Weddings, babies, children, young mothers in SUVs, young fathers with rolled-up shirtsleeves, old fathers in wheelchairs, Clarissa was surrounded. Her world had grown up around her, and she was determined not to be left at the station labeled “She Was So Cute, Remember?”
Clarissa shook her head like a wet dog. She thought maybe she had reached her alcohol limit.
“Uh-huh. Which part would that be?” Larry the Waiter looked at her list and declared it “Sold out. This isn’t the nineties.”
Clarissa looked down the names. Was he right? Gay waiters are always right.
“Look, Sweetness. Do you want to end up here in ten years with fake lips and helmet hair toasting a guy with half a pancreas?”
Clarissa looked at him. “Not Clarissa. I’m not going to end up like a retired Breck girl.” They stared down at the end of the bar. Two Clairol blondes in their forties, their lips wrapped tightly around numerous collagen injections, their noses a matched set of early-eighties ski slopes, were laughing with practiced hilarity at something an older man with spotted hands and a gut spilling out over his elasticized waistband had managed to spit out.
Clarissa noticed that one of them had a rip in her nylons. She noted the scuffed shoes.
Clarissa was all too aware of this tragedy; it was her own personal Clarissa Regina Alpert nightmare. Los Angeles was known as the land of broken dreams (blah, blah). Saunter on your Jimmy Choos into any of the better restaurants—the standards, Spago, Mr. Chow, Nobu, Ivy, Chaya, Giorgio—the tyros—the House, Lucques, Chadwick—and there was always the table Clarissa avoided like the plague (or retail … or J. C. Penney … or Estée Lauder foundation), the table that was either closest to the bathroom or the kitchen, the one with the two women, 90 percent of the time overblonde, with delicate, oval faces that looked good when …
When.
They would eat their salad (“appetizer size, please”) in tidy forkfuls and engage in the appearance of conversation that both were too tired for, and if you didn’t watch closely (as Clarissa did, for she couldn’t help herself—how many get to see their future so clearly?) you wouldn’t notice that they didn’t share eye contact, that they didn’t laugh. That they got up to go to the bathroom at least three times, and they walked slowly, heads up, face set, knowing this, this, was no longer a dress rehearsal; that they always ordered three glasses of house chardonnay but never dessert.
That they were watching your table, watching you watching them. Running their eyes over you like a truck.
And you didn’t blame them.
Clarissa shivered. She had to get married before the end of the year. Her timeline was clear: she would be twenty-nine (thirty-two) in November; she and her lucky husband would have two children within four years; she’d be divorced by forty and still hot (thanks to Dr. Drew Franklin of the Beverly Hills Triangle) and living the good life while the nannied, tutored, personal-trained kids attended out-of-state boarding schools.
But if they fell in love, well … Clarissa wondered about the odds. She’d been in love once. Had she already used up her chits?
A plan. Clarissa always had a plan. (Important Subplot: Her father, the Horrible Teddy Alpert, was threatening to stop paying her rent. This meant two things: (a) Clarissa would have to get a job. Impossible, because, as she told her father, “I am my own full-time job”; leaving: (b) Clarissa would have to get a husband who had a job.) Also, Clarissa felt she was, at her age, walking around with an expiration date on her head.
The waiter took Clarissa’s pen from her frozen hand and wrote these words:
6-10: AARON MASON.
He wrote it in all caps, as though the name were bigger than the sum of itself.
“Who?” Clarissa looked at him, hazel eyes widened with curiosity, greed … and hope.
“Your last hurrah. Read your trades, Missy Miss.”
Clarissa drove her convertible BMW (the preferred driving instrument for young hot women with acquiring minds) to the all-night newsstand at Fairfax and Third and bought copies of the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and a couple music trades, though she loathed anything having to do with the music industry. After she told the ancient cashier to keep her change in order not to touch his hand, she didn’t bother waiting to read the papers. She sat in the open air of her driver’s seat as homeless people beckoned.
“Quarter for a song?” a black man with aging dreads asked.
“I’ll need more than that,” Clarissa said. Clarissa loathed reading under the best of circumstances (in her defense, she did enjoy Vogue and Cosmopolitan and sometimes Marie Claire, when it didn’t get all “intellectual”); she needed to concentrate.
He was taken aback; he thought he’d heard wrong.
“You want me to pay you?”
“Look, Frank Sinatra, Jr., okay, I’ll give you a dollar to walk away from here without singing.”
He took it.
And Clarissa found her man: Aaron Mason had bought something called the “underlying rights” to something called The Gay Divorcee, an old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical (Ugh. I hate old musicals, Clarissa thought) for $1.5 million, paid to the inheritors of the original play—
“One-point-five mill—!” Clarissa exclaimed. The number gratified her, then made her angry that someone would spend so much money on something that wasn’t even in color.
Aaron explained, in the article, that among the things he loved growing up, “the lonely scion of a Forbes 500 family” (the reporter’s words), was old musicals. And his very favorite was The Gay Divorcee.
“I adore old musicals!” Clarissa said. And then proceeded to the twenty-four-hour video rental store on the Strip, a place frequented by blow hounds on a bender, garden-variety insomniacs, and porn addicts. She instantly forgot about the Playboy Mansion and its gaudy clarion song.
Clarissa Alpert had homework to do.
Clarissa’s mom was taking a dump in Clarissa’s own bathroom; Clarissa hated this because waste moved through Clarissa’s mother’s body and came out the other end with little molecular restructuring: If she ate corn, out came a cob; if she ate carrots, deli salad it would be; if she ate steak (she rarely ate steak, or anything with more than 150 calories a serving, for that matter), out came a Hereford.
“Mom!” Clarissa shouted. Her voice was naturally scratchy, like Demi Moore after a week of screaming at assistants. Some found it sexy, some merely annoying. Clarissa picked up the remote control and rewound. She was on her seventh viewing of The Gay Divorcee; as far as she could see, the movie was about how tap dancing could lead to wedding bells.
“Wha’?”
Her mother always said “Wha’?” instead of “What?”
“You know what I told you about taking dumps in my fuck-ing bathroom?”
“You should wash out that mouth, that’s wha’.”
“T! T! T! T! What!”
“Pffft.”
This meant “Shut your mouth, dear daughter, you mean little cunt, or I’ll cut you like a knife.”
The problem was, her mother was hooked on a molten something called “Dieter’s Tea.” It contained an enormous amount of “natural” laxative, enough to clean out a 747 engine. Clarissa drank it once, after a Thanksgiving dinner—she was going to have sex that night with an entertainment attorney with an enormous shlong and bigger Mercedes, and though she loved a heavy meal, especially Thanksgiving dinner, she also loved sex.
She drank it, and almost laid a brick right in the middle of foreplay.
Oral foreplay.
The tea had made her sweat and cramp; she crawled to the bathroom, bent over like a halter-topped Quasimodo. The attorney never called again, except once that next morning, because someone had taken his favorite meditation CD, the one with the stupid monks or something, and he had to ask …
Well, of course Clarissa had taken it. She knew he wasn’t going to call again (there’s always a first time!) and she wanted to punish him.
Oh … what Clarissa learned from the ent
ertainment attorney: Never drink Dieter’s Tea before sex. Never.
Also: Big Mercedes, like the 600 series, drive more smoothly than the small, sporty models.
Her mother was addicted to the hideous brown, bark-tasting liquid; she drank it three times a day. Once, Clarissa had convinced her mother to stop drinking the foul tea; her bowels got so badly backed up, Clarissa had to rush her to the hospital so a dashing Indian intern could stick a long, dark finger up her mother’s tiny, crepey butt.
Clarissa subverted her own rules (don’t date anything that can’t get you into the VIP section of a premiere or table seven at Mr. Chow) and had three dates with the intern until realizing, on the traditional third-date screw, his dick had the circumference of a number two pencil. She was hoping he’d be a “Grower, not a Shower,” to no avail. The shock was so great that Clarissa retired, staying home every night for a month, with only Oreos, Red Bull and vodka, and her Bunny Ears vibrator to keep her company.
Finally, her mother came out of the bathroom to face Clarissa’s grimace, which wasn’t what it used to be, because of the botox.
“Wha’?”
“What?”
“Don’t star—”
Start! Clarissa screamed in her head. Her mother was Jewish Bolivian, the granddaughter of a Bolivian general, once very beautiful, still petite. Clarissa looked like a Chechen weightlifter downing steroids for breakfast when she stood next to her.
“Mommy, did you read the article?” Clarissa shifted gears smoothly.
“Leave that boy alone.” Not smooth enough.
“So Not Supportive,” Clarissa tried to whine, but she was not a natural; her whine came out more like a Volkswagen engine straining over the Sepulveda Pass.
“He’s not going to marry you.”
“Want a bet?”
“Wha’?”
“Bet. Bet. You want to bet.”
“No gambling.”
“Mom, it’s not gambling. Look, he’s having lunch at the Ivy next Tuesday.” Clarissa knew this because, posing as a ditsy secretary who didn’t wish to incur her boss’s wrath, she had called every upscale restaurant on the west side to ask if they had a reservation under “Aaron Mason.”
“I’m not going with you.”
“Yes, you are. I can’t invite my friends. They’re either too hot or they’re too evil—there’d be nothing left of him. He’d be man dust.”
Her mother waved her hand, as she often did when she was agitated.
“Don’t say that, Mom.”
Her mother waved her hand again.
“I’m not going to use him, or ruin him, or whatever it is you think I do to men.” Clarissa uncoiled herself from her red velvet couch, purloined from an ex-boyfriend’s defunct nightclub (from whom she’d learned to always keep chilled vodka on hand). “I just want to meet him.”
Her mother narrowed her eyes and gestured once more.
“Great. I want you to wear the black Armani suit, the silk one with the silver buttons.”
Mom’s hand fluttered up and down.
“It does not make you look fat. You couldn’t look fat if you were fat—Jesus!”
Clarissa rose from the couch and strode to the bar (otherwise known as “the mantel”) in her rented off-Robertson duplex; her apartment was a place where scores of girls like her settled until boys like Aaron (only less rich) married them. Clarissa had stopped counting the girls in her five-square-block neighborhood (Robertson to La Cienega; Beverly to Third) who fit her description when she reached into the thirties: 25-34 (same as the coveted, ideal 9:00 P.M. Fox TV audience), straight blonde or brown hair (if not naturally straight, blow-dried twice weekly), tallish, but not supermodel tall, drinkers of cappuccino (morning) and vodka (evening), and eaters of … not much. They lived off Daddy and Mommy, though their stipends didn’t cover designer shoes and rent and subscriptions to forty-eight beauty magazines. And, lastly, they were jobless, or, at the very least, on the verge of being jobless.
And not at all worried about the prospect.
Their signature personality statement was that they never worried. About anything: poverty, war, dinner, children, grandparents, the melting of the polar ice cap.
Clarissa made two Belvedere vodka tonics (filling hers, first, with maraschino cherries—she liked only red drinks) and walked toward her mother, putting her large gold head (a friend once remarked that it belonged on the face of a coin) on her mother’s tiny shoulder.
“Please, Mama.” The clincher.
Her mother patted her head; Clarissa knew she was home free—her mother would never let her down.
The Starter Wife Page 36