Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

  And they were, in fact, a recognizable tribe. Most had an unmistakably hardened body type, an easily recognizable (to an insider), dancer-like posture, and a deliberate, precise gait and physical aspect that reminded me of ballerinas I had known. Indeed, in an “only in Manhattan” development, I often found myself standing next to ABT or New York City Ballet ballerinas and Rockettes during my Physique 57 workouts. They were tall and stunningly supple and sometimes, without even realizing it, I strove to do just as they did—to kick as high, to reach as far, to turn out as beautifully. The bar was so punishingly high at the barre. We expected ourselves to perform as well as professionals because our physical selves, like our motherhood, had become professionalized. Beyond an identity, it was a calling, a vocation, something to excel at.

  My body did, in fact, change quite quickly and remarkably. Sure, I still peed when I coughed. But from the outside, I was altered and, by Manhattan standards, “improved.” My arms were sinewy and defined—a gay male friend remarked at lunch, when I wore a sleeveless blouse, “Nice guns!” My tummy was not just flatter—it was taut, with muscular shadows and indentations. For once in my life, I wasn’t self-conscious about my thighs. And my bottom was, if I did say so myself, newly pert.

  My husband was surprised and pleased. I had always been relatively thin and blessed with a good metabolism, so I didn’t have to worry about my figure a lot. But now I had more energy during the day, and slept better at night. As a result I was in a better mood, and much better company than I had been in the immediate post-baby haze. Given all this, I became a proselytizer, trying to convert as many friends as I could, which was not hard to do when they saw and heard about all the benefits I had reaped. With a few smiling, happy girlfriends in the classroom with me to blot out all the unfriendly self-absorption, this exercise routine was, for my thirty-five dollars per session, perfect.

  We decided to rent a house out of the city for the summer, in the Hamptons. I would go out for the whole summer to be with the kids and write, courtesy of a sitter who came daily to lend a hand, and my husband would spend weekends with us there, working during the week in the city. “The Hamptons” is a beachy area at the far eastern tip of Long Island—but it is a mythical place, too, and for many, a dream. While plenty of perfectly ordinary people live there year round or visit, there is enough superaffluence on the “East End” that the standards of wealth are utterly skewed. Twenty-million-dollar (and up) waterfront mansions with private screening rooms, five-thousand-bottle wine cellars, helipads, six car garages, private Pilates studios, and even private synagogues are not so unusual. Not a few of my older son’s school chums had such “weekend/summer” places. Our Hamptons rental was, in comparison, bare-bones modest: a three-bedroom affair with a pool and a shady backyard in a leafy suburban enclave with a community bay beach. I couldn’t have been happier that first day as my older son rode his bike along the quiet street while I followed behind with the baby, who craned his neck from his stroller, mouth agape. He was hearing birds for the first time. Adding to the idyllic aspect of this summer that unspooled before us, for me, was the knowledge that there was a Physique 57 studio within striking distance. Driving rather than walking to class would be a fun excursion every other day or so, I figured.

  The next morning I headed off to class—and an unexpected shock. I showed up a good fifteen minutes early, but the parking lot was already jammed. As I rolled along looking for a space on the gravelly hill leading up to the studio, a woman peeled around the corner in a black Maserati, swinging into my half of the road and nearly broadsiding me. We both slammed on the brakes and then she flipped me off, revved her engine, and roared by. A blonde in a black Range Rover behind me took umbrage at my shocked, split-second pause and leaned on her horn, yelling, “Come on. Move already!” A woman wearing a vivid purple tank top in a red Porsche 911 convertible raised her hands in exasperation, shaking them near her face, which was twisted into a rictus of rage, as I pulled into a spot—who knew what her beef was.

  Rattled and hustling to make my way into the studio, I found a space on the floor, and was quickly surrounded—by the woman from the black Maserati, the woman from the black Range Rover, and the woman from the red Porsche. What on earth, I wondered, made them feel they could be so hostile toward the very people they knew were likely to exercise right next to for an hour? Maybe, I hypothesized, it was the fact that once they arrived, they were so self-absorbed, so focused on perfecting their bodies, that others literally did not exist. Now, while we huffed and puffed and pretended no one else was there, I noticed that I was also surrounded by big, enhanced breasts. And supersculpted cheekbones. And big round faces, taut with filler. The Hamptons, it seems, was ground zero for a hyperambitious, hypercompetitive culture of body display and forever-young faces. While women on the Upper East Side wanted to look buff, those who flocked to the Hamptons wanted to look buff in a bikini while surrounded by the twenty-something models and fitness instructors who came here every summer to party and find rich boyfriends. Now the bar was so high, I could no longer see it, let alone hope to reach it. But my peers were not giving up so easily. Aging, like a bad birthday, was unfortunate, a lousy break—and something to be overcome with effort, commitment, and zeal.

  Another thing that piqued my interest at the Hamptons Physique 57 outpost was that it shared physical space with Soul Cycle. Both outfits had their studios in a converted barn on Butter Lane in Bridgehampton. Now that I was fighting them for parking spots, I began to pay closer attention to this other tribe. From what I could tell, they were just like us in their intensity, commitment, and strong identification with their clan. And, sure, we all wore the same tight exercise pants, sometimes with lines crisscrossing the derriere, drawing attention to our bottoms in a way that put me in mind of the bright pink estrus displays of nonhuman female primates. “Look at me! I’m in heat!” our spandex-encased, highlighted bottoms seemed to scream. But the similarities ended there. For one thing, the Soul Cyclers were clubbier, if that was possible, because they were chummier—with each other. But not anyone else. I learned this the hard way when I said hello to a group of Soul Cycle moms I thought I recognized from home—and was roundly ignored.

  Their tribal allegiance also extended to their uniforms, which bonded them together while setting them apart from us. While we were wannabe ballerinas, they were wannabe biker chicks, rich mommies who, improbably and astonishingly enough, dressed like gangsters. The first time I saw a woman sporting a red handkerchief folded and tied LA-gangland-style around her head and a pair of tight exercise pants that said POSSE down the leg, I wanted to sidle up to her and whisper, “I saw you at Margie Levine’s daughter’s bat mitzvah at Temple Emanu-El last month. You are so not a Blood or a Crip!”

  It wasn’t just what they wore or how they acted that set the Soul Cyclers apart from us Physiquers. It was what they did. They bought bikes in the studio or studios of their choice, at up to eight thousand dollars per year for one in the front row. In class, they yelled and groaned and shouted with abandon as they spun to deafening, pounding music. They sweated. They swore. For all I knew, they farted. They let it all go, getting in touch with their ecstatic inner fabulous gangster stationary bike rider. One woman who did both classes explained to me that while Soul Cycle was a sweaty nightclub/hot yoga class mash-up (they turned the lights out in the room, and spun by the light of a candle), Physique 57 was an uptight girls’ school.

  The sense that they are wilder and more fun and cooler, the Birkin to our Kelly, is clear in one of the most widely told stories about Soul Cycle. Legend has it that a mother at my son’s exclusive nursery school, married to a billionaire financier and notorious womanizer, discovered her true self at Soul Cycle. Miserable in her marriage, it was said, she took up the spin, fell for her female instructor, left her husband, and lived and cycled next to her Soul Mate at the front of the class at the East Side studio happily ever after. That story says it all. They were wild a
nd brash and experimental, and we were straitlaced and risk averse. They took chances, and let their freak flag fly, while we took careful sips from our BPA-free water bottles. They were lesbians and we were straight. Or, they were butches on stationary Harleys, and we were femmes in kitten heels.

  I won’t lie—I thought the Soul Cyclers were a little too too. Queen Bee was a Soul Cycler, and that alone would have clinched it for me. But, having lived downtown for years, I must admit I also snickered internally at my sense (which could have been entirely wrong) that many of the Soul Cycle mommies seemed to believe exercise could make them not just fitter but cooler and edgier. Give me a break, I thought when they hooted like wannabe subversive rappers and called each other “thug.” They reminded me of teenaged suburban girls piling on the black leather and taking Metro-North or the Long Island Railroad or the Path into the city for the evening, in a bid to be tougher and more countercultural than they were. I’d rather be mistaken for a prissy matron, I thought when I saw them fist bumping outside class, than try too hard. So go ahead and misunderstand and underestimate me. It’s true: in my Physique 57 loyalty, I had kind of gone around the bend.

  But however you looked at Physique 57 and Soul Cycle—two very different versions of exercise and “female-ness” available to the tribe I study—both are a lot of work. And both confer an identity, a fantasy that being there doesn’t just elevate your heart rate and make you fitter, but actually changes who you are. I could not stop thinking, that summer, of the girls who apprenticed as geishas in pre-WWII Japan. Self-isolated, rigidly hierarchical, and punitively demanding, the okiya where they were trained by older geishas was a entirely separate world, one with its own rules, beliefs, and codes of beauty and conduct. It took years of hard work and assiduous, dedicated study to master the effortless-seeming, highly choreographed rites and rituals of geisha-dom, to learn to be beautiful in “the geisha way.” But after this process, the girl was transformed from an ordinary person into a “flower.” She was the most desirable of all things to men, a flawless hostess and ideal companion, an incarnation of the most lauded cultural ideal of womanhood. And so she earned the admiration of an entire society.

  All this working out, all this zealous, dedicated striving to be a particular kind of fabulous, fit, and chic Manhattan Geisha with children, all this identity and ambition tied up in your exercise practice, would have been unfathomable to my mother and her generation. She and her peers dieted. After having babies, they survived on black coffee and Special K with skim milk, cantaloupe, melba toast, and low-fat cottage cheese for a period of weeks or months. Later in life they did fast walking, or perhaps they tried jogging. But mostly, they watched their weight by watching what they ate. For them, it was hard to be hip over thirty. They were given, and gave themselves, permission to let themselves go a little bit at a certain point. Sure, they went out and they had fun. But they were tired, and they usually didn’t have full-time or even part-time nannies, owing to economics and ideology, and many of them looked like it. By the time they were in their mid-thirties, they might even let their hair go gray.

  Nothing could be more foreign to the tribe I studied and lived among. Not for them the giving up. Ever. Not for them the languid, passive, not-eating of the past. Theirs was an active and engaged quest for thinness, one predicated on always doing. Like geishas learning the arduous tea ceremony or the rules of sophisticated conversation, the women all around me were willing to practically kill themselves in their quest to look like they had the effortlessly perfect, graceful bodies of twentysomething nulliparas. As for food, fat-free and low-cal was pathetically passé. It had to be organic, biodynamic, detoxifying, and antioxidant-rich. It had to work as hard for us as we worked on our bodies, or we would just skip it. No one knows repeated rejection more intimately than a server proffering canapés at an Upper East Side or East End cocktail party. His life is No. No thank you. Not for me. No. No thanks. Nope.

  Why? What was the point of all this effort, this endless fighting and trying and depriving and especially all this working on and working at our selves? After all, the men on the Upper East Side and the East End didn’t really bother to flirt, or hold doors open, or look at you the way men did in Rome or Paris or anywhere else in the world. In fact, the extremely successful men of the Upper East Side and the Hamptons always seemed a little distracted and bored, because they were—by the endless smorgasbord of stunning women all around them, all the time, preening and primping for their benefit. More than one European girlfriend remarked to me that men here seemed always to be looking beyond you, to see if there was a woman who was better or prettier or more important than you at the party or in the room. That was part of the reason we tried so hard, I suspected. The mixed-up numbers, the glut of beautiful young and young-looking-for-their-age women everywhere you looked, had changed everything about how men and women related in my world. Ratcheting up the display of their bodies, recourting their husbands and attracting the glances of other men was, conceivably, an attempt to cut through all the noise and make an impression on men who were utterly habituated to physical beauty.

  And yet, this explanation failed to account for one of the most remarkable social realities of summer life on the East End. Like the Physique 57 and Soul Cycle classes themselves, the whole place was astonishingly and comprehensively sex-segregated. Women came out in June, the second school let out, to set up house with the kids and the nanny. Husbands went back and forth on the weekends, but wives ran the show during the week. Everywhere you looked in the Hamptons, as far as the eye could see, there were women, women, women. Even when the men were there, the women of the tribe I studied often eschewed their company in favor of girls’ night out or an all-women’s evening trunk show or a nighttime charity purse auction to benefit a school or battered-women’s shelter. At dinner parties I went to, it was not unusual for men and women to sit at separate tables, even tables in different rooms. In spite of all the hot bodies artfully displayed, there was not a lot of sexiness in the air. In fact, there was a remarkable absence of it. “Somebody had better flirt with me,” I used to say to my husband before we headed out for the night in Manhattan or the Hamptons. I was stunned by the lack of playful interactions between men and women. What, I wondered, was the point of life and having a body you worked on like crazy, if you didn’t have fun flirting? Utterly unlike geishas, the women I studied gave the impression that they were somehow above things like flirting. Like geishas, however, they were above sex. Sure, they had babies, so we knew they had had sex. But their bodies, put through such rigorous paces, tended to so meticulously, turned out so carefully, were purified and not for earthly pursuits.

  In fact, the exercise and careful attention to dress seemed to take the place of sex in fundamental ways. Women were too tired, too stressed, too aggravated for sex in Manhattan, they all seemed to agree when we talked about it over dinner or drinks. And once out here, removed from the stressors of the city, buffered by the beach and lovely weather, their kids in camp all day or even at sleepaway for weeks, rested and relatively happy, they were removed from men. The whole place put me in mind of a menstrual hut and in fact, the women all spent so much time together all summer long that our periods frequently synchronized. My identification with the tribe deepened with every exercise class and trip to the juice bar after, with every ladies’ luncheon and evening “event.” Compared to our girlfriends, our husbands were unfamiliar to us at summer’s end.

  This, I learned, was their code. They strove equally to be beautiful for the men who were not there, and for the women who were. They did it to bond with their fellow tribe members, but also to measure up to, and to take the measure of others, day by day, evening by evening, event by event, class by class. They were like stunning red male cardinals, or breathtaking male peacocks, feathers spread, ready, always, to be seen. A beautiful, fat-free body and a forever-young face were prestigious “gets,” to be sure. But they were also requisite uniforms, a corporea
l version of the grippy socks or handkerchief headbands women wore to class or the paddleboards they carted in the back of their Range Rovers. My body wasn’t exactly my own, it seemed to me at summer’s end. It belonged to the tribe, too. It was for working on and working at and improving, tirelessly, ceaselessly, endlessly, as hard as you could, for as long as you could stand it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Girls’ Night In

  Fieldnotes

  The natives seem to have accepted me. After many months of observing their tribal ways, countless attempts to mimic and participate in their rites and rituals, and numerous overtures of friendship on my part, the hazing process may have ended. I have been invited to a gathering of high-ranking females at the dwelling hut of a wealthy and powerful chieftain and his wife.

  Most tribal events are comprehensively sex-segregated. Events inside and outside one’s personal dwelling appear to be opportunities for females to bond; build coalitions via social inclusion, social exclusion, and gossip; and reaffirm their place and the place of others within the dominance hierarchy. In these contexts, self-presentation—including adornment of the body with particular textiles and of the face with specific pigments and enhancements—is of utmost importance.

  THE INVITATION came by email. “I don’t know if you got my voicemail on your cell,” the mom from my son’s class wrote. “But I haven’t heard from you. I’d love to have you join for dinner next Thursday night at my place. Some fun girlfriends. LMK, Rebecca.”