Besides, I had a boyfriend, too. His name was Erik.
Erik was Kali’s ex-boyfriend. He became my boyfriend when I invited him to be my date at a Hollywood event. Although he didn’t see why it was necessary for me to hide the fact that I was a lesbian, he assured me that he would play the role of my boyfriend to the best of his ability, so I made Erik my permanent beard. The fact that he agreed to be my beard proved his affection for me. Hollywood events were something he had no interest in attending, and in fact, as a budding novelist, he had expressed contempt for the whole industry. His idols were Hemingway and Vonnegut, not Cruise and Gibson.
I had adored Erik from our first meeting at Kali’s apartment in Santa Monica. He was deeply thoughtful, attractive, and intelligent. If I could have, I would’ve slept with him just to show him how much I adored him, but on the one occasion when he crashed in my bed and sex had crossed my mind, the smell of him took the thoughts away. He didn’t smell bad. He just smelled male. All men do.
Although Erik quickly learned his role, our first public outing as a couple was nerve-racking. I had never walked a red carpet with anyone before and his attitude toward the media was not helping to quell my nerves. To Erik, a television camera was an opportunity to be a wiseass. (He had told me that if he were to ever appear on Letterman, he’d give a shout-out to all the black people in the audience.) As usual, I’d left nothing to chance. I had memorized answers, this time to the right questions: What was I wearing? What are my workout tips? What is my must-have beauty item? In the rented stretch limousine on our way from my apartment to the event on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Erik and I rehearsed answers to possible questions the two of us might be asked.
“So, if they ask something like, ‘How long have you been dating?’ just say something vague like, ‘just a few months.’”
“I think it’s funnier if I say that we just fucked for the first time on the ride over here.”
“Erik! This is serious! Don’t be a dick.”
It was all very funny to Erik. There was nothing on the line for him. He wasn’t gay and trying to appear straight. He could attend the event like a spectator, listen to Bocelli, observe this weird Hollywood charade, and drink wine and eat food without concern of getting fat. He wasn’t going to have to face the press and pretend that all this was real; he just had to say one easy thing or nothing at all.
“Please say nothing at all.”
He shot me an unnerving wink from underneath his mop of blond hair as he got out of the limo, straightened his jacket, and stood with his back to me like a statue, offering his arm like the gentleman escort role I had asked him to play. Despite the fact that he was a smart-ass in my ear all the way down the red carpet, he managed to obscure his disdain from the photographers, and my little plan worked. I was asked if he was my boyfriend and I decided that by answering coyly (“We’re just friends”), I would pique their interest more than by announcing that we were dating. Plus it carried the added benefit of being the truth. Because of him the event felt less like work. As someone who wasn’t particularly smitten with the world in which I lived, he gave me perspective on my job as an actress, served up with a drink and observations that made me laugh. The women at work assumed he was my boyfriend, and I did everything in my power to keep that assumption alive.
I had a boyfriend called Erik. He was smart and handsome and tall, and he was mine. Except Erik had a girlfriend. Erik left me for a woman who would have sex with him because he didn’t smell strange to her. He left me because I was never his to leave. It was a devastating breakup.
12
COME ON in, Portia. How have you been doing this week?” Suzanne was holding an unwashed dinner plate in her hand as she opened the door. I assumed she’d noticed this dirty plate on her walk from wherever she was, through the living room and to the front door. She was surprisingly messy for such a thin woman. I said hello to her, but in my mind I was thinking how funny it was that I would equate thinness with cleanliness. That observation triggered a memory of being in art class when I was asked to describe how Kandinsky painted and to explain why I didn’t like him. “He paints like a fat person,” was all I could think to say at the time, as his painting was messy, nonlinear, disorganized, as opposed to Mondrian, a painter who worked in the same period and used colors sparingly, modestly, and who stayed within the lines. He was orderly, clean, and thin.
By the time I left art class in my head and joined Suzanne, I was on the couch. I was beginning to trust her despite my initial fears and wanted to talk to her about my past. From my first session, I had become more aware of the abnormalities of my eating habits as a kid, and it felt good to talk about it out loud. I had considered going back to the therapist who had helped my husband and me realize that our relationship was doomed to failure, but food and eating seemed to be more of a nutritionist’s area of expertise than a couples’ therapist’s, so I told Suzanne everything. I no longer cared whether she was shocked.
I told her that from the age of twelve, starving and bingeing and purging had been the only way to reach my goal weight. That starving was easy because there was always an end in sight. Junk food was around the bend just after the photo shoot or the round of go-sees. But by the age of fifteen, I needed to devise a plan to not only lose weight but to maintain my weight loss. At the end of the school year, I’d convinced my mother that the strict girls’ grammar school I attended was “getting in the way of my education” and that I needed to take a year off to model, make some money, and then enroll in a more progressive private school the following year. The fact that I needed to lose weight was nothing new. Ever since I’d begun modeling, I’d always needed to “get ready” for a photo shoot. Me losing weight before a job was like an athlete training for a competition. But if I was going to take a year off school to model, I had to figure out a more permanent solution to the weight problem. I couldn’t starve and binge and purge like I had always done. By the time I was fifteen, the purging and the laxatives had become part of my everyday life, and although I wasn’t concerned about the possible damage it could cause to the interior of my body, it was a drag to have to spend so much time in the bathroom. Plus, there was only one bathroom in my house.