Perfection

by Julie Metz

  Now I understood why the single mothers I’d been hanging around with couldn’t get through school, find satisfying jobs, or carve out time for their private pursuits. We were all just trying to get through the day.

  twelve

  October 2003

  After the terrible dancing I am ready for fighting.

  —OVERHEARD AT A PARTY IN THE EAST VILLAGE, 1987

  (SPEAKER, A SHAGGY-HAIRED,

  CRAGGY-TOOTHED POLISH POET)

  While I contemplated what to do with my house, I had also begun to think about ways to escape the loneliness that had overtaken me since my return from Maine. Now that Tomas was no longer part of my daily life, a kind of panic set in. I’d begun pacing rooms again. I missed his companionship and cursed myself for relying on its comforts. I wondered if it was time to start looking around for someone new, if there was a man, anywhere, someone my age, available, who would be interested in being part of my life with Liza.

  With respect to the mysterious world of men, there was the enormous question of baggage. I saw myself as almost nothing but baggage. Large cruise ship trunks and valises, filled to the brim with old, cracked shoes, moldering clothes, and damp, tearstained letters tied up with ragged rose-colored ribbon. I hoped this was resilient, tough survivor kind of baggage and not Dickensian Miss Havisham baggage. I did not want to wake up in thirty years and find myself in a sunless room, fingering the crumbling remains of my wedding album.

  Actually, I was worried that I might, in a rash moment, take my wedding album and toss it, along with all evidence of my married life, into the fireplace. Liza deserved some mementos of her parents’ marriage, however sadly things had turned out. Just to be sure, I took all the albums and tucked them away in a large dovetail-jointed wooden trunk—one of Henry’s family heirlooms. Henry’s father had hired carpenters in Korea to make several of these trunks to transport belongings for the move back to the United States. I placed the albums inside and sealed the lid with the heavy brass latch, hoping to forget about them and the day they recorded for a time, until I was tough enough to look through them again with either compassion or humor.

  There was the question of trust. I had married the only man I thought I could trust, and this had proved to be a spectacular error in judgment. I didn’t trust myself to choose anymore. The old methodology—he’s cute in a way I like, he’s smart, we have compatible tastes in home decor, he’s well mannered enough to bring home to my family—none of this seemed to apply anymore. I would have to start all over again at zero.

  I’d go about this in a practical way this time. I would not be swayed by superficial qualifications, like immediate physical attraction. This had clearly been my greatest mistake, I reasoned as I recalled the party where I’d met Henry—the dark hallway, how cute he’d looked in the gray sweater and white T-shirt, how charming he was. The charming thing would be the first thing to go. After all, it is charming Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice who turns out to be the low-down scoundrel. And Darcy, Mr. Grumpfest, emerges as the honorable fellow who also, fortunately for our heroine, is the fellow with the big bucks. At least, my whatever-it-had-been with Tomas had shown me that there was nothing wrong with me as a sexual being. Although damaged in some ways, in this way I was intact, ready to flower, perhaps, with someone else.

  There was also the question of age—middle age, that is. Like many women in our culture, which enshrines youth and beauty, I had spent most of my life plagued with varying degrees of self-loathing. I’d come of age during the seventies, when the female aesthetic that continues to dominate fashion strode fully and un-apologetically out of the closet. The skinny, boy-hipped, leggy girls with straight blond hair and blue eyes were appreciated, the perfect display objects for low-slung, ragged-bottomed hiphuggers and skimpy tops. Girls like me—petite and curvy, with dark, curly hair that frizzed on a bad day—we were something else. At my best, dressed up in a 1940s vintage dress with my Mary Quant lipstick, yellow stockings, and platform huaraches, I evoked other time periods. I was not now.

  Since Henry’s death, and the undeniably flattering, albeit temporary, attentions of a handsome twenty-eight-year-old man, I suddenly and surprisingly found myself in a belated love affair with my body. The new body I lived in was light and airy. For the first time in my adult life, I often found myself admiring my body in the mirror. I bought some belly-skimming T-shirts and hip-slung jeans, once again in fashion. The clothes fit, right off the goddamned hanger.

  My body was definitely not “perfect.” My legs hadn’t sprouted another four inches. Cellulite still burbled up and outward where it wasn’t wanted. I tried to avoid certain lighting situations that were guaranteed to produce a feeling of gloom. Bathing suits were to be purchased by mail and tried on in the safe haven of one’s own home. And there was that crinkled belly skin, the souvenir of my pregnancy. But this true friend and loyal companion had carried me through a terrible year. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a fine-looking woman, someone I wouldn’t mind holding and touching. I wanted somebody kind to love and appreciate my body.

  Close inspection in my bathroom mirror revealed that there really weren’t that many wrinkles, yet. One of my brows pulled up in a quizzical way; a wrinkle had formed as a result, adding to the asymmetry of my face. Two “laugh lines” had creased the skin on either side of my mouth. I had to laugh at the irony of that. Laugh lines, indeed. There were new creases around my eyes. I wondered if crying so much had created wrinkles.

  I noticed that Anna’s face was looking—suddenly—much more rested and peaceful.

  “Oh, it’s Botox, my friend,” she told me with a chuckle. “I had this permanent worry line across my forehead. My son thought I was upset all the time.” She gave me the phone number of her dermatologist.

  I longed to erase, if just for the few months’ duration of a magical injection, the effects of this anguished year and the last sad years with Henry. I made an appointment with Anna’s dermatologist, unsure of what she would propose or even what I wanted her to do to me.

  On the train to the city, I ran into an acquaintance. Usually I saw this beautiful woman at the supermarket with her young sons in tow. An occasional fashion model, today she looked the part—her makeup perfect, every shiny brown hair in place, no boys.

  “Wow, you look incredible!” I burst out upon seeing her in a nearby seat. “Are you working today?”

  “I’m going to an audition—nothing wonderful, just catalog work,” she said as I settled myself next to her. She spoke about her modeling career, mostly sidelined after the birth of her sons, emphasizing the workmanlike aspects of the job rather than the glamour. She knew just where she stood and seemed clearheaded and pragmatic.

  “Are you going in for a client appointment?” she asked, while I continued to look at her face, as an object now, wondering how she would do at her audition, wondering how many other women of her age—early thirties perhaps—would audition for the job. My gaze wandered down her length, taking in her long legs in slim jeans, the stylish, well-shined black boots.

  Noticing for the first time a tiny scar on her forehead, just faintly visible under makeup, I wanted to ask her about this blemish, an urge I quickly suppressed, guessing that this was not the best time for her to dwell on any of her flaws. I realized with deep, flinching shame, that I was too sheepish to admit the real purpose of my own city visit.

  “Yes, just work.” Oh, I have a lot of learning to do if I can’t even tell this woman, who earns a living with her face and body, that I am going to have a few wrinkles filled in.

  “How are you and your daughter doing?” she asked me, as many acquaintances had. Breathing deeply, I prepared to launch my short response designed to deflect the subject when, through her mask of makeup, I saw that her brown eyes were warm with genuine concern, though we were not intimate friends. She wanted me to tell her the truth.

  And so, to my surprise, I found myself telling her how we really were doing, how hard the last months had been.
She hadn’t heard much about Henry’s affairs, but I told her. We shared a few stories of marriage and its difficulties, the work of balancing career and motherhood, a challenge she seemed to manage graciously.

  When we arrived at Grand Central, we shared a taxi downtown. At her stop, we said good-bye. I wished her luck and watched for a moment as she strode off in her high-heeled boots; then the taxi continued on to the doctor’s office.

  An hour later, I slid out of the dermatologist’s procedure chair, gently touching my face where the laugh lines had been, still tender from the half dozen needle pricks. The dermatologist, a woman whose placid face suggested she practiced what she preached, said the collagen injections would last four months or so. In the reception area, I glanced briefly at the bill—an astounding eight hundred bucks—and slapped down a credit card. I wouldn’t be able to make a habit of this. On the way to the door, I stopped for a long look in the oval mirror. My younger face looked back at me, the face in a photo Henry had taken when I was newly in love, on a hot city afternoon, gazing at him from across a café table. Wow. Great to see you again. That younger version of me had been optimistic, idealistic even, and on the brink of big change, just as I was now.

  Back home, people said, “Hey, Julie, you’re looking so refreshed and rested.” It was just like a commercial.

  Of course not all body parts can be changed so easily, and mostly we have to live with the package we get born into even as we encounter examples of near-perfect aesthetic design—people who seem to have stepped off a pedestal in a museum.

  In the small Italian seacoast town where I briefly lived when I was twenty, I often found myself waiting at a certain café along the curving main street that surrounded the harbor. In those pre-cell-phone days, with unreliable landline service, everyone did a lot of waiting. The phone booths on a few street corners accepted only the mysterious gettone—a slotted coin, worth so many minutes, if you could correctly estimate the initial charge your call required. If you guessed wrong, the machine digested your coin, requiring another trip to the corner tabacchi to change another thousand lire. No one in Italy ever seemed to be in a hurry. With only the one main street, friends and even my unreliable lover eventually turned up at the café. Rather than fumbling with the gettoni, which risked bringing on fits of homesickness for the comparative efficiency of New York City phone booths, I would take a seat at a small outdoor table and order a coffee while enjoying the inspiring view of the bay and mountains.

  A tourist shop offering flashy swimsuits, sunglasses, candy, and a brand of chewing gum called Brooklyn (the packaging featured a drawing of the famous bridge) adjoined the café. When the shops closed for three hours in the middle of the day, the young salesgirl stepped out into the bright sun to lock up the store.

  This woman had unimaginable legs, long, tan, and tapered. I watched her totter across the cobbled street on turquoise high-heeled sandals, the breeze flipping her teeny tiny miniskirt this way and that, revealing a flash of white bikini bottom. She clearly spent her lunch hours working on that tan. She navigated through the slow-moving traffic of Milanese weekenders and foreign summer sun-worshipers, frequently stopping it altogether as she crossed to the beach side of the curved boulevard.

  Even here, in this beautiful land of beautiful women with beautiful legs, these two specimens were utterly breathtaking, like an authentic Botticelli painting startling the eye in a gallery filled with more than acceptable copies.

  “Una scema, ma due belle gambe,” Giancarlo commented as he arrived at the café and followed my gaze. A stupid girl, but two beautiful legs. His indirect compliment to my other good qualities was reassuring. Maybe in my next life I would get legs like hers.

  Chloe, my good friend, city shopping companion, and adviser on all matters related to young widowhood, said it would be good for me to start dating, in a focused way. She had much experience in this area. Chloe had muddled through four years as a young widow, slowly rebuilding her life. Now she had a good job, one of the last rent-stabilized apartments in Greenwich Village, and, most amazingly, a boyfriend, a really nice boyfriend. She’d met him online. In spite of Chloe’s success, the whole online dating thing sounded awful to me, so unromantic. I still wanted to believe in Fate, despite the fact that She hadn’t done so well by me in the past.

  My alternatives, though, were unpromising. I lived in a small town where the unattached men were the ex-husbands of women I knew. I also knew why the women had divorced their husbands. The discarded men were drinkers, philanderers, pains in the neck, or otherwise shiftless nonproviders. In a few cases, couples had just grown apart and no one was to blame, but I didn’t want to connect myself to any of them.

  And then, worst of all, there was The Crush: a man I’d clapped eyes on one Saturday afternoon in the summer, while loitering with Liza in front of his antiques store during a weekend in Brooklyn. Liza was rummaging in a bin of old kitchen tools he’d set out and held up a few prospects for approval. When I looked up, he was standing in the doorway.

  “Is this your store, then?” I asked, checking him out. Slim, short-cropped hair, a smile that formed pleasing triangles of creases near his eyes—clear blue. Why is it that on men, crow’s-feet are attractive and mature, and on women they’re just reminders that you’re heading into middle age, to be quickly followed by decrepitude?

  “Yup, this is my place.” His soft, lighthearted voice rose slightly at the end of the sentence, with the practiced optimism of a salesman.

  It was one of those crazy things where you look at the guy, and that’s it, you’re done for, and you can’t quite figure out why.

  The Crush violated all the plans I’d made. I wanted to be clearheaded. This was no time for teenage crushes. I adamantly did not want to fall head over heels for anyone. But I bought a bowl and an eggbeater for Liza, my junior chef, mostly to give him a chance to register my existence, to give me a reason to say hello the next time I could create an excuse to pass through the neighborhood.

  Chloe gave me advice as I set up my online “profile.” I listened to her several horror stories about creepy men and weird bungled dates. I chose a photo of myself standing next to Tomas—taken on a day I’d been cheerful. I spent a bemused fifteen minutes Photoshopping him out of the photo—too bad it isn’t this easy to detach people in real life—but resisted doctoring the image in any other way before uploading it to the site.

  I should say that I was completely ignorant about dating. Dating wasn’t what we, or at any rate I, did in the New York City of the seventies. I went to an all-girls prep school, so any boys I met were on weekends at my then best friend Lucy’s house. She went to a different school, rollicking and progressive compared with mine. She lived in a dark and cavernous apartment on East Ninety-sixth Street near Central Park. She had lots of friends and gave parties, or we went to other kids’ parties in exciting, less savory neighborhoods. We drank in bars that didn’t exactly observe the letter or spirit of the underage drinking laws. Later, I might find myself French-kissing some guy I’d met, perhaps on the floor alongside Lucy’s bed, my bare toenail caught awkwardly on the frayed hem of her Indian-patterned bedspread. Occasionally things progressed from that point, but usually I never saw the guy again.

  During my college years, a man had taken me to Windows on the World (I am happy I ate there at least once) followed by the opera. That’s when I understood what a date was supposed to be. Except that I went home with him that night, when I should have asked him to send me home in a cab. So I still didn’t really understand what a date was supposed to be. Six years of misadventures later, I met Henry, who had taken me out for precisely the one restaurant meal before we slept together.

  As I pondered the potential adventures awaiting me, I wished I’d grown up absorbing the dating concept along with my morning Wheaties and milk. Dating. Maybe if I said the word enough times, some understanding would penetrate.

  thirteen

  October 2003–March 2004

  Our heads
are round so that thoughts can change direction.

  —FRANCIS PICABIA, PAINTER AND POET

  “You are so sexy! I’m coming again!”

  Is anyone counting here?

  I was in bed with a sex machine, and not happy about it. Tragicomically and now much too late, I realized that I would have been happier with a good warm hug. I had failed utterly at my first attempt at dating. This was now a pathetic bungle that would require a laundry load of sheets—perhaps boiled—at the rate this guy was going.

  Rich was an intelligent, driven man. These qualities had seemed key a week earlier. I reasoned that, among other flaws, Henry’s despair over work success had contributed in some large part to his “crappy life choices,” as Christine in Oregon had described them.

  Rich had seemed a bit overeager, but I was sympathetic when he told me he’d been single for a while. I knew, though I wasn’t telling, that my own motives were utterly impure. I was a disaster area. All I cared about was getting laid, in a safe manner, perhaps just so that I could tell myself I was really moving beyond Tomas. Imperfect as that situation had been, I had felt connected to Tomas on a level that I knew would take time to find again. Tomas and I had been friends before we became lovers; we had always liked each other as people, and I had loved him genuinely.

  A few weeks before meeting Rich, I began a frank talk with Liza one afternoon after school. I told her that I was lonely and that I wanted to find a boyfriend.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Do I get to choose?”