Pen
Samuel Goldwyn Films / Joe Lederer
Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh and Penelope Cruz as Consuela Castillo in “Elegy.”
I’m finally dragging my ass to the task of writing about “Elegy,” a film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel “The Dying Animal” that’s a curious hybrid indeed. It offers Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz in the best performances of their recent careers, as an older professor and his ex-student turned lover (and, as advertised, there are long, contemplative, art-history-lecture style shots of Cruz’s naked torso). This coupling is gracefully handled by Isabel Coixet (“The Secret Life of Words,” “My Life Without Me”), a Spanish filmmaker with an exquisite visual sensibility and a reverent, slightly over-precious approach to her craft.
Then there’s the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, a Hollywood veteran whose career includes three “Star Trek” movies and a best-selling Sherlock Holmes novel, along with a previous Roth adaptation (“The Human Stain”). He sticks closely to the characters and story of “The Dying Animal,” arguably one of Roth’s bleakest and most misanthropic novels — until the end of the film, when Meyer cooks up a completely new, movieland-style denouement. The movie that results from blending all these ingredients, while excellent in many technical respects, is a muted, pretty, anesthetic concoction that’s never fully satisfying.
That said, the complementary but completely different performances by Kingsley and Cruz are worth seeing, and Coixet gets full credit for dragging both of them out of their comfort zones. As the 60ish cultural scholar David Kepesh, Kingsley has a fire and vivacity I haven’t detected in his recent roles since “Sexy Beast.” He can’t seem to play Americans without resorting to mannered, tic-laden performances like those in “The Wackness” and “You Kill Me,” but Kepesh (at least in his film incarnation) isn’t quite an American. He’s a suave, trans-Atlantic transplant, a British Jewish intellectual hardened to a point by his years in New York academia. He trades quips with Charlie Rose and presides, in lordly fashion, over graduate student gatherings.
It’s at one of these parties in his implausibly grand Manhattan apartment — OK, he’s sold some books and hosts a radio chat show, but still — that Kepesh makes his move on Consuela Castillo (Cruz), who’s just completed his class and is hence fair game. He likes her not just because she’s a smokin’ Latin bombshell but because her composure and affect identify her as a fellow outsider. She’s a Cuban immigrant from a conservative background who looks and dresses like a high-end legal secretary, which is what she was before deciding to pursue an academic career. Whether or not it’s because the director is a Spanish woman, this is Cruz’s breakthrough English-language performance. Consuela is a difficult character, both a sheltered flower and a confident intellectual, but Cruz anchors her in a soulful certainty.
Say whatever you want about the ickiness of the older man-younger woman dynamic, but it doesn’t seem mysterious that Consuela responds to Kepesh and even falls in love with him. He’s a cultured and worldly man, an intellectual mentor, and also a man who withholds himself emotionally, a conscious or unconscious tactic that, in movies as in life, tends to drive women nuts. It’s somewhat less clear precisely why Kepesh keeps excusing himself from dates with Consuela’s parents, never introduces her to his best friend — a Pulitzer-winning poet played delightfully by Dennis Hopper — and refuses to end his no-strings sexual relationship with a divorced friend (Patricia Clarkson). I suppose the murkiness is intentional, but it leaves the psychological center of the story uncertain.
Coixet’s individual images are marvelous constructions (as captured by cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu), and she frames the human face with a Bergmanesque intensity. But she’s such a fussy filmmaker, never using one shot when five will do, that I think she subtly exhausts the viewer and drains the picture of vitality. It’s a little like bombing through the Prado until your feet hurt, instead of taking your time and absorbing the work in a couple of galleries. Speaking of art museums and the female nudes often found therein, the already-famous lingering shots of Consuela’s breasts capture them as something akin to a wondrous work of Creation, but completely without prurience. Perhaps the feminist idea that the “female gaze” is intrinsically different is valid after all. Whether Coixet’s gaze is meant to capture Kepesh’s simultaneously lascivious and infantile obsession with Consuela’s poitrine or some objective, aesthetic perspective is once again not quite clear.
Between the marvelous lead performances and the arty, enervated feeling of the mise-en-scène, “Elegy” is already a mixed bag. But the filmmakers lack the courage to stick with Roth’s original gloomy conclusion, so while Consuela, Kepesh and the latter’s estranged son (Peter Sarsgaard) face the same crises as in “The Dying Animal,” the whole sour, Rothian mess of cowardice and mortality is finally wrapped in pink tissue paper and presented to us in a tasteful gift box. There’s an inordinate amount of talent on display in “Elegy,” but it ultimately reveals itself as an upper-middlebrow commercial concoction. It’s beautiful, but nobody involved was ever sure what the movie was actually about, or why they were making it.
“Elegy” is now playing in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider release to follow.
A witty, tragic series concludes
The Patrick Melrose cycle's final installment delves into the psyche of its troubled protagonist
The first thing you will want to know about “At Last,” the final volume in Edward St. Aubyn’s five-novel cycle starring Patrick Melrose, is that, yes, you really do have to read the preceding four if you want to appreciate it fully. The second is that if reading about wealthy, conceited, selfish, dissipated, cruel, monstrously awful people is not for you, then, alas, neither are these novels. The third is that the books are brilliant. They are also highly idiosyncratic: Each installment is both a comedy of manners and a wrenching psychological investigation; each oscillates between satire and tragedy, and all are written with flash and brio, ornamented by inspired simile, and spangled with mordant, Wildean wit.
The first four novels have just been published in one paperback volume, beginning with “Never Mind,” a title of apt and dismal pathos. Here we meet Patrick Melrose, five years old and living in a château in Provence with his parents. His alcoholic, drug-befuddled mother, Eleanor, is an American heiress to some part of a dry-cleaning fortune, and it was that attribute that had captivated Patrick’s sadistic English father, David. Trained as a doctor, he abandoned his practice upon marriage — though, we are told, “there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.”
The novel takes place over one terrible day and night, during which — and I must reveal this, as it is pivotal to the entire series — Patrick is raped by his father. While it is happening, the boy manages to disassociate himself from the event, seeing himself perched above the scene, mentally escaping his body. This split — between being there and not being there, between immediacy of experience and fending it off — bedevils Patrick from then on in every area of existence. That breach and his efforts to repair or at least bridge it, through drugs, alcohol, sex and tormented self-examination, make up the cycle’s shattering theme.
As for Patrick’s mother, Eleanor: she is unmindful of everything but pills and booze, charitable causes, and the sure prospect that her husband will humiliate her, publicly if possible, at every opportunity. Absent from home the morning Patrick was attacked and oblivious to it, she later pauses, while writing a check to the Save the Children Fund, to consider Patrick’s subdued demeanor, marveling “at how well her son had turned out. Perhaps people were just born one way or another and the main thing was not to interfere too much.” Patrick’s fear and confusion, Eleanor’s obtuseness and self-involvement, and David’s viciousness and “nimbus of insanity” provide the atmosphere amid which a dinner party is staged. The guests, characters we will meet again in following volumes, introduce us to the first principle of the decadent British upper caste: Nothing is so insufferable as a bore.
In this view, or, rather, under this obsession, a bore is a person who is genuinely tedious — and there are some terrifically funny representatives of that species in these novels — but a bore is also a person who cares about things. The surest defense against being branded a bore is to avoid the appearance of sincerity or compassion and to display a certain outrageousness. As David contemplates his violation of his son at this novel’s conclusion, he reflects, “He must try not to do it again, that really would be tempting fate. David could not help smiling at his own audacity.”
“Bad News,” the second novel, is not exactly a breath of fresh air. Patrick is now 22 and a heroin addict (with a sideline in Quaaludes, amphetamines, cocaine, and alcohol). He is in New York, having received news that his father has died there. Eleanor, now divorced from her tormenter and even more devoted to charitable works, is not on the scene. Patrick has to deal with the body’s cremation and, more pressingly, with replenishing his drug supply. He is a mess: needle-scarred and bruised, his psyche a tangle of anxiety, hatred and self-loathing. The pain is excruciating, the comedy ghoulish: Storming down the street carrying his father’s ashes, he realizes that “it was the first time he had been alone with his father for more than ten minutes without being buggered, hit, or insulted.”
“Some Hope” brings us Patrick at 30, his past lying “before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.” He lives in London, free of drugs and drink but more than ever engaged in an interior battle with the demons of the past: with his father, and, to an extent, with his mother, who, for all her ceaseless do-gooding, failed to protect her own son. The novel was meant to complete an intended trilogy, and it does end with Patrick finding a certain amount of peace — and some hope. Aside from that, it is enormously funny, the story organized around an elaborate, snob-infested country house party, a scene of social striving and mortification — the guests, among them Princess Margaret, are described with glorious malice.
With “Mother’s Milk,” Patrick Melrose breaks free of the trilogy and emerges as a married man with two children, though — need it be said? — he is back in a state of “agitated despair.” He is drinking again, can’t sleep, and has a slight problem with Tamazepam, “namely that it wasn’t strong enough. The side effects, the memory loss, the dehydration, the hangover, the menace of nightmarish withdrawals, all that worked beautifully. It was just the sleep that was missing.” His troubles are further compounded by the fear that he will pass on his dark and riven consciousness to his children, just as his parents passed on their own sickness of soul. Meanwhile, Eleanor, who, we learn, may not have been entirely ignorant of Patrick’s father’s abuse, is in the process of disinheriting her son. She is handing over her estate in Provence to a New Age charlatan, a smarmy back rubber and would-be shaman who has set up a “Transpersonal Foundation” on the premises.
Profiting from the three-book foundation upon which it is built, “Mother’s Milk” is a triumph, once again both gruesome and funny. There are wonderful comic set pieces, including a dreadful family vacation in New York City. But the grim work of psychological excavation also continues, this time with Eleanor as its chief object, as Patrick considers the machinations by which the weak exercise their grotesque tyranny. But something new has entered the picture: the children, two little boys, bringing with them an element of sweetness and genuine love.
And so we come to “At Last:” Patrick is 45, and his mother has died: With both parents gone, he feels that he has “been waiting all his life for this sense of completeness.” But even as he pats his mother’s coffin “as an owner might pat a winning race horse,” we see that things are not splendid. He has given up drink but is also separated from his wife and children — and he is also still mystified and tormented by the chaos of his psyche.
How, I sense you wondering, can this still be interesting? It really is: Not only because St. Aubyn is so entertaining a writer but because of the increasing philosophical depth he brings to the story. As Patrick delves deeper and deeper into the mystery of memory and identity, we wonder with him if they are, in fact, the same thing. And if so, the urge to escape is, in his case at least, irresistible — if not through drugs and drink, then through irony: “Forget heroin,” he tells a former mistress. “Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”
And yet Patrick’s unwinding story never really loses this double nature, its devotion to pain and the comedy that only partly holds it at bay. St. Aubyn’s own experiences inform these novels, and his unhappy circumstance no doubt endows Patrick’s with its sense of urgency and anguished intensity. But whatever the author’s actual state of mind has been or is now, its expression in art is a complete success.
A beautiful exploration of Jewish identity
Nathan Englander's new short story collection reflects on love, life and epiphanies
There’s a moment in Raymond Carver’s imperishable story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” that might be described as one of unregistered revelation. Two middle-aged couples perch at a kitchen table consuming an anesthetizing amount of gin while trying to converse about the fundamentals of love. Mel McGinnis, a cardiologist and the table’s chief discourser, for whom “gin” is literally a middle name, offers a heuristic anecdote: He once administered to an elderly husband and wife, married for eons, who were almost snuffed out in a heinous car wreck. Supine in the same hospital room as his wife, the old man despairs not because of his own injuries but because he can’t see his wife through the eye holes in his full-body cast. “Can you imagine?” Mel asks. “I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.”
Carver’s story is less a narrative than Mel’s monologue, his inebriated apologia on amore, and one that perhaps would have been better served by the title “How We Talk When We Talk About Love,” since the how is Carver’s real concern: in circles, platitudes and tautologies, and always without certainty or complete comprehension, drunk or otherwise. Mel concludes his anecdote by asking, “Do you see what I’m saying?” But of course none of the four does see, least of all Mel himself. In true Carverian fashion, all present have had multiple marriages and all kneel at the altar of alcohol. The god of the bottle, like covetous and insecure Yahweh himself, requires one’s complete fealty: Eros becomes another casualty of consumption. The revelation that Mel unknowingly offers — true love matures by paradox, by simultaneously vanquishing and uplifting the self — passes unregistered.
In the title story of Nathan Englander’s charismatic new collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” revelations abound. Two Jewish couples — one secular and American, the other Hasidic and Israeli — spend a Sunday afternoon in the former’s Florida home downing vodka and sparring over Jewishness. The Israeli husband, Mark, is a convincing example of exactly what we find obnoxious and, worse, outright yawnful about religious zealotry: Chauvinism and moral superiority wedded to a fondness for bullshit and the very pressing need to spread it. The narrator oscillates between acceptance of and contempt for this oaken blowhard, though alcohol and marijuana help ease the afternoon.
But the marijuana, palliative in one regard, is also cause for the narrator’s unheralded discovery: His wife, Deb, has filched the weed from their teenage son’s bedroom. The narrator is unnerved to learn that his boy has a drug habit and, more menacing, that his wife has kept that fact from him: “It feels to me a lot like betrayal,” he muses. “Like my wife’s old secret” — she and the Israeli wife, Lauren, smoked copious pot as teenagers — “and my son’s new secret are wound up together and that I’ve somehow been wronged.” One senses that this awkward unmasking, this destruction of trust, will deliver a lightning bolt to an otherwise cloudless marriage.
The story’s second unheralded revelation belongs to Lauren. In a spacious pantry with the post-pot munchies, the four play an Anne Frank game devised by the Shoah-obsessed Deb: Should another Holocaust occur, which of their Gentile friends would protect them? Short on Christian comrades to hypothesize about, they turn to each other, and when Mark pretends to be a Gentile asked to safeguard his wife, Lauren realizes, in a tense and exposing moment, that he would not do it, despite his paltry assertions to the contrary.
Englander’s clever version of Carver’s famous story sacrifices precisely that element that makes the Carver so effective — the affirmation that epiphanic awakenings are rare, that people don’t improve because they are adverse to revelations that might challenge their fought-for complacency and force them to confront the inadequacies they’ve spent a lifetime hiding from — and yet the sacrifice yields its own potency. The narrator and Lauren will never behold anything in their homes quite the same way again. Carver’s story occurs on a quotidian day in denuded lives, Englander’s on an uncommon day in lives nearly whole. All eight will wake up the next morning hung over, but only two will wake up changed.
Englander must be one of the most charming, most likable storytellers in America. From his first collection, the wildly successful “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” to his novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases,” to this current collection, he crafts expert fiction with a close to saintly absence of self-congratulation and, more important, with a Cervantean facility for navigating the narrow strait between hilarity and heart wreck. In her magisterial study of Holocaust literature, “A Thousand Darknesses,” Ruth Franklin rightly contends that Englander’s story “The Tumblers,” from his debut collection, “is the most brilliant treatment of the Holocaust in contemporary American fiction.” It achieves this brilliance partly by way of a comedic absurdity that would feel at ease in Ionesco or Beckett — not the well-worn route for Holocaust literature.
In the final story of “Anne Frank,” “Free Fruit for Young Widows,” Englander revisits the Holocaust, this time without the absurdist hand. A Jerusalem fruit vendor tells his son the life story of a certain patron, Professor Tendler, a survivor of the Shoah and former soldier who served with the fruit vendor in the 1956 Suez War with Egypt. Tendler was a savage killer in the years following the liberation of the camps and in the requisite wars he fought for Israel. He had survived the camp by burrowing into “a mountain of putrid, naked corpses, a hill of men,” helped by fellow prisoners who colluded in his concealment and brought him “the crumbs of their crumbs to keep him going” until the Americans arrived. Upon returning home, Tendler slaughtered an entire family, including an infant, who had taken up residence in his house. The fruit vendor’s son is befuddled by how this individual could have turned so monstrous when his father, also a survivor, emerged with his morality intact. “He walks, he breathes,” the fruit vendor tells him, “and he was very close to making it out of Europe alive. But they killed him…. They killed what was left of him in the end.” The story is both a deeply unsettling and oddly touching meditation on the enigma of evil, and — in Kant’s famous metaphor — on the crooked timber of humanity from which no straight thing can ever be made.
No offering in “Anne Frank” fails to accomplish the objective of eminent storytelling: an aptitude for entertainment and instruction affixed to a faultless aesthetic sensibility. “Peep Show” unfurls as if in a Freudian nightmare. “Sister Hills” includes an elegant sparsity and faintly fabulist bent reminiscent of the great Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld. A twist on the classic bully tale “How We Avenged the Blums” extols the deliciousness of retribution while mining the dysphoria that deems it necessary. The most searing, sinister story in the collection, “Camp Sundown,” should be the envy of suspense writers everywhere: At an idyllic summer camp, a pair of survivors becomes convinced that a fellow camper was a Nazi guard during the Holocaust. Josh, the young camp director, grows slowly incensed: “Doley Falk, a Nazi. An old Nazi hiding in the Berkshires under the guise of a blue-toed low-sodium bridge-playing Jew. It is madness.” And by plot’s end that madness will morph into horror, as madness will do given half a chance.
If Englander has a shortcoming as a storyteller it’s his apparent inability to imagine a human predicament that is not insistently Jewish. The least pernicious effect of this can be the ennui involved in asking one to traipse over the same landscape again and again, while the most pernicious can be akin to proselytizing. Despite his frequent critiques and satirizing of the Orthodox, Englander writes as if he’s still one of them. One shouldn’t wish to be tagged a Jewish writer any more than one should wish to be tagged a female writer or an atheist writer, and yet Englander screams for that nomenclature.
He himself hints at an awareness of this potential snag. In “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side,” the girlfriend tells the narrator, a writer named Nathan, “What you do is tell the stories you have, as best you can.” And when Nathan suggests that his stories might be too recognizable, too rote, the girlfriend changes her mind: “You find better stories than that.” In Englander’s case, though, better is not the problem — other is the problem.
Perhaps Bellow is an unjust contrast for any living fiction writer to be set against, but consider how his journeys of mind are never restricted by a single religio-cultural passport; consider his steadfast resistance to being cubicled. Updike’s immortality has been assured in part by an intrepid willingness to go almost anywhere as witness (how many novelists who happen to be secular Protestants would risk the anomie, the chutzpah, to birth Henry Bech, occluded Jewish writer with an inclination to homicide?). Carver, on the other hand, will always be just shy of greatness because his imagination was tranquilized by his circumstances. No one better understands a heaven-less working class ambushed by the fallacy of the American Dream, but Carver simply has no other subject. “Write what you know” sits among the worst advice ever uttered.
Which is not to suggest that Englander has an equally tranquilized imagination. All three of his books indeed contain stretches of superb imaginative and fabulist strength. Englander has had a Borgesian streak in him from the start and more in common with Bruno Schulz than many have been willing to propose. But the incessant likening of him to Jewish writer par excellence, I. B. Singer, is mainly on target. If Englander intends to join the immortals he’ll have to obviate over-trodden territory and widen his range.
For now — no American storyteller writes more beautifully about Jewish identity, and “What We Talk About when We Talk About Anne Frank” is an indelible confirmation of Englander’s observant integrity, one more attestation to the promise of his greatness.
The beautiful banality of high school
A John Hughes-esque book details the failed romance of a "jocky" boy and an "arty" girl
This novel, the fourth that Daniel Handler, better known for the novels he wrote under the name Lemony Snicket, which rival those written by a woman named Rowling in copies sold, has written under his own name, is arguably his first explicitly targeted toward older teens. Though the first two Handler novels featured high school and college-age protagonists, their subject matter (homicide and incest) made them more the province of literary adults.
The subject of “Why We Broke Up” — the unlikely romance between a “jocky” boy and a girl he insists, despite her protests, on calling “arty” — would sit comfortably next to any classic John Hughes movie. But the execution is a master class in the things books do best: It’s loaded with sly, beautifully produced illustrations by Maira Kalman and Handler’s exquisitely wrought sentences, brimming with charm and surprise, whether describing invented plots to classic films, clothes coming off a dry-cleaning rack, or the gorgeous banality, beauty and terror of high school life.
The novel begins at the end: 16-year-old Min — “call me La Desperada” — is making a pilgrimage in a borrowed truck to dump off a cardboard box containing the “prizes and the debris of this relationship, like the glitter in the gutter when the parade has passed.” The intended recipient is her ex-boyfriend, Ed, the co-captain of the basketball team, whom she met when he waltzed into her friend’s Bitter Sixteen party — featuring dandelion green pesto and an inedible 89 percent cacao cake in the shape of a black heart — looking exactly opposite its theme, “strong and showered” and “enormous as a shout.”
Ed is “like some movie everyone sees growing up”: “the jocky hero, handsome in the student newspaper and star of a million strands of gossip,” who always “has a girl on him in the hall, like they came free with a backpack.” She likes jazz, he likes mainstream rock “as bold and dull as a giant potato”; she wants to be a film director, he wants to be “winner of state finals.”
At first, she can’t believe a boy like him would be interested in a girl like her and struggles to put together “the print and the negative, the boyfriend and the celebrity shadow.” But he is utterly smitten; to him, she is “different,” like a “spicy food” from “Whatever-stan.” Though we know from the beginning — heck, from the title — to expect a bad end, Handler unfolds the odd-couple love story in a way that resists, rather than reinforces, clichés — of boys and girls; jocks and freaks — while evoking the universal adolescent experience of falling in, then right back out of, love.
Demi’s last night out
When did Demi Moore know she and Ashton were done? Maybe when she tried and tried, but still couldn't rise from bed
(Credit: AP/Salon)
The party is in the Hollywood Hills, at someone’s house that looks familiar, or maybe all these houses look alike to me at this point. We’re outside by the pool and the air smells of citronella and night-blooming jasmine. I’m drinking a Red Bull and watching a couple of girls in sundresses leap into the shimmering water, the thin fabric revealing their underwear, both of them shrieking loudly to make sure everybody pays attention.
They are lovely, those girls.
The music is so loud it pulses inside my chest, as if it’s replacing my heart, which would be fine with me. Two guys come up and start dancing. They look exactly the same, androgynous and pretty, with floppy hair. It’s a look I like, feel strong against, and we all three sway together.
When the music pauses I order one of them to get me another Red Bull. He nods and bows; he likes being ordered around.
“Chivalry is not dead,” he says.
“Good to know,” I say.
The other one tells me I’m beautiful and I can see he means it. Then he gets that look in his eye — soft, sweet — and asks if I’m OK. Every person I’ve talked to in the past two months has looked at me like that and asked if I’m OK. It is driving me insane.
“Never better,” I say, and I mean it to sound bright but it comes out sarcastic.
This good-looking boy, maybe 23, tells me not to give up on love. “Just … don’t stop believing.”
I laugh. “Like Journey.”
“Exactly,” he says earnestly. “We’re all on a journey.”
I could tell him that believing in love is not my problem. If anything, I believe in it more than ever. I understand its strangeness, its tender bloodthirstiness, how it’s large enough to contain hate and humiliation inside it and still exist. Love is every kind of emotion at the same time. It’s more complicated and terrible than I ever knew, and it has filled me, fractured me.
But seriously, why would I say that to him?
So instead I smile and nod without speaking. It seems fine with both of us. I’ve spent the last few weeks doing nothing but talking. I’ve negotiated and discussed and confessed and processed and prayed. None of it has made much difference. The next time I fall in love, I decide, I will do it all in silence.
Then somehow it’s a couple of hours later and I’ve lost track of my two handsome boys and even worse I’m out of Red Bull. There’s more dancing and a lot of people pressing up against me and in a moment when the crowd shifts I think I see you on the other side of the pool, your white shirt reflected in the turquoise water, and my chest lurches but it’s somebody else and I feel both empty and relieved.
The day I knew it was over, we were camping. It was my idea to go out into nature, into a place that felt simpler, where we’d talk and just be ourselves with nobody watching. We hiked up to a bluff where we could see the ocean, and the air smelled of spicy juniper and warm earth. We held hands and were gentle with each other, as if we might shatter, and looked at the view.
For a little while it was really nice, and I thought maybe we can do this. And then I felt everything around me sinking. I understood: It was the gentleness that told me it was over. We were wrung out. We’d reached the point where all we wanted was not to wake up each day and face the wreck of it.
Now it’s 2 in the morning and we’re in a private room at a club on Sunset and the music is muffled and electric and a beautiful girl with a squeaky voice tells me my hair looks great and I say thank you.
“The best thing about L.A.,” she adds, leaning in like she’s sharing a secret, “is that there’s no humidity. Everybody’s hair looks so perfect.”
I want to laugh at her but I can’t, because every woman wants to be perfect. She notices my lips twisting in this almost-laugh and says sweetly, softly, “Are you OK?”
I reach out to wring her neck. Mistaking this gesture for something else, she grabs my hands and holds them warmly and we sway together for a while. Then somebody offers her some ecstasy and she promises she’ll be right back. As she disappears into a churn of bodies my gaze follows her across the room and I know you’re not even in the country but I see you on a platform dancing with a blond girl in a silver skirt and gleaming skin.
If you were here, these are the things I would say to you:
You have the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen.
That show you’re on is terrible.
I know we’re both to blame. Every day we devised new ways to rub each other raw, scraping the vulnerable spots we’d always known about but left untouched. We were experts at it, geniuses of punishment. And yet, if you offered me the choice, I wouldn’t go back, I wouldn’t give up any of it, because it made me something different, broken but bigger, than I had been before.
Which is another way of saying that I will love you forever, even if that love has no path forward in this world. No journey.
And somehow it’s dawn and we’re in the car with the windows rolled down and the air smells of car exhaust and fried food and my chest is burning in a way that’s not totally unpleasant and my breath is full of diamonds. The sky is beginning to lighten and I know the sun is on its way up even though I can’t see it yet. You’re in the seat next to me, holding my hand, and I’m not sure if this is now or then, a wish or a memory, and I don’t really care, because your smile is bright and there are splashes of neon across your cheek, pink then red, and I’m laughing at something you just said and the car’s going so fast it feels like flying and for a moment, everything is beautiful and so, so perfect.
One day you’re in
When Seal and Heidi Klum split, no one survives on the "Project Runway" set unless they get a little crazy
(Credit: AP/Salon)
The old crew was back to work for the first time since Season 9 ended, and the new hires were cracking the “Make it work” jokes that the rest of us had gotten sick of five years ago. Even Tim seemed a little apologetic when he said it these days. He’d gotten too much sun the day before and was pinker than usual. “Just … make it work, I guess,” he told the makeup artist.
The casting episodes were always awkward, no proper sets or dressing rooms in the hotels and a desperate mass of humanity clutching garment bags in the hallways. And now everyone tiptoeing around Heidi, looking to see if she’d changed since the news broke, peering for bags under her eyes, or deepened lines around her mouth. If she looked older, she must be unhappy. If she didn’t, maybe the entire thing was a stunt to sell more albums. Women in this business are never just sad, they’re one step closer to the grave.
Some new intern had memorized Seal’s entire song catalog, and lobbed titles like little grenades. “‘Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,’” Raoul hissed to me, when Heidi got into a disagreement with Nina about a swimsuit with epaulets. “‘Back Stabbers,’” he said, when a PA told him to get off his ass and do some work. “‘I’ll Be Around,’” he whispered as he left, which turned out to be a track off “Soul 2,” but I just thought he was telling me I could sneak out for a smoke break. I hadn’t listened to much Seal before I’d gotten this job. I hadn’t read Marie Claire, either. But I adapted.
Once Heidi was dressed, it was just hair and makeup that had to hover, who sleeked down her hair or redid eyeliner between takes. But today I didn’t want to leave. I stood around with my hands worrying the insides of my pockets, then invented a scuff on Tim’s left shoe, just to buff it away. He asked me what I’d been up to, during the hiatus. “You’re not wearing your necklace,” he said.
“Just time for a change. Besides, what kind of wardrobe stylist gets away with wearing the same necklace every day? I’m surprised Nina hasn’t had me fired, just for that.”
“I’d stand up for you,” he said. I straightened his tie. We both knew it was already straight.
“I’m fine,” I said.
That’s what Heidi had been saying, to the few people brave enough to ask. We didn’t want to embarrass ourselves by presuming any closeness. But if she wanted a shoulder to cry on, we all wanted it to be our shoulder. Women and men, gay and straight, we’d all watched her give kiss after kiss to the departing contestants and wondered if there were a way to make her notice us short of getting fired.
The overall feel of the room was as tense as the day Tim came back to work after announcing on his other makeover show that he hadn’t had sex in 29 years. I’d felt like I’d accidentally walked in on my parents, seen something that was natural enough but that you really didn’t want to think about. Something I didn’t feel I had any business knowing. It was a surprise and it wasn’t. A surprise, I guess, that he said it on television.
You don’t have to live this way, I wanted to tell them, but I guess some of them do. It wasn’t like Heidi could have taken off her ring and hoped no one noticed. I wondered if Tim ever missed his old life, writing curriculum proposals at Parsons. I wondered if Heidi ever imagined not entering that high school modeling competition in Germany. I wondered about how things would have been different if I’d never left Indiana.
Everyone has to decide. Models all decide early. They have to give it a go before anything else about themselves is formed, before their bodies are even settled. The ones who make it onto “Project Runway,” whatever else they do later, they’ve done this, been on national television in some muslin and macaroni or hot pants made of pet store moss. Their boyfriends will come and go and when they watch Lifetime with some other woman, years from now, they’ll say, “I used to date that girl. The one in the sexy mailman uniform.”
I thought of Sam watching TV with his new wife in West Lafayette and telling her that the girl he was once engaged to left for New York to try and make it big. She never got in front of the camera, but she ended up holding some decent jobs behind it. In West Lafayette, that would count for something. “Oh my god,” she’d say. “Someone chooses those ridiculous outfits?”
I returned the ring, when I called it off. We didn’t have wedding bands yet. Didn’t even have a date set or a venue. Sam should have guessed, and I’d kept wishing he would. He hadn’t even looked for a job in New York, still waiting for me to fail so totally I’d come back, feel settled and satisfied in Indiana. We each thought we could wait the other out, but even when I couldn’t book modeling jobs, I couldn’t imagine going back home.
A rejected contestant was kneeling on the table, crying with his hands clutched in supplication, like Heidi was a merciful god. Security was circling, but they didn’t want to get too close and ruin the shot. Finally the poor guy left on his own, and an AD called a break. Heidi just sat back, didn’t get up and stretch. I tried to remember which shoes she was wearing, whether they were extremely uncomfortable or just moderately uncomfortable.
Raoul came back with a stack of cookies wrapped in a napkin from craft services. He offered me one, humming the chorus of “Kiss From a Rose.” I shook my head, and walked over to Heidi. I pretended to find a thread on her shoulder, pretended to pick it off.
“Don’t tell me that’s been there all morning,” she said.
“Nothing showed up on camera.” I stared at the part in her hair. “I have this,” I said. “You left it on the makeup counter. I didn’t want to leave it sitting out.”
I took her wedding band from my pocket and held it on my opened palm. All the previous seasons, she’d worn it to work and kept it on all day, whatever her outfit. I’d known without explanation that it was my job to accessorize around the ring.
She shifted in her seat. “I forgot about it,” she said. “I’ve been wearing it but then … I was just sitting in the makeup chair and I thought I should take it off. And then I was late to the set.”
A PA was gesturing me away from the table. The next round of auditions was about to start.
“What do you want me to do with it?” I asked.
“I don’t have any pockets,” she said, looking down at her short aquamarine dress. She wasn’t accusatory, but of course I felt responsible. All the things I could not do for her, and I’d denied her even pockets. That, at least, I could have arranged. She had a broken heart and now no pockets even to stow it in.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“That’s OK.”
“But I’m sorry.”
“OK.”
“I have pockets.” I gestured down at my own outfit, plain jeans and flats.
Sam mailed the ring straight back. I want you to have it (and I can’t return it), he wrote. We were playing some game of hot potato, but I didn’t see any way to win. I put the ring on a gold necklace chain, and when people asked I said my fiancé had died. I didn’t get anything good this way. No jobs or dates or even free drinks — it just made people sad and uncomfortable. Tim had put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me close for a hug. But I’d kept saying it. It steeled my resolve. I’d told myself my life had to work out because I’d already given up so much. It just had to.
“I can hold onto it for you,” I said. “Would that help?”
“Or give it to my assistant. She’ll put it in my room. She has the key.”
“OK. I can do that.” I wondered how long Heidi and Seal had tried to make things work just because they felt things had to. Because everyone would be talking about how they’d failed, and leaving notes on her website about how she should just have tried a little harder.
“Thanks,” Heidi said.
“No problem.”
Michael Kors had to push past me to sit back down and he gave me the stink eye. I backed away as the cameras started taping. Raoul had finished the cookies and collected a handful of cheese cubes on toothpicks. He held them like a bouquet, offering me a blossom. “‘Let’s Stay Together,’” he sang.
I shook my head.
“‘Crazy,’” he whispered.
I rolled the ring between my fingers, slipping it on and off the tips of my fingers.
“‘Future Love Paradise.’”
I didn’t say anything. Heidi’s engagement ring had been a rock, but the wedding band was delicate, even thinner than it had looked on her long fingers.
“Debut album. Second single.”
“I know.”
“Which is weird. If it’s future, how are we ever supposed to get there? It’s a totally depressing song.”
During the hiatus I’d gone on vacation with one of the sound mixers. It was getting serious and I could tell the necklace creeped him out, so I’d left it at home. It was easier than I’d thought. I think I’d stopped wanting my life to be one specific thing. I wanted to write Sam to tell him this, that I was happy, that I hoped we both were, that I didn’t think we had anything to regret. I wished there was a way to share this with Heidi.
I figured I could at least say it to Raoul, give him some piece of wisdom he could take away from this job along with all the cheese he could fit in his maw. I tried to think of an appropriate Seal cover to sum up the situation, but “‘A Change Is Gonna Come’” was as close as I could get, and it just seemed obvious.
“What’s the ring?” he asked.
“Auf wiedersehen,” I said. “I need to find Heidi’s assistant.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that. I’m sure she’s got it copyrighted or something.”
“You can’t copyright ‘goodbye,’” I told him, which really could have been a song title of its own.
Page 1 of 124 in Fiction
Confronting the killer inside me; a romance recounted 
America’s Ports: The Place Where Old Trucks Go To Die 
The Fictional Obama 
A new breed of porn CEO — female 
The Oscar favorite no one really likes 
My Facebook angst 
He was our eyes 
Painting as Paris burned 
Quick Hits: Yuja Wang plays live 
How to solve the boomer retirement crisis 
The science of rubbernecking 
38 years of self-love 
TV’s golden age of opening credits 
