Chapter 29
The day after Christmas, Amanda sat me down and said, “We've got work to do.”
“Work?” I asked.
And then she rattled off a list of improvements I needed before I saw Peter—or, more accurately, before he saw me: haircut, mani-pedi, new clothes, new shoes, dentist, eyebrow plucking, new bras.
Haircut first, she said, at a tiny boutique in Harvard Square that had a three-week waiting list. (Amanda had told them I was about to be on Good Morning America). Then: clothes and shoes—and, just as vital, toes, eyebrows, teeth, and hands.
“Like the song,” I said.
“What song?”
And so I sang “toes, eyebrows, teeth, and hands” to the tune of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” pointing out each thing as I went. How could she be a mother of a four-year-old and not know that song?
“Oh,” Amanda said. “She does all that stuff at school.”
Amanda clearly needed a project. She was doing her best to regroup. Grey had been back to the house twice since he left, both times while she was out. He spent Christmas in New York City, “for a change of pace.”
“New York City?” I asked.
“With his girlfriend,” she said. And then, before I could react: “I don't want to talk about it.” What she did want to talk about was me. And Peter. And what we could do to save our marriage. “I don't want you to wind up alone like me,” she kept saying.
Amanda came with me to get my haircut, and when I sat in the chair, she launched into a stupefyingly detailed conversation with the stylist (named Tangy, “like the fruit”) about options for my “look.” Left to my own devices, I would have asked her to trim two inches and then flipped through a magazine until she was done. But Amanda was using words like “lift” and “roots,” “gradation” and “perimeter.” Tangy had washed my hair and combed it all down over my face.
From underneath, I said to Amanda, “You sure know a lot about hair.”
“I love hair,” Amanda said. Then she confessed that often, when people were talking to her, she was imagining new hairstyles for them. She'd try a short bob, for example, on a chubby grocery checker with a pony-tail. A bob done right, she told us, could mimic cheekbones and slenderize anybody. If the bob didn't do the trick, she'd lighten it a little. “Everybody looks better blond,” she said. In this way, she improved the world around her. New hairstyles, swankier clothes, and better makeup. “It's very distracting,” she said.
It was decided that my thick, straight, dark hair needed to be “chipped” and “razored” into a layered shoulder-length “drape” that was long enough to be sexy but not so long that it lost its joie de vivre. Highlights were considered and rejected because we were going to run with my exoticism. “I'd like to be able to put it in a ponytail,” I offered, but realized almost as soon as I'd said it that usability was not the primary consideration. I was no longer in a wash ‘n' go world.
After two and a half hours, I left the place with a shopping bag of hair products, a round styling brush, a professional comb—when I asked Tangy what made it “professional,” she said, “This plastic was developed at NASA”—a $100 blow dryer (with diffuser), and a giant helmet of hair worthy of a TV news anchor.
“I can't afford any of this,” I said, as Amanda piled products on my lap. “I can't even afford”—I picked up the smallest vial—”this.”
“It's my treat,” Amanda said, and when I started to argue, she said, “Actually, it's Grey's,” and held up a credit card with his name on it.
Part two of our Beauty Bonanza was makeup, by way of an eyebrow-shaping session. The beautician, at the nail place next door, who had a great Persian accent, explained to me quite cheerfully that she was going to rip out every errant hair on my face with a piece of twisted thread.
Amanda nodded to me. “It's an incredible technique.”
I hadn't thought too specifically about the concept of “shaping” until that moment. “It sounds like it's going to hurt,” I said.
The beautician smiled gently, sorry to have to break the news. The thread wrapped around her pointer was already pinching a little. “Of course, sweet lady,” she said. “All beauty hurts.”
Tears were still running out of my eyes as we walked across the square to a department store. “Are you crying?” Amanda asked. “Or is it just your eyes?”
“Just my eyes,” I said.
I perched on a stool at the only open makeup counter. The makeup lady, Vanessa, said, “She needs everything?”
Amanda closed her eyes for emphasis before saying, “Everything.”
So Vanessa went to work, Amanda standing behind her shoulder with arms crossed, frowning in concentration. “You're using the Mink?” she asked. “You don't think Black Taffeta?”
“Mink's a little smokier,” Vanessa said.
“But the Taffeta has more mystery.”
“But the Mink is more come-hither.”
“But the Taffeta is more I'm-going-to-throw-you-on-the-ground-and-show-you-who's-boss.” Amanda glanced at me. “In a good way.”
They were dead serious. Colleagues at work on a problem as important as, say, the restoration of the Sistine Chapel or the retrieval of ancient Egyptian artifacts.
Vanessa moisturized me, then evened out my tone with foundation, then spent what seemed like an eternity brushing makeup onto my eyes. All I could think about was Camille Martin from sixth grade, who got an eye infection from a makeover at the mall. “Is this sanitary?” I asked.
“We keep everything very clean,” Vanessa assured me.
I didn't see how, but I didn't ask. I was not in charge today. I just had to cross my fingers and hope for the best, though I couldn't help imagining how useless the effect of all this makeup would be if I arrived in L.A. with pus oozing out of my eyes.
I must confess, on some level, I was hoping for a transformation. I was hoping, as Amanda had promised, to look into the mirror and see a new version of myself—beauty I had never even known was there. Instead, when I looked in the mirror, I just saw me. Me with a lot of makeup. Me like a kid with face paint on. But still, just me.
Vanessa and Amanda gasped when I shook my hair out and turned to them. Vanessa, there in the middle of all those makeup counters, shouted, in a voice that seemed to erupt from genuine enthusiasm: “Foxy!”
When I got home, the boys—all five of them, plus my dad—had built a spaceship out of the bunk beds. Alexander spotted me through the doorway and said, “What happened to your face?”
“I got it painted,” I said. “Like you did at the zoo that time.”
“What type of animal are you supposed to be?”
Before I could answer, my mom, passing me in the hall with a stack of folded laundry, piped up: “A prostitute.”
Alexander frowned. He knew something was up. We'd read a lot of books about animals, and he'd never seen a picture of a prostitute. He looked at me for the straight dope. “What kind of animal is that?”
What was I supposed to do? I shouted, “Thanks, Mom!” over my shoulder. Then I said, “It's a bird that lives at the North Pole. With Santa.”
Chapter 30
Two days before I was supposed to leave for L.A., I found myself, after the boys were asleep, in Peter's practice room. My father and brothers had left, and Amanda and Gracin had gone home. My mother was in the kitchen organizing for her time alone with the boys. The house felt very quiet.
I hadn't been in Peter's practice room since he'd been gone. I hadn't wanted to go in. But now, as time was approaching for me to see him again, I found myself eyeing the door, glancing at it as I folded laundry, touching the handle as I walked by. Finally, I went in.
The room felt like him. The file cabinet he'd dragged with him everywhere since college, the framed poster of a Maurice Sendak print, the mandolin hanging on the wall, the woven Mexican rug on the floor. The combined effect of his things, together in a kind of landscape, left such a strong impression of him that soon a wav
e of longing had me leaning against his desk for balance.
He'd left in a rush, and the place was a wreck. He'd knocked over a chair on his way out that'd had a stack of papers on it, and they'd fanned out all over the floor.
I didn't want him coming home to this mess. I didn't want him coming home to anything that would remind him of that crazy night with Nelson. I righted the knocked-over chair. I emptied his trash can. I started picking up the papers on the floor and stacking them back up.
And that's when I noticed my name at the top of one of them. It was a sheet of unfinished music, which I couldn't read, but, at the top, it said: “For Elena. Again.”
He'd written music for me before. He wrote the music we got married to, as well as many other things, from that first rhapsody to sonatas to spare little modern clinky-sounding things. But it had been a while. A long while, in fact. Until that moment, I'd thought he hadn't written anything for me since before we had kids.
But this page didn't look familiar. A third of a page of notes, and then blank. I picked it up to look a little closer, and there was another one underneath it. This one said, “For Elena, who made me French toast this morning.” It was also unfinished.
I picked that one up. There was another one underneath: “For Elena, whose hair is as black as feathers.” I started picking up the pages faster and faster. They were all pieces that Peter had written, and they were all unfinished, and they were all—every single one of them—dedicated to me. And this had been a tall stack of papers on his chair. I'm telling you, there were hundreds. Each with a slightly different thing to say: “For Elena, who is taking care of a sick baby.” “For Elena, who kissed me in the middle of the night.” “For Elena, so far from home.”
The last piece I picked up was the one that had fluttered the farthest away. By then, I had a stack of sheet music a foot high on the chair. The date on the top of this last one was the night Peter had left. This one had maybe ten notes total. And under the date, it said: “For Elena, who I will miss every day.”
I held it up to my face, as if it might feel good to be close to the page, as if some lingering aura of Peter might still be there. Then I tried to smell it, looking for some remnant of him. And then at last I carried it with me out to our bed, where I hadn't slept since my mother had arrived, and curled up there on my side and held it.
He still hadn't called me. It had been two and a half weeks, and nothing. At first, my mother arriving was a good distraction. And then seeing my brothers and my dad, and then Amanda and Gracin moving in. But with almost everybody gone now, with things settled down, there was no way not to obsess over it. Peter hadn't called. I had not gone two weeks without talking to Peter since I'd known him.
“Maybe he's just punishing you,” Amanda had offered earlier in the week.
“He's not that mean,” I said.
“Maybe he's testing you to see if you'll break down and call him.”
“He's not that messed up.”
It seemed to me that the only explanation for his not calling was that he didn't particularly care. For four years, we'd been straining to keep ourselves, our kids, our minds, and our marriage together. And now, it seemed possible that one bizarre and ridiculous moment had caused everything to unravel.
And that was the notion that had me curled up on the bed. Before the thing with Nelson, Peter was writing music for me—or trying to, at least. After, he didn't seem to be thinking of me at all. Suddenly, I felt stupid flying all the way across the country to see him. I felt desperate and undeserving and greedy. I was hoping this gesture of mine—plus a few artfully applied cosmetics and a new wardrobe—would make it all better. I was hoping to get him back. But there on the bed it occurred to me that it just might not work.
A marriage is such a fragile web of promises—to take out the trash; to pick up tomatoes at the market; to take the kids so the other can nap; to love, honor, and cherish; to not kiss anyone else.
At that, I started crying, and then I couldn't stop. I cried myself to sleep. I cried the next morning as I made breakfast for the boys. I cried off and on all day. I cried so many tears that I actually started to worry I might get dehydrated, and I sat down around four o'clock and drank three glasses of water.
My mother told me to pull myself together. That I was going to disturb the boys. That mothers didn't get to sit around crying all day, no matter how much they felt like it.
But Alexander was the only one of my boys who was disturbed.
“Why are you doing that?” he kept asking.
“It's just my eyes,” I said.
“But not your heart?”
I faked it for him. “Not my heart, just my eyes.”
He wasn't sure if he believed me.
“They'll feel better once they're done,” I said.
But it didn't feel like they'd ever be done. I realized now, in a way I never could have imagined only a month before, that my marriage might be over. And for no reason at all.
Amanda drove me to the airport that night in her Mercedes with heated seats. I had pulled myself together some by dinnertime, but saying good-bye to the boys got me going again. In four years, I had not been away from them even once.
They all held on to me on the front steps—two on my legs and Baby Sam's arms around my neck. I had to peel myself away. Everyone was crying as I scurried down the walk—except for Alexander, who instructed me to “go get Daddy and bring him home.”
“Mama!” he shouted after me, until I turned. “Don't forget to get Daddy!”
“I won't,” I said. I was at the curb now, moving away. Amanda was waiting for me in her shiny car. I was almost on my way.
But Alexander had one more thing to say. “Mama!” he shouted.
What could I do? I turned around.
His face was so cheerful. He knew about compliments now. He'd learned that he could tell women at the store that he liked their earrings or their shoes and their faces would shift into big smiles of pleasure. My own face must have been wrinkled with worry as I tried to get out of there. He must have sensed how much I needed a little boost. When I looked up, he gave me the biggest compliment he could think of. He blew me a kiss and said, “You look even plumper today than you usually do.”
“Thanks, babe,” I said.
On the highway, Amanda's inlaid dashboard polished to a high sheen, Amanda was impatient. She said, “You simply have to stop crying. You're making your eyes puffy.” Then she said she had something to tell me.
“What?”
“I did a crazy thing last night.”
That got my attention. “Please don't tell me you slept with that dog walker who followed you home,” I said.
“Crazier,” she said.
I turned to look at her.
She went on. “I called Peter,” she said.
“Peter who?”
“Your Peter.”
“My Peter?”
She nodded.
“When?”
“Last night.”
“Why?”
“Because you weren't allowed to,” she said, as if it made all the sense in the world.
“Did you tell him I was coming to L.A.?”
“No!” Amanda said, shocked I would even ask. It had been her concept for me to surprise him in the first place. She believed that surprise was the first thing that went missing in married life. A surprise was important. It was not something she would fumble.
“Amanda,” I said, getting nervous. “What did you say?”
“First, let me say,” she began, “that I was only trying to help.” Then she confessed that she ‘d been out on a very bad first date that night and, on top of that, it had been her wedding anniversary, and she'd had maybe a glass of wine too many.
“How did you even get his number?” I asked.
“I had it in my BlackBerry,” she said, like that detail should have been obvious. “From his flyer.”
I waited for her to continue. So she began.
“
I wanted to remind him how great you are, just in case he had forgotten. And I wanted to know why he hadn't called you.”
“Why hasn't he called me?”
“We never got to that part.”
She really had just wanted to smooth the way for me. To butter him up a little, and remind him to be sweet to me, and remind him that I was not as tough as I seemed. She wanted to sing my praises and let him know how hard these weeks had been for me. In case he was still angry. She wanted to help bring him around. But, she confessed, she might have gone a little overboard. “But no matter what he says,” she said then, “I did not actually use the word 'suicide.' “
Suicide! “Who was committing suicide?” I asked.
“You were,” Amanda said.
“I was committing suicide?”
“Just toying with it,” Amanda said.
“You told Peter this?”
“No!” Amanda said. “I just hinted at it.”
Amanda's reasoning for hinting to Peter that I was thinking about suicide went like this: Peter should have called me. He was taking me for granted. He should know how lucky he was to have me. And, to sum up: “Life is short and love is precious.”
“But I am not toying with suicide.”
“No,” Amanda agreed. “But Peter won't know what he's got until it's gone.” I suddenly realized that she did not feel the least bit guilty about lying to Peter. She grinned at me. “It's my Christmas gift to you. Trust me, sweetheart. Fear and passion are, like, practically the same thing. There will be some good loving waiting for you in California.”
Then Amanda told me she was sorry about something else. She had spilled the beans about the miscarriage.
“About the what?”
“About the miscarriage.”
It took me a second to catch up, and by the time I did she was already explaining: “He said nothing I was saying really sounded like you. And so I had to bring out the big guns. I said he'd really broken your heart storming off like that—especially when you were still depressed about the miscarriage.” She gave me a minute to register that before she added, “I had no idea you hadn't told him.”
Everyone Is Beautiful Page 21