I'm Your Man

by Timothy James Beck

  “Come back to the five and dime, Tawny Kitaen, Tawny Kitaen,” I mused.

  Sheila laughed, then said, “It’s just as well. I’m too tired and have no time. I never thought working for Zodiac would be so involved.”

  “So why did you rip Bob a new asshole because he turned down one fashion show for you?” I asked.

  “It’s the principle of the thing. I love doing runway work. If it was up to me, I’d do as many fashion shows as possible, even though the money sucks compared to what I get from Zodiac. No questions asked. And no complaints, either. I guess it doesn’t matter. I have to think about Josh. I barely have enough time to spend with him as it is. Let alone get married to the poor guy.”

  After dating for over a year, Josh had proposed to Sheila and she’d accepted. However, the proposal came just before Sheila won the position as the Zodiac Girl. Before she knew it, she was swept into a cycle of travel between print shoots, public appearances, interviews, and commercial shoots. Her life became a “Who’s That Girl” media frenzy, and she was rarely at home in Manhattan at the same time as Josh.

  Working as a fashion photographer for many years made Josh sympathetic to Sheila’s job. Although he freelanced occasionally, he was employed by Ultimate Magazine and often worked close to home. After Josh’s proposal, they’d decided to marry in the summer of 1999. It hadn’t happened, and he’d agreed to postpone the wedding a year because of Sheila’s new job. They had both thought that Lillith Parker would want a new face for the Zodiac line after the first year was over.

  They were both wrong. Lillith was drastically opposed to changing anything about how Zodiac was represented to the world. In her opinion, when people thought of Sheila Meyers, they thought of Zodiac. And vice versa. Josh began pressuring Sheila to drop the Zodiac job and help him plan their wedding.

  Since Josh’s main concern was that her job was limiting their time together, Sheila offered a compromise: She would move in with him into an apartment on the Upper West Side. They moved, I lost my roommate, and Sheila continued as the Zodiac Girl, certain she could squeeze in a wedding this year if she planned everything just right.

  “How are the wedding plans going?” I asked.

  “Josh wants to get married in June,” she replied.

  “What do you say?”

  “I figure it can happen,” she agreed, opening a PalmPilot and bringing up a calendar on its tiny screen. “There’s a window of three days during the first weekend of June. If I fly into Wisconsin from—where are we shooting Zodiac’s Leo ads?”

  “Miami.”

  “If I fly to Wisconsin from Miami on Thursday night, have my shower on Friday, rehearsal and dinner on Saturday, and wedding on Sunday, I should be able to fly back to New York Sunday night to kick off the promotion for Zodiac’s Cancer line after the reception.”

  “And Josh goes on the honeymoon by himself?” I asked.

  “Blaine, you heard my schedule,” Sheila said. “Unless I hire a stand-in for my own wedding, it’s going to be like an Olympic event trying to fit everything into three days. I can’t live my life and also be the Zodiac Girl. It’s not fair to Josh. Or to me, for that matter. I’m going to ask Lillith for some time off.”

  “What? That’s impossible.”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” Sheila said and frowned.

  “Sheila, we’re talking about a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. And you’re it. This isn’t a shift at Dairy Queen, sweetie. Unless you have a twin sister that I don’t know about, there’s no way you can take time off.”

  “I can’t believe you’re reacting as a businessman instead of as my friend,” Sheila said, violently tossing her PalmPilot into her purse. “I hoped that since you were going to see Lillith, too, and since you’re supposed to be Josh’s best man, you might help me find a way to convince her to give me some time off. You’d think there would be a way to free some time for my wedding.”

  I sympathized with her, but she knew how Lillith operated. The woman kept every magazine that placed Zodiac’s ads in a complete panic because she was determined to shoot each sun sign’s photos as closely as possible to the actual dates the sign encompassed. Added to that was her horror of Mercury’s capricious behavior and some nonsense about the power of the full moon on cosmetics.

  “Call me selfish, but I thought, since you’re one of my oldest friends as well as a business colleague, you might find a way to make this all work out,” Sheila added, her voice soft, perhaps even a bit defeated.

  “I am your friend. And you are selfish. I just don’t see it happening,” I said, and put my hand on her arm, giving it a gentle squeeze.

  “It’s easy for you. You’re not the one running all over the world for the sake of a tube of lipstick. You’re the one pulling the levers behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz, running the show. If you want to take a break, all you have to do is say Stop! and everything comes to a halt. But what about me? I have to answer to you, Lillith, Bob the pig, and Metropole. I just want to get married, for gosh sake.”

  We both paused, listening to the white noise of the airplane as it zoomed us to Baltimore, while we sat in our seats, stuck between a rock and a hard place. A flight attendant stopped by and asked if we’d like something to drink.

  “I’d love a Bloody Mary,” I said.

  “I’ll have a diet ginger ale, please,” Sheila said.

  “She’s being awfully difficult today. Would you add a little arsenic to her ginger ale?” I asked. “Oh, wait. This is first class. I should be able to get cyanide.”

  “Ignore him,” Sheila said, giving the flight attendant a winning smile.

  The flight attendant eyed me warily, then stared at Sheila as if noticing her for the first time. “Aren’t you in those cell phone commercials?”

  “Yes,” Sheila said, blushing.

  “I love the one where the spy is trying to break into an office, but he can’t remember the alarm codes. Then you fall down from the ceiling on a cable, like in Mission Impossible, with a cell phone in your hand so he can call headquarters.”

  “But I scare the crap out of him and he ends up setting off the alarm,” Sheila recalled. “That was the first ad in the series. Another one will premiere during the Oscars, but it’s my last. I only signed to do five.”

  “That’s too bad,” the flight attendant said. “They were cute. I’ll be right back with your drinks.”

  “Your fans know no altitude. We’re always running into people who adore you,” I said. Sheila shrugged, but said nothing. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to be humble or if she was still annoyed with me, so I said, “When we were teenagers in Eau Claire, I never thought we’d turn into the two people on this plane.”

  Sheila started laughing and said, “You didn’t? Gosh, when we were dating, I just knew you’d turn into a gay advertising executive and I’d be a jaded, bitter model.”

  “You’re not jaded,” I said. “You’re tired. Anyway, when we were dating, even I thought I was straight. I dumped you for Sydney Kepler, after all.”

  “You dumped me? I think not, Mister Man. I dumped you when you slept with Sydney, my alleged friend, behind my back. And you stayed with that hag just to look good to all your dumb jock buddies and frat brothers.”

  “I did not,” I protested. “And Sydney isn’t a hag.” Sheila stared at me with a bemused expression for a second, and we both burst out laughing. “Okay,” I gave in. “Sydney’s a bitch, but she’s not a hag.”

  “You say tomato, I say tomahto.”

  “It’s best that we don’t speak of the extortionist,” I said, using my favorite pet name for my ex-wife.

  “You’re the one who lets her get away with it,” Sheila said. “I can’t believe you fronted her the money for that gallery. As if she’d recognize a decent painting if one landed on her perfectly coifed little head.”

  I closed my eyes, wishing I could shut out the memory of Sydney and her paintings, about which the kindest description might be “u
niquely atrocious.” Sydney had started out doing the standard novice’s still lifes. Bowls of fruit, flowers in a vase, sheet music resting atop a grand piano, next to a violin, in front of a picture window, beyond which could be seen a well-manicured lawn. It was what our friend Blythe called “Junior League Art,” after all the women who took an art class between shuffling kids to soccer and raising money for charity.

  Then one night the accident occurred. In the middle of a fight with me about the Lady in Red campaign—Sydney was positive I was having an affair with the model because our marital bed was hardly blissful and rarely busy—she flung a bottle of Allure’s Ruby Red nail polish at me. It shattered on a canvas of marigolds, the glass sticking in the paint, and art was born. Sydney liked to give interviews in which she said she was challenging a patriarchal society’s view of beauty in its traditional forms. It was all bullshit, but somehow it launched a career for her.

  Unfortunately, that career didn’t come with enough money to keep Sydney away from my bank account, even after our divorce. She was determined not to slither back under the thumb of her wealthy, domineering father, and I was easily intimidated by her, especially after she learned “Blaine’s little secret,” as she liked to call my homosexuality.

  Sydney’s manipulations were like a well-executed marketing campaign, and her slogan was, “Knowledge is power.” Unoriginal, much like Sydney, but effective, since I’d spent so many years successfully selling the product that was Blaine Dunhill: scion of a prominent Eau Claire businessman, hero of the gridiron in my youth, the golden boy who was going places. If Sydney exposed my secrets, my trophies and awards would be yanked from the shelves faster than a tainted batch of Tylenol. Daniel’s slogan for the quandary was, “The truth shall set you free.” Unfortunately, that clashed with my golden-boy catchphrase, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” Even if I could face a fall from grace in Eau Claire, there was still my family to consider. The truth would probably finish what remained of my relationship with my parents after my divorce.

  I opened my eyes again when I heard our flight attendant say, “Here are your—”

  Just then we encountered turbulence and the plane began shuddering violently. I watched as the flight attendant stumbled and our drinks flew out of his hands and onto the woman across the aisle. She woke up with a yelp when the ginger ale and ice covered her lap, then she screamed in alarm as the Bloody Mary oozed over her head.

  “Ladies and gentleman, this is your captain speaking. We’ve run into some turbulence. Please buckle your seat belts and refrain from moving about the cabin.”

  “Now he tells us,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry,” our flight attendant whimpered, while the saturated woman ignored our captain and unbuckled her safety belt. She stalked toward the rest room and the flight attendant followed, still apologizing.

  “That poor woman,” Sheila said.

  “I hope the cyanide doesn’t eat through her skirt,” I said. “What were we talking about?”

  “Your ex-wife. Where is the stunning Sydney these days?” Sheila asked, injecting the adjective with enough venom to fatally poison half of our fellow travelers.

  “In Italy. Procuring artists for her gallery or some such nonsense. She’ll be back in a couple of months, I think.”

  “Oh, no,” Sheila said, obviously doing the math in her head.

  “Uh-huh. While we’re in Eau Claire for your wedding—”

  “The hag from hell could be there, too,” finished Sheila with a frown. “Doing everything in her power to make your visit the most miserable experience possible. Our best man won’t be in best spirits, that’s for sure. I’m sorry, Blaine. But hey, there probably won’t be a wedding anyway, since I’ll be too busy and Josh will be so infuriated that he’ll leave me. And you won’t have to worry about me, so you can focus your energy on battling Sydney, the hound from hell.”

  “Hag from hell,” I corrected.

  “You said she’s a bitch, not a hag,” Sheila reminded me.

  “Tomato, tomahto,” I responded in a singsong voice.

  “Please don’t say tomato or tomahto when that woman gets back from the rest room,” Sheila implored. “I don’t understand why Sydney’s still milking you for money. From every horrifying account I hear, she has one of the most successful small galleries in Chicago.”

  “She enjoys making me sweat,” I said. “She’s just like her father; they both love power. She has a little power over me, and she luxuriates in reminding me of it.”

  “If you could just be honest with your parents—”

  “You know why I can’t,” I said. “My mother.”

  Again I watched Sheila bite her lip. I knew what she wanted to say, and the problem was that I agreed with her. For as long as I could remember, my mother had used her health to avoid anything unpleasant. I was convinced that most of her maladies were imaginary, but she’d had a mild heart attack after my divorce from Sydney. That, at least, hadn’t been faked, and my father and brothers placed the blame squarely on me. If my family found out I was gay, and anything happened to my mother . . . As estranged as I was from them all, I would never forgive myself.

  “How are your brothers?” Sheila asked, seeming to read my mind.

  “I think Shane is having an affair with a waitress,” I said. “As for Wayne, who knows?”

  Giving their sons rhyming names had been the only “cute” thing my parents had ever done. In fact, it baffled me that, as staid and unapproachable as they were, they’d managed to produce offspring. I’d always hoped that in one of the many deathbed scenes my mother enacted to her guilty and captive audience over the years, she’d confess that I was the result of some midlife indiscretion. It would explain so many things.

  Both of my brothers worked for my father at Dunhill Electrical, a fate I’d managed to escape. Since I’d be twenty-eight in May, I calculated that Shane must be forty-two. Being a married father of three hadn’t slowed him down any. Even though I thought his wife was shallow and self-absorbed, I found his serial adultery disgusting.

  As for Wayne, he was eleven years older than me. Though I was the one they called “the accident,” I tended to see Wayne in that category. Actually, I saw him as a sociopath waiting for the right moment to rain down destruction on Eau Claire. For as long as I could remember, he’d had a rifle and a Confederate flag in the back of his pickup truck, though to my knowledge, no ancestor of ours had ever been south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Wayne was a conspiracy theory buff. If they hadn’t already arrested the Unabomber, I’d have been happy to turn my brother in for questioning. He had to be guilty of something.

  “It’s not easy, Blaine. I understand,” Sheila said softly.

  “Oh, hell, there are worse things than coming from a dysfunctional family. At least we had money. And they put me through college so I could get away from them. At any rate, you and I have been friends for a long time. I understand your frustration about your wedding plans. But this could be a bad time to ask Lillith for favors, and timing is everything. If there’s anything I understand, it’s when and how to pitch an idea. Trust me and be patient. Don’t give up on me, or Zodiac, just yet.”

  Sheila turned a warm smile in my direction and said, “I won’t. I’m sorry for being so demanding when you’re still dealing with—” She saw me cringe and stopped herself from mentioning my breakup with Daniel. Before I could say anything, she continued, “As far as Zodiac goes, even if things don’t work out my way, I’ll be there for you. You know that, Blaine.”

  We spent the rest of our flight in silence. I assumed Sheila was brooding over Josh and their elusive wedding. I was envisioning a product called Milk of Amnesia. It could settle my stomach even as it helped me forget my ex-boyfriend.

  Ex-boyfriend. That description for Daniel didn’t seem real. In any case, he was still Sheila’s best friend. I knew that if Daniel was in my position, he’d do whatever he could to help her work things out with Lillith so she could have her weddi
ng. He nurtured his friends with the same painstaking care he gave the plants and flowers in his garden.

  I sighed and tried to figure out a way to present Sheila’s need for a leave of absence to Lillith Parker and Frank Allen. It might help me silence the Daniel voice-over in my head that was scolding me about the importance of friendship.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sheila’s situation was uppermost on my mind while we rode to the offices of Lillith Allure Cosmetics. I also wondered why I’d been summoned to Baltimore by Ms. Parker. The message relayed to me by my executive assistant, Violet, was cryptic, to say the least.

  “I don’t know, Blaine,” Violet had said. “All Lillith said was, ‘Now is the time for removing clutter and putting things in the proper order.’ Then she informed me that she needed to meet with you immediately and asked me to book you a flight to Baltimore.”

  I could only guess what Lillith’s idea of clutter and proper order were, and what they meant to our business arrangements. Obviously it had to do with some nonsense read to her by an astrologer or a gypsy fortune-teller. However, despite the carnival of mystic charlatans traipsing in and out of her offices, Lillith Parker was a shrewd businesswoman sitting on top of a multimillion-dollar industry. I had no doubt that, all karma aside, her main interest was running the well-oiled machine that was Lillith Allure Cosmetics.

  “Why do I always feel like Dorothy walking down that long corridor on her way to see the wizard whenever I come here?” Sheila said during our elevator ride to Lillith’s office.

  “Hey. A mere hour ago, you said I was the wizard.”

  “No,” Sheila stated. “I said you were the man behind the curtain pulling the levers.”

  “Oh, great,” I said. “I’m the humbug.”

  “You said it. Not me,” she said, following her words with a giggle.

  When we arrived at the eighteenth floor—the numbers one and eight added together equaled nine, which represented the number of planets in the solar system—Sheila and I departed the elevator and greeted Barbara, Lillith’s assistant.