What I didn’t know at the time was that in extremely fancy New York buildings the doorman escorts you all the way up to the floor you are going to, and indicates the door you will knock on. They don’t even bother putting numbers on the doors. If you don’t know where you’re going, you shouldn’t be roaming down the hallways to begin with.
Anyway, he pointed to the door at the end of the corridor, and I stepped out of the elevator, admiring the decor: the lamps, the carpets, the flowers. There were better furnishings in the hallway of this damn building than in the living room of any house I had ever been to. I swear that you could smell the stench of money just by standing in the hall. As I passed a Venetian mirror, I decided to stop to check myself out and reapply my lipstick, with trembling hands.
I looked in the mirror, and suddenly I wanted to cry. I’ve heard that women with anorexia can be walking skeletons but when they look in the mirror they can’t see themselves, they just see fat. I was having a similar problem. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t see myself, I just saw a collection of flaws. In my mind, the example of beauty was someone like Nicole Kidman, and I was far—way far—from that. I didn’t have her height, I didn’t have her figure, or her bone structure, and no matter what I did, I’d never have it.
“I will never be like Nicole Kidman…I will never be like Nicole Kidman…” I said out loud while I stood there. And then an incredible shift of gears took place, and I started laughing.
“Why the fuck do I have to look like Nicole Kidman?” I said to myself, and I decided to give myself an improvised makeover.
With the attitude of a gay and ruthless interior decorator determined to refurbish a cheesy apartment, I observed myself in the mirror. “What the hell is that, reflected in front of me?” Here I was selling myself for the first time, and I just looked like a frumpy executive assistant (nothing wrong with being an executive assistant, by the way; I’ve been a secretary myself several times). I looked old, matronly, and boring.
Something had to be done, so I opened my blouse one button, then two buttons, then three buttons, and then I went back to one, but I pushed my boobs up so high that I could almost rest my chin on them.
“Good,” I said.
I took off my jacket—turned out it looked better hanging over my right shoulder than on me—I rolled up the sleeves of my shirt—which I think gave me a little bit of a Sharon Stone vibe—and then I started working on my hair. I undid my tight bun—ugh, no good, my hair ended up all over. I tried to go back to the bun, but it was already too late. Cuban hair—or at least my Cuban hair—has a mind of its own, and once you unleash it, it takes hours to tame it again. What could I do? I guess I could get it wet and go for the “just out of the shower” look. I found a flower vase next to the mirror. Grabbing the vase, I thought about using the water to dampen my hair. But as soon as I poured some water on my hand, I realized the water stank—duh! After drying my hands with the velvet drapes, I remembered—duh again—I had hair gel in my bag. I applied the gel profusely, got my wet-curls look, and then looked in the mirror again.
Better. Not “Wow!” but definitely better. When my hair is wild, it is very wild. After a childhood of learning to tame it toward a sleek look, I felt that letting my curls go wild was letting myself go wild as well. Tonight I was pretending to be a whore, so I had to play the part. The problem is that with my hair down—and curled in all its glory—the little gold hoops that I was wearing got completely lost in the jungle. I needed to spice that up somehow. That’s when I noticed the chandelier. A beautiful crystal chandelier was hanging from the ceiling. Should I? Shouldn’t I?
“It’s for a good cause,” I told myself. I pulled up a chair, climbed on it, and reached out for two strings of crystals. There were so many of them in that lamp that nobody would notice the missing beads. They would match my virginity pendant nicely. After one last look in the mirror, I took off my glasses, pulled up my skirt a bit more, and finally walked toward Mr. Rauscher’s door.
I was ready. And as I stood in front of the door with my curls, my cleavage, my crystal earrings, and my jacket hanging—very casually—over my shoulder, I rang the doorbell. I waited for my first customer with my knees shaking, my heart pounding, my mind racing, and the profound knowledge that this was the beginning of something and the end of something else. But the beginning and the end of what?
CHAPTER 8
The door opened and—predictably—a butler was on the other side. We’ve all seen butlers in movies, but I had never seen one in real life. He had a butler’s face that perfectly matched his butler’s uniform. I couldn’t imagine that this guy ever considered doing anything in his life other than being a butler or playing one on TV.
“Hello,” I said with the deepest and sexiest voice I could fake.
“Welcome, madam. Please follow me.”
And he talked like a butler too. Cool. Very proper, very courteous, but detached at the same time.
“My name is B. What is your name?” I said, trying to become his friend.
“My name is Bradley, madam.”
“How long have you worked here, Bradley?”
“Eleven years, madam.”
“So Mr. Rauscher must be a nice guy,” I said, hoping to get a scoop on the eighty-year-old pervert I was about to encounter. Maybe Bradley would turn around and, risking his job, advise me to run for my life. But, no, Bradley remained proper, courteous and detached.
“Mr. Rauscher is no less than a gentleman.”
Okay, no point in trying to squeeze blood out of this rock. Suddenly I got distracted by the decor of the sumptuous apartment, and everything I learned in my art-history classes came to mind. First I noticed the centerpiece of the vestibule. Proudly displayed on a pedestal was a prehistoric sculpture that looked a lot like the Venus of Willendorf. That Venus looks a bit like a raw piece of rock, but when you look at it carefully, you start noticing human features—mainly enormous breasts and a huge ass. It happens to be an ancient representation of a rather fat woman. “A goddess of fertility,” my teacher Grazia explained to me in art class.
I next noticed the walls, which were covered with huge Botero and Rubens—or at least Rubenesque—paintings. I would have checked the signature on the canvas, but I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so I could barely see my hand in front of my face.
I followed Bradley, hallway after hallway, to the room where I was supposed to meet my customer. My customer. Just thinking it freaked me out, but the whole adventure had a twisted allure to it. So I kept walking right behind Bradley, flanked by these oversized images of voluptuous women being abducted by strong warriors. It certainly takes a nice set of muscles to abduct me, that much I can tell you.
“Nice pad!” I said and Bradley finally cracked a smile, making me feel as if I had conquered the tip of Mount Everest.
“Mr. Rauscher will be with you in a moment,” he said as he opened the door of the library for me and immediately disappeared. I was relieved to see that I was not being taken to a bedroom. Maybe Madame was right, and sex wasn’t going to be part of the agenda. But, then, what the hell did this senior citizen want from me?
Incapable of sitting still and with nothing else to do, I started looking at the artwork in the library. The walls were covered with mahogany bookcases filled with leather-clad volumes, but he had left a little space here and there to display a collection of ancient illustrations from the Kama Sutra. I believe that most people think that in ancient times sex was always very boring, very reproductive, certainly nothing kinky. Well, if you take one look at this stuff, you’ll change your mind. Mr. Rauscher’s illustrations looked like sex at Le Cirque d’Soleil. I mean, those were positions I couldn’t do even if I wanted to. So Mr. Rauscher was a dirty old man after all: one with a lot of money who—judging by his art collection—probably was on the mailing list of Sotheby’s.
The sound of the door opening caught me by surprise and almost made me jump to the ceiling.
“I’m sorry for ma
king you wait,” he said with his cavernous voice and his thick German accent.
I turned around and finally met face to face with my client. He was younger than I’d thought, and not bad-looking at all: tall, blue-eyed, square-jawed, mid-fifties, very well preserved, and with salt-and-pepper hair. He was wearing a shirt, slacks, and an elegant navy blue velvet robe on top of it. If he were one of the paintings on his own wall, his title might be Millionaire at Home. Saying that he looked Aryan would be an understatement; Mr. Rauscher looked like the hot Nazi officer from a spy movie, the one you feel guilty about lusting after because he is so evil. He walked up to me and extended his hand.
“Hello, I’m Ludwig.”
“I’m B,” I replied, shaking his hand, and trying to control my shaky knees.
“Would you like something to drink, B?”
I wanted a Diet Coke, but I realized that it didn’t sound very sexy, so I went for what I knew.
“You don’t happen to have anisette, do you?”
“On the rocks?” he asked promptly.
“Sure,” I said.
Mr. Rauscher opened a secret door in the wood paneling, revealing a hidden and very well stocked bar. Once again, my hands got cold, my mouth got dry, and I felt like running away. Mr. Rauscher handed me the drink, and his phone rang almost immediately.
“Excuse me, please,” he said courteously.
He picked up the phone, listened for a second, replied something in German, and then hung up.
“Forgive me, but there is a matter that requires my immediate attention,” he said, and, promising that he would be back shortly, he left me alone in the room, and on the verge of a panic attack.
After he left, I had a moment to regroup. Slut-me, virgin-me, cautious-me, paranoid-me, wild-me, and raised-by-Catholic-Cuban-parents-me—we all had a little powwow inside my head that I’ll try to reproduce.
“You better get your ass out of here immediately!”
“But you’re here already, the guy is loaded and not bad-looking at all. Why can’t you stick around and see what happens?”
“What? Even more reason to get out of here now: you’ll let your guard down because he’s handsome, and before you know it he’ll slash your throat and throw your body into the river.”
“A rich guy like this won’t drag a corpse to the riverside!”
“Of course, he’ll send the butler. Have you considered that he might have put something in your drink already?”
“Relax! You’re a big girl. You know how to defend yourself!”
“I’m sure you can defend yourself, but since when did you turn into a whore?”
Believe it or not, that last remark was the one that put the fire under my ass and made me decide to abort the operation and get the hell out of there as soon as possible. But I couldn’t just get up and leave. I had to wait for him and—at least—apologize. To make a silent statement, I buttoned up my shirt, pulled down my skirt, and then started working on a little speech. I would say something like “Ludwig, I don’t know how to say this, I don’t want to disappoint you or hurt your feelings, but I just can’t go through with this. I understand that you have expectations, desires, manly needs, but I’ve never done anything like this in my life, and I don’t think I can go through with it.” I know, my rehearsed spiel sounded way too corny, but I was in a panic, okay?
How would he react? Would he turn violent? Would he force me into something? He was a pretty strong guy, and I could tell that he went to the gym a lot. Maybe he was like one of the gladiators in his paintings: he could lift a girl of my size, flip her around, and rape her if he set his mind to it. And he was German—and we all know the kind of reputation that Hollywood has built for the Germans because of World War II.
In the middle of all these considerations, the door swung open and Bradley walked in with an envelope.
“Mr. Rauscher wanted me to give you this.”
I took the envelope with trembling hands and found a stack of hundred-dollar bills inside.
“There’s a little extra for your trouble, and if you could follow me to the exit,” Bradley added.
Totally confused, I started following Bradley toward the exit. I managed to pose a question as we walked back through Mr. Rauscher’s fat museum.
“Wait a minute, Bradley, is he not coming back?”
“That’s correct, madam. He wants to thank you for your time and let you know that your services are no longer needed.”
“So we’re not gonna…” I didn’t know how to complete the sentence, since Madame never really clued me in on what Mr. Rauscher wanted.
“No, madam, you’re not,” Bradley stated.
That’s when it finally hit me: Mr. Rauscher was kicking me out. He met me, didn’t like me, and decided to pay me and send me home. I wasn’t even worth his time. Needless to say, I was beyond pissed.
I jumped ahead of Bradley, blocked the exit, and confronted him face to face.
“Wait a fucking minute, Bradford!”
“Bradley, madam.”
I knew that I said his name wrong. I did it on purpose. I wanted him to get angry—as angry as I was. If I was going to be rejected, I wanted to hear the reason.
“I want to know exactly why Mr. Rauscher is suddenly not interested.”
“I’m afraid that I’m not allowed to discuss that, madam,” he answered.
I had nothing to lose, so I shot, point-blank.
“Is it because of my weight?”
“I’m really not allowed…”
“I am not leaving until I get a straight answer from you or from that German jerk!”
“Madam, I must insist…”
“Is it because of my weight?” I yelled.
“Madam…” he said, trying for the last time not to yell back. I pushed him even harder.
“Is it because of my weight?” I shouted.
Clearly fed up by the scene, Bradley took a deep breath, looked me in the eye, and finally answered. “Yes, it’s because of your weight, madam.”
Funny how people can be. Here I was, yelling, hollering, demanding an answer—by force almost—and then, when the answer came, the answer that I was expecting, the answer that had tormented me all my adult life, it still hurt me. It hurt like a slap on the face. Emotionally, I dropped to the floor.
Embarrassed, humiliated, and defeated, I looked down to the ground, turned around, and slowly dragged my feet out of the apartment. Once outside, with tears in my eyes, I looked back at Bradley and with a tiny thread of voice I managed to ask him, “Am I that fat?”
I asked so softly that I’m surprised he even heard me.
Bradley, who was probably more than sick of me by now, simply replied, “Madam, you’re not fat enough,” and slammed the door in my face.
You might be laughing. Good for you. But guess what, though? I wasn’t. I was even more furious. The nerve! To tell me, someone who has dragged her body around for so many years, that I wasn’t fat enough was like telling the Elephant Man that he was fired from the sideshow because he wasn’t ugly enough.
I had no dignity left, so I started banging on the door.
“What do you mean, I’m not fat enough? Bradley! Bradley! I’ll show that son of a bitch what fat looks like, goddamn-it! Bradley!!!”
Bradley must have called Security, because almost immediately the elevator opened and the doorman held the door, indicating that it was time for me to leave. Defeated, I walked away from Mr. Rauscher’s apartment. As I got to the elevator, my cell phone rang. It was Madame.
“Madame?”
“How was it?” she asked.
“Horrible!” I whimpered.
“Did he pay you?”
“Yes, he paid, but who cares? According to him, I’m not fat enough! Can you believe that?”
The doorman pretended not to be paying attention, but I totally knew that he was following every word of our conversation, so—putting Madame on hold—I decided to focus-group with him.
“How muc
h do you think I weigh?” I asked him.
“I couldn’t tell, miss.”
“Oh, come on, give it a shot.”
“Hmm. One hundred and twenty?”
Talk about being polite. In any other circumstance I would have been flattered, but now I was just annoyed.
“Give me a fucking break!” I screamed. If you know me, you would know that I don’t throw the f-word around too easily, but clearly this issue was pushing my buttons.
“Come on!” I insisted. “Try a little harder.”
“I’m really bad at this,” he said.
“Let’s put it this way, if you saw me in the corner, you’d say ‘that fat chick in the corner,’ right?”
“Er…well…I don’t know…Yeah, most likely.”
“Thank you very much.” That was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. By then we were already stepping out of the building and approaching the car. I was still on the phone with Madame.
“See? Even the doorman can tell that I’m fat! What the hell is wrong with this moron?”
Madame, with a peace that almost bothered me, kept trying to calm me down by educating me in the tricks of the trade.
“B, this is your first and most important lesson: the customer is always right.”
“What do you mean?” I replied.
“You got paid, right?”
“Right…”
“So whatever he wants to do or not is his business, not yours.”
“But, Madame, you’re not listening to me! He thinks that I am?—”
“B,” she said very seriously, “this is your second and equally important lesson: what other people think of you is none of your business.”
“But?—”
“B, stop it! Think!” she said, and she was so serious that I actually stopped yapping for a second. “He paid you for your time. It’s not about what you want, it’s about what he wants.”
As I was trying to process the logic of her argument, we arrived at the limo. The doorman opened the car, I stepped in, and almost had a heart attack when I found Madame comfortably sitting in the backseat, with her cell phone in hand.
B as in Beauty Page 8