about, especially after hearing an excessive amount of information on the pressure to be a stay-at-home mom by choice. Now that her notoriety as a caterer and entertainer veered into the potential of seeing her name on a stock ticker, Daphne had lost the ambition.
She then asked me if I felt cold. I felt fine.
Daphne punched in more codes on a device that sounded like a drunken canary than it took for me to type out my senior thesis.
“We just got this air temperature control system,” she said proudly. “I can actually coordinate temperature with the movements of different people.”
Ever consider adjusting the vents?
“Mommy’s always cold,” said Emily, adeptly scooping up Henry’s Jell-O while he used his spoon to make airplanes.
I gave my kiss good-bye, and Daphne expressed her disappointment that I’d be missing Andy’s puppet show. Over Henry and Emily’s squeals of excitement over this show that had more fanfare than Yul Brynner’s last King and I performance, I asked if he could be persuaded to do an encore the next time I visited.
During my ride home, my mind spun quicker than my thoughts could effectively register. Overwhelmed by the abundance of good tidings I had received, what I was most excited about at that moment was my bag of treats. I ate another brownie and opened my sketchbook to a clean page with images of Henry and Emily still fresh in my head.
I drew them side by side, Emily in her French blue pinafore dress and Henry in a striped button-down. Their blue eyes were large and magnificent, too big for their bodies the way a newborn’s eyes look in an ultrasound. Henry’s head tilted on Emily’s shoulder while hers locked onto his cheek.
8
Next to the bed, a tall glass of milk and two Godiva chocolates were laid out for me like medication. I looked at the folded stationery. Henry had sketched a drawing of the two of us in the form of a plastic couple on top of a wedding cake made from containers of low-fat pints of Ben & Jerry’s.
“Hi, Em,” the note read.
I know you wanted to make s’mores tonight but had to go out with some people from FOX on the Upper East Side, where I’d just as soon head for suburbia and get some fresher air out of the meeting. Tried calling you but didn’t leave a message knowing how you are with etiquette on mobiles.
Unless I get lost coming home, hope to be back early but no need to wait up. Enjoy the sweet, my sweet.
Love, Henry
Not certain if the note had a hidden message about whether both the chocolates were for me or meant to be shared, I reread the note comprehensively and then popped a Godiva in my mouth. Yummy but too quick, very similar to an orgasm, but this way I get the calories.
Sitting at the edge of the bed, I realized this was not the first time Henry had avoided a plan with me. In fact it had become a regular pattern. Staring at the note, my eye kept wandering to the other chocolate. That turmoil didn’t last long. Essentially validating that my day consisted of Frosted Flakes, Jell-O, chocolate brownies, and now Godiva, I would be a little girl forever, albeit a fat little girl with a bad complexion as a result of this kind of diet—a prime subject for a Dr. Perricone “Before” picture—and I would have to eat organic food that needed to be weighed on a scale.
I stretched on the bed and began to draw our wedding portrait. Now that I had the image in my head, which was based on the pose of the Sargent portrait of the Stokeses, it was only a matter of putting the picture to paper.
Beginning with a long clean line to create the skirt of my dress, I then added the bodice, my arms, and head. Drawing Henry proved to be more difficult. I lost control of my artistic ability with a picture that started to resemble the alphabet of a dead language. Hoping that my efforts would evolve into something magnificent, like a tangled network of city grids that came into focus when viewed from above—such wishful thinking—I broke from my miserable attempt by collapsing back on the bed, drifting in and out of sleep.
I dreamt that I walked down an aisle, or I assumed it was me walking down an aisle, because it really resembled one of my yet-to-be-filled-in cartoon faces dressed in a wedding gown—a mix of animation and reality in an homage to Mary Poppins.
I walked toward the altar and Henry, who was also an incomplete drawing and just a faceless cartoon dressed in a tux. The closer I approached the altar, the greener my face turned. Suddenly a snout began to grow, reptilian scales popped from my skin—a transformation of Incredible Hulk proportions where I evolved into a green lizard on steroids. My clawed hands ripped from my duchess satin—the damage to the dress—I wondered about refunds.
As I opened my mouth to breath a torrent of fire, I heard a cell phone. Someone had their cell phone on in the church? How rude. Probably one of Henry’s guests. Perhaps this was why I had been turning into something that stomps on train sets in campy Japanese films, for fear that an ill-mannered person would have their cell phone turned on. But it kept ringing until I made myself wake up from this sweat-inducing nightmare, realizing that it had been my cell phone ringing from one of my shopping bags.
I answered the phone. “Emily?” said Daphne. “How odd. I was deliberately calling to leave a message on your mobile because it’s so late.”
Looking at the bedside clock, I saw it was after one in the morning.
“What are you doing up? And why do you have your phone on?”
Rubbing my eyes, trying to make out what had been happening, I started rambling.
“Have I been a monster?”
“Not too bad,” chirped Daphne. “Not as obsessive as most of us, but I do detect that you haven’t quite been yourself.”
I steered away from this direction. “I must have never turned my mobile off,” I said, filling in the pieces—notably the injured petite French lady who currently spent the night in Lenox Hill Hospital.
“Well, I’m glad I got you because I have some amazing news to share—you’re meeting with Daniel West. Tomorrow!”
“Tomorrow?” I said in a panic, running around the room to try and find my Polaroids. “Why for God’s sake so soon?”
“Don’t fret,” she commanded. “He has to go to Paris for a few weeks, maybe even a month, but Daniel really wants to meet with you. He loved your film, Combining Art Forms, and has always made comments on your talent, always admiring your Alice in Wonderland painting whenever he’s over. Now I got you the meeting, all you have to do is dance. Tomorrow, four PM, at West Galleries on Fifty-seventh.
“Listen, I have to run. Andy had too much to drink tonight, petrifying the nanny with stories about his days bumping into Robert Chambers at Dorian’s and the Mad Hatter.”
Robert Chambers, the Literal Bad Boy.
I took my sketchpad and headed the page “Literal Bad Boys,” drawing thumbprint faces as icons—Robert Chambers, Mark Bundy—but I quickly lost interest in Literal Bad Boys, as it became difficult to imagine lustful thoughts with men that looked at women’s heads as dandelions.
The next page I entitled “Bad Boys—Greatest Hits.” Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando before he got fat, JFK Junior and Senior, Paul Newman in Cat on
