by Cathy Alter
Up for Renewal
ALSO BY CATHY ALTER
Virgin Territory: Stories from the Road to Womanhood
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2008 by Cathy Alter
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
ATRIABOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alter, Cathy.
Up for renewal: what magazines taught me about love, sex, and starting over / by Cathy Alter.—1st Atria Books hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Conduct of life—Humor. 2. Women’s periodicals—Humor. I. Title.
PN6231.C6142A48 2008
818'.602—dc22
2007042817
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8042-3
ISBN-10: 1-4165-8042-5
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Names and identifying characteristics of some people portrayed in this book have been changed to protect the innocent—as well as the guilty, who already know who they are.
For my parents,
who hopefully won’t disown me
Up for Renewal
INTRODUCTION
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the noise was overwhelming. The clashing mastheads, the unbridled exclamation points, the multiple Heidi Klums, all boobs and eyes, all at full volume.
And the sex. The sex was everywhere. Easy Sexy Hair. 803 Sexy Looks. Your Best Sex at 20, 30, 40. Flab to Fab: A Plan to Reveal Your Sexy Muscles.
Three rows of beautiful faces, arranged on risers, looked down on me, like a choir of genetic perfection. To either side of me, the ponytailed and manicured congregation reached for their Klums, opening them like hymnals.
I don’t know how long I remained parked in front of that wall of women’s magazines, motionless and mesmerized in an overly lit bookstore, listening to the rhythmic flip-flap of pages being turned. The sensation was similar to being in a Las Vegas casino, where there are no windows or clocks and you could be playing blackjack for either ten minutes or ten years.
What was I doing here? More important, how had I gotten here in the first place?
For starters, I was a recently divorced thirty-seven-year-old who by day wrote painfully dry sales and marketing materials for a legal publishing company in our nation’s capital. It was the kind of ephemera—Dear Subscriber letters and densely worded product brochures—that most people, especially our recipients, would label as junk mail.
By day, I was also screwing a colleague, in my cubicle, with the constant prattling of our two other quadmates providing ambience, mere inches away from the other side of the shared high walls. The literal nine-to-five grind. How we kept it a secret was a mystery to me (frankly, whether I had a cone of silence around my cubicle or just hard-of-hearing coworkers was of no concern to me); how we kept it quiet was Bruno’s hand over my mouth. Bruno was a supremely arrogant art director who did asinine things like nibble his toast into the shape of Argentina, his homeland, and then try and impress the waitress—and everyone else in the vicinity—with his artistry. Being bigheaded, he fought any efforts to correct his work—as in, this should be a period and not a comma; or, the company logo is blue and not red—by completely ignoring anyone’s attempts to manage him.
Dave, my gay work boyfriend, applauded my steamy open-office romance and thought that Bruno was good for my skin. A fellow writer and voyeur, he agreed that the best stories were often in the telling, and nothing pleased him more than listening to me deliver the latest cubicle installment, with pornographic gusto. In a sense, I was getting off two men, one right after the other.
Bruno would go to creative extremes to get me to touch his penis, and Dave especially loved these narratives because I’d adopt a fantastically exaggerated Latin accent in the recounting.
“Cat, Cat, check it out.”
It was always the same prelude. Bruno would enter my cubicle and deftly extract his dick from his fly.
“Can you feel a lump here?” he’d query. “Do you think it could be dangerous?”
Dave and I would howl over Bruno’s latest medical inventions, and marvel at how he always managed to up the ante.
“Congratulations, Bruno”—I’d eye-roll—“this is your most pathetic attempt to date.” And then I’d hike up my skirt and reward him anyway.
So really, who was more pathetic?
I’d like to say that I was punishing myself for the guilt I felt in leaving my husband, taking up with a guy who was clearly using me as an instrument of his own depersonalized, self-serving pleasure (his music, not mine), but I didn’t think the excuses were that interesting. The truth was, I just missed having sex.
I used to joke that I had sex more with Bruno in the first week of our affair than I did in my five years of marriage. But it wasn’t a joke. That my husband had gained more than one hundred pounds since our engagement wasn’t the only reason I stopped sleeping with him, but it was the most convenient one. A better reason was anchored in desolate anger—at my husband for who he was and at myself for never accepting it. My sadness was so profound and so deep that it circumnavigated itself and looped back around, pulling me under with its weight until I was numb.
My desire to desire was absolute, and Bruno, a Botticelli with excellent table manners, the lean and graceful body of a dancer, and the proximity of being on the other side of the cubicle wall, was the perfect receptacle for my id. He was a no-brainer rebound. But after the glow of frequent, open-office sex had been stubbed out, I realized that Bruno was not only a bad idea, he was career suicide. Plus, I didn’t even like him that much.
I knew this. I knew this.
And yet I was unable to stop the feeding frenzy of poor decisions.
When I wasn’t bent over in my cubicle, I was yearning desperately for Glen, who lived in the apartment building next door (as if fishing off the company pier wasn’t enough of a risk), a sweet-faced guy who thought he created a trend the day he pushed his floppy blond hair back with a terry-cloth sweatband. Glen had parlayed an obsession with cowhide into a successful retail business by turning the soft fur of fetal calves into chic clutches and tote bags. If I were lucky, a rare occurrence, he’d let me blow him and sleep over. But mostly I just hung around him, like the girl at last call, hoping that tonight was the night he’d condescend to go home with me, since no one prettier was around and his buddies had taken off and what the hell, he was horny and it didn’t really mean anything as long as we technically didn’t fuck.
Besides my stellar dating choices, I was running with a pretty fast crowd. I had taken up with two of Glen’s clients, the fabulously gay duo of Richard and Ronald, whose “Sunday Fundays” began with cocktails at 11:00 AM and didn’t stop until nightcaps at midnight. In the first winter of our friendship, I was on antibiotics four times.
Drinking required smoking, and I easily picked back up where I had left off in my NYC twenties, reuniting with my Marlboro Lights with great big drags of zeal. I was selecting my lunch based on the contents of the office vending machine and had developed an unhealthy addiction to pepperoni Combos and Cherry Coke. And I was spending like crazy—$800 custom-made cowboy boots, spur-of-the-moment weekends in South Beach, a hand-forged silver necklace by an Israeli sculptress I had never heard of before. Sometimes the balance in my checking account was so measly in between paychecks that I was reduced to paying for my morning coffee with f
istfuls of pennies.
And I was crying. All the time. Silently, in my cubicle; publicly, walking through Georgetown on my way to meet a friend; inconsolably, at a crowded truck-stop diner while my mother passed me handfuls of paper napkins and men with dirty necks and meaty hands stared at me in bug-eyed astonishment.
But the worst casualty of this excessive living was my writing. As a freelance journalist, it was up to me to hunt up story ideas and pitch them to editors. If they liked an idea, they’d assign me the story. In just two years of freelancing, my byline had appeared in the Washington Post, on the cover of the Washington City Paper, in the pages of Spin and Self, and in a continuing, Dave Eggers–commissioned series for McSweeney’s. I saw everyone I met as a potential profile and always seemed to have something in the works.
But not anymore. My priorities were clearly out of whack, and I was wasting way too much time running after dead-end relationships instead of maintaining and cultivating healthy ones with current and potential editors. For six months, the only thing I had managed to write was a piece for the Post’s Home Section about Glen and his cowhide business. But that was really more of a love note.
When I was going through my divorce, I reestablished contact with an old boyfriend who was simultaneously ending his marriage.
“What age do you think we are right now?” he had asked, even though he knew we were both thirty-five. “Do you think when people divorce, they regress to the age they were right before they got married?”
“I’ve gone further back,” I admitted. “I’m behaving like I’m still in college.”
“Me, too.” He laughed.
The last time we spoke, he was dating someone in an open marriage who had become unreasonable when he told her he wanted to see other women.
My life was taking on a similar car-wreck mentality. But after experiencing the initial jolts of bad behavior, I found that my self-destructiveness had become painfully boring. I knew the gig was up when my best friend Jeanne phoned me early one Sunday and said, “Cathy, we are at a low point in our friendship.”
Jeanne and I met as students in the Johns Hopkins part-time graduate program, where we were both earning masters in nonfiction writing. She remembered me, with horror, as the woman who pulled a Pop-Tart out of her pocketbook on the first night of class. I remembered her as the woman who organized weekly brown bag lunches at her office to vilify me as the author of “Bitch Hunt,” a recently published cover story in the Washington City Paper, which detailed (rather tongue-in-cheek, I thought) why women in Washington were such alacritous ballbusters.
“You live in my neighborhood,” she informed me, a few weeks after the Pop-Tart incident.
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw you looking in our kitchen window the other night,” she said matter-of-factly.
This was true. I was a flagrant peeping Tom. And in Georgetown, with the sidewalks practically scraping up against the open-draped windows of its grand homes, certainly more lavish than those in my apartment building, the urge to see how the other half decorated was highly irresistible. And now that she mentioned it, I vaguely remembered peering into a set of open shutters and discovering, along with a Sub-Zero and a rack of impressive cookware, another pair of eyes staring back.
We began to walk. First, tentatively, home from class, where we soon began to gleefully demolish our weaker classmates with our mental red markers. We advanced to longer walks along the C&O Canal, a paved trail alive with cardinals and raspberries. We started with businesslike back-and-forths on Saturday mornings, soon tacked on a stop for coffee at Dean & Deluca, and eventually agreed to walk on Sundays as well, occasionally accompanied by Jeanne’s husband Paul, a brilliantly funny guy who loved to comb the sidewalks for spare change. Our friendship progressed along with the seasons, and our walks became longer and full of ritual as we paused to watch a blue heron, our heron, fish for breakfast, or to collect tight bunches of the wild parsley we discovered growing along the banks of the canal.
Jeanne was my most trusted friend who truly wanted to see me happy and centered. Fifteen years older than I, Jeanne was too young to be my mother and too agenda-less to be a big sister. With this phone call, I knew I had let her down profoundly.
“I don’t think I can be around you any longer,” she said quietly.
“I can’t be around me,” I agreed, and then set the phone down on the pillow and cried like the idiot I knew I had become.
This was not the life I wanted. So I sat down and asked myself what I did want. It proved to be a surprisingly difficult question, a Riddle of the Sphinx for the newly divorced. For so much of my marriage and the messy aftermath, I had never found a quiet moment to even ask—never mind answer—that elegantly elemental question.
Eventually, I scraped together a wish list.
1. I want to be loved and to love someone that I also want to have sex with every day for the rest of my life.
2. I want to be successful in whatever I do—whether it’s writing a book or paying bills on time or painting my bedroom.
3. I want to stay young forever, and I don’t want any more wrinkles or gray hairs than I already have.
4. I want to save money for the future so I can travel at whim or buy a nineteenth-century oil painting.
5. I want to not hurt emotionally so much, and when I do hurt, I don’t want to feel it as deeply.
6. I want to not feel guilty for saying no, as in No, I don’t want to have dinner, call you back, or be your friend.
7. I want to see failures as small victories.
Like the guy who accidentally invented the Post-it note, I had suddenly stumbled on something useful. When I took a closer look at my wants, I noticed something in each one’s wording that seemed annoyingly familiar to me: my list could easily be transformed into the cover lines that screamed out from every women’s magazine on the planet. All I needed to do was rejigger a bit, switch into second person, and add an exclamation point at the end. As in:
Stay Young and Wrinkle-Free Forever!
Be More Successful in Whatever You Do!
Save More Money and Buy That Monet!
Say No Without the Guilt!
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking the same thing I was thinking. Who would be dumb enough to believe that a bunch of magazines, women’s magazines, would have the power to transform her life?
It’s not like I didn’t grow up with a mother who wore her hair like Gloria Steinem and patiently explained why she would have burned her bra if she actually didn’t need to wear one. And it’s not like I didn’t discover The Beauty Myth at the same time I took a job in a NYC advertising agency and walked around saying stuff like, “The media is manipulating women into feeling insecure and unhappy about themselves by creating and marketing a standard of femininity that is impossible for them to attain.” Yes, I saw The Vagina Monologues and participated in the postshow discussions.
But why can’t an undying devotion to Cosmo, Glamour, and the slew of other glossies work wonders for my life? Why can’t a cerebral, unconventional, authority-questioning woman still believe in the power of the perfect mascara? Can’t I still retain my headstrong nature under a supercute beret?
And I ask you…is it so wrong to want to be bossed around by Helen Gurley Brown?
Magazines have rescued me in the past. A major Seventeen devotee in junior high, I madly tore through each issue like it was the Holy Grail. Surely, this would be the month that explained it all: my horrible skin, lackluster hair, dismal luck with boys. What’s more, not only would I get the explanation, full of upbeat, we’re-in-this-together copy, I’d finally get the solution, in a bulleted, step-by-step format.
I talked to my first boy by memorizing the script helpfully provided in “How to Get His Attention.” (The phrase “Are you enjoying yourself?” uttered, as Seventeen instructed, sotto voce, worked wonders for me. Unfortunately, I uttered it at a party where I had no business being, and the boy I said it to was
twenty-eight and stoned off his ass.)
So I made a decision.
For the ensuing twelve months, I resolved to turn my life over to a stack of today’s women’s magazines and follow their advice without question. The method would be pretty simple: to focus on one specific beauty, fashion, fitness, diet, spirit, relationship, or job-related task and then adhere to, for that entire month, the articles that best addressed my goal. Every month, a new challenge, another damage zone to assess and improve upon.
By the end of my subscriptions, I would have gotten rid of upper-arm jiggle, crawled out of debt, hosted the perfect dinner party, run a mile without puking, engaged in better bathtub booty, asked for a raise, rehauled my apartment, mastered the blowout, and faked a perfect complexion.
And then there was the relationship part. I had recently begun to contemplate one with Karl, a peripheral friend who, one night at a party, quietly reached for my hand and told me I deserved better. So far Karl, or at least Potential Karl, was a lot better, and I really didn’t want to send him shrieking for the hills—a talent I innately possessed. I knew my cubicle days with Bruno and random nights with Glen were numbered, and basically amounted to unhappy topics for daytime television. With Potential Karl, who was handsome and forthright and had a refreshingly goofy obsession with building his own robot, the risk of losing something legitimate became very real, and I didn’t want to mess things up. After all, I had messed up every single relationship I had ever been in, from my marriage to my ability to enjoy cheap sex—what made me think I wouldn’t do it again? In the past, when my inner annihilator asked me that same question, I’d shrug and look away. But now, finally, at last, I was tired of having this conversation. And I knew that in order to successfully change my love life, I was going to have to seek some outside counsel.