I'll Eat When I'm Dead

by Barbara Bourland

  Finally Hutton gave up and walked home. He stripped off his work clothes as soon as he walked into the foyer, changing into his running gear. The July evening was sweltering—nearing ninety-five degrees—but he looped around the park three times, punishing himself, pushing harder on every lap. His sneakers hit the pavement until his legs shook and his T-shirt was soaked through. He slowed down each time he passed 170 Ocean, but the building remained dark.

  After a long shower he tried to keep himself busy with unpacking between obsessively checking his phone. After two hours and two doses of scotch, he’d emptied nearly a dozen boxes, collapsing their corpses into a tidy pile by the door and roping them neatly with twine for the super. The apartment barely looked different, having swallowed his meager belongings into cabinets and closets without effect. He was finally moved in.

  Cat still hadn’t called back. He suspected she never would.

  Why am I so obsessed with her? Why do I feel so responsible? She was just another magazine girl, he told himself; there were a thousand of them in the city, beautiful and shallow, obsessing over clothes and makeup all day, posting Photogram images of donuts they would never eat. All of them from good families, all of them educated and poised, all of them working at some job for $35K a year until they met a banker who would be proud to say “My wife used to work at a magazine” for the rest of their lives. Hutton could have his pick of any of them, he told himself.

  Exhausted, clutching his phone, he crawled into bed and sent a text to Callie:

  u back?

  He fell asleep waiting for her to respond.

  Callie Court was at that very moment having a late-night cocktail at Peacock Alley with Whig Beaton Molton-Mauve Lucas, who had very kindly insisted that Callie call her Lou. They were perched on velvet stools in the artfully darkened bar, sharing a charcuterie plate—well, Callie was, anyway—and drinking Negroni cocktails. The bartender loitered at the other end of the bar, reappearing only when Lou summoned him with a flick of her polished fingers.

  When Callie had landed at Newark that evening, she turned her phone on to find a breathless voicemail from her agent. RAGE wanted her for an exclusive pre-resort collection shoot in early September—during Fashion Week. There was one caveat: the editor running the shoot wanted to meet her as soon as possible.

  RAGE represented the first real opportunity to make her defining image something other than the Dalí tit-crease haunting her at every bus stop and subway station, so she had cabbed it home, showered, and changed into a simple black silk T-shirt dress, then grabbed another car back into the city to meet Lou. She’d waited at Peacock Alley—the bar inside the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria—for over an hour.

  As she sat alone, drinking water and scribbling in the black Moleskine notebook she used as a diary, Callie wondered if Lou would really be as glamorous as she looked in all those spreads in RAGE over the years, if she’d be as tiny. If she’d have that look of expensive frailty, like an antique vase, that all terribly rich women wear like moisturizer.

  Lou hadn’t disappointed. She’d swanned into the bar around eleven thirty, begging forgiveness for her lateness in a filmy lilac georgette dress that had probably cost Callie’s annual rent. Her tiny feet were banded into metallic Valentino sandals, and she wrapped them around the stool’s legs like little vines. She ordered for them both—without looking at the menu—before launching animatedly into her vision. Callie just sat back and watched the show as Lou gestured and squeezed and winked her way through her pitch, her big booming voice still managing to be loud in a whisper.

  “It’ll be part public performance and part staged shoot,” Lou was saying. “I want the background to be made up of boldfaced names, so we’ll be doing this after the Dior presentation—literally everyone will be there. I need a girl who can really act, not just pose. Your agent did send your clips, and Jonathan texted me some videos he made of you, which were very compelling.” She swirled her cocktail, the orange Campari casting a glow into the enormous stack of rubies she wore on her right hand.

  Callie looked down, unconsciously covering the panther tattooed on her ring finger.

  “I’d love to,” she said with absolute sincerity. “I’ll do whatever you ask. You don’t need to explain anything to me.”

  “Well, I just wanted to…I’m sure you’ve heard about my colleagues,” Lou said quietly.

  “Yes,” Callie said, surprised that she had brought it up. “I know them, actually. Not well, but Cat lives around the corner from a bar I work at, and I went to college with Bess.”

  Lou looked shocked—I guess she didn’t really expect the fat girl with the hand tattoo to intersect her professional circles—but recovered quickly, pulling her face back into a sympathetic facade that Callie guessed was meant to telegraph seriousness.

  “I’d love to. Really. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old plus-size model, you know? We work longer and we work older than straight-size girls, but I’m ready to take risks. I’ve done enough catalogs to last a lifetime.”

  Lou grinned, the bar’s low lighting glinting off her enormous veneers. “That’s settled, then. We’ll have to get your measurements taken by our coordinator to start getting samples made in your size from the various houses. You’re the first plus-size model we’ve ever worked with at RAGE.”

  Callie held up her glass to toast. “Cheers—I’m honored. Thank you for choosing me for this.”

  Lou toasted with a quick clink and hopped off her stool, half her drink still in the glass. She hugged Callie, squeezing hard, practically groping her. “I’ve got to run, darling girl. Talk soon.” She whirled out of the bar in high gear, the lilac dress flowing behind her like a fairy cape.

  Callie dismissed Hutton’s text and called her agent. The bartender dropped off a black leather folio with a hundred-plus-dollar tab inside. Callie threw down her credit card as the phone rang and rang.

  “I’m in, Roger,” she squealed quietly when he finally answered. Peacock Alley—all chiaroscuro light and soft piano—wasn’t the place to be rowdy. “I’m really going to be in RAGE!”

  “We’re getting you fifty thousand dollars for the shoot,” he said. “They loved those videos you’ve been making with Jonathan. He agreed to release one right before Fashion Week.”

  Her stomach dropped. “Which one?” The bartender returned with the black folio, and she pocketed the receipt—her first RAGE-related expense, Callie thought with satisfaction.

  “Probably the one of you eating an ice-cream sandwich while you do the dance from Rhythm Nation. It’s basically your ‘Cat Daddy.’”

  Callie swallowed the rest of her cocktail in a single gulp. “Shit…Okay. I was really high when we made that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Nobody can tell. Are you ready to get famous, girl? If this shoot works out, it could be the cover of the November issue. You know, she always chooses them herself,” he said reverently, referring to Margot.

  Callie climbed off her stool and grabbed her cotton tote bag, shoving her book into it as she made her way toward the Park Avenue exit. “I can’t even think about that. Let’s just get it booked and signed, okay?”

  “I’m on it, sweetie. There’s an NDA, too. I’ll have it messengered over in the morning. You can’t mention this to anyone—and I mean anyone—until the shoot’s over. It’s eight weeks from now. Fashion omertà. Okay?”

  “Sure. That’s fine. Listen, I have to run—I’m so beat,” she lied. “Talk tomorrow?”

  “Talk tomorrow,” Roger said sweetly. “I’m proud of you, honey.”

  She thought about texting Hutton back, but…she burned with hurt and rejection. If he was going to treat her like this for the millionth time, the very least he could do was call. Or text during the day; she’d settle for that.

  Callie walked out into the street. The city her oyster, she was alone, dressed up, had no plans, and now she had income to count on. Should I treat myself to a late-night dinner at the bar at Balthazar? she wondered.

&n
bsp; No. She wasn’t hungry; and besides, she’d just eaten an entire two-person serving of assorted meats. She needed…to dance it off, she realized. She hopped in a cab and headed back to her neighborhood, stopping into Outcast, the venerable gay bar around the corner from her apartment.

  Outcast was packed tonight with shirtless guys—most of them embarrassingly young—and a lone bachelorette party getting sloppy drunk at the bar. Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” hit the speakers as soon as she walked in. Her friend Jared was behind the bar in a white tank top and extremely low-slung jean shorts. She lifted herself up onto the polished wood, elbowing two boyish blondes out of the way, and kissed him hello.

  “Babe!” Jared yelled over the music. “Shots?”

  She nodded. He passed her two ounces of tequila and she knocked it back without salt or lime, tossing him her tote bag to stash behind the bar.

  “I have to dance!” she screamed over the music. “Come find me when you want to smoke!”

  Callie fought her way through the dance floor into the middle, shimmying between couples. She found a two-foot circle all to herself and started dancing, throwing her hips around while her feet moved in complicated steps, a mishmash of the ten years she’d spent doing competitive jazz routines. The DJ mixed “Drunk Girls” into “Bad Girls,” then sped up the beat and added some of the vocals from Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine” over another beat made up of Lil Wayne grunting. Callie never wanted it to end.

  She stayed on the dance floor until she was soaked in sweat, then ducked out for a cigarette with Jared. They came inside for another round of shots and a little bit of cocaine; she danced more; they smoked more; did more shots; danced more; did more coke, then finally closed down the bar around 3:00 a.m. Callie grabbed her bag from behind the bar, walked over to the DJ—a platinum-haired waif crossing gender’s Rubicon from one side to the other, though she couldn’t quite tell in which direction—and kissed them full on the mouth.

  “That was epic,” she said. “Thank you. Do you have a card?”

  “Anytime.” The DJ winked, handing their card to Callie. “Let me know if you want me for anything.”

  Callie slung her bag over her shoulder and smiled. “Good night, you guys. That was so much fun. It was exactly what I needed.”

  She hugged Jared and walked the single block back to her apartment in the rain, collapsing into bed alone, the speaker buzz still ringing in her ears.

  Cat lay in her bed on Monday night while a summer storm raged outside, the night flashing white with lightning as the raindrops beat a steady drum on her building’s lumpy windowpanes.

  She tried to plan an outfit for the next day while staring out the window. No suede in the rain, she told herself. No white. Tomorrow would have to be all black, she decided, something appropriate for her own funeral.

  Paula had left a voicemail asking her to come in the next day, but Cat didn’t know what that meant. She’d spent her whole life being a good girl, a hard worker. The very idea of being reprimanded at the one place where she’d managed success in her life made her so sick to her stomach that she’d spent the entire day in bed. Apparently Bess’s mother had texted Cat’s mother, Anais, a link to the New York Post story. Cat thought of the email her mother had sent her, the last thing she’d read on her phone before turning it off again:

  Schate Katteke, hoe moeilijk. U besteedt te veel momenten zoeken naar je eigen mooie weerspiegeling, en nu: heb je het gevonden. Ik zie U graag, maar je bent niet op zoek naar de juiste dingen.

  [Dearest little kitten, how hard. You spend too much time searching for your own reflection, and now: you have found it. I love you but you are looking for the wrong things.]

  It was so easy for her to say that. Rijmenam—the Flemish hamlet that Takeshi and Anais Ono lived in just north of Brussels—wasn’t just three thousand miles away. It was actual lifetimes, universes, galaxies away. The little stores open only from eleven to three, and never on weekends; her mother’s two Clydesdale horses, rough and muddy and velvet-mouthed; the tidy little BMW that her father drove into town; the farming priest whose eggs they left a fifty-cent piece in the honor box for. It was all another world. When their butcher died, Anais had gone to his funeral, wept with his widow. Cat shopped at Whole Foods.

  In the 1970s, her father had been sent to Brussels by Mikimoto to attend a European law school course, while her mother, an abstract painter, had been working extra hours at a country stables just off the train stop in Jezus-Eik, a small Flemish town outside the city.

  Takeshi Ono had shown up one afternoon to the stables sporting brand-new jodhpurs, tall patent boots, an immaculately flocked helmet, and a spotless suede two-button sport coat. Nearly two meters high, thin as a rail, and perfectly groomed, he looked as though he’d simply gone into a riding store and asked for the best—which, of course, he had, after receiving an invitation for an afternoon of riding from one of his new colleagues.

  He couldn’t yet read Flemish well enough to follow the signs, so Takeshi wandered through a few stone archways until he reached a set of white stucco Tudor-style stables arranged around a dirt ring. A ruddy-faced girl with braids—the picture of rural health, practically an eighteenth-century painting—had stood in the middle of the ring running a pretty little painted mare in a circle. She’d looked at him and giggled at his new clothes. He looked like he belonged in a magazine.

  “Anais est a la bas,” she’d said in heavily accented French, assuming he’d have no Flemish at all. “Back,” she continued in English. “Back by the horse sleeping,” she directed, pointing to stables that made a hallway to another ring, that one covered. He nodded, gave a small bow in thanks, then strode purposefully across the dirt to the stalls.

  At that very moment Anais Pieters, in a ripped pair of overalls and a stained T-shirt reading “Fuck Nixon,” was trying to pick out the hoof of their new pony. Anais was backing him into the stall, but Chokotoff wouldn’t go. She gave up on moving him and tied his bridle loosely to the stall door, leaving too much slack. As she ran her hand down the horse’s leg, applying pressure at the knee to let him know she’d be picking up his foot, Takeshi appeared, hands outstretched to pet the horse, his destiny.

  Chokotoff leaned forward to search for food from this dandy new stranger—and stepped down so quickly that he crushed Anais’s middle finger.

  The finger turned black in under a minute. Takeshi dropped his immaculate helmet to the ground and picked up Anais, the dust and mud from her overalls smearing his beautiful jacket. She protested in her own broken mix of English, French, and frustrated Flemish—It is just a finger! I can walk! Why are you kidnapping me?—until she saw the look on his face.

  It was the most gallant expression she’d ever seen anyone make. She stopped struggling. She let him carry her out to the parking lot. He set her carefully in his little rented Fiat and with her pointing aid drove her to the town doctor. Dr. Thys drained the swollen finger, pulled out some bone shards, and set the remainder with a tongue-depressor splint. Takeshi watched him like a hawk the entire time.

  A stupid mistake for anyone to make, it was especially humiliating for Anais: she’d been riding at these stables her whole life. She insisted on proving herself to Takeshi, teaching him to ride, jump, and control the horse with some basic dressage in twelve weeks.

  They were married by the end of the year.

  Takeshi then perfected not just riding, but skiing, baccarat, cycling, and skeet shooting—the collegial activities of the wealthy businessmen who moved in and out of the circles of power in Brussels, Antwerp, and Luxembourg—along with Flemish and Dutch, Luxembourgish and German, and French and English, enabling him to move up the ranks at Mikimoto with speed as they grew their business with the Antwerp-based jewelry industry.

  Now, after only three weeks of retirement spent pacing around the barn, trying to boss Anais and the horses around until she forced him back to the house with the business end of a pitchfork, he had taken a job in the Brussels office
of an NGO to coordinate EU aid into developing economies at a fraction of his previous salary. Taki said it was service to the continent that had taken him in.

  Cat was pretty sure he just didn’t know how to be a person if he wasn’t working.

  Anais had continued painting and riding, and she took care of Cat, too, until they sent her off to Miss Sawyer’s in the ninth grade. Cat’s prior education at the European girls’ school had given her flawless English, French, formal Dutch, German, and Italian on top of her native Flemish, but despite the rigor of her education, the Onos had been concerned that staying in Europe would turn her into what her mother called ijdele prinseske.

  Transliterated it was “idle little princess”: many of the wealthy euro-brats she’d grown up with were already asserting their entitlement over the world. Their casual utterances—formed in the bedrock-deep continental racism that Anais had never questioned until it was aimed at people she loved—were painting her daughter with a constant wash of inferiority. As she entered puberty, Cat started to look at herself with an eye so critical Anais feared she’d never recover.

  Anais and Taki could see the consequences of their choices happening to their little Katteke, and they didn’t like it. They had wanted Catherine—whom they’d given a Catholic first name to help her fit in anywhere—to be like them but better; to be practical and dedicated and earnest and then happy. That was the formula. There would be no happiness in chasing the same ambitions of the upper-crust Europeans whom Taki mimicked but was, at his heart, decidedly not. “Never let the mask become the face,” he would say, adapting Orwell for his own purposes.

  Taki was always on time, always at her baseball games and swim meets, always a proud and loving father, but he had a million rules. No television. No store-bought toys. Homework before riding or archery or baseball or swimming. By the time Cat was in seventh grade her peers were getting cars and drivers, heading to Paris or London for shopping weekends with their mothers and nighttime trips to bars with flashy young men. Cat’s own mother, usually covered in a mixture of horse shit and oil paint, preferred Danskos and denim; she did not understand Cat’s concern for clothes, for handbags, for objects and things. She worried that Cat, unable to realize that people who love themselves will fit in anywhere, was trying to change herself to fit in.