Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

  And even though Miss Belladonna acted as if she knew everything, she still didn’t want to be the one to make Jean-Louis mad, or Evan, the British publisher, madder, so she would wheel around to Susie Schein and demand, “Well, you tell me why we should do this.” Susie would get even paler, if such a thing were possible, and while she dithered six o’clock would arrive, and no one on the staff was even allowed to sign out. My office mates, Coco Church, Pascal Reich, Pimm Sanford, and I would stay until midnight while no decisions were made except to feed us elaborate platters of smoked turkey and grapes.

  The four of us were jammed into an office the size of a large dressing room, though the window did look out onto Fifth Avenue. Pascal Reich was the only male on the staff—well, the only straight male on the staff except for Jean-Louis—and he had taken a job at Jolie! to subsidize his work on the Great American Novel. After a childhood spent at Swiss boarding schools, his fluency in French, Italian, and German had gotten him hired, and he was the one who dealt with the European writers. His family’s fortunes had appparently changed since his childhood, hence the searing inconvenience of having to get up every day and go to work, which seemed, for the most part, to consist of him hollering long-distance at odd hours.

  Coco was one of those girls who had grown up in New York City, gone to private school, and seen it all. She was the kind of attractive that didn’t appeal to other women but drew men like magnets—big brown eyes and perfect skin. Her blond permed hair was unkempt, and she was overweight, fashion-magazine standards aside. Still, she had a radiant smile and lots of energy and she was always sleeping with someone new or going somewhere fabulous for the weekend, dressing up in leather bikinis, happily spanking her dates. She also spoke perfect French and cooked with foie gras. Next to her I felt as if I’d spent my life in a convent.

  Which is why I was grateful for Pimm. She was a city girl, too, but shy and plain, with Coke-bottle glasses and a bookish air. No one would ever guess she had grown up on Park Avenue. Her father was an investment banker, and her mother was a hippie-turned-photographer who always carried a camera, just in case anyone forgot. Pimm was a kind person who clucked sympathetically at any tale of woe, laying down her fact-checking materials so often to lend an ear that she invariably had to stay late just to catch up. But after too many nights of being ordered to stay there with her, Coco repeatedly called the guy who sold her Ecstasy and pleaded with him to wait before going out clubbing, and Pascal began a campaign to print up T-shirts that said: “Jolie! magazine. We never close.”

  Despite all of Miss Belladonna’s waffling at The Wall and her rather forbidding elegance and laser-sharp eye for any style disaster (the fake leather bag I bought at Baker’s Shoes for fifteen dollars comes to mind), I had always preferred her to Susie. She had a certain “Let’s get on with it” quality I admired. Both she and I knew that someone had to deal with those Hollywood phone calls, so my strategy for our lunch meeting was to stress my areas of expertise; then, when she brought up art, I would just nod knowingly. Nodding knowingly is a vastly underrated means of communication, though one highly valued among magazine editors who are expected to know a lot about everything, which they don’t. But they do know whom they can call to find out. Nodding knowingly buys time.

  On the art front, the important thing was that I did know who the good writers were, since there were only a handful and I had filched their numbers from a senior editor’s Rolodex one night after she went home. I could talk to them well enough, though “A picture is a picture is a picture” had been my motto since bolting Art History 101. How many fat and happy girls can you watch lolling on a hillside when you’re not one of them? In my own defense, I should say that at least I’ve never been one of those people who stand in front of a virtually blank canvas and say, “Well, I could have done that, too.” Mainly because it would never occur to me to leave anything empty. I’ve always been the kind of person who fills things up.

  On that particular Thursday afternoon, the day before lunch with Miss Belladonna, I put in a few calls to those writers to ask some nonchalant questions about what they thought of certain exhibitions around town, so that the following day, after the Perrier was poured, I could oh-so-casually mention that the Whoever showing at the Wherever was absolutely Whatever, especially his use of color and the unexpected direction of the line. And I would wait for Miss Belladonna to nod knowingly at my staggering expertise, at which point my future, or at least my immediate future, would be secured.

  • • •

  Anyone might have wondered why I was devoting quite so much effort to getting this promotion—not only because my raise would be all of two thousand dollars, but because my engagement to Bucky and the Tudor mansion was shiny new.

  John Buckingham Ross, known as Buck to the boys and Bucky to me, had been my prom date at Green Hills High and my boyfriend since we were seventeen. He was a football player, a baseball player, and, to top it off, a direct descendant of Betsy Ross. Of course, in his family, with its three sons and gangs of cousins who were also all boys, that meant lots of jokes about who was going to sew the buttons on their shirts. But the Rosses were very proud of their ancestor, and if she wasn’t quite a Founding Father, a Founding Seamstress was close enough in my mind to qualify her—and Bucky—as American royalty.

  I, on the other hand, came from a long line of Polish Jewish horse thieves who, once in America, took to reinventing themselves. Their original name was something with a “kowski” attached to it, but my paternal grandfather had a secret fantasy about being a German Jew, which, if you had to be a Jew at all, was the preferred brand. German Jews liked to affect a superiority to other Jews, which always seemed to me like lawyers considering themselves more beloved than dentists. As soon as he arrived, therefore, my “kowski” grandfather renamed himself Berlin, so that he could assure his new countrymen: “Yes, my family came from there.” Of course, he couldn’t say that to anyone who was from Berlin, because the Berlin Jews knew exactly who they were, and that my grandfather was not one of them.

  His story seemed to change in its details every time he told it. Some days his hallucinations were so geographically vivid that our family even hailed from Alsace-Lorraine, excusez-moi. But the gist of it was usually about how the Kowskis, as I came to call them, sailed down (or was it up?) the river one day and found themselves in horse-thief territory that has since become Russia, or Belorussia—anywhere but Poland. Neither my brother, Jerry, nor I gave these genealogical fantasies a second thought until the day he found our father’s passport in his top dresser drawer, and the birthplace really read “Poland.” We were shocked; in one second, we had been transformed from supreme German beings with cunning French accents into the punch line of the “One Mexican guy, one American guy,” jokes.

  None of which really mattered to me, though, because I had found my own ancestral ladder to the top. Sandra Berlin would become Sandra Ross, and I would waste no time propagating little heirs to the American flag, maybe even some girls whose expert needlework would stun my new family. My genes were handy for this, at least on my mother’s side, for my maternal grandmother had been a milliner. Although Mom sewed well too, she had neither the time nor the interest. She was a psychology professor, and when she wasn’t teaching she was happiest in the lab, where the cages were filled with hungry little rodents who were conditioned to behave in all sorts of peculiar ways before pushing the levers that would reward them with pellets of food. Mom found her rodents so absorbing, in fact, that she often left our dinner waiting when she went to her office in the morning: a frozen block of string beans in a pot and a chicken on a timer in the oven. When we heard the beep, we were conditioned to begin eating whether she was home yet or not.

  My father was also an academic, a history professor who was traditionally chattier about Trotsky than anything having to do with his family. Luckily, he also played the stock market with enough skill to keep us ensconced in the swanky New York City suburb of Green Hills, with its su
perior public schools, though in that particular financial food chain we were nearer the rodents than the royalty.

  From time to time I did try to question my father about his family’s extremely confused nationality. On this subject, however, all of his historical outlines and time lines counted for nothing, and he never gave an answer that made any more sense than the original lie.

  It was not the original lie, however, that concerned Bucky’s family; the type of Jew I was or wasn’t scarcely mattered to them. What mattered was that I was any type of Jew at all. When Bucky and I were dating in high school, his parents thought they could wait it out. “Oh, look, there’s that Jewish girl cheering from the sidelines. No matter.” Or: “Oh, well, he’s taking that Jewish girl to the prom. No matter. They’ll go to separate colleges and never see each other again.”

  To their unending dismay, I wound up going to Smith and Bucky to Amherst, so we saw each other all the time. When we went home for vacations, Mrs. Ross would make an elaborate show of looking up at her youngest son adoringly, wrapping her arms around his waist, and saying, in her most wheedling tone, “I’m still your best date, aren’t I, Bucky?” Every Christmas Eve after Midnight Mass at the Presbyterian church, when he would leave to take me home, his mother would trill to him, always within my earshot, “Hurry home, dear, so you can kiss the Baby Jesus good night,” referring to the not one but two crèches displayed under the not one but two Christmas trees in the Rosses’ front hall and living room.

  The Rosses had another chance to be heartened when we graduated from college and, from all indications, I appeared to lose my mind.

  For years I had planned to go to law school, but the night before my boards I started to sob in my mother’s bathroom. While she sat in her makeup chair and I lay on the floor, we talked for hours until I admitted to her that I didn’t want to be a lawyer after all. I wasn’t sure why, but it just didn’t feel right. And I still didn’t understand what “tortious” meant, even after looking it up three times.

  Part of my hesitation came from the fact that, the previous summer, I had worked for Joseph Papp, the head of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Actually, that’s an exaggeration: I did work at the Festival offices, pasting articles about the theater into scrapbooks and answering phones and watching the staff run in the opposite direction whenever Mr. Papp was angry, which seemed to be daily. A few of my co-workers, when they weren’t hiding, were filled with advice to avoid law school (too dull) and recommended their own alma mater, the Yale School of Drama, instead. It had a program called Theater Administration, which trained producers and managers, and some of its graduates had even gone to Hollywood. Management, to hear them tell it, seemed little more than an opportunity to run other people’s lives and get paid for it. What could be bad?

  Actually, I had always wanted to be some sort of writer, but my father reminded me regularly that I would never be able to support myself as one. Years later, when I came home triumphant, having just been hired by Jolie!, he snorted dismissively at its fashion roots and instantly dubbed it a “pseudo-job.” Hell hath no fury like a pseudo-German career academic at a community college.

  Rather than brave the marketplace straight from Smith, I thought a master’s degree in some kind of management, even if it was in the theater, couldn’t hurt. And I would have three more years to figure out what to do next. Once I arrived in New Haven, though, it didn’t take me long to realize that under the heading of “management” fell tasks like doing the actors’ laundry. The Yale Repertory Theatre is a real, live professional playhouse with real, live professional actors, and students pay tuition for the privilege of servicing drama with a capital D. Whenever a T-shirt accidentally shrank or the jeans weren’t quite dry, the actors would call Equity and complain and the students would get yelled at. We, in turn, would yell at the woman at the laundry to whom we had slipped a few bucks to supervise the spin cycle while we went out for coffee.

  I remember when one of those actors asked Paul Romano to do his laundry. Or, more to the point, ordered him. Paul was my best friend, and he came from Los Angeles. He was drop-dead gorgeous and sported an impeccable tan whenever possible, carrying himself with the inimitable ease of a child of privilege. His shirts were crisp, yet open at the neck, pants pleated, but never creased. His smile was ready, his expression game. He could have wandered in from the drawing room of a Philip Barry play.

  And here he was faced with this actor, a short, pockmarked creature who hadn’t been hired in New York for at least five years, waving his dirty sheets around, threatening not to go on, right before curtain. Paul laughed in his face, and before the night was over the creature was on his knees in Paul’s apartment giving what Paul later described as “only passable head.”

  Paul was the first openly gay man I had ever known. Having grown up in Green Hills, where I was assiduously trained to regard any male as a potential enemy on a stealth mission to get me pregnant and ruin my future, I appreciated the novelty of the situation. We met the first day of school, on line at the bank. He was dressed all in white, with a gold watch that sparkled, and we chatted while the line barely moved. When we were only two or three people away from the front, he threw up his hands, disgusted, and turned to go.

  “But we’re almost there,” I protested.

  “I hate waiting,” he announced, even though he had already waited at least an hour. He stalked out as if he were starring in a movie with a grand exit scene and someone had just yelled “Action.” When I ran into him again later that day, he seemed to have forgotten the entire incident. He was only delighted to see me and in immediate need of a hamburger. We were off.

  “You know, you’re very good at starting things,” I would tell him later on. “But you never seem to finish them. You have no staying power. Maybe it’s the rich-kid thing.”

  “Well, Sandra,” he responded dryly, “you have nothing but staying power. You don’t just finish things, you wrestle them to the ground.” He smiled dazzlingly, to take off the edge. “We’re a perfect team.”

  He was definitely a dish, if a touch pretty for my taste, and aside from my initial disappointment the first few times we had dinner together and he didn’t kiss me good night, his sexuality was a nonissue for me. No one was better company. He danced like a dream, and would sit uncomplaining in the dress department of any major department store for hours (I would return the favor in the men’s department, for even longer). He lit my cigarette with his monogrammed gold lighter and laughed at my jokes—most of them, anyway.

  Paul was a whirlwind. He had to see every movie, every play, eat in every restaurant, drink every martini. On one of our first trips together into New York, we were strolling down Fifth Avenue when he took my elbow and guided me to the front door of Buccellati, the posh jeweler.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, but all he said was “Come with me.”

  A middle-aged man in a dark suit appeared and almost succeeded in hiding his disdain for my denim skirt and Frye boots, left over way too long from college.

  “We’re looking for a bracelet,” Paul announced grandly, and we sat in front of a table while Paul kept the salesman hopping up and down, bringing more and more samples and fumbling with the clasp on each one. I was too scared to laugh and finally just started to pretend that I was Paul’s co-star in this particular movie. He was the good-looking playboy, flicking open his gold lighter and leaning back in his chair, puffing languidly on his cigarette. All he needed was an ascot. The salesman narrated the bracelets’ respective pedigrees, and after I switched arms, he and I noticed my Timex simultaneously. To his credit, I was the only one who winced.

  “How about this one?” Paul asked, lifting a gold-and-diamond scrolled chain from its blue silk pillow. “This would go perfectly with your earrings, darling,” he said brightly. “Do try it on.”

  “Mmm, smashing,” I murmured as the bracelet was looped around my wrist, but I could sense that while the salesman was willing to play along with the good-
looking playboy, Miss Frye Boots was not allotted any dialogue. I took it off, quickly, myself.

  After Paul loftily informed the salesman that we would think about it and he and I were back on the street, I tried to catch my breath. “What was that all about?” I yelled, half laughing, half shaking. “How could you just lie like that? Those bracelets were four thousand dollars each! You weren’t going to buy one.”

  “So what?” He shrugged and walked on. “They have nothing to do in there most days anyway. Why shouldn’t we have some fun?” He turned and looked at me. “It was fun trying them on, wasn’t it?”

  I stopped. “Well, yes, now that you mention it, I guess it was.”

  “You can’t let people with money intimidate you, Sandra.”

  “I don’t,” I insisted. But he was right. I did.

  Paul didn’t. He grew up in Bel Air, the ritziest of the ritzy Los Angeles neighborhoods, and his grandfather had made a fortune importing Genoa salami, building an international company that Paul’s father now ran. Before Paul came to Yale, he’d spent his spare time picking up extra money—and extra guys—as a model for Calvin Klein. He went to Hollywood parties with valet parking, and one night he met Diane Keaton poolside, where they laughingly compared their front teeth, and how they both overlapped slightly. Paul was like one of those guys in the liquor ads—money, looks, the world by the balls.

  But he also had humor. And brains. And a huge heart. He cried as easily as my grandmother—at the opera, or seeing a man on a street corner without a coat. After I’d had a fight with Bucky once, early on at Yale, Paul called and I cried and told him I didn’t want to go out that night. Minutes later he rang my bell, flowers in hand, and waited for me to get dressed so that we could go to a show at the Yale Cabaret.