by Alex Witchel
“Why are you doing this?” I snuffled, pulling on my jacket halfheartedly.
“Because, Sandy, you can’t lock yourself away over a fight that doesn’t mean anything,” he said sensibly. “We just got here. We haven’t explored half of what there is to see. Come on now.”
He bundled me into the elevator, and because it wasn’t quite time yet for the show, we walked up and down Chapel Street, where the Rep was, window-shopping while Paul gave a running commentary on the podunk stores and their contents, comparing them to Fifth Avenue and making me laugh out loud.
Weeks later, near midnight on a Saturday after we had finished working a show, we walked out the theater’s back door and found it snowing, the sky suffused with a dark lavender light. We held hands in the parking lot, our faces tipped upward. We stood there a long time, silent, just smiling at each other and watching.
But most of the time we bantered, characters in what became our movie, delighting ourselves with witty quips or shocking each other with bald comments. I informed him that I was sure I gave a better blowjob than the wimps I saw him with. “Oh yeah?” he challenged. We discussed techniques. That was the beauty of Paul, really. Anything went with him. The freedom! The lack of rules, of even a pretense of propriety!
“Do I look fat?” I asked him once, for the thousandth time, when we were finding seats at the movies.
“No,” he said, quickly assessing my behind. Because if I had, he would have told me. Just then, a twig-thin girl walked by.
“But I’m not as thin as she is,” I wailed.
He shook his head. “That is not attractive,” he said instructively. “If a man wants a little boy, he should get a little boy. But if he wants a woman, he should get a woman.”
While I was at Yale being schooled by my new best friend in the Romano Theory of Sex and Gender, Bucky, the love of my life, had begun working as a junior account executive at Klein Chapin & Woodruff, a huge advertising agency with offices all over the world. He had passed on the chance to work for his father at the small bank where Mr. Ross had spent his own career, and in return, Mr. Ross never could seem to remember the name of the firm Bucky had chosen instead. Though it was known on the street as “KCW,” Mr. Ross referred to it only as “that CW operation.” I found it interesting that it was Klein he seemed to consistently forget.
Almost immediately, Bucky started to look like an executive. His thick, white-blond hair thinned on top, extending his forehead in a Benjamin Franklin sort of way. But less hair only highlighted his sky-blue eyes, which, right on cue, sprouted crow’s-feet. It seemed he had gone from boy to man in an instant. He still went to the gym every day, though, and kept up the bulging muscles in his arms and chest. I couldn’t quite understand the point of it, since he was no longer playing team sports, but it seemed to be a link for him, as it did for so many men, to a time in life when anything was possible. At least that’s what I decided it was. But I had no complaints. Anytime I rested my head against that massive chest, I knew the world could get no safer.
Right on cue, Bucky also took on men’s behavior. He shook hands heartily and laughed at jokes at just the right moment. He and his friends would go out after work to lift weights together and have a beer, but when wine became the new thing, Bucky was lost. One night he was at a steak house with the guys from his office when his boss said, “Why don’t you order the wine, Buck?” Instead of admitting that he didn’t know anything about wine, Bucky clutched, as he called it, and ordered a Sauternes, a sweet dessert wine that cost a fortune. When he told me about it I felt terrible for him, naturally. How was he supposed to know? There we were, all of twenty-two years old, and while I was safely tucked away in the sticks, cramming Aeschylus, there he was, out and about with men who were old enough to be his father. Well, they all made terrible fun of him, so he enrolled in a wine course at Windows on the World where he learned to use words like “woody” and “plummy,” and soon enough, he was collecting his own Château Margaux. I admired his effort.
When it came time for me to finally get my degree from Yale, we were twenty-four, and though Bucky was about to become an account executive, I found myself still at square one. I definitely wanted to work before I got married, but the three years in New Haven had not taught me what I wanted to do next. I was fifteen thousand dollars in debt, and the only thing I had learned was when to add the fabric softener. Sure, I could have gotten a job for twelve thousand dollars a year in a nonprofit theater filling out grant proposals, especially if I was willing to move somewhere like Hartford or Baltimore. Or I could have joined up with a Broadway producer and tried to convince little old ladies to part with their life savings so that a sitcom star could fulfill his dream of playing Shakespeare. Instead, I made the rounds of employment agencies in New York and took typing tests with all the high school dropouts who did much better than me, in spite of their outrageously long nails.
Eventually, I landed at Jolie! I had been an English major at Smith and was reasonably sure I could edit. I would apply the skills I had learned about the administration of actors to the administration of writers and coax them toward their deadlines, building their confidence when they were blocked. Paul was delighted by my decision. “A lady editor,” he marveled. “We must buy you a hat.”
Bucky was equally delighted, whisking me to dinner at Lutèce, where we drank Champagne and trotted out our high school French in anticipation of my new career. “This is a perfect plan for you until we have kids,” he announced, glass in hand.
“Aren’t you rushing things?” I asked playfully, but he put the glass down and stopped smiling and seemed to grow pale with responsibility. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, Sandra,” he said solemnly. “We’ve always talked about our life together, and now that you have such a great job, what I want to do is not to rush things, or you, at all. I’ve had time in New York to establish myself and my career, and I think you deserve the same, without any pressure from me, because I never want you to look back and resent me. I think we should make a plan: that two years from now, on this exact date, we come back here and sit at this exact table, and at that point we take the next step forward. Together.”
I was genuinely moved. Bucky not only loved me, he respected me. He wanted me to have the best opportunities to learn and grow on my own, as he had, even as we remained each other’s strongest support. It was the best of both worlds.
Once I left Yale and began the new job, though, I found a glitch in my joy. I hated being separated from Paul. He had moved back to L.A. to work in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency, the first step on the agent/studio executive/producer path to glory. In a strange way, it was even harder for me to be away from him than it ever had been with Bucky. Almost all my time with Bucky was planned, whether it involved dinner, theater, or the movies. When we were together, he would talk about his job and I would talk about school, and after that the magazine, and we both listened intently before going back to doing what we did until we saw each other again—which for me, for three years, had meant spending all day, every day, with Paul. He was the life I lived while waiting for something better. After he left, I missed him all the time.
But Paul and I spoke almost daily as I got more and more enmeshed in the magazine and my routine of seeing Bucky, without fail, three times a week, unless he was in Minneapolis meeting with the brand manager on the account. We were as happy as it was possible to be, apart. Paul approved of my plan with Bucky and almost before I knew it, Bucky was reminding me that we had a date coming up at Lutèce that he had been looking forward to for two years now.
It turned out to be a magical night. We were both nervous, but Bucky ordered Champagne, and after a few minutes of trying to make small talk, he looked deep into my eyes as his filled with tears. He took my hands in his own sweaty ones and said, “Sandra Berlin, this is a moment I’ve thought about since we were seventeen years old. I love you more than anyone or anything in this life. Will you marry me?”
I managed
to say yes as he hugged me, crushingly hard, and the people at the tables around us all applauded and the owner brought more Champagne, on the house. Bucky and I wiped our eyes and toasted each other and decided, since this was already our luckiest date, to have the wedding exactly one year later.
On that particular Thursday afternoon, however, about three weeks after our engagement dinner, I was waiting for Bucky to call with the details of a cocktail party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a preview of a Rodin exhibition sponsored by one of KCW’s clients. That was the big thing then, having enough money and clout to throw parties at the Met. Gossip columns were filled with stories of wildly extravagant socialites buying fifty thousand roses to decorate the museum’s vast spaces, and I could hardly wait to see what it would look like.
I was especially looking forward to seeing Bucky, who had been extremely busy with work and whose friends we hadn’t seen since before our engagement; he had left almost immediately for a sailing trip to St. Vincent and the Grenadines. I had declined to go with him: I was afraid of sailing, of not being able to control the boat in bad weather and having it tip over. I was actually afraid of anything I couldn’t control, a trait Bucky liked to tease me about. “They named a street after you,” he’d say. “One Way.” I would laugh, and so would he, and then he’d kiss me.
I was so caught up in my reveries about Bucky that when the phone rang, I jumped. It was Laura Lattimore, finally calling back. Laura wrote about art for The Village Voice, and was an occasional Jolie! contributor. Even though I found most of her copy impenetrable, everyone else at the magazine would read it, nod, and murmur, “Yes, of course,” and then we would print it virtually unchanged. I asked her opinion of a few painters, copied down her dense replies, and, after I hung up, edited them into something that sounded vaguely like English so I could look into Miss Belladonna’s perfectly mascaraed eyes the next day and recite them with a straight face.
When the phone rang again and it was Bucky, I practically purred a “hello,” I was so eager to see him.
“We can’t go tonight,” he said abruptly.
“Why not?” My heart felt pinched.
“I have to go to Minneapolis.”
I looked at my watch; it was already three o’clock. “Right now?”
“Yeah, there’s a big-deal dinner tonight, and the two senior guys on the account decided I should be there.”
I sighed. Well, of course. Even though no one at KCW liked to admit it, carting out a direct descendant of Betsy Ross had its distinct dinnertime advantages.
“I’m disappointed,” I admitted. “I was looking forward to seeing Ed.” Ed was one of our friends, who worked on a different account at KCW.
“I’m sorry, Sandy,” Bucky said briskly. “As soon as I’m back, we’ll have dinner anyplace you want. You’ve been so patient these last few weeks, and I really miss you.” He lowered his voice so that no one in his office would hear him and slipped into the baby talk we had perfected over the years. “You know I do, Sanny, don’t you?” he asked.
“Of course I do,” I cooed back. Pimm looked at me over the top of her glasses as if I were deranged. And then I heard one of the guys call out Bucky’s name, so he told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him more, as I always did, and we laughed and hung up.
“Oh, well, my plans for tonight fell through,” I said to Pimm. “Bucky had to go out of town at the last minute.”
“Well, at least you’re not married yet,” she said. “Then you’d have to go anyway, to be a good wife. This way you can just go home and get into bed.”
I nodded, though what she’d said made me think. Maybe I should go anyway, be a good fiancée. It would be fun to see all our friends who I knew would be so happy for us. And Bucky would be impressed to discover what a good sport I was, so readily fulfilling my future wifely duties.
Once that was settled, the afternoon seemed to really drag until I finally realized that it couldn’t possibly be 4:20 every time I looked at my watch. My drugstore Timex had died! After all those years.
I headed toward the fashion closet to look for Mimi Dawson, the assistant in charge of accessories—jewelry, scarves, bags, belts—sent by manufacturers for use in fashion shoots, though the merchandise was borrowed so frequently that it spent more time on the employees than on any model.
I liked Mimi: She had no pretensions about fashion and wore leggings and T-shirts every day. She had a southern accent and kept her hair in two little pigtails. She was skinny and friendly and always in motion, giving new meaning to the phrase “bouncing off the walls.” Mimi was also exceedingly generous with all of Jolie!’s borrowed possessions. When something disappeared, she pretended to look harder for it than anyone else, even though it was she who had lent it out.
I showed her my broken watch, and she flung open the safe and pulled out a drawer.
“Oh, Mimi, I don’t need a Rolex, for heaven’s sake,” I said, laughing.“Don’t you have anything simpler?”
She sorted through the pile. “How about a Cartier?” she asked brightly, handing over a tank watch on a black alligator strap.
“Are you kidding?”
“Why not, sugar?” she drawled. “You deserve it, don’t you?”
I was dumbfounded. People in the South had a completely different rule book than upwardly mobile New York Jews with iffy stock portfolios. Who deserved a Cartier watch?
“The shoot they needed it for is over,” Mimi went on, “and I have until Monday to return it. Just bring it back then.”
I fastened it to my wrist. Wow. It was beautiful.
“I have lunch with Miss Belladonna tomorrow,” I said, “so I’ll return it in the morning. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea and think she doesn’t have to give me a raise.”
Mimi smiled. “Okay, hon, you enjoy it now.” And she slid the tray of watches back into the safe and sprinted to answer the phone all in one swift movement.
I went to the ladies’ room and examined my outfit in the full-length mirror. I had loved the suit I was wearing from the minute I’d seen it at Bonwit Teller: a straight black skirt, a black lace camisole, and a tailored magenta jacket with black velvet buttons and a black velvet collar. It was the perfect sartorial accompaniment to Paul’s gold lighter.
Funny, I thought, shifting a cuff back and forth to examine the watch: When I stopped to think about it, I realized that ever since I’d met Paul, I had been shopping to accommodate him. How could I not? His taste was impeccable, after all. The only attention Bucky paid to my clothes was when I was taking them off.
One change Paul had not approved of recently was my hair color, from plain brown to blond streaks. That had been Bucky’s suggestion. “You’d look sexy,” he insisted.
“I don’t look sexy already?” I asked playfully, but then he laughed and so did I, because while he liked to get up and play tennis at six a.m. and I liked to read until three a.m. and sleep till noon, when we did overlap, our sex was sublime.
Paul had sniffed at the prospect of streaks, deeply uninterested as he was in any notion of sex and me in the same sentence. But I thought the blond hair went well with my hazel eyes, and even though I still hated my nose, no matter what angle I examined it from, I was reasonably at peace with my overall appearance—though after growing up with the specter of Twiggy, I was still convinced I was too fat no matter how much I weighed.
I checked my backside in the mirror. Not bad, actually. Bucky could be proud that I was his fiancée. And I couldn’t wait to see the two-carat emerald-cut diamond engagement ring he had bought for me. It was being sized, he said. The way he described it, it sounded so lovely, elegant without being flashy. I liked that. It’s how I imagined our life together would be. Elegant without being flashy.
I thought about fighting for a cab on Madison but decided against it, and called the magazine’s car service instead. Why not? One assistant had even called a car to help her move apartments—on a Saturday. And no one said a word.
; Once inside the museum, I was surprised to see how crowded it was. So many people—most of whom I did not recognize. I made my way slowly through the exhibition and seemed to be the only one stopping to look at the remarkable display.
“The Gates of Hell occupied Rodin for more than a decade,” a sign read. “The work, a monumental portal covered with sculptural relief representing Dante’s Divine Comedy, was commissioned by the French government in 1880 to be delivered by 1885. However, it was still unfinished at that time and, in fact, was never to be cast in bronze during the sculptor’s lifetime.”
I sighed out loud. I hated anything unfinished.
At the Temple of Dendur, I finally found Ed, who seemed startled to see me. “What are you doing here?” he asked, hugging me distractedly as he glanced around the room. “Isn’t Bucky in Minneapolis?”
“Well, yes, but I thought it might be nice to come in his stead.” I looked at him questioningly.
He colored. “I’m sorry, Sandy. It’s just I’m supposed to be hosting this thing and I’m a little on edge.” He squeezed my arm and left me with a couple I couldn’t stand, Biff and Elaine. What were their last names? She was always weighted down with gold jewelry, and the last time we had had dinner, she crossed her legs and waved her foot back and forth just far enough so that I could see the $220 price tag on the sole of her new shoe. I had hoped that that was the reason I nearly fainted after the appetizer, but the reality was that I had been on one of those crash diets, and after a glass of wine, I decided it would be a good idea if I stepped outside the restaurant. We were at one of those snotty Italian places on the Upper East Side, and to the management’s unending chagrin, I collapsed in the doorway.
“She got a bun in the oven?” Biff had asked Bucky, who just shook his head and tried to explain that I frequently did this, because I was always on a diet. It was true. It took work to stay a size 4, and I was prepared to keep up my end. Being at Jolie! didn’t help matters: All day, every day, we were witness to a nonstop procession of six-foot skeletons with million-dollar contracts parading past us to see Jean-Louis.