When I’m in denial, I can be a total idiot.
The living room felt empty with Jake gone. “Come, Annie,” I said with false cheer. “Go for a walk!”
She gave me a withering look—Annie considers exercise something that happens to dogs who are being punished—and headed back to the bedroom. I threw on my coat and left without her. Exercise isn’t my favorite thing either—who do you think Annie learned from?—but I needed some air.
Outside the apartment, I started off, not running exactly but walking briskly toward Central Park. As I walked, my mind went back to the beginning with Jake—to the good times. Suddenly, I realized I’d been doing that a lot in recent weeks. Reminiscing had become my favorite pastime.
Life lesson: When you find yourself frequently strolling down Memory Lane, you’re probably in trouble.
CHAPTER 2
I met Jake because of a book I wrote. It was called Love, Max, and it was about a divorce as seen through the eyes of the family dog. The family in question was one of those enlightened clans living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. You know the kind I’m talking about: Each child has a shrink, and a professional mediator is hired to make sure the divorce experience is a positive one for all involved. In my book, only the dog, Max, was pissed off about the loss of his family and his home until the last chapter, when everyone got all emotional and more than a little ugly, but they realized how much they cared. The book reviews included phrases like “a slyly biting commentary on modern mores.”
I wrote it because, like Max, I was pissed off. I probably had been ever since my parents went their separate ways when I was a kid. Like my imaginary characters, Mother and Dad had one of the cheeriest divorces on record. This was, in part, due to their liberal ideology, and in part because they were so delighted to be getting away from each other. I don’t think it dawned on either of them that anyone—like me—could actually be in mourning for our little family unit. My brother, Peter, who is younger than I am, wasn’t. Hell, even our dog, Fierce, was happier when he moved to southern California with my dad. I was the only one who was upset—which didn’t make me any less angry about the whole thing.
But it wasn’t the actual divorce that led to my writing Love, Max. (For one thing, I was only twelve when my parents split.) What did it was my stepmother’s remarriage.
I’m not going to argue that I am one of the world’s most logical thinkers—Pete says I’m a couple of Brazil nuts shy of a fruitcake, and for the most part I agree. So I’ll try to make my admittedly convoluted thinking clear. My father married Sheryl—the woman he’d been sleeping with while he was still unhappily wed to my mother—and moved to the West Coast with her. So, technically speaking, Sheryl was the catalyst for my parents’ breakup, and after my father moved to Pasadena I tried to dislike her out of loyalty to my mother. But that was hard to do when my mother so clearly regarded Sheryl as the one-woman cavalry charge that had saved her—my mother—from the burden of having to try to be a wife. Instead, I proved my daughterly loyalty by never using makeup or having a fashion sense, and let myself like Sheryl. I can’t imagine anyone actually disliking Sheryl. (Pete managed to pull it off for a while, but eventually even he caved. And he’s made of steel.)
Sheryl is kind, generous, and caring. I suppose she would have felt guilty about ending Dad’s marriage to my mother if Mother hadn’t been so happy about it. Sheryl is the kind of person who wants everyone to be happy. She adored my father, and—an even more radical concept to me at the time—she seemed to think that keeping him content was all the career she needed. She kept her incredible legs in shape with exercise sessions that would have appealed to the boys who cooked up the Spanish Inquisition, because, as she once told me with a giggle, Dad was a leg man. She ran his home in Pasadena like a four-star hotel because that was the way Dad liked it. And, she told me, when he came home from work at the end of the day, she was always as excited as she’d been the time she’d asked Barry Manilow for his autograph after a concert and he’d given her a kiss as well. Sheryl isn’t my mother’s equal in the brains department—not even close—but my father was blissfully happy with her. So I cast Sheryl in the role of Dad’s True Love, a blond California Juliet to his considerably older Romeo. I wanted desperately to believe in Romeo and Juliet. I was already looking for the perfect love story even back then; a romantic tale of love at first sight. And, most importantly, a love that would last forever.
Then Romeo died. It was a heart attack that came out of nowhere, and I still can’t talk about it a lot because I start to tear up. He was only fifty-six.
After a year of mourning, Juliet started dating again. I was devastated. It wasn’t that I wanted Sheryl to stop living—no matter what Pete said, I didn’t expect her to toss herself on Dad’s funeral pyre. I accepted the fact that she would develop a new life and new interests; she could have taken up scrapbooking, for example. I would have been fine with that. But I did want her to stay true to Dad’s memory forever, and I never ever expected her to replace him. Yes, in the kid part of the brain that we can’t control, that’s how I saw it when, after two years of widowhood, Sheryl got engaged to someone new.
How I reacted to this was … unique. I realize that. I joined an adult-ed class called Write Your Bestseller! that was being offered at a college on the Upper East Side. I’d always had a secret yen to write; in college I’d taken a writing run by a failed novelist who probably drank too much. After one particularly blurry session, she’d called me to her office and said, “I never encourage my students, because the last thing the world needs is more lousy fiction, but Francesca, you may just have some talent.”
Armed with this somewhat dubious praise, and desperately needing to find an outlet for all the boiling emotions I couldn’t admit to because they were way too childish, I signed up for Write Your Bestseller! And spurred on by all those messy emotions, I produced Love, Max in two semesters. The book was my answer to the whole concept of divorce as a damn growth experience. And no, thank you, I have no desire to discuss any of this with a good shrink.
I’M SURE YOU’RE wondering what all this history has to do with Jake and me. Hang on, because I’m getting there. But first you need to understand where my life was before I wrote Love, Max.
My brilliant mother was one of the nation’s major go-to lawyers for women’s rights, and I had taken my LSATs after college and failed them twice. I was also the older sister of a genius architect—that would be Pete—who raced around the world designing green housing for the impoverished. While he was collecting awards at the UN for his work as a humanitarian and an environmentalist, I was still living at home—Alexandra’s apartment—with a job working as prop person for a lesbian theater group in SoHo. The gig had come through one of Mother’s political connections and paid enough to cover my daily round-trip on the subway. To say I had some heavy-duty sibling rivalry going on would be a massive understatement. I probably had a major dose of mommy envy as well. Okay, scratch the word probably.
On top of all this, I was usually dating some man who gave new and more poignant meaning to the term Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Love, Max changed all of that.
CHAPTER 3
I’d been so busy remembering the past that I hadn’t noticed that I’d wandered across Central Park. By the time I looked up, I realized I was standing in front of the co-op apartment building where my mother had moved with Pete and me after the divorce. She’d sold the co-op after I moved out—which I did as soon as I had the check for my book advance in my hand—and traded down to a smaller apartment three blocks away, staying in the area because she said she didn’t have the time to learn a different neighborhood. My mother never gave a damn about her surroundings; all she ever wanted was a place in her beloved Manhattan that was low–maintenance and had a good Chinese restaurant around the corner. All her apartments looked the same: There were unpacked boxes stacked in the corners—I think some of them were wedding presents she’d never bothered
to open—and there was always a roll of paper towels tossed on the side of the bathroom sink instead of a hand towel. Alexandra Karras Sewell was the anti–June Cleaver and proud of it.
There is a bench directly across the street from my childhood apartment. I sat down and went back to thinking about the time—the insane, impossible, miraculous time—when my life had changed forever because of Love, Max. And Jake. Yes, I’m still getting to the part about Jake.
IT WAS SHERYL who helped me sell the book. She’d been remarried for a year by the time I finished writing Love, Max and there was no way I could stay mad at her for that long. Besides, you’ve got to focus if you want to carry a grudge, and I was too excited about my book.
I’d already given the final draft of Love, Max to the woman who was teaching the Write Your Bestseller! class. She seemed a little stunned when she handed it back to me. “I’ve never said this to a student before,” she’d said in a hushed tone, “but this may actually be publishable.”
Secretly, I agreed with her. It was the kind of book I thought I’d like to read. But I knew in the real world people don’t take one bogus writing course and produce something that gets published. Real writers have to pay dues. They study the great classics of literature in college and attend prestigious writing seminars, where they grovel at the feet of world-famous mentors. They spend years teaching English 101 at small colleges in dreary New England towns, waking up at four in the morning to work on their masterpieces. I hadn’t done any of that. But every instinct I had told me I had a winner on my hands. So—even though my instincts were always wrong—I decided to get a second opinion. Not from Pete, who never read fiction, or from my mother, who was opposed personally and professionally to girly literature—which Love, Max was. I sent the manuscript to Sheryl.
“I think you were angry when you wrote it,” she said, when she called me from the West Coast.
“So it’s no good?” I gulped.
“Oh, no, you’re very witty when you’re angry.”
“Then you liked it?” I told myself I wasn’t being pathetic.
“I read it in two days. I stayed up until three in the morning and I looked like such a wreck I had to get a deep-sea facial. Do you have an agent?”
“Uh … no,” I said, stunned. Sheryl was an airhead. Who knew she was even aware that there were such entities as agents?
“Well, do you remember my friend Sissy Gilbert?”
“She’s one of the Girls, right?” Sheryl had more friends than Bill and Hillary Clinton combined, but her inner circle was a posse of chums known as the Girls, who had been inseparable since high school.
“Yes. She was one of my bridesmaids when I married your father—the chubby one who wouldn’t wear yellow, so I went for pewter, which was much classier and I’ve always been grateful to her for that. Her husband’s daughter Nancy—she’s from Charlie’s first marriage; he’s ages older than Sissy—works for an agency in New York, and I know Sissy said they sell books; what was the name of it? Stiller … something.”
“The Stiller and William Agency?” I forced myself not to genuflect. “They’re the biggest and the best—”
“Good. I’ll put your manuscript in the mail to Nancy today.” A month later I was having lunch in an expensive Manhattan restaurant with Sissy’s stepdaughter.
Nancy Gilbert was the kind of woman I’d have wanted as a friend even if she hadn’t been one of the hottest young agents in the city. She was my age, and we bonded when she asked if we could tell the waiter to take away the bread basket because she needed to lose ten pounds. Then she told me she was dying to be my agent.
“I know there are thousands of readers out there who are going to relate to your book the way I did,” she said. “I was eight when my parents divorced, and I swear the only thing that got me through it was my dachshund, Posey. With a fifty percent divorce rate in this country, marketing Love, Max is going to be a snap. Plus I don’t know of a woman in the civilized world who doesn’t have issues about her thighs.”
Nancy sold the book in two weeks to a small but prestigious house called Gramercy Publishing. I acquired an editor named Debbie, who took Nancy and me to lunch to discuss book covers and jacket copy, plans for a book tour, and a very few minor rewrites that Debbie suggested oh so gently, while telling me how gifted I was.
When I look back on that time, I wonder if it might have been better for me if it hadn’t all been so easy. I’m not complaining, I know what a miracle I was handed and I’m deeply grateful. But I never felt I earned it—you know? It never felt real. And then, to top it all off—there was Jake.
“THE ART DEPARTMENT needs a picture of you for the back of your book jacket,” Nancy told me. We were six months away from my pub date—the insider’s term for the day when stores start to sell your book and you find out if you’ve written a dud or a winner. “Do you have any photos of yourself?” Nancy asked.
The choices were not terrific. There was my college graduation portrait, complete with cap and gown, and a few snaps that had been taken during my high school Matriculation Wingding, so named because the progressive school I’d gone to was way too cool for a formal graduation ceremony. In all the shots taken of me since college, I was usually trying to wave the camera away. The truth was, I hated to be photographed. But my publisher needed a recent picture, one in which I was not wearing a cap and gown or sticking out my tongue.
“I know a great photographer named Jake Morris,” Nancy said. “Do you remember the model Nina Karsonava? She wrote a beauty book about the benefits of eating borscht—or maybe you were supposed to wash with it, I don’t remember. Anyway, it was awful and we all figured it was headed straight for the shredder until we saw the pictures of Nina. They sold that damn book. And Jake Morris is the genius who took them.”
I knew I should have been excited about being photographed by a genius. But it made me nervous. No, let’s be honest, it made me defensive. So when I called his studio to make my appointment, I had an industrial-sized chip on my shoulder.
THE MORRIS STUDIO was in a former warehouse in what used to be New York’s meat-packing district before the city stopped packing its own meat. I paid off my cab, lugged my suitcase to the curb—I’d been instructed to bring at least three changes of clothes for my “shoot”—and looked around. Sometime during the 1990s the humble neighborhood had been reborn as the home of scarily glossy people and hot clubs and businesses. Just looking at the store windows on either side of the Morris Studio was intimidating. The shop on the right called itself a shoe store, which was accurate if you were prepared to spend a thousand bucks on footwear. The shop on the other side was a bakery whose name I recognized as a place that provided designer cakes for celebrities. A garden of spookily real-looking sugar flowers filled the window. I sighed. This was going to be even worse than I had imagined. I rang the doorbell, and for the first time in my life I wished I knew how to pluck my eyebrows.
The waiting room was what I’d expected it would be: lots of chrome, glass, and chairs you can’t get out of once you sit. The walls were covered with pictures of famous people, and a ridiculously pretty girl sat behind the front desk Her hair fell to her shoulders in a glossy sheet, and as for her makeup … we’re talking flawless.
At first, I could tell she was shocked when I told her I’d come to have my picture taken by the master. My un-glam presence seemed to rock her universe. But then she checked her book. “Oh, okay,” she said, with a relieved smile, “you’re the writer.”
That mystery having been solved, she led me out of the waiting room to a large, dark space with high ceilings, a concrete floor, unfinished brick walls, and windows that had been covered with shutters. A white backdrop hung against one wall, surrounded by what looked like a forest of lights. I figured when they were turned on they would generate enough wattage to light up a small nation. From time to time, human figures bustled around in the gloom.
This entire space, my guide informed me, was the shop, meaning the area w
here Jake Morris took his pictures. On the opposite wall, there were three large, well-lit white cubicles.
“That’s Makeup and Hair.” My guide indicated the first one. “Next to it is Wardrobe, and the last one is Jake’s office. I’ll take you to see Leeland first.”
“Leeland?” I asked.
“Our makeup artist. He’ll be doing your face.”
For a second it sounded glamorous. But when you live with a mother who regularly gives lectures on the evils of the cosmetics industry, you learn to suppress thoughts like that. “I’m not sure I want anyone doing my face,” I said. “I don’t wear makeup.”
The girl gasped. “Never?” she demanded.
“This is the way I look,” I said. “What you see is what you get.” But then I heard myself add wistfully, “I have used lip gloss.” Like I said, at my core I’m marshmallow fluff.
“You can hang your clothes in Wardrobe. I’ll tell them you’re here,” the girl said, and fled, in case whatever madness I suffered from was catching.
I went into the middle cubicle she’d pointed out. It was equipped with an ironing board and iron, a steamer, a sewing machine, a small stool you could stand on while someone pinned up your hem, and an ego-demolishing three-way mirror. Racks of brilliantly colored clothes stood three deep against one wall. Dodging the three-way mirror, I opened my suitcase and hung up my clothes; three mid-calf-length skirts, two crewneck sweaters, one blouse with French cuffs, and three semi-fitted blazers in shades of black, navy, and gray. It was my standard look, and I was determined to be me in this picture. But as I was straightening one of the jackets, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I was overdue for a haircut, so my frizz was truly impressive, and in the bright light, my complexion looked like I’d died recently. I was wearing a beige crewneck, a brown mid-calf skirt, and a darker brown blazer. I turned away from the mirror with a little shudder. Almost without knowing what I was doing, I walked over and started going through the racks of clothes owned by the Morris Studio. I pulled out a pink ball gown with a huge skirt and puffy sleeves and held it up to myself, as I turned back to the mirror.
Looking for a Love Story Page 2