Snapped
Snapped
Pamela Klaffke
Sara B. is losing her cool. Not just in the momentary-meltdown kind of way—though there's that, too. At the helm of must-read Snap magazine, veteran style guru Sara B. has had the job—and joy—for the past fifteen years of eviscerating the city's fashion victims in her legendary DOs and DON'Ts photo spread.But now on the unhip edge of forty, with ambitious hipster kids reinventing the style world, Sara's being spit out like an old Polaroid picture: blurry, undeveloped and obsolete.Fueled by alcohol, nicotine and self-loathing, Sara launches into a cringeworthy but often comic series of blowups—personal, professional and private—that culminate in an epiphany. That she, the arbiter of taste, has made her living by cutting people down…and somehow she's got to make amends.
Praise for Pamela Klaffke
“Klaffke explores the idea of who decides what is cool and, more important, why we listen to them. Sara is a flawed hero whose actions and motives are questionable and often reprehensible. And yet we can’t help but root for her as she realises that, while she has spent her life judging other people, it is her own life that needs the makeover.”
—Booklist
“Profane, painfully honest and savagely funny, Klaffke’s debut novel is a coming-of-middle-age story sure to evoke terror in the under-forty set and reminiscent smiles in those who have already crossed over.”
—Romantic Times
“A dark, comic absurdity peppers every page of this sarcastic romp.”
—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
PAMELA KLAFFKE is a former newspaper and magazine journalist who now works as a novelist and photographer. She is the author of Snapped and the non-fiction book Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping. She has been chronicling the research and writing process of her newest work, The Mod Girls, on the blog www.themodgirls.com.
Her dreamy, vintage-inspired photographs are shot exclusively with analogue cameras using expired and/or damaged film. Her work has appeared in art publications and advertisements around the globe and prints of her work reside in private collections worldwide. She is currently working on two new series: a second instalment of her popular “bestia parvulus” (animal child) series and a photo-adaptation of the classic fairy tale, “Little Red Riding Hood”. In the autumn of 2010, she will travel to Europe to shoot an ambitious series which incorporates digital video, called The Private Lives of Public Creatures.
Pamela is also the founder and chief curator of the Secret Society of Analogue Art, an organisation that encourages the creative fusion of analogue and digital communication and media by offering an ongoing series of participatory art projects.
She lives in Calgary, Canada with her fiancé, philosopher Gillman Payette, and her daughter.
SNAPPED
Pamela Klaffke
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Parrot Girl
I hate the girl with the parrot on her shoulder. I don’t want to but I do. She’s nineteen, maybe twenty, smoking as she waits in line at the restaurant. There’s always a line now for Sunday brunch and I know it’s my fault. Sometimes I should just keep these things to myself. But the Parrot Girl. She’s wearing shiny blue short-shorts with white piping, soccer socks with the stripey tops pulled up to her knees. I can tell her cowboy boots have been scuffed and distressed on purpose, the leather warped and discolored by water, they’re scratched and dirty—she probably dragged them behind a car through an unpaved alleyway then invited her friends to stomp on them with their filthiest shoes. I know all the tricks. Still, the boots are too stiff. She wears a short gold satin jacket that the parrot keeps snagging with its claws every time it readjusts itself on her shoulder. From where I’m sitting I can’t see what’s underneath the jacket and the way the sun is reflecting off the satin, I can’t get a clear view of her face. Plus, the parrot is in the way. Ted has a better view and assures me her face is good, so I polish off my third champagne cocktail and grab my camera bag from under the table.
Up close I see Parrot Girl has a tiny diamond stud in her nose. Her makeup is perfect: smudgy kohl eyes and sticky mascara, smeared lips, classic morning-after face. But her hair is too clean and smells like apples, her face freshly moisturized. I wonder how long she spent getting ready this morning, if she had a fitful sleep editing all the possible combinations of outfits in her head.
“Excuse me.” I tap Parrot Girl on the shoulder. “My name is Sara B. and I was wondering if I could take your picture?”
Parrot Girl turns to look at me. Her friends titter behind her. She lights another cigarette and I notice her hands are shaking slightly. She knows who I am, I’m sure of it. She takes a deep drag and shrugs. “Yeah, okay, that’s cool.”
I lead her away from the line and ask her to face my camera. The satin is tricky in the sun and the parrot won’t look at me. I think for a moment that the parrot is smarter than either of us—it knows how ridiculous this all is, and doesn’t want any part of it. I get the shot and Parrot Girl signs the release allowing the magazine to use the photos however we see fit. She doesn’t ask the obvious—it never occurs to the ones who try so hard to be a DO that they could possibly be a DON’T.
I push my way back through the line and to our table by the window, which is open onto the busy street. A couple of people call my name and wave. I have no idea who they are, but smile and wave back anyway. One of them yells, “Sara B.! Take my picture!” I smile again and sit down.
Genevieve is breast-feeding the baby in the washroom. She won’t do it at the table anymore after last week when a woman in bad camouflage pockety pants that emphasized her puffy abdomen berated her for drinking one champagne cocktail, then feeding the baby an hour later. According to Genevieve, this was typical. The situation was made worse when the Bad Camo Woman broke from her rant and narrowed her eyes at Genevieve. “You!” She pointed a finger in Genevieve’s face. “You! You’re that singer! Gen-Gen! You had that song—what was it called? ‘J’taime, J’taime something … ‘”
“‘J’taime My Baby Tonight,'” Ted spoke up. Genevieve glared at her husband.
Bad Camo Woman snapped her fingers. “That’s it! Wow! I used to listen to that song over and over when I was a teenager! You’re Gen-Gen! Andrew, look, it’s Gen-Gen!” Andrew, who had been hanging sheepishly in the back, nodded a quick hello. He, too, was wearing bad camouflage pockety pants. “So do you think I could get your autograph? Here.” She shoved a crinkled receipt in front of Genevieve and produced a pen from her fake Louis Vuitton bag. “Sign this.”
Genevieve obliged, scrawling Best Wishes, Gen-Gen across the crumpled paper.
“Wow, thanks. I can’t wait to call my friend Angela. She was my best friend in school and she loved you, too. We’re not that close now—she lives in Vancouver—but we try to keep in touch, you know. It’s hard, though, with our kids and our jobs and—”
“How would you feel about me taking a picture of you two?” I interrupted. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Of us?” Bad Camo Woman brought her hand to her chest.
“Sure. But let’s do it outside. There’s not enough room in here,” I said as I ushered the Bad Camo Couple to the door.
“Check it out.” Jack nods toward the table behind ours. We’re silent, we listen. They have the magazine open to the DOs and DON’Ts fashion page and I can see my shot of the Bad Camo Couple staring out as the man holds it up to take a closer look. They are the featured DON’T, the biggest DON’T of the week, more DON’T than the unitard juggler or any of the three other DON’Ts on the page. “Could be a good look for us,” the man jokes.
“Ugh. Put that thing away.” The woman snatches it out of his hands. “It’s so mean.”
Jack leans into me and whispers, “I like it when you’re mean.” Then he kisses me on the neck. I order another drink and he does the same. Ted asks for the check.
“What? No more champagne, Ted? Oh, yeah. I guess you’ve got that long drive ahead of you,” I say. I’m tipsy and when I’m tipsy I can’t help needling Ted about having moved to the suburbs.
“It’s not that bad, Sara. You should come out sometime. You might even like it.”
“We’ll see about that,” I say. I’ve refused on principle to visit Ted and Genevieve’s new house. Jack says I’m being stubborn and immature but Jack’s young and doesn’t get it.
As soon as Genevieve and baby Olivier arrive back at the table, Ted announces it’s time to go. He has to mow the lawn. Genevieve’s parents are coming for a barbecue supper. She has to make potato salad. Genevieve hands Olivier to me, freeing her hands to pack the baby gear and pop open the stroller. I grip the baby firmly, but not too close. Jack tickles Olivier’s nose with his finger and makes goo-goo baby-talk sounds that I hope I’ll be able to block out the next time we have sex. Which won’t be for three weeks, I remind myself. Jack’s leaving for his home in Toronto late this afternoon.
Hugs. Kisses on both cheeks all around. Safe drive, have a great time. Give my best to your parents, Gen. Call me tomorrow. I’ll see you at the office, Ted. They’re gone and I slump back into my chair, knocking back the champagne cocktail that’s been placed in front of me. Then Gen suddenly reappears. She’s frantic. Olivier is wailing. His pacifier has disappeared. We look between plates, under napkins. Jack finds it on the floor and hands it to Gen. She gives it a quick wipe on her shirt and pushes it into Olivier’s mouth before scrambling back out the door. I shudder. Doesn’t it have to be sterile or something?
Jack looks at me but says nothing. His smile is crooked and his eyes are warm. “That is one cute baby,” he says.
“Yup,” I say, my eyes darting around, trying to find a waitress, a hostess, a bus boy, anyone who can get me a drink.
“Do you ever think about it, Sara?”
I can’t look at him. I catch the eye of our waitress and point to my empty glass. She nods.
“We’ve never talked about this, you know.” Jack is not letting up. I hate this conversation more than I hate Parrot Girl.
“That’s true.”
“I have to be honest with you, Sara. And you need to be honest with me. You’re thirty-nine and you know I’m totally cool with that, but I also know that, well, your time is …”
“Running out?”
“I guess, yeah.” Jack’s voice is very quiet.
I laugh. “Jack, I don’t want to have a baby, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He looks relieved. My drink arrives and I immediately suck half of it down. “I’m not one of those women.”
“I know that. I just thought that we’ve been together for almost a year so maybe we should make sure we’re on the same page with this.” I am certainly not on the same page with anyone who says on the same page, but I say nothing and smile. “I mean, I love kids, my nieces and nephews are great and Olivier is adorable, but it’s not for me. I’ve never wanted kids of my own.”
“Great. That’s just great, then.” I raise my near-empty glass to clink Jack’s, down the last of it and instruct him to order another round as I excuse myself to use the bathroom.
I squat above the toilet to pee and wrestle my cell phone out of my purse. I dial Gen’s number, but click the phone shut before it has a chance to ring. I can’t call her about this, about Jack not wanting to have kids and me not wanting to have kids and how great that should be but how I feel mysteriously winded and sad and I don’t know why. I can’t call her and we can’t spend hours dissecting my feelings and his feelings and still not really know why I feel like this by the time one of our phones starts to die. I can’t call her about this because she has Olivier and her parents are coming for a barbecue supper and she has potato salad to make.
There’s a girl sitting in my spot, laughing with Jack. “Hello,” I say.
The girl stands. “Oh, my goodness, Sara B. I saw you over here and I didn’t want to be rude or anything, I just wanted to meet you—you’re, like, my idol, seriously. I want your job. What you do is amazing. I mean, you’re Sara B.”
“You can just call me Sara.” I stick my hand out to shake hers. “And you are?”
“Eva. Eva Belanger.”
“That would make you Eva B., then.”
“Gosh, yes. I guess it would.” Eva’s face is bright red. She looks away from me and to Jack.
“Go ahead,” Jack says. “She won’t bite. Well, not unless you want her to.”
“You’re funny,” I say to Jack. “So what can I do for you, Eva?”
“I just, well, I was wondering if you’d ever consider letting me tag along, shadow you for a day, see how you do it.”
“It’s not magic. It’s just a job.”
“No, no, it’s important. You know, I have almost every issue of Snap. I had to get the older ones off eBay, but now I’m only missing issues six and eight, when you were still only monthly.”
“Nineteen ninety-three,” I confirm. The first year, when it was just Ted and I and a bag of money his dad gave us. By ninety-five we were weekly and had an office. Now we have a building, six satellite offices and three retail stores. Last month, a stuffy American company paid Ted and me twenty thousand dollars to spend a day with their marketing team. Advertising agencies pay us more. We don’t mention those things in the magazine. “I think I’ve got some of those old issues kicking around,” I say to Eva. “If I can find six and eight, they’re yours.”
“Really? Are you serious?”
“It’s not a problem,” I say.
“What is a problem is that you’re not sitting down,” Jack says. “Another round?”
“Sure,” I say. “Would you like to join us, Eva?”
“Oh, my! Yes, of course—if you really don’t mind.”
“We really don’t mind,” I say. I wouldn’t mind anything that’s a distraction from Jack and the baby talk and the talk about babies and not wanting one, and not knowing why I was spooked when he said he didn’t want one when I don’t want one, either. I definitely want this Eva girl to join us.
Eva tells Jack stories about me. She tells him about the time I got into a very public squabble with a Hollywood starlet after we published a picture of her wasted and bleary-eyed, attempting to dress in what I could only guess was her misguided interpretation of Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. Here to shoot a film, the starlet was on the town, trying like they all do when they come to Montreal to look French. But like they all do, she got it wrong. The striped top was not black and white like Hepburn’s, but too short and striped in multicolored pastels. The black leggings were shiny and too tight and made her ass look like a big balloon. Instead of ballet flats, she wore stilettos and her trashy big blond hair was nothing like Hepburn’s neat-and-sleek brunette style. To top it off, the starlet had the scarf—they always had the scarf, no matter the season—wrapped around her neck like a strangling tensor bandage. It was not French. It was sad. She was definitely a DON’T.
Eva tells Jack about how I’d started wearing shrunken kid-size T-shirts with cutesy logos and sayings when everyone else was decked out in Doc Martens and plaid. She tells Jack that when she’d read my TO DO column a couple weeks back she knew she had to meet me for real. The column was about recycling old Girl Guide and Boy Scout merit badges by sewing them onto the sleeves of the prettiest vintage beaded sweaters, and Eva said she had done the very same thing just days before the magazine came out.
I got that particular idea from Sophie, the woman who ran a thrift shop in Westmount I frequented. I didn’t mention this in my column and I don’t mention it now. Sophie said that the kids were coming in and rifling through a bin of old patches in search of merit badges to sew on their coats. Sewing the badges on vintage sweaters was my idea and, according to Eva, hers, too.
Indeed, she’s wearing a pink vintage cardigan, buttoned up to the neck with brown triangular Brownie badges sewn in pairs down one sleeve. I recognize the one for cooking, the one for puppet-making, another for writing. They’re the old-style ones, the ones from the seventies. I had all of these. Eva’s wearing pearls, three strands and they’re real. She wears glasses, vintage cateyes with custom lenses and the tiniest rhinestones clustered at the edge of the frames. She has on a brown pencil skirt that falls below her knees, panty hose and shoes that look clunky and orthopedic, something a nurse or your grandma might wear. But it’s her hair—that red—that gets me. Montreal red, the color old ladies in the city dye their hair instead of trying to keep their natural color or letting it go grey. It’s not red, exactly, but more burgundy, with a bit of that purple that’s the color of eggplant. Aubergine—that’s the word. A bit of aubergine mixed with the color of the reddest wine. It’s no one’s real hair color. It belongs to the old ladies and to Eva.
It’s 3:00 p.m. and Jack and I are sitting at the same table we have been since eleven. I’m drunk, and so is he. Eva is still here and I’m glad. She’s sober and has offered to drive Jack to the airport. If we don’t go soon, Jack will miss his flight, so we stumble out into the afternoon and smoke cigarettes and wait for Eva to bring her car around to pick us up. There’s still a line to get into the restaurant. We’re going to have to find someplace new, and this time, I make a vow to myself, I’m not going to write about it.
“Looks like someone has a fan,” Jack says as he wraps his arms around me.
“She’s cute,” I say.
“Not as cute as me.” Jack gets cocky when he drinks. “Maybe she can keep you company while I’m in Toronto.” Jack also worries about what I’m up to with whom when we’re apart, even though we have an agreement about this.
I kiss him on the lips. “Nope. She’s not as cute as you, baby.” Jack smiles. I think I’m going to throw up. I am not a baby-sweetheart-darling-sugarpie kind of girl. Jack likes that kind of thing so sometimes I do it for him and I hate that more than I hate the baby conversation and Parrot Girl.
Eva zips up in front of the restaurant in a silver Saab convertible. Jack and I pour ourselves into the car and we head to my place in the Plateau. Jack and I race up the stairs and into my apartment. We grab his bags and we’re off to the airport. “It’s really nice of you to do this, Eva. We could have taken a taxi.”
“No, no, don’t be silly. It’s no problem. I just wish we had more time to talk. There are so many things I’d love to ask you about.” She bites her lower lip. “But I don’t want to be a pest.”
“How about you come over after we drop Jack off and we’ll have some wine and talk all you want?”
“Oh, my goodness, Sara, that would be the most amazing thing.”
“Then it’s a plan.”
I toss a packet of breath mints at Jack and straighten his shirt before he heads to the check-in counter. I feel like his mother. But he’s thirty. Biologically, I couldn’t actually be his mother.
“So how long have you two been doing the long distance thing?” Eva asks as we wait for Jack to get his boarding pass.
“Almost a year.”
“Gosh, that must be hard.”
“Not really,” I say. It’s easier than trying to explain how it isn’t hard most of the time but then some of the time it is, like when I’m sick or he’s sick, or at night when I think I hear something weird or I can’t open an especially tight jar of kosher pickles. The worst is when I have to go to a party or dinner and it’s all couples and I wish he was there so we could snicker together in the back of the room—Jack is good for that—and not feel alone and old.
“I don’t think I could do it. You must really trust each other.”
“We have to,” I say. I don’t have to tell Eva about my arrangement with Jack, that our relationship is open, that we can have sex with other people, but not date them, we can screw them, but not love them. I once told Genevieve about this and she called me crazy. I said it was practical, better than making all sorts of promises to each other only to have them broken. Gen called my attitude defeatist. I called it modern and reminded her that she told me once that she had exactly the same arrangement with the two boyfriends she had before Ted.
“Look how that worked out,” Gen said.
“You were fine with it at the time.”
“I could have never done that with Ted.”
“I’m not saying you should have. It’s different with you and Ted.”
“It’s never going to be serious with Jack unless you’re monogamous.”
“Who says I want serious? Who says monogamy is the only way?” Discussing the finer points of your open long-distance relationship with your staunchly monogamous married friend is ill-advised.
“Come on, Sara. You’re almost forty.”
“Yup. I’m almost forty.”
I know that I’m supposed to know what this means. People say it all the time. You’re almost forty. Wow, you’re turning forty. How are you with the big four-oh? How am I with the big four-oh? The big four-oh is super, and I’m not quite there yet, but thanks for reminding me. And yes, I know I’m not married and I know I don’t have a baby and I don’t think I want either of those things. And yes, my boyfriend is nine years younger, so you can stop asking questions and doing speculative math in your head. I am fine with the big four-oh, but you people are freaking me out, and I already had my freak-out at thirty-five, so stop it or I will slap you.
Eva wanders over to the newsstand, leaving Jack and I a moment alone. It’s always the same. I’ll be ready, almost anxious for him to go, to get back to work, to sprawl in my bed and sleep alone, but then I want him to stay and I nearly cry. I kiss him goodbye at the security gate and he says he loves me and that he’ll call when he gets in.
I find Eva at the newsstand thumbing through a celebrity tabloid. “That one’s my favorites,” I say.
“Me, too,” she says. “It’s so trashy.”
“But not too trashy. There has to be a balance.”
“I used to buy it at this Metro stop up in Chabanel when I’d go look at fabrics, then I’d put it inside, like, V or Japanese Vogue or something and read it on the way home. I didn’t want anyone to see me with it.”
We step out of the terminal and walk to Eva’s car. “You can’t worry about what everyone else thinks.”
“Oh, I don’t, not now. Especially after reading that column you wrote about embracing your guilty pleasures.”
“I wrote that years ago.”
Eva stops for a moment. “Two thousand and one, I think. Sometime in the spring?”
I have no idea if she’s right, but I’ll assume she is. “I think you know more about me than I do.”
The drive to the airport and back with the top of Eva’s convertible down has sobered me up and a dull headache is setting in. Eva parks and we walk to the corner and buy two bottles of cheap French wine at the depanneur. A couple glasses and my headache is masked by the liquor. Then there’s the guilt and the phantom pain of work tomorrow. It’s not even eight.
Eva walks around my apartment as if it were a museum. She looks closely at everything, every picture, every knickknack, the title on every spine of every book on my shelves. She doesn’t touch a thing. I take my camera out and upload the weekend’s photos onto my computer. Of the twelve DOs for the fashion page, seven are strong enough to use. I only need five. I have fifteen DON’Ts, of which ten are hysterical, but I only need five of those, as well. And then there’s Parrot Girl.
I hate Parrot Girl because I don’t know what to do with her. It used to be easier when people just dressed how they dressed and it was about style, not irony and preciousness or getting their picture taken. I’m tired of Parrot Girl and all the other girls who may not have parrots but they’re the same because they try so hard not to be. I hate Parrot Girl and her soccer socks and her cowboy boots and her satin jacket. But I hate her most because I know she looks ridiculous and that she is a DON’T. But it’s not about me and my personal DON’Ts, not really, not anymore, it’s about the perception of DON’Ts and knowing whether twenty-year-olds will think Parrot Girl is a DON’T. Stuffy American companies don’t pay people twenty thousand dollars to talk to their marketing department for a day unless they can tell them definitively what a DON’T is to a twenty-year-old. I’m almost forty. I want to slap myself, but instead I take another swig of wine, and then I want to slap Parrot Girl, but she’s not here. Eva is. I don’t want to slap her. She’s twenty-four. I could ask her what she thinks about Parrot Girl. She’d be thrilled, I’m sure. But I don’t because I can’t, because I can’t fucking tell what Parrot Girl is. Is she a poseur or some newfangled post-post-ironic poster child for some save-the-birds society? Is she wrong or all right? Is she a test, a comeuppance for something I did last week or last year? Fuck me. Is she a DO or a DON’T?
My brain flips over and hurts. Get me a cold compress and a very soft pillow. Let me not care and play dead or pretend I’m a teacher, a strict schoolmarm. It’s a pop quiz for Eva: who’s a DO, who’s a DON’T? Pencils down in three minutes! I’ll check her work right away, taking my time—making her wait, making her nervous and possibly sweaty, though Eva seems likely to be one of those girls whose sweat smells like rosewater and never stains. Yes, a pop quiz could be fun, with Parrot Girl first up. No, second—I don’t need Eva to sense that I need her, and that I want her to spill every secret she knows.
I’m quite sure that Eva would tell me everything—anything—I wanted. She’d be happy, I’d be happy, we could do a dance around the living room because we’d know, we’d know, we’d know just what Parrot Girl is. We could revel and open more wine, make a toast to the most fabulous DO or DON’T of the week. I stare at the photo of Parrot Girl and her stupid fucking parrot and my mouth seals shut. I say nothing and there will be no pop quiz. I don’t need Eva, she holds no secrets I haven’t heard or told before. Parrot Girl is my problem, she’s a riddle, not a test, maybe even a joke.
I click through the photos and print them out. I spread them on the floor and Eva stands beside me as I decide which photos will make the column. Skinny Denim Shorts Man with the skeevy mustache is a DON’T. Skinny Pink Polo Shirt Man with the mutton chops and a kilt is a DO. Headband Girl is a DON’T. Babushka Girl is a DO. And so it goes until there is one more DON’T slot and one more DO. Parrot Girl is still on the floor. My confidence is sunk; it’s not too late for the pop quiz and this is no joke. I’ve made a Skinny Pink Polo Shirt Man with mutton chops and a kilt a DO. He looks absurd and he’s trying too hard but I know he’s a DO because the boys at Snap keep trying to grow mutton chops and half of them are in kilts—but never sarongs—and they really like pink and girls like Eva like them. And there are no fucking pets at all so it’s really not so complicated.
I look closer at the photo: it’s technically good. I have to use it. Eva shuffles her feet. She’s bored, she’s waiting, one second longer and she’ll know I’m a fraud. I pick up the photo and put it on the DON’T pile. I feel a rush of bravado and decide she’ll be the feature DON’T. Eva’s shuffling stops. Fuck Parrot Girl.
Jack calls. He’s home and safe. The flight was good. No snacks or bar service, but it was only an hour and he tells me he found a half-eaten protein bar in his jacket pocket. I’m drunk and I can’t believe I’m dating someone who eats protein bars. Eva’s sitting on the sofa wearing gloves and examining issues six and eight of Snap. She told me that she carries the gloves in her handbag at all times. She won’t read an important book or periodical without them, she said. Eva is odd. I slip into my bedroom and say this to Jack and he says,” You’re odd.” And he’s right, of course. I like her—Eva—and her oddness. I like that she carries gloves in her bag and wears panty hose and orthopedic shoes and has hair the color of a Francophone grandma. Jack tells me he loves me and that he misses me already. “I know you do, baby,” I say and as soon as that baby is out of my mouth I feel again like I want to vomit.
Eva is too drunk to drive so I tell her she can stay here. I make up the spare room that’s so rarely used. I lend her a black cotton camisole and a pair of boxer shorts printed with grinning flowers. They’re Japanese and they were free. They look cute on Eva. I rifle through my sleepwear options and decide on a long black silk chemise with lace trim and a matching robe. I keep my bra on so my breasts won’t flop around. I catch myself in the mirror. I look like a madam, but the silk feels cool and soft against my skin. At home, I’m usually in long johns and T-shirts, my hair tied back in a ponytail and my glasses on. I swipe a neutral gloss across my lips before heading back to the living room.
As we finish the wine, Eva tells me all about how great and important and influential I am. Sometimes I ask her about herself. She grew up in Pointe-Claire with an Anglo mother and a French father, not far it turns out from Ted and Genevieve’s new house. I look up their address in my book and Eva knows the street, it’s about six blocks from her parents’ place. She’s living there now, just temporarily she says. She has a job, an office PA for a French film company, but the pay is shit. She hates it, says the producer is a prick who wears a fedora and a trench coat every day and does nothing except play video games and look at porn on his cell phone. I tell her I’ll take his picture and make him the featured DON’T one week. She laughs until her eyes tear and I do, too. Eva tells me she went to private school, with uniforms that she started altering at thirteen. She says she makes clothes she sometimes sells to friends, but mostly she’s a stylist and a writer—like me. Except when I was twenty-four no one knew what a stylist did and no one knew our names. I tell her this and she goes on about how it’s about time people—but mostly me—were recognized for our talent. We’re the ones who spot and set the trends, not the movie stars, not the pop stars. Eva is very passionate about this. I’m fading and my eyes are heavy, but Eva keeps talking, telling me how remarkable and inspiring I am. “Look at all you’ve accomplished—look at everything you’ve done. And you’re not even forty.” Eva says this and it’s better than sex, it’s better than a lullaby.
Swag
Red wine is crusted around the corners of my mouth and looks nearly black. I scrape it off with my fingernail and splash water on my face before pinning my hair up and stepping into the shower. Under the water I’m dizzy and hot. I feel like I’m sweating. I step out and wrap myself in an oversize towel and sit on the edge of the bathtub for a long time, still and silent. If I move my head I fear it may explode. I reach for my body cream and rub it in all over. It has a faint vanilla scent, but I can still smell the toxic odor of yesterday afternoon’s champagne and last night’s wine on my skin. I spritz myself with extra perfume. I spray my hair with a citrusy refresher that absorbs the smell of smoke, then I work it into two low pigtails. Ted will know I’m hungover. I always wear my hair in pigtails when I’m hungover. It used to be, even five years ago, that I’d often be asked for ID in bars, liquor stores, buying cigarettes at chain stores with signs declaring Anyone Who Looks Under 30 Will Be Asked For Identification. I examine my face. No one will be asking me for ID today.
My face sucks up the first layer of moisturizer in seconds, so I slather on another. It’s the eyes. The eyes are the biggest problem. It’s not so much the wrinkles, but the skin—it’s like the thinnest tissue paper, delicate and soft, never totally smooth, which makes concealer an issue. Applying it evenly on the puffy, papery skin is next to impossible and no matter how much blending and dabbing I do, it’s never perfect. Still, I grout the area around my eyes with concealer, set it with a light powder, then attack with an expensive moisturizing spray gel that I nabbed from the Swag Shack at the office. I feel my skin suck it in and I wait for the promised youthful, reenergizing glow that after five minutes doesn’t appear, so I give up and brush my teeth again. My tongue is still dark with wine. I brush it raw with my toothbrush, which looks too gross to ever use again, so I toss it in the trash and want to climb right in with it, but the pail is too small. I don’t have a garbage pail big enough anywhere in the apartment. I could probably fold myself into one of those black plastic jumbo bags I use to dump all bottles into after a party—the ones I leave around back of the building for the bottle-picker with the beard and the giant tricycle who I always try to smile at but can never quite look in the eye or say hello to. The jumbo bag is problematic, though. I’d need someone to twist-tie the top for me and get me to the Dumpster and Ted isn’t strong enough to lift me. Jack is, but he wouldn’t do it. I could ask Eva if she has any big-guy friends, but that might seem weird since we just met.
Eva’s not in the spare room, but I can tell she slept there because the bed is made just so, all crisp corners and symmetry. I find her in the kitchen slicing fresh bagels from the Fairmount Bakery, which is not close by, but she says it was no big deal to nip up there and back. She’s also picked up cut flowers and opened the blinds to the day.
“I have Mondays off,” she says between bagel bites. “We shoot Tuesday to Saturday.”
I remember now. She’s a film office PA. She lives in Pointe-Claire with her parents. There’s a guy with a hat and porn on his phone. “So what are your plans for today?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Just hang around, I guess. But should probably go home and change. I used your shower, though. I hope that’s okay.”
“Use whatever you want. And if you’re looking for something to wear, I’m sure you could find something at my office—we’ve got piles of stuff.” It is true. The Swag Shack is full of free stuff companies send us in hopes that we’ll write about it, put it on our IT LIST. Most of the stuff is crap that no one could possibly want, but sometimes it is such spectacular crap we put it on our ICK LIST. Then the publicists at the companies—the very people who sent us this crap stuff in the first place—call up whining and angry and we laugh at them and ask them if they’ve ever actually read Snap and they get all flustered and say yes, of course, but are suddenly nervous and polite and have a call they have to take on the other line, so goodbye.
There is good stuff, too. Cute clothes, but it’s been ages since a pair of pants that fit me have come in and I could use new pants. The free-stuff publicists call up our market editors and ask about me, about Ted—favorite colors, hated colors, sizes. I haven’t gotten around to telling anyone that I’m not an eight, but a ten now, so none of the pants they send over fit. If they ask, I tell our market editors I don’t like the pants—any of them—even if I do. It’s better than sending some internal e-mail that’s sure to end up on someone’s goddamn blog announcing that my ass is fatter. Like they haven’t noticed. But skirts, if they’re A-line or pleated, they fit. My waist is still an eight—it’s my ass that’s a ten. And tops are fine. Shoes and handbags are the best. I don’t wear jewelry so I couldn’t care whether it’s free or not.
I take Eva to work with me. It’s exciting for her and I’m happy that she drives and that I don’t have to walk or contend with the Metro today. My legs are achy and my knee cracks as I cross it over the other in the passenger seat of Eva’s Saab. She presses a button and the top comes down. I’m grateful for this because I worry that the smell of my hangover has defeated that extra spray of perfume.
The Snap building is squat and two storeys, a former embroidery factory in the east end. The first floor is reception and production, there’s a fully equipped photo studio, and piled high to the ceiling in one corner there’s a heap of old Macs that looks like it could tumble down at any moment, but really they’re all superglued together and affixed to the wall. Sometimes when Ted and I are taking corporate clients though we tell them it’s art.
I spin Eva around through production, the studio, mumble a few introductions. She seems impressed and keeps saying, “Oh, my gosh.” Eva doesn’t swear, I’ve noticed. She says goodness and gosh, and I’m waiting for a golly-gee. This could annoy me, but it’s Eva so it doesn’t.
We take the freight elevator to the second floor. I can’t face the stairs even though I know my ass will never shrink riding an elevator. Today I’m a lazy bitch and I couldn’t care. I’ve brought a CD with the DOs and DON’Ts fashion photos for the week. I’ll give it to Layout, then show it to Ted, who will laugh and sign off and we’ll get proofs of the entire issue and mark it up one more time before six when it has to go to the printer. By noon tomorrow it’ll be in record stores and fashion boutiques and cafés in Montreal that we’ve personally approved. On Wednesday, it’ll be in more record stores and fashion boutiques and cafés across the country and in the States that I suppose someone at some point has visited and approved on our behalf, but that’s Ted’s responsibility, not mine.
My office, like Ted’s, is an actual office, with walls and windows and a door that locks. When we first moved into the building it was all open and chaos. Music blared and people smoked at their desks, although even back then it was against city bylaws. There’s still music and chaos and it’s fun to watch through the windows of my quiet, sound-proofed office, but I have to smoke on the roof.
Music and chaos is good for business, so we built the boardroom in the middle of it all and glassed it in. Ted’s in there meeting with our branding team. I wave and he nods. I lead Eva to my office and collapse immediately into the swiveling fuchsia chair I received as a gift from a boring furniture manufacturer that made a splash in the market by hiring a flamboyant women’s wear designer to create a line of equally flamboyant home and office furnishings that got lots of press but sold abysmally. Our research showed the price point was too high—there are only so many people who will pay eight thousand dollars for a polka-dot leather sofa and they don’t shop at the boring furniture manufacturer’s stores. So they can’t say we didn’t tell them so.
“I love your chair,” Eva says.
“Here—give it a try. It’s stylish and ergonomic.” Christ. I’m an infomercial. I muster all my strength and lift myself out of it, placing both hands on my desk in front of me for balance. I hear my knees crack—both of them this time. Beside my desk there’s an empty garbage pail. It’s larger than your average office garbage pail, but I know I can’t wedge my ass into that one, either.
Eva spins around in the fuchsia chair. “Mmm. Comfy.”
“Free,” I say. Like that explains anything. I think I may be retarded today, but I know enough to know I can’t say that because this isn’t junior high when Ted and I called everything gay and retarded and we called each other gaylord and retard. You can’t say that unless you created South Park and you’re saying it through those animated kids that are surprisingly still funny, because you never know who’s gay or has a retard in their family.
Pleased with my self-censoring restraint, I walk Eva to the Swag Shack. It’s the Swag Shack because that’s what’s burned into the plank of wood above the door. It’s a room, the office Ted and I were going to give to the fancy financial executive we never got around to hiring. Instead, we beefed up our in-house accounting staff and none of them are fancy enough for an office. But we may have to rethink this because they keep complaining about the chaos and the noise and someone quits what seems like every second day, but is actually more like every five months according to Ted, and Ted would know because they report to him.
The Swag Shack is jammed with racks and shelves. There’s free stuff everywhere. I let Eva loose and tell her to grab what she wants and come back to my office when she’s done. I think she’s going to freak—her eyes are all buggy and glazed, her mouth twisted in wonder. I’ve seen this look before—on girls the first time they enter the Swag Shack, on guys who are fucking me right before they come and on drummers, particularly the ones who are good.
“Sara, oh, my goodness! I don’t know where to start,” Eva says. She hugs me and I pat her shoulder. “Thank you!”
“Take as long as you want,” I say and lope back to my office.
My eyes swim across the page. I’m in the boardroom proofing with Ted and our art director, Brian. My head is throbbing and I’m out of Advil. I’m sticky and sweaty and if there was ever any doubt earlier in the day that I was toxic and stinky, it’s gone. I want to crawl under the giant kidney-shaped table, but it’s glass-tinted, completely see-through—and people will notice. I force myself to read each word, take in every photo cutline, check the folio at the bottom of the pages. I find a missing word and I’m very proud.
I get to the DOs and DON’Ts page and there’s Parrot Girl, looking disaffected, slouchy and numb. It’s not too late to move her to a DO, but I don’t because that will just make me feel more toxic and retarded. I sign off on the issue, as do Ted and Brian, who scrams at once, pressed to make the final changes before deadline. My work here is done and all I can think about is my bed.
“Who’s the redhead?” Ted asks as we’re clearing off the boardroom table.
“What?”
“Her.” Ted points to Eva, who is sitting in my office. It’s nearly four. I’ve forgotten all about her. I am retarded today and an asshole and a very poor host.
“That’s Eva.” Ted follows me out of the boardroom and to my office where I introduce him to her. She’s changed into a pair of skinny madras plaid golf pants that I’m quite sure are men’s, and a purple blouse with a fussy bow at the neck. She’s pinned a gaudy rhinestone brooch in the shape of a lizard above her left breast. Scrunched up knee-highs peek out of her orthopedic shoes. She’s a DO and I can tell Ted knows it, too.
“Eva, I’m so, so sorry for leaving you this long. You should have just grabbed me from the boardroom.”
“Please don’t worry about me, Sara. I’ve kept myself busy. As a matter of fact, I just finished.” Eva bites her lower lip and casts her eyes down. “I hope you guys won’t be mad, but I kind of did something.”
Jesus. This can’t be good. What’d she do? Break something? Wreck something? Spill something on my velvet chair? This must be what Genevieve means when she says she can’t let baby Olivier out of her sight for a second.
“Come here,” Eva says. She brushes past Ted and he smiles in that goofy way that all men do when an attractive girl touches them by accident. I notice Ted adjust his pants as he follows Eva out. It’s subtle and Ted’s no perv, but still. I flash on Ted with a hard-on when we were seventeen, his purple penis and its big mushroom head. I’m dizzy and nauseous. I haven’t eaten since this morning and the picture of Ted’s mushroom-head dick isn’t helping. He was a virgin. I wasn’t. We were drunk. He actually begged, so we fucked and we never talked about it again. I wonder if Genevieve knows, but I doubt it because she tells me all about sex with Ted—at least she did until the baby—and I figure if she knew she probably wouldn’t tell me so much. As I walk behind Ted, who’s walking behind Eva, I contemplate which is worse: hearing from Gen about how turned on she gets sucking Ted’s cock when I know that it’s a weird mushroom-head cock or hearing Gen describe how Olivier peed in her face when she was changing him and about how baby balls disappear up inside their little baby-boy bodies and how babies get teeny-tiny erections. I wonder if Olivier has a mini mushroom-head penis like his dad. Incarcerate me in a giant garbage pail under the boardroom table and slap me around. Put me out of my misery, I’m a fucked-up sicko.
“Surprise!” Eva swings open the door to the Swag Shack and I’m agog. It’s clean, orderly. The body and beauty products are grouped together. The men’s and women’s wear have been separated and, from what I can tell, organized according to style and color. Gadgets and toys have assigned spaces. CDs and books are alphabetized. I am speechless.
“Who are you and what have you done with the Swag Shack? “ Ted says, shaking Eva by the shoulders. He can be such a cheese sometimes.
Eva blushes. “I hope you don’t mind. It just seemed like it would be so hard to find anything in here. I wanted to make it easier for you.”
I love her. I think I could, as my mother used to say, go gay. My mother didn’t believe a person could be born gay, but she didn’t think anyone would choose to be gay, either. Hence, her go gay theory. Much like being struck by a random bolt of lightning, she believed someone could be walking down the street and—poof! — they’d just go gay and that would be that. This could be somewhat embarrassing when I’d have my gay friends over and my mother would insist on asking them about their personal going-gay experience, but it was better than her being a bigoty homophobe like Ted’s nightmare all-Bible, all-the-time Catholic parents. I could totally go gay for Eva right now, but the sex would be trouble. I’d still have to have sex with men without bulbous mushroom-head penises. So maybe gay isn’t the best option for Eva and me. Maybe I’ll make her my assistant.
I’ve never had an assistant. Watching Ted burn through new assistants like Jack goes through his revolting protein bars has made me wary of both. The point of having an assistant as far as I can tell is to help you, but assistants from what I’ve seen are snaky whiners who spend more time trying to write some pathetic roman à clef than actually helping the bosses whom they so obviously hate. Eva doesn’t hate me. Eva loves me. And Eva’s smart and cute and she cleaned the Swag Shack.
Eva is my new assistant. It’s Tuesday morning and she’s at her desk tap-tapping away on her computer. She brought Fairmount bagels so everyone loves her already, except for one of the IT guys who’s allergic to wheat and gluten and sugar and everything else good. It’s a miracle he hasn’t killed himself.
I’m feeling much better, clean almost. I washed my hair this morning and my resolve to quit smoking is strong. Day one was a breeze—I couldn’t face a cigarette yesterday—and when I told Jack on the phone last night that I was done, he was pleased. He says I snore when I smoke too much. He smokes. He snores. I don’t make a big thing of it. Jack can really piss me off sometimes.
But Eva is perfect. We’re going out tonight to celebrate her new job at a new restaurant that has cordially invited me and a guest to wine and dine on the house. Genevieve was supposed to go with me, but sent a midnight e-mail bailing. Olivier is acting up, which is code for I can’t leave Ted alone with the baby. Olivier is nearly one and Gen has yet to leave him with Ted for more than five minutes. Occasionally she’ll entrust Prince Olivier’s care to one of her newfangled suburban mommy friends I’ve never met, but not Ted. I think that’s fucked up, but I’m smart enough to keep my mouth shut about things like mommy-baby codependency and mini mushroom-head penises.
I will take Eva to the restaurant. She bounced up and down on her chair when I asked if she’d like to go. She clapped her hands and said, “Goody!” I suspect it won’t be long before I get that golly-gee I’ve been waiting for.
Eva helps stuff the Trend Essentials swag bags we’ll be giving to the six participants in our Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend that starts Friday. I hate Trend Mecca Bootcamp weekends, but considering that each one of the corporate fucks that signs up pays ten thousand dollars to experience the street life and underground of trendsetting Montreal, I can hardly complain. No one wants to hear from a high-priced whore about the sultan who paid her a million dollars to fuck her up the ass for a weekend and no one wants to hear me gripe about the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend. I don’t even want to know there is such a thing as a Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend, let alone lead it. Maybe I’ll take Eva this time. Maybe I’ll wear a wig. Maybe I’ll bring a rag soaked in chloroform to wipe the smirk off the face of anyone who sees me out with these guys and their pleated pants and patterned sweaters. The people who sign up for the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend are almost always all guys.
Eva says she thinks it sounds fun and that she wants to learn everything she can about the business. She says she’ll carry my coffee or fetch drinks for the Bootcamp suits. Eva is my dream girl until about 2:00 p.m. when she knocks on my door and asks if she can come in. She looks nervous. She’s biting her lower lip again.
“What’s up, Eva? You’re not thinking about going back to that fedora porn guy are you?”
“No, no, nothing like that. It’s just that there’s this Web site—it’s not important, really, but you might want to see….”
I wave her over behind my desk and lean back, letting her type the URL into my computer. The Apples Are Tasty logo comes up. “Yeah, I’ve seen this,” I say, ignoring the screen. There are no DON’Ts walking the streets if one is to buy in to the Apples Are Tasty philosophy. Everyone is a DO in their own special way. Rid the world of negativity, embrace your individuality, pay fifty bucks to attend one of the parties we’re already being paid ten grand to throw, for another thousand one of the Apples Are Tasty crew will spend a day shopping with you. But getting your picture on the Apples Are Tasty Web site is the latest and greatest in hipster validation.
In two months, the site has gone from nothing to a very biggish deal. These party-planners-cum-DJingstyle-setters started getting attention and our clients started asking about them. At first we dismissed them as wannabes—we’ve dealt with copycats before—but when we tried to arrange access to one of their parties as a stop on the upcoming Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend we were rebuffed. That’s how Ted puts it—rebuffed—but what really happened was he lost it in an e-mail exchange with the Tasty ringleader when the guy refused to cough up comp party tickets for the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend. Then he posted Ted’s tirade online and forwarded it to all the clients he knew we had and to every media outlet on the planet. That was two weeks ago. Things have calmed down, but Ted won’t talk about it. And he’s more determined than ever to ferret out whoever put that apple on his desk the day after the whole thing went down and fire their ass. We have security cameras everywhere now. It won’t happen again.
I tell Eva it’s important to know your competition and what they’re doing, but not to get too wrapped up, not to obsessively worry about where they’re going and what they’re doing. There’s room for all of us and we should appreciate each other’s differences because that’s what makes us all unique and wonderful. I’m a raving hypocrite, I know, and I don’t care. I’ve built my career taking pictures of unfortunate-looking people wearing unfortunate-looking outfits. Like Parrot Girl. Like Parrot Girl, who’s staring out at me from my computer, the same Parrot Girl who is the current Apples Are Tasty Look Girl.
Fuck me and stop the presses. But it’s too late—kill me now or let me fall on the sword I bought in Osaka, the one that I had to fill out reams of paperwork to get through customs. Let Parrot Girl’s parrot gnaw at my corpse.
They’re right, they’re right, I know they’re right. I hate Parrot Girl, but twenty-year-old urbanites and suburban scenesters don’t. Laminate my picture, doctor my birth date and make me sixty-five. I’ll eat tiny portions ordered from special menus in restaurants, shop for groceries on certain days and ride the Metro for cheap. Book me into a home where I can be with my kind: wrinkled rock stars and one-time starlets with puffy lips and faces that don’t move when they talk about the good old days, which is all anybody talks about. We talk and talk so we can remember when we knew something and weren’t old and disgusting and had better things to do than clip coupons and play bridge and wait to die.
I don’t want to die. I want to disappear. I want to press Rewind and give Eva a pop quiz. I want to be right. I want to care. I want to leave. I need to stop and I need to rest but the constant ping of my e-mail makes everything impossible. I rap the side of my computer with a curled knuckle. Eva’s still standing behind me, silent but for the quiet shuffle of her feet. I knock on the side of my computer again as a burst of ping-ping-pings signals the arrival of yet more e-mail undoubtedly demanding my resignation. But it hasn’t been twenty-five years: I won’t get a watch or a shitty roast beef dinner buffet at some economy motel that must have a discount rate for seniors.
I don’t need to knock on the computer again. I know they’re all inside. The place is packed with girls with shiny jackets and soccer socks. Their pet birds are shitting everywhere, but they don’t care as long as it’s not on their boots. It’s filthy and the girls are smoking and think it’s all so very funny. They’re talking about me but I can’t hear the words over the laughter. I creep on unnoticed and over the wires and microchips and bird shit until someone drops a lit cigarette on my head and I jerk up, screaming. They all stop and look, but nobody laughs. Someone helps me to the door but I can’t keep a grip on her arm because the satin jacket she’s wearing is so slippery. I stumble and land at the feet of the Skinny Pink Polo Shirt Boy with the mutton chops and the kilt. I get a flash up his skirt and he’s not wearing any underwear. His cock is thick and long and doesn’t have a mushroom head. I smile up at him, but his expression reads nothing but pity. The Slippery Girl gets me to the door and nudges me out. It’s all fine. I have to go anyhow. I have to make a call or have a meeting and buy clothes for my new job. Yes, I have to go. I have to go. I have to go.
I reach into my desk and pull out a spare set of keys for the office front door, the back door, the Swag Shack. I can’t go. I don’t need to go. I have nowhere to go. I still have my keys. I hold them tightly in my hand until the metal edges dig into my skin—not enough to draw blood, but enough to hurt. My e-mail pings and pings and soon it’s the rhythm of an old techno song—no, early Chicago house, which I know is back and that my vinyl is worth maybe thousands to some know-it-all DJ with a cute face and a thousand girlfriends. But he loves Parrot Girl the most and is living in the suburbs with his parents to save enough money to impress her by giving her the rarest, most colorful parrot in the world—one that’s fully bilingual and shits in a toilet and knows how to use a bidet.
There is nothing worse than suburban scenesters who love girls with parrots who try too hard. I force myself to look at Parrot Girl’s photo on my screen. She’s standing in front of the brunch spot that now I’ll truly never, ever return to—and she’s smiling. We have a strict no-smile policy for our DOs and DON’Ts. Perhaps it’s time to revisit that. I make a note on a yellow sticky: Smiles? Eva says nothing, she hovers, frozen behind me.
“I guess people love birds,” I say, which is maybe the dumbest thing to come out of my mouth all day. “Hey, why don’t I make a couple of quick calls and we cut out early, do the streets and grab a couple of drinks before dinner?” This is maybe the smartest thing to come out of my mouth all day.
Eva heads back to her desk and I e-mail Ted that I’m heading out to do the streets, which means going trolling for unfortunate-looking people wearing unfortunate outfits, and call Jack in Toronto on his cell. He’s prepping a video for a New York electro-goth band all week. When he doesn’t pick up on the third ring I hang up and straighten the papers on my desk. A call comes through on my private line.
“Did you just call?” It’s Jack.
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you leave a message?”
“I don’t know.” We’ve had this conversation before.
“You could at least leave a message.”
“Next time I will, then.”
“You sound funny.”
“I am funny.”
“Seriously, Sara, are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I saw Parrot Girl on Apples Are Tasty.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you call?”
“I figured you would have seen it.”
“I just saw it now—Eva showed it to me.” Admitting this is torture. I’m humiliated and bruised. All the blood in my body feels like it’s rushing to my head. My eyes sting. I’m going to cry. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” I whisper into the phone. The tears come.
“Oh, baby, it’s gonna be okay. We all have off days.”
“This isn’t about an off day.” My voice is choking; I’m strangled by confession.
“Are you gonna be home later, sweetheart? We could talk more about this then. Now—it’s not a good time. But I really want to talk to you.”
“I have a dinner,” I say.
“Call me when you get in, okay, baby? It doesn’t matter how late.”
“Okay.” My voice is tiny. I am the crying girlfriend.
I hold the phone to my ear and face the back wall of my office long after I’ve said goodbye to Jack. I examine in a compact mirror the hot splotches on my face and my swollen eyes. A coat of moisturizer cools my skin and I reapply my eye makeup, all with the phone tucked between my shoulder and ear, listening again and again to the robot operator lady say, Please hang up and try your call again, first in French then in English. I want to call Genevieve, but every time I do she can’t talk, she’s too tired, or I get the feeling that what I want to talk about isn’t anything she wants to hear. I want to call Ted and he’s right next door, but he’s so stressed and serious these days the last thing he needs is me in his office bawling about Apples Are Fucking Tasty and Parrot Girl.
“You ready to go?” I ask Eva. She’s at her desk arranging the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend files. She’s compiling dossiers for me about each of the participants. One of the men is not terribly discreet about his interest in rubber masks, ball gags and female domination. Eva shows me the online evidence, and scrunches up her face as if she’d discovered a turd in her breakfast cereal instead of a prize. “There’s always one,” I say. “Put it in the file.”
We park at my place and walk through the streets of the Plateau, then over to Saint-Laurent. It’s June and the tourists are starting to descend, making it prime DON’T season. Within seconds I spot no less than three socks-and-sandals men, but they’re boring so we move on. We walk east and along the way encounter a beefy man with a mullet. He’s wearing a mesh half-shirt and drawstring bouncer pants with a Mickey Mouse print. His sneakers have neon green laces and he’s got a thick gold chain around his neck. I approach him and ask to take his picture. I click away but he won’t stop smiling. I ask in my most polite voice for him to stop and he does, but the smile lingers in his eyes. His pride is like a sucker punch. Tears well up and sting. Eva has him sign the release and I quickly wipe my eyes.
“Are you all right, Sara?” Eva asks once Beefy Cartoon Pants Man has gone.
“Allergies,” I say.
“Gosh, that’s terrible. Is there anything I can do? There’s a pharmacy around the corner—I could get you some of those pills, those antihistamines.”
“That would be great, Eva. Thanks.” I park myself on a bus bench and fiddle with my camera in an effort to calm down while I wait for Eva to return. I have to shake off this psycho-spaz cry-baby thing. There’s a bar across the street, one of those crappy fake Irish pubs—no affected urbanites, no suburban scenesters, no Apples Are Tasty or Snap, no Sara B., take my picture! It’s exactly what I need. As I dart across the road, I call Eva on her cell and tell her to meet me there. My beer arrives just as she does. I rip into the box of allergy tablets and weasel two out their childproof packaging, then down them with my beer. I assure Eva that once the pills kick in my eyes will be just fine.
Mecca
Not everything French is chic, and Montreal isn’t the zenith of cool. Part of my job on this Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend is to ensure that none of the six participants figures this out. I’ve known them for half a day now and am confident this will not be a concern.
As we tour the myth of the city—the shops and cafés, the lairs of local designers—the überalphas emerge from the group of type-A corporate alpha dogs and as usual the advertising people rise to the top of the shit pile. They know it all. Everywhere we go, they jostle for position—who can get an I’ve heard about this out of their mouth faster? There’s a creative director from Chicago determined to harness the zeitgeist and one from Vancouver who’s all about the next big thing. Then there’s the woman from Baltimore who won’t shut up about how she has her finger on the pulse, though from the way she keeps ogling Zeitgeist from Chicago I think she wants her precious finger up his ass, and from the way Big Thing Vancouver keeps leering at her, it’s his ass that wants Precious Finger. I want to cut my veins open and hurl myself into the St. Lawrence River, but I can’t because I don’t have a knife or a razor blade and we’re not going to be near the waterfront until after lunch.
I thank God that Eva is such a small-talk enthusiast. She answers silly questions about the city and Snap and she sounds very authoritative. We’re lunching at a popular bistro on Saint-Laurent better known for its attractive staff than its food. I order a side of mayo for my fries, which is something Precious Finger cannot deal with—the fat, the calories, the cholesterol, your heart—so when it arrives, a goopy dollop in a small white bowl, I’m sure to pass it around for everyone at the table to try. I notice Zeitgeist watching the waitresses and Precious Finger watching him. He is momentarily distracted by my fries/mayo offering. After one bite he declares it genius. He’s chewing as he says this and I see tiny bits of salivamushed potato-and-mayo spray from his mouth.
It’s Precious Finger’s turn and I reckon she has no choice but to risk it all—her weight, her cholesterol, her heart—if she has any chance of impressing Zeitgeist, ardent supporter of genius fries-and-mayo and, more important, of getting a chance to shove a well-lubed finger up his ass. I am convinced that Zeitgeist is the kind of man who has a bottle of travel-size lube beside the bed in his hotel room if not in the fake army surplus bag he’s had slung across his chest all morning. Just because it’s green and burlap with numbers and patches on it doesn’t mean it’s not a purse.
Precious Finger closes her eyes and screws up her face as she brings the mayo-coated fry to her mouth. I watch Big Thing from Vancouver watch her, rapt and eyes glazed. Zeitgeist is still watching the waitresses. Precious Finger purses her lips and makes a face. She munches fast. Her mouth is tight but her cheeks move furtively. Her lipstick has been wiped clean by her lunch—mandarin-almond salad, vinaigrette on the side, one fry-and-mayo. She looks like a squinty squirrel. “Mmm, delicious! Genius,” she says.
Zeitgeist stops looking at the waitresses and turns his attention back to the table and briefly to Precious Finger. He points at a stray spot of mayonnaise on the side of her squirrelly mouth. She blushes and dabs it away with a napkin.
“Good, huh?” Zeitgeist says.
“Delicious. Genius. You were so right.” Precious Finger brushes her bangs off her forehead. “Actually, I’m thinking of ordering some more—if there’s time.” She looks at me. We can be late for the flea market in Old Montreal. Witnessing Precious Finger force-feed herself a plate of fries and mayo is an opportunity I refuse to pass up.
The fries come and I take out my camera. Precious Finger moves in closer to Zeitgeist, her head nearly resting on his shoulder. Big Thing scoots into frame. I coax Precious Finger to eat a fry while I snap a photo, but she won’t until Zeitgeist slathers one in mayo and feeds it to her. His face is smirky. Big Thing’s shoulders slump in defeat. I take the picture and Precious Finger excuses herself to use the washroom. I wait two minutes and follow her in. I don’t have to go, but I wash my hands. The sound of the water does nothing to drown out the sound of Precious Finger retching in a locked stall.
I’m back at the table before she is and am surprised to find Ted there, smiling and doling out handshakes all around. Ted never comes on the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekends.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Nothing. Just thought I’d stop by, maybe tag along.”
“Sounds great.”
It is great that Ted is here. Between him and Eva they answer all the inane questions. I walk behind and take pictures that I’ll delete at home. No one bugs me when I have a camera in front of my face. We push through the crowded flea market, visit the studio of an artist friend, walk some more, shop a little and the three advertising alpha dogs talk and talk and talk while the three boring corporate types take notes and ask nerdy questions. We stop for drinks and dinner. Precious Finger sits beside Zeitgeist and forces another order of fries and mayo down her throat and then we’re off to see a band that Big Thing is particularly excited about. “They’re gonna break big this summer,” he announces like he’s the Casey Kasem of alterna-everything. We flag three taxis after the show and I’m stuck with him riding back to the Bootcampers’ boutique hotel. He won’t shut up about the Montreal scene, which is not what it was five years ago, let alone ten years ago, but he doesn’t need to know that. I want to strike him in the head with a giant mallet, but reconsider and think I’d rather use it on myself. I remember that I have a big wooden meat tenderizer in a drawer at home that I’ve never used.
The three boring corporate types go straight to their rooms and to bed, blathering about time zones and saying they have to call their wives or their boyfriends or their kids or their cats. If he doesn’t call his wife, one man says—the one with the shirt and tie and high-waisted no-name big-box-store blue jeans—there will be hell to pay.
Zeitgeist, it seems, has no fear of hell or paying. Each time he lifts his glass to drink, the gold of his wedding band reflects the candlelight. Precious Finger pets his leg and Big Thing abruptly excuses himself. He settles into a seat at the bar and two women I’ve seen here before sidle up to him. If Precious Finger doesn’t want him, he can always rent a lady friend for the night.
So it’s me and Eva and Ted and Zeitgeist and Precious Finger. Eva is trying to convince Ted that now is the time for Snap to expand its online presence. Precious Finger is pawing at Zeitgeist, who seems sufficiently drunk and has stopped looking at every other woman in the room. But this could well be because his eyes can no longer focus or because he’s now thinking seriously of Precious Finger’s lubed finger in his ass while her squirrelly mouth is wrapped around his cock, which I’ll bet is a stubby, skinny thing.
I stir my drink with a skinny straw that makes me think of Zeitgeist’s dick but longer. It’s unpleasant, so I take out my cell phone and check for messages I know aren’t there. I told Jack I’d be busy all weekend with the Bootcamp and that I’d call him Sunday if the whole thing hadn’t killed me and if not we’d talk sometime Monday. It’s Friday night and I’m annoyed he hasn’t called. I check my messages at home. Nothing. Well, a call from Genevieve that I can barely hear due to the noise in the bar and Olivier’s piercing screams. No wonder Ted is here. I dial Jack’s number but hang up before it rings or my number shows up on his call display and we have to have that stupid conversation again about me not leaving messages.
Zeitgeist and Precious Finger say their good-nights and stumble off together to the lobby. Eva and Ted are laughing. I lean forward and rest my elbow on the table and my head on my hand, like a girl playing jump rope with friends waiting for the right time to step into the game. I order another drink and scan the busy bar. I feel someone watching me but I don’t turn my head to look, afraid of the hipster boy-waif or nightmare suburban suit guy that I might find standing there. He moves closer and hovers behind me and to the left. I pretend the dodgy artwork on the wall to my right is interesting.
“Hi, there. Can we help you?” Eva asks.
“Oh, yes, perhaps. We’d certainly appreciate it.” It’s a woman’s voice.
I turn to face her, relieved. I smile and look up and then down again, stirring my drink with the Zeitgeistskinny-dick straw. They’re ladies—old ladies, old ladies with orthopedic shoes and red hair the same shade as Eva’s.
“It’s so crowded and we noticed you weren’t using all of your seats. We don’t mean to impose, but—”
“Sit, sit, by all means, sit,” says Ted as he leaps from his chair to pull back two for the old ladies.
The old ladies thank us too many times and offer to buy us a round of drinks, which Ted refuses and instead says that he’d be honored to by them a round. Ted’s using his chuffy voice, which means he’s awfully proud of himself and I wonder why he’s here and not home helping his wife with their screaming child.
The old ladies’ names are Esther and Lila. Esther takes Ted’s hand in both of hers and shakes it. She does the same with Eva. Then it’s my turn. I tell them that my hands are really cold and Lila seems okay with this and backs away, but Esther grabs my hands anyway and now she knows I lied—my hands aren’t cold, I’m just not an old-people person.
I learn things about Esther and Lila I don’t want to know. Lila is divorced. Esther is seventy-five; she’s six years older than Lila, who I guess that would make sixty-nine, not that I could tell a day’s difference in their made-up wrinkly faces even if I could look at them for more than a second. Neither woman is married or has children. They do share an apartment, but Lila makes it clear that they’re not funny by which I assume she means lesbian. Esther is quick to add that there’s nothing wrong with being funny, she’s always simply preferred a man’s touch. She looks right at me when she says this. I look at my watch and grab my phone off the table. “I have to call my boyfriend,” I say. My voice is too loud but I can’t shove it back in my mouth so I clod off to the lobby to pretend to call Jack, but change my mind and go outside to smoke and pretend to call Jack.
I left my cigarettes in my bag at the table, so now there’s nothing to do except stand outside and play with the buttons on my phone. There’s a guy smoking a few feet away. I think about asking him for a cigarette, but he’s a hipster boy-waif, the kind I was afraid might be hovering behind me when it was really the old ladies. I weigh my options. I bum a smoke, he’ll want to talk—people always want to talk. He’ll ask me what I do and I’ll tell him the truth because I’m too tired to lie and I’m still smarting over being busted by old lady Esther for saying my hands were cold. I’ll tell the hipster waif-boy what I do and he’ll be impressed without saying so, like Parrot Girl was when I took her picture. Then I’ll be reminded of Parrot Girl and the goddamn Apples Are Tasty fiasco and the night—not that it’s been stellar or anything—will be unsalvageable.
“Would you like one?” It’s Esther. I didn’t hear her come up. Old people are quiet and sneaky.
She holds open a thin gold case filled with cigarettes. I take one. I can’t help myself. “Thanks.”
She lights it for me with a gold lighter that matches the case and I thank her again. “It’s a lovely night,” Esther says.
“Yup.”
“The young girl, Eva—is she your sister?”
I laugh. “No. She’s … “ What is Eva? “We work together.”
“You could be sisters.”
I’m flattered, I suppose, that someone, Esther even, thinks Eva and I could be related. “We really don’t look alike.”
“It’s not that. My sister and I looked nothing alike. It’s more your presence, your mannerisms.”
I shrug, not sure what to say, so we smoke in silence for a moment. “That Ted is such a pleasant young man. He said something about putting out that trendy magazine Lila and I pick up all the time, Snap?”
“We run it together.”
“Oh, my. Well, congratulations. That’s quite an accomplishment for two young people. Lila and I think it’s a hoot, by the way. Those DOs and DON’Ts always have us in stitches.”
“I do those.” I take a deep drag on my cigarette. It’s a hoot, they say, the old ladies are in stitches. A taxi peals up in front of the hotel and I consider throwing myself in front of it.
Lila breaks out into a coughing fit as Esther and I approach the table. It’s loud and audible above the trancy music. People are starting to stare. She doesn’t stop and I look at Ted in panic. Should we do something? Should we call an ambulance? Does anyone know CPR? Esther swats her friend playfully on the shoulder and the two women burst into giggles. “Oh, you,” Esther says and turns to me. “She does this every time I nip out for a ciggie. She hates it when I smoke.”
“Filthy habit!” Lila says.
“Sara here was telling me that she takes those photos that crack us up so much,” Esther says, changing the subject as she lowers herself slowly into her chair.
“The ones in Snap? We love those!”
“That’s what I told her.”
“That’s how we found out about this place—we read about it on that fun MUST DO list!” Lila says. She’s awfully excitable and squirming in her seat. I hope she doesn’t have a stroke.
“Lila’s addicted to magazines and newspapers,” Esther explains.
“It’s better than being addicted to cigarettes!”
“And she keeps them all. You should see her library, Sara. Floor-to-ceiling magazines—fifty years’ worth all stacked and in order.”
“What kind of magazines?” I ask.
“Oh, everything. But mostly fashion. I was quite the clotheshorse in my day—used to pore over every issue of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar for inspiration then sew up my own dresses.”
“And you have all of those? Fifty years?” I would kill—well, maybe not kill, but certainly maim or pay handsomely for fifty years of those magazines.
“When I was a teenager I would make confirmation dresses for girls in the neighborhood. I spent every penny I made on magazines and material.”
Esther beams proudly at her friend. “Our Lila was quite the entrepreneur.”
“Sounds like it,” I say. I look at Lila. Her face is heart-shaped, her features are delicate and her cheekbones high and defined. Behind the mask of age and powder and blush she was probably quite beautiful.
“Perhaps you’d like to come for tea sometime and take a look,” Lila suggests.
“That would be awesome!” If my status as a complete retard was ever in question, it is in this moment that I irrefutably determine that I am. I scrawl my cell-phone number on the back of my card and give it to Lila, who accepts it, probably out of pity for the softheaded thirty-nine-year-old who says awesome.
There are two taxis idling outside the hotel, but Esther insists on driving us—even suburban Ted—in her old Mercedes sedan. She’s only had one drink and though no one asks she makes a point of telling us that her eyesight is perfect.
“That’s because she had the laser surgery,” Lila whispers to me. “Used to be blind as a bat.”
I notice a copy of Snap from two weeks ago folded open to the MUST DOs page on the backseat. The address of the boutique hotel is circled in black ink. I pick it up and place it carefully on my lap and Ted, Eva and I slide in.
Eva is staying at my place for the weekend. With the Bootcamp schedule it’s more convenient than her driving to and from Pointe-Claire every day, and I like having her around.
It’s late and we should probably sleep, but my soft retard head is dancing with visions of midcentury fashion magazines, their pages filled with photographs by Avedon, Penn and Hiro. I open a bottle of wine and relax into my favorite chair. Eva sits with her legs curled up under her granny nightgown. It’s short, flannelette with long sleeves and a high lace-trimmed neck that looks itchy. I admire her unwavering commitment to personal style. I’m dressed in my black silk floor-length chemise again. I’m dying to take off my bra, but don’t want to scare Eva with the reality of thirty-nine-year-old breasts. I sit up straight, suck in my stomach and arch my back a little. I am a lady in repose.
I’m only half listening to Eva. She’s talking about online something and some Internet show that is either something she wants Ted to watch or wants him to produce for Snap and I’m not sure which because I’m talking about Lila’s magazines and what I know is in them. I’m speculating about how much such a collection would be worth and I get up and log on to eBay and find that a single issue of Vogue from the fifties can go for more than twenty-five dollars. I try to do the math but it’s too much for my soft head. I debate the merits of Vogue versus Bazaar aloud and decide that it depends on the decade and on Diana Vreeland, and which magazine she was with at the time. Eva’s talking at the same time and I wish she’d shut up, but she keeps talking and so do I and we talk louder and faster and over each other until it’s all white noise and I have to go to bed.
It’s Eva who wakes me at eight-thirty. Bootcamp starts at nine. She tells me Ted called and that he’s on his way to pick up his car, which he left at the Snap building overnight, and he’ll meet us at the hotel at nine and we’ll take the Bootcampers for a bagels-and-lox breakfast. I must have been out so hard I didn’t hear the phone.
Eva’s dressed in a sixties day dress with tiny pink flowers running along the hem. As usual, this is topped with a cardigan and her red hair is coiffed and sprayed. I can see a hint of blond roots as she bends down to hand me a coffee and three Advil. “Let me know if you need anything else,” she says and skips out of my bedroom.
I heave myself up and wash the pills down with the coffee. My glamorous silk chemise is twisted up around my waist, exposing the ugly stretched-out panties I wear when Jack’s not here. I’m still wearing my bra and the straps have left deep red grooves on my shoulders. Eva is humming in the kitchen.
I shower then call Ted and tell him I’m running late and to entertain the Bootcampers until Eva and I arrive. I like Ted-the-helpful-tagalong much better than Ted-the-angry-Apples-Are-Tasty-e-mailing ranter.
I want to wear my glasses and my baggy vintage men’s 501s that some crazy Japanese guy offered to buy off my ass on the spot at a gig last summer for four hundred American dollars, but I don’t. I shimmy into a cute summer wrap dress. I seal the plunging V-neck with a piece of the stickiest double-sided tape until it’s semi-respectable-looking and my tits aren’t entirely popping out. I make up my face and scrunch up my hair until it looks artfully tousled, but it’s lopsided. I want my ponytails. I strap on sandals with heels, but there’s no way my contacts are going in. I put on my prescription Ray-Bans and vow not to take them off until after sundown.
Every time Precious Finger laughs her shrill laugh at breakfast I feel like someone is stabbing an ice pick into my ears. Who knew such a sound could come out of a tiny, squirrelly woman? I can only imagine what kinds of offensive noises she was making last night, undoubtedly naked and writhing with her undoubtedly shaved pussy impaled on Zeitgeist’s skinny stub. I can imagine this but I don’t want to. What I want to do is throw up or lie on the floor or call Jack and tell him to get the next flight to Montreal so he can make me tea and pet my head.
I pick at my bagel and let Eva tell the group about the day’s itinerary: shopping, eating, music. “And tomorrow—” she’s getting them all worked up now “—we’ve arranged an exclusive tour of the Snap offices and a roundtable discussion with some great examples of the city’s most stylish DOs.”
This is news. Trend Mecca Bootcamp Sunday is usually homework day, when I spend time with the participants arranging their photographs and notes into a sort of scrapbook that they can take back to their bosses as proof that the weekend was ten grand well spent. And it’s the day we hand out the goody bags, which is my favorite part because it means that shortly they’ll all be getting on airplanes and going home. Trend Mecca Bootcamp Sunday is not for Snap tours and roundtables. I glare at Ted from behind my sunglasses but he doesn’t notice so I kick him under the table. He points to Eva and gives me the thumbs-up sign. It takes all my willpower not to grab a serrated knife off the table, hold his hand down and saw off his fucking thumb.
“It was just an idea we came up with last night. I told her it was impossible, we could never assemble the right people in time for a Sunday roundtable, but she called this morning and said she’d taken care of it. What was I supposed to say? I thought she ran it by you.”
“She did not run it by me,” I hiss. We’re outside the bagel place. Eva is a few feet away chatting up the group while I smoke and bitch at Ted.
“Are you sure, Sara?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“You were pretty drunk last night.”
This is true, but I’m sure I would remember agreeing to something like this. It’s not the sort of thing I’d be likely to forget unless of course Eva was talking about it while I was talking about Lila’s magazines. Fuck me hard with Zeitgeist’s skinny-stub dick—I don’t know what to say. “Well, she told me about it, but I thought she meant for the next Bootcamp.”
Ted looks relieved. I am a lying dirtbag with possible blackout issues. No more hard liquor. No more drinking till I’m drunk. Wine and beer only, and only with food. Ted and I join the others and walk up the street to our first shopping stop of the day. The straps of my high-heeled sandals rub against my feet and I can feel the blisters bubbling up.
By midafternoon I’m gimping behind the group like I have some kind of palsy. Women pass and either smile in empathy or sneer at my stupidity. The men—the straight men—are oblivious: they’re staring at my tits, which refused to be contained by the stickiest double-sided tape and are pushing out of my clingy wrap dress. I sit down once we reach the Snap store. I rarely come here—it’s too weird, all the staff know who I am and act skittish and extra friendly when I visit so I don’t except on Bootcamp weekends and that’s only because Ted reminds me that the Bootcampers always drop serious cash. It’s better to endure a stop at the Snap store than to contend with bitchy Ted, who inevitably shows up in my office the following Monday saying something like I have a bee in my bonnet or I have a bone to pick with you. He thinks this is funny but is never actually amused if the company store wasn’t on the tour.
This particular Bootcamp weekend I am delighted, ecstatic, positively aglow that we’ve stopped at the Snap store, as I can get off my fucking feet. I survey the shop and notice we are stocking an excellent selection of limited-edition sneakers, the sight of which make my feet throb more and I long for an axe and an epidural to numb my lower half so I won’t feel the pain when I lob off my swollen, blistery feet.
We’re also selling pairs of hand-knit, mismatched argyle socks and this is most helpful—I’ll need something to cauterize my stumps before I shove them into a pair of three-hundred-dollar hip-hop-fantastic sneakers. I’ll be like one of those ladies I see walking to the Metro station in the morning, dressed in a skirt suit with socks and sneakers, the practical pumps she’ll change into at the office stuffed in the plastic Gap bag she carries. I could be one of those ladies, but better, with good clothes and expensive sneakers and hand-knit mismatched argyle socks that the Gap-bag ladies don’t know they want yet but they will in about eight to twelve months. I could make myself a DO and parents everywhere would write me hateful letters because after seeing me as a Snap DO their kid bought in to the amputation-is-awesome hype and now there’s nothing they can do to get their child’s feet back. They’ll never be in the Olympics unless it’s the Special Olympics and that’s just not the same no matter what anyone says.
I’m trying to think of the closest axe store when my cell rings. I’m disappointed when the caller ID comes up as Genevieve and not Jack and then I’m sure I’m a dirtbag whose feet deserve to be chopped off without an epidural.
“Hey, Gen. What’s up?”
“You haven’t called me back.”
“Yeah, sorry. It’s Bootcamp weekend.” Gen called yesterday. I picked the message up at the bar but couldn’t hear a thing. I remember this with total clarity and it’s a gold-star moment on a dark and unforgiving day.
“I know it’s Bootcamp weekend. I don’t know why you need Ted there, but fine, whatever. It’s work, I know. But I need to know if you’re coming to the party.”
“Right. The party.” I have no idea what she’s talking about. And why is Ted telling her I need him here? “What’s the date again?”
“Next Saturday at eleven—a.m.”
“Of course, eleven a.m. It’s not like you’d have a party at eleven p.m.,” I say.
“We used to.” Gen’s voice is very small.
“Are you okay?”
“Of course. I’m fine. I’ll let you go.” She’s snuffling, but I have to go—the group is heading out the door.
“Are you sure? We can talk later if you want.”
In the background I hear Olivier shriek and I rip the phone away from my ear. After the initial shock dulls, I slowly bring it back toward my head. “I gotta go,” Gen says, her voice suddenly brusque. “We’ll talk soon.”
At dinner I see Eva approach a stylish couple sitting a few tables over. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but they’re all nodding and smiling. I see Eva hand them each what looks like a business card. Eva has cards? I get up and hobble over to Ted, who’s currently sandwiched between Precious Finger and Zeitgeist. Precious Finger has ordered fries and mayo again and seems to be angling for a replay of last night’s action with Zeitgeist, but he’s having none of it and saves his lechy grin for our leggy waitress. “Eva has cards?” I whisper in Ted’s ear.
“What?”
“Eva has business cards? Did you get her cards already?”
“What are you talking about, Sara?” Maybe Ted’s the one who needs to wear a helmet and live in a house with no sharp edges. “I saw Eva giving those people cards and I wanted to know if you ordered her business cards.” I speak very, very slowly.
“They’re your cards,” he says. “She needed something with the Snap address and number so I gave her a stack of your cards so she can invite the right people to tomorrow’s roundtable.”
“Of course. The roundtable.”
“You don’t mind, do you? I’ll order her cards Monday.”
“Monday,” I repeat after Ted.
“Are you all right? You don’t look so good. Maybe you should go home and take it easy.”
“We still have the gig.”
“Eva and I can handle the gig.”
“But she’s staying at my place.”
“I can give her your spare key,” Ted says as he pulls his keys out of his briefcase that looks like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag and dangles them in front of me.
I’m hypnotized—not by the dangling but by thoughts of a bath, my bed and a pair of ugly panties. “Only if you’re sure,” I say.
As amusing as it would be to watch Precious Finger chase Zeitgeist and Big Thing chase Precious Finger and the boring ones try without success to find some semblance of rhythm at tonight’s gig, I’ve seen it before.
I didn’t hear Eva come in last night and this morning it’s my turn to wake her with coffee and Advil. She groans and reaches for her glasses. There are makeup smears on the pillowcase and she’s not wearing her flannelette granny nightie, but a tight Snap T-shirt and a lacy black thong.
“Nice shirt,” I say.
Eva covers her chest with her hands. “I found it in the Swag Shack,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit. Help yourself,” I say. I’m quite sure the particular Snap shirt she’s wearing is one of the originals. There are only a few left and they’re in the locked archive room, not the Swag Shack. Then again, we did reissue them for our tenth anniversary and there’s a pile of those in the Swag Shack. I shake my head. It’s a T-shirt. I am ridiculous.
Precious Finger is the last to arrive for breakfast. Her nose is runny and she looks like she’s been crying. I want to tell her that Zeitgeist isn’t worth it, but decide not to. If I say that she’ll start bawling and then we’ll be in the bathroom and she’ll tell me about riding his skinny stub and how she’s never felt like this before and knows he feels the same, but he’s scared. He’s married, with two kids and he lives in Chicago, but it’s not impossible. They have so much in common: they both work in advertising, they both love Depeche Mode, they both eat their fries with mayonnaise. I could be brutal and tell her that Zeitgeist is a prick and he only fucked her because he was drunk and she was there, but she’ll say that I don’t know him the way she does, that I couldn’t possibly understand their connection. But she’d still want to be my friend and she’d call me and want to visit and stay at my place and talk about Zeitgeist. Sometimes it’s better to hand someone a tissue and say nothing. But I have no tissues, so I bury my face in a menu even though I already know I’m having the eggs Benedict.
I lead the tour of Snap headquarters and the Bootcampers are suitably impressed. Eva’s DOs begin to arrive for the roundtable and out of the corner of my eye I spot a girl who looks familiar: long dark hair, pretty. She’s wearing a pleated miniskirt with a fitted boy’s suit jacket that’s been tailored and carefully deconstructed. She’s wearing flat suede ankle boots and slouchy fuzzy socks. She’s a DO. I lead the Bootcampers past her and I catch a glimpse of a tiny diamond stud in her nose. The girl gives me the biggest grin. It’s Parrot Girl without her parrot. Eva has invited Parrot Girl to the roundtable. I hate Parrot Girl. I call over to Eva and ask to speak to her in my office. I usher the Bootcampers into the boardroom for what I call an informal mixer to chat with the DOs who have already arrived.
“You invited Parrot Girl to the roundtable?”
“Excuse me?”
“The fucking Parrot Girl, Eva.”
“Parrot Girl’s not here.”
“The girl in the boy’s suit jacket—that’s Parrot Girl.”
“No!”
“It’s her, Eva.”
“I saw her at the gig last night, after you left. She had a great look, and gosh, I guess I didn’t notice.” Eva’s voice is warbly. She sounds like she’s going to cry and I know I have no tissues. “Please don’t be mad, Sara. I’ll ask her to leave.”
I sigh and fall into my fuchsia velvet chair, my anger deflated. “No, that will just make it worse. We’ll do the roundtable, we’ll keep it brief, we won’t ask her any specific questions. Then before she leaves take her picture with the Polaroid—take Polaroids of all the DOs so it doesn’t look weird—and put it on your desk so you don’t forget what Parrot Girl looks like ever again. Now, I’m going to talk to Ted and fill him in.”
“Let me tell him, Sara. I’m the one who messed up, it’s my responsibility.”
“Okay, but make it quick, and don’t make him mad.”
“I promise,” Eva says and scurries off. I swivel in my chair and think about the whereabouts of Parrot Girl’s parrot. Is it home? Alone? Does Parrot Girl have a roommate? Does she live with her parents? Does she have more than one parrot—maybe different colors for her different outfits? A gaggle, a herd, a flock, a gang of parrots would be good. I could get them and bring them here. No one would notice me gone, not with Miss Eva and Mushroom-Head-Dick Ted busy fellating the Bootcampers and the Bootcampers going down on the roundtable DOs in one naked orgy of trend and style bullshit. Precious Finger would like that; maybe she could get Zeitgeist to fuck her again.
There would be plenty of time to get Parrot Girl’s gang of parrots here. I could lure them into the taxi with bits of some flavored nacho chips that I have about a trillion mini-bags of in my office that some PR company sent me last week. The chips are disgusting and my fingers are coated orange and smell like vomit after I eat them, which I frequently do simply because they’re there.
I would get the parrot gang in the taxi with the disgusting flavored nacho chips then march them into my office, right past the orgy in the glass-walled conference room, right past Ted and Parrot Girl and weepy, idiot Eva whose fault this is in the first place. So after she’s had some mindblowing DO of a multiple, triple-X orgasm she can come on into my office and take that fucking responsibility she seems so eager for by lying on the floor as the parrots take turns shitting orange nacho poo all over her and imitating her pleas for mercy as she cries. I could do this and Eva would learn her lesson and then we could set the parrots free together on the roof, while I smoke.
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Pamela Klaffke
Sara B. is losing her cool. Not just in the momentary-meltdown kind of way—though there's that, too. At the helm of must-read Snap magazine, veteran style guru Sara B. has had the job—and joy—for the past fifteen years of eviscerating the city's fashion victims in her legendary DOs and DON'Ts photo spread.But now on the unhip edge of forty, with ambitious hipster kids reinventing the style world, Sara's being spit out like an old Polaroid picture: blurry, undeveloped and obsolete.Fueled by alcohol, nicotine and self-loathing, Sara launches into a cringeworthy but often comic series of blowups—personal, professional and private—that culminate in an epiphany. That she, the arbiter of taste, has made her living by cutting people down…and somehow she's got to make amends.
Praise for Pamela Klaffke
“Klaffke explores the idea of who decides what is cool and, more important, why we listen to them. Sara is a flawed hero whose actions and motives are questionable and often reprehensible. And yet we can’t help but root for her as she realises that, while she has spent her life judging other people, it is her own life that needs the makeover.”
—Booklist
“Profane, painfully honest and savagely funny, Klaffke’s debut novel is a coming-of-middle-age story sure to evoke terror in the under-forty set and reminiscent smiles in those who have already crossed over.”
—Romantic Times
“A dark, comic absurdity peppers every page of this sarcastic romp.”
—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
PAMELA KLAFFKE is a former newspaper and magazine journalist who now works as a novelist and photographer. She is the author of Snapped and the non-fiction book Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping. She has been chronicling the research and writing process of her newest work, The Mod Girls, on the blog www.themodgirls.com.
Her dreamy, vintage-inspired photographs are shot exclusively with analogue cameras using expired and/or damaged film. Her work has appeared in art publications and advertisements around the globe and prints of her work reside in private collections worldwide. She is currently working on two new series: a second instalment of her popular “bestia parvulus” (animal child) series and a photo-adaptation of the classic fairy tale, “Little Red Riding Hood”. In the autumn of 2010, she will travel to Europe to shoot an ambitious series which incorporates digital video, called The Private Lives of Public Creatures.
Pamela is also the founder and chief curator of the Secret Society of Analogue Art, an organisation that encourages the creative fusion of analogue and digital communication and media by offering an ongoing series of participatory art projects.
She lives in Calgary, Canada with her fiancé, philosopher Gillman Payette, and her daughter.
SNAPPED
Pamela Klaffke
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Parrot Girl
I hate the girl with the parrot on her shoulder. I don’t want to but I do. She’s nineteen, maybe twenty, smoking as she waits in line at the restaurant. There’s always a line now for Sunday brunch and I know it’s my fault. Sometimes I should just keep these things to myself. But the Parrot Girl. She’s wearing shiny blue short-shorts with white piping, soccer socks with the stripey tops pulled up to her knees. I can tell her cowboy boots have been scuffed and distressed on purpose, the leather warped and discolored by water, they’re scratched and dirty—she probably dragged them behind a car through an unpaved alleyway then invited her friends to stomp on them with their filthiest shoes. I know all the tricks. Still, the boots are too stiff. She wears a short gold satin jacket that the parrot keeps snagging with its claws every time it readjusts itself on her shoulder. From where I’m sitting I can’t see what’s underneath the jacket and the way the sun is reflecting off the satin, I can’t get a clear view of her face. Plus, the parrot is in the way. Ted has a better view and assures me her face is good, so I polish off my third champagne cocktail and grab my camera bag from under the table.
Up close I see Parrot Girl has a tiny diamond stud in her nose. Her makeup is perfect: smudgy kohl eyes and sticky mascara, smeared lips, classic morning-after face. But her hair is too clean and smells like apples, her face freshly moisturized. I wonder how long she spent getting ready this morning, if she had a fitful sleep editing all the possible combinations of outfits in her head.
“Excuse me.” I tap Parrot Girl on the shoulder. “My name is Sara B. and I was wondering if I could take your picture?”
Parrot Girl turns to look at me. Her friends titter behind her. She lights another cigarette and I notice her hands are shaking slightly. She knows who I am, I’m sure of it. She takes a deep drag and shrugs. “Yeah, okay, that’s cool.”
I lead her away from the line and ask her to face my camera. The satin is tricky in the sun and the parrot won’t look at me. I think for a moment that the parrot is smarter than either of us—it knows how ridiculous this all is, and doesn’t want any part of it. I get the shot and Parrot Girl signs the release allowing the magazine to use the photos however we see fit. She doesn’t ask the obvious—it never occurs to the ones who try so hard to be a DO that they could possibly be a DON’T.
I push my way back through the line and to our table by the window, which is open onto the busy street. A couple of people call my name and wave. I have no idea who they are, but smile and wave back anyway. One of them yells, “Sara B.! Take my picture!” I smile again and sit down.
Genevieve is breast-feeding the baby in the washroom. She won’t do it at the table anymore after last week when a woman in bad camouflage pockety pants that emphasized her puffy abdomen berated her for drinking one champagne cocktail, then feeding the baby an hour later. According to Genevieve, this was typical. The situation was made worse when the Bad Camo Woman broke from her rant and narrowed her eyes at Genevieve. “You!” She pointed a finger in Genevieve’s face. “You! You’re that singer! Gen-Gen! You had that song—what was it called? ‘J’taime, J’taime something … ‘”
“‘J’taime My Baby Tonight,'” Ted spoke up. Genevieve glared at her husband.
Bad Camo Woman snapped her fingers. “That’s it! Wow! I used to listen to that song over and over when I was a teenager! You’re Gen-Gen! Andrew, look, it’s Gen-Gen!” Andrew, who had been hanging sheepishly in the back, nodded a quick hello. He, too, was wearing bad camouflage pockety pants. “So do you think I could get your autograph? Here.” She shoved a crinkled receipt in front of Genevieve and produced a pen from her fake Louis Vuitton bag. “Sign this.”
Genevieve obliged, scrawling Best Wishes, Gen-Gen across the crumpled paper.
“Wow, thanks. I can’t wait to call my friend Angela. She was my best friend in school and she loved you, too. We’re not that close now—she lives in Vancouver—but we try to keep in touch, you know. It’s hard, though, with our kids and our jobs and—”
“How would you feel about me taking a picture of you two?” I interrupted. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Of us?” Bad Camo Woman brought her hand to her chest.
“Sure. But let’s do it outside. There’s not enough room in here,” I said as I ushered the Bad Camo Couple to the door.
“Check it out.” Jack nods toward the table behind ours. We’re silent, we listen. They have the magazine open to the DOs and DON’Ts fashion page and I can see my shot of the Bad Camo Couple staring out as the man holds it up to take a closer look. They are the featured DON’T, the biggest DON’T of the week, more DON’T than the unitard juggler or any of the three other DON’Ts on the page. “Could be a good look for us,” the man jokes.
“Ugh. Put that thing away.” The woman snatches it out of his hands. “It’s so mean.”
Jack leans into me and whispers, “I like it when you’re mean.” Then he kisses me on the neck. I order another drink and he does the same. Ted asks for the check.
“What? No more champagne, Ted? Oh, yeah. I guess you’ve got that long drive ahead of you,” I say. I’m tipsy and when I’m tipsy I can’t help needling Ted about having moved to the suburbs.
“It’s not that bad, Sara. You should come out sometime. You might even like it.”
“We’ll see about that,” I say. I’ve refused on principle to visit Ted and Genevieve’s new house. Jack says I’m being stubborn and immature but Jack’s young and doesn’t get it.
As soon as Genevieve and baby Olivier arrive back at the table, Ted announces it’s time to go. He has to mow the lawn. Genevieve’s parents are coming for a barbecue supper. She has to make potato salad. Genevieve hands Olivier to me, freeing her hands to pack the baby gear and pop open the stroller. I grip the baby firmly, but not too close. Jack tickles Olivier’s nose with his finger and makes goo-goo baby-talk sounds that I hope I’ll be able to block out the next time we have sex. Which won’t be for three weeks, I remind myself. Jack’s leaving for his home in Toronto late this afternoon.
Hugs. Kisses on both cheeks all around. Safe drive, have a great time. Give my best to your parents, Gen. Call me tomorrow. I’ll see you at the office, Ted. They’re gone and I slump back into my chair, knocking back the champagne cocktail that’s been placed in front of me. Then Gen suddenly reappears. She’s frantic. Olivier is wailing. His pacifier has disappeared. We look between plates, under napkins. Jack finds it on the floor and hands it to Gen. She gives it a quick wipe on her shirt and pushes it into Olivier’s mouth before scrambling back out the door. I shudder. Doesn’t it have to be sterile or something?
Jack looks at me but says nothing. His smile is crooked and his eyes are warm. “That is one cute baby,” he says.
“Yup,” I say, my eyes darting around, trying to find a waitress, a hostess, a bus boy, anyone who can get me a drink.
“Do you ever think about it, Sara?”
I can’t look at him. I catch the eye of our waitress and point to my empty glass. She nods.
“We’ve never talked about this, you know.” Jack is not letting up. I hate this conversation more than I hate Parrot Girl.
“That’s true.”
“I have to be honest with you, Sara. And you need to be honest with me. You’re thirty-nine and you know I’m totally cool with that, but I also know that, well, your time is …”
“Running out?”
“I guess, yeah.” Jack’s voice is very quiet.
I laugh. “Jack, I don’t want to have a baby, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He looks relieved. My drink arrives and I immediately suck half of it down. “I’m not one of those women.”
“I know that. I just thought that we’ve been together for almost a year so maybe we should make sure we’re on the same page with this.” I am certainly not on the same page with anyone who says on the same page, but I say nothing and smile. “I mean, I love kids, my nieces and nephews are great and Olivier is adorable, but it’s not for me. I’ve never wanted kids of my own.”
“Great. That’s just great, then.” I raise my near-empty glass to clink Jack’s, down the last of it and instruct him to order another round as I excuse myself to use the bathroom.
I squat above the toilet to pee and wrestle my cell phone out of my purse. I dial Gen’s number, but click the phone shut before it has a chance to ring. I can’t call her about this, about Jack not wanting to have kids and me not wanting to have kids and how great that should be but how I feel mysteriously winded and sad and I don’t know why. I can’t call her and we can’t spend hours dissecting my feelings and his feelings and still not really know why I feel like this by the time one of our phones starts to die. I can’t call her about this because she has Olivier and her parents are coming for a barbecue supper and she has potato salad to make.
There’s a girl sitting in my spot, laughing with Jack. “Hello,” I say.
The girl stands. “Oh, my goodness, Sara B. I saw you over here and I didn’t want to be rude or anything, I just wanted to meet you—you’re, like, my idol, seriously. I want your job. What you do is amazing. I mean, you’re Sara B.”
“You can just call me Sara.” I stick my hand out to shake hers. “And you are?”
“Eva. Eva Belanger.”
“That would make you Eva B., then.”
“Gosh, yes. I guess it would.” Eva’s face is bright red. She looks away from me and to Jack.
“Go ahead,” Jack says. “She won’t bite. Well, not unless you want her to.”
“You’re funny,” I say to Jack. “So what can I do for you, Eva?”
“I just, well, I was wondering if you’d ever consider letting me tag along, shadow you for a day, see how you do it.”
“It’s not magic. It’s just a job.”
“No, no, it’s important. You know, I have almost every issue of Snap. I had to get the older ones off eBay, but now I’m only missing issues six and eight, when you were still only monthly.”
“Nineteen ninety-three,” I confirm. The first year, when it was just Ted and I and a bag of money his dad gave us. By ninety-five we were weekly and had an office. Now we have a building, six satellite offices and three retail stores. Last month, a stuffy American company paid Ted and me twenty thousand dollars to spend a day with their marketing team. Advertising agencies pay us more. We don’t mention those things in the magazine. “I think I’ve got some of those old issues kicking around,” I say to Eva. “If I can find six and eight, they’re yours.”
“Really? Are you serious?”
“It’s not a problem,” I say.
“What is a problem is that you’re not sitting down,” Jack says. “Another round?”
“Sure,” I say. “Would you like to join us, Eva?”
“Oh, my! Yes, of course—if you really don’t mind.”
“We really don’t mind,” I say. I wouldn’t mind anything that’s a distraction from Jack and the baby talk and the talk about babies and not wanting one, and not knowing why I was spooked when he said he didn’t want one when I don’t want one, either. I definitely want this Eva girl to join us.
Eva tells Jack stories about me. She tells him about the time I got into a very public squabble with a Hollywood starlet after we published a picture of her wasted and bleary-eyed, attempting to dress in what I could only guess was her misguided interpretation of Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. Here to shoot a film, the starlet was on the town, trying like they all do when they come to Montreal to look French. But like they all do, she got it wrong. The striped top was not black and white like Hepburn’s, but too short and striped in multicolored pastels. The black leggings were shiny and too tight and made her ass look like a big balloon. Instead of ballet flats, she wore stilettos and her trashy big blond hair was nothing like Hepburn’s neat-and-sleek brunette style. To top it off, the starlet had the scarf—they always had the scarf, no matter the season—wrapped around her neck like a strangling tensor bandage. It was not French. It was sad. She was definitely a DON’T.
Eva tells Jack about how I’d started wearing shrunken kid-size T-shirts with cutesy logos and sayings when everyone else was decked out in Doc Martens and plaid. She tells Jack that when she’d read my TO DO column a couple weeks back she knew she had to meet me for real. The column was about recycling old Girl Guide and Boy Scout merit badges by sewing them onto the sleeves of the prettiest vintage beaded sweaters, and Eva said she had done the very same thing just days before the magazine came out.
I got that particular idea from Sophie, the woman who ran a thrift shop in Westmount I frequented. I didn’t mention this in my column and I don’t mention it now. Sophie said that the kids were coming in and rifling through a bin of old patches in search of merit badges to sew on their coats. Sewing the badges on vintage sweaters was my idea and, according to Eva, hers, too.
Indeed, she’s wearing a pink vintage cardigan, buttoned up to the neck with brown triangular Brownie badges sewn in pairs down one sleeve. I recognize the one for cooking, the one for puppet-making, another for writing. They’re the old-style ones, the ones from the seventies. I had all of these. Eva’s wearing pearls, three strands and they’re real. She wears glasses, vintage cateyes with custom lenses and the tiniest rhinestones clustered at the edge of the frames. She has on a brown pencil skirt that falls below her knees, panty hose and shoes that look clunky and orthopedic, something a nurse or your grandma might wear. But it’s her hair—that red—that gets me. Montreal red, the color old ladies in the city dye their hair instead of trying to keep their natural color or letting it go grey. It’s not red, exactly, but more burgundy, with a bit of that purple that’s the color of eggplant. Aubergine—that’s the word. A bit of aubergine mixed with the color of the reddest wine. It’s no one’s real hair color. It belongs to the old ladies and to Eva.
It’s 3:00 p.m. and Jack and I are sitting at the same table we have been since eleven. I’m drunk, and so is he. Eva is still here and I’m glad. She’s sober and has offered to drive Jack to the airport. If we don’t go soon, Jack will miss his flight, so we stumble out into the afternoon and smoke cigarettes and wait for Eva to bring her car around to pick us up. There’s still a line to get into the restaurant. We’re going to have to find someplace new, and this time, I make a vow to myself, I’m not going to write about it.
“Looks like someone has a fan,” Jack says as he wraps his arms around me.
“She’s cute,” I say.
“Not as cute as me.” Jack gets cocky when he drinks. “Maybe she can keep you company while I’m in Toronto.” Jack also worries about what I’m up to with whom when we’re apart, even though we have an agreement about this.
I kiss him on the lips. “Nope. She’s not as cute as you, baby.” Jack smiles. I think I’m going to throw up. I am not a baby-sweetheart-darling-sugarpie kind of girl. Jack likes that kind of thing so sometimes I do it for him and I hate that more than I hate the baby conversation and Parrot Girl.
Eva zips up in front of the restaurant in a silver Saab convertible. Jack and I pour ourselves into the car and we head to my place in the Plateau. Jack and I race up the stairs and into my apartment. We grab his bags and we’re off to the airport. “It’s really nice of you to do this, Eva. We could have taken a taxi.”
“No, no, don’t be silly. It’s no problem. I just wish we had more time to talk. There are so many things I’d love to ask you about.” She bites her lower lip. “But I don’t want to be a pest.”
“How about you come over after we drop Jack off and we’ll have some wine and talk all you want?”
“Oh, my goodness, Sara, that would be the most amazing thing.”
“Then it’s a plan.”
I toss a packet of breath mints at Jack and straighten his shirt before he heads to the check-in counter. I feel like his mother. But he’s thirty. Biologically, I couldn’t actually be his mother.
“So how long have you two been doing the long distance thing?” Eva asks as we wait for Jack to get his boarding pass.
“Almost a year.”
“Gosh, that must be hard.”
“Not really,” I say. It’s easier than trying to explain how it isn’t hard most of the time but then some of the time it is, like when I’m sick or he’s sick, or at night when I think I hear something weird or I can’t open an especially tight jar of kosher pickles. The worst is when I have to go to a party or dinner and it’s all couples and I wish he was there so we could snicker together in the back of the room—Jack is good for that—and not feel alone and old.
“I don’t think I could do it. You must really trust each other.”
“We have to,” I say. I don’t have to tell Eva about my arrangement with Jack, that our relationship is open, that we can have sex with other people, but not date them, we can screw them, but not love them. I once told Genevieve about this and she called me crazy. I said it was practical, better than making all sorts of promises to each other only to have them broken. Gen called my attitude defeatist. I called it modern and reminded her that she told me once that she had exactly the same arrangement with the two boyfriends she had before Ted.
“Look how that worked out,” Gen said.
“You were fine with it at the time.”
“I could have never done that with Ted.”
“I’m not saying you should have. It’s different with you and Ted.”
“It’s never going to be serious with Jack unless you’re monogamous.”
“Who says I want serious? Who says monogamy is the only way?” Discussing the finer points of your open long-distance relationship with your staunchly monogamous married friend is ill-advised.
“Come on, Sara. You’re almost forty.”
“Yup. I’m almost forty.”
I know that I’m supposed to know what this means. People say it all the time. You’re almost forty. Wow, you’re turning forty. How are you with the big four-oh? How am I with the big four-oh? The big four-oh is super, and I’m not quite there yet, but thanks for reminding me. And yes, I know I’m not married and I know I don’t have a baby and I don’t think I want either of those things. And yes, my boyfriend is nine years younger, so you can stop asking questions and doing speculative math in your head. I am fine with the big four-oh, but you people are freaking me out, and I already had my freak-out at thirty-five, so stop it or I will slap you.
Eva wanders over to the newsstand, leaving Jack and I a moment alone. It’s always the same. I’ll be ready, almost anxious for him to go, to get back to work, to sprawl in my bed and sleep alone, but then I want him to stay and I nearly cry. I kiss him goodbye at the security gate and he says he loves me and that he’ll call when he gets in.
I find Eva at the newsstand thumbing through a celebrity tabloid. “That one’s my favorites,” I say.
“Me, too,” she says. “It’s so trashy.”
“But not too trashy. There has to be a balance.”
“I used to buy it at this Metro stop up in Chabanel when I’d go look at fabrics, then I’d put it inside, like, V or Japanese Vogue or something and read it on the way home. I didn’t want anyone to see me with it.”
We step out of the terminal and walk to Eva’s car. “You can’t worry about what everyone else thinks.”
“Oh, I don’t, not now. Especially after reading that column you wrote about embracing your guilty pleasures.”
“I wrote that years ago.”
Eva stops for a moment. “Two thousand and one, I think. Sometime in the spring?”
I have no idea if she’s right, but I’ll assume she is. “I think you know more about me than I do.”
The drive to the airport and back with the top of Eva’s convertible down has sobered me up and a dull headache is setting in. Eva parks and we walk to the corner and buy two bottles of cheap French wine at the depanneur. A couple glasses and my headache is masked by the liquor. Then there’s the guilt and the phantom pain of work tomorrow. It’s not even eight.
Eva walks around my apartment as if it were a museum. She looks closely at everything, every picture, every knickknack, the title on every spine of every book on my shelves. She doesn’t touch a thing. I take my camera out and upload the weekend’s photos onto my computer. Of the twelve DOs for the fashion page, seven are strong enough to use. I only need five. I have fifteen DON’Ts, of which ten are hysterical, but I only need five of those, as well. And then there’s Parrot Girl.
I hate Parrot Girl because I don’t know what to do with her. It used to be easier when people just dressed how they dressed and it was about style, not irony and preciousness or getting their picture taken. I’m tired of Parrot Girl and all the other girls who may not have parrots but they’re the same because they try so hard not to be. I hate Parrot Girl and her soccer socks and her cowboy boots and her satin jacket. But I hate her most because I know she looks ridiculous and that she is a DON’T. But it’s not about me and my personal DON’Ts, not really, not anymore, it’s about the perception of DON’Ts and knowing whether twenty-year-olds will think Parrot Girl is a DON’T. Stuffy American companies don’t pay people twenty thousand dollars to talk to their marketing department for a day unless they can tell them definitively what a DON’T is to a twenty-year-old. I’m almost forty. I want to slap myself, but instead I take another swig of wine, and then I want to slap Parrot Girl, but she’s not here. Eva is. I don’t want to slap her. She’s twenty-four. I could ask her what she thinks about Parrot Girl. She’d be thrilled, I’m sure. But I don’t because I can’t, because I can’t fucking tell what Parrot Girl is. Is she a poseur or some newfangled post-post-ironic poster child for some save-the-birds society? Is she wrong or all right? Is she a test, a comeuppance for something I did last week or last year? Fuck me. Is she a DO or a DON’T?
My brain flips over and hurts. Get me a cold compress and a very soft pillow. Let me not care and play dead or pretend I’m a teacher, a strict schoolmarm. It’s a pop quiz for Eva: who’s a DO, who’s a DON’T? Pencils down in three minutes! I’ll check her work right away, taking my time—making her wait, making her nervous and possibly sweaty, though Eva seems likely to be one of those girls whose sweat smells like rosewater and never stains. Yes, a pop quiz could be fun, with Parrot Girl first up. No, second—I don’t need Eva to sense that I need her, and that I want her to spill every secret she knows.
I’m quite sure that Eva would tell me everything—anything—I wanted. She’d be happy, I’d be happy, we could do a dance around the living room because we’d know, we’d know, we’d know just what Parrot Girl is. We could revel and open more wine, make a toast to the most fabulous DO or DON’T of the week. I stare at the photo of Parrot Girl and her stupid fucking parrot and my mouth seals shut. I say nothing and there will be no pop quiz. I don’t need Eva, she holds no secrets I haven’t heard or told before. Parrot Girl is my problem, she’s a riddle, not a test, maybe even a joke.
I click through the photos and print them out. I spread them on the floor and Eva stands beside me as I decide which photos will make the column. Skinny Denim Shorts Man with the skeevy mustache is a DON’T. Skinny Pink Polo Shirt Man with the mutton chops and a kilt is a DO. Headband Girl is a DON’T. Babushka Girl is a DO. And so it goes until there is one more DON’T slot and one more DO. Parrot Girl is still on the floor. My confidence is sunk; it’s not too late for the pop quiz and this is no joke. I’ve made a Skinny Pink Polo Shirt Man with mutton chops and a kilt a DO. He looks absurd and he’s trying too hard but I know he’s a DO because the boys at Snap keep trying to grow mutton chops and half of them are in kilts—but never sarongs—and they really like pink and girls like Eva like them. And there are no fucking pets at all so it’s really not so complicated.
I look closer at the photo: it’s technically good. I have to use it. Eva shuffles her feet. She’s bored, she’s waiting, one second longer and she’ll know I’m a fraud. I pick up the photo and put it on the DON’T pile. I feel a rush of bravado and decide she’ll be the feature DON’T. Eva’s shuffling stops. Fuck Parrot Girl.
Jack calls. He’s home and safe. The flight was good. No snacks or bar service, but it was only an hour and he tells me he found a half-eaten protein bar in his jacket pocket. I’m drunk and I can’t believe I’m dating someone who eats protein bars. Eva’s sitting on the sofa wearing gloves and examining issues six and eight of Snap. She told me that she carries the gloves in her handbag at all times. She won’t read an important book or periodical without them, she said. Eva is odd. I slip into my bedroom and say this to Jack and he says,” You’re odd.” And he’s right, of course. I like her—Eva—and her oddness. I like that she carries gloves in her bag and wears panty hose and orthopedic shoes and has hair the color of a Francophone grandma. Jack tells me he loves me and that he misses me already. “I know you do, baby,” I say and as soon as that baby is out of my mouth I feel again like I want to vomit.
Eva is too drunk to drive so I tell her she can stay here. I make up the spare room that’s so rarely used. I lend her a black cotton camisole and a pair of boxer shorts printed with grinning flowers. They’re Japanese and they were free. They look cute on Eva. I rifle through my sleepwear options and decide on a long black silk chemise with lace trim and a matching robe. I keep my bra on so my breasts won’t flop around. I catch myself in the mirror. I look like a madam, but the silk feels cool and soft against my skin. At home, I’m usually in long johns and T-shirts, my hair tied back in a ponytail and my glasses on. I swipe a neutral gloss across my lips before heading back to the living room.
As we finish the wine, Eva tells me all about how great and important and influential I am. Sometimes I ask her about herself. She grew up in Pointe-Claire with an Anglo mother and a French father, not far it turns out from Ted and Genevieve’s new house. I look up their address in my book and Eva knows the street, it’s about six blocks from her parents’ place. She’s living there now, just temporarily she says. She has a job, an office PA for a French film company, but the pay is shit. She hates it, says the producer is a prick who wears a fedora and a trench coat every day and does nothing except play video games and look at porn on his cell phone. I tell her I’ll take his picture and make him the featured DON’T one week. She laughs until her eyes tear and I do, too. Eva tells me she went to private school, with uniforms that she started altering at thirteen. She says she makes clothes she sometimes sells to friends, but mostly she’s a stylist and a writer—like me. Except when I was twenty-four no one knew what a stylist did and no one knew our names. I tell her this and she goes on about how it’s about time people—but mostly me—were recognized for our talent. We’re the ones who spot and set the trends, not the movie stars, not the pop stars. Eva is very passionate about this. I’m fading and my eyes are heavy, but Eva keeps talking, telling me how remarkable and inspiring I am. “Look at all you’ve accomplished—look at everything you’ve done. And you’re not even forty.” Eva says this and it’s better than sex, it’s better than a lullaby.
Swag
Red wine is crusted around the corners of my mouth and looks nearly black. I scrape it off with my fingernail and splash water on my face before pinning my hair up and stepping into the shower. Under the water I’m dizzy and hot. I feel like I’m sweating. I step out and wrap myself in an oversize towel and sit on the edge of the bathtub for a long time, still and silent. If I move my head I fear it may explode. I reach for my body cream and rub it in all over. It has a faint vanilla scent, but I can still smell the toxic odor of yesterday afternoon’s champagne and last night’s wine on my skin. I spritz myself with extra perfume. I spray my hair with a citrusy refresher that absorbs the smell of smoke, then I work it into two low pigtails. Ted will know I’m hungover. I always wear my hair in pigtails when I’m hungover. It used to be, even five years ago, that I’d often be asked for ID in bars, liquor stores, buying cigarettes at chain stores with signs declaring Anyone Who Looks Under 30 Will Be Asked For Identification. I examine my face. No one will be asking me for ID today.
My face sucks up the first layer of moisturizer in seconds, so I slather on another. It’s the eyes. The eyes are the biggest problem. It’s not so much the wrinkles, but the skin—it’s like the thinnest tissue paper, delicate and soft, never totally smooth, which makes concealer an issue. Applying it evenly on the puffy, papery skin is next to impossible and no matter how much blending and dabbing I do, it’s never perfect. Still, I grout the area around my eyes with concealer, set it with a light powder, then attack with an expensive moisturizing spray gel that I nabbed from the Swag Shack at the office. I feel my skin suck it in and I wait for the promised youthful, reenergizing glow that after five minutes doesn’t appear, so I give up and brush my teeth again. My tongue is still dark with wine. I brush it raw with my toothbrush, which looks too gross to ever use again, so I toss it in the trash and want to climb right in with it, but the pail is too small. I don’t have a garbage pail big enough anywhere in the apartment. I could probably fold myself into one of those black plastic jumbo bags I use to dump all bottles into after a party—the ones I leave around back of the building for the bottle-picker with the beard and the giant tricycle who I always try to smile at but can never quite look in the eye or say hello to. The jumbo bag is problematic, though. I’d need someone to twist-tie the top for me and get me to the Dumpster and Ted isn’t strong enough to lift me. Jack is, but he wouldn’t do it. I could ask Eva if she has any big-guy friends, but that might seem weird since we just met.
Eva’s not in the spare room, but I can tell she slept there because the bed is made just so, all crisp corners and symmetry. I find her in the kitchen slicing fresh bagels from the Fairmount Bakery, which is not close by, but she says it was no big deal to nip up there and back. She’s also picked up cut flowers and opened the blinds to the day.
“I have Mondays off,” she says between bagel bites. “We shoot Tuesday to Saturday.”
I remember now. She’s a film office PA. She lives in Pointe-Claire with her parents. There’s a guy with a hat and porn on his phone. “So what are your plans for today?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Just hang around, I guess. But should probably go home and change. I used your shower, though. I hope that’s okay.”
“Use whatever you want. And if you’re looking for something to wear, I’m sure you could find something at my office—we’ve got piles of stuff.” It is true. The Swag Shack is full of free stuff companies send us in hopes that we’ll write about it, put it on our IT LIST. Most of the stuff is crap that no one could possibly want, but sometimes it is such spectacular crap we put it on our ICK LIST. Then the publicists at the companies—the very people who sent us this crap stuff in the first place—call up whining and angry and we laugh at them and ask them if they’ve ever actually read Snap and they get all flustered and say yes, of course, but are suddenly nervous and polite and have a call they have to take on the other line, so goodbye.
There is good stuff, too. Cute clothes, but it’s been ages since a pair of pants that fit me have come in and I could use new pants. The free-stuff publicists call up our market editors and ask about me, about Ted—favorite colors, hated colors, sizes. I haven’t gotten around to telling anyone that I’m not an eight, but a ten now, so none of the pants they send over fit. If they ask, I tell our market editors I don’t like the pants—any of them—even if I do. It’s better than sending some internal e-mail that’s sure to end up on someone’s goddamn blog announcing that my ass is fatter. Like they haven’t noticed. But skirts, if they’re A-line or pleated, they fit. My waist is still an eight—it’s my ass that’s a ten. And tops are fine. Shoes and handbags are the best. I don’t wear jewelry so I couldn’t care whether it’s free or not.
I take Eva to work with me. It’s exciting for her and I’m happy that she drives and that I don’t have to walk or contend with the Metro today. My legs are achy and my knee cracks as I cross it over the other in the passenger seat of Eva’s Saab. She presses a button and the top comes down. I’m grateful for this because I worry that the smell of my hangover has defeated that extra spray of perfume.
The Snap building is squat and two storeys, a former embroidery factory in the east end. The first floor is reception and production, there’s a fully equipped photo studio, and piled high to the ceiling in one corner there’s a heap of old Macs that looks like it could tumble down at any moment, but really they’re all superglued together and affixed to the wall. Sometimes when Ted and I are taking corporate clients though we tell them it’s art.
I spin Eva around through production, the studio, mumble a few introductions. She seems impressed and keeps saying, “Oh, my gosh.” Eva doesn’t swear, I’ve noticed. She says goodness and gosh, and I’m waiting for a golly-gee. This could annoy me, but it’s Eva so it doesn’t.
We take the freight elevator to the second floor. I can’t face the stairs even though I know my ass will never shrink riding an elevator. Today I’m a lazy bitch and I couldn’t care. I’ve brought a CD with the DOs and DON’Ts fashion photos for the week. I’ll give it to Layout, then show it to Ted, who will laugh and sign off and we’ll get proofs of the entire issue and mark it up one more time before six when it has to go to the printer. By noon tomorrow it’ll be in record stores and fashion boutiques and cafés in Montreal that we’ve personally approved. On Wednesday, it’ll be in more record stores and fashion boutiques and cafés across the country and in the States that I suppose someone at some point has visited and approved on our behalf, but that’s Ted’s responsibility, not mine.
My office, like Ted’s, is an actual office, with walls and windows and a door that locks. When we first moved into the building it was all open and chaos. Music blared and people smoked at their desks, although even back then it was against city bylaws. There’s still music and chaos and it’s fun to watch through the windows of my quiet, sound-proofed office, but I have to smoke on the roof.
Music and chaos is good for business, so we built the boardroom in the middle of it all and glassed it in. Ted’s in there meeting with our branding team. I wave and he nods. I lead Eva to my office and collapse immediately into the swiveling fuchsia chair I received as a gift from a boring furniture manufacturer that made a splash in the market by hiring a flamboyant women’s wear designer to create a line of equally flamboyant home and office furnishings that got lots of press but sold abysmally. Our research showed the price point was too high—there are only so many people who will pay eight thousand dollars for a polka-dot leather sofa and they don’t shop at the boring furniture manufacturer’s stores. So they can’t say we didn’t tell them so.
“I love your chair,” Eva says.
“Here—give it a try. It’s stylish and ergonomic.” Christ. I’m an infomercial. I muster all my strength and lift myself out of it, placing both hands on my desk in front of me for balance. I hear my knees crack—both of them this time. Beside my desk there’s an empty garbage pail. It’s larger than your average office garbage pail, but I know I can’t wedge my ass into that one, either.
Eva spins around in the fuchsia chair. “Mmm. Comfy.”
“Free,” I say. Like that explains anything. I think I may be retarded today, but I know enough to know I can’t say that because this isn’t junior high when Ted and I called everything gay and retarded and we called each other gaylord and retard. You can’t say that unless you created South Park and you’re saying it through those animated kids that are surprisingly still funny, because you never know who’s gay or has a retard in their family.
Pleased with my self-censoring restraint, I walk Eva to the Swag Shack. It’s the Swag Shack because that’s what’s burned into the plank of wood above the door. It’s a room, the office Ted and I were going to give to the fancy financial executive we never got around to hiring. Instead, we beefed up our in-house accounting staff and none of them are fancy enough for an office. But we may have to rethink this because they keep complaining about the chaos and the noise and someone quits what seems like every second day, but is actually more like every five months according to Ted, and Ted would know because they report to him.
The Swag Shack is jammed with racks and shelves. There’s free stuff everywhere. I let Eva loose and tell her to grab what she wants and come back to my office when she’s done. I think she’s going to freak—her eyes are all buggy and glazed, her mouth twisted in wonder. I’ve seen this look before—on girls the first time they enter the Swag Shack, on guys who are fucking me right before they come and on drummers, particularly the ones who are good.
“Sara, oh, my goodness! I don’t know where to start,” Eva says. She hugs me and I pat her shoulder. “Thank you!”
“Take as long as you want,” I say and lope back to my office.
My eyes swim across the page. I’m in the boardroom proofing with Ted and our art director, Brian. My head is throbbing and I’m out of Advil. I’m sticky and sweaty and if there was ever any doubt earlier in the day that I was toxic and stinky, it’s gone. I want to crawl under the giant kidney-shaped table, but it’s glass-tinted, completely see-through—and people will notice. I force myself to read each word, take in every photo cutline, check the folio at the bottom of the pages. I find a missing word and I’m very proud.
I get to the DOs and DON’Ts page and there’s Parrot Girl, looking disaffected, slouchy and numb. It’s not too late to move her to a DO, but I don’t because that will just make me feel more toxic and retarded. I sign off on the issue, as do Ted and Brian, who scrams at once, pressed to make the final changes before deadline. My work here is done and all I can think about is my bed.
“Who’s the redhead?” Ted asks as we’re clearing off the boardroom table.
“What?”
“Her.” Ted points to Eva, who is sitting in my office. It’s nearly four. I’ve forgotten all about her. I am retarded today and an asshole and a very poor host.
“That’s Eva.” Ted follows me out of the boardroom and to my office where I introduce him to her. She’s changed into a pair of skinny madras plaid golf pants that I’m quite sure are men’s, and a purple blouse with a fussy bow at the neck. She’s pinned a gaudy rhinestone brooch in the shape of a lizard above her left breast. Scrunched up knee-highs peek out of her orthopedic shoes. She’s a DO and I can tell Ted knows it, too.
“Eva, I’m so, so sorry for leaving you this long. You should have just grabbed me from the boardroom.”
“Please don’t worry about me, Sara. I’ve kept myself busy. As a matter of fact, I just finished.” Eva bites her lower lip and casts her eyes down. “I hope you guys won’t be mad, but I kind of did something.”
Jesus. This can’t be good. What’d she do? Break something? Wreck something? Spill something on my velvet chair? This must be what Genevieve means when she says she can’t let baby Olivier out of her sight for a second.
“Come here,” Eva says. She brushes past Ted and he smiles in that goofy way that all men do when an attractive girl touches them by accident. I notice Ted adjust his pants as he follows Eva out. It’s subtle and Ted’s no perv, but still. I flash on Ted with a hard-on when we were seventeen, his purple penis and its big mushroom head. I’m dizzy and nauseous. I haven’t eaten since this morning and the picture of Ted’s mushroom-head dick isn’t helping. He was a virgin. I wasn’t. We were drunk. He actually begged, so we fucked and we never talked about it again. I wonder if Genevieve knows, but I doubt it because she tells me all about sex with Ted—at least she did until the baby—and I figure if she knew she probably wouldn’t tell me so much. As I walk behind Ted, who’s walking behind Eva, I contemplate which is worse: hearing from Gen about how turned on she gets sucking Ted’s cock when I know that it’s a weird mushroom-head cock or hearing Gen describe how Olivier peed in her face when she was changing him and about how baby balls disappear up inside their little baby-boy bodies and how babies get teeny-tiny erections. I wonder if Olivier has a mini mushroom-head penis like his dad. Incarcerate me in a giant garbage pail under the boardroom table and slap me around. Put me out of my misery, I’m a fucked-up sicko.
“Surprise!” Eva swings open the door to the Swag Shack and I’m agog. It’s clean, orderly. The body and beauty products are grouped together. The men’s and women’s wear have been separated and, from what I can tell, organized according to style and color. Gadgets and toys have assigned spaces. CDs and books are alphabetized. I am speechless.
“Who are you and what have you done with the Swag Shack? “ Ted says, shaking Eva by the shoulders. He can be such a cheese sometimes.
Eva blushes. “I hope you don’t mind. It just seemed like it would be so hard to find anything in here. I wanted to make it easier for you.”
I love her. I think I could, as my mother used to say, go gay. My mother didn’t believe a person could be born gay, but she didn’t think anyone would choose to be gay, either. Hence, her go gay theory. Much like being struck by a random bolt of lightning, she believed someone could be walking down the street and—poof! — they’d just go gay and that would be that. This could be somewhat embarrassing when I’d have my gay friends over and my mother would insist on asking them about their personal going-gay experience, but it was better than her being a bigoty homophobe like Ted’s nightmare all-Bible, all-the-time Catholic parents. I could totally go gay for Eva right now, but the sex would be trouble. I’d still have to have sex with men without bulbous mushroom-head penises. So maybe gay isn’t the best option for Eva and me. Maybe I’ll make her my assistant.
I’ve never had an assistant. Watching Ted burn through new assistants like Jack goes through his revolting protein bars has made me wary of both. The point of having an assistant as far as I can tell is to help you, but assistants from what I’ve seen are snaky whiners who spend more time trying to write some pathetic roman à clef than actually helping the bosses whom they so obviously hate. Eva doesn’t hate me. Eva loves me. And Eva’s smart and cute and she cleaned the Swag Shack.
Eva is my new assistant. It’s Tuesday morning and she’s at her desk tap-tapping away on her computer. She brought Fairmount bagels so everyone loves her already, except for one of the IT guys who’s allergic to wheat and gluten and sugar and everything else good. It’s a miracle he hasn’t killed himself.
I’m feeling much better, clean almost. I washed my hair this morning and my resolve to quit smoking is strong. Day one was a breeze—I couldn’t face a cigarette yesterday—and when I told Jack on the phone last night that I was done, he was pleased. He says I snore when I smoke too much. He smokes. He snores. I don’t make a big thing of it. Jack can really piss me off sometimes.
But Eva is perfect. We’re going out tonight to celebrate her new job at a new restaurant that has cordially invited me and a guest to wine and dine on the house. Genevieve was supposed to go with me, but sent a midnight e-mail bailing. Olivier is acting up, which is code for I can’t leave Ted alone with the baby. Olivier is nearly one and Gen has yet to leave him with Ted for more than five minutes. Occasionally she’ll entrust Prince Olivier’s care to one of her newfangled suburban mommy friends I’ve never met, but not Ted. I think that’s fucked up, but I’m smart enough to keep my mouth shut about things like mommy-baby codependency and mini mushroom-head penises.
I will take Eva to the restaurant. She bounced up and down on her chair when I asked if she’d like to go. She clapped her hands and said, “Goody!” I suspect it won’t be long before I get that golly-gee I’ve been waiting for.
Eva helps stuff the Trend Essentials swag bags we’ll be giving to the six participants in our Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend that starts Friday. I hate Trend Mecca Bootcamp weekends, but considering that each one of the corporate fucks that signs up pays ten thousand dollars to experience the street life and underground of trendsetting Montreal, I can hardly complain. No one wants to hear from a high-priced whore about the sultan who paid her a million dollars to fuck her up the ass for a weekend and no one wants to hear me gripe about the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend. I don’t even want to know there is such a thing as a Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend, let alone lead it. Maybe I’ll take Eva this time. Maybe I’ll wear a wig. Maybe I’ll bring a rag soaked in chloroform to wipe the smirk off the face of anyone who sees me out with these guys and their pleated pants and patterned sweaters. The people who sign up for the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend are almost always all guys.
Eva says she thinks it sounds fun and that she wants to learn everything she can about the business. She says she’ll carry my coffee or fetch drinks for the Bootcamp suits. Eva is my dream girl until about 2:00 p.m. when she knocks on my door and asks if she can come in. She looks nervous. She’s biting her lower lip again.
“What’s up, Eva? You’re not thinking about going back to that fedora porn guy are you?”
“No, no, nothing like that. It’s just that there’s this Web site—it’s not important, really, but you might want to see….”
I wave her over behind my desk and lean back, letting her type the URL into my computer. The Apples Are Tasty logo comes up. “Yeah, I’ve seen this,” I say, ignoring the screen. There are no DON’Ts walking the streets if one is to buy in to the Apples Are Tasty philosophy. Everyone is a DO in their own special way. Rid the world of negativity, embrace your individuality, pay fifty bucks to attend one of the parties we’re already being paid ten grand to throw, for another thousand one of the Apples Are Tasty crew will spend a day shopping with you. But getting your picture on the Apples Are Tasty Web site is the latest and greatest in hipster validation.
In two months, the site has gone from nothing to a very biggish deal. These party-planners-cum-DJingstyle-setters started getting attention and our clients started asking about them. At first we dismissed them as wannabes—we’ve dealt with copycats before—but when we tried to arrange access to one of their parties as a stop on the upcoming Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend we were rebuffed. That’s how Ted puts it—rebuffed—but what really happened was he lost it in an e-mail exchange with the Tasty ringleader when the guy refused to cough up comp party tickets for the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend. Then he posted Ted’s tirade online and forwarded it to all the clients he knew we had and to every media outlet on the planet. That was two weeks ago. Things have calmed down, but Ted won’t talk about it. And he’s more determined than ever to ferret out whoever put that apple on his desk the day after the whole thing went down and fire their ass. We have security cameras everywhere now. It won’t happen again.
I tell Eva it’s important to know your competition and what they’re doing, but not to get too wrapped up, not to obsessively worry about where they’re going and what they’re doing. There’s room for all of us and we should appreciate each other’s differences because that’s what makes us all unique and wonderful. I’m a raving hypocrite, I know, and I don’t care. I’ve built my career taking pictures of unfortunate-looking people wearing unfortunate-looking outfits. Like Parrot Girl. Like Parrot Girl, who’s staring out at me from my computer, the same Parrot Girl who is the current Apples Are Tasty Look Girl.
Fuck me and stop the presses. But it’s too late—kill me now or let me fall on the sword I bought in Osaka, the one that I had to fill out reams of paperwork to get through customs. Let Parrot Girl’s parrot gnaw at my corpse.
They’re right, they’re right, I know they’re right. I hate Parrot Girl, but twenty-year-old urbanites and suburban scenesters don’t. Laminate my picture, doctor my birth date and make me sixty-five. I’ll eat tiny portions ordered from special menus in restaurants, shop for groceries on certain days and ride the Metro for cheap. Book me into a home where I can be with my kind: wrinkled rock stars and one-time starlets with puffy lips and faces that don’t move when they talk about the good old days, which is all anybody talks about. We talk and talk so we can remember when we knew something and weren’t old and disgusting and had better things to do than clip coupons and play bridge and wait to die.
I don’t want to die. I want to disappear. I want to press Rewind and give Eva a pop quiz. I want to be right. I want to care. I want to leave. I need to stop and I need to rest but the constant ping of my e-mail makes everything impossible. I rap the side of my computer with a curled knuckle. Eva’s still standing behind me, silent but for the quiet shuffle of her feet. I knock on the side of my computer again as a burst of ping-ping-pings signals the arrival of yet more e-mail undoubtedly demanding my resignation. But it hasn’t been twenty-five years: I won’t get a watch or a shitty roast beef dinner buffet at some economy motel that must have a discount rate for seniors.
I don’t need to knock on the computer again. I know they’re all inside. The place is packed with girls with shiny jackets and soccer socks. Their pet birds are shitting everywhere, but they don’t care as long as it’s not on their boots. It’s filthy and the girls are smoking and think it’s all so very funny. They’re talking about me but I can’t hear the words over the laughter. I creep on unnoticed and over the wires and microchips and bird shit until someone drops a lit cigarette on my head and I jerk up, screaming. They all stop and look, but nobody laughs. Someone helps me to the door but I can’t keep a grip on her arm because the satin jacket she’s wearing is so slippery. I stumble and land at the feet of the Skinny Pink Polo Shirt Boy with the mutton chops and the kilt. I get a flash up his skirt and he’s not wearing any underwear. His cock is thick and long and doesn’t have a mushroom head. I smile up at him, but his expression reads nothing but pity. The Slippery Girl gets me to the door and nudges me out. It’s all fine. I have to go anyhow. I have to make a call or have a meeting and buy clothes for my new job. Yes, I have to go. I have to go. I have to go.
I reach into my desk and pull out a spare set of keys for the office front door, the back door, the Swag Shack. I can’t go. I don’t need to go. I have nowhere to go. I still have my keys. I hold them tightly in my hand until the metal edges dig into my skin—not enough to draw blood, but enough to hurt. My e-mail pings and pings and soon it’s the rhythm of an old techno song—no, early Chicago house, which I know is back and that my vinyl is worth maybe thousands to some know-it-all DJ with a cute face and a thousand girlfriends. But he loves Parrot Girl the most and is living in the suburbs with his parents to save enough money to impress her by giving her the rarest, most colorful parrot in the world—one that’s fully bilingual and shits in a toilet and knows how to use a bidet.
There is nothing worse than suburban scenesters who love girls with parrots who try too hard. I force myself to look at Parrot Girl’s photo on my screen. She’s standing in front of the brunch spot that now I’ll truly never, ever return to—and she’s smiling. We have a strict no-smile policy for our DOs and DON’Ts. Perhaps it’s time to revisit that. I make a note on a yellow sticky: Smiles? Eva says nothing, she hovers, frozen behind me.
“I guess people love birds,” I say, which is maybe the dumbest thing to come out of my mouth all day. “Hey, why don’t I make a couple of quick calls and we cut out early, do the streets and grab a couple of drinks before dinner?” This is maybe the smartest thing to come out of my mouth all day.
Eva heads back to her desk and I e-mail Ted that I’m heading out to do the streets, which means going trolling for unfortunate-looking people wearing unfortunate outfits, and call Jack in Toronto on his cell. He’s prepping a video for a New York electro-goth band all week. When he doesn’t pick up on the third ring I hang up and straighten the papers on my desk. A call comes through on my private line.
“Did you just call?” It’s Jack.
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you leave a message?”
“I don’t know.” We’ve had this conversation before.
“You could at least leave a message.”
“Next time I will, then.”
“You sound funny.”
“I am funny.”
“Seriously, Sara, are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I saw Parrot Girl on Apples Are Tasty.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you call?”
“I figured you would have seen it.”
“I just saw it now—Eva showed it to me.” Admitting this is torture. I’m humiliated and bruised. All the blood in my body feels like it’s rushing to my head. My eyes sting. I’m going to cry. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” I whisper into the phone. The tears come.
“Oh, baby, it’s gonna be okay. We all have off days.”
“This isn’t about an off day.” My voice is choking; I’m strangled by confession.
“Are you gonna be home later, sweetheart? We could talk more about this then. Now—it’s not a good time. But I really want to talk to you.”
“I have a dinner,” I say.
“Call me when you get in, okay, baby? It doesn’t matter how late.”
“Okay.” My voice is tiny. I am the crying girlfriend.
I hold the phone to my ear and face the back wall of my office long after I’ve said goodbye to Jack. I examine in a compact mirror the hot splotches on my face and my swollen eyes. A coat of moisturizer cools my skin and I reapply my eye makeup, all with the phone tucked between my shoulder and ear, listening again and again to the robot operator lady say, Please hang up and try your call again, first in French then in English. I want to call Genevieve, but every time I do she can’t talk, she’s too tired, or I get the feeling that what I want to talk about isn’t anything she wants to hear. I want to call Ted and he’s right next door, but he’s so stressed and serious these days the last thing he needs is me in his office bawling about Apples Are Fucking Tasty and Parrot Girl.
“You ready to go?” I ask Eva. She’s at her desk arranging the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend files. She’s compiling dossiers for me about each of the participants. One of the men is not terribly discreet about his interest in rubber masks, ball gags and female domination. Eva shows me the online evidence, and scrunches up her face as if she’d discovered a turd in her breakfast cereal instead of a prize. “There’s always one,” I say. “Put it in the file.”
We park at my place and walk through the streets of the Plateau, then over to Saint-Laurent. It’s June and the tourists are starting to descend, making it prime DON’T season. Within seconds I spot no less than three socks-and-sandals men, but they’re boring so we move on. We walk east and along the way encounter a beefy man with a mullet. He’s wearing a mesh half-shirt and drawstring bouncer pants with a Mickey Mouse print. His sneakers have neon green laces and he’s got a thick gold chain around his neck. I approach him and ask to take his picture. I click away but he won’t stop smiling. I ask in my most polite voice for him to stop and he does, but the smile lingers in his eyes. His pride is like a sucker punch. Tears well up and sting. Eva has him sign the release and I quickly wipe my eyes.
“Are you all right, Sara?” Eva asks once Beefy Cartoon Pants Man has gone.
“Allergies,” I say.
“Gosh, that’s terrible. Is there anything I can do? There’s a pharmacy around the corner—I could get you some of those pills, those antihistamines.”
“That would be great, Eva. Thanks.” I park myself on a bus bench and fiddle with my camera in an effort to calm down while I wait for Eva to return. I have to shake off this psycho-spaz cry-baby thing. There’s a bar across the street, one of those crappy fake Irish pubs—no affected urbanites, no suburban scenesters, no Apples Are Tasty or Snap, no Sara B., take my picture! It’s exactly what I need. As I dart across the road, I call Eva on her cell and tell her to meet me there. My beer arrives just as she does. I rip into the box of allergy tablets and weasel two out their childproof packaging, then down them with my beer. I assure Eva that once the pills kick in my eyes will be just fine.
Mecca
Not everything French is chic, and Montreal isn’t the zenith of cool. Part of my job on this Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend is to ensure that none of the six participants figures this out. I’ve known them for half a day now and am confident this will not be a concern.
As we tour the myth of the city—the shops and cafés, the lairs of local designers—the überalphas emerge from the group of type-A corporate alpha dogs and as usual the advertising people rise to the top of the shit pile. They know it all. Everywhere we go, they jostle for position—who can get an I’ve heard about this out of their mouth faster? There’s a creative director from Chicago determined to harness the zeitgeist and one from Vancouver who’s all about the next big thing. Then there’s the woman from Baltimore who won’t shut up about how she has her finger on the pulse, though from the way she keeps ogling Zeitgeist from Chicago I think she wants her precious finger up his ass, and from the way Big Thing Vancouver keeps leering at her, it’s his ass that wants Precious Finger. I want to cut my veins open and hurl myself into the St. Lawrence River, but I can’t because I don’t have a knife or a razor blade and we’re not going to be near the waterfront until after lunch.
I thank God that Eva is such a small-talk enthusiast. She answers silly questions about the city and Snap and she sounds very authoritative. We’re lunching at a popular bistro on Saint-Laurent better known for its attractive staff than its food. I order a side of mayo for my fries, which is something Precious Finger cannot deal with—the fat, the calories, the cholesterol, your heart—so when it arrives, a goopy dollop in a small white bowl, I’m sure to pass it around for everyone at the table to try. I notice Zeitgeist watching the waitresses and Precious Finger watching him. He is momentarily distracted by my fries/mayo offering. After one bite he declares it genius. He’s chewing as he says this and I see tiny bits of salivamushed potato-and-mayo spray from his mouth.
It’s Precious Finger’s turn and I reckon she has no choice but to risk it all—her weight, her cholesterol, her heart—if she has any chance of impressing Zeitgeist, ardent supporter of genius fries-and-mayo and, more important, of getting a chance to shove a well-lubed finger up his ass. I am convinced that Zeitgeist is the kind of man who has a bottle of travel-size lube beside the bed in his hotel room if not in the fake army surplus bag he’s had slung across his chest all morning. Just because it’s green and burlap with numbers and patches on it doesn’t mean it’s not a purse.
Precious Finger closes her eyes and screws up her face as she brings the mayo-coated fry to her mouth. I watch Big Thing from Vancouver watch her, rapt and eyes glazed. Zeitgeist is still watching the waitresses. Precious Finger purses her lips and makes a face. She munches fast. Her mouth is tight but her cheeks move furtively. Her lipstick has been wiped clean by her lunch—mandarin-almond salad, vinaigrette on the side, one fry-and-mayo. She looks like a squinty squirrel. “Mmm, delicious! Genius,” she says.
Zeitgeist stops looking at the waitresses and turns his attention back to the table and briefly to Precious Finger. He points at a stray spot of mayonnaise on the side of her squirrelly mouth. She blushes and dabs it away with a napkin.
“Good, huh?” Zeitgeist says.
“Delicious. Genius. You were so right.” Precious Finger brushes her bangs off her forehead. “Actually, I’m thinking of ordering some more—if there’s time.” She looks at me. We can be late for the flea market in Old Montreal. Witnessing Precious Finger force-feed herself a plate of fries and mayo is an opportunity I refuse to pass up.
The fries come and I take out my camera. Precious Finger moves in closer to Zeitgeist, her head nearly resting on his shoulder. Big Thing scoots into frame. I coax Precious Finger to eat a fry while I snap a photo, but she won’t until Zeitgeist slathers one in mayo and feeds it to her. His face is smirky. Big Thing’s shoulders slump in defeat. I take the picture and Precious Finger excuses herself to use the washroom. I wait two minutes and follow her in. I don’t have to go, but I wash my hands. The sound of the water does nothing to drown out the sound of Precious Finger retching in a locked stall.
I’m back at the table before she is and am surprised to find Ted there, smiling and doling out handshakes all around. Ted never comes on the Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekends.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Nothing. Just thought I’d stop by, maybe tag along.”
“Sounds great.”
It is great that Ted is here. Between him and Eva they answer all the inane questions. I walk behind and take pictures that I’ll delete at home. No one bugs me when I have a camera in front of my face. We push through the crowded flea market, visit the studio of an artist friend, walk some more, shop a little and the three advertising alpha dogs talk and talk and talk while the three boring corporate types take notes and ask nerdy questions. We stop for drinks and dinner. Precious Finger sits beside Zeitgeist and forces another order of fries and mayo down her throat and then we’re off to see a band that Big Thing is particularly excited about. “They’re gonna break big this summer,” he announces like he’s the Casey Kasem of alterna-everything. We flag three taxis after the show and I’m stuck with him riding back to the Bootcampers’ boutique hotel. He won’t shut up about the Montreal scene, which is not what it was five years ago, let alone ten years ago, but he doesn’t need to know that. I want to strike him in the head with a giant mallet, but reconsider and think I’d rather use it on myself. I remember that I have a big wooden meat tenderizer in a drawer at home that I’ve never used.
The three boring corporate types go straight to their rooms and to bed, blathering about time zones and saying they have to call their wives or their boyfriends or their kids or their cats. If he doesn’t call his wife, one man says—the one with the shirt and tie and high-waisted no-name big-box-store blue jeans—there will be hell to pay.
Zeitgeist, it seems, has no fear of hell or paying. Each time he lifts his glass to drink, the gold of his wedding band reflects the candlelight. Precious Finger pets his leg and Big Thing abruptly excuses himself. He settles into a seat at the bar and two women I’ve seen here before sidle up to him. If Precious Finger doesn’t want him, he can always rent a lady friend for the night.
So it’s me and Eva and Ted and Zeitgeist and Precious Finger. Eva is trying to convince Ted that now is the time for Snap to expand its online presence. Precious Finger is pawing at Zeitgeist, who seems sufficiently drunk and has stopped looking at every other woman in the room. But this could well be because his eyes can no longer focus or because he’s now thinking seriously of Precious Finger’s lubed finger in his ass while her squirrelly mouth is wrapped around his cock, which I’ll bet is a stubby, skinny thing.
I stir my drink with a skinny straw that makes me think of Zeitgeist’s dick but longer. It’s unpleasant, so I take out my cell phone and check for messages I know aren’t there. I told Jack I’d be busy all weekend with the Bootcamp and that I’d call him Sunday if the whole thing hadn’t killed me and if not we’d talk sometime Monday. It’s Friday night and I’m annoyed he hasn’t called. I check my messages at home. Nothing. Well, a call from Genevieve that I can barely hear due to the noise in the bar and Olivier’s piercing screams. No wonder Ted is here. I dial Jack’s number but hang up before it rings or my number shows up on his call display and we have to have that stupid conversation again about me not leaving messages.
Zeitgeist and Precious Finger say their good-nights and stumble off together to the lobby. Eva and Ted are laughing. I lean forward and rest my elbow on the table and my head on my hand, like a girl playing jump rope with friends waiting for the right time to step into the game. I order another drink and scan the busy bar. I feel someone watching me but I don’t turn my head to look, afraid of the hipster boy-waif or nightmare suburban suit guy that I might find standing there. He moves closer and hovers behind me and to the left. I pretend the dodgy artwork on the wall to my right is interesting.
“Hi, there. Can we help you?” Eva asks.
“Oh, yes, perhaps. We’d certainly appreciate it.” It’s a woman’s voice.
I turn to face her, relieved. I smile and look up and then down again, stirring my drink with the Zeitgeistskinny-dick straw. They’re ladies—old ladies, old ladies with orthopedic shoes and red hair the same shade as Eva’s.
“It’s so crowded and we noticed you weren’t using all of your seats. We don’t mean to impose, but—”
“Sit, sit, by all means, sit,” says Ted as he leaps from his chair to pull back two for the old ladies.
The old ladies thank us too many times and offer to buy us a round of drinks, which Ted refuses and instead says that he’d be honored to by them a round. Ted’s using his chuffy voice, which means he’s awfully proud of himself and I wonder why he’s here and not home helping his wife with their screaming child.
The old ladies’ names are Esther and Lila. Esther takes Ted’s hand in both of hers and shakes it. She does the same with Eva. Then it’s my turn. I tell them that my hands are really cold and Lila seems okay with this and backs away, but Esther grabs my hands anyway and now she knows I lied—my hands aren’t cold, I’m just not an old-people person.
I learn things about Esther and Lila I don’t want to know. Lila is divorced. Esther is seventy-five; she’s six years older than Lila, who I guess that would make sixty-nine, not that I could tell a day’s difference in their made-up wrinkly faces even if I could look at them for more than a second. Neither woman is married or has children. They do share an apartment, but Lila makes it clear that they’re not funny by which I assume she means lesbian. Esther is quick to add that there’s nothing wrong with being funny, she’s always simply preferred a man’s touch. She looks right at me when she says this. I look at my watch and grab my phone off the table. “I have to call my boyfriend,” I say. My voice is too loud but I can’t shove it back in my mouth so I clod off to the lobby to pretend to call Jack, but change my mind and go outside to smoke and pretend to call Jack.
I left my cigarettes in my bag at the table, so now there’s nothing to do except stand outside and play with the buttons on my phone. There’s a guy smoking a few feet away. I think about asking him for a cigarette, but he’s a hipster boy-waif, the kind I was afraid might be hovering behind me when it was really the old ladies. I weigh my options. I bum a smoke, he’ll want to talk—people always want to talk. He’ll ask me what I do and I’ll tell him the truth because I’m too tired to lie and I’m still smarting over being busted by old lady Esther for saying my hands were cold. I’ll tell the hipster waif-boy what I do and he’ll be impressed without saying so, like Parrot Girl was when I took her picture. Then I’ll be reminded of Parrot Girl and the goddamn Apples Are Tasty fiasco and the night—not that it’s been stellar or anything—will be unsalvageable.
“Would you like one?” It’s Esther. I didn’t hear her come up. Old people are quiet and sneaky.
She holds open a thin gold case filled with cigarettes. I take one. I can’t help myself. “Thanks.”
She lights it for me with a gold lighter that matches the case and I thank her again. “It’s a lovely night,” Esther says.
“Yup.”
“The young girl, Eva—is she your sister?”
I laugh. “No. She’s … “ What is Eva? “We work together.”
“You could be sisters.”
I’m flattered, I suppose, that someone, Esther even, thinks Eva and I could be related. “We really don’t look alike.”
“It’s not that. My sister and I looked nothing alike. It’s more your presence, your mannerisms.”
I shrug, not sure what to say, so we smoke in silence for a moment. “That Ted is such a pleasant young man. He said something about putting out that trendy magazine Lila and I pick up all the time, Snap?”
“We run it together.”
“Oh, my. Well, congratulations. That’s quite an accomplishment for two young people. Lila and I think it’s a hoot, by the way. Those DOs and DON’Ts always have us in stitches.”
“I do those.” I take a deep drag on my cigarette. It’s a hoot, they say, the old ladies are in stitches. A taxi peals up in front of the hotel and I consider throwing myself in front of it.
Lila breaks out into a coughing fit as Esther and I approach the table. It’s loud and audible above the trancy music. People are starting to stare. She doesn’t stop and I look at Ted in panic. Should we do something? Should we call an ambulance? Does anyone know CPR? Esther swats her friend playfully on the shoulder and the two women burst into giggles. “Oh, you,” Esther says and turns to me. “She does this every time I nip out for a ciggie. She hates it when I smoke.”
“Filthy habit!” Lila says.
“Sara here was telling me that she takes those photos that crack us up so much,” Esther says, changing the subject as she lowers herself slowly into her chair.
“The ones in Snap? We love those!”
“That’s what I told her.”
“That’s how we found out about this place—we read about it on that fun MUST DO list!” Lila says. She’s awfully excitable and squirming in her seat. I hope she doesn’t have a stroke.
“Lila’s addicted to magazines and newspapers,” Esther explains.
“It’s better than being addicted to cigarettes!”
“And she keeps them all. You should see her library, Sara. Floor-to-ceiling magazines—fifty years’ worth all stacked and in order.”
“What kind of magazines?” I ask.
“Oh, everything. But mostly fashion. I was quite the clotheshorse in my day—used to pore over every issue of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar for inspiration then sew up my own dresses.”
“And you have all of those? Fifty years?” I would kill—well, maybe not kill, but certainly maim or pay handsomely for fifty years of those magazines.
“When I was a teenager I would make confirmation dresses for girls in the neighborhood. I spent every penny I made on magazines and material.”
Esther beams proudly at her friend. “Our Lila was quite the entrepreneur.”
“Sounds like it,” I say. I look at Lila. Her face is heart-shaped, her features are delicate and her cheekbones high and defined. Behind the mask of age and powder and blush she was probably quite beautiful.
“Perhaps you’d like to come for tea sometime and take a look,” Lila suggests.
“That would be awesome!” If my status as a complete retard was ever in question, it is in this moment that I irrefutably determine that I am. I scrawl my cell-phone number on the back of my card and give it to Lila, who accepts it, probably out of pity for the softheaded thirty-nine-year-old who says awesome.
There are two taxis idling outside the hotel, but Esther insists on driving us—even suburban Ted—in her old Mercedes sedan. She’s only had one drink and though no one asks she makes a point of telling us that her eyesight is perfect.
“That’s because she had the laser surgery,” Lila whispers to me. “Used to be blind as a bat.”
I notice a copy of Snap from two weeks ago folded open to the MUST DOs page on the backseat. The address of the boutique hotel is circled in black ink. I pick it up and place it carefully on my lap and Ted, Eva and I slide in.
Eva is staying at my place for the weekend. With the Bootcamp schedule it’s more convenient than her driving to and from Pointe-Claire every day, and I like having her around.
It’s late and we should probably sleep, but my soft retard head is dancing with visions of midcentury fashion magazines, their pages filled with photographs by Avedon, Penn and Hiro. I open a bottle of wine and relax into my favorite chair. Eva sits with her legs curled up under her granny nightgown. It’s short, flannelette with long sleeves and a high lace-trimmed neck that looks itchy. I admire her unwavering commitment to personal style. I’m dressed in my black silk floor-length chemise again. I’m dying to take off my bra, but don’t want to scare Eva with the reality of thirty-nine-year-old breasts. I sit up straight, suck in my stomach and arch my back a little. I am a lady in repose.
I’m only half listening to Eva. She’s talking about online something and some Internet show that is either something she wants Ted to watch or wants him to produce for Snap and I’m not sure which because I’m talking about Lila’s magazines and what I know is in them. I’m speculating about how much such a collection would be worth and I get up and log on to eBay and find that a single issue of Vogue from the fifties can go for more than twenty-five dollars. I try to do the math but it’s too much for my soft head. I debate the merits of Vogue versus Bazaar aloud and decide that it depends on the decade and on Diana Vreeland, and which magazine she was with at the time. Eva’s talking at the same time and I wish she’d shut up, but she keeps talking and so do I and we talk louder and faster and over each other until it’s all white noise and I have to go to bed.
It’s Eva who wakes me at eight-thirty. Bootcamp starts at nine. She tells me Ted called and that he’s on his way to pick up his car, which he left at the Snap building overnight, and he’ll meet us at the hotel at nine and we’ll take the Bootcampers for a bagels-and-lox breakfast. I must have been out so hard I didn’t hear the phone.
Eva’s dressed in a sixties day dress with tiny pink flowers running along the hem. As usual, this is topped with a cardigan and her red hair is coiffed and sprayed. I can see a hint of blond roots as she bends down to hand me a coffee and three Advil. “Let me know if you need anything else,” she says and skips out of my bedroom.
I heave myself up and wash the pills down with the coffee. My glamorous silk chemise is twisted up around my waist, exposing the ugly stretched-out panties I wear when Jack’s not here. I’m still wearing my bra and the straps have left deep red grooves on my shoulders. Eva is humming in the kitchen.
I shower then call Ted and tell him I’m running late and to entertain the Bootcampers until Eva and I arrive. I like Ted-the-helpful-tagalong much better than Ted-the-angry-Apples-Are-Tasty-e-mailing ranter.
I want to wear my glasses and my baggy vintage men’s 501s that some crazy Japanese guy offered to buy off my ass on the spot at a gig last summer for four hundred American dollars, but I don’t. I shimmy into a cute summer wrap dress. I seal the plunging V-neck with a piece of the stickiest double-sided tape until it’s semi-respectable-looking and my tits aren’t entirely popping out. I make up my face and scrunch up my hair until it looks artfully tousled, but it’s lopsided. I want my ponytails. I strap on sandals with heels, but there’s no way my contacts are going in. I put on my prescription Ray-Bans and vow not to take them off until after sundown.
Every time Precious Finger laughs her shrill laugh at breakfast I feel like someone is stabbing an ice pick into my ears. Who knew such a sound could come out of a tiny, squirrelly woman? I can only imagine what kinds of offensive noises she was making last night, undoubtedly naked and writhing with her undoubtedly shaved pussy impaled on Zeitgeist’s skinny stub. I can imagine this but I don’t want to. What I want to do is throw up or lie on the floor or call Jack and tell him to get the next flight to Montreal so he can make me tea and pet my head.
I pick at my bagel and let Eva tell the group about the day’s itinerary: shopping, eating, music. “And tomorrow—” she’s getting them all worked up now “—we’ve arranged an exclusive tour of the Snap offices and a roundtable discussion with some great examples of the city’s most stylish DOs.”
This is news. Trend Mecca Bootcamp Sunday is usually homework day, when I spend time with the participants arranging their photographs and notes into a sort of scrapbook that they can take back to their bosses as proof that the weekend was ten grand well spent. And it’s the day we hand out the goody bags, which is my favorite part because it means that shortly they’ll all be getting on airplanes and going home. Trend Mecca Bootcamp Sunday is not for Snap tours and roundtables. I glare at Ted from behind my sunglasses but he doesn’t notice so I kick him under the table. He points to Eva and gives me the thumbs-up sign. It takes all my willpower not to grab a serrated knife off the table, hold his hand down and saw off his fucking thumb.
“It was just an idea we came up with last night. I told her it was impossible, we could never assemble the right people in time for a Sunday roundtable, but she called this morning and said she’d taken care of it. What was I supposed to say? I thought she ran it by you.”
“She did not run it by me,” I hiss. We’re outside the bagel place. Eva is a few feet away chatting up the group while I smoke and bitch at Ted.
“Are you sure, Sara?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“You were pretty drunk last night.”
This is true, but I’m sure I would remember agreeing to something like this. It’s not the sort of thing I’d be likely to forget unless of course Eva was talking about it while I was talking about Lila’s magazines. Fuck me hard with Zeitgeist’s skinny-stub dick—I don’t know what to say. “Well, she told me about it, but I thought she meant for the next Bootcamp.”
Ted looks relieved. I am a lying dirtbag with possible blackout issues. No more hard liquor. No more drinking till I’m drunk. Wine and beer only, and only with food. Ted and I join the others and walk up the street to our first shopping stop of the day. The straps of my high-heeled sandals rub against my feet and I can feel the blisters bubbling up.
By midafternoon I’m gimping behind the group like I have some kind of palsy. Women pass and either smile in empathy or sneer at my stupidity. The men—the straight men—are oblivious: they’re staring at my tits, which refused to be contained by the stickiest double-sided tape and are pushing out of my clingy wrap dress. I sit down once we reach the Snap store. I rarely come here—it’s too weird, all the staff know who I am and act skittish and extra friendly when I visit so I don’t except on Bootcamp weekends and that’s only because Ted reminds me that the Bootcampers always drop serious cash. It’s better to endure a stop at the Snap store than to contend with bitchy Ted, who inevitably shows up in my office the following Monday saying something like I have a bee in my bonnet or I have a bone to pick with you. He thinks this is funny but is never actually amused if the company store wasn’t on the tour.
This particular Bootcamp weekend I am delighted, ecstatic, positively aglow that we’ve stopped at the Snap store, as I can get off my fucking feet. I survey the shop and notice we are stocking an excellent selection of limited-edition sneakers, the sight of which make my feet throb more and I long for an axe and an epidural to numb my lower half so I won’t feel the pain when I lob off my swollen, blistery feet.
We’re also selling pairs of hand-knit, mismatched argyle socks and this is most helpful—I’ll need something to cauterize my stumps before I shove them into a pair of three-hundred-dollar hip-hop-fantastic sneakers. I’ll be like one of those ladies I see walking to the Metro station in the morning, dressed in a skirt suit with socks and sneakers, the practical pumps she’ll change into at the office stuffed in the plastic Gap bag she carries. I could be one of those ladies, but better, with good clothes and expensive sneakers and hand-knit mismatched argyle socks that the Gap-bag ladies don’t know they want yet but they will in about eight to twelve months. I could make myself a DO and parents everywhere would write me hateful letters because after seeing me as a Snap DO their kid bought in to the amputation-is-awesome hype and now there’s nothing they can do to get their child’s feet back. They’ll never be in the Olympics unless it’s the Special Olympics and that’s just not the same no matter what anyone says.
I’m trying to think of the closest axe store when my cell rings. I’m disappointed when the caller ID comes up as Genevieve and not Jack and then I’m sure I’m a dirtbag whose feet deserve to be chopped off without an epidural.
“Hey, Gen. What’s up?”
“You haven’t called me back.”
“Yeah, sorry. It’s Bootcamp weekend.” Gen called yesterday. I picked the message up at the bar but couldn’t hear a thing. I remember this with total clarity and it’s a gold-star moment on a dark and unforgiving day.
“I know it’s Bootcamp weekend. I don’t know why you need Ted there, but fine, whatever. It’s work, I know. But I need to know if you’re coming to the party.”
“Right. The party.” I have no idea what she’s talking about. And why is Ted telling her I need him here? “What’s the date again?”
“Next Saturday at eleven—a.m.”
“Of course, eleven a.m. It’s not like you’d have a party at eleven p.m.,” I say.
“We used to.” Gen’s voice is very small.
“Are you okay?”
“Of course. I’m fine. I’ll let you go.” She’s snuffling, but I have to go—the group is heading out the door.
“Are you sure? We can talk later if you want.”
In the background I hear Olivier shriek and I rip the phone away from my ear. After the initial shock dulls, I slowly bring it back toward my head. “I gotta go,” Gen says, her voice suddenly brusque. “We’ll talk soon.”
At dinner I see Eva approach a stylish couple sitting a few tables over. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but they’re all nodding and smiling. I see Eva hand them each what looks like a business card. Eva has cards? I get up and hobble over to Ted, who’s currently sandwiched between Precious Finger and Zeitgeist. Precious Finger has ordered fries and mayo again and seems to be angling for a replay of last night’s action with Zeitgeist, but he’s having none of it and saves his lechy grin for our leggy waitress. “Eva has cards?” I whisper in Ted’s ear.
“What?”
“Eva has business cards? Did you get her cards already?”
“What are you talking about, Sara?” Maybe Ted’s the one who needs to wear a helmet and live in a house with no sharp edges. “I saw Eva giving those people cards and I wanted to know if you ordered her business cards.” I speak very, very slowly.
“They’re your cards,” he says. “She needed something with the Snap address and number so I gave her a stack of your cards so she can invite the right people to tomorrow’s roundtable.”
“Of course. The roundtable.”
“You don’t mind, do you? I’ll order her cards Monday.”
“Monday,” I repeat after Ted.
“Are you all right? You don’t look so good. Maybe you should go home and take it easy.”
“We still have the gig.”
“Eva and I can handle the gig.”
“But she’s staying at my place.”
“I can give her your spare key,” Ted says as he pulls his keys out of his briefcase that looks like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag and dangles them in front of me.
I’m hypnotized—not by the dangling but by thoughts of a bath, my bed and a pair of ugly panties. “Only if you’re sure,” I say.
As amusing as it would be to watch Precious Finger chase Zeitgeist and Big Thing chase Precious Finger and the boring ones try without success to find some semblance of rhythm at tonight’s gig, I’ve seen it before.
I didn’t hear Eva come in last night and this morning it’s my turn to wake her with coffee and Advil. She groans and reaches for her glasses. There are makeup smears on the pillowcase and she’s not wearing her flannelette granny nightie, but a tight Snap T-shirt and a lacy black thong.
“Nice shirt,” I say.
Eva covers her chest with her hands. “I found it in the Swag Shack,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit. Help yourself,” I say. I’m quite sure the particular Snap shirt she’s wearing is one of the originals. There are only a few left and they’re in the locked archive room, not the Swag Shack. Then again, we did reissue them for our tenth anniversary and there’s a pile of those in the Swag Shack. I shake my head. It’s a T-shirt. I am ridiculous.
Precious Finger is the last to arrive for breakfast. Her nose is runny and she looks like she’s been crying. I want to tell her that Zeitgeist isn’t worth it, but decide not to. If I say that she’ll start bawling and then we’ll be in the bathroom and she’ll tell me about riding his skinny stub and how she’s never felt like this before and knows he feels the same, but he’s scared. He’s married, with two kids and he lives in Chicago, but it’s not impossible. They have so much in common: they both work in advertising, they both love Depeche Mode, they both eat their fries with mayonnaise. I could be brutal and tell her that Zeitgeist is a prick and he only fucked her because he was drunk and she was there, but she’ll say that I don’t know him the way she does, that I couldn’t possibly understand their connection. But she’d still want to be my friend and she’d call me and want to visit and stay at my place and talk about Zeitgeist. Sometimes it’s better to hand someone a tissue and say nothing. But I have no tissues, so I bury my face in a menu even though I already know I’m having the eggs Benedict.
I lead the tour of Snap headquarters and the Bootcampers are suitably impressed. Eva’s DOs begin to arrive for the roundtable and out of the corner of my eye I spot a girl who looks familiar: long dark hair, pretty. She’s wearing a pleated miniskirt with a fitted boy’s suit jacket that’s been tailored and carefully deconstructed. She’s wearing flat suede ankle boots and slouchy fuzzy socks. She’s a DO. I lead the Bootcampers past her and I catch a glimpse of a tiny diamond stud in her nose. The girl gives me the biggest grin. It’s Parrot Girl without her parrot. Eva has invited Parrot Girl to the roundtable. I hate Parrot Girl. I call over to Eva and ask to speak to her in my office. I usher the Bootcampers into the boardroom for what I call an informal mixer to chat with the DOs who have already arrived.
“You invited Parrot Girl to the roundtable?”
“Excuse me?”
“The fucking Parrot Girl, Eva.”
“Parrot Girl’s not here.”
“The girl in the boy’s suit jacket—that’s Parrot Girl.”
“No!”
“It’s her, Eva.”
“I saw her at the gig last night, after you left. She had a great look, and gosh, I guess I didn’t notice.” Eva’s voice is warbly. She sounds like she’s going to cry and I know I have no tissues. “Please don’t be mad, Sara. I’ll ask her to leave.”
I sigh and fall into my fuchsia velvet chair, my anger deflated. “No, that will just make it worse. We’ll do the roundtable, we’ll keep it brief, we won’t ask her any specific questions. Then before she leaves take her picture with the Polaroid—take Polaroids of all the DOs so it doesn’t look weird—and put it on your desk so you don’t forget what Parrot Girl looks like ever again. Now, I’m going to talk to Ted and fill him in.”
“Let me tell him, Sara. I’m the one who messed up, it’s my responsibility.”
“Okay, but make it quick, and don’t make him mad.”
“I promise,” Eva says and scurries off. I swivel in my chair and think about the whereabouts of Parrot Girl’s parrot. Is it home? Alone? Does Parrot Girl have a roommate? Does she live with her parents? Does she have more than one parrot—maybe different colors for her different outfits? A gaggle, a herd, a flock, a gang of parrots would be good. I could get them and bring them here. No one would notice me gone, not with Miss Eva and Mushroom-Head-Dick Ted busy fellating the Bootcampers and the Bootcampers going down on the roundtable DOs in one naked orgy of trend and style bullshit. Precious Finger would like that; maybe she could get Zeitgeist to fuck her again.
There would be plenty of time to get Parrot Girl’s gang of parrots here. I could lure them into the taxi with bits of some flavored nacho chips that I have about a trillion mini-bags of in my office that some PR company sent me last week. The chips are disgusting and my fingers are coated orange and smell like vomit after I eat them, which I frequently do simply because they’re there.
I would get the parrot gang in the taxi with the disgusting flavored nacho chips then march them into my office, right past the orgy in the glass-walled conference room, right past Ted and Parrot Girl and weepy, idiot Eva whose fault this is in the first place. So after she’s had some mindblowing DO of a multiple, triple-X orgasm she can come on into my office and take that fucking responsibility she seems so eager for by lying on the floor as the parrots take turns shitting orange nacho poo all over her and imitating her pleas for mercy as she cries. I could do this and Eva would learn her lesson and then we could set the parrots free together on the roof, while I smoke.
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Pamela Klaffke
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Sara B. is losing her cool. Not just in the momentary-meltdown kind of way—though there′s that, too. At the helm of must-read Snap magazine, veteran style guru Sara B. has had the job—and joy—for the past fifteen years of eviscerating the city′s fashion victims in her legendary DOs and DON′Ts photo spread.But now on the unhip edge of forty, with ambitious hipster kids reinventing the style world, Sara′s being spit out like an old Polaroid picture: blurry, undeveloped and obsolete.Fueled by alcohol, nicotine and self-loathing, Sara launches into a cringeworthy but often comic series of blowups—personal, professional and private—that culminate in an epiphany. That she, the arbiter of taste, has made her living by cutting people down…and somehow she′s got to make amends.