by Rebecca Dana
I will never be as hungry as Helen Gurley Brown, as skinny as Kate Moss or as supremely rational and well-adjusted as my shrink. I live for sugar the way certain insufferable people live for the gym, and I’ve made my peace with that. Call it a crutch, call it an addiction, call it the sad solace of a lonely girl. It’s just the way I am. I get real joy from carbohydrates. I love cake like a fat kid loves cake.
Of course, the only thing better than cake is turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, gravy, two kinds of cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes with little marshmallows melted on top, apple pie, cherry pie, pumpkin pie—and cake. Which is why Thanksgiving is the most religious day of my calendar year.
By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I had plunged headlong into the period following an epic and well-deserved breakup that Nora Ephron called the “warm bath of innocent victimization.” It was by then abundantly clear that I had done the right thing, the fact of which our friends—I had come away with basically all of them—were at pains to remind me. Someday, they promised, I would barely remember the turd I had dated all those years. I came more slowly to this realization and even felt sad for Chad in the early days. This despite his habit of sending me long e-mail apologies, all of which fell somewhere short of genuine contrition. “If I could cut my heart out without killing myself, I would,” he wrote the afternoon after our breakup. So what was the point then, exactly? If I could forget he ever existed without suffering the unwelcome side effects of brain damage, I thought, I would nuke my hippocampus. But there was no point in writing. The last time Chad and I spoke was the weekend before Thanksgiving, when he sent me a long letter complaining that his parents wouldn’t subsidize his plane ticket home, and I asked him to please never write me again.
Cosmo had never celebrated Thanksgiving. He had never even tasted turkey and he longed to, so I invited him to join some of my friends and me for a group dinner at a large loft in downtown Brooklyn. It was an orphans’ gathering, a random group of people with no families or nowhere else to go. The hosts were Allegra, the owner of an art gallery on the Lower East Side, and her boyfriend, Forrest, a chef and restaurateur whose entire body was covered in tattoos. Cosmo had to work at the copy shop that day, since Lubavitchers, who have enough regularly scheduled holidays, don’t exactly fall all over themselves to celebrate one time four hundred years ago when a bunch of Puritans had a feast. Via a few quick e-mails, Cosmo and I arranged to meet at Allegra’s later. We weren’t exactly friendly at this point, but we were, in a way, dear friends. This is a strange thing that happens to two people thrown together in moments of mutual disarray. It’s like being the last two survivors on a boat that’s just been ransacked by pirates. You have to learn how to steer the thing before you have time to develop a rapport.
It was overcast and windy outside on Thanksgiving morning, the kind of day that feels much colder than it actually is. I slept late and soundly on my new Sealy Posture Premier. Around two I pulled on three sweaters and dragged myself downtown for a long soak in the tub of righteousness. Allegra met me at the door to the apartment, an open beer in one hand. I handed over a six-pack of Brooklyn Lager and settled on the couch next to Forrest’s parents, who were watching football.
Allegra is a New York City girl, born and bred, but she could just as easily have parachuted in from Majorca. She’s always wearing a bright red vintage dress and big turquoise earrings, or a bright green vintage dress and rainbow-striped vintage mules, or a yellow vintage dress and a very large custom-made black-feathered hat. She is a little bit proper and a little bit profane, and she laughs outrageously in a way that makes you feel like you’ve performed some wild feat just in saying something funny. The best laughs, like Allegra’s, blow up like bubbles around everyone who’s in on the joke. This, to me, is the holy grail of human connection, and Allegra is a wonder at it. You draw a little circle around people and say, “No one else gets this, just us.”
Dinner itself was on a narrow wooden table in a large banquet hall with an antelope skull mounted on the far wall. There were two wood-burning stoves in the corner and a few scattered animal pelts on the raw cement floor. The food had already been served when Cosmo arrived, and I was already reeling from two strong Manhattans. There were two fires going and the room was toasty, but even with the cocktails, I couldn’t get warm. Cosmo called from the subway stop, lost, and I went outside and performed Beyoncé choreography in the street so he could see where we were. He brought a bottle of kosher wine. When he entered, he said quiet hellos to the large group and said no to dinner, claiming he felt full.
All I felt from the moment the night started was a humming in my ears and a deep coldness somewhere in my gut that tryptophan and whiskey couldn’t warm. When I called to retrace my steps the next day, Allegra told me it had been a perfectly lovely night, and I believed her. But I hadn’t been aware of any such thing at the time. I floated around the room, turning circles, mouthing the words to the music playing in the background and listening attentively as one after another person said how much better off I was now. I drifted in and out of conversations, heard Cosmo arguing with one guy about agriculture in Scotland, telling another about G-dcast, this really swell podcast his friend produced that analyzed each week’s Torah portion. “You can find it on Facebook.” “Oh yeah?” At some point I looked over and Cosmo was devouring a plate of food, with nonkosher turkey that had been slow-cooked underneath a layer of bacon. He looked ecstatic.
“Cosmo, do you want to know what you’re eating?” I asked.
“Let’s leave it a mystery,” he said.
I imagined the two of us leaving together, trudging through Brooklyn late at night, to the subway, to the apartment we shared, and in doing so, I lost my balance and collapsed into a chair. The shape of it all was so familiar. You go to a dinner, you chitchat, you have dessert, and then you go to your home with your man. It is the organizing principle of adult life, but in this case, it felt like insanity. It’s so disorienting to look around and see the world unchanged, and the only difference is that you are completely unrecognizable, frozen under three sweaters, in what was supposed to be your prime.
A few weeks later, a census form appeared under Cosmo and my door, and I looked at it for fifteen solid minutes before tearing it up and throwing it out. That winter did not seem like the time to register consciousness, it seemed like the time to obliterate it. It turned out much of New York felt the same way. A year hence, because of dismally low participation and questionable efforts of census workers to try to force people to count themselves, New York Senator Charles Schumer mounted an effort to invalidate the results. Forget 2010—before it even got going, we were all trying to.
“Are you happy?” Cosmo asked, trying to catch my eyes. “Are you happy on the inside or on the outside?”
“Of course I’m happy, Cosmo!” I said, pirouetting, avoiding his gaze. “I’m always happy.” As I said this I realized just how untrue it was, and that realization had the same effect as Cosmo’s armpit-twist rug-burn jujitsu move that had sent me tumbling to the ground. Except this time the flight response won out. I looked around the room and then I fled, leaving Cosmo there by himself, happily smoking hand-rolled cigarettes beside one of the wood-burning stoves. I ditched him before dessert. I said good-bye to Allegra and slipped out to the street. I hailed a cab and took it into Manhattan, to a giant loft in Soho, to another Thanksgiving—invitation only, no guests allowed—hosted by Dave, a high-fashion photographer I barely knew, and attended by eight models, two other photographers and Dave’s mom. When I got there, dinner was over. Dave’s mom had left. Bowls—still brimming with mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, yams, salad and Brussels sprouts—and giant serving plates of turkey were out on the table. Here, no one was much into eating. Here, the spirit of Kate Moss compelled everyone to pack into the bathroom every hour or so and pass around a tiny baggie of cocaine. I would’ve loved to join in on these clown-car coke binges, but I had never
done cocaine, and this was plainly obvious to everyone there, since they all seemed to rise and disappear in unison, as if beckoned by a high-pitched whistle I couldn’t hear. No one invited me along. Profligacy being its own kind of destiny, I stayed behind on the couch and worked my way through a pecan pie.
Someone had set up a karaoke machine on the giant flat-panel TV, and two Russian models, both named Svetlana, were singing their way through the Smiths. A British model and actor named Alex, an old friend with ice-blue eyes and a Ken-doll torso, found a bicycle somewhere and was peddling it leisurely up and down the hallway. Everyone knew my story somehow; and over the course of the evening, each person at the party came up to offer their condolences, to tell me about their own experiences cheating or being cheated on. I had a vegan oatmeal cookie. At some point, Alex’s girlfriend, a Korean supermodel named Eileen, took a microphone from one of the Svetlanas and told me a long story about a five-year relationship she’d gotten into when she was fifteen, and how the guy had cheated on her seven times, and how she caught him by waiting outside a theater and surprising him when he emerged hand in hand with his ex-girlfriend. No one knew why she spoke into a microphone, but it was a good story and we were all crying by the end. The moral was that my misery, while acute, was also banal. It didn’t make the experience better or worse for me to hear this message broadcast over a top-of-the-line speaker system.
The first time I woke up, I was in bed next to the one who went by “Sveta.” She was sleeping in a full-length ball gown she’d worn to this, her first Thanksgiving. I was wearing boxers and someone’s Harvard T-shirt. The second time I woke up, it was because Alex was giving me a kiss on the forehead. “Open up,” he said. I did. He popped a Valium from a silver blister pack and placed it gently down in the center of my tongue. Then he handed me a cup of vodka, and I took a quick swallow.
“Just a little Val-y, dolly,” he said. “One left, pumpkin. Just for you.”
THE THIRD TIME I woke up it was Friday. I was sleeping on the couch in the front part of the apartment, under a small chenille area rug. I woke because Edward, my boss, was calling my cell phone. Edward was the executive editor of the Daily Beast, a Jewish lawyer from Tennessee who had worked for many years as an editor at the Wall Street Journal. He was the one who had interviewed me for a job at the Beast. When I came, I was wearing a very carefully selected outfit designed to make me look as much as possible like a character from The Devil Wears Prada: a black dress, black stockings, and black five-inch platform wedge shoes, which put me up around six foot three. Edward, I discovered that first time we met, is not a tall man. About a foot separated us, with me in my silly heels, and I spent the duration of our interview praying for someone to come and saw me off at the knees.
“Do you know who Tiger Woods is?” he asked when I rasped hello.
“Yes, I know who Tiger Woods is,” I said too authoritatively.
Edward laughs like he’s throwing something at you. It announces his presence in a building—a zip code—with the clarity and reach of an air raid siren. He’s clever and calm, and the way he draws a circle around two people is to speak as if everyone else on the planet were an absolute drunk buffoon and that you are the only sane ones left. My colleague Jacob, a muscle-bound entertainment writer, says that in journalism, a person generally has one of two dispositions: either he reacts to every piece of news with shock, or he reacts to everything with amusement. Edward is among the latter group, and it was always fun to get an assignment from him, since work became an exercise in plumbing other people’s idiotic depths.
Edward was calling because a terrible thing had happened to Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer who ever lived. Woods and his wife, Swedish model Elin Nordegren, had two precious children, a nice home in Florida and around a billion dollars in accrued and expected income from a raft of lucrative sponsorship deals. Until Thanksgiving 2009, Woods was easily the most boring professional athlete in America. He barely gave interviews, and when he did, they were full of bland sound bites about his love for the game and his beautiful family—who cares? What Elin reportedly discovered on Thanksgiving Day was that the most boring professional athlete in America had a truly Olympian taste for rough sex with cocktail waitresses. In his years on the road, according to news reports that would emerge in the coming weeks, Woods amassed more than a dozen mistresses. These included a porn star, several dubiously tasked nightclub employees and one considerably older woman, whom the press dubbed “Tiger’s cougar.” When Elin discovered this, after brief cell-phone contact with the puffy-lipped woman the press would dub Tiger’s “alpha mistress,” her brain did not desert her body. It pointed her in the direction of her husband’s clubs, one of which she reportedly took to the family Escalade, Tiger cowering within.
When the news broke that tryptofantastic Friday, the Woods scandal captivated a sleepy nation. We were all bored senseless by the other news of the day—health care reform, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the interminable recession—but how much fun is a storybook marriage collapsing luridly before your eyes! The story had everything anyone could ever want: hubris, fake breasts, a fallen idol, his wronged wife. While strumpet after strumpet paraded before the media at press conferences in the weeks that followed, Elin did nothing. It was mesmerizing. She moved about Florida like a wood nymph. She spent her days driving back and forth to the gas station and to her children’s school. In the six months that elapsed between the alleged Thanksgiving incident and the announcement of their preliminary divorce settlement, virtually the only pictures paparazzi managed to get were of her in yoga pants and sunglasses, standing calmly next to her SUV. I looked in the reflective coating of her sunglasses in the pictures of her that came across the wires and thought: What is going on in there?
It is only relatively recently that sex scandals have become such big business for American journalism. British tabloids figured it out first, chasing Princess Diana into an early grave, and still do it best. We Puritans were slower to catch on, a delay that made it possible for a college student in the early twenty-first century to imagine a journalism career that would never involve hours spent in search of the phone number of the ex-wife of the gay former governor of New Jersey. Everyone blames Gary Hart, who in 1987 challenged the media to report on his personal life while he was running for president, then seemed shocked to be caught with his mistress, for the initial breach. The Clinton scandal a decade hence turned infidelity into an entire category of political journalism. The Woods scandal, breaking like dawn over my post-Thanksgiving hangover, would turn it into a legitimate business proposition for a slew of struggling new media outlets. Entire publications survived for months on Tiger Woods, following every minor development and every false lead with surgical precision. Paparazzi provided live-action video of the train wreck. This sort of attention is a condition of celebrity in the modern era, but it was jacked up to the highest setting for Woods. Every time pop star Britney Spears went for a microwavable burrito at her local gas station, swarms of photographers recorded the trip for posterity, and this went tenfold for Tiger’s many supposed mistresses. These pictures and videos helped keep countless news organizations in business at a time when “news,” in the traditional sense, had ceased to be much of a moneymaker. We made photo galleries with these pictures and used them to boost the Web traffic of the Daily Beast. We wrote stories pivoting off minor details in the Woods saga, as if contained within the collapse of this marriage were a thousand koans, an infinitely applicable guide to human life. What is Elin’s crisis-management strategy here? Why don’t famous women get caught up in sex scandals the way men do? How have wronged women learned from the media coverage of other wronged women? I wrote all these essays and more in the weeks that followed. It was beyond meta. It was a metastasis.
Even the altruists among us—the hospice nurses, the bone marrow donors—must have mornings when they wake up under a chenille area rug and say, “What the hell am I doing with my life?” To be young and to desire a uniq
ue and worthwhile existence on this planet is basically to fight a feeling of pointlessness every minute of the day. You fix a thousand cleft palates and there are millions more you could never get to, and what’s to stop those smiling kids from dying of AIDS a year later or chopping each other to bits in some incomprehensible war or growing up to be the lowest kind of human life, anonymous Internet commenters who spend their afternoons trolling websites and leaving messages like “Who cares?” Alternately, you write stories for a living, and maybe occasionally you say something that passes for genuine insight, but then the rest of the time it’s just you and Elin Nordegren and the designer of Michelle Obama’s latest gown in the great Internet traffic jam of hell. To be young and to desire a unique and worthwhile existence as a journalist in the age of search engine optimization—when the ultimate goal of every endeavor is to lure as many anonymous commenters as possible, to get as many odious Internet aggregators to link to your little bit of bother on the Tiger Woods debacle—felt, that winter, after my entire life collapsed, like one more aspect of an already extinct dream.
In the months that followed that first phone call with Edward, I interviewed Dina McGreevey, ex-wife of former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, who resigned and came out as a “gay American” in 2004. I attended an intimate ladies lunch with Jenny Sanford, ex-wife of doomed South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who told everyone he was going hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the spring of 2009 and instead went to visit his Argentinean lover, to whom he wrote long letters about the pleasures of farmwork. Both women had written books about their marital struggles, and Sanford signed a copy of hers for me at the end of our lunch, which occurred at an empty midtown restaurant at the beginning of a blizzard; Lou Dobbs sat two tables away. From my little desk in my big candy-colored office, I tapped out these stories in two hours or less. “Commerce, not art,” I told myself. And when I got lucky, lots of people read my commerce and left a note about how dumb or ugly I was.