Maybe I looked too fat in my underwear.
The L’Oréal campaign would fix all this. A beauty campaign would be an opportunity for me to restore my dignity, my uniqueness. Apart from gracing the cover of Vogue, I couldn’t imagine anything in the world more glamorous than a beauty campaign. A beauty campaign had the power to validate. Like becoming a model, it was a way to convince people beyond a doubt that you were, in fact, attractive. Selling shampoo serves up an answer to a question that’s vague and subjective. It tells you what beauty is, that the face selling this product is a beautiful face.
There’s nothing like external validation. I craved it. It’s why I went to law school. The theory of objectivism claims that there are certain things that most people in society can agree upon. A model is pretty. A lawyer is smart. Our society is based upon objectivism. It’s how we make rules and why we obey them. That was perhaps the only thing I learned in law school. I was too busy modeling to go to class.
The L’Oréal bigwig was a pleasant, smiling man and he ordered a Heineken from the server. I could tell he was the bigwig, because no one else who sat in a floral lounge chair would have had the gall to order alcohol in a meeting. It bothered me slightly that he did that. It seemed like meeting with me wasn’t terribly important. That he didn’t need to impress me, win me away from Garnier or any other competitive hair care brands that might be offering me a similar deal. But what bothered me most about the Heineken was the thing he said as he picked up the icy green bottle and pointed to it with the index finger from his other hand.
“No more of this for you, Portia.”
Now, I liked beer. I especially liked Heineken, and I didn’t like that anyone would say something like that to me. If he’d been a doctor who was explaining my impending liver failure while demonstrating what caused it at a bar, or if I was that Olympic gymnast I’d pretended to be in summer as a kid, who was celebrating her last night before going to a foreign country to compete for gold, I might have been okay with such a statement. At least, I would’ve understood it. But why did he not want me to drink beer? Could it be because alcohol is fattening? Aging? Makes you stupid if you get drunk? I didn’t understand. But what I did understand from that comment was that I had just been offered the job of being the new face of L’Oréal.
A fitting followed a week after the meeting, and with it all the excitement and beer drinking that came with celebrating my new, prestigious job. The fitting for the commercial took place at the Four Seasons again, and I figured the hotel served as a kind of L’Oréal office base away from the home office in New York. The executives took their meetings in the bar, conferred in a conference room, slept in their individual suites, and lavished their new star with a room full of beautiful clothes to try in the presidential suite. My manager came with me to the fitting and both of us were excited.
After the initial meetings and greetings of the stylist and her assistants and tailors, I wandered into the main room of the presidential suite wide-eyed and my mouth agape. All the furniture had been removed and the walls were lined with racks and racks of clothing. Hundreds of suits hung on the racks and on every rack, on the north, south, and west walls, was the same gray suit.
“Great. I was just looking for a gray suit! Now I know where they all are.”
The mood in the room was quiet and not jovial, so I put my smart-ass personality to rest and took out the pleasant, compliant, easygoing one I’ve been using at work since the day I started. I knew this kind of client, the kind where every little detail mattered; I’d modeled for them for years. I’d just never worked for this giant of a company at this level. My experience with clients who tested every little detail in a think tank of consumers who’d been randomly collected from shopping malls was limited to the smaller companies in Australia. And nothing says, “You’re in the big leagues” like two hundred near-identical suits in the presidential suite of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.
I looked at a gray suit with a short jacket and a pencil skirt with a side slit. Then I looked at a gray suit with a pencil skirt and a short jacket with a slightly different lapel than the one I’d looked at five minutes prior that had a pointier, larger lapel and a skirt that was slit on the opposite side. Some of the fabrics were a different weight than others with a different ratio of cotton to wool. It was clear to me that my opinion or preference of suits didn’t matter at all, and so I went into the dressing room and tried on jackets and skirts as they were handed to me.
Undressing in front of my manager was embarrassing. I didn’t feel quite thin enough to be standing around barefoot in my G-string, but I didn’t want to tell her to leave the room. After all, the only reason for her to be here was to help me navigate through the sea of suits, and I knew she’d have much preferred to be somewhere else with another of her bigger, more famous clients. She was a busy woman whose time was important, so I couldn’t have her wait in the living room. Besides, there was no furniture anywhere else in the hotel suite. Comfort had been cleared away for productivity. And the skirts that were passed in and out of that dressing room from the stylist’s assistant to the stylist to the tailor and then back to the stylist’s assistant to be hung back up on the rack of suits that didn’t fit looked like a production line in a factory—an unproductive factory. So far, not one of the suits had fit. The skirts either didn’t zip up in the back, or if they had Lycra or another synthetic fabric helping them to stretch, the skirt did that telltale bunching that looks like ripples on a lakeshore between two gently rolling hills that were my thighs. They didn’t fit. None of them. I tried on suit after suit until it was obvious to the stylist and the tailor that the fitting should take place skirt by skirt. It was pointless to try the jacket if the skirt was so small it couldn’t be zipped up in the back.
They were all a size 4. My modeling card measurements—34, 24, 35—had put me at a size 4. And it seemed like the more expensive the suit, the tighter it was. A size 4 in Prada was a size 2 in the type of clothes I’d wear for Ally. I could’ve argued that the European sizing was different. I could’ve made a case for myself, but none of that was important when I couldn’t zip up the fifteenth skirt in a row. None of what I could’ve said would be important.
You can put on a brave face for only so long. I put one on for about three hours before it cracked. After three hours I fell silent. There was nothing to say. We all knew what was going on. I was unprofessional. I didn’t deserve the campaign. My manager had slid down into her chair with her hand on the side of her face, exhausted, no longer willing to go to battle for me. The stylist, who had lacked a personality in the beginning, found one toward the fourth hour of the fitting, and it wasn’t pleasant to be around. She’d stopped addressing me directly. Everything she said in front of me was to her assistant or tailor: “Go get the Dolce skirt. Let’s see if she can fit into that.” Or “What if you let the skirt out as much as you can. She might be able to get away with it.”
She stopped cold as the door of the suite was knocked upon and opened simultaneously. It was the L’Oréal executives come to see what was taking so long. They had been in the conference room taking meetings but had been expecting to see some pictures of Portia de Rossi in several gray suits. We were supposed to have given them Polaroids of all the options by now. We had given them none.
“Hi.”
I didn’t bother to smile or go to them in the hallway. My manager didn’t even get up.
“What’s going on in here?” The female executive had a smiley yet accusatory voice. The kind of pissed-off yet polite voice one would expect from Hillary Clinton if she had the sneaking suspicion that someone was trying to pull the wool over her eyes.
There was an awful silence. It was a silence full of thwarted hopes, a stale-air kind of silence.
The explanation they were seeking was summed up with a simple statement from the stylist that everyone seemed to understand.
“Nobody told me she was a size eight.”
Like a dead man to the
galley, I walked with my manager to the Four Seasons parking garage. When I’d driven in that morning, I’d been given the option to self-park or to valet park and, quite honestly, I didn’t know which one was the cool thing to do. I thought maybe it said more about the type of person I was if I did away with all the ceremony of a valet. It said that I was self-sufficient, that I could see through artifice, that I wasn’t falling for it. I was happy about that now because the vast gray parking structure was empty of people, except for my manager and me, the emptiness echoing the clicking of our heels as we walked through it. It occurred to me as I was walking miles to my car (valet parkers got all the good spaces) that the parking garage held up the rest of the building and was its true nature, that all the floral lounge chairs and Hollywood dealings were like costumes and a character to an actor; another kind of empty shell that needed a good stylist and a purpose. I’d been given another fitting two days from now, a time and address scratched on a piece of paper. That would give the stylist time to find bigger sizes. The second fitting would take place in the rented space of the stylist in a not-so-good part of Hollywood. That’s what you get for drinking beer.
My manager walked me as far as the elevators, but that was as far as she’d go. We’d come down the stairs, tried to find my car around that area, and then started walking because I thought that maybe my car was at the other end. I have no sense of direction. If I haven’t been to a place before, I’ll get lost. In the car, if I haven’t traveled the exact route, I’ll get lost and almost force myself to go the wrong way to prove that I knew it was the wrong way. I deliberately go the wrong way so I can predict the outcome with confidence.
At the elevators, as she was trying to leave me and get back to her pretty Jaguar and her pretty office with the ocean breeze, I showed her the big gray empty space inside me. I didn’t mean to; it’s just what happens if I disappoint someone I’m trying to impress. The crying seemed to come abruptly and from my stomach and as I cried, it folded in half and bent over and couldn’t be straightened back up. My head was somewhere past my knees and my heels could no longer balance the weight of my head and torso—all of it making heaving, sobbing motions and so I sank to the cold gray concrete. I was on the ground. It was a brief moment, but for that moment I was on the floor of the bottom floor of the Four Seasons: from the presidential suite to the floor of the bottom floor in four hours. My manager yanked me up by the arm with the super-human strength that comes with embarrassment, the way a mother yanks up a child who’s thrown a tantrum in a department store.
“I can’t do this, Joan. I’m too fat. They don’t want me. They want someone else. I think we should get out of it. I don’t want to do this anymore. Joan, I’m too fat. They told me that Heather Locklear was a size zero and Andie MacDowell was a two!”
She looked around to make sure no one could see us. She made sure none of her producer friends whose kids play soccer were anywhere around to see this spectacle and then she said:
“Honey. You have big legs.”
I stopped crying. I was shocked into stopping. I’d never heard that before in all my years of modeling. I was hoping for some bullshit reassurance about how the stylist should have had more sizes and how women my height shouldn’t be a size 2. Instead I was told the truth.
Yes. Of course, I have big legs. I have big thighs that make all the skirts tight no matter how much I weigh. Everything makes sense now. In fact, Anthony Nankervis, the boy who told me I had slitty, lizard eyes also told me I had footballer’s legs. I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten that.
With a dismissive hand gesture to punctuate her point, she said it again. She announced it with certainty, the way that any fact would be stated, requiring no qualification and inviting no rebuttal.
“Just face it, honey. You have big legs.”
“What part of your body do you like?”
The Jenny Craig counselor is talking to a jovial woman at the two o’clock spot in the group circle. She is a very fat woman with dull brown hair.
“My hair?” Laughter all round.
“Well, that’s not exactly a body part, now is it, Jan.”
The circle has about twelve people in it, and I am at six o’clock. While Jan consults her list of several of her body parts that she likes, I look at the blank sheet in front of me and try to think of one of my own. Hands? No. I hate my hands.
“I like my hands,” says Jan, looking down at her fatty, pasty hands. I wonder how she can like her hands because even if she thought that her right hand was graceful and slender, her wedding band on her left hand, barely visible through the mounds of flesh suffocating it, tells the story of the big fat body attached to it. As she waves them around to help her mouth make a point, I wonder who put that band on her finger with a promise of being true to her through thick and thin. I wonder if that promise is diminished now, relative to the sliver of band now visible: a once-thick gold band now seemingly thin: a seemingly happy bride now thick with disappointment. But I guess if you only looked at her right hand and heard her laughter, you might still think she was happy. And maybe her husband’s fat, too.
Three o’clock likes her eyes. That would’ve been an obvious one for me because my eyes can’t gain weight, but I don’t like my eyes. They’re too small and close together. Four o’clock likes her calves. They’re strong and lean apparently, although I can’t see them through her pant leg so I’ll have to take her word for it. My calves are my least favorite part of my body because after years of treating my local ballet class like it was the Australian Ballet Company, they are enormous. You can’t see them, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Five o’clock likes her arms. Really?
“Portia?”
“Has everyone met Portia? She’s a newcomer to the group and is the youngest Jenny Craig member we’ve ever had. Tell us your favorite body part, Portia.”
My workbook is blank. My mind is blank and yet racing through thoughts. I am fifteen years old and 130 pounds in a room filled with people twice my weight and age and yet I can’t think of a thing. My feet have crooked toes, my ankles are too thin, my calves are too thick, my knees are dimply, my thighs are too big, my ass is droopy, my hips are too wide, my stomach is round and has rolls, my rib cage . . . ? No. My ribs stick too far out at the bottom and that makes my whole torso look wide. My breasts are tiny and disproportionate to the rest of my body . . .
“Portia?”
“Umm. I don’t know.”
What about my arms? My back? My shoulders? My wrists? Wrists. No, my wrists are too small for my forearms and my hands, and so because of my wrists, my hands and arms look bigger.
“There’s nothing I like.”
The room falls silent. We were all laughing a second ago and complimenting three o’clock on her mauve eyes that looked like Elizabeth Taylor’s and now we’re all silent, all around the clock. All the fat people sitting from twelve right back around to eleven are looking at me at six o’clock. I know that look. It’s the look of the thoughts that run through your mind when you’re looking at a smart-ass. I was the joke to them—the kind that makes you not want to laugh.
“Come on, dear. There must be something that you like?”
There was an ounce of anger to her tone. My lack of an answer probably looked like unwillingness to play along, but in truth I was still running through all my parts trying to find something to say.
“Well, if you don’t think you have any good body parts, then I guess we’re all in trouble!”
That was the kind of joke that makes people laugh.
PART TWO
15
I AWOKE TO a strange silence and shafts of light stabbing into the room from the corners of the blinds. The light carried millions of tiny dust particles, which I guess were always there yet only now visible because of the soupy, thick air with its beams of light illuminating them. I was eerily calm when I awoke. I was aware that I had cried myself to sleep over the L’Oréal incident; my eye sockets felt misshapen and waterlo
gged, as though they could barely keep my sore, dry eyes in my head. But it felt like I had cried for the last time. That I was never going to cry myself to sleep like that again. Despite the heaviness of my head, with its headache and sinus pressure, there was a levity to it, a lightness to it, like everything inside of it that made the world I lived in a place of peace or a place of torture, was weightless—quiet, floating. I felt overtaken by a sense of peace, by the feeling that today was truly a new day.
I got out of bed and immediately started stretching. An odd thing for me to do, but I wanted to feel my body. I wanted to “check in” with it, acknowledge it. As I stretched, there was a certain love I gave to it, an appreciation for its muscles straining and contracting. I liked the way it felt as I touched my toes and straightened my back. I felt like I was suddenly self-contained. Like the answers lay within me. Like my life was about to be lived within the confines of my body and would answer only to it. I didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of me.
As I stretched my arms out to the sides, I ran my fingers through the beams of light, cloudy with the dust that swirled around my bedroom. I saw the beauty of my messy bedroom and inhaled the summer air. All the clothes I’d tried on and discarded on the floor before going to my L’Oréal fitting were looking up at me, wondering what they had done wrong. Despite the mess and the dust, it smelled sweet and I felt myself smiling as I inhaled. I liked that smell. It was the smell of the imported Italian talc in the yellow plastic bottle that I had bought to pamper myself but only now enjoyed as talc and not a status symbol. As I walked barefoot on the painted concrete floor of my bedroom toward the bathroom scale I felt confident that what I was about to see would make me happy for the rest of the day. I felt empty and light and I didn’t care what number the scale told me I was, today I was not going to define myself by it. Today I knew that despite what it said, it was unimportant. Today I would start my new life.
Unbearable Lightness Page 11
