The Art of Undressing

by Stephanie Lehmann

  I thought he sounded somewhat surprised. “You didn’t think it would be?”

  “I did. It was very good. Really.”

  “Thanks. Yeah. So.” I took a deep breath. I figured I would take care of this during the appetizer. “I was helping Emma in her room . . . to clean up a little . . .”

  “I can actually see her floor for the first time in years.”

  “Yeah.” It flashed through my mind that maybe he didn’t even need to know this. It could be my secret with Emma. I’d be in charge of her napkin supply. He didn’t need to be involved. But, on the other hand, she did say I could tell him. And I wanted him to get a dose of reality. His little girl wasn’t so little anymore. “I’m sure you haven’t noticed, but Emma’s got her period.”

  “What?”

  I had to repeat myself? “Her period. She’s menstruating.”

  “Really?” He swallowed his last bite of prosciutto and fennel, looked over towards the bar, then back at me. “I didn’t know.” Then back towards the bar. Then back at me. “She told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  “Probably, you know, because you’re a guy.”

  “Of course.”

  Or perhaps because he was cold and distant. “So I told her I would tell you. And I got her some supplies, you know, so you don’t have to worry about that. At least, not for a few months.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I could check in with her about it again. But I think you should say something to her. Give her something positive. Some kind of encouragement, you know, something supportive? So she can feel good about it.”

  The waiter came and took our plates. It felt odd to be giving my father advice for a change. After the waiter was gone, he said, “Of course. I’ll say something.”

  I exhaled. Good. I was glad to get that done with. Why did it have to be so painful to talk about anything personal with him? And I wasn’t even done.

  I brought up Coco during the main course. We’d both ordered the same thing. Salmon with sesame and orange-ginger relish. I wondered if Tom had made it.

  “This is really good.” I waited until after we’d both had second bites. “Can I ask you something about Mom?”

  “Sure.”

  “When you first knew her in high school. Before you were married. Do you think she was in love with you?”

  “In love?” He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  “Really?” I leaned forward against the table, my biceps pressing against the edge.

  “I suppose . . . maybe she was.” He shrugged.

  “Were you in love with her?”

  “Ginger. Words like that . . .”

  “You aren’t on trial here. I just want to know. What was it like? I mean, were you two ever happy together?”

  “Look. We were young. I was ambitious. The timing was bad. And your mother . . .” He took a stab at his fish. “She liked to do what she liked to do. And I was not about to . . .”

  “What I don’t fully understand . . .” I put my fork down. “I never understood . . .” My voice was wavering. The muscle under my right eye twitched. I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t ask why he never did more about me. Sharing custody of me. “I can understand,” I said. “Coco can be pretty wild. No boundaries.” But at least she’d raised me, with Grandma’s help. He’d done nothing. “Sometimes she drives me crazy.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded sympathetically, and I could see it in his eyes, he wanted to hear more.

  “I feel like I can’t bring any friends around to see her. Because they never look at me the same again.” I savored my salmon. All the flavors really did complement each other.

  “That must be tough.”

  “And everything always has to be about sex. I get sick of it!” I glanced over at Tom. He looked flushed from being over the stove. I wished I could wipe his forehead with a cool cloth. “Sometimes I just wish . . . she did something normal, you know?”

  “Sure. Of course you do.”

  Oh, god, I was betraying my mother. “And now she wants to marry this guy Jack.”

  “Really.”

  I sensed my father’s interest. Had I gone too far?

  “You don’t like him?”

  Was my father jealous? Of Coco? “He has a lot of money. An apartment on Central Park South.”

  “Uh-huh. Well. It’s her life.” My father patted his mouth with his napkin. “You can’t tell her what to do with it. She wouldn’t listen to you anyway.” He looked away then, and I knew our semi-intimate conversation was over.

  My father paid the check and offered to get me a cab. I preferred to walk home. My mind was spinning. I needed to think. I wanted to be proud of the woman who’d raised me. In some ways, Coco really was strong. I’d grown up hearing countless stories about her dancer friends who needed alcohol and/or drugs to get through a shift, and then they’d start sleeping with customers for extra cash, and there’d be a whole downward spiral.

  Not Coco. She didn’t smoke or drink or take drugs. She had never, so far as I knew, slept with a customer. And the fact was, she really had enjoyed her work for many years and was sad when she got too old for the clubs. That was the hard part for her—when she had to stop.

  And wasn’t it, really, when you got down to it, a very positive thing, the way she was so comfortable with her body, so free of inhibitions, so without guilt for doing something society condemned but was really, in the end, about experiencing pleasure, and what was wrong with that? I knew from one of my cultural anthropology classes that dances centering around rolling hips and bellies were originally performed by women for other women and were all about fertility and the land. It was only after it was for the men that it came to be considered dirty.

  At the bottom of the park, I passed a lineup of horses and carriages waiting to be hired. I breathed in the manure and remembered how it had made Tom think fondly of home. I sat down on a bench and took another whiff. It made me think fondly of Tom.

  chapter twenty-one

  k ingsley stood up at the front of the demo kitchen with an impressive lineup of expensive wines and a tall stack of trays from the dishwasher filled with glasses. “Your wine list is going to tell your customer about your level of sophistication, so educate yourselves. Learn how to choose wines, buy them, and store them. I hold wine-tasting seminars every few weeks so my staff has firsthand knowledge about what we’re serving.”

  Yet one more enticement to work for Kingsley.

  As he lined up a dozen glasses along the side of the table, he went over some of the basics, like filling the glass only one third of the way so the “imbiber” can swirl the liquid around, release the aroma, let it breathe . . . Then he got into the difference between reds and whites.

  “Shall we do reds first?” he asked no one in particular as he uncorked a few bottles of Cabernet and poured a taste into each of the glasses. This promised to be the best class ever. “White wines are made from green grapes or red grapes that have been skinned. Red wines use the whole grape, skin and seeds. This has a big impact on the taste. Leaving the skin on produces tannins. The more tannin, the more bitter the drink.”

  He passed out the glasses of wine. “How many of you prefer red wines to whites?”

  I raised my hand. So did Tom. Tara didn’t. “I myself have a bias towards reds. They’re fuller, richer, earthier . . . Once you take that layer of skin off that grape, it tends to be lighter, less complex.” I took a sip of my Cabernet and craved a piece of cheese to go with it. “Some people think whites are more approachable for that reason,” Kingsley continued, “and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But I find the complexity of a full-bodied red to be much more satisfying.” Kingsley swirled his wine around in his glass. I could’ve sworn, when he raised it to toast the class, he looked straight at me.

  Did that mean something? Was I totally reading in? I took another sip. It couldn’t be. I wanted to think he was interested in me. Not that I would do a
nything about it. Not that he would. But it would be so amazing. And scary. I would have to convince him I was . . . refined. He would never think enough of the real me. It was too unsettling to think about. Anyway, Tom was the one I was thinking about. Wasn’t he?

  By lunchtime, we were all enjoying the lesson quite a bit, and some particularly diligent students were more than a little soused. Ralph was wagging his tongue at Kingsley, and I was toying with the idea of sauntering up to Tom and planting a big wet kiss on his lips. He couldn’t fall for a rotten tomato like Tara, could he? Maybe the problem was, I’d been too passive. And I was being a fool, just letting her steal him away. I had my chance to make a move when Kingsley asked Tara to help take the used wineglasses back to the dishwasher. Tom mentioned to me that he was going to get some air on the roof. I figured that was more or less an invitation to join him. “I’ll come too.”

  I followed him up the stairwell and he pushed open the heavy door that led onto the gravelly rooftop. There was a rumor floating around that a distraught student had once jumped over the edge after burning a tray of crème brulee.

  “The air is sweet!” I said.

  “I’m not used to drinking so much in the middle of the day.”

  “That was fun, though. And informative, of course.”

  “I’m still not sure I can identify the difference between a fat wine, a round wine, and a plump wine . . .”

  “How can words ever really adequately describe a taste?”

  “So,” he said, sitting down on a bench that looked like it had been stolen from the park. “I saw you at L’Etoile the other night. Why didn’t you come say hi?”

  I felt like I’d been caught with my underwear down. “You looked busy. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “You should’ve! What did you think of the food?”

  “I loved it.”

  “What did you have?”

  “The salmon with the orange-ginger relish.”

  “Good choice,” he said. “Orange and ginger. Those flavors ‘marry’ quite well.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s inspiring when you can find two flavors that are willing to commit to each other like that.”

  “So often, ingredients get mixed up with any old seasoning that happens to be around.”

  “Or they get involved with some totally unreliable exotic spice.” I giggled tipsily. “You looked pretty good back there cooking away.”

  “Thanks. It’s been kind of scary, to tell you the truth. Tara’s dad is a real perfectionist. I keep worrying I’m going to fuck up.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, really. It’s a lot of pressure. And you can’t hide. The orders come in. You’re doing ten things at once. Do something wrong, you get yelled at by the sous chef, yelled at by the waiters. You wouldn’t believe how tired I am at the end of the shift. It’s really exhausting.”

  “Yeah. I got a lot of that when I was at Chantal.”

  “And then it’s torture waking up in the morning to come here.”

  “Maybe you’re doing too much.”

  “But I have to. It’s such a great opportunity.”

  “You have too much on your plate. I hate that phrase. Too much on your plate.”

  “But it’s all good.”

  “It’s just . . .” I paused. He looked at me. I edged closer to him. “It’s too bad you’ve gotten so busy.” I gazed into his blue eyes in the most inviting way I could conjure up. “I had a good time with you that day, at the restaurant supply store.”

  “Restaurant supply store” didn’t come out sounding quite as seductive as I might’ve liked. I wasn’t quite drunk enough to actually kiss him, but I did lift my chin and pout my lips very slightly in his direction.

  He slid ever so slightly away from me. “I know,” he said. “That was fun.”

  “Yeah,” I said, telling myself that the fact that he slid ever so slightly away from me was only because he wanted me to slide ever so slightly closer to him. “And I was looking forward to . . . um . . . showing you around . . . the city . . . some more.”

  “That would be nice,” he said.

  I smiled. He smiled. It was the perfect moment for him to kiss me.

  He stood up. “The thing is . . .” He seemed engrossed with the view. “The thing is, I can’t quit that job. It would be smarter to quit school. I’m getting paid to learn. It’s great. I really have to feel lucky. And Tara. She’s been great. She really made it happen. The way she introduced me to her dad. I’m sure she convinced him to hire me. So I really have her to thank.”

  “Mr. Glass wouldn’t have hired you if he didn’t think you had talent.”

  “Are you kidding? He can hire anyone he wants. But he hired me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He sat back down next to me. “Look, Ginger, I’m sorry, but . . .”

  Suddenly I didn’t feel tipsy anymore.

  “Tara and I . . .”

  His voice trailed off. He didn’t need to say any more. I didn’t need to ask either, but who can resist a little masochism? “What, she’s your girlfriend?”

  “We’re kind of . . . involved right now. It turns out.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s nice.”

  “I . . .” He hunched over, elbows on knees, and stared down at the gravel.

  He actually looked ashamed, like I’d walked in on him stealing twenties from the till. “It’s not surprising. She’s a very beautiful girl.”

  “I really like you, Ginger. I hope . . .” He turned to me. “I really want us to be friends.”

  “Of course.”

  “You aren’t mad?”

  “Why should I be?”

  There was a cement barrier that ran around the edge of the roof. I treated my brain to a symbolic jump over it. A quick drop, one bounce on that blue awning way down there, then splat.

  “I never expected . . . I didn’t expect it . . . to happen . . . so fast.”

  “I guess she just swept you off your feet.”

  “I guess.”

  “So.” I stood up. “I wonder what interesting assignment Jean Paul has for me this afternoon. Maybe he’ll ask me to scour the fat drippings off the bottom of the stove. Oh, no wait, I saw a shipment of calamari. Perhaps he’ll ask me to degut all six million . . .”

  “Don’t give up on him, Ginger. Jean Paul must see what a hard worker you are. That’s what’s so great about you. You’re just like one of the guys.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Okay. Now, not only was I tough and thick-skinned, I was one of the guys! I knew he meant it as a compliment. And god knows, on another day, from anyone else, I would’ve taken it as one. But right then? From him? It burned. “I’m gonna go back inside.”

  chapter twenty-two

  m y mother was right. No man would ever find me attractive if I didn’t inflate my boobs, hide my pores, streak my hair, cripple my feet. I cut my way through Rockefeller Plaza hoping to find her at home. I owed Coco an apology. I’d been fooling myself all these years, was deficient as a human being, a downright failure as a woman. I went past Dean and Deluca, and resisted going in there to buy a large carrot muffin with cream cheese frosting that would most certainly help dull the pain. I had work to do.

  Coco was doing crunches on the floor of the living room. She had on black stretch yoga pants and a black tank with two intertwined red dragons on her chest. Judy Garland belted out “The Man That Got Away.”

  “Mom? Can you turn the music down for a sec?”

  “When I’m done . . .”

  “I need to talk.”

  “Can you wait until I do a hundred?”

  I sat down on the sofa, took off my sneakers, and waited. Even in my distressed mental state, I almost had to laugh, considering the absurd juxtaposition of Judy’s angst and flat abs. But it gave me a chance to give myself another pep talk. Yes. It was necessary to do all these things girls do to attract men, and I’d been wasting my youthful beauty, or potential beauty, all these years in some self-defeating act of rebelli
on. But all was not lost. Who better to have in my corner? Tara’s advantage would not last long, because I had the expert at my disposal, and the expert was chomping at the bit to coach me.

  Finally she crunched her last crunch. “Whoo! So what’s up?”

  I turned off the sound as she stood. “I want to apologize.”

  She took a long sip from a water bottle. “Good. Go ahead. I’m just gonna do some poses.”

  “I’m sorry I made a scene at your birthday party.”

  “Okay,” she said, sitting with her butt on her heels, spine straightened, hands on knees.

  “And I’m sorry I made a fuss about the plastic surgery concept. If you want to get some work done, go ahead. It’s your decision even if you do ruin your looks and die on the operating table.”

  “Thanks,” she said, raising her butt, reaching her hands back, arching her back, dropping her head back and grabbing her ankles. It made my back hurt just to watch.

  “And . . . if you want to marry Jack . . . I suppose . . . that’s your decision . . . and I’ll try not to be so negative about the whole thing, even if—”

  “Great!” she interrupted. “I think that’s a good place to stop.” She released forward again, legs folded under her, butt on her heels. “Apology accepted.”

  “But can I just say one thing?”

  Now she leaned forward over her thighs. “Can I stop you?” Her forehead rested on the floor, arms along her sides.

  “You should’ve told me about Jack before you announced it to everyone.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.” She aimed her eyeballs up at me. “It’s just, he popped the question right before the party, and he was all excited . . .”

  “And then you completely embarrassed me with that stupid lap dance.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, looking down again, “I was just having fun!”

  “It was humiliating! Really! I mean, sometimes you just don’t have boundaries. And it’s screwed up.”

  She gave up on the hope of achieving her Zen state and sat up. “I have boundaries. They’re just farther out than you want ’em to be.”