Up For Renewal

by Cathy Alter

  Outside the restaurant, I hugged her. Moving her heavy red hair, I whispered in her ear, “Once I make it through my birthday, I’ll be back to normal.”

  “I hope so,” she whispered back. “Otherwise I’m going to get you a subscription to Leg Sex and that will really fuck you up.”

  Seeing Steph again was a good antidote for how nuts I was feeling. But now that she was on a plane home to sell porn to high-tech workers ( her biggest client base), and Karl and I were sitting on a D.C.-bound Acela, I had settled into my seat with a broad sense of disappointment and Marie Claire on my lap.

  As our train pulled out of Penn Station, Karl turned to me and said, “Every time Drew and I looked over, you and Steph had your heads together and were laughing like you were up to no good.”

  I gave him a weak smile. The kicker to the whole trip was Karl had ended up buying himself a jacket from that store. He was wearing it now, and the leather smelled faintly of tobacco and turtle wax. I would say it also smelled of broken dreams, but that would be too pathetic. Even for me. As he buried himself in the new Maxim (unlike mine, his reading experience was one of pure pleasure), I opened up Marie Claire and began reading an article in the “Couples” section. “The Dangerous New Infidelity You Need to Know About,” blared the headline. “HEAD SEX!” The art showed a string of Lotus Notes emails between Derrick, a married father of one, and Lucy, a contributor to a feminist webzine, whom he met at a bar. “Even if we never do anything,” began one from Lucy, “I have to say that this whole drawn-out text/voice/ tactile foreplay with you is very exciting. I would like to continue to explore.”

  “Though they may never have had sex on the set,” writer Sandra Barron began, “Brad and Angelina were technically cheating. Emotionally.” The term head sex, according to Barron, “springs from a feeling that you’re on the same wavelength with a guy.” Which, she noted, is way more intense than a physical connection. And, Barron included in a bright pink box-out, head sex is way more popular than ever. “Major societal changes have affected even the way we form crushes.” Barron provided three new enablers of the new head sex explosion: longer hours at work, more time spent online, and BlackBerries.

  As Lucy and Derrick’s emails continued to be sprinkled throughout the six-page feature, other women stepped forward to attest to this phenomenon. “The night I met Michael,” revealed Mia, 24, “I swear the song ‘Magic,’ by The Cars, started playing in my head.” Mia went on to explain that even though Michael was the boyfriend of her good friend, she still maintained a consistent email relationship with him. “We even shared a bed one evening and spooned all night without taking it further.” Eventually, what a surprise, Mia and Michael ended up “making out on a hill under the stars, for so long that I had grass burns.” Two days later, Michael broke up with his girlfriend to be with Mia; two months later, Michael’s ass was grass. “I called it quits via email,” Mia confessed.

  After reading the seven telltale signs that a guy is heading for trouble (“Your guy is paying more attention to his appearance, whether it’s new clothes, new cologne, or increased time at the gym”), I looked over at Karl in his new jacket. “Karl,” I baby-talked, showing him the title page to the article, “are you having head sex?”

  He refused to take the bait. “You don’t have much to worry about,” he said distractedly.

  “That kind of response, to me, means I may have something to worry about.”

  “It’s just an expression.”

  “So is ‘You have nothing to worry about.’”

  Why in the world did I feel the need to show him this article? Why did I endlessly need his reassurance? Peace, I told myself, seeing if my mantra from last month still worked. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and realized I was still a piece of work.

  The truth of the matter was, I was regressing. My impending birthday, which by now I had built up into an event as monumental as a virgin’s deflowering, had caused me to back-slide into a playground of insecurity and bullying self-doubt.

  Work was the last place I wanted to feel vulnerable. Lately, I was spending at least an hour a day holing up in Dave’s office, “in different meetings,” I told my manager.

  “I know Karl is going to get me a digital camera for my birthday,” I whined, flopping myself dramatically across his desk. A few months ago, I had mentioned how nice it would be to have a camera like Jeanne’s, a miniature apparatus that she always carried during our walks in case we spotted what she referred to as “nature shots.” I had no choice but to think, in hindsight and with much regret, that Karl had taken my photographic desires a bit too seriously.

  “Do I take a picture of myself giving him the finger and then throw the camera across the room in a fit of Veda rage?”

  Dave found my Mildred Pierce reference hilarious and launched into his own routine.

  “You son of a bitch,” he cried, pantomiming like he was throwing the camera like a football.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, switching into the character of a ditz. “How am I supposed to wear this?” I mimicked, trying to put the camera strap around my ring finger.

  To cheer me up, Dave offered to throw a small post-birthday party on the twenty-seventh at my favorite restaurant. I was hesitant though, uncomfortable with the idea of asking people to add one more name to their holiday dance card, not to mention buy me a gift on top of it. But I agreed to let Dave organize it, mostly because he promised to make it low-key.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll keep the emphasis off your birthday.”

  And then I got his Evite:

  Cathy Alter. Jimmy Buffett. Jesus Christ. Anwar Sadat.

  What do they have in common? All great minds, of course. Spectacular fashion trendsetters. That’s indisputable. Very creative, except for maybe Anwar, who would have been born on the 26th if the camel had slowed down.

  Most importantly, they share a birthday! And yes, it’s a big birthday…so let’s celebrate in style with Cathy!

  And may I say, as we all move forward in the time continuum: let us not fear the big birthdays. As the fabulous Sally O’Malley once said, “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Sally O’Malley. I’m proud to say that I am 50 years old. I’m not one of those gals who are afraid to tell her real age, and I like to [demonstrate] Kick! Stretch! and KICK! I’m 50! 50 years old! 50 years old. Not afraid to hide my age, 50!”

  So come out and let’s KICK and STRETCH and KICK and just generally have fun for Cathy’s 40th!

  After assuring me he wouldn’t stress my birthday or my age, he goes and crafts something like this? What should have been the appropriate reaction? Not only did he make a not-so-subtle dig at women who are uncomfortable broadcasting their real age, but he had to do it in the voice of an old Saturday Night Live sketch. And come on, could he have possibly squeezed in the number 50 a few more times? Was he doing me a favor by using fifty to deflect forty?

  But I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if he was an ass. Besides, I still had to make it through my birthday and a couple of nights of Hanukkah before I needed to deal with this party.

  In order to survive the five days leading up to my birthday, I would have to pull myself together and perform a major attitude adjustment. Despite what I did or didn’t get, I had to see the value in it, unconditionally—whether it was a digital camera or a birthday party thrown by a showboating friend.

  And so I asked myself: what would Oprah do?

  In her What I Know for Sure column, Oprah talked about “five-star pleasures,” and opened up her own pleasure map to reveal some of the things that made her happy. “For me just waking up ‘clothed in my right mind,’ being able to put my feet on the floor, walk to the bathroom, and do what needs to be done there is a five-starrer.”

  There was a joke in here somewhere ( like, she scores her bowel movements?), but I was really trying to cast aside my judgment and bias (although, call me cynical, it was hard to imagine that Oprah did all of the above unassisted)
. I looked at Oprah’s photo. She was leaning back in laughter, one heel kicked up in the air, her left index finger pointed to the heavens. Was she inferring that she got her greatest pleasure from God?

  As part of a feature called “Take Pleasure,” there was a bliss list called “What Makes Us Purr.” God was not on it. Yoga was. So was Scrabble, homemade whipped cream, and “a great scalp massage from the shampoo lady at the hairdresser.” I had to agree with that last one. After the fortieth (symbolic?) item on the list (“Wearing a wide-brim hat just because you want to”) were five blank lines with the instructions, “Please feel free to add, adapt, borrow.”

  Similar to the wish list I made for myself at the beginning of my year, it took me a while to eke out my own five-starrers.

  The first thing that came to mind was: counting eleven deer on my last walk with Jeanne.

  Then: watching Karl spritz cologne in his armpits.

  And: seeing my byline, cupping the heads of babies, the Sunday flea market.

  I’m not going to tell you that Oprah cured me of my materialistic impulses and my desire to hurry up and get engaged now, please. But goddamn if that list didn’t put things into perspective. “What you put out comes back,” wrote Oprah at the end of her column. “Your base level of pleasure is determined by how you view your whole life.”

  I decided I was going to love my new digital camera. Five days before my birthday, Karl came home from work and set down his motorcycle’s saddlebag. “I know you,” he said in lieu of a greeting. “And I know you’ll go snooping around for your birthday and Hanukkah presents. So I’m keeping everything at my office.”

  “I already know what you got me for my birthday,” I said.

  “What does it begin with?” Karl asked, nervously eyeing his saddlebag. I knew whatever he got me was in there and not, as he just warned, at his office.

  “It begins with a D.”

  “Well, you know,” he said slyly, “they are forever.”

  “Oh yah. Karl is going to propose. He wants to marry you. Definitely.”

  I was sitting across from Dr. Oskar, milking my last appointment of the year for all it was worth. We had spent most of the session taking stock of my progress, even though I was insisting that my rush-to-the-altar machinations didn’t feel much like giant steps forward.

  “That is because you’re ready,” he said. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was high-fiving himself for helping to get me this far.

  “What if he’s not? What if he likes things the way they are?” I had never heard Karl utter the word “marriage” before, even in reference to someone else. Maybe his hard palate was different from other men.

  “I shouldn’t stake my reputation on this,” Dr. Oskar began, “but Karl will ask you to marry him before the end of the year.”

  “How do you know?” For a second, I thought maybe Karl had called Dr. Oskar to ask for my hand.

  “It’s just a feeling,” he answered, leaning back into his tweed couch. “But I will bet you I’m right.”

  “Is this what you call trying to manage my expectations?” I asked, shaking his hand and taking the bet.

  We had cake for breakfast. Karl had used an entire tube of pink icing to write, “Happy Birthday, Girlie.” After I blew out my candles, one for every decade, he disappeared into the bedroom and I soon heard the unmistakable snow-crunching sound of a plastic bag being disturbed. My ear told me it was Best Buy.

  “I didn’t wrap it,” he said. “Since you already knew what it was.”

  We spent the rest of the morning taking silly photos with my new camera. Earlier in the week, a coworker had given me a paper crown that read “Birthday Slut” across the front. We took turns posing for each other, wearing it at increasingly rakish angles.

  The phrase self-fulfilling prophecy had flitted through my brain when I first saw the box, wounded for just a second that it wasn’t black and velvet and palm-size. My ex-husband had given me tons of small shiny things that were now tucked away in the back of my sock drawer.

  This month, Cosmo had a spread called “Unwrap the Meaning Behind His Gift.” On each of the four pages, a different shirtless and waxed man posed next to something with a bow. The copy read, “Every offering is a statement of how your guy feels about you and your relationship. Here, find out what he’s really trying to say when he surprises you with…”

  A digital camera fell into their “Exactly What You Wanted” category. “Those 7,000 hints you dropped didn’t fall on deaf ears,” congratulated the text. And I guess, now that I replayed the previous nature shot conversation on fast forward, how could I be disappointed with Karl’s level of attention? At least he hadn’t gotten me “A Practical Present,” which according to Cosmo could be anything from a flashlight to an umbrella. The accompanying photo showed a baby-faced guy with a completely hairless torso toting an emergency roadside kit with a big red bow stuck to the plastic handle.

  I tried taking pleasure in the gift. Really, I did. But still, all day, I kept wanting to hear that question. So much so that when we were lying quietly in bed together, listening to the rain hit the air conditioner, and Karl said, “Doesn’t the rain make you want to pee?” I heard, “Don’t you want to marry me?”

  Early that evening, we made our own menorah out of polymer clay, and Karl presented me with my first night’s gift: two bears, one gray and one pink, that he had also made out of the polymer.

  “I’m the gray one,” he explained. “I made the pink one a little smaller, because it’s you.”

  The bears represented a dream Karl had when we were first dating. He had woken up one morning and had told me about us being little bears, wandering through the forest and sniffing for berries.

  “Every once in a while, you would grunt—but I somehow understood exactly what you were saying,” he had said excitedly.

  Soon after, I had recounted the dream to Dr. Oskar. “What an excellent dream!” he had remarked, clapping his hands. “Karl is telling you that even if you speak to each other in bear, he feels understood at the most primal level.”

  The next night, after lighting our clay menorah, Karl gave me more handmade clay gifts—a heart-shaped charm (so small I had to look at it under my jeweler’s loupe to fully appreciate the level of work he put into it) and an intricate snowflake that looked like Belgian lace. He had attached the snowflake to a straightened paper clip, explaining that I could wear it like a stickpin. The following night, he gave me a plaid scarf flecked with gold, which he had actually bought at a store. “You can stick the snowflake into the material,” he demonstrated, tying the scarf around his neck and stabbing it with the end of the paper clip.

  Later that night, I showed off the scarf and stickpin at the birthday party Dave was throwing for me.

  As soon as we walked through the door of the restaurant, my friend Chris swept me off to the bar. “What did he get you for your birthday?” she asked with way too much eagerness.

  I unzipped my pocketbook and pulled out the digital camera.

  “Oh, no!” she exclaimed, covering her eyes with both hands to block out the offensive sight. “I’m so sorry.”

  “For what?” I blinked to emphasize the naïveté I hoped I was pulling off. “It’s exactly what I wanted.”

  Experiencing someone else’s disappointment for me had an inverse effect. The fact that she thought I was suffering some sort of collapse because I received a piece of electronics for my birthday probably said more about her own life’s discontent.

  The truth was, I knew Karl was getting ready to propose. Everything was leading up to it. And once my birthday was over, so was the anxiety that went along with it. I became a whole lot calmer about the waiting process.

  “It’s good you’re not stressing, C Dawg,” emailed my friend Missy, using my rap star name. Hers was Money Mel. “You know it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.”

  Missy was also invested in my getting engaged, but mostly because she lived in Boca Raton and a wed
ding meant that she and I could see each other again. I had last seen her at her own wedding, which was a year ago. Because she had gone through a similar impatience waiting for her husband Brad to propose, I had found myself calling and emailing her more than usual over the past weeks.

  “Are you checking Karl for pocket bulges?” she emailed. “Before Brad proposed, every time we did something different, I thought tonight’s the night. One time he suggested going to the beach on a random night and I kept checking his pockets for a ring box indent.”

  Missy eventually found the ring box hidden in the refrigerator a few weeks later. “When you least expect it, it will happen, so don’t worry. Soon, we’ll all be jetting off to Las Vegas!!!”

  I had jokingly told her that I wanted to get married in front of Siegfried and Roy’s white tigers dressed in a sequined jumpsuit with a fat Elvis officiating. Missy ended her email with hotel recommendations. “The Bellagio or The Venetian work for me, Dawg!”

  With all the hoopla surrounding my birthday and coming up with eight nights of Hanukkah gifts (alas, mine were not homemade), I had completely forgotten about New Year’s Eve. As far as I knew, Karl and I had no plans. Which wasn’t a big deal. I knew one phone call to Crazy Larry would solve that dilemma. But I wasn’t about to dial the number. After spending most of November ascending the twelve steps to sexy party girl consciousness, I didn’t care if we spent New Year’s Eve in our pajamas eating frozen pizza.

  “So what are we going to do?” I finally asked Karl over breakfast.

  “I rented a car for the afternoon,” he said. “I thought we’d take a drive out to the mountains and tool around.” I knew his definition of mountains was a particular stretch of Route 211, just west of Sperryville, Virginia, where the road twisted and turned like a piece of Silly String. It was Karl’s favorite spot to ride his motorcycle because he could take each bend like an acrobat, leaning his bike so far over that his knee practically touched the ground. The few times he’d taken me on the ride, I had to sit out on the side of the road, nauseous from all the pitching around.