I had a yen to do a couple of summer classes in Bridgehampton. I needed to believe I’d have work if the show flopped. I’d explained to my regular groups why I wasn’t doing fall sessions. They’d been excited for me but I’d been uneasy ever since. Summer groups seemed like a good compromise, but Sheldon dismissed the idea. Sheldon’s house was in Southampton, less than a ten-minute drive from ours. If I was becoming anxious about the show, he was borderline-hysterical. As the summer passed he took to coming by the house without notice to discuss something that was never important. The kids thought he was funny, “a dweeb” (Annie), “an asshole” (Rennie; she wasn’t allowed to say this in her father’s presence, but she and I had developed an understanding). Ovvy looked at me slyly and laughed. Leon’s attitude, when I complained about Sheldon, was close to the way it had been when I worried about Livvy: I should lighten up and get a kick out of the guy the way his kids did. Maybe my problem was that the summer was going too well; the kids had begun by behaving themselves and gone on to forget, a good portion of the time, that they didn’t like me anymore. Did I know that I was very Jewish in at least one way? I found it impossible to relax when too many good things were happening to me. Then Sheldon showed up without warning at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning in the middle of August because he’d been playing tennis nearby and there was something he had to tell me instantly if not sooner.
All three kids had slept elsewhere. Leon and I had been in bed until a short while earlier. I’d come downstairs in my bathing suit to put up coffee and make breakfast. Sundays I always made something special in the pancake or waffle department. I had some good local peaches and I’d already cut them up, mixed a pancake batter, and brought in the Times, in its blue-plastic bag, from the doorstep, when Leon came down and settled at the table. I gave him his coffee.
There was a knock, the kitchen door opened before either of us said a word, and Sheldon appeared, all sweat and white tennis clothes, pleased with himself for having had the foresight to know where I’d be.
“Well,” I said, “look who’s here.”
Leon stared at him. I dumped the peaches into the batter, turned on the heat under the big frying pan.
“I need to talk to you,” Sheldon said. “Mind if I take a cup of coffee?”
“Oh, sure, please,” Leon said after a moment as I poured the batter into the pan. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you’d called.”
“I was two blocks away,” Sheldon said, meaning that he hadn’t called.
I grinned.
Sheldon sat down with Leon. Sniffed the cooking pancake.
“That for the show?”
“Of course,” I said. “We never eat except to rehearse for the show.”
He was not amused. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether Sheldon really didn’t get a joke or was making it a point not to be amused. Or the reverse. That is, when he laughed because he knew a joke was funny, he was sort of showing that he knew it was funny rather than enjoying it. Kupferman and I often exchanged glances when Sheldon did his I-get-the-joke routine. Anyway, now he wasn’t even bothering to Get It.
“Would you like a piece?” I asked as I took three dishes instead of two from the cabinet.
“Yeah. Sure.”
It was only when he’d polished off his pancake and gone for the last coffee in the pot that he settled back at the table and made his announcement.
“We have to go into the city.”
“We?”
“You.”
It was gratifying to watch Leon, who for months had been arguing with me on Sheldon’s behalf, reacting to this real-life invasion of the body snatcher.
“What for?” I asked.
“To see how we can fix you up for the show.”
Under the napkin Leon had left on the table, his middle finger was signaling “Fuck you.”
I smiled radiantly at Sheldon. I had long since stopped trying to figure out whether he deliberately couched his thoughts in the most insulting possible manner.
“I know they’ll want me to wear makeup. And I’ll put up my hair, and wear these nice cotton prints that look hamisch, and—”
“Never mind hamisch. Kupferman thinks you could be good-looking.”
Leon stood up to get the paper.
“It’s not me, Leon,” I said. “It’s occidental females.”
Sheldon shook his head. “Bob doesn’t wanna go for the Julia look. You’re not fat enough. They decided to go for a little glamour. We’re taking a shot at the first glamorous female chef.”
I laughed.
If finding my own way in an academic family had left me with no strong sense of myself that didn’t reside in the kitchen, a fringe benefit of having grown up in that family was never to have developed the pervasive anxiety about appearance that many women had always had, and that seems to oppress male and female of all ages now. Recently, whether because men’s eyes were full of television females or their brains were full of women who’d threatened to sue for ocular rape when they were eyed on the street, I was more likely to have my existence noted by strangers if I wore makeup and dressed up a little. I could tell Livvy had grown more and more anxious about her appearance, not just her weight. She was spending a huge amount of money on cosmetics and products guaranteed to remove hair from one place, make it silkier in another. But a few fast looks around me told me she was no worse than her friends and others I saw on the streets, in places called nail parlors (the first time I’d seen a sign for one, I’d thought I was reading it wrong), and in department stores, where you got the impression that cosmetics, perfumes, and powders were doing more for capitalism than the clothing and furniture industries put together. Walking into the elevator of Sheldon’s office building, I’d be bowled over by the scent worn by some young woman who’d been promised it would lure a man and had decided to use enough to lure ten.
If they tried to make me wear perfume on the show, I’d tell them it interfered with the smell of the food.
Anyway, I knew I was lucky that I didn’t obsess over the way I looked. On the other hand, it would have been too much to hope that they’d be the same way. Or to anticipate what they had in mind.
Or the results.
Daphne Kupferman brought me to her hairdresser, Gilbert. Pronounced Zheelbear. Who had an accent that was either false French or real French-Canadian, and who never spoke directly to me. He talked to Daphne, a young and glamorous second wife who avoided meeting my eyes in the mirror as she listened to him.
First he described, for our benefit and not without pain to himself, how I would appear on the screen if I were so foolish as to go on the air with “zis.” Zis being my hair, a lock of which he raised with an expression I’d have reserved for a dead waterbug.
“She weel fade into za woodworrrk.”
Then he described the various possibilities, beginning with Jane Pauley blonde, going on to Vanna White blonde, Madonna blonde, and several other blondes I hadn’t heard of. I asked uneasily whether maybe we could start with just a little henna rinse. He ignored me but Daphne smiled sympathetically, patted my shoulder.
To make an afternoon-long’s story short, I left Zheelbear with my hair shoulder-length, curly instead of wavy, and Sarah Jessica Parker blonde. I had been heavily made up under Daphne’s supervision. She needed, she said, to get a feeling for the possibilities. I’d kept my eyes closed, refused to look in the mirror, and when I accidentally did so, was uncertain for a second or two whom I was looking at. They kept telling me I’d get used to wearing makeup and appeared not to believe my claim that I always had. (Of course, I’d worn it to look better when I got dressed up, not to be someone I couldn’t recognize.) Now I felt more self-conscious than I had the first time I wore a brassiere, as embarrassed as the first time I got my period—in school. Daphne brought me to Bob’s office for approval, and approve he did, but all I wanted was to sneak home before anyone saw me. I felt like one of those women you saw sauntering along Fifth Avenue on weekdays who really wouldn
’t know what to do with the afternoon if the stores closed.
It was Monday. I was scheduled for a Tuesday-morning clothes conference with Daphne’s Personal Shopper, after which I’d take the train back to Bridgehampton. Leon had hired a local high-school boy the kids liked to stay at the house and supervise them, particularly with regard to the pool. They didn’t really need anyone to take care of them, especially if Rennie was being nice because she liked the young man; Annie was capable of preparing the simple meals they ate in our absence. I had no idea of how Leon’s kids would react to my ghastly transformation, but I knew I wasn’t ready to face their father.
I hailed a cab, changed my mind, let it go. If I got back to my apartment too quickly, I might jump into the shower instead of trying to get accustomed to the way I looked. From a street phone, I left a message for Leon that I wouldn’t be home for dinner. Then I began walking down Fifth Avenue. It was only when I was somewhere below Thirty-fourth Street that I started trying to remember Olivia’s working hours. Having her see me, if she was in one of her nasty moods, could be worse than facing Leon.
By the time I reached home, I was in a less extreme state, though still too fragile to let Leon see me. By now he’d be curled up in his icy-cold bedroom with some awful food he’d brought home with him. Maybe when I walked in his whole digestive system would go haywire. I’d walk over to Sixth Avenue and pick up a bread and some cheese in the doubtful event that I’d get hungry later. I took off my clothes, showered with a shower cap on, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, combed my hair without looking in the mirror, cursing because the front ends weren’t even long enough to pull back away from my face. Why couldn’t they have waited until the end of the goddamned summer to do this to me? I put on a little makeup because my old face just didn’t look right with my new hair.
As I pushed open the building’s front door, someone pulled it from the outside, so that I fell forward slightly, reached out for the wrought-iron railing at the steps’ side.
“Whoops, sorry,” Leon’s voice said. Then, as I turned around, it added in a somewhat more seductive tone, “Are you okay?”
I looked up at him. We were inches away from each other, but it was several seconds before he realized that it was me. Then it was his turn to start. After which his face turned bright red under his Hamptons’ tan.
“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed.
“It was His hairdresser, actually,” I said, tartly defensive.
“You look gorgeous!” He set down the shopping bag he’d been carrying.
Now it was my turn to be stunned. Maybe he was being sarcastic. No. Looking at him, it was impossible to believe this. My mind went to the first time I’d gotten dressed up to go to the Coach House and he’d made his first pass. But this was on another scale entirely. His eyes took me in as though I’d managed, in his absence, to find and occupy Marilyn Monroe’s undamaged earthly remains.
“Let me look at you!” His hands were on my arms. “I can’t believe—” His arms came around me and he tried to kiss me but a car horn honked nearby, startling us both.
“Leon, this is—”
Again, he tried to kiss me, but I could feel passersby looking at us and I pushed him away. I said I wanted to go to the store. He said there was something he had to show me first. Inside, he led me upstairs to his apartment, and then to his bedroom, where he made love to me with a vigor that was particularly noteworthy because he’d been working since eight that morning, and later, when we’d had dinner out, and come home to bed, he made love to me again. I didn’t understand yet what had happened, but I liked it enough to forget everything else for a while.
In the morning, I got back into my T-shirt and shorts, had a glass of what Leon called “fresh-squoze orange juice” with him, resisted his efforts to go back to bed for a quickie, went down to my apartment when he left for work. I was under orders to stick around for dinner even if I finished early with Daphne Kupferman.
I turned the key in my top lock, which wasn’t on. I’d have to speak to Livvy about doing it automatically at night. I turned the key in the bottom lock, opened the door to face Pablo, just coming out of the bathroom, wearing his pants, but no shirt, socks, or shoes. If I was thrown for a loop, he was thrown further by this strange blonde with a key to the apartment. When he realized it was Olivia’s mother under the hair, he was stunned, then terribly upset.
I said, “Hi,” came in, closed the door behind me. “It’s me. They made me do my hair for the TV show.”
He nodded, but he couldn’t speak. He might not even have heard yet about the show.
“I slept upstairs.”
Nothing.
“Olivia sleeping?”
Another nod.
I smiled. “Maybe it’s just as well. Do you have time for a cup of coffee and a little talk?” He hesitated. “I think it’s really a good idea, Pablo.” I smiled. “The talk, anyway.”
He whispered, “She won’t like that.”
I nodded. “I know she won’t. But she’s fifteen years old and I’m concerned about her.”
He looked at the floor. “I wouldn’t hurt her.”
“You don’t have to want to hurt her to get her pregnant, you just—”
“I’m very careful,” he said earnestly, looking at me now. “I’m not the one to take chances. I try to tell her—”
Later I would think about the phrasing, but at that moment Olivia opened her door and walked into the living room. She’d wrapped a cotton blanket around herself. She’d heard my voice and decided to tough it out, but of course she hadn’t been prepared for the hair. She did a double take. Her lip curled. She looked away from me to Pablo, sitting at the kitchen table.
“I hope you’re comfortable,” she said to him, in a tone of voice I’d thought she reserved for me.
“Your mama,” he said after a moment, “wants to talk to us, O. She’s worried, you know. . . .”
It was the “us” in “wants to talk to us” that made me decide I could trust him.
I put up water for coffee.
She said, “Since you and my mother agree about everything, why don’t you two talk, and I’ll go back to bed!”
But she went to the bathroom, and when she came out a moment later, she was wearing one of the twin towel robes my parents had bought us. I’d been setting up coffee cups, afraid to speak lest she think it was behind her back. As she sat down, I looked for a way to open a conversation without adding to the tension at the table.
“I’m glad you two’ve made up, and I hope you’ll spend some time with us at the beach. I told Livvy, there’s a downstairs bedroom with its own bath for you this year.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Pablo said.
Olivia gave him a dirty look. He looked back—imploringly. He hadn’t arranged all this. What was he supposed to do?
“Look,” I said, having poured coffee for each of us and sat down with them, “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this. It’s very simple. L—Olivia’s not quite sixteen years old. She wants to go to college. She shouldn’t get pregnant.”
“Mother of God!” she exploded. “Don’t you have anything else in the whole world to worry about, beside me having a baby?” She stood up, with her coffee. She looked at Pablo meaningfully. “You must be late for work by now.” She turned to me. “If you think of something else you care about, please knock at my door and tell me. In the meantime, I’m going back to sleep.”
With an apologetic shrug, Pablo finished the last of his coffee, went to finish dressing, came out again. At the front door, he turned back.
He said, “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, Mrs. Ferrante. I love her. I . . .” Words failed him.
I smiled. “I can tell you’re a good man, Pablo,” I said, to cover the acute uneasiness his words caused me. You could take care of a young man who wanted to get laid; a young man in love might be much more difficult.
I walked upstairs to Leon’s apartment and called him at the hospital. He could o
nly talk to me for a moment, but he ordered me not to go back to Bridgehampton after doing my clothes shopping. I should wait for him at his apartment or mine. He would call the sitter and his kids and explain that I’d been delayed. That way, we could drive out together on Friday.
I told Livvy I’d be in Leon’s apartment until Friday, that I’d ring first if I had to come down for anything in the early morning or the evening. My computer was out at the beach, but I brought up some books and notes. I’d told my father, before we all separated for the summer, that I was afraid my ability to be, as they say, quick with the snappy answer wouldn’t be up to par for television. He had suggested that I do what he did in teaching, compile a list of answers that I’d be able to adapt to whatever questions were asked. I’d laughed at the idea, but now I was going to try to do just that.
The clothing trip was relatively painless, if only because Daphne agreed that I had to wear clothes I could really prepare food in, skirts not so tight I couldn’t pick up something that fell, et cetera. I ended up with slightly more glamorous cottons than I already owned, and the low heels that were, fortunately, in style.
I prepared dinners for Leon and me at home, upstairs. Main-course salads and other dishes appropriate to the hot weather and a kitchen with only a fan to make it bearable. On hotter nights, I served them in the bedroom. And as I moved back and forth between the hot kitchen and the cool bedroom, looking for the salt and pepper or something else I’d forgotten, and then, later, brought back the dishes, or went to find one of the books I was scouring for ad libs, Leon, more often than not, followed me. Sometimes he’d just thought of something he wanted to tell me. At other times he was sure he’d had a reason to leave the other room, but now he couldn’t remember it. Often it was just a sudden urge to kiss me. Or hug me. Or make love. I made jokes about how it was true blondes had more fun, but he really seemed not to get them. Nor did I catch on immediately. It was too absurd.
I’d told the kids over the phone that I’d been turned into a blonde and they mustn’t tease me too much about it. Their reactions, when we reached the house Friday night, varied from Rennie’s enthusiasm to Annie’s polite “You look very nice, Caroline” with Ovvy’s appearing not to notice. He came running out of the house when we parked the car to show me a huge and particularly wonderful shell he’d found intact on the beach, allowed me to kiss his cheek though he was becoming shy about hugs and kisses, then ran off to find the sitter, who was inside watching MTV.
Olivia Page 23
