Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (18 page)

From Daniele, I learned so much about Italian food, in the quotidian way you do when your days and nights together are full of pumpkin ravioli swimming in sage butter. He meticulously planned our movie times and snacking. Pre-movie lunch might be at Pizzeria Gambarotta, then after movie number one,
spuntini
at the luxe café Cova, its ceiling dripping
with chandeliers, for little sandwiches of arugula, goat cheese, and leathery bresaola (cured beef) or some pastel-colored pastries fit for Marie Antoinette. I loved eating in tiny portions, the opposite of my experience in America. Even my Coca-Cola came in a miniature glass bottle. After movie number two, we were off to dinner at Il Rigolo, the Tuscan trattoria we went to every Sunday and possibly the only place in the world to offer
lasagna al curry.
This cracked me up, and I ordered it often, a béchamel-heavy stack of pasta stained yellow with turmeric. Only occasionally did I look for these reminders of home in my food. For the most part, I embraced the new and unfamiliar, in the way you do when you’re young and captivated by a life different from the one you’ve known. I did, however, order my
pasta arrabbiata
as angry as they could make it—for an Indian girl, their “spicy” was never quite enough. Somehow our favorite lunch in Milan during movie days was at the nearby McDonald’s—ah, Italy, where modernity and antiquity exist side by side—where I’d lay into
un Big Mac
and a side of
patatine fritte.
Somehow even McDonald’s was better in Italy.

Besides treating his money-strapped girlfriend to fine food, Daniele also upped my sartorial game. Textiles were his family’s business and he had his own operation, making and selling printed fabric. He did “research” constantly, by which I mean he shopped. I’d tag along for his sessions, where he’d buy whatever inspired him and send it to the fabric factory for a few days to be studied and some aspect of it replicated. He’d always buy whatever it was in my size, so after he was done with it, I’d get to wear it. He had great taste. I had my own style, a hodgepodge of vintage bargains and a few splurges from Contempo Casuals and Express, but he gently challenged my choices. He taught me the subtle and not-so-subtle precepts of fashion, the unspoken rules that no one had ever codified for me. A very short skirt and heels were overkill. If I liked a sweater or pants, he’d politely check the tag to identify the fabric. This isn’t good quality, he’d explain, or this won’t keep you warm. Daniele made sure I had the
staples. Just as a good home cook needs to have high-quality olive oil, nice vinegar, and a heavy sauté pan, a girl needs a dress coat, real leather boots, and a nice watch. And just as it’s impossible to go back to cheap balsamic after tasting the good stuff, it’s hard to slip on rayon once you’ve worn cashmere.

Three months into our relationship, he took me for the weekend to the Swiss ski resort St. Moritz, where his family had a house. Our first night there, he hired a horse and sleigh to drive us across the frozen lake. With snow-capped Alpine peaks in the background, he proposed to me. As romantic a gesture as this seemed to be, and as doe-eyed as I was, I had no problem saying no. I was naïve, not stupid. I cared for him, but I was too young to marry anyone, especially someone—and goodness knows I see the comedy in this now—seventeen years older than me. In fact, marriage didn’t figure into my girlish fantasies. From my mom’s three marriages, I inherited a skepticism toward the institution, with its “till death do us part” commitment. I promised to marry him one day, adding “if all goes well” so I had plenty of wiggle room. That’s how I said no. And so the relationship sailed on, ultimately for six years, as if nothing had happened. I was in love and just happy in the way you are when you’re young. The future felt far, far away. Commitment is easy before a relationship requires compromise and obligation. I felt wise then, proud of my man and his sophistication, the complete opposite of my mother’s latest choice in a mate. Somewhere inside, I knew it wouldn’t last. The relationship was one, ultimately, of contented convenience. We stayed together because we were reasonably happy and because there was no good reason to split up.

A year had passed since I arrived in Europe and not much had changed. I was making ends meet, with the huge help of having no rent to pay when in Milan, but the work had become increasingly tiresome. I was no
stranger to rejection by this point. There were several explanations for this: I wasn’t a particularly gifted model. The waif phenomenon was in full swing, and I was a (relatively) voluptuous 34-24-34. Yet I couldn’t help but see all those nos (or, more accurately, the lack of any response at all) as a referendum on my scar. I was bored of the shame I felt, of people’s furtive downward glances when I went sleeveless, of the inevitable questions the scar invited. I was tired of the requisite disclosures when I went on castings: “Before we begin, let me show you my hideous scar.” I saw an obvious ceiling to my achievement.

I accepted that I would get only so far with my aesthetic handicap. So I made an appointment to undergo chemical dermabrasion to take some of the dark pigment out of the scar. This wasn’t the first time I’d tried to reduce its visual impact. Before I had cold-called Nina Blanchard’s agency, I’d visited an Indian surgeon named Dr. Raj Kanodia in L.A. recommended to me by another model. He told me that while he couldn’t erase the scar, he could significantly flatten it, making it easier to hide with makeup. This might be uncomfortable, he said, before inserting a needle as long as an asparagus spear and withdrawing it excruciatingly slowly to ensure an even distribution of Kenalog. The injection did flatten the scar but left me terrorized. Now, after a year in Milan, my agency identified a doctor—agencies had Rolodexes filled with doctors who could fix anything from teeth to tits—who treated it inch by inch as I gritted my teeth and cried. This was primitive dermabrasion—essentially a controlled chemical burn, a painful stripping of layers of tissue—which I hope has improved since the early nineties. I had never known such agony, even during painful monthly periods and in the car accident itself. But the procedure worked. After a dozen sessions, about half an inch of the scar had been visibly pruned of a few layers of knobby tissue and was now a neutral color, close to that of the rest of my arm.

My agency sent me for a go-see with the agent Davide Manfredi,
who was looking to cast the next photo series for a photographer named Helmut Newton. Art lovers, fashion-industry types, and
Vogue
-magazine devotees—they all knew Helmut Newton. I’d first heard of him when I was in college. In the same league as Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, he was a trailblazing photographer who made his own rules. Mr. Newton urged fashion photography from the restrained toward the provocative—a big deal at the time for a demure industry. (A
Vogue
editor reportedly admonished him: “Ladies, Helmut, do not lean against lampposts.”) He was perhaps best known at the time for the series
Big Nudes,
unflinching, elegant portraits of women who were completely nude but for a pair of high heels. Being chosen as his subject was a potentially career-making job.

When my turn with Davide came, I entered his office with familiar trepidation. He told me to strip to my underwear. I was neither surprised nor entirely comfortable. I had been modeling for a year and was more or less immune to the humiliation of being photographed in this state. It had become only mildly unpleasant, like getting blood drawn. At least by now I knew enough to shave first. As I undressed behind a partition, I gave him my requisite scar spiel, half expecting him to tell me to put my clothes back on. “Don’t worry, Helmut likes scars,” he said. He took a few Polaroids, affixed them to a piece of paper, and faxed them, along with hundreds of others, to Mr. Newton in Monte Carlo.

The audition came and went. I thought little about it, because I did not for a second expect to get it. I was a benchwarmer for my agency. Once in a while, when a job came in that wasn’t commercial, they called me in to take a swing. I had a better shot at scoring that kind of job, where the model would be a subject of art, rather than a consumer aspiration. While an ad exec would not see my “exotic” look as relatable, the artist might at least see it as fun to photograph.

My career so far had been an elaborate game of pretend. I was a model who barely got work, who existed on the lowest rung of the business, and
who saw no indication of that changing. I was still effectively in debt to Luigi for the plane ticket to Milan and to City Models in Paris. Somewhere in me I understood that the farce would soon end and I would move back home, go to grad school, find a real job. As a result, I was only partly present during my auditions and shoots. As I stripped for Davide, I felt as if I were role-playing, as if I were looking through someone else’s eyes.

Two weeks later, I got a call from my agency. They informed me that Mr. Newton wanted to book me for a private commission. Me! Perhaps the coolest part: he loved my scar. The minute he saw it, Davide later told me, the great photographer said, “I have to photograph her.” My agent was thrilled, of course, almost shocked. Everyone at the agency seemed genuinely happy. The underdog had won one. I was an MFA student getting a story in
The New Yorker.

This could be the job that launched me from an unknown model with a funny name to a model with a funny name that bookers recognized. Instead of being just one of three hundred models on a casting call, I’d be one of forty. If I was able to say I worked with Mr. Newton, it would no longer matter that I wasn’t the most beautiful or talented model in the business. Once you graduate from Harvard, does anyone really care about your GPA? Get through this, my agent promised, and I could forever sport his imprimatur. The subtext for me was that my scar, that indelible blot on my body, would be effectively erased.

Once the excitement faded, I began to confront what the shoot would entail. Mr. Newton, I learned, had been privately commissioned by a Japanese businessman to do a sort of
Big Nudes
redux. It was not to be published or exhibited but merely hung, perhaps in his dining room. I’d have to be naked. To get a sense of how naked, Daniele and I went to a bookstore to look at Mr. Newton’s work. As I flipped the pages, I understood that this was not “strategically placed fabric” naked. It was full-blown, oh-my-that’s-your-vagina naked. I was terrified of posing completely
nude. I was a child of conservative India, where women went to the beach in their saris. My grandfather was still alive. He would not be happy. I also hated the idea of a photo of my poontang hanging in some banker’s dining room. This was an odd reaction, I now realize. But for some reason I’d rather have had thousands of people staring at my body than just that one.

Vag was the final frontier, the thing you still didn’t see on TV or in mainstream ads and media. Italian magazines like
Max
and others did show fully nude models, and many respected Italian actresses and TV personalities had gone full frontal by then, some more artistically than others. Later, I would do
Max
magazine, but that was still to come. At that moment in time, in 1993, just showing my boobs with both nipples blazing seemed like a crossing of some Rubicon in itself.

My body tensed as Daniele and I leafed the pages of one of the Newton books. Daniele noticed. “You should only do it if you’re comfortable,” he said. “If you’re not, it’ll show.” He was right. You can fake being bubbly for a Folgers shoot. You can fake the obligatory stoic look of the runway. But when you’re entirely exposed, the camera won’t be fooled. And I couldn’t go all the way to Monte Carlo on this legendary photographer’s dime to be a disappointment.

Yet whenever I thought I’d finally decided to demur, the infectious thrill among my colleagues and my agency pulled me back into “maybe” land. Perhaps I was just nervous. I didn’t want my fear to torpedo such a huge opportunity. I spoke to my mother, who has never been prudish. She had raised me not to be ashamed of my body, and to appreciate the female form and celebrate it. We both routinely went naked around the house when there weren’t others around, and I never saw my mom behave as if she were ashamed of her own body, no matter what. We even went to a nude beach once in San Diego, when I was an adolescent, mostly out of gleeful curiosity but also because my mom and I did like being naked. I
mean that we just liked the naturalness of it. At Black’s Beach we quickly became bored after seeing that most of the other beachgoers were older gay men. Any shred of feeling risqué or sexy because we were nude on that beach quickly evaporated. My mother understood that posing nude could be a celebration of the female form, not just the culmination of male fantasy. Yet as the days crept forward, my doubt grew. Two days before the shoot, I got into my bed and called my agent. Exasperation barely concealed his fury. No one says no to Helmut Newton, he said. I had embarrassed the agency and myself.

A few weeks later, I got a surprising call from my modeling agent. Mr. Newton was shooting a calendar for Lavazza, the Italian coffee company, and wondering, what if I wasn’t completely nude, but just topless? Not only hadn’t I blown my moment, but I didn’t have to compromise in order to grab it. I was glad and relieved they still wanted to work with me, especially as I was still feeling a bit like a chicken for turning the other job down, especially at the last minute. The atmosphere in Milan at that time in the early 1990s was much more liberal than in America. Italy (Catholicism notwithstanding) was much less puritanical than the United States, and overt images of female sensuality and sexuality were much more prevalent in magazines and on TV. Women with fully nude breasts nursing infants in commercials for baby bottles or formula were commonplace on Italian TV. It was also a time before the Internet. Things you did in photos couldn’t haunt you and follow you in the same way.

More than exploitive, the atmosphere seemed to be one that celebrated the female form and equated breasts with femininity and motherhood. Often all but the cracks of buttocks were exposed in thong bikinis, and on beaches along the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas, grandmothers and teenagers and everyone in between bathed and sunbathed topless. Even excursions in Sardinia with Daniele’s family proved eye-opening. So the compromise, the willingness to show my breasts, seemed an easy
one. I mean, if even Daniele’s mom could go topless then surely I could, to work with an artist like Helmut. I didn’t regret refusing the first job with him, but I was left with a feeling that I had missed a great opportunity, not only for my career, but also as an artistic experience. At that time, as now, pretty girls were a dime a dozen, and most of them didn’t have the extra handicap of being brown or having a scar seven inches long down their arm. Retouching was still not an option for almost all but
Vogue
covers back then. Models poured out from every residence and hotel. Milan was the first stop while building your portfolio, and if you didn’t want to do some job, there were lines down the block of starving girls who would, with a smile.