Wasn’t that what my makeover was all about? Repainting reality? Toying with nature? Priming the surface with diet and denial, and then drawing a new figure. Making up a prettier face, a brighter hair color. Buying clothes to flatter the new figure. But would the paint stick over the old surface? Or would the true grain show through, and the new design warp and wear?
But I’m striving to stay in the moment. Some of my old self was surely shed with the weight, at least some of the negativism. And, for the most part, it seemed as though I had broken through old barriers and was now liberated from the burden that excess weight put not only on my body, but also my mind.
I set the table. Two plates, napkins, forks and knives. Oh…I’ve forgotten Jolie. Not too Freudian or anything. I quickly fling down another dinner plate. It crosses my mind to replace it with a teacup, but I restrain myself. I grab a carrot. There really is something to be said for the nibbling (no, gorging) on vegetables while cooking idea.
Just before eight, Taylor’s torso is silhouetted in the door frame. He’s wearing a band-collared white linen shirt over jeans. Does he realize how it sets off his eyes? I try not to stare.
“I’m fashionably early, and starvin’ to death.”
“Where’s Jolie?”
He shrugs. “Maybe undressing for dinner?” I smile at him. Are we both making fun of her? Bitch that I am, I warm to that idea.
“Well, while we’re waiting, I’ll give you a quick taste of my specialty to get your juices flowing.” Oh no, did I really say that? Doesn’t look like he’s reading anything into it, fortunately.
“C’mere.” I spear a meatball, blow on it, and hold it out to him. “Tell me what you think.”
He closes his eyes and moans as his mouth moves. “I’m yours,” he says, lunging at me.
“You pathetic creature. Is one miserable meatball all it takes to win you over?”
He’s reduced to silence.
“Tell me something, Taylor. With all the women swarming over you, hasn’t anyone ever cooked you a meal, for God’s sake?”
“Can I count the chef at David K’s?”
I shake my head in disbelief. “In a crunch you ever rustle up your own dinner?”
“I poured milk over corn—no—amaranth flakes once.”
“What?”
“It’s some grain they found in an Egyptian crypt, I think,” Taylor says. “Tastes that way, anyhow. Otherwise, let’s see. Sometimes I scramble eggs. Other than that, I don’t think this kitchen has ever been used this much before. You christened it.” He reaches for another meatball, but I push his hand away.
“Wait for your girlfriend.”
He starts to turn away when Jolie walks in wearing a halter dress that I think is really a long blouse.
“I see that the party started sans moi.”
“No, we were waiting,” I insist. I bring the dishes to the table and start serving.
“Taste Maggie’s meatballs, you won’t believe them,” Taylor says, looking upward. “They’re out of this world.”
Jolie gives me the mal occhio, or whatever the evil eye is in French. “Un peu,” she says, holding up her hand. She cuts off a pebble-sized piece and tastes it, allowing me a small smile.
“You are a good cook. I have never seen Michael so excited—about food.”
I’m about to give her a helping of oysters and manicotti, but the hand shoots up again. Two miserable meatballs and a glass of wine. Not Taylor. He’s piling his plate high like a college boy home for the holidays, and popping the cork on another bottle of vin ordinaire. The more he and I eat and drink, the more explosively our stories erupt into laughter. By nine o’clock, Jolie has a splitting “mal à la tête.”
“Please excuse me. I don’t feel very well.”
“C’mon, we haven’t even had dessert yet,” Taylor says. “Maggie made zabaglione.”
She shrugs and walks off, turning back only once to glare at him over her shoulder. He’s oblivious.
“So I’m up on stage in front of a group of Hollywood honchos,” he says, trying hard to stifle a laugh. “It’s my first audition.” He puts his head down contemplatively to control the urge to laugh, then continues. “I walk up, working hard at looking laid-back, confident, and I clear my throat and get down to business.” He slaps his hand on the table for emphasis. “I start reading and I don’t stop, I can’t, I’m off and running, flying high on my performance, my incredible virtuosity, oblivious to the words…the meaning…except five minutes down the line it hits me that unless this show is for transsexuals, I blew it big-time, because instead of reading Stanley Kowalski, I was a brilliant Blanche DuBois….”
By eleven o’clock one candle has burned out, and the other is just a flicker in a pool of melted wax. We sit opposite each other like old friends. Bizarre, but it feels like trading stories with him is the most natural thing in the world. Two empty wine bottles stand between us. He reaches for a third.
“I don’t want to become a candidate for a liver transplant,” I say, putting a hand out to stop him. “I don’t know about you, but I need some air.”
We walk down to the pool and stretch out on lounge chairs. My head is spinning, buzzing. I’m mesmerized by the luminescent turquoise water, and in the stillness, every sound filters through me. A helicopter sputters overhead and then turns silent, absorbed by the vast acres of darkness. The wooden chaise creaks, as if in pain, as I shift my position and lie back, tranquilized by the meal, the whir of cicadas, the comforting sound of my own breathing. Taylor lifts the wine bottle to his mouth then lets it slide to the ground. It hits the concrete with a ping. Why do I feel like a stoned, twenty-year-old stowaway who inexplicably ended up in a strange place with a celebrity rock star? I break the silence.
“Do you have some kind of herbal cure out here—some capsules from the health food store or Tibet or somewhere—to prevent hangovers, because I think I’m going to wake up with a raging one tomorrow, and I have a column to write.”
Taylor rubs his chin. “Yeah, okay, here’s what we do,” he says, his voice booming. He starts to laugh, the slow, sexy laugh of someone who has happily been relieved of the burden of sobriety. “We wrap our heads real tight in towels filled with ice cubes, down some Vat 69, and then take off our clothes and go swimming in the buff.” He laughs harder, and harder. It’s contagious, we’re both so ripped.
“I would sink. I would sink like a stone, like a medicine ball. They’d have to use a rope to haul me up.” That sets me off and I can’t stop. “Oh, God, it’s not so funny.” Inexplicably, tears fill my eyes. The line is blurring between comedy and tragedy. “Why am I laughing so hard, or whatever this is?”
“You’re away from home,” Taylor says, looking at me levelly. “And you’re having an adventure.”
I avoid his eyes. Heat is spreading over me. If I allow my head to turn one inch in his direction, we’ll be on top of one another and this is moving far too fast for me. I’m so afraid of crashing, of having it all look so different in the morning light, that I put on the brakes. “Yup, that’s it. A long-overdue R&R.”
He’s still staring and I’m pretending not to notice, but the power of his look seems to immobilize me. I’m about to tell him to stop, but stop what? Instead, I chide myself. Do not move your mouth again. Stop before you blurt out something that you’re going to die of embarrassment from for the next eleven days. Abruptly, I get up on my feet. “I’ve got to go up,” I say, crossing my hands over my chest for emphasis. “Do you mind if I leave you the dishes? I am so wrecked.”
“Actually, I think I would mind if I had to do all of them right now,” he says in a goofy voice, “but the maid is coming bright and early. Come on,” he says, managing to stand. “I’ll go up with you.”
I follow him as he weaves up the stairs. We’re standing outside my bedroom door.
“’Night, Taylor.”
He leans forward and runs the back of his knuckles along the side of my cheek. “G’night, Maggie. Thanks. Tha
nk you. It was a great night.” He doesn’t move, and I don’t dare draw breath. Finally, I ease back and look at him questioningly.
“What?” My legs are going weak. But he just smiles woozily, touches his finger to my lips and then walks off down the corridor.
Not all migraines are created equal. This one mimicks the pummeling given to a slab of veal being reduced to wafer thinness. The pulsations come in waves, the cerebral equivalent of what the poor uterus probably goes through as it contracts explosively in the last centimeters of childbirth. But nothing productive would come out of this torture session, other than the lesson to lay off wine and drink more mineral water.
But while my paddled brain might have been getting thinner, my waistline wasn’t. The fat fairy has reappeared and waved her magic wand, causing my middle to swell. Then there was jet lag, topped off by exhaustion from going to bed at three, New York time, and the pressure to write a column when outside it was sunny and 80 degrees.
Are You Eating Your Heart Out?
You’re home alone, the phone doesn’t ring, your heart aches and you reflexively reach for a quart of Rocky Road. Does it take away your loneliness, your grief, the pain?
You’re in a rage. You head to McDonald’s for a bucket-size family meal, only, you don’t have a family to share it with and you’re all alone. Does the feeding-frenzy stuff down the anger and get rid of your problems?
More likely your self-styled eating cure dooms you to suffer postmeal syndrome: Self-hatred, frustration, misery and helplessness. You’ll never do that again, you vow—not until tomorrow, when you do. I know, I’ve been there. We all love to eat, but when eating isn’t about love and nourishment, and instead becomes a weapon that you’re using against yourself, it’s time to put down your forked weapon and start exploring your inner landscape.
Roughly thirty years ago, an overweight California woman took a friend of hers with a gambling problem to a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. She recognized that the men in the group suffered from an addiction that was the same one that she as an overweight woman had battled with all her life: Compulsive behavior. In her words: “As long as I live I will never forget that night. We were in a meeting hall with about twenty-five men and just a few women…I heard men talk about lives of lying and cheating, stealing and hiding…I’m just like that, I said to myself. The only difference is that I overeat instead of gamble.”
Food was my drug of choice too. But it’s not just eating the food, it’s thinking about the food, not eating the food, and fantasizing about how your life is going to change when you lose the weight. The funny thing is your life does change, but what happens is frequently it changes for the worse. Suddenly you’ve got to face the real problems that were sitting there all along.
My thoughts are racing and I stop typing. The column is autobiography masked as journalism. Maybe that was why it had affected readers. But the end was a question mark. Would I triumph over my obsession with food, weight and body image and honestly accept myself for who I am? A month ago, it looked that way. But now, having lost weight at great expense, would I be going back in time, fighting the old battles—perpetually weight cycling—and again joining the ranks of the one third of all women, fat or thin, who despised some part of their bodies?
To make matters worse, with my first breath of California air, I become a hypocrite, hiding my crush. Diet guru? Hard-nosed journalist? Wise counselor? No, schizo.
A knock on the door interrupts my reverie.
“Maggie, you okay?”
Taylor is standing there, unshaven, barefoot, in bleached jeans and a torn black T-shirt. Was it worn to death or expressly made that way by an Italian designer? He looks even sexier all disheveled, of course, so good he might have been photographed that way—leaning up against a rusty pickup truck, say, among tall grass in the backwoods of Tennessee. There would be the tinkle of banjo music somewhere in the background. A heart-stopping Vanity Fair cover that someone like me would tear off and stick up on my bulletin board, or squirrel away in a marbleized paper accordion folder among a thick pile of treasured pictures and articles about a life more perfect than my own. I had lots of those photos tucked away. Fabulous men, triplex penthouse apartments, perfectly set dinner tables like the Thanksgiving table that featured a cranberry-draped turkey and take-your-breath-away hotel rooms perfect for honey-moons, including one I particularly liked in Marrakesh, and another, a Mediterranean gem on Italy’s Amalfi Coast with an enormous window over the bathtub that opened out to the sea.
He’s holding out a cup of coffee. “Thought maybe you could use some.”
I reach for it and groan. “First aid, thanks. I’m just working frantically to finish. I need about another hour. You going to be around?”
“I have to be at the studio, and I’ll be back late. If you want we can grab dinner later on this week and, if you’re interested, one of the writers on the show is having a party in Santa Monica. We could go after I get back.” He raises his eyebrows in question.
“Look, I’ll be here for a while, so it’s really fine if you want to go out, I understand. You have a life, a girlfriend, you don’t have to baby-sit me. I’ll be just—”
“Stop. I’d like to take you out. It can be fun here. We’re not all cardboard cutouts, I swear.” He makes a dopey self-mocking expression.
“Okay, I guess I can tough it out for dinner and then the party if you don’t mind a third leg.”
“Third leg?”
“You, Jolie, me?”
He shakes his head. “She’s not coming.”
“Oh,” I say, nodding. I don’t want to know. I look at the time, and gently close the door.
My makeover regimen also seems to be altering the course of Tamara’s life as well. She told me in a phone call just as I was finishing the column that she was sitting in the cafeteria in a new dress when a hot guy she had spotted in the elevator approached the empty seat at her table with his double cheeseburger and fries.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he said. She smiled back at him, and by the end of lunch, she had a date with the hot sports reporter to go to the next Knicks game.
“I developed a passion for basketball, right then and there,” Tamara tells me.
It’s been a long time since Tamara’s dated, and I’m thrilled she has a new prospect. Smart move for her to eat in the cafeteria, instead of getting takeout. It certainly beat seeing Brunhilda’s disapproving scowl ever since we started ordering salads.
I can’t even remember the last guy she dated.
“I had a string of club dates with a rock star,” she says, refreshing my memory. “GUI-TAR man. Not half-bad-looking, fun to be with, but his gigs started after midnight. I saw the pink slip on the wall if I kept stumbling into work after just three hours of sleep. Then there was the two-timer from advertising.”
I groan. “That was when I was two sizes larger.” We both remember the navy tent dresses. We each had one. They looked like they came from the camping department of L.L. Bean. What rags they were, but then again so were some of the guys we went out with when we wore them.
Actually, I could track my entire life—where I went and with whom—by the outfit I had on. I had an eclectic mix of sizes and styles, all revolving around the numbers on the scale. I never forgot the size-twelve events—so precious and rare.
Fortunately, Ty had a life that meshed with Tamara’s and there he was, under the same roof. Not only does she check with the Garden to get the Knicks’ schedule so she’d have enough time to find a new outfit, and get her hair done, she tells me that she’s working more and more on her novel and the lead character is a photographer.
I end the call by promising to buy Tamara a camera and a how-to book. I make her promise not to take pictures of me, however. I can’t forget what I heard in grade school. Models are much thinner than they look. The camera adds ten pounds.
She’s thrilled with the gift. She’s now buttering up the photo editor and plans to spend lunch hours wi
th him. Since photographers always walk around with their cameras, and she’s going to a game with Ty, she’s getting ready to take basketball shots and doesn’t want to come off like the novice that she is.
“We went out to dinner first,” Tamara said, in one of our marathon conversations, and, “I found myself telling him all about my home life. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I was talking to a man who I could open up to. He’s like the new acquaintance that you wouldn’t have second thoughts about giving your house keys.”
For some reason, Tamara and I have better conversations on the phone than in person. Maybe it’s easier to talk when you’re not looking someone in the eye, but we’ve got a country between us now and, for the first time, I learn about her family.
“I grew up in Harlem,” she says. “Four kids, my mom—my father died in a car accident when I was six —I don’t really remember much about him. We lived in a cramped apartment, and went to an overcrowded school. There were classes in the cafeteria, even the halls. Sometimes not enough books to go around, and the ones they had were old.” Instead of salads and seafood, she ate macaroni and cheese and fried chicken legs that they paid for with food stamps. She didn’t know there was any other way to eat.
“It was humiliating going food shopping,” she says, because their pockets held food stamps instead of money. “You could see what people were thinking,” Tamara says, “even when their faces were blank.” She lived on welfare, she adds. I’m quiet, saying nothing, not wanting to stop her.
“Do you know what it’s like to go with your mother to sign the checks? There were these short little yellow pencils with no erasers in a size made for a child’s hand so you feel like you don’t even deserve a bigger pencil. I told him all that,” Tamara says, “and you know what, Maggie?”
Fat Chance Page 11
