rejects love and commitment and armloads of peonies in hopes of finding something everyone wants and almost no one has? A few weeks after our breakup, I e-mail Helena and ask if she’d consider doing a couples counseling session with me. I send her a link to the Beverly Hills therapist who saved a friend’s marriage.
“Just tell me when and where,” she writes back immediately. “I’ll be there.”
Even as I’m figuring out what to wear to the session, I’m wondering: Mascara or not? Waterproof or not? Why am I doing this?
Driving west on Beverly, wondering.
Circling the therapist’s block an hour early, wondering.
I’m still wondering when I hear a familiar honk. I glance into my rearview mirror and there’s Helena, right behind me. She pulls her car up next to mine and she rolls down her window and she smiles her familiar smile, and she says, “Hi, honey,” in her familiar way. She beckons for me to follow her into a garage and she pays for both of us and we get out of our cars and she holds her arms out to me and I fall into them with an equal mix of gratitude and despair. Who gets two great loves in one lifetime? I was lucky to have had one.
After the session, to celebrate our reconciliation, Helena takes me to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Sipping Champagne cocktails on the patio with white linen napkins in our laps and bougainvillea draping the curvy white walls, trying not to stare at the celebrity couple whose names we can’t quite remember, I imagine my wife—or is that God?—looking down at me, shaking her head or His head, reminding me that I used to spend my nights out with my wife at indie movie houses and Occupy encampments, drinking Two-Buck Chuck and feeling like the luckiest woman alive. And now? And now the Polo Lounge, feeling like the most ambivalent woman alive.
SEVENTEEN
The minute I arrive at the Bellissima office, I can tell something’s wrong. It’s too quiet. No one’s at her desk. I check my phone to see if I forgot a company-wide meeting. No.
The lunchroom’s empty. That never happens first thing in the morning. I go looking for my boss. Heather’s office is empty. Her little antique side table, the artwork on the walls, the pictures of her kids are all gone.
“Heather left,” Marguerite says from behind me.
I turn to face Marguerite. Her eyes are red and puffy. “We had a meeting about the spring line yesterday,” I say. “She didn’t tell me she was leaving.”
Marguerite dabs at her cheeks with a pretty white hankie. Heather showed me that hankie in our meeting yesterday. She asked me to research the history of handkerchiefs for the spring line.
“Did you know she was quitting?” I ask Marguerite. “Did she get another job?”
Marguerite shakes her head. “Check your e-mail.”
I go back to my desk. The memo from Isabel to the whole company says that Heather left “for a new opportunity.” It says that everyone who reported to Heather—Marguerite, Clementine, and me—will report directly to Isabel from now on.
My anxiety skyrockets. Nearly thirty years ago I worked for a cool company much like Bellissima. We had a staff of groovy artists and writers who produced a groovy catalogue full of groovy travel clothes made of all-natural fabrics. Then a giant corporation bought our cute little company, and within six months, the groovy clothes and the groovy catalogue and the groovy people, including me, were all gone.
It was horrible when it happened, but I was in my thirties. I freelanced for as long as I could hold out, and then I got another job. I’m in my sixties now, unemployable. I moved to L.A. for this job. I bought a house for this job. This job pays for that house.
Isabel’s a real person, I tell myself. A nice person. With good politics and good values. There’s no way she’d sell the company to some evil corporation. The intuition that tells me otherwise must be paranoia.
—
BUT THEN A WEEK LATER Isabel summons me to her office and closes the door. She sinks to the floor with her legs folded in half lotus, as usual, and gestures for me to join her there, as usual. The look on her flawless face tells me what I don’t want to know.
“Meredith.” She sighs. “You’ve been doing a great job. You’ve given the company a voice. The perfect voice for us, really. You’ve taught us so much about using a few words to convey big ideas.”
“That’s good to hear,” I say through clenched teeth.
“The thing is . . .” Isabel picks at a loose white thread on her shredded jeans. “Everyone’s doing eco-clothing now. The market is saturated. If we’re going to stay competitive, we need to make some big investments in R&D.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We need to cut back on payroll so we can afford to do that.”
My lunch roils in my belly. My free, company-wide Indian lunch, eaten just an hour ago with my fellow Bellas.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Isabel says. “But we’re going to have to let you go.”
Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry.
“If I’m not here,” I manage, “who’s going to do the writing?”
“Each department is going to write its own copy.”
“The designers are going to write copy? The merchandisers? The sales reps?”
“They know the products,” Isabel says.
“They don’t know how to write.”
“They’ll learn.”
Does Isabel actually believe the all-too-popular excuse for not paying writers, that the craft of writing is “providing content,” and therefore something anyone can do?
“Effective when?” I choke out.
“Effective now,” Isabel says. “Norma’s waiting for you in the HR office.”
She unfolds her long legs and unfurls her body in one smooth move, leaving a scattering of short white threads on the carpet where she was sitting. “The two of you can work out the details.”
How am I going to feed myself? Pay my therapist? Keep the Bungalito?
Stiffly, I push myself to my feet, wincing at the shooting pains in my knees. I want to say something. Something angry, something graceful, something self-possessed. But I’ll cry if I try to speak.
“I’m sorry,” Isabel says again as I head for the door.
I don’t answer. I send a text to Charlotte—“Got fired, outta here”—and decide to skip the HR office and get out of the building before I fall apart.
—
I CALL HELENA from my car. When I hear her voice, I start to cry.
“I lost my job.”
“What? You just got a great review! What reason did they give you?”
“Budget cutbacks.”
“Not your performance?”
“No.”
“Okay, good. You can get unemployment. Where are you right now?”
Normally I hate it when Helena uses her steely businesswoman voice with me. But now it soothes me. “Driving home.”
“Who fired you?”
“Isabel.”
“Did she give you anything in writing?”
“No.”
“Did you sign anything?”
“No.”
“Good. I’ll meet you at the Bungalito.”
Twenty minutes later I’m on my couch with Helena, crying and shaking. “I’m too old to get another job,” I weep.
“You’ll go back to freelancing. And your unemployment will almost cover your mortgage.”
“That only lasts six months. What if I lose the Bungalito?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
Helena stands.
“I’m taking you to dinner. Wherever you want to go.” She pulls me to my feet. Her cavalier attitude infuriates me. Why is she always mi
nimizing my crises?
“I’m too upset to go out to eat,” I say.
Helena laughs. “When were you ever too upset to eat?” She puts her arm through mine and steers us toward the door. “You’ll feel better tomorrow,” she says, opening the passenger door of her Mercedes for me.
—
I DON’T FEEL BETTER the next day. I feel terrified and bereft. How could this have happened, again? A plan in place, a life running smoothly, a sense of safety in the world, and then—gone. Again.
Helena calls. Her voice is soothing, but I don’t hear her words. All I hear is the voice in my head saying, I love her and she loves me, but she is not my person.
Stop catastrophizing, I tell myself. Don’t turn one bad thing into everything bad. You don’t have to lose your girlfriend just because you lost your job.
“Honey?” Helena says.
“I’m here,” I say, painfully aware that “here”—being in my sixties; having a girlfriend I’m not in love with; being unemployed; being utterly uncertain about pretty much everything important in my life—is not where I want to be.
I can do something about one of those things. I tell Helena I’ll call her later and I send out a mass e-mail, telling friends that I’m going to be freelancing again, asking them to send work my way. Over the next few days I get a dozen responses from writers and editors across the country, people I’ve read, reviewed, fed, housed, and written for and people who have read, reviewed, fed, and housed me.
Another item for the list of Good Things About Getting Old: in sixty years, one amasses sixty years’ worth of colleagues, friends, and goodwill—many of whom, I learn from their return e-mails, are going through major life changes, too.
Carol, who’s fifty-nine, tells me that she just left the lucrative corporate accounting job that bored her and went after a job she really wanted, managing expenses for an indie film.
“I could have hung in there a few more years and then retired,” she says. “But I don’t even know what retirement means for someone like me. Why would I stop working when I’m at the top of my game? I’ve never been as skilled or as smart as I am now.”
The New Old Me Page 18
