“It’s no big deal. I have it too,” I said. “Don’t bleach your pillowcases and make sure your detergent is unscented! But anyway, I think you’ll look better in cooler colors like blue or green. Oh my God! Do you know what you should try?” Almost imperceptibly she shook her head. “Purple! You should try purple! See, you have really pretty green eyes. A lot of people don’t know this, but purple brings out green! Get yourself a purple blouse—like a deep aubergine—and I guarantee people will compliment your eyes. All. Day. Long.”
She seemed to perk up a smidge at the idea. “I never thought of that,” she said.
“That’s why I’m here! Now, let’s move on to you.” The next girl was the heaviest of the bunch, probably a 14, which is not obese by any stretch but a solid five sizes larger than the average female magazine editor working in New York City. “I feel like your proportions are just slightly off.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“I’ll explain. See how your tunic is coming down past your tush? That makes your torso look longer than your legs. You’ve got great legs! Let’s show them off a bit. Look for tops that hit at mid-hip. That will keep the leg line long, making you look taller and leaner.”
“Thank you,” she said. The sound of my own voice was making me ill. While everything I was saying was technically true, it still felt like complete bullshit.
“And now you . . .” I turned to the one who had asked my opinion in the first place. She stood with her right hand on her hip and her right knee slightly bent in a perfect, and most probably rehearsed, local-beauty-pageant bevel. Her closed-mouth smile told me she was confident that her outfit—expertly distressed jeans, a simple white V-neck blouse, a cropped tweed jacket with metallic threading, and snakeskin pumps—was flawless. And it was. Everything about her looked expensive, right down to her dyed-blond roots. But for some reason, I just could not tell her so. Perhaps it was because she had asked for my opinion knowing full well that she was dressed better than her colleagues. Had she only asked, “Did I pass?” I would have said, “With straight As, girl!” But she didn’t. She had used the word we and implicated two, possibly innocent, bystanders. I toyed with the idea of telling her she looked like she was trying too hard, but that would have been a lie. She looked effortlessly chic, the bitch.
Then I noticed the mole.
She had one of those puffy, three-dimensional moles—the kind that nice girls from good families with overbearing mothers have removed by a dermatologist—on her décolletage. And the diamond (real or fake, I couldn’t tell) pendant shaped like an asymmetrical heart dangling from the baby chain around her neck was stuck to it, off-kilter, when it should have been hanging straight down. I felt simultaneously relieved and saddened. The former because she was not as perfect as she projected, and I was perceptive enough to realize it. The latter because I was certain this mole was standing between her and true love. I could imagine a man saying to her, innocuously but perhaps recklessly, “Why don’t you get that taken care of?,” which she would find either controlling or shallow. And so she would break up with him, despite the fact that he was otherwise quite caring and maybe just a bit mole-phobic. It’s a little fucked up, but that’s the way my mind works. Sometimes dumb stories just pop into my head about people. For all I know I could be psychic. Or psychotic.
I must have been looking at her chest for too long or with a quizzical expression that she asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Your necklace,” I said. I couldn’t tell her it was stuck to her mole, but I had to say something. “The chain’s about an inch too long.”
“Too long?”
“The pendant. It’s competing with the neckline of your blouse. If you just raised it up a little bit, your whole look would be . . . cleaner.”
She touched the pendant without looking at it and uttered an annoyed grunt. The pendant fell away from the mole and dropped into its intended place. The other two editors looked at each other, and I got the feeling I had made everyone uncomfortable.
“Other than that,” I said, “you’re a star! Can I get you guys another drink?”
“No,” she said. “We’re heading out.”
I told them it had been nice chatting with them, which was neither lie nor truth, and headed back to the folding table with a sheet over it serving as the bar. As I waited for the gin and tonic I had ordered from the rented bartender, an actor by his generic good looks, another woman I didn’t recognize asked, “How many women at this party have asked you to critique their outfits?”
“Eight or so. Slow night.”
“Must be exhausting.” She said it so earnestly I knew she was kidding. With her wavy auburn hair, wide-set blue eyes, and big smile, she reminded me of Cate Blanchett playing Katharine Hepburn.
“You have no idea.”
She smiled and modeled her own clothes with a spin. “So, what do you think?”
“You’re not nearly as dumpy as everyone says.” She gave a fake pout. “I’m kidding. You look fabulous,” I said. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’m Cheryl from Redbook!”
As it turned out, I did know her. She had interviewed me several times via telephone for a monthly makeover column she wrote about participants on the show. She wasn’t one of those writers who asked five thousand questions over the course of an hour for a two-hundred-word story only to painfully misquote me in print. So, she was my new favorite person in the room.
“Am I happy to see you,” I said. “Do you want to get out of here by any chance? I’m not sure I can take another minute of this.”
“I’m done too,” Cheryl said, and we grabbed our things. As we were walking out of the studio, my phone rang. Rick, my on-and-off boyfriend of two years, was calling from our apartment a block away. He asked what time I was coming home and I explained that I was going to grab a drink in the neighborhood with an editor I knew. Never one to pass up the opportunity for a cocktail (he and I weren’t too different that way), Rick asked if he could join us and I agreed.
The bars closest to the studio were all filled with bankers who also worked nearby, and I wasn’t in the mood for so much heterosexuality. So we walked a few blocks north to a quiet restaurant I had passed several times but never entered. Rick met us there, and before Cheryl and I could finish our drinks, he was bored.
“We should go to Beige,” he said.
Beige was gay night at Bowery Bar, where every Tuesday scores of good-looking, immaculately groomed, professional men, many of whom worked in the fashion and entertainment industries, would meet for drinks and act like they were better-looking, more fashionable, and richer than they actually were. When I was in the right mood, I kind of enjoyed it. Cheryl said she would probably just head on home, but Rick convinced her it would be fun. He had that effect on people, convincing them they were on the verge of having a truly spectacular time.
We arrived by taxi a little past 10 p.m. and the bar was busy, not jam-packed but headed that way. Beige usually reached maximum capacity around midnight. While Rick headed to the bar to order us drinks, I said to Cheryl, “Let’s play a game.”
“OK. Go.”
“Your phone rings right now,” I said. “It’s God. You know this because the caller ID says ‘GOD’ and because your phone has turned all glowy and sparkly. You answer, and God says, ‘CHERYL! YOU MUST SLEEP WITH ONE MAN IN THIS BAR TONIGHT! THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE DEPENDS ON IT!’ Then God hangs up and your phone goes back to normal. Now, look around the room. Who’s it gonna be?”
“Can I tell God I’m seeing someone right now?”
“God knows and doesn’t care.”
“Does God care that no one in this bar wants to sleep with me?”
“Let’s pretend a few of them do.”
“I choose celibacy.”
I was a little miffed that Cheryl wasn’t playing by the rules, but I cut her some slack because she was the only woman in a bar full of homos. I was more annoyed that she hadn’
t asked me whom I would sleep with if the human race depended on it, but I was determined to play nonetheless. I scanned the room until I spotted the back of some guy’s head that struck me as the most attractive thing I had ever seen. “That one. In the orange stripes,” I said.
“What?”
I remembered she wasn’t really into the game. “I choose that guy in the stripes. On the other side of the bar. To save the world and all.”
“I can’t see him from here,” Cheryl said.
The funny thing was, I couldn’t either. I could see he was tall, about my height, with black hair shorter on the sides than on the top, and wearing an orange, vertically striped, button-front shirt I was fairly certain was by Paul Smith. And then, as if he could hear every word of our conversation, the guy across the room turned around, a full 180 degrees, and looked me directly in the eyes.
I put my hand up to my mouth, so he couldn’t read my lips. “He’s looking at me,” I said to Cheryl. “There’s no way he could have heard me, is there?”
“Absolutely not. I can barely hear you and I’m standing right next to you.”
“Wow. He’s even better-looking from the front.”
Rick returned with our cocktails. “I was just talking to a guy at the bar who’s a big Broadway producer,” he said. “I told him he should cast me in his next show. You should meet him.”
“You’ll probably have better luck getting cast if you’re by yourself,” I said. “We’ll stay here.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll thank you when I win my Tony.” Rick returned to the producer, I assumed, though I didn’t look back to confirm it. I had stopped tracking his whereabouts in bars months ago. This was Rick’s milieu, drinking and flirting in a sexually charged atmosphere. With big arms and high cheekbones, he always received considerable attention from strangers, which he enjoyed, too much for my taste. If one drunken college student told him he looked like Jude Law on a Friday night, Rick would be firmly ensconced on Cloud Nine for the remainder of the weekend. If two people over the course of an evening happened to remark upon the same resemblance, he’d talk for a week about moving to Hollywood. The exponential effect of compliments on his mental state intrigued the hell out of me, and I wondered if I secretly paid ten people to tell him he looked like Jude Law over the course of a random day, would his head just explode into a million tiny pieces like a balloon full of glitter?
“You never tell me I’m attractive,” he once told me during a fight. I answered, “That’s because you seem so convinced of it already.” I thought it would sting more than it apparently did, although in retaliation he did call me an “ice queen,” which made me laugh.
In a bar filled with men in designer clothes, mostly black fitted jackets, I began to feel a little self-conscious. I hadn’t planned on going out for gay drinks and regretted not changing into something more evening-appropriate. It was mid-April and warming up, so I wore a white button-front shirt and a coral sweater by Reiss with two wings printed on the back, one on each shoulder blade. I’m a harbinger of spring, I told myself. (An older woman once called me that when I wore a turquoise paisley tie to a ballroom dancing lesson on a February evening in Boston, and it stuck with me.) It crossed my mind that the cute guy was smiling in my direction because he and his friends were making fun of my outfit, but he was wearing orange, so that would have been a little hypocritical, and he didn’t strike me as the type.
Then the cute guy started to walk toward me.
“Oh my God, Cheryl. He’s coming over here.” My boyfriend was ten feet away from me at the bar. Perhaps I had done something to lead this other—my God, he’s really handsome—guy on and now I’d have to awkwardly extricate myself from an inevitable exchange. “Shit. Fuck. What do I do?”
“First, you should wash that mouth out with soap,” Cheryl said, nonplussed.
As he maneuvered his way around clusters of chatting men, the cute stranger, I realized, wasn’t moving of his own volition. One of the guys he had been speaking with on the other side of the bar was dragging him by the elbow toward me. He doesn’t want to talk to me, I thought. Someone is making him talk to me. Oh, the indignity. Please, God, kill me now. Is this retribution for that dumb game? Forgive me my sins because I’m a schmuck.
His friend placed him directly in front of me with a smirk and asked me, “Are you Clinton Kelly?”
“I am,” I said.
“I think you know my friend . . .”
Switch!
* * *
At this point, dear reader—as jarring as it may be to your system—I invite you to travel back two years in time with me. I promise we’ll return to the man in the orange striped shirt very soon. But first a little more about the path upon which I had been traveling.
I was working as the executive editor of a men’s fashion trade magazine called DNR (“It’s the men’s version of Women’s Wear Daily except it’s a weekly,” I would say when explaining my career at cocktail parties) and accepting the rare freelance writing assignment when it came up. This particular week, my friend Kevin had asked me if I would write an article and direct a photo shoot about indoor rock climbing for a magazine bankrolled by Philip Morris. I said no, but he talked me into it because we had a history. And because he had money to spend.
For several years I had worked for the custom publishing company that produced the magazine. And even though I wasn’t exactly passing out free loosies to twelve-year-olds in the local playground, while employed there I had struggled morally with being a cog—albeit a minuscule one—in the Big Tobacco machine. But the pay was solid for the amount of effort the job required, and the magazine, an oversized action-adventure glossy, was actually quite good. The average person would have assumed it was a newsstand magazine like Outside or Men’s Journal, except there was always a Marlboro ad (usually involving some combination of cowboys, horses, and buttes) on the back, which would have been illegal in a consumer mag. Editorial guidelines forbade any mention of tobacco or smoking, and it was sent without charge to men over the age of twenty-one—approximately 5 million of them—who, somehow or another, had ended up on the Marlboro mailing list.
I once asked a marketing executive how Philip Morris acquired all these names and addresses. She told me, more churlishly than I would have preferred, “A great many people express an interest in Marlboro-branded merchandise.” Marlboro-branded merchandise? This information blew my mind. How much does someone need a Marlboro beer koozie that they’re willing to tell the tobacco company where they live?
I could probably report the story and write it all in one day, Kevin said; it was just one thousand words for which he would pay me three thousand dollars. At that point in my life, with credit-card and student-loan debt slowly crushing my soul like an empty milk carton, I would have done a lot worse for a lot less. I had heard the indoor rock wall at Chelsea Piers, a high-end sports complex on Manhattan’s West Side, was the best in the city, so I called and asked to speak to someone in their marketing department. The phone rang and a male voice answered.
“This is Damon,” the male voice said.
I explained that I was writing a freelance article that would be seen by a lot of people for a magazine he had most certainly never heard of and asked if I could use the wall for a photo shoot and one of the instructors as a source. With a little professional persuasion he agreed, so the next week I took a morning off of work. I figured I would report the story in half a day and write it in one evening.
I wasn’t expecting to be so flustered when we met in person. In his white polo shirt and blue chinos, standing in the middle of the weight-training floor, he looked less like a marketing exec than the sexy phys ed teacher I had always wished for in high school.
“Have you ever worked out here?” Damon asked as he escorted me to the climbing area.
“Yeah, just once,” I said.
“Why just once?”
“I took a group fitness class,” I said. “I forget the name. Extreme Turbo Power or
some shit like that. Everyone in it was ridiculously in-shape.”
“You look like you’re in pretty good shape,” he said.
“Thanks, I’ve been working out. But this was nuts. Everyone in the place was ripped. And the class was all running and jumping and free weights. It was too much. I totally barfed.”
He opened his eyes wide and I noticed they were green. “You barfed in the class?”
“No, thank God. I had to run to the bathroom in the middle of it. I puked, washed my face, and walked right out the door. Never came back.”
He laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe you should try another class, on the house.”
“Oh, hell no. Still too embarrassed. I’m only here for the money.”
When we reached the climbing wall, the photographer was setting up his equipment, which left Damon and me standing there with nothing to do. He asked me how I became a writer, and I told him I got a master’s degree in journalism because I thought it would pay the bills. I asked him how he got into marketing for a sports complex, and he told me he had always been an athlete so it seemed a natural fit. At one point, he told me he rowed at Brown and I, completely confused, asked, “Rode what?”
He looked at me as if my head had suddenly turned into a canned ham. “A boat.”
“You rode a boat?”
“Yeah. As in crew.”
“Oh, rowed!” I said. “I thought you meant you rode—R-O-D-E—like horses or a bicycle or something. Not R-O-W-E-D.” I realized that the more I kept talking the more insane I sounded.
As if to save me from further embarrassment, Damon said, “Look, I think you’re all set up here. I have to go back to my office, but send me a copy of the story when it’s printed.” He handed me his business card.
I looked down at it. “Will do, Damon Bayles.”
He looked shocked. “You pronounced my name right.”
“Damon is a pretty easy name.”
“No, Bayles. Most people say Bails. But you said Bay-liss.”
“Oh, I didn’t even think to pronounce it any other way,” I said. “When I was growing up, I used to work at a restaurant called Danfords Inn, and it was on Bayles Dock.”
I Hate Everyone, Except You Page 10