As I reached my apartment door, left wide open, I remembered that my purchase from the Beverly Center was still in the trunk of my car. A black exercise mat lay in the trunk of my car. How typical of me to buy exercise equipment and never use it. How typically disorganized of me to forget that I bought it so I could begin my workouts with my trainer at home. She would be here first thing in the morning.
It was clear I needed an assistant. I was overwhelmed with all the things that needed to be done. I needed an assistant to help me remember Bean, that she needed to be groomed, walked, and taken downstairs so she wouldn’t go to the bathroom on my rug. I needed an assistant to go to the convenience store and to remind me of my workouts. But mainly I needed an assistant to go to the Beverly Center so that this would never happen again.
21
THE NOISE of the escalators as they took people to the gym was a strange one. It was dull and barely there, like the hum of a refrigerator. It was a backdrop to the screaming of the coffee grinder coming from within Buzz Coffee and the music that would blurt out of the Virgin Megastore as its glass doors spat out another customer or sucked one in. But the escalators were beckoning me, politely but relentlessly inviting me to the gym as I sat and waited to interview an assistant. Now that my body was thinner, I wondered if I wouldn’t mind the other women in the gym seeing it. Maybe I could ignore their critical looks long enough to work at defining my muscles now that they’re not buried underneath layers of fat? As I waited for her to arrive, I watched the escalators go up and down regardless of whether there are people on them or not. They took people to the gym and then they took nobody to the gym. The movie theater was on the second floor also, and I was trying to spot the people who were going to the midday movie, wondering whether the blackness of the theater would fill the void or exasperate it. I would never see a movie on a Tuesday afternoon. Everyone knows workdays are for working.
By the time Carolyn arrived I had come up with a few immediate reasons for needing her, although sitting motionless and watching people go to the gym had made me quietly anxious. I had begun to move my legs up and down to get rid of some of that anxiety, but I found that most of it was thrust at Carolyn, as I began telling her what I needed even before she had time to settle into one of the uncomfortable iron chairs that circled the bolted-down outdoor table. She responded immediately by whipping out her notebook and pen and seemingly matched my anxiety by writing hurriedly and responding to every grocery list item with “What else?” I’m not sure we really made eye contact until the frenzied listing and recording of the to dos was over.
“I need for you to go to a Ralphs to get the yogurt because only Ralphs carries the brand that I eat.” “What else?” “I need you to take Bean to the groomer’s.” “What else?” “I need you to schedule Pilates.” “What else?” “I need you to oversee the renovation of my apartment.” “What else?” “I need you to go hiking with me because I hate being alone.” “What else?”
I’m gay and I need you to be okay with that. What else? I need you to make me okay with that. What else? I need you to keep all my secrets and not tell anyone that I’m a phony.
“That all?”
She signed a confidentiality agreement drafted by my business manager, who knew of no real reason why I should need one, and became my assistant.
“I like to work out. Do you?”
“Yes. I do.”
When Carolyn and I finally sat back and breathed each other in, we were already committed. I noticed a few striking things about her. Carolyn was colorless. She had depth to her hair because it wasn’t white, yet it had no color. She had a pale, colorless face. She had thin, bony hands that were also colorless except for a thin blue vein that meandered its way from the end of her wrist across the back of her hand to the start of her little finger. Her bony hands matched her thin, bony frame. Among all the round people on the escalators and at Buzz Coffee, Carolyn struck me as straight. I wasn’t envious of Carolyn’s weight, but instead appreciated it. I appreciated that someone other than me cared about weight loss, and as I instinctively knew that weight loss wasn’t a new thing to her, I appreciated that she cared about weight-loss maintenance. And so from that moment on, Carolyn and I would be united in our goal to maintain. With her help, I would maintain my hair color, my nail length, my dog’s whiteness, and my car’s cleanliness. I would maintain my clothes and my friendships by politely remembering to send apology notes to Kali or Erik explaining how my work schedule conflicted with their dinner parties. And because Carolyn would bring me food and schedule my workouts with my trainers, I would easily maintain my weight.
I returned home after my meeting with Carolyn and was immediately struck by the cold that had crept into my apartment through a crack in the window. I usually left the window slightly open because I liked the idea of fresh air. Actually, it was more than just the air I was wanting. It was the sounds of traffic on Sunset Boulevard, the noise of the industrial air conditioner on top of the Sunset 5. I could sit in my dining room to face another meal alone and yet feel connected to the world around me. I could imagine the actresses rushing to auditions reciting their lines as they waited for the light to turn green at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights. Thinking about actresses driving around to auditions prompted me remember my favorite quote from Mae West when she was asked if she had any advice to give young actresses in Hollywood. “Take Fountain,” she said exhaling the smoke from her cigarette. There was so much traffic outside my apartment on Sunset, I wished more actresses took her advice.
I walked into the kitchen to prepare my meal. I would eat 50 calories of egg whites. I found that alternating the egg whites and the tuna for lunch helped with weight loss, as egg whites would cut my lunchtime calorie intake in half. I had been eating egg whites instead of tuna a lot more lately for this reason. Plus, I liked to cook. I never really enjoyed it before, but it was very satisfying preparing a meal, cooking and eating it. I felt quite obsessed with food. It was all I ever really thought about. I was worried that my passion for it would lead to my failure to abstain from overindulging, but I took comfort in the knowledge that people who love to cook are quite often obsessed with food. Cooking was a hobby, an artistic expression, and for me, the ultimate control of what I put in my body. I washed the small mustard plate with the black swirl pattern that I used for egg whites. I washed all the dishes before I ate from them to make sure they were clean. Occasionally the dishes felt greasy when I took them out of the dishwasher and I wanted to ensure that I wasn’t ingesting any residual grease or oil that might be on them.
Dishes and utensils were very important. I couldn’t just eat from any dish. Each dish had meaning. Each dish helped me in my quest to achieve the perfect body. If I felt anxious about eating, my anxiety was always instantly allayed when I saw my little white bowl with the green flowers, as it had a faint hairline crack that helped me to figure out portions. I had to see the crack at the bottom of the bowl at all times, plus the crack is particularly helpful when I didn’t want foods to touch. I also ate every meal with my second favorite tool—chopsticks. Chopsticks were useful for obvious reasons. I’m not Asian, nor am I coordinated. They were unnatural and awkward for me and as a result, the food fell through the little obtuse triangles making me eat slower. If I ate slowly, I didn’t eat as much.
I sat down at the dining table to my mustard-colored plate of egg whites. Then I got up and closed the window. The wind had kicked up making it colder, and now the sounds of Sunset Boulevard, once soothing and connecting me to the world at large, were intrusive and grating on my nerves. Horns blasting and muscle cars accelerating reminded me of all the impatience, pretension, and aggression in society that lay beneath my penthouse loft apartment. I was very safe in there with my scale and my schedule. I closed the window, but I turned the air conditioner down to sixty degrees. I hadn’t really proven my theory, but it just made sense that if you were shivering and trying to stay warm, your body was burning excess calories. It had to. As I hadn’t yet begun to eat the egg whites, it occurred to me that maybe my body was burning fat, not calories, as I probably used up the 100 calories from breakfast on my morning Pilates workout. I liked that thought. Although I didn’t have to lose more weight, I definitely had a little more fat to burn. My thighs were still big. My stomach still had about an inch of fat on it and, as it was summer during Christmas in Australia, I wanted my stomach to be flat and perfect when I went home. If it wasn’t flat, then all that effort would’ve been in vain. When I went to Australia for Christmas, I wanted my mother to see a determined girl, a girl in control of her life, and a fat stomach doesn’t exactly convey that message. A fat stomach said that no matter how hard I tried, it got the better of me. I failed. I couldn’t finish the job.