“This place is a mess. But I have to confess that it’s fascinating,” I said.
“You are a Gemini, right?” asked Lorre.
“How did you know?”
“You have that double-thing thing—the child and the adult, the virgin and the whore—you’re very Gemini,” Lorre explained while browsing a French magazine from the sixties. “Wasn’t Sophia Loren gorgeous?” she asked.
“Beyond gorgeous,” I said, and we all sighed.
Feeling more comfortable with the girls, I ventured an apology to Myrna.
“By the way, I didn’t mean to come across as homophobic out there.”
“Don’t worry, Mama, I’m not a lesbian,” she replied. “But if you find me a woman who’s got a nine-inch dick, I might give it a shot.”
We laughed as if we were stoned, until we were interrupted by a mournful groan.
Myrna propped herself up, looked at the spot she was sitting on, and asked, “Honey, can you breathe okay?”
“Dontcha move!” moaned Guido.
Oh, wait a minute. I forgot to tell you something fairly relevant: all along, as we talked and laughed on the bed, Guido had been lying underneath us, facedown, on a feather mattress.
I know, it’s crazy, but Guido seemed to be turned on by heavy burdens. So the three off us, with clinking-clanking weights and all, were parked right on top of him for about two hours. I was going to volunteer the phone number of Dr. Goldstein, my chiropractor, but I didn’t want to put Guido on the spot.
Myrna sat back down on his shoulders and went back to her magazine. That’s when we heard another muffled groan from below.
“What did he say?” asked Myrna.
“Grind, I think,” replied Lorre.
And so we did. We kept grinding ourselves repeatedly to increase the pressure on Guido. Each time, he screamed in ecstasy. He was as happy as a pig in shit. Who knew that someone would get off on something so ridiculously simple?
“A Carmita como que le gustan los hombres sin culo,” my mom used to say about my aunt Carmita, who always dated the same type of men, with broad shoulders and no ass. “I think she has a fetish,” Mom said, and that was the first time I heard that word: fetish.
As the years went by, I ended up associating fetishes with creepy guests on daytime talk shows, but after that night in Guido’s apartment I started seeing the other side of the coin.
The most obvious fetishes are well known: shoes (especially stilettos), leather clothing, dungeons, military uniforms. But I have learned that fetishists can be turned on by pretty much anything. Some people are irresistibly attracted to veiny arms, soft elbows, bulging eyes, hairy backs, and even big front teeth. What has to happen in your childhood to make you crave the company of a bucktoothed lover? I have no idea, but I wonder if God decided to create fetishes to make sure that the bucktoothed guy found a girlfriend too. I’ve heard that some people are even turned on by sneezing. I can be a bit of a sneezer when the seasons change, so for a minute I wondered if I could find myself a nice “sneezophiliac,” but, knowing how insecure I can be, I know that I would constantly be questioning if I sneeze too much, or not enough, or if he’s seeing another woman on the side who sneezes better than me.
When I see these young girls who marry rich old men, I wonder if they have a money fetish. Would they marry the same senior citizen if he were poor?
But when I see someone like Guido, who’s turned on by such a simple pleasure as having three fat girls sitting on his back, I can’t help feeling a little envious. For me sex is not so simple. In my case, sexual attraction is based on a mix of feelings, fantasies, and expectations. Even at my horniest, I need to think that the man I’m with is “the one.” I can’t just randomly pick three bodies and place them on my back. I need someone with a certain personality, a nice smile, a good job. Is it better to be like me, or to be like Guido? I honestly don’t know. He will always find someone who’ll make him happy. But me? I wasn’t so sure. Maybe Alberto was right when he told me that I was picky. Maybe that’s why I had such a hard time finding my match.
But let’s go back to the story. After two hours sitting on Guido’s back, Myrna, Lorre, and I decided to go to a Greek diner for a quick bite. While our respective chauffeurs smoked cigars outside, we looked at the menus and decided to indulge in comfort food.
A super-young, super-skinny, super-gothic waitress with black lipstick and piercings all over her face came over to take our order.
“I want a hamburger…make it a Cheddar cheeseburger deluxe, and a Coke,” said Myrna, while still browsing the menu.
“Diet Coke?” asked the waitress innocently.
There was a dead silence while Myrna lowered the menu with a menacing look on her face.
“Did you hear me say ‘Diet’” she snapped.
“I…I didn’t hear it…” the waitress tried to say apologetically, but Myrna interrupted her.
“You didn’t hear it because I didn’t say it. So bring me a full-fat sugar-coated carb-loaded motherfucking soda, all right?”
Understanding the screw-up, the girl blushed and turned to me, trying to change the subject.
“And for you, miss?”
“Same thing.”
Lorre indicated with a smile that she wanted the same, and the waitress left in a hurry.
We all laughed at the incident. What’s up with people assuming that just because you’re fat you have to drink a diet soda? Let’s face it, if we’re having cheeseburgers deluxe, we’re not in a hurry to lose any weight.
“So how long have you been in the business?” asked Myrna. “A week?”
“Yes. How did you know?” I said as I smiled, a little embarrassed. “Is it that obvious?”
Myrna and Lorre laughed out loud.
“We can tell,” said Lorre. “It’s great money, right?”
“Oh, it’s fantastic money, but for me…”
Before I could finish the sentence, Myrna stepped in, completing my thought. “You’re doing it for the thrill, right?”
I nodded, and they laughed again.
“Getting paid to be worshipped? How did this happen?” said Lorre.
“First I did it for the thrill too,” said Myrna, “but then the thrill went away and I got hooked on the money.”
“See…that’s my problem. I’m not a prude, but I feel guilty about making money out of this. Being with someone because he paid me, it makes me feel weird, it makes me feel like I’m a…”
“Whore?” Myrna completed.
“Exactly,” I whined.
“That’s just social bullshit. What’s the difference between marrying for money and having sex for money?” Lorre asked.
“Sex? I wish this was sex!” Myrna added. “My husband loves this, because I make a ton of cash and I come home horny every night. Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked me.
“Nope.”
“Well, you better get one, because you’re gonna get very horny very fast,” predicted Myrna.
I must have blushed to a deep purple, because both girls laughed so hard at me that I was afraid they were going to have a stroke.
Yes. I needed a boyfriend, because I was getting restless, and impatient, and—truth be told—I was also getting very horny, very fast.
CHAPTER 16
My friend Rodolfo was a seriously talented advertising producer, and he did tons of commercials for my agency. But he had a bad habit: every time someone in the crew made a mistake, he would call him an idiot to his face. It was kind of embarrassing to witness that, because he would yell and scream things like “How stupid can you be?” or “What kind of retarded asshole are you?” The guy was smart and gifted, but his social skills truly sucked.
Obviously, he wouldn’t treat his clients the same way. However, though he never insulted them to their faces, privately he would tell me anecdotes that proved their hopeless idiocy. I confess that, for me, it’s sometimes fun to trash certain people, like Bonnie. But Rodolfo really took it to another le
vel. He dwelled on it.
At some point, his company, which used to be extremely successful, went down. Unable to attract clients, he felt the need to leave expensive New York City for a more forgiving environment. He moved to Mexico, where he produced a few commercials and a documentary about the shamans of Tulum. I lost track of Rodolfo, then a year later he came back to New York and took me out for dinner.
I noticed that he had mellowed out quite a bit. He wasn’t describing in detail the stupidity of mankind anymore. He talked a lot of about Tulum, where he was living now, making videos for some New Age company that promoted spiritual healing and such. I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was in a less negative mind-set, and I told him so. He heard me and smiled. Then, after looking around as if we were being spied upon, he told me something I never forgot.
“B, after I lost my business I realized that not only should you not call people stupid, you shouldn’t even think it, because they can hear you.”
“Okaaay,” I said to myself, thinking that maybe he’d gone a little crazy. I guess that, after you’d been chewing peyote for a while with the shamans of Tulum, something was bound to happen. But, crazy or not, after this spiritual awakening he was a much nicer person. His confession always stayed with me, and the morning after my Upper East Side adventure, I caught myself thinking about Rodolfo’s statement. Not only should you not call people stupid, you shouldn’t even think it, because they can hear you.
Can people actually read your mind? I must confess that I have seen men running away from me every time I got into my desperate-spinster funks. Just like dogs that attack you when they smell fear, men run away from you when they smell an agenda. I know that there’s a generalized complaint that men are afraid of commitment, but when women show up with an agenda—be it marry me, or buy me a house—men have very few options other than doing it, or running away as fast as they can.
But that Friday morning, as I pondered all these things in my cubicle, a mysterious phone call brought me back to reality.
“B?”
“Hi, Mary!”
“I think you need to go to the bathroom.”
“What?”
“I think you need to go to the bathroom right now.”
That’s when it clicked. Something had happened in Bonnie’s office that required my immediate presence in the ladies’ room. Without hesitation I grabbed my recorder and went to sit in the toilet with my legs propped against the wall, dying to hear and register whatever the hell was going on.
Bonnie stormed into the ladies’ room bitching and moaning, closely followed by Christine. I felt her checking for any visible legs under the stall door before—convinced that they were alone—erupting in an endless tirade against the Chicago Boss. Apparently, she was having a disagreement with him about the UK Charms pitch, but, being the two-headed monster that she was, she would keep up the smile in front of him, and then use Christine to blow off steam.
“I can’t stand that asshole!” Bonnie said. “But he is digging his own grave, that much I can tell you.”
“Are you sure that you want to pick a fight with him?” Christine asked.
“Oh, I’m not going to fight with him. I don’t waste my time fighting. But he’s going to come in next Friday and he’s going to find himself in the middle of a minefield. And you can write that down.”
Actually, there was no need for Christine to write it down, since I was recording the confession of her master plan from my stall. The only good news was that, this time, I wasn’t her prime target. She had her eyes on someone bigger. Even I had to acknowledge that she was brilliant. Rotten, but brilliant. And the problem with brilliant, rotten people is that, much like serial killers, after they get away with murder over and over, they get cocky, and they start thinking that they are invincible. That’s probably why Bonnie wasn’t smart enough to realize that when you brag about your killings in a public place, someone—like me—can be recording every word of it.
Back at my desk, I finished working on the brainstorm notes that I had to e-mail to Bonnie. I kept even the stupidest slogans from the disgruntled creatives, including “Say hello to Aunt Flo” and “Parting the Red Sea.” The fact is that all the ideas sucked, but it would make no difference to Bonnie. It would probably facilitate things for her.
Two hours later, I was at the copy machine when she walked by.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m putting together the reports for the UK Charms presentation.”
“I didn’t have time to go through the stats that you gave me, so you have to write me some bullet points,” she said in her usual military tone.
“And by when do you need this?” I asked while examining my cuticles.
“By the end of the day. I’m going to leave early, so drop it with my doorman tonight so I can read it during the weekend.”
Great. So I did the research, I gave it to her a week ago, I offered to write her bullet points then—but she refused them—and now I had to stay way past midnight on a Friday so she could look good in her meeting. And, naturally, she expected me to drop it at her home, because, even though I had to work late, she was leaving early. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this lady’s cojones should be on display at the Museum of Natural History.
But timing is everything, and at that particular moment my red cell phone rang loud and clear. I pulled it out of my cleavage. Bonnie looked at me as if I had burped in the middle of her wedding. Her nasty look encouraged me.
“I can’t work tonight,” I said.
“This is very important,” she threatened me.
“Well, this is a very important call, and I will not work late tonight, so if you’ll excuse me…”
I just walked away from her, knowing that I would piss her off beyond reason, and that was exactly what I wanted to accomplish.
Once out of the reach of her claws, I answered my cell.
“Madame?”
“Honey? Alberto will pick you up at ten. It’s going to be a mellow night. Bring a book to read.”
Knowing that Bonnie was leaving early, I left a bit early myself, and I rushed home to get ready and to go through the pile of books that I’d been buying but, because I have never said no to Bonnie, I hadn’t had time to read in the last three years. I chose a book of short stories by Gabriel García Márquez that a friend had recommended months ago. I threw it in my bag and went downstairs to meet Alberto.
Alberto took me to Tribeca, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city. We stopped in front of a renovated warehouse. I rang the bell, and a female voice answered.
“Who is it?”
“It’s B,” I said, wondering if my client could be a woman. Would Madame send me to see a woman?
The woman buzzed me in, and I walked into one of those private elevators where you need a key to access the floor you’re going to. Someone called the elevator up, and the door opened in a photography studio. Turned out that the whole warehouse was the studio and residence of a fashion photographer.
I stepped out of the elevator to find a very active photo shoot in progress. There were a handful of assistants, hair and makeup stylists, and several super-skinny models dressed up in haute-couture gowns, posing in front of a very complicated set made out of pink leather. Some of the models looked familiar, probably because I had seen them on the covers of fashion magazines. These were the kind of girls who fly first-class from New York to Milan to work on the big fashion shows.
The photographer was tall, skinny, and scruffy, and he wore thick eyeglasses. I immediately knew who he was. I had seen him mentioned in the newspapers as the fashion photographer of the moment. He was none other than Simon Leary.
“Put your right hand on your hip…Okay…you are bored…You are so bored you can hardly stay awake…Now look at me!” said Simon while snapping a few shots of a blonde who was lying on a chaise longue.
He switched cameras, got rid of the chair, brought over two more models, and started
snapping a new batch of pictures. The girls stood in languid poses, looking away from each other as if they had been forced to stand together. I’ve worked in advertising for several years, but I’m always involved in unglamorous projects where we have to photograph a box of cereal or a jar of peanut butter. This was my very first time watching fashion models at work. I’m not crazy about the whole anorexic-model aesthetic, but I couldn’t stop watching them. It was one of the most interesting things I’ve ever seen.
When the models were not posing, they just looked like emaciated teenagers. But the moment they made their “model face,” they would turn into sex goddesses. They would stretch their necks, relax their shoulders, lower their faces, open their eyes really wide, and—very subtly—suck in the sides of their mouths to enhance their cheekbones. They managed to look real and fake at the same time.
Watching these girls working it for the camera made me realize how much effort and energy it takes to look naturally pretty in a photo. It looked exhausting.
“Sandra, you either look at her or you don’t, but right now you’re giving me this three-quarter look that is totally useless,” Simon said to one of the girls, without even making eye contact with her.
I studied Simon. There was an extreme awkwardness about him. His lips were tightly pressed together, as if he was fighting a smile, and he spoke so low that catching his words was like trying to catch a bullet with your teeth.
At some point the Sandra girl tried to adjust the strap of her shoe, but she lost her balance and attempted to grab Simon so that she wouldn’t fall. Before she even touched him, he jumped away from her as if she were trying to stab him, knocking over one of the lights and causing a small commotion.
What’s wrong with him? I thought. She had barely touched him, and he jumped back as if the devil were coming to take his soul. The oddest part was that Simon didn’t even apologize to her.
“I’m so sorry,” said a confused and embarrassed Sandra.
In my opinion, it was Simon who should have apologized.
B as in Beauty Page 15
