I had the answer to my problems.
I would always be prepared.
I was about to make everything easier.
The scale confirmed what I’d suspected. It read 130. The weight I had always returned to no matter the effort to get beneath it. In the past, this number had invariably plummeted me into despair. It reminded me that no matter what I did, I could never win—that my body with its bones and its guts and its blood weighed in at what it felt comfortable being as a living organism with its own needs. It hated me and thought I was stupid for attempting to change it with my tortuous rituals of forcing regurgitation and starving it of food. It always had the upper hand, the last word. And the last word was 130.
Today being the first day of my brand-new life, with its sunshine and its soupy air, 130 was a beautiful weight. It was my weight. It was Portia, a straight-A student who earned a place at the most prestigious law school in Australia, who had an exciting modeling career and the courage to try her hand at acting in a foreign country. It was the weight of the girl who was a successful actress, who made money, who was independent. For the first time in my life, I didn’t view my body as the enemy. Today it was my friend, my partner in all the success I’d accomplished. As it stepped off the scale and over the pile of discarded clothes, onto the wooden floorboards and toward the food journal on the coffee table, it expressed its strength and joy by lunging, deep and controlled, thighs burning, stomach taut. And with an outstretched arm the hand flicked through the pages of lists of food items and calories and wrote in big, curly pen strokes something the journal had never before seen: my weight.
130
I was hungry and yet unusually unafraid of being hungry. I went to the fridge and then the pantry and proceeded to line up all the possible breakfast foods on the counter. Sitting on the counter in a row, equally spaced and looking like The Price Is Right game show items, were the foods Suzanne, my nutritionist, had given me to eat. The breakfast options of oatmeal, egg whites (you can buy them in a jar, you know), bran muffins, wheat toast, and yogurt were all looking at me and available, but Suzanne had preferred me to eat oatmeal and egg whites because the combination of the two gave good amounts of carbohydrates and protein and because the two-part process of cooking and eating, she believed, made you feel as though you were eating a big, satisfying meal. I made the decision to eat egg whites and oatmeal. I read the calorie contents of the single-serving prepackaged oatmeal sachet: 100 calories. I wondered what 100 calories meant to my body, what it would do with it. Would it use it just to drive to work today or could it drive to work, sit through hair and makeup, and act out a scene all on 100 calories? Would it gently prompt my mind to produce feelings of hunger when it was done burning the calories or would it ask for more food before it was done using the energy from the food I’d given it? If the body was so clever and knew what it needed for health and survival, how come obese people got hungry? The body should use the stored fat to sustain itself to prevent diabetes or heart failure. If it was so clever, it should take over the mind of a self-destructive obese person and send out brain signals of nausea instead of hunger. I came to the conclusion that no matter what my body said it needed, I could no longer trust it. I couldn’t rely on my body to tell me what I needed. From now on, I was in control. I was its captain and would make all the decisions.
I decided that I didn’t need the full 100-calorie oatmeal packet. It was clearly a common measurement for a normal common portion of food that ordinary people would eat. Obviously, it wasn’t a portion that was meant for a person who was dieting. If the average person who wasn’t going to lose weight ate a 100-calorie packet for breakfast, then I should eat less. I immediately felt so stupid that I hadn’t seen that before. Of course you couldn’t lose weight if you relied on Quaker to allot your portion; I had to take control of it. I calculated the grams of food that would deliver an 80-calorie serving on the kitchen scale, and after being careful to give myself the exact amount of oats, I poured it into a bowl. I added hot water and a sprinkling of Splenda. I ate it slowly, tasting every morsel of oatmeal and its claggy syrup. Then, instead of randomly pouring a generous dollop of egg whites from the jar into a hot pan coated in oil, I got out the measuring cup. I measured half a cup of egg whites and poured it into a pan coated with Pam—a no-calorie substitute for oil. I added a sprinkling of Mrs. Dash and salt. Next step was coffee. A mindless consumption of calories in the past would now be another thing ingested that needed measuring. How many additional calories I could spare in my coffee would be determined by the rest of my meal; if I was particularly hungry and needed a large portion of egg whites with my oatmeal, for example, I would take my coffee black, but if I came in under my allotted calorie consumption for the morning, I could measure out a tablespoon of Mocha Mix, a nondairy creamer, to add to it. In the past I would just randomly pour calories into a cup, not caring that a generous pouring of Mocha Mix could run 50 calories. Fifty calories. That was more than a third of my actual food for the morning. After drinking the coffee and eating the egg whites and the oatmeal, I had never felt more satisfied. I was full. I was clever. I had halved my morning calorie intake. I planned on readjusting my whole program. I would take my diary everywhere I went and record each calorie that went into my mouth. Suzanne had taught me to weigh, calculate, and document like a mathematician solving an equation, and with my new education I was ready to solve the weight problem.
Suzanne had set my calorie intake for optimum weight loss at 1,400 calories a day. I reset it to 1,000.
Problem solved.
16
“WELL, HELLO there. I’m a big fan of your show. What a delight to meet you.”
A middle-aged gray-haired man sat behind the desk of the Granville Towers lobby and practically sang his greeting to me in a gently lilting Southern accent. He seemed genuinely excited to meet me, and his happy demeanor was contagious. I shook his hand and smiled an involuntarily broad smile and I realized that I hadn’t really smiled in awhile, that his sparkly nature was in stark contrast to my dullness. Everything about the Granville made me happy. Situated at Sunset and Crescent Heights, the location was perfect, and the building was historic and beautiful. A true example of 1920s architecture, the penthouse apartment that I was about to see had the potential to saddle me with a mortgage. It was time to buy a home, to invest in my life in Los Angeles. I needed a place of my own and a penthouse apartment in an Old Hollywood building on Sunset Boulevard sounded like a place an actress should live.
As I waited in the lobby for the real estate agent to arrive, the doorman, who introduced himself as Jeff, got up from his station and walked around the desk, talking excitedly as if I was the only visitor he’d had in months.
“Mickey Rourke lived here. He just moved out, oh . . . what . . . it’d be a couple of months now. He had three little dogs, Chihuahuas I believe.” It annoyed me that people find celebrity so impressive that they have to talk about it. What annoyed me more was that I was impressed. Somehow the building was instantly more valuable to me just because a celebrity had lived in it.
“I’ll show you his apartment if you like, but don’t tell the agent—I’ll get in trouble.” Jeff spoke from the corner of his mouth in an exaggerated whisper even though there was no one else in the lobby to overhear. It was dramatic and I would usually have found it annoying, but I liked the fact that he’d invited me to share a secret with him. It felt warm, welcoming.
“It’s on the ground floor, but I like it more than the penthouse you’re going to see because it has the beautiful coffered ceilings, you know.”
On our way see Mickey Rourke’s apartment, Jeff told me of other celebrities who had lived at the Granville: Brendan Fraser, David Bowie, and Amy Locane. Michael Michele, an actress on ER, was a current resident.
“You know, the place was built in 1929 and it was called the Voltaire. It was a hotel back then, but sometime after that it was made into apartments and apparently, though there’s no real proof of thi
s, Marilyn Monroe lived here with Joe DiMaggio.”
Jeff wore a jacket and tie. In fact, everything about him was old-fashioned. He seemed to be part of the history he so loved to talk about, as if he lived in a black-and-white movie. If he weren’t so enamored with movie stars, I could also picture him living in the South before the Civil War. I could see him as a gentleman on a plantation in Georgia in his hunter green library dwarfed by ceiling-high shelves filled with leather-bound books. But Jeff clearly loved Hollywood, and he loved his job. He was the doorman, the gatekeeper of the Granville Towers, and his excitement over me made me feel as though I could be one of his movie star stories, just as Mickey Rourke and his dogs and his ceilings will forever be one of his stories.
The penthouse apartment wasn’t spectacular. It didn’t have the molding on the baseboards or the high coffered ceiling that Mickey’s had. It wasn’t particularly spacious, and the views, although beautiful from the east window, were blocked on the north side by the Virgin Megastore building at Sunset 5, the shopping complex next door to the Granville. In fact, from the first floor of the apartment, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows on the north side created the optical illusion of a scorching desert. The yellow paint on the Sunset 5 building looked like sand and the heat that spewed out from the air conditioning vents on the roof created that warped-air look of a heat wave. After seeing the small galley kitchen and the modest bedroom and living room, we took the staircase next to the public elevator that led to the attic above the penthouse apartment, while the real estate agent explained to me the resale potential if I connected the penthouse apartment to the attic with an interior staircase. I hadn’t planned on renovating, but when I saw the view from the spacious high-ceilinged attic I no longer had a choice. I had never been so excited in my life. On the north wall were thirty or so large windows in rows of three, pitched in an A-frame, and beyond the windows, instead of the desert that I saw from the floor below, was the vast industrial roof of the Sunset 5. Clouds of smoke billowed from the metal chimneys and swirled in the wind, occasionally clearing to show the enormous steel tubes in a cross-section of right angles looking like the indecipherable circuit boards my brother as a kid used to spend hours soldering wires onto to make LEDs light up. The space was currently being used as a studio for the portrait photographer who owned the unit, and the tungsten lights and paper backdrops clamped onto C-stands made the apartment even more loftlike. I felt as though I had been transported to an artist’s loft in a city like Philadelphia, which was much more exciting to me than where I actually was. Where I was, was predictable. But the apartment made me think there was more to life than being an actress on a David Kelley show. It made me remember who I used to be and where I had wanted to live if I had stayed in law school in Melbourne: in a nongentrified artist neighborhood off Brunswick Street, the place that made me happier than any other place on earth. For on Brunswick Street I was gay. I wore motorcycle boots, had slightly dreadlocked hair, and wrapped leather around my wrists. I drank beer at the Provincial and ate penne Amatriciana at Mario’s and saw indie bands with my best friend, Bill.
“I’ll take it.”
I left my new apartment with its own industrial city and flew past Jeff, the doorman, in a hurry. I had to get back to my sublet in Hancock Park in time to make dinner. Since lowering my calorie intake to exactly 1,000 calories a day, I discovered that the best time to eat dinner was at exactly six o’clock to give my body a head start in burning the calories. If I ate at six, I still had five or six hours to move around before I lay still for six hours. If I ate any later than that, I worried that overnight the unused calories would turn to fat. I discovered that although I didn’t want to lower my calorie intake to under 1,000, as anything lower would be the equivalent of crash dieting, I could speed up the weight loss by increasing the amount of exercise and eating at the right times. Occasionally, if I felt particularly energetic, I could squeeze in a quick workout before bed and if I didn’t actually get on the treadmill, I would do sit-ups and leg lifts on the floor next to my bed.
When I got home, I prepared four ounces of lean ground turkey and a spattering of ketchup, cooked with Pam and lightly sprayed with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray. As annoying as the name of the product was, every time I doused my food with the stuff I would silently congratulate the marketing team behind the brand. For yes, I too, couldn’t believe it wasn’t butter. More than that, I couldn’t believe something that delicious didn’t have any calories. I sprayed it on everything. It tasted great with my morning oatmeal, mixed into my tuna at lunch, and was a perfect partner for my ground turkey with ketchup at dinner. It even tasted delicious as an ingredient of a dessert I concocted: Jell-O, Splenda, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray all mixed together. At 10 calories per serving, it satisfied my sweet tooth and was my favorite new recipe that I had created. I had never thought of myself as a chef before, but I was quite impressed with my cooking. I was impressed that I had the ability to take foods that weren’t usually paired and put them together for a delicious, low-calorie meal.
I picked up the phone before deciding which number to dial. Kali? Erik? Would either of them care about my new apartment? I had originally wanted to live with Erik. I wanted to buy an apartment that was big enough so I could have Erik as my roommate. But the thought of what the pantry in the kitchen would look like stopped me from pursuing it. Erik would buy food. All kinds of food would assault me as I opened the cupboard to reach in for a can of tuna. And I would have to prepare myself mentally every time I opened the refrigerator, as maybe one of those foods would tempt me enough to trigger a binge. On Sundays he might invite friends over to watch a game, eat pizza, and I would be left alone cleaning up the kitchen with the tortuous decision of whether to eat the remaining slice or throw it in the trash. Even if I threw it in the trash I couldn’t be certain that the thought of eating it wouldn’t keep me up all night, worried that I would retrieve it and eat the cold discarded piece despite the fact that it smelled of cigarette ash and beer. I would certainly get up out of bed and eat it. Then, knowing that I’d blown it, I’d have to keep going. I’d eat every bit of his food, his potato chips, and his leftover Chinese food, his breakfast cereal, and those chocolate cookies he eats when he needs to be comforted. My kitchen would be a dangerous temptress—and she would constantly flirt with the fat slob inside.
In my new apartment my fridge will be sparse. My cupboard will be bare. My house will be safe.
I picked up the phone to dial Ann in New York. I couldn’t help but feel like a conversation with her would feel more like the second round of a boxing match than a celebration of my new apartment. Since the underwear episode on the show, Ann and I had barely spoken. Upon further evaluation of her comment about my looking like a normal woman in my underwear, I was quite sure she wasn’t aware that she was insulting me. However, I was sure she was careful not to compliment me, either. She had expressed her opinions about not emphasizing looks and weight and had tried to get me to read feminist literature like Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. No, Ann didn’t mean anything by it. Nevertheless, I couldn’t let a comment like that slip by again without retaliation. My gloves were on, ready to strike if Ann was being insensitive.
“AC. PdR”
“PdR!”
For some reason, when Ann and I first became friends, I had to call her by her full name, Ann Catrina, when I was referring to her. Then I had to say her full name to her face. Eventually it got so tedious to call her Ann Catrina, I shortened it to AC. She reciprocated by calling me PdR. So now we have that.
I excitedly told her about my new place while pouring my fourth Diet Coke; a low-calorie substitute for the wine I used to drink with dinner. Not drinking was yet another healthy change I had made since taking nutrition and fitness seriously. I told her about what had happened in St. Barths with Sacha. She said she was glad because she seemed to think there was a great gay girl out there who could really love me. That if I kept chasing S
acha as she was busy chasing men, I would miss this wonderful, proud-to-be-gay girl as I ran right by. What she couldn’t quite tell me was how this self-confident, happy gay woman was going to meet a closeted Portia and be perfectly okay with going back into the closet to be her secret girlfriend. Where would I meet her? Would it occur at a supermarket when our shopping carts accidentally collided and we telepathically exchanged the information that we were gay, available, and interested? Ann Catrina needed to understand that there wasn’t a solution to this problem. To shut her up, I told her the most disturbing information:
“There’s a morality clause in the L’Oréal contract.”
“A . . . what now?”
“It states that if I’m caught doing something that damages the image of the company, I’ll have to pay all the money back. I’ll have to pay back the advance, everything.”
My agent and manager had called me to go over the contract just before the fitting. Remembering how I sat in the car with the cell phone to my ear, having to pull over in order to calm myself, I felt as sick telling Ann about it as I had when it was told to me. The clause cited examples like public drunkenness, arrests, et cetera, but I knew that it would include homosexuality. The wording of the contract was vague, and I was unsure exactly what would constitute a breach of the contract and how “morality” was defined. The whole thing made me sick. I was so scared about the morality clause I didn’t want to even talk about it. I just wanted her to stop talking about how easy it would be for me to live my life openly. I just wanted her to shut up about it.
Unbearable Lightness Page 12
