Elegance and Innocence (8 page)

I nodded.

She took out a red plastic model of a uterus cut in half.

‘This is a model of a uterus,’ she said.

I nodded again. I wondered where she’d got it, what kind of company made these sorts of things, and what other models they had in their catalogue.

She started to talk and point at the model. I could hear her voice, and see her hands moving, but my mind had gone numb. I just stared at the plastic uterus, thinking how red it was and how a real one couldn’t possibly be that red.

‘Excuse me,’ I interrupted, after a while. ‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Of course,’ she said.

I went and threw up in a little cubical next door. There seemed to be cubicles everywhere – clean, little rooms filled with women throwing up. When I came back, she continued where she left off. She was obviously used to people throwing up in the middle of her presentation.

‘During the operation, what we will do is remove the lining of the uterus, creating a kind of non-biological miscarriage. You will have all the symptoms of a miscarriage – heavy bleeding, cramps, and hormonal imbalance. This will make you feel a little more fragile than normal. It’s important for you to rest afterwards and take it easy for a few days. Is someone coming to pick you up?’

I stared at her.

‘Did you drive yourself?’ she repeated.

The room was perfectly still. She had no make-up on. I tried to imagine her in a bar, talking to a stranger, way past closing time. I couldn’t.

She waited. She was used to waiting.

I started to open my mouth; it tasted like yellow sick. I closed it again and tried to swallow.

‘Would you like some water?’

I shook my head; it would only make me throw up again.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ she said at last.

She was looking at me with her clean, fresh face, the face of a mother on a children’s aspirin commercial.

I started to cry and she was used to that too.

I hated myself because I knew we would all be doing it. She passed me a Kleenex. Twenty minutes from now, she’d be passing a Kleenex to someone else, the girl with the boyfriend perhaps.

‘Maybe you’d like to think about it some more,’ she offered. Freedom of choice.

‘No.’ I was done crying. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’

It was exactly as she said it would be. An hour later I was lying in a hospital version of a La-Z-y Boy chair, drinking sugary tea and eating biscuits.

Four hours later I was shopping for a new winter coat with my friend Anne, using a credit card I’d stolen from my parents.

‘Your ulcer seems to be better,’ my father remarked a week later.

‘Yes, Da. I believe it’s gone.’

And it is gone. Until the next time.

There’s a coat that hangs in the front hall cloakroom of my parents’ house. It’s a single-breasted, navy blue winter coat; a classic cut in immaculate condition. It’s been there for years but no one’s noticed. It has never been worn.

F
Fur

If women are honest with themselves, they would admit that the fascination they feel for furs is not only due to the warmth they provide. After all, a fur is never just a fur – it is also, more than any other garment I can think of, a symbol, and a mink coat is the most easily identifiable symbol of them all. It stands for achievement, both for the man who bought it and the woman who wears it, as well as status and undeniable luxury. It has been said with a great deal of truth that a mink is the feminine Legion of Honour
.

Furs are important milestones in a woman’s life, and in general they are purchased only after a great deal of thought and many comparisons. So make your selection with care. After all, men come and go but a good fur is a destiny
.

There’s a story about a famous opera diva rehearsing for a production of
Tosca
at the Met. At the end of the rehearsal, she sends her dresser to collect her things and the poor woman comes back clutching a black wool coat.

The star is appalled. She tosses her head and fixes the woman with an icy stare. ‘Honey, you know I don’t wear no
cloth
coats!’

Divas and minks have a lot in common. You have to kill something to make a mink. Its beauty is horrible to behold. Divas are like that too. And while you don’t have to be a diva to wear a mink, it helps.

I got my first mink when I was nineteen years old. It was given to me by a friend of my mother’s, whose own mother had recently died of Alzheimer’s. She’d been a tiny woman and no one else in the family could wear the coat. Or wanted to.

It was a full-length mink; glossy, heavy, stinking of musk when it rained. It was the most un-PC garment it was possible to own. And yet it had both authority and a powerful, threatening, glamour. People reacted violently to it; they were infuriated, offended, jealous, or lustful. It was a coat of almost biblical symbolism. It hid nothing, accommodated no one. If you hated it, it was there to be hated. If you loved it, it couldn’t care less. The very thing that made it repulsive was the same thing that gave it its splendour. And it fitted me like a glove.

The trouble with a coat like that is it can take over your
life; dominate your whole personality. If you don’t know who you are, you can easily become a mink coat.

I had a boyfriend at the time. He’d been a car thief in high school and was now two years ahead of me in drama school. He wore a denim jacket that had been in police chases, that still had bloodstains on it from when he’d been arrested. Badly worn, it hung together in places by threads.

We looked like brother and sister, he and I, with the same pale hair and green eyes. Neither of us knew who we were or who we wanted to be, so we became actors. We spent our nights eating at an all night diner called Chief’s, he in his threadbare denim and me in my mink, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer with our eggs, and arguing about iambic pentameter and if Pinter was really a genius or just a fraud. We were going to be great actors, famous and rich. We made up stories about ourselves, wore costumes, acted in scenes. And we were our own favourite characters.

Only, I was always the mink and he was always the denim jacket. We met wearing them, parted wearing them and despite all the drinking, fucking, and fighting, we just couldn’t manage to take them off.

He performed Romeo in his end of term project with a black eye. He got it smashing in the face of a man who propositioned me in an all night drinking club over the Christmas break. It was three o’clock in the morning. We’d been drinking since six. The man had said something I
hadn’t quite heard and then all of a sudden we were outside in the bitter cold.

They rolled around in the frozen black snow in the middle of the road, punching and kicking, blood forming pale pink pools between the patches of dark grit. A crowd gathered and cheered them on; shouting and jeering – full of exactly the kind of people you’d expect to be strolling around at three in the morning.

I hated to be upstaged. Pulling the mink around me tightly, I walked away, staggering in my high heels over the snowdrifts to the car.

We were doing a close up, just the mink and me, when I saw him running towards me, limping. His nose was bleeding and his knuckles smashed. The guy had been wearing a ring and the side of his face was cut.

‘You cunt!’ he shouted across the car park. ‘You filthy, fucking cunt!’

So, we’re starting with Mamet.

D
ENIM
J
ACKET
: I fucking defend your fucking honour and you fucking walk away!

M
INK
: Get in the car.

D
ENIM
J
ACKET
: Fuck you!

M
INK
: Get in the fucking car!

D
ENIM
J
ACKET
: I said, fuck you! Or maybe you didn’t fucking hear me. Maybe you were too busy walking the fuck away!

M
INK
: I didn’t ask you to fight him, did I?

D
ENIM
J
ACKET
: No man takes that.

M
INK
: It was about me!

D
ENIM
J
ACKET
: No man fucking takes that, understand? You’re my girlfriend. A man says something to you, he says it to me. Understand?

M
INK
: Fuck you!

D
ENIM
J
ACKET
: Fuck you too.

(Pinter pause.)

D
ENIM
J
ACKET
: You walked away.

M
INK
: I couldn’t watch you do it, Baby. (Tears welling up in eyes; gin tears; three o’clock in the morning tears.) I just couldn’t watch you get hurt.

(Grabs me by the shoulders; moving rapidly into Tennessee Williams territory now.)

D
ENIM
J
ACKET
: You gotta have faith in me, Louie. Please. (Bloody head on mink.) I need you to have faith in me. (
sotto voce
) I need you, Baby. I need you.

(Curtain.)

Only the curtain never fell.

We broke up just before I came to England, exhausted. I discovered I wasn’t a diva, that I didn’t have the endurance for grand opera. And there are only so many ways you can say ‘Fuck you’ to someone before you start to really mean it.

I had imagined that passion, drama, and love were all
one and the same – proof that the others existed. But the opposite was true: drama and passion are just very clever disguises for a love that has never taken root.

I gave the mink away to a friend in New York. It was a heavy coat to wear and I was relieved to get rid of it. But very soon after it was gone, I began to feel that something was missing.

I thought I could change my character as easily as I could change my coat.

But I’ve been searching for the right one ever since.

G
Girl Friends

It is a good idea never to go shopping for clothes with a girl friend. Since she is often an unwitting rival as well, she will unconsciously demolish everything that suits you best. Even if she is the most loyal friend in the world, if she simply adores you, and if her only desire is for you to be the most beautiful, I remain just as firm in my opinion: shop alone, and turn only to specialists for guidance. Although they may not be unmercenary, at least they are not emotionally involved
.

I particularly dread these kinds of girl friends:

1. The one who wants to be just like you, who is struck by the same love-at-first-sight for the same dress, who excuses herself in advance by saying, ‘I hope you don’t mind, darling, and anyway, we don’t go out together very much, and we can always
telephone beforehand to make sure we don’t wear it at the same time, etc. etc.… You are furious but don’t dare show it and you return the dress the next day
.

2. The friend with a more modest budget than yours, who couldn’t dream of buying the same kind of clothes as you (the truth is that she dreams of nothing else). Perhaps you think it is a real treat for her to go shopping with you. Personally, I call it mental cruelty, and I am always painfully embarrassed by the role of second fiddle that certain women reserve for their best friend. Besides, her presence is of absolutely no use to you at all, because this kind of friend always approves of everything you select, and will agree with even greater enthusiasm if it happens to be something that isn’t very becoming
.

3. Finally, the friend who lives for clothes and whose advice you seek. This spoilt and self-confident woman will monopolize the attention of the shop assistants, who are quick to scent a good customer. You find yourself forgotten by everybody, trying to decide what looks best not on you, but on your friend
.

Moral: Always shop alone. Women who shop with their friends may be popular, but elegant they are NOT
.

I’m on my way to Notting Hill to see a friend I write with, Nicki Sands. We began working on a screenplay together about a year ago. Neither of us is really a writer, which is probably why we aren’t making a lot of progress on the project. We meet up religiously twice a week, loitering around in a kind of career cul-de-sac. However, writing does provide us with a useful alibi, instantly deflecting any embarrassing questions such as, ‘So, what do you do?’

Nicki used to be a model in the late seventies and early eighties and now she lives with a record producer in an enormous double-fronted house in Notting Hill. They openly despise one another. Neither one of them is obliged to work, so they while away the hours wandering from room to room, looking for new ways to torture each other.

I arrive around 10:30 to find Nicki and Dan milling about in their Santa Fe style kitchen. They own a cappuccino machine that neither of them can work and are standing in front of the faux adobe woodburning hearth and indoor barbecue unit holding their empty cups.

Every once in a while, one of them will have a go and the other will provide a running commentary.

‘That’s right, put the coffee in and turn the knob … No! No, no, no, no, no!’

‘Shut up!’

‘Jesus, you’re doing it wrong
again!
’

‘No, I’m not!’

‘Steam, there’s meant to be steam!’

‘Shut up! What is it with you?’

‘What is it with me? What
is
it? I’ve been up since six and I still haven’t had a fucking cup of coffee!’

Reading the instructions is considered cheating.

After a while, Dan gives up and makes a Nescafé. The three-hundred-pound triumph of Italian engineering has won again. Nicki and I decide to go out for coffee and discuss plot development. But what we really do is sit in Tom’s, a café and organic food shop around the corner, and hash over Nicki’s failing relationship in detail.