by Cathy Alter
In the end, a rough count confirmed that I had twice the wardrobe that Glamour advised (remember, it was just a goal!), but I had still successfully freed up more than half of my closet—including, once I pitched my bulky L.L.Bean ragg wool, reindeer-print, and Nordic ski sweaters, an entire shelf!
The things we do for love.
Moving on to the bathroom, I used Glamour’s “19 Beauty Items Every Woman Should Own” as a guide to dump an entire medicine cabinet of gummy nail polish, any suspicious-smelling lipstick, and about a decade’s worth of sample perfume vials. Surprisingly, for a pretty clueless beauty shopper (that was a challenge for an upcoming month), I had everything on Glamour’s must-have list:
1. Foundation
2. Tinted moisturizer
3. Concealer
4. Mascara
5. Black or brown eyeliner
6. Neutral eyeshadow
7. Fun-colored eyeshadow
8. A rosy bronze blush
9. A lipstick that works day and evening
10. Clear nail polish
11. A lash curler
12. Slanted tweezers
13. An 1,800-watt blow-dryer
14. A wide-tooth comb
15. A round brush
16. A shampoo for my hair type
17. A daily conditioner
18. A deep conditioner
19. Anti-frizz crème for curly hair
I had already looked in the cupboard under Karl’s bathroom sink, and knew that we were headed for trouble. He bought in bulk, and from the looks of things, had cornered the market on Yardley’s Natural Oatmeal & Almond Soap. I had a similar soap problem, just on a slightly smaller scale. Deaccessioning my collection of hotel soaps, especially the bite-size Hermès samples, was a personal defeat of sorts. I had been hanging on to these morsels for years, imagining how they’d play out in my future guest bathroom, contained in their fancy logoed green boxes, coolly waiting to cleanse and impress the scores of visiting hands. The soaps marked me as an expensive traveler, even though Jeanne, an authentic five-star guest, gave most to me as souvenirs.
I realized I was using the space under my sink as a hope chest. But if I cleared space for Karl’s soap stash, I was actually fulfilling a less invented future for myself. One that wasn’t valued by illusion.
When my brother David was potty training, he availed himself of any open receptacle that remotely looked like a toilet. My mother found him variously in the garage, crouching over unused flowerpots, in his bedroom, squatting, most fittingly, over his Tonka dump truck, and on our front lawn, aiming into the hole left by an old tree stump.
Karl packed his belongings in a similar fashion. Anything that was suitable for stuffing was suitably stuffed. While he lugged over the latest carload from his end, I unpacked it at mine. During one exchange, I unfurled a lumpy sleeping bag and found it filled with an entire library of Ian Fleming paperbacks. Lifting the lid off a surprisingly heavy saucepan, I discovered about fifty million at-large BB pellets. And, in a spectacularly unpleasant morning wake-up call, a box of cereal contained heaps of dirty nickels, not, as promised, bunches of honey and/or oats.
As long as I was in charge of dispersal, everything had a place, either hidden in a drawer, tucked into a bookshelf, or, like the set of sticky shot glasses I found in a pair of tube socks, chucked in the garbage.
Unfortunately, there were some items that defied placement. One night, while Karl worked late at his new job ( he was now a marketing director for a national retail chain), I busied myself with the contents of a mesh laundry bag. Loosening the drawstring, I shook the bag open and poured out a dozen boxes of lightly scented tea lights. Along with the candles came a leather presentation box. Lifting the lid, I expected to find some vintage wristwatches or maybe Karl’s bar mitzvah cuff links. What I wasn’t prepared to encounter was a roll of twenty-eight condoms, all expired. He had never lit candles for me, and we did not use rubbers. I had a vision of Karl, splayed out on his futon with the bikini model, aglow in a thousand tea lights, going through Trojan after Trojan.
I immediately phoned Jeanne and reported my findings. “The only thing missing was a Barry White CD.”
“At least the condoms were expired,” she offered, trying hard not to laugh.
“Should I feel relieved or concerned?”
“I think you should quit while you’re ahead.”
When Karl got home later that night, the incriminating pile was right where I had left it.
“Did you light those candles for all your girlfriends?” I wanted to sound playful, but I succeeded in coming off like an insecure twit.
“And how was your day?” he asked mockingly.
Pointing to the snake of condoms, I said, “It was going fine until I decided to help you unpack.”
“I guess my pimping days are over.” He sighed.
It wasn’t that I had found the condoms. It was that I had opened a leather presentation box into his past. “I don’t like to imagine you with other women.”
“You think it doesn’t kill me to know you’ve been with other men?”
“Didn’t you know I dropped out of the sky a virgin?” I gently teased.
“And just so you know,” he offered sheepishly, “those candles were just for me. After a certain hour, bright lights bother my eyes.”
This was such an unsexy statement, how could I not believe him?
Occasionally, there was a design challenge. My hundred-strong collection of bride-and-groom cake toppers, for example. I had been collecting them since my early twenties, after I had seen hundreds of them marching around the store window of a Rhode Island antiques store. Whether an adult way to play with dolls or evidence of a burgeoning fetish, I loved my miniature couplings and made a point of proudly displaying them. When I lived in New York, my collection congregated on a bureau in my bedroom. Whenever a new conquest would walk past them on his way to the bathroom, he’d always return with the same strained look on his face.
“What are you, obsessed with getting married or something?” he’d always ask.
My army of brides and grooms were my best barometer for men. And luckily, Karl wasn’t threatened by what they represented. He was simply bothered by their existence.
“One cake topper is the equivalent of ten doilies,” he insisted. He also complained about their placement in the bedroom. “I don’t like them watching me sleep.” I compromised by wrapping all but my favorite ten couples in tissue paper and storing them on the top shelf of the linen closet. Karl cooperated further by adding a pair of plastic motorcycles to the processional.
Karl had been living with me for a week, maybe more. It’s a shame I didn’t remember the exact date, but it just sort of happened. Like boobs. It’s not like you can point to a day on the calendar and say, There, that’s the day I got boobs. In the same magical way, I went from a state of not having to one of having.
But I knew we were really living together when our new bed came. I remember that date. It was the last Tuesday in September (I made sure to mark the event in my Day-Timer). Karl and I had decided we didn’t want to sleep with the ghosts of our respective pasts, so this bed represented a true clean slate, pristine and unsullied.
“We’ve made our bed,” I told Karl as he unloaded an armful of suits into the closet.
“Now let’s get busy in it,” he quipped, swan-diving right in.
That night, I had a dream. In it, Karl had moved the last of his belongings, and we were about to go to bed. As we got under the covers, I looked at Karl and thought, didn’t he used to be a lot cuter? Then, when he reached over and cupped my breast, I told myself, it will all be over in a few minutes.
“I know what this dream was about,” I announced brightly to Dr. Oskar. I had conveniently dreamed it the night before a session.
“You do?” asked Dr. Oskar incredulously. I had never analyzed my subconscious before. Dr. Oskar scribbled something in his notebook and shifted forward in his seat.
“I
t’s about my ex-husband.”
Any lust I had felt for my ex was quelled as soon as I left my life in New York and moved into the moldy-smelling apartment we shared in Arlington, Virginia. We began fighting immediately, usually verbally, more than once physically.
The front he held up while we were both living, separately, in New York, the one where he presented himself as a responsible citizen who kept normal hours and didn’t lose his marbles every time he felt even the tiniest bit challenged, was dismantled the moment we began living together. At least once a week, I threatened to pack my bags and move out. And once, after one of those threats cast me outside of our apartment barefoot and hysterically clutching the bra that I was about to pack in my suitcase, I phoned my parents and told them I was moving back home to live with them and that I was “going to need a lot of therapy.”
Of course, none of that happened. I had given up too much in New York—my beloved brother, a job in advertising where, miraculously, I was appreciated and valued, and a fabulous rent-controlled apartment on East Eighty-third Street—because I had believed this was the right person to give everything up for. And so I stayed and convinced myself that relationships were supposed to be hard work.
But really, there was no saving us. I told Dr. Oskar about the breaking point, the actual moment in time when I stopped desiring my ex.
“I woke up in the middle of the night and heard lip smacking coming from his side of the bed, like he was eating something,” I explained, and then paused for effect. “When I looked over to see what he was snacking on, I saw him picking his nose and eating it.”
Dr. Oskar’s face turned from its usual pink to an angry red, like a Looney Tunes character who had just hit his thumb.
“You have ruined my lunch,” he complained and quickly covered his face with his freckled hands. “I just enjoyed a nice halibut with a friend. But you have made me very nauseous.”
Considering I once showed up early for an appointment and overheard the patient before me yell, “I don’t know what the fuck I was doing but all of a sudden I was fucking kicking his fucking head in,” I figured telling him about my ex-husband’s nose-picking was fairly tame stuff.
I began to laugh. “Oh, yah,” he said through his fingers. “I’m glad you find this funny. Yah, ha ha hah.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t think you had such a delicate stomach.”
It took the rest of the hour—my hour—for Dr. Oskar to recover. “I’ll never get that image out of my head,” he whined, ushering me out of his office and quickly closing the door. I felt bad about Dr. Oskar almost losing his lunch, but I was proud of myself for having that dream. I had already made physical room for Karl, but I realized that the dream about my ex was about making some emotional room as well. I was telling my sleeping self that it was okay to be concerned about my future with Karl.
When I was going through a pile of old books, deciding which ones to leave out in the lobby for the betterment of my neighbors, a piece of paper slipped out from one of those gift books found at checkout counters around Valentine’s Day, I Like You Because. I recognized this small white sheet immediately. It was a list of pros and cons I had made during my marriage. The pros column was completely blank. And all I had written down the cons side was:
this
this
this
this.
Would I one day make a similar list for Karl and hide it among the pages of an impulse buy?
That evening, as Karl banged around in the bedroom, I opened the bottom of my armoire and reached deep in the back, where I had been keeping a secret stash of photos—of my old boyfriends, of my ex-husband, of my past lives. There was one of me, as a wife, with my ex holding our cat, who was trying to escape his arms. There was one of me, as a girlfriend, celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday in a red leather miniskirt. My legs are splayed, encased in Donna Karan opaque tights, and I am looking hopefully over at the dark-haired boy who would break my heart less than a month later. And there was one of me, as a fool, posed next to Bruno, just after I had surprised him with a ride in a blimp. My shoulders are turned toward him and I’m smiling like I’m at my senior prom. He is gazing downward, most likely checking his cell phone to see all the calls he missed while up and away.
For an hour, I pulled photo after photo from their frames and put the pile of loose pictures into a legal-size white envelope. It didn’t feel right to throw them away. Not yet. I piled the empty frames into a corner and thought about all the new memories I was about to create.
When I joined Karl, I saw that he had also succeeded in making some room. He had Velcroed everything from his nightstand—the phone, his clock, an eyeglass case—to the wall.
“What do you think?” he asked, clearly satisfied with his decorating touch.
He was reclining on our bed with his arms folded behind his head. I sat down next to him and tentatively touched the clock.
“I just hope it sticks.”
OCTOBER
Promote from Within
lately, I had been walking to work with the sound track of Song of the South playing in my head. There I was, practically skipping down Twenty-third Street in my well-edited fall outfit (under which I still wore the warm cloak of waking up next to Karl), swinging my Neimans bagged lunch, and feeling that there was, finally, plenty of sunshine headed my way. It wouldn’t have surprised me if a cartoon bluebird landed on my shoulder and started whistling “Dixie.”
Absolutely everything seemed more animated—even my coworkers. As I made my way through the marketing department, I was reminded that, like me, most of my coworkers carried on second, less profitable lives as photographers, winemakers, and, in the case of one shy environmental editor, shamanist. I imagined their cubicles as booths at a flea market—each one displaying the vendor’s true passion. As I made my way to my own stall, I passed by Kym’s Asian art emporium, Rob’s world of puzzles, and Rena’s mind-blowing collection of cow-related paraphernalia, which was highlighted by an udder-shaped vase that sat next to her iMac. Even my manager Todd, a feckless leader whose managerial style was to let his department run amok, gave more wall space to his framed drawings of ferrets than to our award-winning direct mail, samples of which sat piled on the floor.
I wondered what my own cubicle, which had more kitsch than a VH1 marathon, said about me. Every cornerstone of camp was represented in the form of Pee-wee Herman, Bay-watch, and a huge psychedelic paint-by-number of a bouquet-bearing Uncle Sam (who is trying to win back his amputated left leg, which is being carried off by a naked angel with an afro). The sheer busy-ness of my workspace acted as a sort of camouflage. There was so much going on, I suppose I was trying to distract people from what (and not so long ago, who) I was doing.
Because my back was to the entrance, I used to have a large, motion-sensitive plastic frog near the opening to my cubicle as a warning device. Whenever anyone rounded the corner, the frog emitted four metallic-sounding ribbits. It also drove my coworkers crazy, and one morning I found the frog flipped on its back, batteries removed, with a ballpoint pen speared through its eye. Ever since, I worked on my freelance pieces, chatted on the phone, and basically goofed off at my own peril.
I was doing just that when my phone rang.
“This is Cathy,” I answered, with my embarrassing first-grader’s greeting.
“This is Chew.” Karl had taken to calling himself by my father’s nickname for him.
“This is Girlie,” I replied on cue, using the name his mother had reserved for me.
His call marked the safe start of his workday. I was nervous about Karl riding his motorcycle on the Beltway, a route that was filled with road rage, unpredictable construction, and SUVs driven by people from Virginia.
We chatted about nothing for a while, and I guess I just got lost in another Song of the South moment, floating around my color-tastic cubicle, with Karl in one ear and the happy clacking sound of Rena stringing beads in the other, when, zip-a-dee-
doo-dah, the music came to a grinding halt as a hand plunged down the front of my blouse and seized hold.
“Jesus Christ,” I blurted, grabbing Bruno around the wrist and yanking his hand out of my shirt with such force, his knuckles rapped me on the chin.
“What’s the matter?” Karl asked, pausing the story he was telling me about robot arms.
As soon as I had extracted one hand, Bruno dove in with the other. “Nothing,” I said, rolling my chair across my cubicle to get away. “Just reading an annoying email from one of the editors.”
When he approached again, I kicked him in the shins and mouthed an exaggerated “Go away.” When he didn’t, I cradled the phone under my chin and batted at Bruno with both hands. “Stop it,” I mouthed again, slapping away his dancing fingers.
Bruno was clearly enjoying this game, laughing and pretending to shadow box with my boobs. Once, when I was talking to one of my editors at the Washington Post, Bruno slipped into my cubicle and, before I could finish my sentence, placed his mouth over mine and kissed me so deeply, I began to gag. At the time, I thought he was being playful. But now I realized his sport was one of control and needy aggression, and I was done playing by his rules.
After saying good-bye to Karl, who had become so enthusiastic in telling his robot story he didn’t notice how out of breath I was from all my arm flapping, I grabbed a red marker and a printout of a catalog we’d been working on and escorted Bruno back into his own cubicle. Spreading the pages across his desk and pretend-pointing to them with my marker, I gave him my meanest gunslinger look and hissed, “Don’t ever touch me again.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head slightly from side to side. “Ssst, ssst, sssst,” he snickered.
I had been ignoring Bruno’s advances ever since getting together with Karl. I hadn’t yet informed Karl of my past with Bruno because, as with revealing my age, when, really, was an appropriate time to admit this staggering truth? So rather than tell Bruno about Karl—which wouldn’t have stopped him anyway—I chose to say nothing. I wanted Bruno to know that I was done with him. I wanted him to believe that there was no special reason or excuse other than I had simply lost interest. In not providing grounds for my shutting down shop, I finally held a bit of power.